an incomplete indictment of the American establishment

The Security, Liberties and Wellbeing of the people are jeopardized by their own government which has been infiltrated and corrupted by corporate aggression. This is an Indictment of this Empire (a System of Corporate-Puppet Governance which commits inhumane acts in “our name”) by the People of the 50 States:

Overthrown democracies and oppressed peoples.

Deaths from invasions.

Deaths from labor oppression.

War Atrocities: especially Torture.

Economic devastation of other countries, such as through sanctions/embargos which ultimately exacerbate the suffering of citizens already enduring violent conflict.

Domestic economic devastation, such as through free trade agreements and allowing the abandonment of the manufacturing sector, whole communities and the general labor force (run-away factories and outsourcing).

Human rights violations:

Criminalizing Dissent: Unjust detention and/or deprivation.

Privacy rights violations.

Free speech violations.

Ruined Reputations, Mischaracterizations and Outright Lies (including Black-listing).

Other constitutional abuses:

Emergency powers through false flag events.

Supreme Court severely out of sync with stare decisis.

Elections fraud.

Corporatre campaign financing ruining integrity of federal elections.

Corporate profits and "Personhood" manipulated to the benefit of the corp over all other "externalizations" to the effect that the citizen, the employee and the consumer are all non-entities and even expendable.

Corrupt or dishonest practices:

cronyism, nepotism...

quid pro quo

moralistic rhetoric

Public School Administrations and Boards: Funding not reaching intended Public School children

deregulation of financial and industrial sectors.

Conflict of interest violations including non-recusal.

Voices to Reference:

Former Attorney General Ramsey Clark

Retired Supreme Court Justice Stevens

The crisis of American middle class ideology (continued)

I'd like to paraphrase Stanley Payne on the topic of the conditions for the development of fascism.

Firstly, yes, unemployment appears to be a condition but more importantly the economic pressures must be accompanied by:

• a perception that it "stem[s] in large measure from foreign defeat or exploitation."
• a sense of "international [...] status humiliation";
• a "[state system having just entered] a framework of liberal democracy";
• "political fragmentation";
• "large sectors [...] either not represented or [having] lost confidence in existing parties." [bold italics my emphasis]

- from A History of Fascism, Stanley G. Payne

If indeed these factors complete the criteria for the potential for fascism to develop it could be said that America today harbors this dangerous capacity. Already one can see, hear so much hatred and anger (on the internet) towards our government and the financial sector. We shall consider that the World Bank, the IMF, the Federal Reserve as well as all the world's capitalist trade centers and Global Corporations comprise the condition of foreign exploitation. Who can argue that America's Wall Street has not brought upon Americans a severe drop in status in the eyes of the world? And what of the current federal government administration? Wasn't its platform promised as an attempt to achieve a more liberal democracy― however shallow? And how many voters now perhaps are considering abandoning both parties? Who indeed represents the 99% that the recent Occupy Wallstreet protestors speak for? Is it those who commit 20% of our annual budget to military defense. If anyone of us spent that much on weapons in the home there would be little food on the table and precious little else to do but fight with each other.

With the added fuel of fear contrived into an internal terrorism threat and the further fanatical patriotism of such groups as Citizens United and the Tea Party―we are ripe for scrutinizing our neighbors, trammeling our co-workers, calling out every little bit of suspected neglect or abuse; and attempting to weed out in every unjust way the non-conformers. We are less patient, less forgiving and much more arrogant and likely to express cruelty than we have ever been. Why is there so much ridicule and reputation damaging intrigue? Is it because underneath we are basically aggressive animals and it's just a dog eat dog world―the hunter mentality crouching behind the gift and the promise?

No, I am not so proud of my nation today. I am as yet not completely proud to be an American ―not if being American means exploiting the environment and the poorer nations for our own comfort, not if it means oppressing our own poor, propertyless or less acquisitive citizens. If being American means allowing corporations to become so powerful that they are the defacto government, then I am not proud to be an American. If being American means I will denounce my neighbor if he will not volunteer to patrol the streets as a vigilanti, when truly he aspires to a productive income, then I am not proud to be an American. If being an American means fostering a predatory ethic, then I am not proud to be an American.

But if being American means to oppose all the above and be willing to sacrifice comfort, frivolous or excessive possessions to achieve these just conditions for living on this continent, much less on this planet, then I am truly a proud American and even more so a proper and decent human being. I can only hope to be joined in this, this aspiration for profoundly fair global citizenship.

fascism already here?...

coincidental(?) phrases, concepts and events that should make you very uncomfortable:

freedom corps / freikorp

homeland / heimat

Patriot Act / Enabling Act

Read, Naomi Wolf's, The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot or watch the film based on the book. Note her ten steps of the closing down of an open society. Here are the first two:

1. "invoke a threat" (fear mongering and the "war on terror" war economy) enabling "Patriot Act (severe reduction of constitutional civil rights);

2. "secret prisons where torture takes place"

So you wonder who fabricated this threat: watch this

And on a related topic, a perhaps a film worth watching: The wave. Note the instructor's experimental classroom project eschewing of concern for "cheating" and the transformation of it into a proactive sharing of answers in order for group cohesion to be strengthened.

monocultural collapse

Bee colony health and corporate America are intimately related.

Monoculture and pesticide dependent agriculture is likely the cause of bee colony collapses around the world. It has already been demonstrated that bee populations have been negatively impacted by mass systemic pesticide use in agribusiness. Large acreages of single crops have often enough been cited as contrary to natural processes, contrary to the necessary condition of diversity of species which supports a healthy ecosystem. But this is wholy new level of danger given the role of the bee in the vital process of plant pollination.

In Europe for example you will find decisive actions have already been taken preventing the use of systemic pesticides. Comparisons of the bees' physical behavioral responses while on the organic v. the systemicly treated plants have been put on film. Disorientation and even abrupt neurological failure occurred for bees foraging on the treated plants.

The premise then: EPA regulation does not use the precautionary principle.

...and: The financial regulatory system in the US is also just as lacking in precautionary principles.

The entire framework of human practices it would seem is corrupted by this lack of forethought regarding sustainability. The principle of profit determined by the corporate sturcture of American business is likley the primary culprit here.

How did this happen? Well, for one thing the appointment process allows government to input conflict of interest into the infrastructure of regulation. At least as far back as the Reagan administration we know that regulation was frowned upon, that it appeared to government itself it only hindered American dominance in world business and trade. So in order to ensure this competitive edge corporate figures have been allowed in and out of government departments and regulatory agencies. And we know that this occurred during the G.W Bush administration as well as in the current Obama administration. (Monsanto)

The two realms of power in free trade economies have in effect merged into one force. Any postulations of checks or balance are a sham and misdirect attempts to find a solution. The government has merely become a front for corrupt and inhumane practices. Even the Supreme Court has resumed this bent of discontinuing scrutiny of corporate behavior. For example, there is no precautionary principle protecting the integrity of the Federal Election system from high concentrations of corporate funding now. See the recent decision: Citizens United v. the Federal Elections Commission.

The point here is that while we in America presume to follow democratic principles this very openness to activities has fostered a one-sidedness in leadership, one of monolithic corporate control of everything including governance―to the ultimate collapse of earth's life friendly ecosystem.

We need not list the many inhumane events such as political detainment, torture or genocide to call attention to the great horrors we are capable of? But these are the extreme result of this same obsession to homogenize ideas and peoples which has been the focus of many interest groups, especially the Christian right―and not just in America, but also in China where to be a member of a minority religion could mean imprisonment (China maintains a rather sinister combination of communist totalitarianism with profit-making principles of corrupted capitalism). Sadly we see it now in our educational reformers too. From NCLB to Race to the Top common core standardization, the idea of getting everybody on the same page of preparing for innovation and global competition for jobs has been tainted by the same corrupt profiteering that has begun the toppling of global economic stability.

So how is it that very few question this conflict of interest in America, our single-minded forging ahead with standardized testing and the privatization of education?  How is it that our ethical environmental principles have dissolved and been resigned to accepting the patenting of genes and the genocide of the bees? It's because most of us are too busy entertaining ourselves to see the quid pro quo and the outright corrupted nature of our governing and corporate powers, nor even the harm being done each and everyone of us on a daily basis through the poisoned food web. So now what? Are we just waiting for Fukashima to kill us all off?  We can't just choose to launder our problem with biodegradables and sort the recyclables, nor single crop or common core our way to fix this. The whole structure needs to preserve diversity otherwise you just get more of the same dirtied water, and stagnant minds.

This monoculturalism then must cease, for homogenization of anything is to give all a death sentence.

The Difference between an excellent education and an average one

The differences between children.

I won't address the cultural differences here but I will address the issue of the attentive v. the not-so-attentive student, and the dynamic diversity of readiness to learn. Firstly, I state it this way because children who "act up" in class are often simply ready for more stimuli, and therefore I think disruptions can be dealt with indirectly by giving these children more responsibility. Care should be taken of course to observe first and especially to note the conditions, then on another day or so seek to guide this child's energy towards a helpful task, towards more responsibility in class, and thus attach a positive association to their impulses rather then a spirit defeating negative response. Very quickly one will discover which disruptive children have a different sort of pro-activity need and which truly have disorders and/or counseling or other professional needs. This may seem an indirect way to this revelation, but I think it is better than the applying the survey line of questioning that only serves to underscore the negative perspective.

The differences between home environment and classroom.

I believe it could very well be that children labeled as attention deficited can be better helped if they are viewed contrarily as prepared for a faster pace. In other words, less challenged internally but rather the classroom environment is challenged―that is, in that it does not match the pace the child has become accustomed to. Of course this will not be true of all children diagnosed ADHD, but I do believe we can avoid losing creative thinkers to this categorical limbo if we account for the above concern that perhaps some children just need a higher level engagement. Perhaps this is already addressed in some schools or programs, I don't know. Regardless, this presents a greater challenge for educators obviously, and so therefore, very energetic, gifted teachers will more likely excel at this. But to extend that a little further, I think teachers should be required to take drawing and/or design classes. Here me out: only in this way will they in the least become visually competent. I should emphasize: I don't mean teachers should aspire to be artists, not even that they must be able to draft a likeness. What should be required though is that their vocabulary be broader, such that they can train the develping child's eye to be able to describe what they see with more acuracy and therefore be on the way to greater critical thinking, the pinnacle of literacy. The pace of civilization today and the need for more innovative thinkers, demands that we address visual literacy.

Perceived adult to child differences.

In general I think teachers should take parenting classes. An odd thought perhaps, but maybe not so. They are truly the most challenged of guardians are they not? What would we think of a mother or father with 25 kids at home? We'd either think them irresponsible for having so many or we'd merely wish them a good deal of fortitude. Teachers can use volunteers, it is true. And parents I think should recognize this and do all they can to participate in what ever way they can, from cross walk duty to helping out on the playground or in the classroom. But, what must be recognized is that we are training our children to repspond to multiple authorities that often have different rules. The child thus learns that adults differ too as to how to manage their difficutlies and other people. How are we surprised then when children are not consistent in their behavior? Perhaps we expect too much consistency. And further, this leads to my last "difference" point...

Different teachers lead to a world of diverse ideas.

Frankly, this is what may hold us back forever until our doom if we do not address this. Thanks to nearly a century of weeding out the controversy and "political incorrectness," both liberal and consrvtive efforts have manged to sterilize our history and narrow the curricular scope and thus deter the posibility of learning from our big mistakes. In simple terms, if we take out what can be debated in the schools, what's left but sentiment and rote learning? So, what do I propose to do about it. Well, first of all, I think we need to give more authority back to the teachers to the degree that they are not required to test for national standards and school performance for Federal funding. This NCLB precedent is bogus. Secondly, teachers should be given the mandate to form congresses such that they decide amongst themselves what literature to utilize, and become responsible to each other to report successes and failures. Let them make this their challenge to be flexible and thus more responsive and engaged with the continualy morphing dynamic of "differing" children. They must also be allowed variance from the congresses selections. I believe we will achieve a greater variety of thinkers, the more variety we allow in the classrooms, it's as simple as that.

Other differences (of opinion) and Barriers? There is another great barrier, however, that must be addressed if any of the above can be achieved. The interest groups, corporate or otherwise, that have become dependent upon the status quo will fight like the dickens to prevent any considerable change. Lobbies, for example, must be answered and challenged in kind in the legislatures and in the media. Both administrators and union leaders will be aggressively against these relaxed constraints, I'm sure. So too, will the publishers of inferior texts that have been given extended contracts and even perhaps complacent teachers will raise their offended voices. What better way to put debate and ingenuity back into academia than such a row?!

a review of Barry Lopez's Crossing Open Ground

I was on the bus and it occurred to me there was a passage about landscape, storytelling and lying that struck me and though I forget the exact quote and won't go back to find it, I am provoked to think about how it is so easy to trust nature and the landscape, that truth and language are not so much an issue or required; that there is no real question posed about being. We do not fear an unfaithfulness in nature's utterances. And further finding myself on the bus reading this, it occurred to me too how safe such an allegiance (to the driver)is. I do not have to worry about the reckless acts of others[...] But once the contemporary human begins to orate directly upon us, faith and our footing fail us. We are dragged along upon someone else's tilting, winding path, only hoping not to find ourselves upon a precipice gazing down in a singular lack of togetherness with the ground. We find ourselves in a kind of cordial free-fall without any hope of landing softly; there are only cacti and vultures waiting for the ultimate failure of lingual competence between antagonists. The landscape on the other hand is a truly sound protagonist; there is no doubting it, for it has no intention but acts as it will, as it must, and we can be comforted all along as we are nearly swept off the earth at the same time by natural disaster or the failure of aging organs...

I have faith that one day I will be taken back into this grand scheme. Therein my true faith resides. Not in human nature, that is, not at least as we have misunderstood it to be. We choose as we progress, and therefore even reason fails us in this way: being choice at all it goes against nature!

Mr. Lopez has privileged us with a close view of his direct and very personal contact with a landscape I feel I could love were I fortunate enough to be an outdoors person. Such is story telling: a privileged impossibility.

A response to Senator Patty Murray's "Learn Act"

So far I don't see what's unique or reformative. Literacy is important. That is not the debate. However, I fail to see how lock-stepping all schools under a national standard will provide fertile ground for innovation. Jobs mean nothing without new ideas. We already have a service nation. We don't need more cashiers. We need creative, critical thinkers. And yes, we need to be a productive nation. Without new ideas there'll be nothing to produce. To foster new ideas we need a diversity of input and output. Perhaps teachers should be given more room to open up the content and empower the methods with their own strengths. When teachers buy in this way you foster pasionate instruction. So, allow the nation room for educational experimentation and surely we'll adapt more quickly to the swiftly morphing social environment, not to forget the alarming ecological challenges we've created. National Standards is a ruse and a false solution propelled by interests that have only capital to gain from production of sterile texts and cloned minds. Let's produce a sustainable, inventive and humane future, shall we.

as it happens

I watch myself as it happens, quoting myself, wrapping a cerebral parentheses about the bubbling up of it. You can't catch bubbles, I say to me. You can't save mercury from oblivion once you've released it. My mind has escaped me and the air infiltrates my Tacoma like a two-by-four... no a four-by-four, and I'm realing in the reality: no more deep breaths: there's no time for it, and time negated is in me like a cancer, a bloated prostate. Impale me please, schtick a needle-me in the apple which has eden my eye!

The hijacking of environmentalism, and the crisis of American middle class ideology

I am compelled today to ponder the subject of “community” mobilization, institutional/establishment chicanery and potential crisis in American middle class ideology.

“I cannot accept the facile comfort that this catastrophe [in a few words elsewhere, “barbarism in modern Europe”] was a purely German phenomenon or some calamitous mishap rooted in the persona of one or another totalitarian order. Ten years after the Gestapo quit Paris, the countrymen of Voltaire were torturing Algerians[....]” [ George Steiner, Language and Silence, 1967]

“In the twentieth century it is not easy for an honest man to be a literary critic. There are so many urgent things to be done....” [Steiner]

While it is not suggested here that an Nationalist Socialist path is inevitable for the United States, there are some foreboding circumstances. Firstly, the middle class are quite literally right in the middle of it all. In the United states that is. I also believe certain elements of “community based” and grass-root organizing are perhaps more than partnered with commercial groups―but rather expose a more institutional origin for their supposed environmental concerns and “activism.” Could not this presumed mobilization be postured, virtually imposed upon communities and truthfully be Establishment masquerading as a social movement from the bottom up.

{A rant: Such posturing would be expected of Tacoma Housing Authority, building contractors such as Quadrant, industry (Weyerhauser, for example), real estate bankers and investors (at the expense of the buyers, especially the low-income families) which have everything to gain by slicing up the parcels on the east side of Tacoma into smaller units; in order to preserve the hoped for property value of said “communities” surely they would insist residents volunteer to keep it clean and tidy--that is, work for no pay out in the public domain. We could assume that this was because the tax base was expected to increase only imperceptibly at first and would not support public property landscaping or street maintenance; or should we recognize that a powerful organization of specialized groups fronted by a “neighborhood Association” as a thin guise has deemed this area a kind of third solution for the impoverished and therefore it means to hover over it as if it were an untrustworthy child, or worse, has engraved forever the stigma of “projects” onto the polished surface of Salishan! This is what we do with our enlisted soldiers and their families. Nor should we be fooled when Tacoma’s public schools for example become partners in this by enlisting children and families through shallow “ecology projects” and neighborhood events to cleanup the east-side and the gulch. Even labeling wooded areas as “sensitive habitat areas” is insulting to the intelligence of these residents!}

Cloaking cost saving institutional strategies as an environmental movement is a sham and we should be wary of this device. It occurs to me too, remembering that recently a community member from the east-side said to me that these were times when it didn't suffice to be thinking of oneself, that it was selfish to even desire solitude, that others came first. That "community" is supreme seems a suspiciously familiar theme: Dostoevsky’s “pan-humanism” is just one that comes to mind; and our tendency to become rigid as we mobilize for “causes” is another. But let us ask why this question of “community” and ideological crisis should come up whilst reading a novel.

"These are perilous times for free spirits." [Bao Ninh, The Sorrow of War]

These words are spoken by the father of the main character of the novel by Bao Dinh. The father is an artist whose style and subjects were "completely out of step with the times, which required artists to accede to certain socialist ethics, to display material understandable to the working class." He could "never have been successful in that era[...]" writes Bao Ninh, [and it should be noted that the act of writing is in the forefront in Ninh’s narrative] and he became "regarded as a suspicious malcontent" by the Party. I am reminded here of the real artist, George Grosz, and others like him who were labelled "degenerates" by the Nazis in the first half 20th century Germany. I can't help but note that authors, artists are particularly sensitive to these issues of aesthetics, literature and social criticism―as some of these inheritors of intuition, whether they aspire to, or not, offer us in fact a kind of window looking out upon society in general; they are its conscience as it were, and it should not be surprising that they and their ‘creations’ expose a dread of the potential threat of encroaching institutions, what-ever they might be driven by―commercial, religious or political doctrines―to throw rocks at the spot lights coming through the frame or the page. Sadly even presumed well-meaning social movements to save community or the environment could be hijacked and undermined for such institutional re-establishments of power by those who wield it and wish to maintain it.

“After the inroads made by Volkish thought, a large segment of German youth associated hikes through the countryside with revolution, and identifying with nature was thought equivalent to subverting the existing order. And here alone it functioned as a vital part of an ideology that was conservative as contrasted with the progress of the times [....] the direction it took immersed youth in a romanticism based upon the native landscape, elemental vitality and awareness of the German past.” [George Mosse. The Crisis of German Ideology, 1981]

I make reference here not to associate with any political development or party myself, nor to suggest America has outright become a Fascist regime, though it's pretty darn close (and I'll deal with that later)―as is heralded by some in the extreme media; but rather to point out an apparent proclivity amongst the powerful for duping the rest of polity with the skin of the same natural aspiration that gilds all classes of society, a desire for scouts’ honor order on a planet whose inhabitability is likely in jeopardy. (Note, too, that Ninh refers to a Youth Union and its patriotic campaigns in his novel.) (And, yes, even the holocaust had part origin in what purported to be a benign soil-loving movement, which then proceeded to collide with the ‘diaspora’ of another movement.)

The taxis of humankind has this in common with pan-germanic insecurity, and pan-slavic tribalism as well with the cold war aspirations of the American Empire. The cold war was more a cold front than a wall, for it moves and tosses like a cyclone, the breath of the land itself, the primal vagrant. And within it, this torrent pan-episode, we will forever be forced upward or cast all else asunder. Perhaps such a force is that which George Steiner meant to convey when he said:

“The history of taste is rather like a spiral. Ideas which are at first considered outrageous or avaunt-garde become the reactionary and sanctified beliefs of the succeeding generation,” and “[t]hus a modern critic finds himself in double-jeopardy. Criticism has about it something of a more leisured age. It is difficult on moral grounds, to resist the fierce solicitations of economic, social, and political issues.... ”

Bao Ninh’s protagonists should cause one to shudder, in the midst of our “Western” leisure, to see that while we in the ‘West’ have so little understanding of SE Asia, its bioregions, its cultures, walls and its proclivities; we are yet caught in the same basic struggle of loyalties between the many and the few, between desires and fears, longing for thrills or serenity; but perhaps as loci are merely out of sync. Whether it is Imperialist expansion, or street-gang territorial murder, we are all slumping toward some fourth dimensional shoreline, the ‘final-solution’ which sends the ultra-predatory few of us into the sea―embarking upon a floating city or walking a plank for the sake and punishment for their thoroughly abused tribal longings. Ultimately, vying for land, its borders and its bounty, has led us over and over to the inhumanity of war, however genocidal.

Today, what have we learned but how to disguise the acquisitive motivation more stealthily, more insidiously and just beneath the prickling hairs of our alarum. We are still telling each other what to do, when, where to stand and that akimbo should do just as well as caressing for our arms, for respite. So, this is all far more than to simply ask should a home owner be harassed because their landscaping aesthetics don’t match everybody else’s in the neighborhood. This nation boasts its diversity. Oddly enough, though, just as diversity is as much the problem inherent in diversity, Democracy has as well been proclaimed to be what “ails democracy.” [can’t remember the source for this phrase].

Perhaps we need to recognize that all beliefs are laden with contingents, provisions and the like. So it’s not a question of ‘believing’ in the ‘American Dream.’ It’s more that we’ve finally recognized that dreams are morphing everywhere, and that 'here' is just another place to call home to bigotry, greed and enslavement behind rows of prefabricated picket white fences manufactured 'who knows where,' in just another place called come ‘home.’ Perhaps a gated concrete wall around all neighborhoods would be a boon―the barbarians and predatory animals after all were outside the village, weren't they? But wait, wouldn't this just be another level of marginalization!?

end of review, part 1

Canadian Geese, David B. Williams, Barry Lopez and crowding...

A thought about Canadian Geese. On the days I have to walk to pick up my daughter from First Creek Middle School I can't help but notice the goose droppings, large dollops of greenish mush. There is a "sensitive area" under a small stand of trees where they gather by the school and forage from there out onto the grass. I'm not bothered really by them or their poop. I do wonder whether they are bothered by us though, do they feel crowded out.

I was on the bus the other day and found myself quite literally crowded out of the bus. I got off the #1 early at Pearl Street to catch the #10, fearing that I would miss it at the TCC transit station because of all the passengers. Standing by the bus stop I saw a goose sitting nearby, almost as if on a nestegg. I got out my (TESC's actually) camera and as I neared him cautiously, I realized he was injured. I called 911. Yes, I dialed 911; and they did not chastise me over it. They take that kind of call. Anyway, I guess I wonder whether he was picked up or not. Regardless, my having been crowded off the bus to such an event leaves me feeling a little deserved discomfort, and that perhaps I should take this feeling and make something bigger out of it. A blog will have to do for the moment... but I suspect it's a step in the right direction. And in fact, stepping, traversing this earth is exactly what I do quite a bit of now (having had to sell my car a few years ago). But not nearly as much as i'd like, I mean: not in the way I'd prefer: walking just to walk and see what there is to see.

So, to continue, I was just reading Barry Lopez's Crossing Open Ground and came upon the following, in reference to Carl Sauer: "The idea of bioregionalism, as it has been developed by his followers, is a political concept that would reshape human life." Lopez had just described previously a "great swath cut through the spruce forest" which delineated a borderline where the Yukon crossed into Alaska. "What a waste of trees," he says. But he goes on about Sauer and the bioregionalism concept... "It would decentralize residents of an area into smaller, more self-sufficient, environmentally responsible units, occupying lands the borders of which would be identical with the borders of natural regions---watersheds, for example." Then it hit me... a map I had noticed in a book on the shelf at a local store which showed evidence of early Tacoma property size. There were perhaps eight or ten large plats along the Narrows abreast the Tacoma shoreline extending south from Point Defiance (which was military land) at least as far south as Titlow Beach. The plats were very large plats. The type was too small to read, but surely I could find record then of settlement or land use! I'm wishing I had purchased the book. But to get to the point, I read on... and sure enough, Lopez saunters right into my path again and in a big way. He mentions a bluff where he finds hundreds of feathers, "evidence of their residence and passage is everywhere[...]" [migrating birds]. And finally I realize the significance of the Goose poop. It's evidence of another mode of being on this earth, evidence of migration, a way of life I will never know, being so drawn down by my personal relationship with gravity and winglessness. Suddenly, I am struck with compassion for the wounded goose... and yet he's still been places and seen the world in a way that makes him invincible in another kind of way, makes him symbolic of just how truly sensitive the few spaces are that we've managed to preserve, and how badly we need to stop developing. Land can 'develop' and create 'usage' all by itself quite nicely. We just have to slow down and look a little harder for the 'signage.' Yet, not to wring this narrative of any remaining flow, having read David B. Williams I am confused further having discovering that I can not assume that this "residence" even is natural; that their flyways may have been effected by human involvement. And not only that I have to consider the great possibility that I sealed the final deliverance of that goose, that really my haste to get home brought me his way and thus hastened his demise at the hands of some mandate for extermination. But, while "stepping in poop is not a call to arms," [Williams] it is a reminder that my own poop is concentrating elsewhere and probably doing far more ecological harm.

beauty is...

Beauty is in the eye of the boulder.

Wendell Berry lecture in May.

Wendell Berry is coming to Seattle.

"Whence comes this new wealth?" W.E.B. Du Bois

Today we are likely asking "Where did it go?" But did we have a right to it in the first place if all our wealth and leisure was acquired through our imperialist attitude toward the "darker" nations (as Du Bois put it) from which we pilfered natural resources and squelched their attempts to achieve independent and democratic nationhood. We Americans have no grounds I think to complain as our "standard of living" tumbles downwards toward where it might have been had we not been led by such a predatory corporate leadership to want for more than we needed.

But truthfully, and as Du Bois insists, we were all in it together, the leaders and the laborers. We all benefitted from the plunder!

influence...

I am caused to think about influence as I was recently listening to Ray Charles and noticing the Nat Cole in his early voice. Then I was reading at another point about Marvin Gaye's early Nat Cole influenced style which failed to work for him too. Both these gentlemen developed their own style of course which stood out, defined a new sound.

How can I say this?... I wonder did they hear this influence in their own voice as they sang? Did they hear it in the recordings? And how exactly did they go about sliding into their own style? I want to believe it was a gradual evolution. Did they hear themselves coming through the influence? Could they hear their voice the way a an artist sees his brush stroke? How does one differentiate one's style from the ground up? Do we clear away the learned information, slice away bits here and there as it were like a sculptor? Or do we build upon it as if suddenly it were incomplete, or a mere armature?

I am currently developing some critical work and wonder sometimes how much of it is me. I can hear at times the authoritativeness in my voice, but then often enough I feel dizzied by my own thoughts and expressions. My insights are clearly coming from me. I am not reading them, not "remembering" any specific text when I write. But certainly I am constructing upon the minds that have come before me. I can not hear any one author... yet, I ask myself: have I already broken free, or will I one day shake my head hearing distinct influence?....

This is a dark thought - the possibility that everything anyone of us says is a mere reiteration. After all I continue to see the same shapes everywhere around me and I am uncertain whether it is worth the effort to attempt to seize meaning from their occurrences.