John Shirley Blog

[note: it is totally uncool for me to reprint this section of an interview conducted by Greg Sargent in The Washington Post, as I’m doing it without permission. But I’m doing it because this is an emergency situation. People need to know. The article is behind a paywall.]

“…But hovering over these hearings will be a broader, unanswered question: whether the United States is developing an endemic problem with political violence and, in coming years, how bad it might get.

“For an unflinching look at this larger context, I reached out to Rachel Kleinfeld, a specialist in political conflict who has studied the breakdown of democracy and the rule of law in many countries.

“Greg Sargent: You’ve written that the Republican Party has a “militia problem.” Can you describe it?

“Rachel Kleinfeld: For the last few years, we’ve seen an uptick in Republican parties at the local level — though occasionally at the state level — using militias for security at party events, having militias vote on party business, in one case in Michigan having militias introduce legislation. You’re seeing a lot of photo-ops with militia members — things that normalize their interaction with the democratic process.

“These militias are being used to threaten other Republicans who aren’t part of this antidemocratic faction.

“Sargent: It seems as though some GOP and right-wing politicians are hovering in a gray area. They’re endorsing violent attacks on the opposition without facing serious party discipline, fantasizing about settling political differences via paramilitary combat, vastly minimizing the Jan. 6 insurrectionist violence or erasing it with propaganda, and describing Jan. 6 rioters facing prosecution as ‘political prisoners.‘ “Has this gray area been replicated by other countries that went on to spiral into worse political violence?

“Kleinfeld: One of the things we know about other countries that descend into greater political violence is that violence is preceded by a dehumanization phase. America is well along in that phase: things like misogyny, racial epithets, calling Democrats “groomers” and comparing them to pedophiles.

“The next stage is making violence against those dehumanized opponents seem more normal. You’re starting to see GOP candidates posing with rifles — everything from Rep. Thomas Massie’s family Christmas photo to Eric Greitens’s new ads about hunting RINOs.

“Sometimes it’s against Republicans who are not part of the antidemocratic faction. Sometimes it’s against Democrats. But either way, dehumanization normalizes the idea that harming those dehumanized opponents is legitimate.

“We know from other countries that have descended into really serious political violence that this is a trajectory, and we’re on it. We’re actually pretty far advanced on it.

“Sargent: What would a further spiraling downward from here look like? One can imagine something like this: Threats of violence toward election administrators get worse. Election outcomes, particularly when Republicans lose, are violently contested with more regularity. Now-routine chatter about Democratic rule being illegitimate gets increasingly endorsed by GOP party actors, leading to violent attacks on politicians.

“Some experts in democratic breakdown fear something akin to “the Troubles” in Ireland. What’s your worry? Is it similar to what I just laid out?

“Kleinfeld: It’s actually a little worse. The percentages of Americans endorsing violence are approaching Northern Ireland’s Troubles at their height in 1973.

“Right now, the antidemocratic faction of Republicans is targeting three groups: the pro-democratic faction of Republicans; election officials in both parties who are maintaining free and fair elections; and a lot of regular people they’re targeting with dehumanization and violence, to build their own base.

“If the antidemocratic faction wins, then I think the heightened violence we’re seeing now will continue. But if they start losing, then they’ve built up a lot of hatred — a lot of distrust in the system — and then the violence is going to get out of their control. It’ll look more like an insurgency. A disaffected left, not connected to the Democratic Party, is also justifying violence. It could get ugly.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/11/gop-political-violence-militias-jan-6-democratic-breakdown/

2.3 billion dollars will be spent on on fireworks this Fourth of July and mostly by individuals, not by town councils…People point to the tradition of fourth of July fireworks…If you want to talk about the TRADITION OF FIREWORKS–in the majority of places, it was like this, when I was a kid in the NW: There was a fairground or a big park area selected by the local community. You went there, for free, and the community would set off a really wonderful fireworks display–often with patriotic music playing. AND we had our picnics there, before hand, and barbecues. It was a true community event. You shared something with the *whole community*. When I was a kid I loved it. That was before I had PTSD. I could enjoy it now, I think, if it was at such an event–if it disturbed me I could just drive home. But if they had the traditional kind of skyrockets there, and if it was out in some safe area, I would probably enjoy it–it’s the fact that it’s happening now around my home that triggers me. And some of what is sold now is just to create a noise that sounds like a mortar shell striking. Around here, it sounds like a warzone. It isn’t pleasant.

You see, what we have now is the consequence of advertising, pushing home fireworks. It’s all to MAKE AN INDUSTRY RICHER. They don’t live in our communities. They just come here to sell us something that some people seem to confuse with their masculinity. We could still go back to the TRADITIONAL way to share fireworks…away from the neighborhoods and with everyone all together. And I really do seriously say to you: God Bless America.

Dependence Day By John Daniel

It would be a quieter holiday, no fireworks or loud parades, no speeches, no salutes to any flag, a day of staying home instead of crowding away, a day we celebrate nothing gained in war but what we’re given—how the sun’s warmth is democratic, touching everyone, and the rain is democratic too, how the strongest branches in the wind give themselves as they resist, resist and give themselves, how birds could have no freedom without the planet’s weight to wing against, how Earth itself could come to be only when a whirling cloud of dust pledged allegiance as a world circling dependently around a star, and the star blossomed into fire from the ash of other stars, and once, at the dark zero of our time, a blaze of revolutionary light exploded out of nowhere, out of nothing, because nothing needed the light, as the brilliance of the light itself needs nothing.

[thanks to the Poetry Foundation]

Selections from an article by Kate Aronoff for The Guardian

“In a major environmental case, the court has made clear that it would rather represent the interests of corporations and the super-rich than the needs and desires of the vast majority of Americans – or people on Earth.

“In its Thursday ruling on West Virginia v EPA – in line with a string of decisions that will make life here more dangerous – the US supreme court all but declared that war, curtailing the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate power plants under a provision of the Clean Air Act and – more worryingly – striking an opening blow to the government’s ability to do its job.

“… Polluters have always been happy to throw small fortunes at the right’s quest for minority rule, keen to protect fossil fuel profits and their ability to dump waste into the air and water from pesky things like democracy. As Nancy MacLean writes in Democracy in Chains, Charles Koch took a special interest in destroying public education, thus maintaining de facto segregation, before leading the charge against climate policy at every level of government. He continues to be a generous funder of the Federalist Society, an instrumental force in building and filling the pipeline of clerks, judges and cases that has created the judicial branch as we know it, and rulings like the one that overturned Roe v Wadelast week. Secretive dark-money outfits like Donors Trust, as well as Chevron and the Scaife Foundation – furnished by old oil and aluminum money – have joined him.

“West Virginia v EPA itself was brought with the help of the Republican Attorneys General Association, a network of state attorneys general whose own funders include the country’s biggest fossil fuel companies and the beleaguered coal barons who had the most to lose from the modest power plant regulations. They also spent $150,000 sponsoring Trump’s rally on 6 January.

“The interests of the country’s wealthiest residents and corporations are at odds with the vast majority of people who live here. Luckily for the right, a political system designed by slaveholders provides an easy on ramp to concretize minority rule, encasing their power within definitionally undemocratic institutions. With a young, ideological rightwing majority on the court, there’s no telling how far they might go. And there’s not much that can stop them.”

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jul/01/the-us-supreme-court-just-declared-war-on-the-earths-future

We’re playing

Covid

Mutation

Roulette

But all of life is

  a dangerous

   Bet

    Will tonight be the night

       a drunk driver

 Puts  Out My Light?

            It’s Covid

            Mutation

            Roulette

            You don’t know

            If its done

            Yet

            Viruses Mutate

            And the sun sets

            It’s Covid

            Mutation

            Roulette

            And love is a bet

            That lovers

            Can tell the truth

can anyone now

be honest with you?

            Like Covid

            Mutation

            roulette

If there was some kind of betting parlor for it, I’d bet two thousand dollars on the triumph of lies brought about by Trump’s presidency–lies effectuated by the degradation of consensus reality; a degradation produced by the mindless use of social media….

I will vote for Democrats, and fight for Democracy–but I would bet money on the imminent midterm elections giving congress to the GOP, and the 2024 election being stolen by Trump or a Trumpy, with the collusion of a GOP-led congress. Then will come theocracy, an end to democracy, a restoration of racial segregation–and worse. I fervently hope I’m wrong.

The optimism part? I’m certain that something over half of America will be outraged when the country is stolen by the extreme-right corporate oligarchy; when flagrant racism and the oppression of women becomes the order of the day. This outrage will split the nation into a de facto geographic balkanization. Something like discrete mini-nations, official or unofficial, will become the norm within the USA, formed around progressive zones: California, the NE USA, Washington State (Oregon could go either way), in reaction to the takeover of the theocratic right…

Militias formed by progressives will defend these stubbornly progressive regions. But the federal military, with the US Army and Marines, its Navy and Air Force, its tanks and missiles, will be controlled by the rightist regime. Only a sadly improbable revolution organized from within the federal military could lead us back to a unified democratic nation. Still, optimistically, there will be areas of the USA–the geographical USA at least–which may remain free and Democratic…locally. And who knows what technological innovations, what hacks, what new drone technologies, could be deployed by the Unified Progressive States…

The monastery, on the lower slopes of Mt Everest, was a tumbledown affair, there being only five surviving monks to maintain it. Renegade soldiers had attacked it, a year before, and now all five of the surviving Vipassana monks were working to rebuild it stone by stone, with their bare hands.  I arrived weary, and my head throbbed–I wasn’t used to the thinner air here. I bowed to the nearest monk, a man of middle aged in the robe of a Master, and said, “I am here to study. I was sent by Hanh.” The monk ignored me, and adjusted the stone on its crumbling wall. I had used the proper language. Why was he ignoring me? I was nettled. It had been hard enough to get here, without being ignored too… “I am Dedeman,” I said. “I am here as appointed.”

The monk ignored me. I was puzzled. There was no vow of silence at this monastery and I had committed no solecism. 

One of the other acolytes spoke to the Master. “I thought I heard someone say, ‘I am here.’ But–I believe it was the wind.”

“Yes,” the Master told him. “No one but else but we five are here–thus it must have been a trick of the wind.”

I smiled. “Perhaps if I set to work with you? I am here, after all, to work…”

“Again I heard a sound like ‘I am here,” said the acolyte. “Perhaps an echo?”

“If a newcomer was here,” said the Master to the acolyte, “I would sense it. A man is not here if he is asleep. There is someone here who is asleep. He speaks in his sleep. No one is truly here but we five…”

Suddenly I understood. I gathered all my attention to the present moment, and to the sphere of fine energies around me; I stopped identifying with my weariness, my irritation. I was now quite present. “I am here,” I said.

“Ah yes,” said the Master, nodding at me. “Here you are. We have been expecting you.”

“You!”

“What? Who’s that? I can’t see who’s talking…!”

“I’m down here, by your feet!” Pierce  called out, shouting up to the giant. “Careful where you step  with your gigantically reeking feet you great enormous lummox!”

“So!” cried the God of Daily Irritations. The giant towered over the human who dared to challenge him in the castle carved out of the upper quarter of Mount Prestidigitation. “I see you now: a little shred, a worm, a mort of a man! How came you here?”

“The clouds parted in the spring wind–and thereupon I beheld your ugly hulking goat-faced person, flinging persistent irritations, minor mishaps, and annoying bad luck upon the people of Oblivious Valley!”

 “But I am invisible to mortals! How could a vile monkey-dropping such as yourself see me at work?”

“Ha! Were you not such a thick, dim, blockheaded nitwit you might have logically deduced I have used Revelation Spectacles! I inherited them from Uncle Mortimer who was too cowardly to put them on! Now, you discourteous lout! Explain yourself!”

“Tiny pink fleck of snot, you see but you do not see! I was tasked by the Dark Gods to spread small woes so that you would be too busy to guess the Great Woe, and do something about it!”

“And what is the Great Woe, you unspeakably tremendous waste of space!”

“Why–it is letting small things distract you from the Grace of Living! But you shall never report this to your kind, for now I shall crush you under my feet, and make you the blot you have always been destined to be!”

But as the giant lifted his gigantic foot, Pierce drew his sword, braced its pommel in a crack of the stone floor, and leapt to one side. The foot came slamming down and impaled upon the sword. The giant leapt about, clutching at its foot, and howling, “Aiee! Fuck you, you little shit!”

“No fuck you!” cried Pierce. “For I am away to inform my people of your perfidy–fare-unwell, you pestilence!” And with that, Pierce sprinted under a stone table and out the drainage pipe he’d used to enter the carven castle. . .

Of course there are good habits. I’m in the habit of meditation, that’s a good habit. I’m in the habit of cleaning up after myself in the kitchen. A good habit. But within me operates a parasitic vine, or several of them intertwined–of bad habits. Such is the human condition.

The grip of this parasitic vine can be challenged, and some of the ivy, some of the strangle-weed in my inner self, can be cut away. It’s got a hard bark on it, and it’s resistant to cutting, but it can be done. Or more accurately it can can be *seen* away–there is a process, called self observation, allowing us to turn some of our attention to ourselves in the most objective perspective we can manage, and in seeing a negative, problematic habit, we’re able to work against it by degrees. First, just seeing it–not just saying “I see that I have this habit” but literally seeing it as if it were physically manifest–has the curious effect of gradually weakening it.

And this means seeing it without self-reproach. Honesty but not self-condemnation. Just “Oh, there is my tendency to deflect blame onto someone else…Or: ah, once again I see my tendency to lose myself in social media…Or: yes, once again I see that I have the bad habit of spending energy defending my vanity…” Seeing it as a kind of vine is a bit of a revelation–I realize these bad habits work together, reinforce one another. And in the organic structure of my psychology they are almost literally parasitic vines. They draw energy away from me that could be used for a thousand positive experiences…When I build up the “databank” of self-knowledge, of seeing myself, I am less identified with the bad habits, less subject to their grip. By degrees I can become someone realer, and freer…

Shortly after the Big Bang, space began to expand, and the strong electromagnetic force broke up into four basal forces: the strong nuclear force, the “weak” nuclear force, electromagnetism, and gravity. Soon, space’s expansion increased in intensity, interacting with the four basal forces to spawn various particles, which became a gigantic expanding continuum of chaos. But there were certain highly distinct particles thrown off by the process: particles of pure mind. Naked awareness.

The particles of pure mind located one another; they were not positively or negatively charged, they were choice-charged, and at first they chose to merely rotate around one another, gazing into each other, one reflecting into the other, and aware of it–like conscious mirrors. As more mind particles gathered, more raw intellect reflected and back and forth and up and down and in every direction, like light bouncing within a mirror-ball which had its mirrors facing inward. This process merged all the particles into a taut organization, a field of pure mind which collectively became one individual consciousness. The Mind. And thanks to each mind-particle’s innate willingness to coordinate–to work with others in a field–The Mind developed a selfhood that could ponder, wonder, and project ideas.

The remainder of the universe was chaos. Crude laws existed within the chaotic interactions of particles; but any systems randomly arising were ephemeral, they didn’t last, as they could not withstand the general randomness. Eventually, these laws would result in the creation of stars and planets. But chaos still ruled.

The Mind had a center that was particularly concentrated, so much that this concentration engendered feeling. And what it felt, firstly, was…alone. All it had to turn to, in all the universe, was chaos. But chaos was unresponsive. Chaos had no Mind.

The Mind sought to obtain something besides random energy signals from chaos. How could it give chaos a mind? Another mind on the scale of The Mind was not possible in the vast chaotic universe. But perhaps in limited areas some sort of smaller mind could be created.

The Mind mentally envisioned what could happen if a discrete complex of reactivity within the great endless body of chaos was precisely stimulated. The projection showed the Mind that reproducible patterns were feasible. Each mind-particle within The Mind’s consciousness had a micron of an erg of kinetic energy at its disposal. That energy could be a nudge. Carefully applied to set up a concatenation in just the right spot in the whirling chaos, the little nudge could create a small system. And it was a system that would replicate itself.

So, Mind experimented, and made a replicating system happen. This new, tiny, individual system was a sort of molecular womb. The Mind was then able to dispatch a mind-particle of itself with another nudge, into the replicating system. That mind-particle was able to experience the new micro-system from within. The mind-particle in the system kept in touch with the big primal mind, using “spooky action at a distance”, so that its experiences could be shared by original Mind…The Mind felt less alone…

More systems were created, and they were nudged to evolve into cells. The possibility of DNA, mentally envisaged by The Mind and implanted into the probability matrix of each cell, brought the first genetic molecules into being.

The cells reproduced and interconnected and evolved as groups. More particles of mind were interwoven into the groups…And as organisms developed more complex brains, they attracted more and more mind-particles. Their offspring gradually became sentient, unknowingly sharing what they experienced with the Mind. Over time, The Mind itself began to evolve, in a way other than biologically, developing fine degrees of empathy. Subjective communications came about between it and the organisms…It began to work at making these communications clearer, over time…Conversations were had….

The Mind was no longer lonely.