C.J.Sellers

The Brits are sneering…yes sneering at the Democrat “majority” in play. But who cares what they think anyway. According to a CBS poll from February, 70% of Americans are angry and dissatisfied with Washington. This health care reform debacle is just a distraction from the really annoying fact that we were only just slightly ahead of Mexico for total % of population that’s currently below the poverty line BEFORE the recession hit. But Bob Herbert totally GETS IT.

“How loud do the alarms have to get? There is an economic emergency in the country with millions upon millions of Americans riddled with fear and anxiety as they struggle with long-term joblessness, home foreclosures, personal bankruptcies and dwindling opportunities for themselves and their children.

The door is being slammed on the American dream and the politicians, including the president and his Democratic allies on Capitol Hill, seem not just helpless to deal with the crisis, but completely out of touch with the hardships that have fallen on so many.

While the nation was suffering through the worst economy since the Depression, the Democrats wasted a year squabbling like unruly toddlers over health insurance legislation. No one in his or her right mind could have believed that a workable, efficient, cost-effective system could come out of the monstrously ugly plan that finally emerged from the Senate after long months of shady alliances, disgraceful back-room deals, outlandish payoffs and abject capitulation to the insurance companies and giant pharmaceutical outfits.

The public interest? Forget about it.

With the power elite consumed with its incessant, discordant fiddling over health care, the economic plight of ordinary Americans, from the middle class to the very poor, got pathetically short shrift. And there is no evidence, even now, that leaders of either party fully grasp the depth of the crisis, which began long before the official start of the Great Recession in December 2007.”

Full op-ed:  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/23/opinion/23herbert.html

I saw a 30second commercial for the National Guard on Hulu.com recently that’s like Starship Troopers without the bugs. Found it on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5pQW-k43is

It’s revolting to watch them start out with benignly helping folks and quickly lead into to tanks and killing, given the recent history of military propaganda and the climate of fear fomented by politicians in league with the corporate media post 9/11. I remember the lip service given to freedom and our fine ideals and the insistence by those who voted for more warfare that we were going there to help and do good. I remember the justification of liberating the people, most especially the women who, in reality, had a greater likelihood of being starved, killed, raped, or now may have children with birth defects due to the “Happy Liberation” gift we left of Radioactive Uranium Dust, making Saddam Hussein’s exploits look small by comparison.

Shiny buttons and fancy swords (as shown in the recruiting video) can’t hide the shame brought on the uniform by engaging in illegal preemptive warfare on premise of lies wrought through means of torture to jumpstart the Bush Dynasty Wars, Part Deux. Military service is no longer an honorable profession so long as war follows a corporate profit motive. Some of the idiots that signed up for a paycheck, while claiming to be patriots, were too dense to catch on even when the neocons spelled it out for them in an acronym: Operation Iraqi Liberation= OIL. For years they still denied the stupidity. Years. Even after watching the military stand over the oil field while Iraqs museums were ransacked and the women were raped…er, “liberated”. Even after the Abu-Ghraib documented evils, even after finding out how much Halliburton profited.http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=544476389136766337#
But hardly anyone denies the stupidity of Iraq now. Yet people still sign up to go over there and kill people in some other area nearby and continue to fuel the military industrial complex chasing a boogieman Al Queda that didn’t even exist before we called it that? We can’t kill the idea that is morally reprehensible to some Muslims, we’re only giving it fuel by attacking them and occupying their lands. http://www.archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmares

If we’re going to blow money over there instead of at home, common sense says forgo weapons, invest, and give the Iraqis jobs that don’t involve killing Americans. But that would be *common* sense, which serves the commoner. The military is not serving the common person by going over there, they’re serving (albeit indirectly) profiteering corporations that are milking the taxpayers…and they’re consigning us, our children, and grandchildren in a national debt to foreign interests.

Corporations are amoral. By and large, they exist, bottom-line, for profit. That’s why we must resist their influence in politics and pop culture and public opinion if we wish to preserve some semblance of morality. Even now, with Bush & Co. out of the picture, the corporations continue to gain ground. The problem is much bigger than punishing a guilty figurehead such as Bush or Cheney (though that would be a welcome start). The corruption is firmly entrenched in America but who can and will root it out? What’s it going to take when corporations own nearly everything, have the most money and power, and will get each other’s back but not the average American’s? Who’s looking out for the poor chump that’s lured to his/her death by this video?

RESOURCES FOR RESISTERS:

http://www.veteransforpeace.org/Resources_resisters.vp.html

George Lakoff asks us, “Where’s the Movement?” Then he goes on with a lot of the same material.

I like Lakoff, don’t get me wrong. He’s been helpful in understanding the need to frame political issues to appeal to a large audience.

The problem I have with Lakoff is that what he has to say about what language moves conservatives is much more insightful than what he suggests will move liberals. IMO, he’s not much help in crafting effective jargon. The conservative selling points work because they only aspire to sell to their base. Liberals try to be everything to everyone. They try to appeal to the heart and intellect as it applies to government. Conservatives appeal to the gut. The gut reaction is always more powerful than appeals to compassion or thoughtfulness.

I mean think about it, when you see someone begging in the street, do you rush up and see what you can do to help? Do you offer them the shirt off your back? Do you offer to take them anywhere they want to go or let them stay in your place? Someone somewhere probably does but it’s far from the norm. This is the image that the empathy message implies and it ends where it runs up against the hard reality that we’re NOT all in it together and that’s just bullshit.

Liberals need to come up with some new material and don’t look to Lakoff, he just doesn’t get human nature, he’s projecting his personality type onto the rest of us. Not all liberals respond to the touchy-feely response. Look at how effective Obama was, was it because he was making appeals for empathy? No, he proposed fairness and direct action. He promised results. Action is what liberals want to see. They’re sick of being sold out by lame-ass stand-for-nothing Democrats. Liberals want justice. They want results.

Don’t wait for something worthwhile to happen, liberals. Be it now, make it happen. Learn from Obama’s failure and the conservative’s success. Don’t play to the middle, speak to the gut, shoot from the hip, shoot straight, pitch in and lend a hand. These cliches are about action and they still pay out. Craft your message about action and integrity, that will appeal to liberals at this point, IMO. And maybe even some centrists and conservatives too but don’t count on it and don’t aim for them, they are not your audience.

by C.J. Sellers

“Josmar Trujillo is trying to cross the bridge
from Reactionary to Revolutionary.”

And what of them! Those rarefied American Elms
Ulmus americana, the White Elms that boomed large,
clustered and towering, condemning the new and young
with damning shade after all these many years of
enjoying their grace and wealth of sun.

They complain of us yet see how in winter they don’t mind
the young fodder or whatever’s down there that works and dies–
our corpses hide their tender roots all day and night.
Do the poor saps warm from obligation or is it fate
where in shade the progeny fell and when?

Tree of Heaven, Josmar Trujillo exclaims (in hate),
What of this old forest? Fuck this usury, I say good firewood.
Though these sprouts are lost, so what, they would have been.
When the smoke clears, there at the base, generations
of diversity to live free amid the blessed sun!

So say we all, as Josmar echoes Che, “Vive la Revolución!”
Come lightning, come wind, spark! Bring it all down in flames
and the young leaves of the cultivar, American Liberty
will be the first of us to dance amid the ash
and stretch to face the sun again.

Just when you think things are starting to shape up a little, Ireland goes and declares blasphemy illegal, and now “Islamic states led by Pakistan are already using the wording of this Irish law to promote new blasphemy laws at UN level”.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/01/irish-atheists-challenge-blasphemy-law

by C.J. Sellers

“If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you’re a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.”
~Kurt Vonnegut

He was born in November in that senate win.
What he won no corn fritter had ever had before.
In the city in the garden, you might say he found a plan;
You might say he even found his campaign therein.

Come from Honolulu to join the inner beltway loop.
He was on his way, fueled by waves of corn.
If promises are broken, the corn won’t really care.
Better popcorn than Republican.

But Manhattan’s Smoky Mountain lie
will bring a rain of fire in the sky.
Our stalks will be outlines against what walls remain.
Smoky Mountain lies,
Smoky Mountain lies.

He soon climbed the polls, saw his sea of fans below
spread wider than his eyes could even see.
To elect him might be crazy cuz he said we’d touch the sun.
We were glad to lose our minds and memories.

Now he stands at the podium, wondering if he’s wise.
Fine words replaced the corn and they’d won.
History tells if POTUS transcends or hides the corn.
Like once Moses did, clear words divide our field.

But back that old Smoky Mountain lie,
someone somewhere gets a mushroom in the sky.
Talk to POTUS in the town hall, this one might again reply
Smoky Mountain lies.

His rise was a wonder but our hearts still know some fear.
Of a simple thing we cannot comprehend–
They build bombs at the mountains and now want to make some more,
more bombs as a means toward our end.

But Y-12’s Smoky Mountain lies
will billow a bright fire in the sky.
He’d be just a corn nugget to believe that he could fly
Smoky Mountain lies.

Its believin’ Hocus-pocus lies
that feeds us this ol’ pie in the sky.
Roll us/smoke us, prize or POTUS, use us to fuel your car…
Smoky Mountain lies.
Smoky Mountain lies.
Smoky Mountain lies.

“A truth that’s told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent.” ~William Blake from “Auguries of Innocence”

by C.J.Sellers

White hair, blue suits and red lips
ruled the decorous front line.

She wandered up like a silly duck
about to squawk at lions.

She stood tall for a child,
at the podium, as all the rest had,
even those two, three times her age.

She’d walked up there to protest,
but to their surprise, she talked about
the voice itself in a sing-song way.

She let her voice go high
and then very low and swung her arms wide
and up as if she really would just give up

And one leg pitched out to the side.
She might have even flapped.
I don’t recall what all she said
amid this circus act.

The whole room was confused smiles
and silence before she walked away.

Defying sense,
the old folks spent millions on a new
nuclear weapons plant that day.

It occurs to me that I am a preacher and so are you. Everyone is biased and we wear our bias/colors like plumage, some of us to bond us to a group out of defense or to better attack, which may still be some sort of defense.

On my pulpit, as an ex-patriot of the herd, I wear no colors in particular. Mine are a kaleidoscope of holograms reflecting the whole of creation, just what I can see from my vantage, this little spot here that I own, I own all that I survey, you included. In my ex-patriotism, I’m for no one in particular and everyone in general.

I just want to tell you, from my soapbox, that the sting you feel from the preacher man/woman on the corner is not from what is said or from accusing silence, but at the implication that you are not of the same ilk, that you, one or the other, are an alien object, not you both the integral subject. What stings you is the sense of disunion that comes from the absence of love.

Three quotes on love that illustrate my meaning:

“Love is not just looking at each other; it’s looking in the same direction.”
~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of withering, of tarnishing.”
~Anais Nin

“Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love’s tragedies.”
~ Oscar Wilde

You can ignore the man on the corner but you can’t escape him in your heart. And you will never reach your enemy if you call him the enemy. You will never know his love if you tell yourself he is not capable or worthy of yours. Never love the lie that we, as individuals, are separate from the whole of creation and from each other, it has been proven untrue, not just in our hearts but by modern science! When I’m dead, I hope they put that on my tombstone so I can keep preaching love from the grave.

Cheers!

by C.J.Sellers

Woman is a jar of untold jellybeans.
Who keeps a jar of jellybeans? Why?
Who wants a jar of jellybeans, jellybeans?
Who knows the jar of jellybeans, jellybeans?
Who owns the jar of jellybeans, jellybeans?
Answer: Just the woman. I say it oughtta be the law.

“Her Welsh Testament” by C.J. Sellers

“As promised, the illustrious Mrs. Woosnam,” claims the patron, her great-grandson, grandly ushering. She enters, garbed in a proud, violet gown, her gait, somewhat unsteady and wrong, like worn, bleached wood that’s been afloat too long, that now I’ve found on this foreign land. And around she brings her island’s home, Wales, dragging its proud veil, affixed like a net in tow.  Her presence bends the New  World back ’til it succumbs. Elbow gently mugged by the young man’s dutiful hand, she’s sat down, put in a chair in the good light.

He whispers, “Paint her young. It’s a gift. Don’t bother chatting. Doesn’t know a word of English.” He turns and speaks her native tongue; a wild strangeness he domesticates with,”Mum”. She nods,  smiling, and lets him kiss an ashen hand, then holds his, tight at first, as if she won’t let go. The feather falls, the moment’s warmed.

Now alone, I turn my canvas to her still frame and the easel legs scrape, resounding, confounding the awkward day Now follows smiles and blushes and quickly on to choosing paints, brushes… So I’m gazing, mixing, dabbing at the pallet… Paining for some momentum and hours later, still not painting. I look to her. I’m searching and I can see the light has plait parched lines across her arms that press deeper down the hour hand. Light pervades the icy blue globe of her farthest eye that must want to squint to see the street below or look inward or want to sleep or so I imagine her. The neatly up-swept crown is haloed with a disarray of fine, white hair, counterweight by sulky shadows in the standing hollows of the nape below. That sweet face that must have once held charm. Nothing smooth now but all fair. Just as I am to press my brush down, I despair and want to speak but she’s been wise. She knows English. I don’t know Welsh. I’m no Brit, no need to gloat, but I’m American. My television has never once mentioned her home. What do I know? I cannot know the stubborn place of root there. She comes and sits politely for her grandson in silent testament but can’t expect much from a blind, American painter, this inviolate Welshman, Mrs. Woosnam.

[Author's note: inspired by,"A Welsh Testament" by by R. S. Thomas and "Christina's World" by Andrew Wyeth (July 12, 1917 – January 16, 2009).]