Yesterday was my friend Lyle Sears’ birthday; he’s been dead these many long years - this morning his daughter, who remains wisely vacant from the fictional FB world posted a photo of what i have to believe is her rolly-polly newborn baby. Seeing new life and the loving language my friend’s daughter used to describe this baby filled places in my being i didn’t even know had been emptied. Lyle and i shared a heritage of rebellion having been children of the 60’s, though from vastly different sides of the political spectrum. His son, ironically has pursued a law enforcement career path that given the branding of his father as "incorrigible" and subsequent incarceration in his adolescent years, oddly mirrors the bizarre embrace of my nephew as a financial wizard given my own brother’s sworn fidelity to the “proletariate.” These are the paradoxes of our time. The difference being a license for independent thought that is vanishing from our species like spit on the hood of the policeman’s war wagon as he chains you to your prosecution regardless of your faith in freedom, and now almost entirely predicated on the color of your skin.
Today i read the leader of the “free world” is disavowing ballots and priming the pump for “continuation” rather than the peaceful transition of power that has marked the previous 225 years of history for the country to which i was born. I fear that even if my friend who possessed the character to embrace me as friend, however much it antagonized the sycophants that had surrounded his parent’s pool table in our adolescent years, would have found common cause with the manufactured “white pride” so easily accessed in the obtuse socially engineered media message of today’s contempt for thinking people everywhere. But i cannot leave go this thread without conveying the irony of being schooled by my friend’s youngest son of the betrayal of freedom for the Palestinian people - a politically independent position entirely unexpected but undeniable in its truth · as they say in Santa Ana, s`plain that to me, please.
I now live in what in my own history had been the fault line between two waring ideologies but which has now morphed into some hide-and-seek game of who has “dirty pictures of who” and who is the traitor or who is the patriot of what? As a 12 year old playing with GI Joes, it was cut and dry - you are with me, or you are against me. I remember my parent’s angst, or as much angst as an 11 year old boy could muster, when the HO train set they had taken pains to provide at Xmas time on top of the commandeered pingpong table got transformed into a battlefield full of overturned freight cars creating caves and avenues of escape for the partisans. The gift of the model train set was a feature of my parents wholly wholesome hope to elicit dreams of engineering exploits to fortify their good name as righteous parents of an unusual child in an exemplary family, but only resulted in caves of blown up rail cars mimicking the proximity of a sensitive child to a warlike ethos from TV viewing that couldn’t be easily hidden.
And here i sit 50 years later on the “demilitarized” zone of their Television Horror show faced with unresolved antagonisms about quarrels that were never meant to be concluded - but exploited by a world leadership looking for easy pickings amongst the uneducated and easily moved - not unlike my childhood friend Lyle · had he lived longer, he might have become a nazi of the _rump style; he was always a very conventional kind of guy, except as i was to learn in struggles that we shared about very personal issues. One drunken New Year’s morning telephone call, we discovered common cause about having been raised to erroneously believe ourselves to be “pieces of shit” by the rolls into which our family's attempted to consign us - and from that point forward our shorthand in times of duress at least until his demise was the greeting, “you’re not a piece of shit” and we had some grand chuckles about that · a laughter i miss and have found rare in my later years.´
Our world is largely fake, and people in positions of power are determined to portray an authenticity that doesn’t exist - it cannot be right in a world where the aged and the infirm amongst us are in the greatest jeopardy, while the rich and the powerful laud their exploits for having rescued us all from a destruction of their design and execution, but which no one wants to admit to - i say, FUCK YOU, AND THE HORSE YOUR RODE IN ON.” The planet is simmering; people have lost simple respect for age old wisdom and want to describe it as “trendy” or popular; again i say FUCK YOU AND THE HORSE YOU RODE IN ON.” I learned this expression at the dinner table of the 2nd man to marry my mother, i loved and respected him, though i was to later learn i’d been played, and not. I brought a 200 lb granite femur i had carved to his death bed, for no other reason than he enjoyed it - a fact my family or anyone else familiar with the circumstances of his death - wants to ignore · i do not, nor i think did he. We can only do our best to love those in our world and pray that it is enough. Don’t believe me - look into your own heart and ask whether you have done all you can to help our species to survive.
jts 24/09/2020
http://stoanartst.blogspot.com
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
∞
No comments:
Post a Comment