Moderates United

Contemplating Neal Cassady, without whom “On the Road” would not have been written, and without whom, arguably, Howl would not have been written (it is dedicated to him, and it worth noting Ginsberg had a sexual relationship with Cassady and seems to have been in love with him), and thus, without whom, the “Beats” likely never would have been, it is obvious in retrospect that his “love” of life was really a mad dash away from himself, from his deepest feelings, from what hurt inside of him, and which was, thus, a race towards a suicide of some sort.

He died at 41.  Here is what Wikipedia has to say:

In January 1967, Cassady traveled to Mexico with fellow prankster George “Barely Visible” Walker and Cassady’s longtime girlfriend Anne Murphy. In a beachside house just south of Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, they were joined by Barbara Wilson and Walter Cox. All-night storytelling, speed drives in Walker’s Lotus Elan, and the use of LSD made for a classic Cassady performance — “like a trained bear,” Carolyn Cassady once said. Cassady was beloved for his ability to inspire others to love life. Yet at rare times he was known to express regret over his wild life, especially as it affected his family. At one point Cassady took Cox, then 19, aside and told him; “twenty years of fast living—there’s just not much left, and my kids are all screwed up. Don’t do what I have done.”

During the next year, Cassady’s life became less stable, and the pace of his travels more frenetic. He left Mexico in May, traveling to San Francisco, Denver, New York City, and points in between. Cassady then returned to Mexico in September and October (stopping in San Antonio, on the way to visit his oldest daughter who had just given birth to his first grandchild), visited Ken Kesey’s Oregon farm in December, and spent the New Year with Carolyn at a friend’s house near San Francisco. Finally, in late January 1968, Cassady returned to Mexico once again.

On February 3, 1968, Cassady attended a wedding party in San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico. After the party, he went walking along a railroad track to reach the next town, but passed out in the cold and rainy night wearing nothing but a T-shirt and jeans. In the morning, he was found in a coma by the tracks, reportedly by Anton Black, later a professor at El Paso Community College, who carried Cassady over his shoulders to the local post office building. Cassady was then transported to the closest hospital where he died a few hours later on February 4, four days short of his 42nd birthday.

The exact cause of Cassady’s death remains uncertain. Those who attended the wedding party confirm that he took an unknown quantity of secobarbital, a powerful barbiturate sold under the brand name Seconal. The physician who performed the autopsy wrote simply, “general congestion in all systems.” When interviewed later, the physician stated that he was unable to give an accurate report because Cassady was a foreigner and there were drugs involved. “Exposure” is commonly cited as his cause of death, although his widow believes he may have died of renal failure.

To my mind, Cassady kind of embodies the YOLO mindset.  But life is everywhere.  It is in the room where you are now.  It is in the eyes of those you know.  It is outside of your window, in the growth and the sleep of all that lives.  It seems to me that in PURSUING life, that you have forgotten how to live it.  You are chasing what is not already there within you.  Being empty, you go in endless circles, which you justify by calling it “drinking the marrow of life”.

There is nothing wrong with going slow.  There is nothing wrong with savoring all the plenty which is blossoming everywhere, if you only learn how to see.

I have taken to reading motivational quotes to myself in the morning, one of which is Chief Tecumsah’s call to “love your life, perfect your life, beautify everything in your life.  Seek to make your life long and it purpose in the service of your people.”

All of this may seem irrelevant.  But when Paypal, for example, bans InfoWars, the roots of that possibility extend back, in some ways, to how Cassady chose to live his life, to what he chose to value.  He should not be a hero.  He should not be a role model.  But this spirit lives on.  It leads minds into unnecessary vanity, stupidity, ugliness, pettiness, and ultimately aggression and violence.

Either you are with us or against us, college students are taught.  Either you are good or you are bad, and if you are bad, you cannot be reasoned with.  All of the beauty, all of the LIFE, resides on one side, and not the other.  All of the love, decency, courage lie on one side, and not the other.  The other people are ugly.  They are abominations.  They hate freedom, they hate tolerance, they hate everything all good people stand for.  Trump is literally Hitler, because he is not one of us, and Hitler is the only symbol of evil we can all agree on.

The guy who got Burroughs hooked on “junk”, and taught him the life of a petty hoodlum, thief, and general lowlife, was a guy named Herbert Huncke.

From the Beat Reader:

He first met William Burroughs in 1944, when Burroughs was trying to sell a [stolen] sawed off shotgun and some morphine syrettes.  Burroughs took Huncke, according to biographer Ted Morgan, as a sort of ‘Virgilian guide to the lower depths. . .[He] was the first hipster. . .an antihero pointing the way to an embryonic counter-culture, which would arise from this Times Square world of hustlers.. . .

Allan Ginsberg, on Huncke:

[Huncke’s] prose proceeds from his midnight mouth, that is, literal story-telling, just talking–for that reason it is both awkward and pure. . .In his anonymity & holy Creephood in New York he was the sensitive vehicle for a veritable new consciousness which spread to others sensitized by their dislocation from History and then to entire generations. 

I will note that Brecht’s Three Penny Opera depends on the anti-hero, Mackie Messer, immortalized as Mack the Knife, who is a two bit criminal, thug, and cutthroat.

It is quite possible to look at all the unwashed masses of hippies as direct descendants of fuckups from the worst parts of New York.  They preach love, but you don’t have to talk to an average hippy too long before you start hearing stories of theft, abuse, grotesque selfishness, violence, and even sociopathy.

One rich girl I know (Ah, you’ve gone to the finest school all right, Miss Lonely, but you know you only used to get juiced in it) told me a story of being on the road with the Dead, and they have a ritual–I forget the name–where LSD is fed forcibly and involuntarily to someone while they are held down.  She tripped for three days.  I think she still has PTSD from it, although I don’t think she can admit it, since she still loves the Dead, and Deadheads.

Going to Berkeley, I ran into more Deadheads than I can count.  By and large, the hard core ones are thieves, drug pushers, liars, and complete flakes.  While I was there a group of them built some pipe bombs which were found before they could do anything with them, and of that group one later broke into the Chancellors house with a machete, and was shot dead by a cop.

Large things come from small things.  This is why it is important to trace beginnings, because even large things carry the mark of their beginnings.

Our culture values hard work, honesty, civic mindedness, piety, family, courage, and it used to value frugality, which was made impractical by Fed policy of steadily diluting the value of our money.

To be “counter” to this, you need to value dishonesty, disengagement or active opposition to everything positive anyone is trying to do, laziness, radical selfishness, cowardice and prodigality.

This IS the “counterculture”.  They are reasonably open about it.  Watch Rent, and look for all this.  The frustrated “auteur” is in nearly all cases a radical narcissist, who merely needs people from time to time.

What we see in the Democrats today–and in the principled rot in many Republicans–is all an outflow from people like Howard Huncke. 

And I might comment that Beat has roughly the same connotation as Punk.  Kerouac later tried to claim it referred to beatitude and similar words, but in the original use it referred to being tired, worn out, defeated, done.  To being the dregs of society, the bottom, the gutter, the forgotten.  Because this is what they were.  This is who they hung around with.  And nearly all of them were homosexuals.  Burroughs was married for a time, but he shot his wife–accidentally, we are told, but perhaps accidentally on purpose.  Kerouac was bi, Cassady was bi, Ginsberg was gay.

And the term punk came from the slang for what we would in America call a prison bitch. They were the ones who wound up getting fucked up the ass in jail.  The losers.  The bottom of the heap, who, understandably, were filled with rage.

Ginsberg actually worked with The Clash, which was highly appropriate.

Truth is knowable.  What exists, can always be understood, or at least understood better.  Clear thinking is possible.  Clear language is possible.  Principle based thinking can still be performed.  Nonsense can be rejected, as needed with anger and even rage.

These things need to be said.  And I doubt very much they can be said enough, much less too much.

Well, with the ban rescinded, Google seems to have become evil: https://www.infowars.com/google-employees-reportedly-forced-to-delete-chinese-censorship-memo/

I say again: no TRUE Liberal would come within a mile of this.  China is the sort of repressive regime that Amnesty International supposedly exists to oppose.  They still arrest dissidents, they still operate gulags, and the mass of Chinese are still treated like serfs, as far as I can tell.

China is a class based society, like it always has been.  “Communism” changed nothing, other than to remove all the traditional, palliating notions, like that the King enjoyed divine favor, and that there were heavens to go to after this world.

We can debate the existence of  God, but “History” is plainly a fiction of academics like Marx who never left their studies, hated people, lied and cheated their way through life, and died miserable and pathetic human beings.

It occurs to me Grassley should blame Dianne Feinstein for Ford not testifying.  He should say that Ford’s Senator let her down.  Not only did she hold onto the letter long past the appropriate time to reveal it, but she is unwilling even now to share the original with the committee.

Feinstein is a senior Senator.  She knows the rules.  She did what she did intentionally.  She could have created the space to include Ford and give her plenty of time to work out agreeable conditions, but she kept her silence ALL THE WAY through the hearings, then pulled this out last minute.  It’s not appropriate.  It’s not fair to the Senate, to her colleagues and to the American people.

She had her chance.  She blew it.

And I will add, again, that you cannot simply allow left wing lunatics to insult you because they are wrong.  You cannot allow them to speak lies simply because they are lies.  There has to be a counter-attack.  There have to be competing stories, because when you have one story only, no matter how ridiculous it is to sane people, it will win for lack of competition.

I think Grassley should specifically attack Feinstein.  And as far as that goes, why not?  She DESERVES it.  She knew full fucking well what she was doing.  She is telling the Senate to fuck itself, and telling the American people to go fuck themselves.  This was not a mistake: it was a calculation, an opportunity to insult and denigrate her colleagues for partisan purposes.  Demeaning and insulting them with no true provocation IS the game she wants to play.

Trump has shown how to counter-punch.  All Republicans would do well to listen and learn.  They fear the fallout, but the truth is that many people are unreachable, and if you are speaking your truth clearly, blatantly, and even crassly, it will be heard, understood, and believed by more people than I think most of them would have thought possible.

If I had actually been raped, this woman would be pissing me off.   She is a poster child of all the flaky bullshit that causes women not to be believed.  She was, according to the yearbook of her rich girl prep school, attending parties often and getting drunk at them.  She can’t remember where or when Kavanaugh supposedly attacked her.

And on her account, she was not even raped.  She was not disrobed.  She was held down for a time, then released.

It seems most likely to me that something LIKE what she describes did happen, but it wasn’t Kavanaugh.

The posturing the Democrats are doing is, to my mind, completely amoral and cynical.  It is OBVIOUS that these charges, even if they had merit, cannot be investigated.  No witnesses have come forward, and the people she claims were there have specifically said they remember nothing.  65 women who know Kavanaugh have come forward saying he is a good guy.

So you have on the one side a woman who is flaky as shit, can’t remember shit, who wore a pussy hat to the anti-Trump march, who is represented by a Soros connected attorney, doing everything she can to prevent Kavanaugh being seated before the next Supreme Court session, which starts October 1st.

On the other, you have a guy who was vetted thoroughly by the FBI, who was questioned extensively by the Senate, and whose sole blemish is being cast by this woman.

If it is true she is getting death threats–and keep in mind, made-up attacks by Trump supporters have been a mainstay of left wing lunatics since before he was elected–it is small wonder.  It is indefensible, to be clear, but that her aim here is to subvert the will of the people who elected Trump is obvious enough.

Throwing mud, lying, obstructing: these things piss people off.

I really hope Grassley calls BS on this whole thing, and just has the vote on Monday.  Let’s let this shitshow end.  In a week, the Democrats and their media monkeys will have moved on to some other purported atrocity.

I spent some time with a bunch of therapists a month or two ago.  The details I will reveal, maybe, when I feel like it.  I think I was the only identified patient in the group.

And most of them were superficially likable.  They would say things like “we care”, or “we got your back”, but I felt a pervasive undercurrent of unprocessed anxiety and in some cases anger.

Us trauma folks are hypersensitive.  I don’t miss much when I am paying attention.

And it struck me to consider what a typical psychotherapist does all day.  They sit in an office, and people come to them for advice.  They sit in a place, in other words, of social power, power which is unchallenged in a typical day.  Therapists might disagree with one another, in group practices, but the fundamental need they all have to be in charge, and being paid to tell other people how to live their lives, is unchallenged and latent.

My goal continues to be to create something which works better.  I have hurdles, troubles, and work to do.  I did an I Ching reading which rang true because it said “you’ll get there eventually, but you will pay your dues, motherfucker.”

But I’ve lived in this system.  I’ve seen it up close.  And my honest opinion is that priests do Catholics more good than most therapists.  Rabbis for Jews, and preachers for Protestants.  Because they teach faith, and faith is the beginning of everything.

Consider this: if you went to fifteen therapists with the same complaint, how many treatment approaches do you think you would get?  Is that the mark of a mature science?

You cannot pacify feigned outrage by taking it seriously.

Corollary: it is both possible and common for Rrpublicans to piss off their base by trying to appease Democrats, but in the modern era unheard of for it to make the slightest bit of difference.

There was a time the parties played “one for you, one for me.” But since at least Obama the game has been “one for me and who the fuck are you?”

My feeling is Grassley gives this chick one last shot at testifying Monday, then closes the door.  IT DOES NOT MATTER WHAT HE DOES: outrage–feigned outage–will be the result. We might as well cut to the chase. There will be screaming and howling no matter what.

Most the time, when I am driven to offer advice, I think it is in the context of asserting an advantage.  Most of the time, I think, for most people, advice giving is a way of creating a relative power advantage.

Now, as the Taoists teach, the teacher is the one from whom information is passing, and the student the one TO whom it is passing.  It is not always obvious, though, which is which.

This is why you should never, ever listen to anyone giving advice.  I must insist on this.

Once started, the Beat movement had a momentum of its own and a world-wide impact. In fact, the intelligent conservatives in America saw this as a serious threat to their position long before the Beat writers saw it themselves.  A much more serious threat, say, than the Communist Party.  The Beat literary movement came at exactly the right time and said something that millions of people of all nationalities all over the world were waiting to hear.  You can’t tell anybody anything he doesn’t know already.  The alienation, the restlessness, the dissatisfaction were already there waiting when Kerouac pointed out the road.

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not political legislators, who implement change after the fact.  Art exerts a profound influence on the style of life, the mode, range, and direction of perception.  Art tells us what we know and don’t know that we know. Certainly On the Road performed that function in 1957 to an extraordinary extent.  There’s no doubt we’re living in a freer America as a result of the Beat literary movement, which is an important part of the larger picture of cultural and political change in this country during the last forty years, when a four letter word couldn’t appear on the printed page, and minority rights were ridiculous. (xxxi, Beat Reader)

From letters Burroughs sent to his friend and fellow pedophile, Allan Ginsberg, about his travels in South America seeking out, and finding, a drug called Yage, which I believe to be the same as Ayahuasca:

On the boat I talked to a man who knows the Ecuador jungle like his own prick.  It seems jungle traders periodically raid the Auca (a tribe of hostile Indians) and carry off women they keep penned up for purposes of sex.  Sounds interesting.  Maybe I could capture an Auca boy. 

I have precise instructions for Auca raiding.  It’s quite simple.  You cover both exits of Auca house and shoot everybody you don’t wanna fuck. . .

The boat gave out with a broken propeller at Las Playas halfway between Manta and Guayaquil.  I rode ashore on a balsa raft.  Arrested on the beach suspect to have floated up from Peru on the Humboldt current with a young boy and a tooth brush (I travel light, only the essentials) so we are hauled before an old dried up fuck, with a withered face of cancerous control.  The kid with me don’t have paper one.  . . .[he himself leaves it ambiguous if the kid was actually with him, but does not explain what the connection might be, if not.]

Three paragraphs later:

Ecuador is really on the skids.  Let Peru take over and civilize the place so a man can score for the amenities.  I never yet lay a boy in Ecuador and you can’t buy any form of junk.

From Naked Lunch, a semi-autobiographical novel written while under the influence of a number of drugs, and assembled by Allan Ginsberg, and with a title suggested by Jack Kerouac.  This is him, as a drug dealer and user, contemplating getting caught:

And if my kid customers ever hit the stand: “he force me to commit all kinda awful sex acts in return for junk” I could kiss the street good-bye. 

And:

Into the Interior: a vast subdivision, antennae of television to the meaningless sky.  In lifeproof houses they hover over the young, sop up a little of what they shut out.  Only the young bring anything in, and they are not young long. 

Biographically, Burroughs son died of severe alcoholism brought on, seemingly, by both his emotional coldness, and by the fact that one of his friends molested him when he was 14, in Tangiers.

Burroughs last public appearance was on the U2 video, “Last Night on Earth“.  He is on the other side of the light, at the end, opposing all the men with guns.  His face is the last picture in the video.

Ask yourself: what has been wrought, and who wrought it?  And why, to what purpose, if any?