700 billion to Wall Street, with 25 billion going to CitiCorp. 600 billion to "stimulate" the economy. Another 20 billion to CitiCorp. Don't EVER let me hear again that we don't have enough money to educate our children or care for the suffering!
I used to think that money was our only motivator but I was wrong. Fear is what makes the world go 'round. Money is just our symbol for fear. As Geno just said: It's really dark in here with our head up our ass!
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Monday, November 17, 2008
FURTHER THOUGHTS ON VIOLENCE AS SPORT
The previous post, THE LUCHA LIBRE SHOW, promted a response from Berone well worth posting here. His is the voice of the poet touching with gentle (or not so) precision the keys of the subject so that ones mind is stimulated to "see" the human truth and to "know" more than what has been said. The song of the poet, music, the most abstract and soulful of the arts.
Mon 11/17/2008 8:36 AM Buff:
Phew! That’s one hell of a sentence! As your comments confirm, there is a mystical rapture for violence in the human soul and always has been. In this, nothing has changed since the emergence of primitive man to what we now call civilization, except perhaps the levels and forms of expression. We humans can imagine the potential for peace and love yet inevitably opt to grovel in the dust, stirred
by this holy and dark longing for destruction, pain, and danger. Mysterious to me. When I was a skinny kid at Christian Brothers School in Sacramento our P.E. class was visited once by the famous boxer Max Baer, a pug nosed veteran of the ring with a kind heart a big smile and cauliflower ears. Somehow I found myself in those high waisted boxing shorts, black high ankle shoes and thick red boxing gloves stepping into the ring with another kid to receive some pointers from the Champ. Without waiting for the bell or a word from the Champ the kid attacked, pummeling me with flailing arms and leather gloves until I was on my back looking up at my assailant and an amused Max Baer while the mob of classmates cheered the action. Lesson learned. I would be a lover, not a fighter. I would rather wrestle under the sheets with a lovely than on the streets with a thug.
I don’t much understand the human animal, his motives and purposes. I don’t know where we come from or where we are going, nor do I grasp my role in all of this. I have always been in the crowd but not of the crowd, watching life swirl all around me while I seem to be standing still. It is quiet here in the eye of the storm where one hears the music of the river and the song of wildlife. And when the hawk suddenly swoops down through the glare of the sun to sink its talons into the body of the rabbit, as I witnessed recently near my house, there is grace to the lifting up into the air, the rabbit hanging limp and silent, grace to the rising and falling of the strong wings, the flying up and away. Violence seems to be uniquely human. Even the ferocity of a pack of hyenas ripping at the flesh of a struggling zebra calf has a form and purpose and sense to it that I just don’t find in two men fighting in a cage, the mob roaring in rage.
The sport of human violence is a form of entertainment, a source of human pleasure. We find joy in the pain of others, pleased to see the blood flow, to hear the crack of a bone, to see the agony in the face. We cheer this and then go home to kiss our children in their beds. Because of our physical adeptness and mental faculties we find ourselves at the top of the food chain, yet there is something dark in the human spirit that brings us down, down below all other forms of life and dooms us to the vagaries of greed, deceit, and violence, the Achilles Heel that may one day destroy our specie and life as we know it.
Email to the Buffalo
11/16/2008 12:23 PM Bersone:
11/16/2008 12:23 PM Bersone:
Dear buffalo,
I read the vital exchange between you and Larry that discussed violence, the ritualization of violence, the commercial promise of violence, the use of violence by the media to capture our senses, the glorification of violence, the violence in art, such as the murals, violence as a bonding medium between men and boys, the sexual spiciness of violence, the occult uses of violence, the righteousness we feel when we abhor violence, the communion we feel when we go to a game, the strange loss of entertainment value we feel when, for example, a running back, McGee, I think, audibly broke his leg on a run, effectively draining any enthusiasm the crowd had for the remainder of the game, the ability of violence to almost single-handedly sustain and propel the industry of computer games into perhaps our only example of a growing field, to except career opportunities in prison management, and I have read how inevitably the theme of violence turned to consider the relationship between the individual and the group, for witnessing a hanging (a popular event in the old west) or witnessing a whipping, or some poor soul yoked in stocks, his rear end vulnerably exposed to hectoring by children, the sacrifice of Inca individuals having their hearts ripped out of their chest while still alive to honor the Jaguar, the sacrifice of Christ on the cross, of Obama on the campaign trail, and couldn't help thinking of the long line of individuals, for the savior is always an individual, whether he be Galileo or Rimbaud or Novice Theory or Jacqueline Kennedy, who has offered him or herself as a liaison between our everyday world and other worlds, real or imagined, which we long for and dread, such as the man singled out by the Dogun, a tribe in Africa that centers all its activities and structures, the arrangement of their huts, for example, on the orbit of the Dogstar, a star we were unable to detect until the nineteen thirties but which this tribe has worshipped and communicated with for god knows how long, singled out to sit on a ledge, where he sleeps and maintains communication with this star, whose meals are brought to him, and who must never be touched! and I am led back into painful disappointments I experienced as a child in the schoolyard when, swept down upon by the mob, to fight Huey Sullivan, for toughest kid in the fifth grade, Huey, a friend of mine, both of us at the mercy of the mob, feeling the murderous cowardice and unquenchable appetite for safe entertainment of the mob, faced with a no-win situation, for fight you must, one way or another: to fight and win, you lose a friend but gain a crowd, an insufferable master; fight and lose, perhaps deepen a friendship and lose the crowd's crown, no doubt made of thorns, saving the mob from its own cowardice; chicken out, which I did, and hurt yourself, which required a later fight for redemption, but chosen alone, after school, unseen by the crowd, a bitter fight but a respectful fight but a fight that left me still afraid of the crowd, and I thought of another fight, at YMCA camp, with a bully, rolling and spitting down a hillside, until asked by the counselors if I would enter the ring for the boxing tournament that culminated the camp, and refusing, which confused them, someone turning down their honor, for I felt behind their offer the urging of the crowd, and as I read of your exchange I was led through my memories through a string of fights, arguments, some violent some verbal, which can be even more vicious, some heroic, some cowardly, some chosen some imposed until I was led to consider how one fights, where one fights, how one chooses and accepts the arena, what one fights for, who one fights for and realize that to fight for life, for a truth beyond yourself is the difficult thing to do, although it may not lead to honor or victory or salvation: you can be burned at the stake like Giordano Bruno, swept up in the Catholic Inquisition, or you can be peppered by the paparazzi, but to fight to be yourself, to fight to be heard, to fight to be seen with the mask ripped off, which ironically may require a mask being pulled on, to choose to fight, that is difficult indeed, to choose not to fight out of a higher awareness like Thich Nhat Hanh, perhaps the most difficult path, for, as he has shown, both sides hate you, even though you fight for the deeper being with everyone, yes, as I read I felt the spiral that contemplation of violence revolves us in and am left with the dizzying confusion the bull must feel, taunted and speared into attack to play a part in what must be an ancient primitive ritual, the Bull, formidable but not a predator, a grazer, a prey animal, killed by a man in tight pants, tortured into a foaming wrath by incomprehensible motives stirring in the crowd of people around him, him, an individual bull against an individual man, whom we would love to see gored as we deserve to be gored, or transcendentally avoiding it by a deft pivot and sweep of the cape that resolves our terror in a beautiful gesture . . .
I read the vital exchange between you and Larry that discussed violence, the ritualization of violence, the commercial promise of violence, the use of violence by the media to capture our senses, the glorification of violence, the violence in art, such as the murals, violence as a bonding medium between men and boys, the sexual spiciness of violence, the occult uses of violence, the righteousness we feel when we abhor violence, the communion we feel when we go to a game, the strange loss of entertainment value we feel when, for example, a running back, McGee, I think, audibly broke his leg on a run, effectively draining any enthusiasm the crowd had for the remainder of the game, the ability of violence to almost single-handedly sustain and propel the industry of computer games into perhaps our only example of a growing field, to except career opportunities in prison management, and I have read how inevitably the theme of violence turned to consider the relationship between the individual and the group, for witnessing a hanging (a popular event in the old west) or witnessing a whipping, or some poor soul yoked in stocks, his rear end vulnerably exposed to hectoring by children, the sacrifice of Inca individuals having their hearts ripped out of their chest while still alive to honor the Jaguar, the sacrifice of Christ on the cross, of Obama on the campaign trail, and couldn't help thinking of the long line of individuals, for the savior is always an individual, whether he be Galileo or Rimbaud or Novice Theory or Jacqueline Kennedy, who has offered him or herself as a liaison between our everyday world and other worlds, real or imagined, which we long for and dread, such as the man singled out by the Dogun, a tribe in Africa that centers all its activities and structures, the arrangement of their huts, for example, on the orbit of the Dogstar, a star we were unable to detect until the nineteen thirties but which this tribe has worshipped and communicated with for god knows how long, singled out to sit on a ledge, where he sleeps and maintains communication with this star, whose meals are brought to him, and who must never be touched! and I am led back into painful disappointments I experienced as a child in the schoolyard when, swept down upon by the mob, to fight Huey Sullivan, for toughest kid in the fifth grade, Huey, a friend of mine, both of us at the mercy of the mob, feeling the murderous cowardice and unquenchable appetite for safe entertainment of the mob, faced with a no-win situation, for fight you must, one way or another: to fight and win, you lose a friend but gain a crowd, an insufferable master; fight and lose, perhaps deepen a friendship and lose the crowd's crown, no doubt made of thorns, saving the mob from its own cowardice; chicken out, which I did, and hurt yourself, which required a later fight for redemption, but chosen alone, after school, unseen by the crowd, a bitter fight but a respectful fight but a fight that left me still afraid of the crowd, and I thought of another fight, at YMCA camp, with a bully, rolling and spitting down a hillside, until asked by the counselors if I would enter the ring for the boxing tournament that culminated the camp, and refusing, which confused them, someone turning down their honor, for I felt behind their offer the urging of the crowd, and as I read of your exchange I was led through my memories through a string of fights, arguments, some violent some verbal, which can be even more vicious, some heroic, some cowardly, some chosen some imposed until I was led to consider how one fights, where one fights, how one chooses and accepts the arena, what one fights for, who one fights for and realize that to fight for life, for a truth beyond yourself is the difficult thing to do, although it may not lead to honor or victory or salvation: you can be burned at the stake like Giordano Bruno, swept up in the Catholic Inquisition, or you can be peppered by the paparazzi, but to fight to be yourself, to fight to be heard, to fight to be seen with the mask ripped off, which ironically may require a mask being pulled on, to choose to fight, that is difficult indeed, to choose not to fight out of a higher awareness like Thich Nhat Hanh, perhaps the most difficult path, for, as he has shown, both sides hate you, even though you fight for the deeper being with everyone, yes, as I read I felt the spiral that contemplation of violence revolves us in and am left with the dizzying confusion the bull must feel, taunted and speared into attack to play a part in what must be an ancient primitive ritual, the Bull, formidable but not a predator, a grazer, a prey animal, killed by a man in tight pants, tortured into a foaming wrath by incomprehensible motives stirring in the crowd of people around him, him, an individual bull against an individual man, whom we would love to see gored as we deserve to be gored, or transcendentally avoiding it by a deft pivot and sweep of the cape that resolves our terror in a beautiful gesture . . .
Mon 11/17/2008 8:36 AM Buff:
Phew! That’s one hell of a sentence! As your comments confirm, there is a mystical rapture for violence in the human soul and always has been. In this, nothing has changed since the emergence of primitive man to what we now call civilization, except perhaps the levels and forms of expression. We humans can imagine the potential for peace and love yet inevitably opt to grovel in the dust, stirred
by this holy and dark longing for destruction, pain, and danger. Mysterious to me. When I was a skinny kid at Christian Brothers School in Sacramento our P.E. class was visited once by the famous boxer Max Baer, a pug nosed veteran of the ring with a kind heart a big smile and cauliflower ears. Somehow I found myself in those high waisted boxing shorts, black high ankle shoes and thick red boxing gloves stepping into the ring with another kid to receive some pointers from the Champ. Without waiting for the bell or a word from the Champ the kid attacked, pummeling me with flailing arms and leather gloves until I was on my back looking up at my assailant and an amused Max Baer while the mob of classmates cheered the action. Lesson learned. I would be a lover, not a fighter. I would rather wrestle under the sheets with a lovely than on the streets with a thug. I don’t much understand the human animal, his motives and purposes. I don’t know where we come from or where we are going, nor do I grasp my role in all of this. I have always been in the crowd but not of the crowd, watching life swirl all around me while I seem to be standing still. It is quiet here in the eye of the storm where one hears the music of the river and the song of wildlife. And when the hawk suddenly swoops down through the glare of the sun to sink its talons into the body of the rabbit, as I witnessed recently near my house, there is grace to the lifting up into the air, the rabbit hanging limp and silent, grace to the rising and falling of the strong wings, the flying up and away. Violence seems to be uniquely human. Even the ferocity of a pack of hyenas ripping at the flesh of a struggling zebra calf has a form and purpose and sense to it that I just don’t find in two men fighting in a cage, the mob roaring in rage.
The sport of human violence is a form of entertainment, a source of human pleasure. We find joy in the pain of others, pleased to see the blood flow, to hear the crack of a bone, to see the agony in the face. We cheer this and then go home to kiss our children in their beds. Because of our physical adeptness and mental faculties we find ourselves at the top of the food chain, yet there is something dark in the human spirit that brings us down, down below all other forms of life and dooms us to the vagaries of greed, deceit, and violence, the Achilles Heel that may one day destroy our specie and life as we know it.
So it goes.
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
THE LUCHA LIBRE SHOW
Photo by Larry Miller
On October 29th, Lorenzo posted this photo of the lucha libre event that they were planning to attend that night in Oaxaca City, Oaxaca, Mexico, where they are vacationing.
I made this comment: “Doesn't this make you wonder - just what in the world is going on in our heads?!”
His light-hearted response: “Tom, it seems perfectly human to me.”
The next day he posted this flick:
Photo by Larry Miller
My rather sarcastic comment on this one was: “Human Beings just having a little fun. Is that a skull I see in the audience?”
That comment prompted the following Email to the Buffalo exchange:
Email to the Buffalo
11/01/2008 5:46 PM Lorenzo:
You sound a little disgusted in your comments on the lucha shots. I was surprised at how friendly the whole thing was. It was like watching a morality play where the cheaters win at first but good triumphs in the end. The crowd boos the bad guys and cheers the good. All the wrestlers play to the kids, posing with them after the matches and freely handing out autographs. A good bit of money is made selling tshirts, masks and photos.
There was one match that was very violent and hard to watch. It was the the next to the last. The good guys won and were presented with an award belt. Then two big bruisers jumped in the ring and announced they were taking away the award. They then proceeded to beat the holy shit out of the guy, who was slimmer than the rest and not masked. While it wasn't real violence, it was too effective for comfort to my gringo mind. They threw him out of the ring, beat him with chairs and finally carried him off bleeding from a scalp wound and hanging over the shoulder of one of the bullies. It seemed like stepping back into some ancient, violent, sacrificial rite. Now I wonder if they have one match like that on each bill.
Hope you and yours are well.
don lorenzo
11/01/2008 9:26 PM Buff:
Good descriptive. Sounds a bit like the bull fights and just might have come out of that tradition - the bull being the symbol of power - fear - evil. Usually the toreador wins with the sword, but everyone is really there to see the skinny guy in tights get gored. What I noticed first in the poster you put up was the skull, which is the graphics champion of this decade. Of course it has always been popular, but now it is being worshipped, and an essential sticker on any and all high springs "Off Road" pickup truck. The skull and the masks of the luchadores expressing evil, danger, fear, etc. is what made me pause to wonder what in the world is going on in our heads. Young boys go for it immediately, and the daddies encourage it. It's an obsession with fear and death. Of course the same claim could be made of any contact sport, especially American Football. But this lucha/skull/pickup truck stuff is a kind of symbolism that goes beyond any sport, even football. At the end of football games the players hug and kiss. Luchadores smack each other with folded chairs until there is enough blood to make the crowd happy. Of course what was called "Profes
sional Wrestling" was big in our youth and a lot of people actually believed it was a sport. But now it has been ratcheted up a several notches to the level of what is called "Extreme Fighting", two guys fighting in a cage, no holds barred, knees and elbows, teeth and snot, while the smoky crowd sweats and cheers, hoping to see someone knocked cold, and maybe even a broken neck! A human cock fight. Are we itching to get back to the gladiators? Christians and lions? Thumbs up or down? The Taliban took it all to the supreme level with the public beheadings in the soccer fields. And they always drew a good sized crowd! You know, I always thought that if we are so intent on having Capital Punishment here in the good ol U.S. of A., the executions should be public and painful. Why fuck around? If the point is to deter crime, we might as well go all the way. The one and only way to sanctify barbarism is to drop the pretense, be out front about it, ritualize it like the Aztecs did. In our so highly "civilized" societies there would undoubtedly be a lot of support for open and public torture and execution, and the Christian extremist's would definitely be first in line! "Kill him!", they shouted about Obama while the "soccer mom" grinned and winked. As a people, we are like a great herd of animals just on the verge of stampede, chaos. Come to think of it, however, it just might be the lucha libre, and the secret executions by poisonous injection, and the NFL itself that holds us all together as a nation, a people, a civilization. How can I argue with that? Imagine the alternative!Go 49ers! Fuck the Rams!
:)
11/02/2008 5:28 AM Lorenzo:
the executions should be publicand painful.
I have thought that for years and the coffins of our soldiers and pictures of the innocence we kill in war.
While it is dismaying to realize how barbaric we are as a species I don't think we are that way as a majority. Most of the people in Oaxaca weren't' at the lucha. Most people weren't yelling kill him at the rallies. I continue to think that more of us are nurturers than killers.
I do believe that the universe is evolving and that we are part of that. I don't know that we will reach the kind of perfection that you and I would both like to see, but I think we will help. Then again then nature doesn't seem to particular care about kindness or mercy to individuals.
Questions, questions and damn few answers.
Its 7:13 am here and I can hear the comparse band playing in the distance. They have been marching around our little barrio since early last evening dressed as werewolves, skeletons, bishops (a favorite) and a few guys dressed as hot looking girls. They would stop and shoot mescal in your mouth from bota bags.
I guess all we can really do is be what we want to see.
love
lorenzo
11/04/2008 8:38 AM Buff:
I don’t disagree with: “I don't think we are that way as a majority.” I guess what irks me the most is the pandering to ignorance as a capitalistic strategy, which gives ignorant attitudes social status. If it makes a buck, it’s OK – the one and only morality judgment that we, as a collective society, m
ake. All of this confused me as a kid – the Church and elders teaching one way, the society living in another. Eventually, I threw them all over and went to sea in my own leaky boat. I’ve never been a functional part of society since.Yes, “I do believe that the universe is evolving and that we are part of that.” And, no, “nature doesn’t much care about kindness or mercy”. In the evolutionary perspective we’re all OK, living out our natural potentials and tendencies. And the peace and stillness of the natural world is a great solace that some of us have found. When I maintain my evolutionary perspective, all this pandering to violence washes over me, but the images are just so strong and graphic! I must say, at times they cause me physical pain – a shudder of excruciating empathy. I wish it wasn’t so, and that I could find the humor in Lucha Libre and Extreme Fighting and all the off-shoot “gear” that comes with those “sports”. I wish I could ignore the children being enrolled by the parents in such “entertainment”, not really dissimilar from the children we once saw in the KKK robes and masks. But I am effected by this pandering to the base instincts; my sensibilities are assaulted. I wish it wasn’t so, and I accept this as my personal issue without meaning to assign these feelings to anyone else. And I do not feel, nor do I want to imply, that going to a lucha libre match is wrong or even disrespectable. It’s the kids, it’s the images, it’s the capitalistic pandering that turns my head and makes me shudder. There is a higher way, we all know that, and perhaps we are just following the path to that place. I hope so.
Go Niners! Fuck the Rams!
:)
11/04/2008 1:43 PM Lorenzo:
And I do not feel, nor do I want to imply, that going to a lucha libre match is wrong or even disrespectable.
I didn't feel that you expressed that. I wasn't personally peeved. Obviously, I guess, the place of evil and violence in the world is difficult for me to understand, a constant question, but I can see I am less sensitive to it than you. Most likely from the defenses I have built up over the years. One of those defenses is the "well that's how humans are".
love
larry
11/05/2008 11:06 AM Buff:
The defenses we erect to protect ourselves from the inevitable assaults on our person and our sensibilities by the social world are natural, helpful and good. They enable us to function in a society that is littered with customs and habits that run against our own personal truth. None of us can fit neatly into any society and we all must compromise and protect ourselves. My rant on this subject is, as usual, impractical and inflated by my preachy nature. Yet, I never approach the pulpit without having at least attempted to restrain myself, for we must choose carefully our battles and skirmishes. I took this one up because your photo of the lucha poster reminded me of how prevalent violence has become in our games and other forms of entertainment, and also what a huge part of our lives entertainment itself has become. I may be remembering this inaccurately, and correct me if I am, but I don’t remember anywhere near this level of violence worship in my teen years, the fifties. Entertainment was “Fibber McGee and Molly” or “I Love a Mystery” on the wireless, or Lucile Ball on the flickering black and white TV, or a cruise down K Street in Sacramento. The advent of transistor electronics and then the internet have brought us finally to the place of total
entertainment, so total that it has become essential, at least for many of us, the youth especially. And the “thrill” of brushing elbows with danger and evil underpins a large part of this “entertainment”. Most of us accept this, or just haven’t noticed. My kids’ generation accumulate and use the communication and entertainment devises without question, assuming that it has always been so. And the violence that has been carefully interwoven into this fabric is accepted without question. I think it needs to be noticed and questioned, and I don’t mean legislated. I am feeling the need to nudge against some of this and to encourage my kids to take notice of how they are being marketed, setup and sold by the capitalists. The extreme thrill rides and parks, skulls and crossbones, the low grade language in the music, the me-first and fuck you attitudes, the high springs pickup trucks and all the other macho posturing have become so familiar we hardly notice them. The Ad Man has infiltrated the fabric of our social manners to create a continuing market he can control and cash in on. That is what offends me the most, and I feel a need to resist at least a little.I know that I will never change the attitudes my youngest children (Erick and Brigitte) have been brought up in. They believe I am out of step with modern society, and I guess they are right. But I will and do confront them with these feelings when I feel the need to do so. They politely tolerate me while ignoring everything I say.
And so did I.
:)
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