Joe Biden is a BillaryBot just as was Trump
Not everyone will understand the skulduggery that has invaded Washington, DC; they simply believe and accept that it is not a place for simple people to congregate and expect to redress their grievances against their government. It no longer is their government, the American People no longer have one of those. What the American People have, today, is an oligarchy. This means that a cabal of rich, self-entitled fucktards dictate our domestic and foreign policies TO us, we pay for their wealth AND we are on the hook for ALL of it.
Let me see if I can focus that last point and make it clearer.
You, dear reader and John Q. Citizen of the US of A, are psychologically, emotionally, financially, politically and, if you believe in it, spiritually on the hook for everything the United States Government has done in your name. That means Wounded Knee and the massacre of tens of millions of indigenous people and their subsequent deprivation; that means Frank Olsen who in 1953 was thrown out of a 13th floor hotel window in New York City because he did not agree that the United States Government should ever do to the world what the Nazis of Germany had just got through doing in 1945; that means terminal interrogations of innocent men, women and children — alone and in front of each other; that means the assassination of every US President who has ever suffered an assassin’s bullet; the widespread destruction of every left wing, socialist or thinking person’s government from the late 19th century, onward; the suicides of men ruined in Wall Street’s games of chance as controlled by the Bankers and Banking Families who see to the dispatch of hundreds of millions of people too innocent, too stupid or too virtuous to get out of the way of an Empire of Diabolical proportions; and, that means the suffering and losses of your children, grandchildren and the people you love and trust. All on you, John Q. Citizen, because you uncritically swallowed every goddamned lie this country’s media machines ever told you or raised you to believe. And you will pay, first with your dignity, then your integrity and then with the lives of the people you love; finally with your own life as the dystopian nightmare of Aldous Huxley oozes out before your very eyes.
Congratulations
Clarity is important in life. We need to know what we are doing, how it impacts the world around us and whether we wish to be a party to the consequences of our collective actions.
On a clear day a coyote inserted himself into a community far into the south of Mexico. He drove a nice car, wore jewelry and loved to explain to the local ranchito owners how much better their life would be if they worked a kush job picking oranges in Florida. The price would be fair and he would hold their property in exchange so no cash would need to change hands. Simple. They could pay him back for his trouble from all the money they would make in Florida picking oranges, much more than they could ever hope to make sowing subsistence crops for the rest of their whole lives here on their ranchito. Or they could just stay in Florida, he would keep their property for himself and they could go on living the good life of an American citizen.
This far south, no one talks or even knows about legal or illegal immigration, the Sonoran Desert, the endless Walk, the Heat, how heat breaks down the body, what dehydration does to the mind, or the parched, anonymous bones it leaves behind, jutting out of the desert sand. They litter the Sonoran Desert, victims of the not-so-silent battle between rich and poor, the Hopeful and the Hopeless, the border crossers and the coyotes who feed off of their ignorance. This is the purest, most vile form of capitalism operating at the ass-end of the world you and I live in.
A mother, father and their six year old daughter finally made the bargain with the coyote and by the time they had reached northern Mexico, they were, “all in.” It was either make it to Florida or lose what little they had to the longest walk of their lives.
Prayers to Mary do not work in the Borderland. They knew that this trek would be difficult, but nothing and no one they had ever seen or met could have prepared them for what still remained between them and the paradise that was picking oranges in the Florida sunshine.
After several days battling dehydration and evading Border Patrol agents, the father became separated from his wife and daughter, leaving them both stranded in the desert with little food or water to keep them alive.
The mother wandered the desert with her young daughter in despair, aimlessly searching for her husband to no avail, crossing paths, inevitably, with another coyote who offered to watch her daughter while she tried to “earn” the necessary funds to pay the coyote’s price for watching her daughter and getting her the rest of the way to Florida.
Or she could pray to Mother Mary.
So she prayed in a world spinning upside down and out of control, leaving the coyote to sun himself in the desert a while longer atop the rocks where he could later hide from the heat of the afternoon.
A man who has lived in the Borderland his whole life soon appeared in the distance with an archeologist walking about and doing a study regarding the migration from north to south and back again over thousands of years. He had a recorder and the two men had been talking about the thousands of backpacks he had collected over the three years of his study, the artifacts of the lost and the dying that seemed to be increasing in volume of late. The archeologist was creating a story for the Public Radio Exchange Project, a dubious little corner of the worldwide web where some of the worthless artifacts of disaster capitalism are stored, frozen in time with the hope no one can trade for a living wage any longer.
“That is the nature of this place, hombre.”
“What do you mean, Pedro?”
“Prayers do not work here, señor. There is no forgiveness in the Borderland.”
The eyebrows of the archeologist raised and as he turned to shake his head, he caught a glimpse of the woman and her daughter, trudging through the hot sand. “More data,” he thought.
The mother spoke no English, and so Pedro intervened between the two while the archeologist recorded her story for Science, for PRX and for my ears driving home from Austin, from my relatively kush job trying to bring health insurance, maybe healthcare, to my in-laws and countless millions who had nothing only a few short years before. It was the most I thought I had left to do with my life and my Creator obviously agreed with me. Working for a Defense contractor before now, while better than starving to death trying to sell cable television and telephone at the age of 50 to a world that no longer needed either, was nowhere near the best possible fit for either me or a culture of people used to blowing two-dollar tents, and their contents, to bits using 100 thousand dollar missiles. But it was a living, I was slowly returning to the level of income I had been at prior to 9/11/2001, and so when the chance to work on a project that might lead to socialized medicine for all, I felt the attraction of the project and the repulsion of my own karma made my journey to Austin inevitable. As inevitable as Pedro’s place in space and time translating for an archeologist and Posterity in the Sonoran Desert could possibly be.
Pedro explained the mother’s story and her plight to the archeologist, her dehydration making tears impossible and the smell of drinking her own urine for hours seem so desperate, that Pedro, a man who had no money himself, openly weep for this mother and her young daughter in front of this man of Science.
The archeologist watched, recorder in hand, while Pedro reached deep into his pocket to pull out what must have been his last and only hope for a cup of soup that evening, placing it into the mother’s hand with two of his own. Thirty pesos. Not even American money. The mother’s knees buckled to the hot sand, the little girl leaning in towards her mother. Pedro wailed like a baby.
End of story.
You can build your wall, create a few hundred jobs and perhaps even ease your conscience flipping quarters into the tin cups of the hustlers and the homeless who have littered our streets for most of the last 40 years. Maybe even pretend like you can detect the difference between the two better than a subsistence farmer in southern Mexico. But you are lying to yourself every bit as effectively as all those Jews who filled up all those rail cars thinking that they were finally going to the Promised Land of Israel, only to discover – far too late – that their fate had already been decided for them by one of their own long before they had even left the Ghetto, long before they had given up all of their earthly possessions to pay for a holy trip that was to be their Final Solution.
Their prayers, like ours, are not answered in the Borderland. All we have left anymore are the stories we tell each other about where we’ve been and what we’ve done to get here to this moment in space and time. Our only prayer is that we are telling one another the honest truth as we see it.
Fat chance.
When I hear those words echo from outside myself, I get angry, too.
I don’t know where the anger comes from – the fury. I just know that it comes. And it becomes. On grey Winter days it may come
at any time. In the bursts of springtime blossoms it may fester and go rancid for a chance to spill its seed into the life of another unwitting victim. Beginning anew, a little less angry with each successive generation, it comes forth with the promise of something different, something interesting, something beyond what has ever come before. But then it just dies in fits of forgetful regret for not having lived out its promise, for never having broken through its own shell to reach out to the Light. The Light that’s never really there when we need it, anyway.
Such is the fate of stardust and the powder-filled wings of angels.
If there’s anything good to come from the outright theft and betrayal of the sexual identities of fourteen young women, it is the minor wizardry of these words spilling forth in a waterfall of grief, regret, despair, disappointment and utter betrayal. I cannot believe we gave so much of ourselves, promised to so many for so very little.
I used to blame my father’s Catholicism for the fact that I could never seem to accept the timid, tentative outstretched hand of a woman looking for connection, for shared joy, for relief from the bitter dregs of adolescent angst. I could never smash the faces of my enemies nor vanquish my guilt over my reticence. It was because of that old mossy, rusty cross and those eyes cast down upon the world in a familiar fact-filled glance of grief, regret, despair, disappointment and utter betrayal. I could not bring myself to strike at the face of my own despair and fear; I could never accept the hand of promise stretched out to me from what seemed like miles away because I never felt entitled to the release, the resolution or the reconciliation. I never felt entitled because…Jesus. I never felt good enough because He was hung there like carrion for a murder of crows. Every bloody nose I willed to be theirs, every smashed face that wasn’t mine, every orgasm lost in grievous sin into tawdry linens I sacrificed by being nailed to a cross of my own construction and design because “They” told me to do it when I couldn’t cross myself correctly, serve mass piously, take my torments with humility or confess my sins honestly. The same sins it has taken most of my life to even recognize much less comprehend in origin. “How convenient,” I thought, “that they have numbered all my bones and laid the wages of all sin at my feet, in my tawdry linens, in all my unreconciled torments and dreams of vengeance – no matter how long delayed!” Of course it was the rancid, ancient beliefs of little men in fancy clothing and funny hats sent from a righteous heaven to defile the dreams of resolution and absolution begged for from a laiety so masochistic, so anachronistic that only a fool would pass on the chance to milk so sacred a cow. Let the carnival barking begin! Crash my dreams of a normal, healthy existence into the side of bitter mountaintop, never to be seen, nor heard from, again!
My mother’s bloodied face in 1966 and her long-defiled, swollen abdomen in 1936 had more to do with my tormented-shut libido and my interpersonal cowardice than any religious liturgy oozing out of ancient Rome. The sadism was handed down from years of masochism gone unrequited, from beatings so severe and senseless that the beguiled prayed to be set free even onto a snow-filled prairie to take their chances with wild buffalo; buffalo soon to be stacked high near the dead natives left without food to fight the chill of Winter. No, the Catholics gave these brutal people safe passage into purgatory years after condemning them to the hottest Hell for refusing to eat fish on Fridays, refusing to restrain their coital urges for a public sanctioning of wedlock, for missing a week of mass or a Holy Day. Or for loving an improper stranger.
The sins of 120 million dead brothers and sisters, of at least as many tears, bore witness then to a brutal savagery yet to come. A web of interdependent shame so hideous as to make the true character of a people facile in the face of sacrificing any hero or shrew, for they would always be one in the same here. To Europe and to ancient Rome, the impudent Americans would always be a laughing stock of hollow native outcasts, of fools and of dregs. We would always care little for ourselves because, for centuries, we would be forsaken by the Crown of Britain for intransigence and singled out for disrespect. Nevermind that the freedom we sought was only a modicum of what might be deserved for the children of any lesser god. This callous disregard of our dignity was passed down to all others too taken by our silly clothes and poor agrarian skills to yield to the iron fist our naiveté concealed.
But proof is thus concealed in pudding and murmurs in the mud.
Of one thing my age has granted me some certainty: no deity or reified human being hangs from a tree after being beaten to a point where human death becomes a distant, fond wish and but gives a damn who eats what, who goes where nor who fucks whom. The look of grief and utter, dismal betrayal in those bloodied, half-shuttered eyes cast down from that effigy beneath which I prayed longingly had nothing to do with anything but the behavior of those who birthed me here and on whose knees my tutelage received. Beyond that I cannot speak intelligibly, for that is a matter of personal faith which, on a good day, my heart lightens and my smiles abound; on a bad day (or thirty minutes later), well, I wish for you nothing but the cynical fury of a life spent searching for what cannot be found: American dignity.
Fourteen women lost their will to live lives as human beings open to the advances of honest, trustworthy men because a cynical fury, known only to adults, cast onto a child a seething despair so rancid, so irreconcilably lost in the devotion, love and innocence of children, that that child had nowhere left to put their love, had no place to share a joy twisted by fury into sickness and death. That child turned adult would have you thank them for not murdering these women, but for leaving them broken and not whole inside, that we might reconcile and untwist his sickness into love. Thank you, Bill. Now go back to the now snow-starved prairie bereft of the buffalo and their brothers, back to the land from which you were fortunate enough to have survived and tell us more tales of laughter and exuberance, if you dare. Of the wisdom or compassion of a man who hollows out the heart of a woman, eating it but once yet shitting it out sideways into a bag for the rest of his pathetic life, I know precious little but an agonizing despair so deep it cannot be reached.
That was my mother you raped, that was my sister you violated, that was my daughter you betrayed and that was my sex life you utterly destroyed in multiple thoughtless acts of muted revenge for sins beyond any adult ability to reason or scope, let alone a child. A flaccid awesome lie paints the pants of the American landscape, and we blame you for a child’s disability to communicate a need for reason and for help.
It was not the Catholics after all. Nor the Crown. We are where we are because we deserve it. All power and privilege decreed it so centuries ago. For that revelation I thank you, Bill Cosby.
No clap of thunder or any tornado-swept hole in Hell matches the jolt of a mind split apart with wattage, laid waste to by countless drugs having side-effects too hideously tormenting to recount, only to be discounted by a community caught in disbelief over its own hypocrisy and loss of moral compass. It was left to the judgment of a Judge that all power of judgment be taken from a nine year old girl so her goat-copulating father, who freely chose to leave his loose change and burning cigarettes on her nightstand, might continue to work in the community and sustain a family that was rejecting him outright. The year was 1936 and from 1932 my mother endured the heaving advances, the pathetic breath, the jaundiced eyes and the enormous penis of an entity ten times her weight and orders of magnitude her size. He was a brutal, drunken heap of human flesh thrown completely clear of a Hell made hot, barren and unwelcoming by his utter presence. There is a reason the State of Oklahoma continues to quake in ignorant fear of supernatural evil: Jack Shelby lived there once. He brewed ‘shine fit for Pretty Boy Floyd, lying his way through solid stone, melting handcuffs of righteous lawmen and leaving machine-gun toting criminals in awe of the power of his thunderous, cloven-hooved gait over wooden floors worn down soft by the shuffling feet of the despairing. He would leave the Dustbowl of Oklahoma just ahead of fate because of the Great Depression, the same Great Depression the people of Texas continue to believe never happened. They may be right; it may just have been the crater this sucking chest wound of moral ambivalence left in the dirt of Oklahoma when Satan, Himself, threw this Irish asshole to Earth from the hellfire of the Sun. Steinbeck recounted symptoms for posterity, receiving a Nobel Prize; my mother absorbed a full-frontal moral shock for an entire world terrified by an evil so brutal it defied her ability to remain a whole human being. For that service she received the scorn of her community, the misunderstanding of her children, and a life that continues to haunt my credulity and stain my credibility with good men who have never had to bear witness to such an empty vastness – to the sheer cold depth – of a moral black hole from which no hope of any light could ever escape.
That is why you have never heard of Jack Shelby, for as soon as he appeared in your life, your mind demanded you forget him; the sheer gravity of his darkness exceeded human comprehension. What I realize today is that it was his presence in my mother’s life that sealed her fate long before I was even born. It was never my grandmother’s fault; it wasn’t even the Catholic Churches’ fault; though responsibility, when it hits the fan, is never evenly nor fairly distributed. This was all Jack Shelby, my grandfather, an evil-dead non-person who raped my mother from the time she was five until she was nine, defiling the countryside from Oklahoma to California in one, long forgettable visitation to our planet.
The first time they strapped my mother down, shoved rubber into her terrified, confused mouth and scrambled her brain with electricity was when she was 19 years old and had had two children by a man from the House of Canterbury. He left soon after her stay in the sanitarium never to be seen, nor heard from, again. Decades later, when his children were fully adults and merely curious, they located Jonathan and attempted contact with him. He refused the connection. He insisted they were mistakes and that they never contact him again. They dutifully complied, a burden lifted from one child and left to rest on the shoulders of another. That child died drinking a gallon of cheap wine every night just to maintain himself from shaking due to withdrawals, aged 64 years. The official cause of death wasn’t cirrhosis or poisoning, but cancer. A mere brush with a black hole sends grown men a full country’s width away from their own children and another man into a bottle never to surface again. Mental illness caused a terrible fright in the 1940’s, even some 4 decades after a firm commitment from the country to build sanitariums to house the mentally ill, the alcoholic and the terminally misunderstood received cheers for President Teddy the Bullmoose. If we could not repair broken lives, we could at least hide them, and our shame, from public view. It was the least we could do since, prior to that time, it was the SPCA – the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals – who were the only human beings willing to risk contact with society’s untouchables. Sydney Cameron, a psychiatrist and admirer of the strides the Nazis had made experimenting on the Jews and others in their “work camps,” not one to miss out on an opportunity, used these sanitariums to find research subjects for his experiments involving the erasure and reconstitution of the human personality. To relieve suffering, of course. Dr. Cameron never quite perfected the “reconstitution” aspect of his experiments with “psychic driving” before he was forced underground and his experimentations along with him, but that wasn’t for lack of available test subjects. There will always be plenty of shame to drive some of us completely mad and in search of some sort of erasure. I do not know if my mother was ever a formal test subject in the early days of the “Monarch” program – a place where the cleansed records of Nazi doctors found a home and adequate funding for further research – but I do know she was given numerous “shock treatments” on multiple occasions in her many three-month, “convalescent stays,” behind the walls of Santa Clara’s now defunct, “Agnews State Hospital.” I may never know the actual extent of the procedures my mother endured because the State of California “mishandled” all of the patient records from those days, selling the property to Sun Microsystems in 1997. But at least I know that of the many “sterilization” operations that were performed on mentally ill women without their consent or awareness, my mother was probably not among them. That could be considered a stroke of luck since, of the fifty states in these United States, California sterilized the mentally ill far more often than any other State. Texas, where I now live, the least often.
We have always placed great pride in our mental illness in Texas, as it turns out, burying a wealth of “crazy uncles” and “addled aunts” in trailers and trailerparks spread out across the vast, expansive countryside, as if they were our secret treasure waiting to be mined. We’ve even sent a couple of our most grievously afflicted to serve as Presidents of these United States. One from each political party has been sent, so far, just to prove that we are nonpartisan and fair in our admiration and respect.
Both men were, history has shown, equally and predictably destructive.
“If nominated I would not run, if elected, I would not serve,” should have been LBJ’s motto before he ascended to the Presidency on the odd coincidence that his predecessor had fallen victim to an assassin’s bullet, not unlike at least one or two other of Johnson’s political opponents. The Johnson Family might like to parade their favored son’s “Great Society” programs for all to see, but had he not guided and passed that legislation through Congress during his first and only term as President, Bobby Kennedy, the fallen President’s brother, close confidante and a sworn enemy of LBJ and his friend J. Edgar Hoover, would have certainly taken the Presidency and proceeded to right the grievous wrong that had been not just to his family, but to the entire country as a result of his brother’s untimely demise. As it turned out, the evil that had been done to the United States and to my family up to that point, had taken up deep roots here in the American South, as multiple homicides just happened to take place against every major political opponent who dared to take exception to this country’s economic alliance with Nazi Germany back in 1932. That would be about the same time Jack Shelby started making his drunken, twisted advances at my mother when she was barely able to walk and not yet able to run.
As for Texas’ other contribution to “whirled peas,” the wound is still quite fresh and infected to the bone as only the bite from the fetid mouth of a Komodo Dragon can be. I think George W. Bushes’ dubious flight and appearance aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln in 2003 to announce, “Mission Accomplished,” says everything about the purpose and plan the Bush Family had in mind for the United States beginning around 1932 when the President’s grandfather, Prescott, began funneling money and weapons to Nazi Germany and its new Chancellor, “Adolf Hitler.” The “mission accomplished” banner had precious little to do with “combat operations in Iraq” being complete, because that proved to be complete nonsense. The mission, from World War I to the present day, has been to bring about a New World Order; the same “novus ordo seclorum” Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler tried to ooze all over the world during World War II. That mission, to the chagrin of all those brave soldiers and civilians who died during World War II, and their families, has been accomplished. The dark crown of fascism has been restored on the head where it properly belonged. God saved the Queen.
The only time I ever saw Jack Shelby, the person, was when he was dying on his bed in a convalescent hospital in Merced, California. My grandmother couldn’t see fit to keep something like the death of a parent from my mother and, true to form, she gave him more comfort than I was able to comprehend at the age of 12. True to the nature of these events, I do not recall his face. I do, however, recall the old man not two beds away pathetically masturbating as my cousins Deborah and Cheryl sat vigil with my mother and grandmother as they said their final “goodbyes” to a hollowed-out shell of a human being. By this time the evil had left behind little more than an effigy of the man who terrified and terrorized the women in his life four and five decades before. By that time only Bobby, Jimmy and my mother were left, and they would pass in that order, all from cancer as the official cause. As I sat there in that room soaked with the smell of Betadine and urine, wondering what I was even doing there, I began to feel the emptiness creeping over me like a hole in my chest that the wind would not leave alone. Neither Bobby, nor Jimmy, bothered to see their father off with a final fair-the-well. Over the decades they had seen many men off to Hell in multiple wars as they served in the Navy; the death of their father would be just another hollowed-out shell tossed overboard, the engines of progress full steam ahead. They had said all they were ever going to say to the man who had terrorized them and raped their sisters.
There was nothing funny or sad about any experience that included Jack Shelby or his clan; these were spiritual trials to be endured, replete with panic attacks, anxiety and terror that seemed to know no bottom. The terror that I grew up and through, damaging and traumatizing though it was, was nothing in comparison to the fate these poor souls had consigned themselves to. Enough of my soul and heart was left to allow me to walk through the doors of Alcoholics Anonymous at the age of 30, thinking and believing I had been cheated of another 10 good years of drinking and taking drugs, “for fun.” In those ten years, had I survived them, the disease would have convinced me that life was not about joy but was a trial to be endured. Only the meanest, coldest and nastiest men lived long or prospered in this hellhole that the likes of JP Morgan, Henry Ford, JD Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie left in their wake. These four horsemen created a country that will be known not so much for its natural beauty or its kind people but for its unrelenting cruelty against its own and others. We have been uncompromising in that regard, the scope and depths of our genocidal history so hideously sublime that no history book dare print a word nor utter a sound lest the hounds of hell be unleashed against them and their families. Such was the case with the Kennedys, such will be the case with any organized resistance against the evil that grows wild here and in places where the Sun never shines.
Just the other day I was reading a recounting of the history of German Uboats of World War II and the various artifacts found in that most impressive submarine fleet of the day. Among the contents? Several ticket stubs to movie theaters along the Texas coast.
The point of my story lost in a fog of shame and guilt will be over what shame and guilt I have failed to surface and resolve here. My responsibility thus adjudicated, I shall suffer that the Queen and Rome might continue their masquerade as unwilling witness to the original sin the publishers of fiction and contradiction thus contrived.
“When thy intelligence shall cross beyond the whirl of delusion, then shalt thou become indifferent to Scripture heard or that which thou hast yet to hear.” – Bhagavadgita
I keep this passage from the Book of Doctrines close to my heart since I first came across it in the winter of 1991, for I thought it a dangerous passage. Two centuries prior to our beloved Christian movement and some seven to twelve hundred years after Moses first freed the Jews from slavery in Egypt, the Gita was making doctrines obsolete faster than scribes could record them. Or the rich people of those days could typeset, print and distribute them. The ebb of life on the planet was slow and uneven in the third century BCE or we might all be walking about with dots on our foreheads.
By the year 1948 (CE), those laying claim to being the people of Moses had had enough talk of messiahs coming or going, enough discussion of Judaic Ethics and decided, some would say with wide-ranging consensus, that “The Jews” had waited long enough. The persecutions and the pogroms, usually sponsored by Christians, were a tiresome affair to observe and, all too often, a heartbreaking routine to experience. “The Jews” would return to Israel and David Ben Gurion was as good a messiah as any in his time. Maybe putting pen to paper would shut the Jews up. In any case, the narrative of six million dead Jews at the hands of a lapsed Catholic expedited matters considerably. The Jews would, “come home,” from their perspective, but for the Palestinians who had had a very amicable relationship with Palestinian Jewry up until the early twentieth century, the sudden shift toward Jewish hegemony in what had been “their homeland” must have felt like a betrayal among good neighbors.
I happened along on the planet a year before a fellow from my hometown won a Nobel Peace Prize for recording and codifying the epic journey of the Joads from Oklahoma to California, a journey that many read in sadness and shame but a journey that only told a smattering of details regarding the indignities humans serve up to other humans. As the Grapes of Wrath went to print in 1939, the woman who was pushing me out into this theatre of the absurd in 1961 had been just 12 years old and had actually been a part of that original journey to California in 1929. Needless to say, John Steinbeck had skipped a few significant details in the interest of brevity and creative license, but let it not be said it was because his creativity was waning; he had been drinking rather heavily in the hills above Los Gatos at the time and generally making an ass of himself between his residence and the post office where he delivered his manuscripts for editing to his publisher. The politics of publishing any account of human-imposed human suffering within US borders that was not Civil War-related, would still need to follow that mould of, “all things come together for the good of the country and God Bless America,” or it would not be typeset. Being a practicing drunk of some literary and journalistic promise, it is virtually certain Steinbeck was nearing the end of his publisher’s largesse when he and his wife made the editing decisions that could have meant the end of an endless river of booze and cigarettes, neither of which Our Dear John could have lived without. Details be damned, even if it was my entire family’s story that was left out.
The reason why the Steinbeck (really, “GrossSteinbeck,”) story is relevant to a story about landscaping an area of Palestine who some feel has fallen into disrepair is because Steinbeck’s paternal grandfather, Johann, formed, with Clorinda Minor, the Mount Hope colony/pre-kibbutz in Jaffa. Steinbeck’s grandfather’s brother, Frederick, was murdered and his brother’s wife and mother-in-law beaten and raped by Arab farmers in an all night affair of murder and mayhem that came to be known as, “the Outrages at Jaffa.” To be certain the Steinbeck’s and their family had suffered from Arab and Bedouin harassment before this night in 1858, but this was the first noteworthy incident of Arab on Jew violence in Ottoman Palestine and it had more to do with zealous Christian Dominionist end-times theology in collision with Muslim hegemony, than with the inability of Palestinian Jews to live peacefully amidst their Muslim majority neighbors. The murder of men and the raping of women, while practiced as an act of profound disrespect towards the “unclean” in Muslim countries, is not an act sanctioned by Islam. It just so happens that where there are Muslims and “infidels,” there tends to be a lot of violence towards women and xenophobia towards men. Sort of reminds me of South Texas, after a fashion. Sniff.
The other reason why landscaping stories interest me is because of a side-business I use to support my greater aspirations. Being an actor and being the owner of a small lawn maintenance concern between Killeen and Austin, Texas, basically means I mow lawns for a living. As part of a lawn deal with a dentist in Austin, I managed to get my teeth bleached whiter than most politicians, which really helps me get past the first knock on neighborhood doors looking for additional clients, but has done nothing to enhance my capacity for finding dramatic work in a sea of blond-haired, blue-eyed twenty-something’s. It is not that I am a bad actor or poorly skilled in delivering my lines, it’s that I am a young forty-something at the age of fifty-two. People in Killeen look at me and think, “he’s a smart, handsome-enough man, why can’t he find any real work,” as I discuss the finer points of putting a clean edge on their lawn, while people in Austin, usually my friends, generally say, “there he goes, livin’ the dream and undeterred by the naysayers. I can support that!” Whatever it takes to get the bills paid. If I have to tan to look Hispanic enough to be in this business, I am willing to do that, but I have to keep the blond hair and blue eyes ceded to me by my parents in hopes of greater commercial exposure. Landscaping is just part of my larger plan to take Hollywood by storm. Yay, me.
How I made it here to Texas I couldn’t begin to tell you beyond a tragic tale of unguided love. Clichés may not be interesting to the general public, but they do tend to move people across country when the getting is good and the timing seems right. Moving from California to Texas might seem to some folks like a backward move economically, spiritually, morally and culturally. But I see where Manifest Destiny pegged a journey that began at Plymouth Rock and moved westward like a huge conveyor belt, carrying social pariahs of all kinds who got as close to the ocean as they could before they faced the fact that they would be living in close quarters with people they didn’t like any better than did the rest of the country. Moving to Texas was a huge cultural shock to my system, but it appears now that my system needed the shocking. Apparently the world is chalk-full of people who hate what they do for a living, are hanging on to their life story by their fingernails and are doing so while living in a poaching humidity that leaves molds, bacteria’s and fungi floating in midair, waiting for a receptive pair of lungs to come along and sustain them a while longer. Prior to moving to Texas, I thought everyone lived in a place like Salinas and had a cleansing fog to look forward to rolling in every evening, only to watch it roll back out to sea by noon the following day. Sixty-eight degrees, year-round. This was certainly the case in San Luis Obispo where I once went to college, and is true all up and down the central coast of California. But not so in any part of Texas. Nor is it true in Philadelphia, my father’s hometown which he no longer claims.
If landscaping and the mowing of lawns has been something of a meditation for me while I await the next chapter of my life to unfold, learning to speak with, tolerate, understand and make a living selling lawn services to a typical Texas homeowner has been an exercise in linguistic gymnastics, religious tolerance and humility.
“Do what,” the grey-haired man in the bolo tie said to me after I asked him what time it was. He then took a step back and looked at the time piece in his front pocket and let me know that I was perilously close to noon-time in mid-August. No one in their right mind mows their lawn after noon in the midst of a Texas summer, but that wouldn’t stop my client from asking for extras designed to watch me sweat and drip, becoming half-crazy from dehydration and completely incapable of carrying on an adult conversation.
“I really wanted to get back inside by noon, Mr. Deutsche.”
“The Lord works in mysterious ways, Ed. Mysterious ways. A hard day’s work cleanses the soul and brings us closer to the Almighty.”
Now it used to be that I could ignore an asinine comment like this from a client. My Mexican counterparts do all the time, amazing me with their comprehension of American idioms and context, only to become deaf, mute or illiterate at the prospect of being asked to work past noon in the summer. They often smile politely, say, “jess,” and pack up and leave the job site just as they had planned to from the beginning of the day. But my way past competing with the rock-bottom pricing capacity of your typical Mexican landscaper was to ape the German-Protestant work ethic that demands a willingness to work for slave wages under third-world conditions, all the while maintaining a bright smile and pleasant demeanor that would make them proud to call me, “son.” “Arbeit macht frei .” They know what they are asking for is unreasonable, they know they are challenging me to survive a huge and unnecessary obstacle between doing my job and ending up in an emergency room with heat exhaustion or worse; but they also know that if I am a true-blue Texan down to my bone marrow, I will go out of my way to prove it at the drop of any hat. If a Texan challenges you to a throw-down, you better show up or plan on being part of a parade in your honor that sends you marching out of town. Texans pride themselves on not being lazy, on working hard and on honoring authority; but once you prove to them that you are among friends who see eye to eye, you begin to notice how much harder the Mexicans you are competing against are actually working than the Texans who are paying their wages. Southern hospitality meets southern hypocrisy every day in Texas, but don’t ever be caught dead saying so or you’re back out in the heat proving yourself one more time. God-fearing German Protestants raised in this State get the smartass smacked off their faces at a very young age. So I smile the brightest, toothiest Austin-bleached smile I can muster and say, “yes sir, Mr. Deutsche,” and I get busy not resisting authority since authority is helping to pay my rent this month.
“Thank you, son. I sure do appreciate it.”
“Anytime, Mr. Deutsche. You can count on me.”
“Do what?”
“I said, ‘you can count on me, sir,’” with yet another smile as genuine as any smile seen from the pulpit of any mega church in this State. The “do what” was perfunctory and used as a double-check to ensure I wasn’t full of shit the first time I said what I said. If you pass the second, “do what,” test, you’re in. You’ve sold ‘em. And if you think it gets any harder than that, just remember the long-con the Bush Family has been able to pull off in this State and the people here still hold their Family in high regard. They were able to drop the entire economic, political and legal infrastructure of the goddamn United States to its knees in a fortnight using the same tricks Hitler used to come to power in Germany, yet Texans still want to get their pictures taken with these lizards, still want to be seen around them. Frankly, I’d rather mow Mr. Deutsche’s lawn. He’s a big fan of “Dubya,” swears to God Almighty that “Lib’ruls” are the death of this country, watches FoxNews and Reverend Hagee, but his heart is pure gold. He would no more take a switch to a man beaten down by circumstance than he would stab his wife in the heart. He’s actually quite liberal in ways not understood by those he supports with his money and his vote. But he’s a Texan, so that means he has to win. Texans pick a winner and stick with them to the bitter end. So as long as I’m putting a perfect edge to Mr. Deutsche’s lawn and making it the pride of his block, I can count on plenty of business in this neighborhood. My Californian ancestry is excused for as long as I am willing to adopt Texas values as my own and respect those whose trust I have earned.
Jews wouldn’t be terribly comfortable with the accommodations here in Texas because, first and foremost, Texans don’t like hearing people complain. And complaining is something bred into the genetic code of every modern Jew I have ever had the pleasure of knowing. They might talk a good game, might be able to get you to relax and laugh with them, but make no mistake: this whole fucking world is beneath them, they know it for a fact and they believe that you do not. Your willingness to accept the unacceptable is what makes you, “goyim,” and a sally, and this permits them to think of you as no better than a pack animal. Heaven help you if you tell them this truth to their face, even if you heard them tell it to each other in your presence. Now not every single Jew is this touchy any more than every single Texan is a naïve fool, but generally Jews and Texans share something in common that makes them mutually repulsed by one another: they stick together when times get rough and they share the spoils when times swing in the other direction. The reason so many Americans find Texans so obnoxious is for the same reasons that the people of the world have always had it out for the Jews: they know their own, they cling to their own, they protect their own and they damn sure aren’t going to tolerate being invaded by someone not, “their own.” And, “fuck you,” for noticing it, you anti-Semitic/anti-Texas parent-hating Californian with a thirst for the ungodly and the unseemly.
I don’t often launch into a thesis while I’m mowing someone’s lawn, but my thoughts make it possible for me to do what has become second nature to me while I make use of the time discussing more important matters with you. Matters of gravest urgency. Matters that you might have overlooked while you were busy trying to live your daily life without feeling like a complete and utter failure to your employer, your spouse and/or your children. I’d like to think we can sit down in this sacred space I am creating in my mind and recognize our thoughts in each other and identify the common mentality that binds us to one another on a global basis. You look at me and think, “Loser,” because I am choosing to work at a menial job I am good at while I nurture a dream I have to connect with a whole roomful of people using a script or the written word as a vehicle. I must seem silly to you to harbor such fantastic delusions of grandeur while I scrape the wet grass from the underside of my mower because you watered before I arrived and let your grass get too high before calling me to come shred the tops off your lawn and make it look brown and sick. I am unworthy of your time because I appear to you to be less than what you would expect from someone who can speak and write English as if I were a college graduate, as if the graduates from your institutions of higher learning will ever be able to write or spell like I can. I was born with this freakishly precocious diction and suffered many ass-whippings in the old neighborhoods I grew up in because of it. Yes, it might be going to waste while I tell you about the finer points of lawn care and maintenance, but at least I am not using my gifts to decimate and devalue the lives crowded into a pseudo-city and made into clichés with fleschette bombs and white phosphorus, as your more promising college graduates do. At least I know better than to see the heads of Palestinian children in every blade of grass I sever from its root, or regard every crawling insect or worm that inhabits one of my lawns as a signal that I need to spray insecticide over an entire yard. At least I have the sense to realize that the same causes and effects that require me to intervene in a lawn gone wrong are identical to the causes and effects that make my own yard problematic. At least I know what the word, “conservative,” means, and when a “radical” intervention is indicated. I know lawn care, I’ve done yard work my entire life, and I know better than to treat every brown spot in a yard as a case of lawn moths requiring insecticide, rather than as a neighbor’s dog who got out over the weekend and had his way with the neighborhood. A lawn is a system and systems always reflect the thinking and the behavior of those responsible for bringing them into being. If I can’t make reasonable sense out of what you expect from a lawn care professional in the first ten seconds of conversing with you, I am not going to be able to save your lawn from your own ignorance and stupidity. I have walked away from business like that out of sheer reflex because I know I am tossing pearls down a privy. Maybe that makes me xenophobic or maybe that makes me a Jew, but I haven’t missed a rent payment in a long time and I haven’t had the police called on me because my client felt cheated by my work ethic or felt I was being, “unfair.”
So what does lawn care have to do with Gaza, especially now that we all know there isn’t a blade of grass left in Gaza worth sacrificing potable water for?
Point one. Only people with money are going to be able to afford to sustain and maintain a lawn in the heat of Central Texas. I am not going to find much business for myself in a poor neighborhood. Likewise, people treat their religions like they treat their lawns. People who don’t give a shit about their lawns generally do not go to church, mosque or synagogue, nor do they give a damn about what anyone else thinks about their status as the neighborhood iconoclast. If I want to find the “sweet spot” for a lawn care business, I need to find people with the right mixture of devotion and money to make my talents profitable for my efforts. If having a shitty lawn happens to be your religion, good luck getting your holy scriptures published and available to a wider audience. While your devotion might be admirable, it is not a good fit with mine. Vaya con dios.
Point one-aye. The Holy Scriptures everyone seems willing to lose their minds and their lives over could only have been written, printed and sustained by a system of wealth and power that crosses many multiples of human generations. That means that what is written in those scriptures was deemed as “not offensive” to their publishers and when it might be seen as such, was rapidly edited and a new edition published. In the case of multiple editions deemed to be offensive, the errant editions were categorized and subsequently burned from public memory. People have always heard what rich people wanted them to hear. Loudly. So while you might be fixated with using your chemical fertilizers and insecticides, there is a pretty good chance you are doing so because some rich guy told you to do so, or he told someone you trust to do so, and, voila, you’re doing it based on authority. I’ve had to rescue plenty of lawns burned with chemical fertilizers, so I know that authority is about making a “prophet” into a profit, not necessarily doing the right thing.
Point one-bee. Not everyone has a god, but everyone has a story that they treat like their god. If you want people to believe your story, you better find a way of understanding your story, their story and a story with a happy ending that you can all blend together in that satisfies everyone’s need to have a good story to tell and one worth living for. If you cannot master this very fundamental art of community building, plan on spending a great deal of time, energy and resources keeping everyone else from erasing your story from the slate of acceptable storylines. A storyline that informs me that you want to have a lawn that is the envy of your neighborhood but requires no devotion or commitment from you is not an acceptable storyline, from my perspective as a lawn care professional. That won’t stop you from trying to tell everyone about your storyline, especially if you have a lot of disposable income to spare. While doing the impossible with nothing sounds appealing to the ears of sleepwalkers, in practice it is a waste of time and energy. Everything is already Nothing, so expecting something for nothing is nothing new but it is a request for a static separateness that will be satisfied, if the desire in your heart is to be empty and alone. The purpose of anything in Nothing is to communicate to you how very fucking alone you really are as you delusionally whirl on a speck of dust, flying safely away from anywhere you might cause greater harm. Once you get the depth and scope of the abyss, the appearance of a helping hand on the horizon is accorded its proper value. Communication received. So if I ask you to do a few minimal chores in between my appearances to mow your yard, I am not suggesting that you should light it on fire, blow it up, mine it with explosives, or tear it up and put in Astroturf. You can do any of these things, if you wish, because Everything is Nothing. But you can also expect to feel the value of Nothing in great depth within yourself for all your trouble. You have been warned countless times and in many ways about the meanings you assign to particular things at particular times. Accept responsibility for your own crappy choices and make your problem solvable; blame me and repeat the same error with a less forgiving lawn maintenance professional.
Point two. Christian Dominionists and Jews were strange bedfellows from the beginning. But there was a beginning and that beginning came from a particular interpretation of an ending – an ending and an interpretation that began and ended with the rich folks mentioned in Point one. If I were to go corporate and start swallowing up all the lawn care business in Killeen, at some point, I would need to ensure that everyone was always going to have a lawn, that they were always going to be able to keep their lawn alive and that there were always going to be plenty of bad examples of lawn care around town from which I could contrast my service results against. Likewise, if I know my authority is based in a happy ending to a story we all fit into, I need to make sure that we all have the means to survive our stories and our shared happy ending, but I will still need to provide for plenty of bad examples to keep everyone focused on moving in the same general direction. That is what war is for. War is nothing more than a bad example of humans failing to get along with other humans. With enough war, we drive people to peace. But if I try to turn a profit from your bad example, I lose control of my ability to release either you, or myself, from my need for bad examples. In so doing, I become a bad example. Fixation with bad examples is illness and this illness results in death. There is no exception. So I let others better suited to the task try to corporatize what they do not, and cannot, own until they learn that they did not create life, nor can they wish for anything more without automatically asking for an end to their own existence. I love lawn care. I despise paperwork.
Point two-aye. The entire state of Israel began as an apostasy that no practicing Jew would want or would have tolerated during the 19th century CE. This did not stop Christian Dominionists from wanting the ending foretold in their scriptures, nor did it stop a certain type of educated Jew from wanting to beat certain types of Christians to death with their own ignorance. Enter World Wars I and II. World War I decimated the Ottoman Empire, making possible the transformation of all those 19th century Jewish colonies, and later, kibbutzim, in Palestine into a Jewish homeland while also gaining control of the oilfields of Basra. World War II was about killing off all internal Jewish opposition to the establishment of a Jewish homeland followed by the restoration of the British Empire to its former glory. In a very real sense, World Wars I and II were about mowing the lawn in Europe and Palestine, at the expense of the mostly Muslim Turks. The Crusades might have ended with Saladin running a victory lap all over Eastern Europe and North Africa, but no blue-eyed Caucasian is going to allow a dark-skinned mud-person living in a tent have the final word in any argument. Being crazy is an important survival skill bred into the genetic makeup of the Caucasian race. Ask any black African from which all of us once came and they will make plain that white people are crazy and they aren’t kidding. It appears that albinism took more than melanin from our skin: it took away a piece of our ability to be humane.
Point two-bee. While the rich publishers of our fine scriptures are busily trying to assure us that, in the end, the Jews will agree with everyone and all will be well, the Israelis are also busily trying to arrange for Muslims and Christians to kill each other over false pretenses while defending their ability to maintain their status in Palestine. That means the order of the day is convincing the rest of the world that they need to “globalize” their economies while Israel busily arms itself in preparation for the inevitable resource wars that will come when there are too many Muslims and too many Christians left to maintain a healthy biosphere, at which time the Israelis will, as they have done in Gaza, mow the fucking lawn and leave us all bereft of a place to live in or a window to throw it out of.
Zionism – whether it is Judaic, Christian, Muslim, Confucian, Shinto or agnostic – is the endless search for perfection in a place where perfection has no utility. There are no Edens, there are no utopias, there is only a choice between the deepest, darkest emptiness our heart’s can stand, and the hand of a brother in arms. We might feel abandoned by our churches, synagogues, mosques, families or neighbors, but we have not been abandoned by that which created us. Life knows itself.
It is high-time we got to know ourselves.
Eating Crow and Humble Pie 