A comment on Sovereignty & Empire

"Our" American Imperialism has deep roots, running far back, beneath Wilson "making the world “safe” for democracy" long before any speechwriters scripted Reagan or Bush Sr. stumping for freedom or democracy. American will was flat fiat. No president, on either side of the aisle has shifted or questioned the course of U.S. foreign policy to impose our markets and their owners will. We are finally beginning to see the cost of such policies.

The largely muted and consistently oppressed dialogue about, or examination of, the costs of empire has been facilitated by the tsunami of mindless media advertising cheap consumer goods.

What dialogue that has made it out into the market place of ideas and concern is focused on species, as well as “collateral” populations of non consuming human and non human portions of the biosphere. However I suggest, that in such a purely “subjective focus” we miss the opportunity or ability to address the market functions and economic imperatives that drive the cannibalistic consumption of the planet. I mention Biosphere here to remind us that a hungry human or animal will kill to feed his child, and that in our greed and lust for “democracy” we have impoverished not only ourselves, but the world.

I suggest that we recall that is our Ancestors (bless them) in their blithe hubris of self sufficiency and isolationism we slept through the watch and facilitated the deconstruction of what was, (so I hear) at one time, a decent rhetorically challenging, and affordable, national educational system the envy of the world.

It's non efficient replacement produces a citizen consumer ill fitted to sleep well in a market driven system filled with demonically possessed market architects at the helm of capitalist empires such as Monsanto, Blackwater, Halliburton, Texaco, pharmacy, and the merger between big agricultural and genetic market investors.

This corporate kleptocracy in turn funds, controls, and formulates our dialogue of our so called political system. Only when we successfully engage the body politic holistically will we succeed in shifting our collective and individual prioritizes towards actions that create beauty and meaning rather than consuming it.

Our Collective inability to engage “the right” merely exposes us for poorly educated elite without the capacity for imagination and inspiration to engage in both rigorous rhetorical and compassionate thinking. Which first and foremost is best applied to own little souls. The lack of educational ritual, rigor and maturation has created a society of narcissistic addicts bent on self destruction. This mistake has dam near doomed the world.

The lucky and the self entitled Bourgeois collectively fuck the world. As Leonard Cohen calmly states in “Everybody knows” Blindly and compulsively we replicate and consume our way through life in an attempt to avoid the unconscious fact at the root of our (mostly)white privileged, sex obsessed souls that we know there is another way.

America is a continent and hemisphere, as well as a media icon. Another truth is it is a land onto itself, with its own imperiled aboriginal, flora, fauna and tribes.

We are survivors. Call it humanity or Darwinism, Luck or “god’s will” or evil or simply what appears in awareness. The weak, the poor, the different, the stranger, often, mostly die. I know Jared Diamond might argue.

We non aboriginals have diverse gods and ancestors. We are refugees, slaves, and invaders. Some are like my family; members of the first wave of refugees and invaders. Some are more recent. Their choices are few and elusively subtle, yet with profound consequence.

One of these is the chance or opportunity to recognize and most importantly, remember our innate humanity and love. From that choice we live in either heaven or hell. The global “Clampdown” is simply to present and too serious to play games any longer about the world or our roles in it.

Refugees and criminals are defined by economic resources, timing, witnesses and chance. It is our responsibility to remember, to viscerally re-call the spirits of this land, our ancestors, and the land’s of our families birth. Through this collective re-tempering we may actually begin to meaningfully relate with each other and our colective dilema of how to live together on /with our mother-father planet spaceship.

I suspect “that everybody knows” we are far more intuitive or “savage” than we care to admit. Regardless if our efforts are beyond the "tipping point" we still have the ability and vision to offer our children a good and peaceful death, owning our part, and our complete lack of intention to suffer. This is a bright lining on a dark cloud. There is no reason not to celebrate what we have, the challenge is to share what is good and make space for each other, whether flora, fauna or enemy.

Is this moment an opportunity for a change in the consciousness of the American public? Are we desperate enough in our withdrawal from consumerism to have the fundamental realization of all recovering addicts, that untreated addiction destroys societies, worlds and lives.

It matters not if its power or crack, the ends are the same and yes, the solution is both internal and external, both within our bodies, families, and communities, but also in our immigration, employment, education and environmental and economic priorities. The fundamental failure of the “Left” is it's entrapment in dualism. when we can bow to the hawk within, we will risk the possibility of compromise as well as compassion. We cannot find unity without, if we do not free ourselves and our dialogues of shame, blame and guilt.

While it is an effective story to release adrenaline and stress hormones, our collective or personal focus on past or present human sacrifices, to our gods of national defense and fear, or too loose ourselves and grieve the dead. We repeat the trauma and remain a nation lost in narcissism and personally and collectively isolated.

It may be through the opportunity of the current global environmental economic moral crisis that we may seize this opportunity to evolve as a species dependent upon the bio-sphere we have poisoned in the name of secular profits.

Collectively we have the resources of imagination and implementation to make a quantum jump both as individuals and begin to husband the planet. Perhaps we have looked down in confusion, pain and anger. It may prove more humane to raise our gaze and our hearts to the heavens and make this day and this world all it may me. There is in simple honesty, an opportunity to unite, move forward and focus on life and it's inherent beauty in each and every moment. Yet there is hope that such a small shift may be the missing catalyst for our collective salvation.


More to come later, thanks for reading.

Leonard

I'm an old Cohen fan, back from my teenage years in San Francisco punk scene. So I imagined that after 30 years of listening to my favorite bards voice I knew something shared, unique in all of us. I wanted to go to the show, but had no tickets and just put a prayer out on Craig's List. To my surprise i found myself answering the phone at 7.30 pm, a woman on the phone asking me if i had a printer, and saying i should get dressed.

An hour later, across the bay in Oakland's Paramount theater, I found myself together with the friend. Persians would call it "Sobet" "divine conversation" pure fields of musical nectar, enhanced joy of life, spontaneous, pouring through the "cracks in everything" where the light gets in.

Seats at gods feet, i cannot speak except with the sweet tears of loves fulfilled desire. All my life i have been like a blind man slowly finding my own way, hurt by help of others way. With the three thousand souls together we shared some truth, recognizing hearts know the way. This man is a living icon of all that is good and beautiful in life, nature, the world and the masculine soul.

And funny, humble and playful, skipping off the stage and pretending to go, And seeming to play a Kafka~esque riff on Sinatra. He appeared as a hip~post apocalyptic Archetype in the flesh. Masquerading as classical folk rock global poetic treasure. A genre transcending art that both contrasts and unites disparate experience of wealth, class and self esteem in the cauldron of the human heart. Where our struggles for power, meaning and control are ultimately passionately analyzed and surrendered upon the the mercy of love. And the letting go of even that, in love.

too familiar

Philosophy can start out comfortable, so abstract, know what i mean?

Then in some late night, early some morning, samadhi fuled meditation, it actually start sliding into and out of some rather altered experience of conciousness.

A mad comuters early morning anxity attack smorgasbnoard?!

I would have a moment of dream awareness, perhaps identifying a gender, or a body type, some focus of attention, maybee a emotion. a felt sense of life embdied but not "mine"

Then it would begin to shift, i would remember "myself" and experience vertigo or nausea a shifting sence of awareness and personal karma

Then a personal referance point would fade or evaporate demanding an imediate sureender to what is joy if not fought, it it is resisted, it is freak the fuck out scarry!, riding the tusnami !

maybe another experience, a dream vinyet of body, calm breathing a clear pchysic exchange of some sort, yet i am riding the edges of Trama again. . . it can get to much really quick!

But also exhilarating and almost extinction. if that's excitement, i don't need it. Yet it's not for excitement, it's experiencing, and a letting go or allowing in, of other experiences, ones that are waiting to share if we allow much wonder in to our dreams, our awakenings.

Healthcare & Warfare

They are a pair, like husband and wife, an allegory made ironic by it's accuracy and lack of funding. Its an unexploited argument in soundbite time; media cannot repress. Imagination is revolution Lennon taught us that. Lydon gave us anger Strummer epitomized self control.

So back to my refrain: Dark and Light, Love and Hate, Separation and Unity, the list go's on. Living on the edges~surender~enjoy. The love we all share, no matter how obscure'd are shared by a "critical mass" like pshye fission, it's our only choice: we either evole or we die, and of course it's allways the two.

Enough of us have all grown weary of the monatary junk, weary of our next desire, we shudder to even tru it. no matter where we run, the rest of the world is going straight to hell. We have brought it upon ourselves, The sins of our fathers, seven generations told: were still paying off the civil war. . .

If it's all karma, and we'll pay every second as we go. We come in with lot's of credit - or none of that's "how it goes". Not abstract or interesting when afluant dreamers wish to die in some winter dreams. I say dance your sister to the freedom, that has allways been here, we know it's only music that's playing in our ear.

Take a deap breath ad breathe into this pose. Every perspective is like a child, manipulating it's patents in to defending regardless of the cost. I imagine a mature recognition, that releases sahme and guilt - control. none of us is inocent, none are guilty if truth is honestly known. All that happens is a fragment of ourselves, the deeper we deny it, more the evil sold.

The dynamic of conflict is rooted in our souls, it aches in the morning as soon as we awake, as we age we feel it's cost in our bones.

smiling

Life is going on
with or without us
constantly shifting
Like the sea.
our only delusion:
naming a direction.

Heaven or Hell

Such a perfect day

two hours of yoga

two at the coffee shop

perfect conversations with friends

all parts of life embraced

Today we are enjoying more peace

than many know their entire lives.

Wind on the hill

I love to get out, around sunset and take a walk up the hill.

I even like the anticipation, like sex, when you know it's going to happen

and you haven't yet moved a muscle, I don't ever know what it will be like

i don't' think it's ever been bad ( or at least not for a long time), and i love it every time.

Just an unexpected flower, or the wind pushing the grass flat against the hill

like forces bend me without my knowing anything, but this lying down and getting up.

Then they sky grows pink and red and i know it's getting dark, and I'm happy to be alive.