9/11. This day has become a symbol. A political symbol that has been used to mute our true feeling of grief and horror for that day, and ignite in this nation a national terror, a political terror that was then used by Bush and Cheney to advance their perverted political ideology that otherwise would never have been accepted. The terrorists could not have hoped for such success. I remember President Double-yuh saying with fist pounding emphasis: “This will not stand!” and he was right. It did not stand, but was advanced by him and his puppeteers. I watched in disbelief as people were jumping from the windows of the towers and falling to the pavement like stunt doubles in an everyday Hollywood movie. But this was no movie. Then the collapse of the buildings, like hot wax melting and the dust clouds that seemed to have been released for the purpose of covering, finally, the horror of the scene. I kept saying, in my profound American ignorance, What do these people want? What are they so pissed off about? I was ignorant and detached, just another cookie-cutter Ugly American picking his nose in disbelief.
As a nation, we had a chance on that day to wake up and smell the stench of our selfishness and ignorance. Sadly, we blew it. Instead, what is now called 9/11 has become a call for our deep seeded bigotry to rise to the surface. Hate, hate, and more hate. Us and them. Axis of Evil. How many innocents killed since then in the name of American Freedom? The rise of a frightening nationalism (Nationalism is always frightening!). Religious zealotry. The invocation of God’s fucking name to somehow justify our pitiful anger and fear. We are a nation of morons. Tens of millions of us voted for Bush – the SECOND time around, and we are about to do it all once again. Why? Because we are angry. Angry that our pillows have not been fluffed properly. Angry that a black man is now the President of the United States. Angry that our greed and stupidity is finally catching up with us. Angry that our “I’ve got mine, and fuck you!” attitudes are no longer paying financial dividends. Angry that our precious, polluting, greedy, selfish nation is in deep decline, a decline from which we will not ever recover. The poor are angry because they want it all. The rich are angry because they can’t have more. The sick are dying. The children are ignorant. The hard working are unemployed. The wise are silent. The singers are mute. And the masses are pointing fingers at one another. Hate is our touchstone. Fear is our god! We worship fear and will kill for it. Why? Why, all this? Because we are not alive. Because we are not vital. Because we are not singing with the birds and swimming with the fish – the few that remain. Because we are all stuck in the spinning mantra: Make a living. Face reality. Do your duty. Pay your dues. Suck it up.
We have but one job in this life and that is to live. LIVE! Live our vitality. Live our dreams. Live in each moment. Live together as the brothers and sisters that we all are. Live the truth. Share the wealth of all this life provides. Help those in need and ask for help when in need. Don’t want for anything; accept everything. There is enough on the earth for all of us. Everything is provided. There is no need to hoard out of the fear of not enough.
This day can be transformed into a day of thanksgiving – thanksgiving for the moment in time when we, as a nation, turned away from the darkness of fear and into the light of hope and trust. This day can be transformed into a holy day, a celebration of life. It takes only our will and our dedication to joy and our renouncement of fear and our acceptance of the abundance of life of which we are an integral part.
Don’t worry, be happy!
Peace and love.
Showing posts with label Commentary. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Commentary. Show all posts
Saturday, September 11, 2010
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
YOU ARE NOT DEPRESSED. YOU ARE DISTRACTED.
I ran across this posting today on a blog that I have been following for a few months. Check it out. It will make you feel good. I promise!
http://gravitando.wordpress.com/2009/03/24/you-are-not-depressed-you-are-distracted/
The blog is written by a young jewelry designer who lives in Costa Rica. I found her when I did a Google search for the writer Anais Nin and followed this link:
http://gravitando.wordpress.com/2008/03/10/winter-1931-1932-from-the-diary-of-anais-nin/
To see the whole blog, click on the blog title, AL GRAVITAR RODANDO, at the top of her page.
(To return to this page, press the BACK arrow.)
http://gravitando.wordpress.com/2009/03/24/you-are-not-depressed-you-are-distracted/
The blog is written by a young jewelry designer who lives in Costa Rica. I found her when I did a Google search for the writer Anais Nin and followed this link:
http://gravitando.wordpress.com/2008/03/10/winter-1931-1932-from-the-diary-of-anais-nin/
To see the whole blog, click on the blog title, AL GRAVITAR RODANDO, at the top of her page.
(To return to this page, press the BACK arrow.)
Sunday, January 4, 2009
CAN YOU HEAR THE SUICIDE BOMBER SINGING?
By Gene Berson
(He’s a good prose writer, as his Email to the Buffalo show, but it is not often that he offers examples such as this one so rich in poetic voice while determined and uncompromising in perspective.)
The hummingbird in my heart is a suicide bomber, for the world has placed the poet in Solitude: and, in a world of people falling through the atmosphere without ears, our job now, as Henry Miller says, “is not to generate warmth, but to seek a virus that society must allow itself to be injected with or perish. It does not matter whether the artist preaches love or hate, freedom or slavery; he must create room to be heard, ears that will hear. . . . If through indifference and inertia we can create human as well as atomic bombs, then it seems to me that the poet has the right to explode in his own fashion, at his own appointed time.”
Now, forty-five years after those words were written, the suicide bomber speaks every day on the front page. The metaphor of the artist as a suicide bomber has become literalized, his words unheard except for the screams of his victims and the sirens wailing in his wake. The suicide bomber, it turns out, is a woman who was calmly in her second year of law school, capable, accomplishing goals, when the call came. Serenely, responding to the pearl of dedicated death that was her life, she turned silently within herself, put on her explosive vest and went and blew herself up. That commitment was her counselor, her keel in a wasteland of illusion where people are trying their damnedest to eat everything around them, literally, until the most patriotic thing any American can now do, and any other people subjunctively yearning for the latest gadget, is to get a good Tarzan comic book and sit on a toilet and take a phenomenal Shit. We must shit until we feel life easing from us like a smooth train, endless, carrying away an entire century, carrying the Jews on the way to Dachau, the Cambodians whose skulls have been used as retaining walls, the suburban rainbirds squirting through slats of the rickety railway cars as they pass, snapping shadows in half, squirting into the malls of polished terrazzo, shaking the tinsel in the domed sky lit lobbies at Christmas time as people wrack their nerves with obligations they imagine they have, buying tennis-shoes, ties, cell phones, massage chairs, blankets – every object an objet d’Art - every box of Q-tips and bottle of peroxide, every box of Pampers and every box of Depends, every CD and book and shimmering green shawl, every saw, drill and tool, every notebook and cosmetic compact and tube of lipstick, every brassiere, corset, support hose and bracelet, every atomizer full of poisonous perfume, every bottle of Clorox, every piper cub leaving a nostalgic sound in the atmosphere at every air show, every child trying to eat cotton candy like a snail squeezing together its vulvaic lips to clean algae from the walls of an aquarium, every subway token now in the Smithsonian, carefully encased next to a shoelace made obsolete by Velcro, every powder puff used on the face of a newscaster before his broadcast about every bridge between the hand and the heart collapsing due to adrenal glands that have been exhausted by worry – all this must ultimately pass through the bowels as Tarzan swings through the jungle. Shitting is now perhaps the most patriotic act we can accomplish, patriotic not to the country, for nationalism has been obsolete for decades, but patriotic to the earth herself. Please, Please will everybody, every Muslim on his carpet with his fanny in the air five times a day, every shopper, every Malaysian chipmaker, every plastics worker and turbaned Sheik sitting in the kiosk of an all night gas station in Sunnyvale, please, will everybody, every fourth chair symphony bass player and hip-hop spinning DJ please go at once to the only temple left available to us and take a long meditative shit just to at least, finally, be thoroughly involved in the act of giving back.
Copyright © August, 2007 by Gene Berson. All rights reserved.
(He’s a good prose writer, as his Email to the Buffalo show, but it is not often that he offers examples such as this one so rich in poetic voice while determined and uncompromising in perspective.)
The hummingbird in my heart is a suicide bomber, for the world has placed the poet in Solitude: and, in a world of people falling through the atmosphere without ears, our job now, as Henry Miller says, “is not to generate warmth, but to seek a virus that society must allow itself to be injected with or perish. It does not matter whether the artist preaches love or hate, freedom or slavery; he must create room to be heard, ears that will hear. . . . If through indifference and inertia we can create human as well as atomic bombs, then it seems to me that the poet has the right to explode in his own fashion, at his own appointed time.”
Now, forty-five years after those words were written, the suicide bomber speaks every day on the front page. The metaphor of the artist as a suicide bomber has become literalized, his words unheard except for the screams of his victims and the sirens wailing in his wake. The suicide bomber, it turns out, is a woman who was calmly in her second year of law school, capable, accomplishing goals, when the call came. Serenely, responding to the pearl of dedicated death that was her life, she turned silently within herself, put on her explosive vest and went and blew herself up. That commitment was her counselor, her keel in a wasteland of illusion where people are trying their damnedest to eat everything around them, literally, until the most patriotic thing any American can now do, and any other people subjunctively yearning for the latest gadget, is to get a good Tarzan comic book and sit on a toilet and take a phenomenal Shit. We must shit until we feel life easing from us like a smooth train, endless, carrying away an entire century, carrying the Jews on the way to Dachau, the Cambodians whose skulls have been used as retaining walls, the suburban rainbirds squirting through slats of the rickety railway cars as they pass, snapping shadows in half, squirting into the malls of polished terrazzo, shaking the tinsel in the domed sky lit lobbies at Christmas time as people wrack their nerves with obligations they imagine they have, buying tennis-shoes, ties, cell phones, massage chairs, blankets – every object an objet d’Art - every box of Q-tips and bottle of peroxide, every box of Pampers and every box of Depends, every CD and book and shimmering green shawl, every saw, drill and tool, every notebook and cosmetic compact and tube of lipstick, every brassiere, corset, support hose and bracelet, every atomizer full of poisonous perfume, every bottle of Clorox, every piper cub leaving a nostalgic sound in the atmosphere at every air show, every child trying to eat cotton candy like a snail squeezing together its vulvaic lips to clean algae from the walls of an aquarium, every subway token now in the Smithsonian, carefully encased next to a shoelace made obsolete by Velcro, every powder puff used on the face of a newscaster before his broadcast about every bridge between the hand and the heart collapsing due to adrenal glands that have been exhausted by worry – all this must ultimately pass through the bowels as Tarzan swings through the jungle. Shitting is now perhaps the most patriotic act we can accomplish, patriotic not to the country, for nationalism has been obsolete for decades, but patriotic to the earth herself. Please, Please will everybody, every Muslim on his carpet with his fanny in the air five times a day, every shopper, every Malaysian chipmaker, every plastics worker and turbaned Sheik sitting in the kiosk of an all night gas station in Sunnyvale, please, will everybody, every fourth chair symphony bass player and hip-hop spinning DJ please go at once to the only temple left available to us and take a long meditative shit just to at least, finally, be thoroughly involved in the act of giving back.
Copyright © August, 2007 by Gene Berson. All rights reserved.
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
FEAR
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!
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!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
