Our trip down Turd River

“Tell me one thing you have ever learned from a true intellectual,”  I said to my friend, a well-read, bright man. He confessed at the close of the evening that he couldn’t think of a single thing he had ever learned from those who are deeply lost in the far soggy reaches of the brain. For me, I have been taught more by my kids and my dogs than I have ever been taught by an intellectual.

I think of those from whom we have learned the most. They are the simple story tellers of history. They are Buddha and Christ and Martin Luther King and Gandhi. And how about Mark Twain? It takes a special kind intelligence to tell a story, and from our tribal days to this moment we learn most from stories.

At this same said gathering the people wanted to talk about Madoff and his now infamous Ponzi scheme that skinned some of the brightest minds of the financial world. How could this happen? Yet what we discover is that the world was earlier taken in by a world-wide Ponzi scheme that has brought down the entire world’s economy. The result is referred to by the timid as “a deep recession.” In truth we are sunk in a world-wide depression that most of my readers have never personally experienced.

How did this happen to these mighty money-intellectuals? Like all such massive frauds built on greed it caught up with itself when the banks could no longer sell any more worthless credit instruments along with their clever derivatives. The whole ugly mess imploded and brought down with it the innocent, the naïve, and the poor.

The culture of the money world teaches that the principal value above all is profit. Give me profit. If I have to cheat, steal, lie, bribe — it is all right if the one, principal value remains in tact — namely profit. Money! And why should the people complain? They got their promised trickle down although their wages buy less than in the seventies. Houses were built.  People had jobs.  They could buy cars and TVs and furniture and ocean cruises and, and, and …all on credit, no money down. Mother worked along with dad. The kids went to good schools where they prepared themselves for life in Ponzi Puddle. Life was good for everyone. Why cry now?

The guy who lately got caught in his fifty billion Ponzi enterprise — why get upset with him?  He paid his clients 10 or 12 per cent over many years. Doubled their money. Tripled it. Everyone was happy until the collapse came. They got big returns while the widow got her Social Security payment and the retirement fund of the Joneses was losing its value to inflation and millions were without health care.

I say we are living in the aftermath of another major ubiquitous Ponzi economy. But we can survive the wreckage.

Those of my generation were but children when the crash of ‘29 came. Still I remember how our family lived off our garden and the resourcefulness of my parents. Mother canned for the winter. We put the squash and the turnips and carrots in moist sand in the cellar for winter eating. My father worked six days a week and rode his bicycle to work.

We had a nanny goat and chickens in the back yard. The nanny provided us with milk. Humans have been living for thousands of years off of goats. They are warm and wonderful and gentle and have a pretty little bleat. You can stake them out in the alley. We had chickens and preserved the eggs for winter in a crock of water glass. My father was a hunter. We lived off wild game. You know the story. We might have even been happy.

Many people can no longer find a place to grow a garden and our wild game would soon be wiped out if the nation hunted for food. But remember, we have plenty of golf courses with lots of water that would feed thousands of people. We can buy pinto beans by the hundred pounds and rice the same and live for a year on nearly nothing.

We can help each other. We can still barter. We don’t need two or three cars and all the TVs and four wheelers and snow machines and appliances. Mother washed once a week and we hung out our clothes, summer and winter, to dry on the line. We can darn our socks and press our own shirts. We don’t need twenty pairs of shoes. We had a pair to work in and a pair for Sunday. We can bake our own bread. Our kids can work and earn money for college.

We can stop killing our brothers and sisters across the world because we want their oil or because they worship a different God. That will bring real prosperity — if only we can no longer afford war. Perhaps that should become a universal prayer that takes the place of a prayer for prosperity.

The new life coming may turn out to better. More money has not made us a better nation. Our penitentiaries are full. We are building more. Our justice system is broken. Our democracy is being challenged by politicians who want to sell to the highest bidder the people’s right to representation. Our poor are being wasted and abandoned. Our middle class is disappearing and many are now unemployed.

Our children are not prepared to work with their hands. Learning to perform an honest day’s labor has been lost to soccer and hockey and a host of school activities “to keep kids occupied.”

We have given up our independence to the poor of foreign countries who make our steel, make our automobiles, make our clothing, grow much of our food — make our everything while we trade money back and forth and barrow from the producing nations and find ways to engage in yet another world-wide Ponzi. The result of all of this could be a change of values where money is no longer king and where honesty and caring become more satisfying.

Yes, as they say, “We are up Shit Creek without a paddle.” Perhaps you didn’t know the following. No intellectual has revealed this truth — but Shit Creek is a tributary of Turd River. No matter how hard we fight against it, we cannot get off that river until we reach Turd Falls at its end.

Well, my friends, the challenge is to have a good trip. What we face today is just another part of the passing landscape though which the river flows. One does not need to be an intellectual to come to that conclusion. Hopefully we will find a way to survive these dangerous rapids and learn something of worth about ourselves and each other in the experience. Yes. Have a good trip.

The art of catching pigs

Recently someone wanted to talk about catching wild pigs. Why should anyone want to know? There are a plenty of domestic giant hogs running loose on Wall Street.

He told this story:

“You catch wild pigs by finding a suitable place in the woods and putting corn on the ground. The pigs discover it and begin to come everyday to eat the free corn. When they are used to coming every day, you put a fence down one side of the place where they are used to coming. When they get used to the fence, they begin to eat the corn again and you put up another side of the fence.

They get used to that and start to eat again. You continue until you have all four sides of the fence up with a gate in the last side. The pigs, who are used to the free corn, start to come through the gate to eat, you slam the gate on them and catch the whole herd.

Suddenly the wild pigs have lost their freedom. They run around and around inside the fence, but they are caught. Soon they go back to eating the free corn. They are so used to it that they have forgotten how to forage in the woods for themselves, so they accept their captivity.

The storyteller then suggests that that is exactly what he sees happening to America.”

I say, I have rarely seen a corporate executive who was hungry. Yet more than a half million children in America go to bed hungry each night. Tell them and their parents the pig story.

The cruel irony is that the pigs, the giant hogs on Wall Street and elsewhere (they thrive in Washington D.C. as well) are engaged in capturing the people upon which they feed. One hog asks another: “Do you know how to capture innocent citizens? You make false promises. You lie and cheat and commit all nature of fraud, and the innocent people, believing that huge investment houses and corporate businesses with legendary names would never steal from them entrust we hogs with their money. It is that simple.”

The irony proves to be even more insidious. Corporate America, the non-living, non-breathing composite hog has captured massive numbers of Americans, indeed, most, through television, teaching them year after year what they must buy in order to be cool. They are taught to buy on credit. They are taught to mortgage their homes and cars. They are taught “to shop until they drop.” Then the corporate glob teaches them how to get out of debt by going to a debt-consultant who takes more of their earnings to help them keep the corporate hog fed.

Corporations do not build fences to catch people. They throw propaganda nets, called advertising, over the people. The bait in the nets is the TV shows that people watch, and as they watch they are gradually dumbed-down and captured by endless corporate propaganda that tells them how they must spend their earnings to be acceptable — the new car –the new TV set – the diamond that is a symbol of love — on and endlessly on.

Now that the people are in debt and need help, the corporate hog would doubtlessly love the pig story. The questions the corporate hog now asks hard-working ordinary people are: “Why don’t you work even harder to feed yourself and your family? Why aren’t you independent like you should be? Why do you want something free?”

Now the irony approaches absurdity. The giant hogs have eaten themselves. Nothing remains. Their lies and their frauds have been exposed. Their destruction of trust and their rejection of basic American values has now become rampant. And the hogs come begging to the people, ride their corporate jets to Washington, and beseech the people to save them.

Secrets of Argus Joseph Thompson: Invasion of the Mind Monitor

My friend Argus Joseph Thompson wrote about the Mind Monitor (MM). He insists it is reading his thoughts and recording and classifying the more important ones. I present his meanderings with edits. Parental guidance is recommended:

“After many weeks my initial outrage over MM’s invasion of my mind began to abate. Moreover, if I were being monitored, then ipso facto I was important enough to be monitored.

“I possessed Class A secrets, not the mundane unclassified secrets of the masses, not the secrets of farm boys who had made it with chickens—mostly laying hens, because laying hens are easy to catch while sitting on the nest; not the secrets of preachers loping the lizzard over the pages of Penthouse, not the secrets of boys fantasizing about their Sunday school teachers who gave the class beaver-shots under the table to enhance attendance. Such secrets were so common they merited no classification whatsoever although MM duly recorded the same in the event a respondent sought public office, which accounts for Jimmy Carter’s having been forced to reveal his lust for the women of Playboy. Cheating, stealing, wife beating and child abuse were also so commonplace they were merely filed away without classification.

“One got on MM’s classified record by asking certain questions, for question-askers have always been the enemies of the system. Those who wondered how the king got off taxing their tea without representation and dumped 342 chests of the same into Boston Harbor were enemies of the system. Thoreau wondering why he should have to pay a head tax to vote and went to jail instead was considered dangerous and an enemy of the system. If you secretly questioned certain truths like Jesus smiles on Texas debutantes who spend twenty thousand for their coming out dresses while thousands of children starve in the streets, or if you question certain axioms such as “The system isn’t perfect, but it’s the best damned system we know,” well you automatically got classified.

“If you questioned the efficacy of Double Dribble Economics, well, that was at least a Class C secret. But you really got MM’s attention if, in the middle of the night, you began to question the right of the non-its, the corporations, to destroy the pristine forests, the living birds and innocent beasts and generally to shit all over the face of the earth in the name of profit. If you secretly began to wonder if we had all gone mad by permitting an oligarchy of non-its to poison us in the womb of our own Mother Earth and to abort us there from in order that the non-its could dangle a favorable profit and loss statement in front of the Wall Street analysts, well, such questions were Class A secrets which ipso facto designated you as a targeted person, (TP),and I, Argus Joseph Thompson, was, indeed, a TP for which I was very grateful, for how miserable to otherwise be nothing, even to non-its.”

No escape for OJ

 
I have written earlier here that, as an old and wise criminal defense lawyer, Tom Fagen, of Casper, Wyoming, once said to me, “You can never beat the big one.” He was referring to murder.  He meant that a jury can acquit, or for other reasons an accused may never be convicted, but the accused cannot escape the consequences of his act. The murderer will end up destroyed in one way or another – if nothing more definitive than suffering a tortured, pain-filled life.

This axiom applies to O.J. I have always held mixed feelings about his acquittal for the murders of two innocent people. There is little doubt in my mind that he committed the murders.  But I thought the verdict of acquittal was understandable given the tenor of the prosecution presented by Marcia Clark – in my opinion a display of prosecutorial behavior that encouraged a predominately black jury to acquit. I wrote about this in some detail in my book, O.J. the Last Word.

Given the state of the collective American mind that O.J. was guilty of murder, O.J. could never hope to get a fair trial anywhere in this country today, even if an angel magically descended and proclaimed him to be innocent.

I do not argue that in his most recent trial for robbery he was not guilty. Out of disinterest I have not followed the case nor examined the evidence. The verdict may have been justified. But he was still entitled to a fair trial in this latest case which, given the state of universal public opinion, he could not receive.

And then there is the societal need for vengeance, which is a black spot on all of us. If he was guilty was his guilt determined by an unprejudiced jury? I say there was zero chance to empanel such a jury in this country today. Despite his acquittal it has become a cultural truth that O.J. Simpson is a murderer and people generally celebrated his conviction in this latest case without the slightest idea of whether he was guilty of not.

Is it all right for a guilty person to be convicted by jurors who are prejudiced against him? If so, this exposes a serious defect in the system, one as antithetical to justice as one that permits a guilty person to escape.

Letters from the insane: The domestication of man

My close friend, Argus Thompson - who is insane – wrote on the passiveness of Americans who stumble through their lives blinking and mumbling and sometimes staring at the sun while the earth is being destroyed:

“A strange stillness lies over the American masses. Something about servitude stills. Something about domestication stifles. The wolf, now the poodle, no longer howls. The wild boar lies on its side in the hog pen and grunts. The wildebeest, now the Holstein cow, stands in her stanchion placidly chewing her cud while she’s milked dry. Domestication of man and beast muffles the cry of freedom and suffocates the spirit of liberty.

“This is a war for the very survival of the earth, our Mother. Yet, as in all wars, only the radical edge, the impassioned few, rise up, the placid majority, gagged by apathy, the wicked sister of death, are heard to mumble only occasionally from under their bed cloths in the dark of night.”