Universal travel: plenty of haves and a shit more have-nots
Passing through the Columbia Gorge from Portland, Oregon, along the scenic Gorge through Hood River (once a logging place, with apples and cherries, now bloody wind surfing capital of the world), landslides chucked debris on Interstate 84, and these incredible new cataracts of water spewing from the slopes and basalt drop offs. I saw an eagle on the mile post 68, eyeing the SUVs passing by. Tons of mountain goats out, new shoots and mists and fog. There is a hustle and bustle in America, a million trucks criss-crossing the land, from port to polluted port … OJ concentrate from California heading to Florida and that Everglades OJ concentrate moving west to LA.
Skis and big lugging trailers, the fanciest of vehicles, many new, Nazi cars driven by Jews – BMWs and Mercedes Benzes. Amazing disconnect the world is now displaying as we fly past towns that were once thriving, cool places, not just Star Bucks and McDonald’s stops with a Flying J or Sinclair Dinosaur for some of that $2 a gallon fossil fuel love.
Music in each passenger’s and driver’s ear buds, cargo of kids with individual DVD screens watching the next lobotomizing Hollywood lithium leak. You gotta love those truckers, mean as dirt, bellies as big as Santa’s, but hearts as small as your proctologist’s, as they zip by, smoking their cigs or dragging on their strawberry shortcake flavored vaps. Wouldn’t stop for a granny with a flat tire if their lives depended on it.
America, this completely ignorant mass of muscle lovers, football freaks, just hoping for another fill-er-up at the Buffalo Wings joint, just more of the same, endless mini-markets and malls, and towns tumbleweeded into extinction because those cars go faster, quieter and longer with their 20 gallon tanks.
Only rivers in America are blacktops with wheels turning
The river is a slack water, dammed up, with fishermen and women hauling in artificially raised salmon. The big dams Dalles, Bonneville, John Day, etc., etc., there for the taking, all those homes in the middle of nowhere, lit up like Fourth of July is inside … four-car/three-boat/two-Winnebago garages and outbuildings holding junk and more junk, and big three-story homes, and then the clog that is Portland, all those hipsters flying out for their Xmas-Hanukkah fun, heading back to their family DNA, these urban tribes, IT and digital dingbats, but racking in millions, dislocated from their homes now to be REI and Northface tough with florescent-cherry snow shoes and mountain gear that could outfit an entire Afghan company.
People do not talk, say much, have anything real to profess, but they do, in America, talk about that weather channel, that spicy GMO on their McNuggets, and they waddle and limp back and forth to the potty, spools of TP for each True Blooded American Single Flush.
This nanny-gate society, endless signs, these expensive reflective 3M products on everything, including the squirrels and deer, millions of mileposts, tens of millions of speed limit posts, exits-off ramps-on ramps-Hitchhiker’s Guide to Eisenhower’s Road System, warning signs, an endless reflective nightmare of offending the few of us who took roads down the Baja before it was paved, who need none of this diaper babying that is AMERICA.
Billboards selling adoption, Christ, right to life; selling endless casinos and resorts and $300 a night hotel rooms and multi-state lottos; and the splatter of deep-fried- you-name-it-burger-burrito-bun-dog-wing-thigh-pizza and those four foot beef jerky blue whale phallus things they chew on in between those lollipops and Eskimo Pies.
War, baby, the society that has wars for its little 50 star flag. All the might of calorie rich fuckers making the goo, the engines, the guidance systems, the shrouding, the marketing brochures for the missiles of war.
Community college ticket to the drone school, community college will teach you how to tap into a hard-drive, the FBI-CIA-TSA-PD want you, and throw in Homeland Security, and all those sheriff departments, age and IQ and beer belly of no consequence.
Continuation of the childization of Amerika
The children of these infantilized idiots listen to mom pop off about Target sales, listen to pop pop off about the next Mexican enchilada stop along the itinerary. “Betcha that one gets killer mileage. How many? Must be a bear with all those trucks. How’s it do in the fog?”
They ask me about the three-cylinder Metro … red, of course, and, shoot, small enough to fit halfway in their trunks. You gotta love the superficiality of the most powerful and most economically possessed nation on earth.
You get to Spokane, and alas, there it is, snow plows running the stream of hard ice onto sidewalks. Limping walkers and people using canes and wheelchairs, in the roadway, because the sidewalks are all caked in snow, road grime and mountains of ice.
Amerika, the helpful. Hit the newspaper headlines, and yet another USA Town of Ill-repute, Spokane, err any place, hell, Chicago or NYC. Police chief, on the outs, highest paid public official in Spokane, and he’s raking in $40,000 while he writes a report about justice-injustice. Imagine, these fucks, and this guy is suing the city for wrongful termination, more than several million to that tune. He makes $22 a word for a memo, 1,890 words long, big report on how to fix the city’s crime wave, the one in City Hall and Inside the Police Bureau. That Thin Blue Line. He blames the culture of the police force for forcing the police chief off the thin black-and-blue rapist line.
How is it a few good apples get out of the mostly bad apples? Shit, Spokane, every city USA.
We are all Trump-Clinton-Gore-Obama-Powers-Bezos-Starbucks-Walmart
Really, Fruitvale Station… watch it, the dramatized version of 22-year-old Oscar Grant’s last day on earth, those great men and women in blue in Oakland, BART cops, and this is Amerika, every city USA, racist to the core, white shit faced to the core, those elitists and many are chosen people, running the numbers as DAs, lawyers, psychologists, judges, all those high people in high office, running us into the ground with fine after penalty after levy after ticket after debt after tax after fee.
I watched the flick in a shady Rodeway Inn (all owned by one fat little family of economists and shekel hoarders, a mini-monopoly) and I thought it wouldn’t get to me, but oh, you know, some of us Marxists are not hold-your-hand-and-pray-and-hope-for-justice types, and, shit, what would a couple of righteous people with a couple of decent Molotovs do? That is the question, Shakespeare! Multiply your rank, go forth, and multiply those Molotovs.
I came into town to see my 19-year- old daughter, who had such a hard time with retrograde mean-as-Kardashians fellow students in junior high and high school. Another little microcosm into the world of education, USA central, one fashion-style-BS pop culture show and bubbling in the test class after another. This is the state of Amerika, teaching young people to hate their own kind, to try and compete for most unpopular kid in school. So, my daughter, with her own style, loving, real greenie and vegetarian and lover of social justice, well, she got stomped on … this, USA City, A Great Place to Raise a Child Bullshit Town, USA, Anywhere, just anywhere you might find these sick minds, these parents who look like Baby Huey, all dressed up in their fat butt sweatpants and tent-like jerseys selling some team or chocolate or beer or car or completely-Idiotic-Americana-Axiom-that would turn a Quaker into a Una Bomber.
I also was in town doing a story on volunteerism, and well, Spokane was hit with climate change winds of 500 year proportions, knocking down 200 year old ponderosa pines and Doug firs, a place without electricity for 10 days, like, 200,000 people without juice.
Hunger in Amerika — itching for some truth to go on top of humble pie
You know, Second Harvest is a non-profit that takes in food. Like, 26 million pounds of it a year, and distributes it in 26 counties. Apples by the 10,000 pounds, bread stacked five stories high, canned food, dairy about to go out of date, you name it. This outfit has been around since 1971 and now channels those food boxes to 250 agencies around the state and into Idaho. If someone in Ohio has a semi-load of peanut butter in 18 ounce jars, expired, Second Harvest will pony up the $3100 to ship it down to little Spokane.
Hunger. Unemployment here, in WA or Spokane or Anywhere USA, it’s 8 percent or higher, and then, we don’t count the millions who stopped looking for work, because, there really isn’t any work out there . . . really.
Anywhere, USA – cut off the water, send in the lead pipes, shoot to kill meter jumpers. Flint, Michigan, or Cleveland, Ohio, or Chandler, Arizona. Amerika.
State Football and Basketball programs pulling in millions from taxpayers, hundreds of millions in salaries, a multi-billion dollar industry, USA NCAA, and none of them makes a profit, all those rapists and fucked up fat cat coaches, all of it, a living tribute to paying people like me to teach students how to think and write and put thoughts together and to question stupidity/authority and how to love history, roots, and to reappropriate language and values, and to know thy self, and to never repeat history, well, we get paid, drum roll, please, about $14 an hour with our PhD’s and MA’s, but it’s only the girls and boys sports and all those weekends rooting that count.
A world of yelling-bombing-PCing into hell
Hell, before I headed out of town, I did my substitute gig – on call, with my phone ringing off the hook (wouldn’t that still be cool if my Princess Phone was still around and the hook was there and I could hear that little pink ring). Teaching 2nd, 3rd and 4th graders, and my dance card is open to math, science, language arts, art, music, health, PE, mechanics, you name it, K12, all of them, any class, any jurisdiction. These young people are amazing, that they can survive with their peanut, gluten, soy, dairy, corn, polyester, dye, air, cold, heat allergies. Boys and girls just a little askew, in their eyes, off kilter facial structures, something. Mostly taught by white middle class Christian folks, superstitious, and, well, not to be Bobby Riggs Against Billy Jean King sexist, mostly female. REALLY. These boys and girls only have women in their lives at school, and the rules they have to follow, all the military line ups, quiet times, all the stuff that has NOTHING to do with teaching and learning, but, alas, maybe all those hormones and all those food additives and all those things we feed them before they are conceived, well, maybe that’s the ticket to why the “administrators” many times treat the school/school kids like a scene from Doctor Moreau’s Island!
Hyper active, fidgety, ticks, and some really full of spectrumy behavior, many of them, truly, a testament to all the pollutants, plastics, hormone inhibitors and enhancers in their diets, all the vaccinations, all the shit in their hair, all of it, this antibacterial crazed junkie society, these kids weened on Hawaiian Punch, never breast fed, put in front of Teletubbies and Turtle Ninjas and Cops and one million murders-rapes-assaults-and-commercials-viewed-by-the-time-they-reach-18 consequences.
But, get this – when a Marxist teaches, we have someone who can build a tepee, a fire, fish with his belt, follow tracks, cast them, and then teach them to photograph the source; mentor children by someone who loves connecting art with history with carpentry with literature and music and math; a fellow who is about having kids be kids but with uncles there, and aunts, teaching basket weaving, teaching jam making, teaching how to stitch leather together, how to build a solar water heater, how to jump out of trees, and swing from bridges they made, and eat that apple pie they grew and cooked … these kids, if left to OUR Marxist Creative Collective devices would turn out pretty fucking cool, and just might be the ones to turn things around.
Oh, pipe dream. Kids know more about brands, about sales, about Netflix stars and B-movies and shit on shelves and things in plastic wrapped boxes, and, well, know each make and model of car from a distance of five miles, and, shoot, this is what the Chosen Few want, those marketing monsters, all the junk of obsolete thinking, all the stuff to get hooked on in the body or mind or at work. We are teaching kids to shop, to pay, to work for shit, or to shit on those who work their fingers to the bone.
Everyone has a story but no free-unbiased-interested Press to tell it
Story after story I collect as I go my way, driving, walking, stopping into coffee shops, talking to the motel desk person from Punjab, India, or the African-American from Wisconsin signing me out. We are a shit storm of a society, for sure.
This 68 year old running the motel, his Indian roots seemingly interesting, until he spouts off how George W. Bush was the best thing since chutney. And we know how dumb immigrants to this country can be, after 30 years here, making money, consumers, and, well, he was pretty interesting in his stupidity and spouting off all sorts of bizarre things, but, again, nurtured by the Elite Media, the Chosen Profession of a Chosen Few.
He was attacking Chinese goods for being cheaply made, and he just doesn’t get it, like millions – those products that are manufactured FOR USA companies FOR USA consumption WITH USA standards and details to the last millimeter, well, they are made to the Master’s Specifications, from materials, to glues to their durability or lack thereof. The Masters decide!
Ignorance and finding a new home in the USA, and then, grabbing at the Media Doublespeak and Triple-think and just on and on about what the FOX-news says, or CBS or whomever, it’s all bastardized, all fabricated, all just rotten to the core media mush.
Funny, being a writer and a teacher and a radical, talking to these guys and gals. Story after story faltered, never captured, always pushed away or never even considered, by this Amerika, short-sighted and full of celebrity cults and full of one-liners and just binary thinking, and, well, Amerika, if you have the three homes and the five cars and kids in college, well, you are leaders, the smartest, the most deserving folks on earth. Amerika, all full of Jello or Gelatin, all washed up before turning 10!
My African-American motel worker, 55 years old, saw it in my eyes, and talked of his shitty minimum wage job, no benefits, no bonuses, nothing, from the Punjabi owners and their kids, and, he is paying for child support, and knows dozens like him paying up the ass, tens of thousands garnered from paycheck or unemployment check or tax return.
Cause-effect-effect-cause — there is blood and pain in those ideas
He faulted African-American women, having four or five kids, saying they did not know the father, and, $700 a month in food stamps later, public assistance, and then, a few years later, when the kids are teens, bam, paternity test forced upon men, and, then child support, back support, and, for my gentleman at the Rodeway Inn, he said it’s killing black men, putting many out on the streets, inside cardboard boxes.
Complicated, uh, Amerika, where you work your life to the bone, to the last penny, fines-fees-charges-levies-penalties-quadruple-taxation. But, again, binary thinking, and, alas, Deadbeat Dads — Bad … Struggling Moms – Good.
But exactly how did we get there? Or here? Where an almost 70-year-old guy from India tells me he thinks Bush-baby is the best president he’s been living under, and that Trump is a Good Guy?
How’d we get here, at a place where Trump gets softballs or Nurf Balls tossed at him at these debates (sic), err, circuses, from multimillionaire press (sic) people and when Bernie the Beady Eye Sanders gets hardly any TV coverage? Almost NO coverage!
People get paid to spout off at COP21?
How did we get to a place where Bill “350.orgy” McKibben says COP-Out 21 was a success and that he is endorsing Bernie Sanders . . . .? As I said in a past post, NO More Bill McKibben or Naomi Klein or James Hansen, please.
Email from Sanders to my mailbox – Bill, says:
Last night’s Democratic debate was a disappointment for anyone who cares about the future of our planet. After an historic climate summit in Paris, it is unconscionable that the moderators of last night’s debate — as well as the Republican debate — didn’t ask a single question about climate change.
It’s too bad, because Bernie’s new climate plan is the kind of deep, powerful plan we really need. I hope that you’ll sign on to support it.
It gets us started fast — 40% reductions in carbon emissions by 2030 would put the country and the world on a new pathway.
Bernie’s plan would create ten million jobs — and make sure that they’re shared with those communities that usually get left out of our economic booms.
Oh, yes, making money from green energy, what a funny thing said on the way to the forum. This guy, Vermonter Bill, is a silly tenured professor, a guy with book contracts guaranteed, his jet plane schedule filled for 2016. He will never ever call for real change, the only change – retrenchment — and no more consumerism, rampant buying and consuming, and he never ever talks about all the ecosystems degraded or dead, all the near extinct animal and plant species, the End of Nature, really, as in wetlands, as in rivers, as in arable land, and clean water and subsistence farmers and cultures. Endless lives of toil, in the billions, to make those new green goods for those new green gods, Amerikans.
Oh well, Bernie … err, Hillary’s Lap Dog! What cabinet position is Mr. Sanders getting, I wonder? Here, Jill Stein, in Moscow, after Paris, declaring COP-out 21 a disaster:
As the summit progressed and its final outcome took shape, it became clear that COP21 has failed to take the action necessary to prevent global climate catastrophe.
The voluntary, unenforceable pledges being produced by COP21 are entirely insufficient to prevent climate crisis. Scientific analysis shows that these pledges will lead us to 3 degrees centigrade global temperature rise – and that will be catastrophic.
Some of the pledges being touted as historic agreements could actually result in increases in emission of greenhouse gasses. Plans are adopting deceptive measures of success, such as reductions in the amount of carbon emitted per unit of GDP. Countries are claiming to be making progress when they are not reducing their actual pollution by a single ounce. Mother Nature doesn’t respond to such games. It is the real quantity of pollution that determines whether we will destroy the climate or save it.
I also called on both the US and Russia to stop wasting enormous sums on weapons while critical human needs go unmet. For example, the US is now embarking on a program to spend $1 trillion updating its nuclear weaponry, while slashing programs to fight hunger, address homelessness, and provide economic security for our people.
You can read more of my remarks from the RT forum here.
At dinner the evening of the gala, I sat at the same table as Russian President Vladimir Putin, who gave a short talk after dinner. While he mostly focused on commemorating RT’s 10th anniversary, one thing he said jumped right out at me: “Something very unexpected… When I was listening to politicians from other countries, you know what I caught myself thinking? I agree with them on many issues.”
I should note that my panel was the only one with politicians from other countries – and I was the only active politician in the group!
Two-party Armageddon, no alternative candidates need apply
What does this all add up to, really? Jill has done a better job of defining and redefining herself, against Hillary and Bernie, but she still can’t suck it up and attack Israel like she attacks US policies, or Obama, or our War Nation. Very sad, Stein flagging like so many patriots in the USA with Jewish roots not able to align the sins of Amerika with the sins and crimes of Israel, though as a Jew, she is not in her mind capable of telling it like it is, that Israel is illegitimate and is in a process of 70 years of genocide … let along all the other crimes committed by a country with 300 or more nuclear warheads, some of which are pointed at the US of A. She calls on Russia and the USA, but what about the meddling of 1.8 percent of the global population? Absurd, really … these politicians and thinkers fear what, Assassination? Via Star of David? Here, from the Guardian:
The list of nations that secretly sold Israel the material and expertise to make nuclear warheads, or who turned a blind eye to its theft, include today’s staunchest campaigners against proliferation: the US, France, Germany, Britain and even Norway.
Meanwhile, Israeli agents charged with buying fissile material and state-of-the-art technology found their way into some of the most sensitive industrial establishments in the world. This daring and remarkably successful spy ring, known as Lakam, the Hebrew acronym for the innocuous-sounding Science Liaison Bureau, included such colourful figures as Arnon Milchan, a billionaire Hollywood producer behind such hits as Pretty Woman, LA Confidential and 12 Years a Slave, who finally admitted his role last month.
Oh, heck, the world according to the sold-out, distracted, celebrity-ized and dying media. And this is about Arabs and Muslims, now, Amerika, and Europe.
We will cheer at those Tokyo Olympics, all those glowing athletes, those Fukushima bones now brittle, evacuations postponed forever, that nuclear trade, energy, all that love for and from uranium now, what half the greenies call nuclear, gulp, renewable, green energy!?
Ahh, Anywhere Stupid USA Everywhere Capitalism Sucks Away Common Good and Common Sense.
Back to Portlandia, a messaging idea, no jobs, service economy or bust!
Headed back to Portlandia, and how those greenies are as dead from the neck up as ever — jobs I applied for with greenie outfits and labor organizing outfits, all of them, spineless and heartless, no acknowledgement of humanity, nothing, just the big digital dump in their heads, on their behinds. That’s what they are about these days — Search Engine Optimization and Facebooking and Messaging and Donor Hunting.
Eagles in my mirror, mountain goats all along the side of the road eating, Great Blue Herons and Black-Tailed Deer While Amerika Watches all those Star Wars prequels … and starves on ignorance and Cheetos and is already planning for the summer break — Amerika.