Moderates United

ONE THOUSAND FEARFUL WORDS FOR FIDEL CASTRO

by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

I am sitting in Mike’s Place trying to figure out
what’s going to happen
without Fidel Castro
Among the salami sandwiches and spittoons
I see no solution
It’s going to be a tragedy
I see no way out
among the admen and slumming models
and the brilliant snooping columnists
who are qualified to call Castro psychotic
because they no doubt are doctors
and have examined him personally
and are also qualified to call him Communist
with a capital C
because they know the difference between Soviet Communism
(which put the “slave” back in Slavic)
and socialism with a small c
and also know a paranoid hysterical tyrant when they see one
because they have it on first hand
from personal observation by the CIA
and the great disinterested news services
And Hearst is dead but his great Cuban wire still stands:
“You get the pictures, I’ll make the War”
I see no answer
I see no way out
among the paisanos playing pool
it looks like Curtains for Fidel
They’re going to fix his wagon
in the course of human events. . . .

He goes on.  He documents his bona fides as someone living a “real” life in a big city, where violence happens.  He mentions he is reading Camus.  It is all very dramatic, this is the shit, man, this is the shit, man.  I know they are going to kill this great man, who has a Beat beard, man, they are going to kill him.  No way out. No way out.

I have a bad habit of pointing out the obvious.  This, itself, is perhaps an example.  However, I will allow myself to comment that everything that was said about Castro, everything that was feared, was amply validated.  It is like some magical spell was cast on Cuba the moment the Devolution [by the way, I do think we should start speaking of Communist take-overs as either coups–which is usually the most accurate term, where they get support from people who just want freedom long enough to overthrow someone, and who then seize power from within that group, and then throw all their old allies in jail or shoot them–or as Devolutions] hit peak tyranny, and time stopped.  Nothing new happened.  Nothing new was allowed.  It was like a Twilight Zone episode, where the sun stopped in place, the birds stopped singing, the insects stopped buzzing, and whatever people were doing at the moment they continued doing forever.  The country was frozen in amber. 

This is how Cuba has long felt to me.  Periodically they drag someone off and throw them in a dog cage for a year.  Periodically a Party leader rapes some attractive girl or boy, but mostly nothing changes.  Everyone is on edge.  Everyone is afraid to move too suddenly, speak too loudly, or to think at all.  It is much like the place portrayed in Madeline L’Engle’s “Wrinkle in Time”, where It ruled, with It standing in symbolically–so I have long assumed–for Communism.  The Party motto is “Be Afraid.  Be VERY Afraid.”

I will note the petulant, borderline childish resentment and sarcasm there.  That tone is everywhere.  One sees it ubiquitously on the internet.  “Oh, I am SURE YOU know what you are talking about, Mr. Smart Guy.”  It is the anger of someone who is physically and emotionally weak.

And I will note that he said socialism small c.  He might as well have said, as those who are au courant presently are saying, it’s DEMOCRAT Socialism.  I in fact thought that was what he said, on first reading.  It fits so perfectly.  And he did say small c.  That was not a typo.  communism, rather than Communism.  That was what he stood for, communism.

Could he not have written this same poem about Huge Chavez?  Is there any doubt he would have been a fervent Bernie supporter?

What has changed in 60 years?  He was wrong then.  His descendants are wrong now.

Thinking about my last post–that phrase just popped in my head, so I figured I’d share it–it occurs to me that, logically, if hate is the result of love, then love is impossible without the possibility of hate.

Ponder where we are at.  Most people who want to stay connected with a mutable horde–which is to say, most people on both coasts, most college students, most people who fit in to big cities, most employees of tech companies and journalistic enterprises of all sorts–have to be very careful what they say.  You can’t be too spontaneous.  You have to measure everything.  At least, if you retain any capacity to go outside lines which keep moving.

This is the thing: I think people don’t just self censor.  They don’t just bite their tongues.  I think the core demand being made is that people limit their emotionality itself.  You have to reject truly grand passions, truly deep feelings.  For it, you substitute a vapid sentimentality, of the sort I described when speaking of the boy who called himself a “kind soul”.  This was his morality: looking down his nose at me, in pursuit of a nonsensical aim pursued incompetently.

If you can’t hate, you can’t love.  If you can’t love, what is the point of life?  Small wonder we are having an epidemic of drug mediated suicides, as well as regular suicides.  Really, if you think about it, all the deaths from drugs and alcohol should be added to suicide statistics.  None of these people were under any illusion about what they were doing.

To attempt to create a world truly devoid of hate, everything has to be made so plastic, so sterile, so superficial, that you wonder what COULD be left that will worth more than a steaming pile of dogshit.  Peace?  Peace for what?  Peace to eat ice cream with plastic spoons while watching vapid comedies, and spending your week moving numbers and creating letters in various forms on a computer screen?

There is no depth whatever in the “anti-hate” movement, as we might broadly call the Left. 

And, obviously, as I have discussed ad nauseum, the Left is not even tolerant.  It does not reject hate.  But here is the thing: people who have loved, knew they loved.  They can remember it.  If those people then hate, they know they hate.  They know who and what they hate and why they hate it.  There is no confusion, no emotional subterfuge, no lies.

This is not true of the demonic children we are breeding on college campuses.  They use words like Love and Peace.  They hug each other, they are glad to see each other, they say “that’s cool” to each other.

But if you do no more than dangle an appropriate–conditioned, to be clear, with operant conditioning being a key element in successful propaganda–and that facade disappears, and the fangs appear.  But even then, they don’t call it hate.  They call it a love of justice.  They call it defending the oppressed (who exist, in theory at least, somewhere, and who need to be defended always and everywhere rhetorically).  They call it being “kind souls”.

Nothing further from honest emotional intelligence could be imagined.

We–humankind–have a choice: do we pursue easy and wrong, simplistic, childish, and ultimately cruel and authoritarian ideals, or do we choose the harder, better path of emotional growth, maturation, honest dialogue, Liberal reconciliation and negotiation of true difference, and continuing freedom?

“Freedom is the first step to curiosity and knowledge”.  Gibbon.

No one hates more thoroughly than one who has once loved.

Corollary: anyone capable of great hate was once capable of great goodness.

I’ve really been feeling for the past couple days that the bottom could just drop out on the Democrats, and their support plummet by a third or more virtually overnight.

They are at peak propaganda.  You have a major candidate for governor saying America was never great, and will only be great if we meet some arbitrary standard of equality only met in nations where abject poverty is the norm.  Simply doing our best to give everyone a fair shot is not enough: they have to be equal at the finish line.  This is where the Democrats are now.  Substantially all of them.  Cuomo was merely articulating what has become the mean of Democrat views.

The media is at peak propaganda, but as I have commented from time to time, they are going Pravda in a world where the Voice of America is just a channel click or an internet URL away.  Yes, NBC, CBS, ABC, MSNBC, CNN, the New York Times and others represent a good share of the media consumption in this country.  But people flip channels.  It would be devastating if a good chunk of their customers starting regularly watching Tucker Carlson’s monologues, or listening to Sean Hannity on the radio.  It would not take long.  They only have to listen long enough to realize there are major stories which simply are not covered by the complicit media, which focuses on trivia, while ignoring major stories like economic growth.

All of us, once we realize we have been lied to, remember it.  And we don’t forgive it easily.

Take a Brandon Straka.  What happened with him is he was a generic Leftist, who was very upset when Trump won.  Then he watched a video–for some reason, as a resistance to hearing alternative views is a defining feature of the Left–which pointed out that Trump was not mocking the disability of the guy who was lying about him, but the fact that he was lying about him.  It was a motion he did often, for all people.  Then he watched a video showing how the media was systematically avoiding showing the many black people at a Trump rally.  Then he put two and two together, and realized that his whole world view was built on lies.

Self evidently, you cannot build a stable foundation on lies.  It is the very instability, the inherent instability, of the world views of Leftists which makes them so nasty, so recalcitrant, so unable to see and bear, much less honestly consider and meditate on, the views of any people who even try to think differently.  The Left is a monolith precisely because it has to be.  They cannot tolerate dissent.  They cannot allow free thought.  If they did, the whole project would come apart like a sand castle at high tide.

This is why they are INHERENTLY authoritarian.  There is no other possibility.  This is why I feared a Hillary Presidency so greatly.  Imagine if Hillary were President now, after the first shot of global censorship fired at Alex Jones.  She would be praising it and calling for more.  It likely would have happened, actually, in the first year of her Presidency, and been extended to as many sites as she thought she could get away with.  She would have worked to silence her critics as quickly as possible, and as we have seen, in our modern world this is not hard.

Thank God for Trump.  And let us all pray this nest of lies is soon revealed more generally to be what it is, and the American people wake from at least some portion of their trance.

All beep and no bang.

The only reason to be  a Democrat is ignorance.

When dealing with people, it is important to respond to what they are REALLY saying, rather than the words they are using.

In a great many cases, there is a latent emotional tone which even they may not be aware of, but which contains, for practical purposes, the most important part of the communication.

What made me recall this idea is that it is relevant to me at the moment.  As is often the case, I am having to negotiate something with someone I don’t know very well.  As is often the case, I am forced to speculate as to motivation, background, and the like, with very little concrete information.

If you deal with people enough, you can usually make pretty good guesses.  With respect to this specific person, I think I am dealing with resentments he has felt since childhood.  I think he feels the need to feel superior to me.  I think much of his life has been dedicated to proving wrong all the people who said he would never amount to anything.

It is not the case here, I don’t think, but it is likely I have often made people feel dumb.  I use “big” words without thinking about it, because English is a great language, and I see no reason not to plumb its resources.

But, to take that concrete example, when you use a “big” word–let us say the word superfluous counts, for some people–you are using the word, but you are also displaying a level of education, and you are making an assumption the person with whom you are using the word shares that education.  If they don’t, they may hear “I am better than you”.

My job is to see and feel this, and if possible to remedy it, because if I don’t, I am telling that person not to feel comfortable around me, not to like me, and not to trust me.

It is, I think, impossible to view any person, thing, idea, feeling, etc. which you NEED, clearly.  If you need a person, you cannot see them as they are.  If you need to believe America is a horrible nation, or a beautiful nation, then you cannot see what is in front of you.  If you need to believe the worst or best of people, you cannot see what is in front of you.

If you don’t need people–this is my current process–then you can see them honestly, in all their glory and defilement, in all their potential, their failure, their curiosity, their hostility, their love, their joy, their hate.

It is not entirely inaccurate to describe myself as a hermit living in a cave.  It’s a very comfortable cave, to be sure.

And, there: Buddhism is a logical set of ideas.  If you want to see life as a whole clearly, then need as little as possible.  Eat only enough to survive.  Reject material comforts beyond the absolutely necessary.  Abide in no fixed place.  Be a perennial stranger to all but the Dharma.

But, then, Tantra: what you get when you loosen your attachment to this world is a constantly replenishing joy, which is the attribute of another world–one of many, but the best one, and the source of them all–which suffuses this one.  You get to that world by accepting everything in this world, by digesting it emotionally, by digging, digging, digging, until you reach the light.  No, it is more like floating down, slowly, as you untangle knots which constrain the light.  It is a process of slowly remembering what is at the root of your being.

I had something else to say, but it is hiding from me.  Come back, idea.

It’s giggling and running away.  Ah, it may come back.  It may not.  I wonder if we recollect all the ideas we had and forgot, and forgot that we forgot, when we do our Life Review.  For me, this will be quite a few.  I try to note things down as they come to me, but I don’t always succeed.

It’s an interesting process.  I wonder sometimes what I would feel if this blog just disappeared one day.  I don’t think it would bother me very much.  The goal, here, is to develop myself, my own ideas, my own practice which flows from these ideas.  All of that is in me.  I don’t need these words.

No, not Zamyatin’s We.

Here is my question: if I point out that the cultural depth of many Americans goes no farther, seemingly, than that of the script of their favorite movie, do I have the right to feel, or should I then feel, superior?

My sense is no.  These are my people.  You are my people.  I owe you a life debt.  I owe you my efforts to get you out of this trance.  If I want to say that you are stupid, I owe you something better.  I owe you my life blood.  I have plenty.

It is far too easy, otherwise, to use “cultural criticism” as a means to the very simple end of feeling well endowed with virtue and moral elevation without doing the work of being worth a shit to anyone.

I was sitting at Hooter’s tonight, after a long day as both a worker–very literally, as I am sweaty, covered with dirt, and physically worn out–and a Capitalist (since I own my company), looking at my bartenders fat ass, wondering about the process of getting into those shorts, when it occurred to me that I really should read Theodor Adorno.  It was of course a logical progression.  He’s not somebody I expect to like or agree with, but all of these people were pointing out real problems, even if their reflexive (SIEG HEIL!!!) solution was always Marxism, which in practice meant “And here a miracle happens, and the unicorns and rainbows appear, and the children dance, and we all live happily ever after.”

But I want to crunch the gap between Edmund Burke and Theodor Adorno.  In what respects were BOTH of them right?  I don’t know.  I intend to find out.

Could we (and You) not always view We as a Synthesis, and the dream of a new We as the project of cultural evolution?

This really is an oddly fascinating time.  We are playing for all the marbles, for global death and destruction, or the contrary.  For a blossoming of human potential, or a boot on our necks for enough of time to seem like all of it.

It does seem to me that, as with economic models which assume that behavior does not change in response to tax rates–which of course is ludicrous, since people will work harder for two dollars than one dollar–much of the consensus about the future rests upon an assumption that only elites have the brainpower to change their behavior in response to changed circumstances.

I read this MIT “computer model” predicts global decline by 2020.  Certainly, the Rockefellers and their ilk likely have the power to wreck just about everything economically.  One of their people is always in a position of some influence at the Fed, and who knows what else they control via an extended set of strings.  The Fed could cause a Depression tomorrow.  Ponder that for a moment.  None of them are elected, none of them are accountable to anyone, and we don’t even know for sure who the member banks are.  It is classified, or so I read some time ago.  The Fed is invitation only, extended via stock created for the purpose, which is non-transferable.  This beast is in the heart of our world, and its tentacles on every street corner, every restaurant, every skyscraper, every car, every home, and in the air around the world.

Be that as it may, my view is that if we can shift from a model of happiness and economic output based on mechanized, habitual consumption, to something more organic, more healthful, more natural to how humans have evolved to live, more congruent with “LIFE”, in all the senses of that term, then all these problems disappear.  All the problems to which tyranny is the proposed solution vanish, making the essential power mongering and psychopathy underlying what no doubt appears benign rhetoric at times to be revealed as what it is.

All problems are simultaneously adventures.  None of this is boring.  Far from it.

1. So two of my three main news sites (Drudge is the other, in addition to incidental stuff on Yahoo and Facebook)–Lucianne and InfoWars–have recently been hacked and taken off-line by computer sabateurs.What does the Left fear, if not the truth? Why Alex Jones in particular? He speaks often of high level interest in pedophilia, in sex trafficking, in organized conspiracies, of pervasive corruption. It was certainly a conspiracy that took him off most social media. And he predicted it.There are no conservatives trying to hack left wing websites. We win our arguments through debate. Who but aspiring totalitarians win through censorship, violence, and aggression on every front open to it?
This stuff is ugly. It may not affect you yet, but there is no reason that it will not someday. Someday you, too, will cross some line you did not realize existed until you face consequences you don’t understand, which are not fair, which you cannot defend against, and which are unavoidable. This is the spirit infesting large segments of our nation, and nesting very comfortably throughout the tech sector, among the many among them whose antisocial personality disorders make radical politics their only option for feigning a moral sensibility.
An attack on any of us is an attack on all of us. Even the ACLU has finally realized this.

2. Here is Alex Jones on all this. Here is my view: half the stuff he says seems crazy. He himself CERTAINLY seems crazy. I have great trouble watching him, and rarely do.
But why the attacks, if there is no truth behind what he is saying? No one is committing acts of violence based on anything he says, and, conversely, people ARE committing many acts of violence based on things Facebook/Apple/Google et al see no problems with. This is not principle based. There is no hate they are remediating. His is not a hate site. His is a site which says things THEY DON’T WANT PEOPLE TO KNOW ABOUT.

The only logical conclusion is that he is RIGHT about nearly everything, or at least enough that he is dangerous. There are many powerful people who do not want you to hear what he has to say..

Jones is saying, unbelievably, but now everything is believable, that the goal is to bring about a Chinese style social scoring system, where people win or lose points on a scale based upon their conformity to the beliefs the Party (in this country, the Democrats, and the Republicans who are more or less on their side) wants them to hold.

Apple recently made the tyranny in China much more effective by making every electronic transmission in China much easier for the police to track. This was an evil move, which will certainly result in death, torture, and the continuation of an evil oligarchic regime. Why do this, unless they are either amoral, or anti-moral to the extent of fundamentally agreeing with most of the views of the Chinese Fascist elites?

Do you want to gain or lose promotions based on your Facebook posts? Do you want your political affiliations to be used in determining whether or not to hire you? Do you want colleges vetting your political conformity prior to even considering your applications? Need I go on? Is this the world you want to live in? Because that is where we are heading, and Jones is one of the ONLY people willing to state this directly, clearly, and openly.

And do you think if you are a Democrat, now, that that is enough? It will never be enough. You have to hold ALL the right views. They simple tighten the net as they rope in the major outliers, then they move to the minor outliers. If this is allowed to continue, freedom will be gone within ten years at the outside in this country, and indeed in Jones case is disappearing NOW.

This should concern everyone with a pulse, a brain, and a conscience.