Day off …

Off yesterday earning. Spent the day in Searcy, AR. Some agitation there over two students finding a body in a thickly wooded area next to a school. They think the body may been there as long as two years.

I've no doubt the police will figure it all out. They have a fine department there and the Mayor is a former Police Chief. Most of us don't realize how lucky we are to have folks who look after our safety. I'm not sure we always treat them fairly. We give them less than a second to make a life-altering situation and then spend six months debating as to whether they did it right. I dunno.

I sat in the patio at the Lonoke house yesterday and watched a crew installing new sewer pipes. I'm not sure we all understand what happens when we flush our toilets. We take so much for granted and if it doesn't appear on our little cell phone screen, we lose interest.

Heard an elected official the other day say he was going to vote against a badly needed project. He thought it was a good idea, and that his cities needed it badly. But he had decided it was a "new tax" and he had promised Grover Norquist  that he would never vote for anything that involved taxes.

Say what?

I wish we still taught Civics in school and that there was a universal draft for young folks in America.

Dreams of dry days ...

Looks as if they will start again soon, the “Rainsoons” I mean. The pattern stays the same. Each morning when I arise, the first thing I do is breathe on a hand-held mirror to see if I am still alive. Assuming I am, I then proceed to take whatever medication I’m on and brew a pot of coffee.

At the computer with “first cup,” I turn straight away to the weather. I don’t have to really. I can already tell that it is raining outside. I look at the screen anyway. I see what should be wonderful news. This day it will stop raining and there will be five or more days with a zero … yes … zero chance of rain. “O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!” I chortle in my joy.

I begin making plans. Tomorrow, it will still be muddy, no use trying to do outside work. I’ll pick guitar.

Next day after tomorrow, it will still be muddy. Let’s read and pick the banjo.

Next day, the ground will be squishy, I’ll plan to stare at the computer while my roommate yells at the TV over some man she says is “nutso.” If I get tired of staring at the computer, I'll stare at my cell phone.

Ah, the fifth day of dry weather I’ll go outside and alter the world for the better.

Next morning, I arise full of vim and vigor and proceed through my routine. I add a blood-pressure check to make sure I’ll be physically fit to endure the trials ahead. Might have to add another day of house rest.

No worry. As soon as I see the computer screen lights up, I get ready to chortle.

What?

Oh no. Where only yesterday, there had been five days of dry weather forecast. Little zeros had marched across the screen. Now, in their place are these little symbols representing percentages. They range from 99.91 per day to 99.98. What? Has the Weather Person been prescribed Medical Marijuana? Am I living in a dream world? What’s that noise?

I know what that noise is. I’ve been hearing it most days since last August. I stumble into the living room and engage the television. OMG! There’s the odd-looking face of that man my roommate screams at all day long. He’s telling me that climate change is a hoax, but if not, it’s Hillary Clinton’s fault. He’s real pissed about it. Says that his opponents are causing it to rain on his people, trying to dilute their brain cells. The crowd goes berserk. He says something about a woodpile but I can’t tell because of the crowd noise, which gets louder. He posts a huge smirking smile, nods his head, then moves it up and down while pursing his lips, like a “bobble-head” doll. Reassuring he ain’t. His face is flashing red then orange, like a neon sign advertising soft drinks and pizza. He definitely needs some form of therapy.

That reminds me. I sure hope those banjo strings I ordered come today.  

Yep. That's me.

Don't get me started: Good souls ...

After a rain-soaked weekend, one can almost hear, of a Monday morning, the collective groan of folks going to work. It reminds me of the words of Henry David Thoreau when he wrote, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

Over the years, we tortured poor Thoreau until his words were quoted as, “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and die with their song still inside them.”

Actually, I’m not sure that I “agree 100 percent with his police work,” in either case, to borrow a quote from Sheriff Marge Gunderson of Brainerd, N.D.

I’m afraid there is a tendency for us to assume that having great “songs” inside us must demand that one have a great position in life. I’m afraid there are souls from the highest skyscrapers in Manhattan that not only lead lives of quiet desperation, but could only spew songs of imbecilic ineptitude. Just read today’s newspaper.

Conversely, I have the singular honor of having known, once, a beautiful soul named Almeda Riddle who had so many wonderful songs in her heart that one could hardly count them. Born in Cleburne County, Arkansas, she received a welcome in such far-off places as the hallowed halls of Harvard University. This was back in the days of folk music, a time I miss a lot.

She could be “misunderestimated,” as all wondrous souls are. Once, after appearing at a Folk Music concert in Little Rock, a “journalist,” having expected, I suppose, to see Joan Baez, or Joni Mitchell, gave Almeda’s reedy voice a scathing review. There was a great scurrying next morning by her hosts to hide the trashy review from her. As far as I know, she never saw it.

At party back then, fueled by a tragic volume of alcohol, I was induced to play “The Wildwood Flower” for her and even to sing along with her heart-piercing voice. She took it in stride like a true saint. She’d heard worse, I imagine.

But as for me, I would not trade that moment with “Granny Riddle," for days with the “beautiful people” who are writhing in the fetid swamps of America today, dominating the headlines from cold hearts and empty souls.

To have known her is a song in itself.

A state of grace, or of confusion?

Those who know me can tell you that I stay confused about half the time. This state of being stems from ignorance, of course. I don’t seek ignorance. It simply floats down and covers me like a soft spring mist.

No wonder then that I find myself particularly confused early Sunday mornings when I set aside time for contemplation of the Christian scriptures. These allegedly set forth the prescription for a better life beyond the travesties of our earthly wanderings. Nowadays, though, among so-called Christians, we find the scriptures, particularly the words of the Galilean, mostly unused, or, at a minimum, heavily redacted.

I’ve mentioned this to the Galilean more than once. He says I think too much and should practice, as he puts it, “allowing the mind to drift along the current, as if, “… being carried toward internal peace by the River Jordan itself.” He still has the gift of speech, doesn’t he?

Once, I responded by asking him why he preached the Sermon on the Mount if he didn’t intend to hold his people to it. It is, I pointed out to him, considered by many to be the most beautiful passage of the New Testament, perhaps of any words over spoken. Why does he allow that wondrous wisdom to lie un-worshiped, while so many hijack his teachings and concentrate on their opposite?

He simply shrugged and said, “My ways ain’t your ways.” He knows that upsets me.

This morning I selected a single passage, one that experts (of which I’m not) call “The Beatitudes.” The word is from the Latin beatus, meaning “blessed.” Ahhh. Therein lies the root of my confusion.

I chose the first of the Beatitudes for closer inspection. Two of the gospels state it thusly:

“Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” – Matthew 5-3 (KJV)

“Blessed be ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God.” - Luke 6:20 (KJV)

Yes, I’ve chosen the King James version since those in the “flag-decal crowd” don’t trust the scriptures unless they are presented in the original American.

Anyway,

“Why,” I asked the Galilean, “would you teach that we are blessed if we are poor in spirit or, worse, just plain poor? Aren’t your followers supposed to enjoy riches untold?”

“Idiot,” he explained.

“I didn’t say it,” Joel Osteen did.”

“Don’t aggravate me this morning,” he said. “I’m not in the mood for it. Next thing I know you’ll be quoting …uh, … what’s his name? Oh yes, Franklin Graham. He’s a real hoot, ain’t he?”

“Can we get back on topic?”

“Surely,” he said. Now tell me, what did the word ‘blessed’ mean back in my day?”

I thought. “I suppose it meant ‘favored,’ or something like that.”

“Idiot.”

“Was I wrong?”

“It meant ‘happy.’ You know what it means to be happy, don’t you?”

“I think so.”

“Don’t you remember my saying that my ways ain’t … .?”

“Our ways,” I said. “I remember.”

“Well then,” he said. “If my ways ain’t your ways, did you ever consider that it’s because my world is not your world?”

I stopped to think about that.

He said, “Haven’t you ever had to endure some pain in order to arrive at a higher state of pleasure?”

“Yes.”

“I mean a genuine, five-star, gut-busting state of pleasure, nothing like normal “feel-good days.”

“Does military service count?”

“Bingo,” he said.

“You’re telling me then that enduring poverty, or the poverty of spirit, might just be preparing one for a higher state of grace down the line somewhere?”

“Bingo,” he said.

“But what about those who only seek the wealth of the moment? What about those who seek false riches? What about those who deprive the poor in order to enrich themselves, their children, or their friends? What about those who worship such people and put them in charge of the common folks? What happens to them?”

“You don’t want to know.” He said. With that, he disappeared.

I wish he would have stayed. I had so many things to ask him. He had planted a seed. Why didn’t he stay and help it grow? Was he just teasing me? Why don’t more people live by what he taught on that rocky mountain top so many years ago? Why does he always leave me confused?

Well, I guess his ways ain’t my ways.

Been confused for a long time.

Introduction to logic

Fortunate I was as a child growing up in south Arkansas. I had a world-class philosopher as a father. No, he wasn’t highly educated. An eighth-grade education at a one-room school near Kedron, Arkansas sufficed for him. Oh, he believed strongly in continued education. Thus, he extended his knowledge-base each morning with a careful perusal of the Arkansas Gazette. Also, he was the only person I ever knew who read the center portion of Red Ryder and other action comics. This was the short, printed, two-page section that no one else, I am sure, ever bothered to read.

Yep, only a true seeker of knowledge would bother to read narrative in a comic book. But that was my daddy.

He would be a delight if he were around to comment on such ideas as the one posed by our national Energy Secretary when he approved the sale of our nuclear technology to the country that furnished all but one of the 9-11 bombers of the World Trade Center. Oh yes, it was the same country whose leader recently commanded the execution of an American journalist.

I imagine my father looking him straight in the eyes as did me when I would advance, at the supper table, one of my hair-brained plans to make money without working. Using a principle as old as Socrates, he would say, “That don’t make no sense.” I can still hear, through the musty corridors of history, Aristotle chortling.

His expertise floated into economics as well. I’ll never forget the time I suggested a way to increase profits in the store. “Simple,” I said. “Just start giving away free cokes.”

“Free what?’

“Cokolas.”

“Do what?”

“Give customers free soft drinks. You won’t get revenue from them, but more folks will spend more money and profits will go sky-high.”

“We’ll make more money by taking in less money?”

“It’s as simple as that. What do you think?”

“I think,” he said, again piercing me with his eyes, “that they have a special ward in the state hospital over in Little Rock for people who believe such things.”

Yes, that sound you just heard was Descartes giving Kant a “high-five.”

My most memorable moment came years later, when I had reached full height and gotten married. We were sitting in the backyard of the family homesite waiting on ribs to cook. He was talking about hard times back during The Depression, about how growing their own food kept his family from starving.

I saw the opportunity for a “learning moment.” I told him how some high-income urban dwellers were giving it all up and “returning to the land” to live with nature and grow their own food like his family had done.

“Back to farming like we did?”

“Pretty much so.” I said, thinking though, of the pitiful scene from Easy Rider, where a demented group of misfit hippies were planting seeds in the barest desert land you ever saw. “I don’t think some of them know a lot about farming.”

But they are going back to living like we had to when I was a kid?

“Yep.”

“And they are leaving good jobs for it?”

“Yep.”

That man, who had once dug fence post holes for, as he put it, “four bits a day,” who had sharecropped, chopping cotton alongside his new wife in the blistering Arkansas sun, and who had butchered hogs while his wife “watched the store” and ended the day with bloody hands and soiled clothes, turned his head. He looked at me with those pale blue eyes that had won the heart of a local beauty as used to hard work as he was, and shook his head in a manner that would have pleased Plato.

“Why?” was all he said.

Early economic training.

The Wandering Mind ...

I started thinking about something early this morning. I finally gave into my obsession and looked it up. I thought I remembered reading it in 1968 when I was in the United States Navy. The Navy, no matter where one was moored, always had a small library, else I never would have read Ditmars’ Snakes of the World, Joyce’s Ulysses, or William Manchester’s The Arms of Krupp, among others. In those days, people in power preferred underlings who read to keep busy while off-duty rather than join in less productive endeavors.

Anyway, somewhere about that time I read the little masterpiece by Franz Kafka called The Great Wall of China (Beim Bau der ChinesischenMauer). What amazes me the most was that he wrote this in 1917. He could have written it this morning without losing a shred of its insight. Like the Chinese of old, we have, in America today, an absentee ruler who would like to be Emperor for Life. Another great wall figures into his plans, plans guided by feints and distractions. The ancient Chinese would have found it fascinating. And so it goes.

I don’t know if the account by Kafka is accurate. After all, we are talking about an odd sort of a man who lived out of wedlock with his lover during his adult life, wrote at night, and died young of TB. His complex and mystifying writings gave birth to the term “Kafkaesque” to describe the nightmarish struggles between humankind and faceless organizations. He dwelt upon, among other things, the concept of original sin, the sudden transformation of one’s person, the horrors of struggling with faceless beings inside a bureaucratic castle, and a mystical place he called “Amerika.” I won’t go into these further, for any educated person has probably read them and formed opinions.

The work here today, The Great Wall of China, deals with a project he compares with the Tower of Babel in its poor conception, poor planning, and poor technical expertise. In his account, each segment of the great wall was built in a somewhat autonomous manner so that, in the end, many sections failed to connect, obviating the future failure of the structure to achieve its stated purpose: keeping out the enemy hordes to the north.

Thus we observe the journeys of the plans of dictators through the perpetual comedy stage that we call history.

Most likely, like the great pyramids of Egypt, the true purpose leading to the construction of the wall was to keep warring and independent tribes, fiefdoms, and clans occupied with actions other than war. Yes, it may have just been a great public works project designed to keep the poor folks distracted. It didn’t matter if the individual works, like the books I read in my youth, had no apparent connection.

At any rate, it created a cult, according to Kafka, consisting of those who were sure the Emperor acted in good faith and for the betterment of society. My favorite passage follows.

“There was a great deal of mental confusion at the time … perhaps simply because so many people were trying as hard as they could to join together for a single purpose. Human nature, which is fundamentally careless and by nature like the whirling dust, endures no restraint. If it restricts itself, it will soon begin to shake the restraints madly and tear up walls, chains, and even itself all over the place.”

Yes. He wrote that in 1917.

Ain’t that something? Perhaps that is why are now so many, working so hard, and spending so much money tying to destroy any concept of public education for the common folks in America. An educated society is a dangerous society for the Emperor and his followers. Let us now mourn for the American who will wake up, as did Kafka’s famous hero, surprised and dumbfounded. Kafka described this way: “When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.”

At that moment, the existence or non-existence of another great wall will be as meaningless as that of the original.

I've read that it is the only
human-made structure that
is visible from our moon.

Don't get me started ...

It never seems to stop. Some days just make me sad. Rainy days make me think of sitting on a bunker with an M-16 on my lap, staring at the jungle during a steady downpour that has gone on for more than a week.

They make me think of the young Navy Corpsmen in a wrinkled, soiled uniform, but with a chest full of ribbons, sitting alone on a bench at the Da Nang airbase, waiting to go home but staring into space with vacant eyes, unable to talk, and I remember wondering how long it might be before the demons left him

They make me think of how we, I and the guys on the plane with me, thought we had survived it all when we first saw nothing but the South China Sea below us. How we did clap and cheer.

They make me think of maybe a fourth of my comrades on that plane who would be denied, because of the color of their skin, the basic dignities of life when they disembarked onto American soil, and how not a few of my brothers and sisters would be hated and harmed, even until today, because of the body nature provided them.

They make me think of the woman in the San Bernardino airport who shielded her young child from me when she saw the service ribbons on my uniform.

They make me think of the personnel manager at the telephone company office in my home town, where I had filled out an employment application just to pass the time, telling me that the telephone company didn’t need veterans. It needed smart young grads.

They make me think of the “liberal” woman at a party years later who, when a friend told her that I was Vietnam Veteran, looked me over and said, “You don’t seem crazy like the rest of them.”

They make me think of how many movies, even still, include the ubiquitous character of a dope-fiend sociopath stalking the innocent because of his military service in that long-ago war.

They make me think of how those of us who thought we had survived, now a half-century later, awake each morning knowing that we may be carrying a final liability foisted upon us back then by people who thought we could kill more of their enemies if jungle hiding places became defoliated. As our former colleagues die or become disabled, one by one, we think more and more about the idiocy of war.

They make me think of the draft-dodging sons-of-bitches who would send young men and women to war, then say that it’s not worth taxing the immeasurably rich to provide care for the poor and the poor in spirit, many of my comrades among them.

They make me think of the sorry bastards who mock those comrades in public.

Finally, they just make me think, and wonder, that’s all. It places a sadness in my heart for all those who served and then become forgotten. I’ll get over it, if the ancient seeds planted by evil men don’t get me first.