Let him be. Give him a cigarette if he comes to. So he’s dying of lung-cancer, so what? It’s a terminal case. Dose him with morphine whenever he asks for it, whether for analgesic or recreational satisfaction. I know, I know: “We’re gonna do something, something serious and huge, we’re gonna fix stuff.” No yer not. You’re just gonna talk about stuff on the Information-overloaded Dirt Road of Surveillance and Road Pizza.
After 94 years, on January 27, 2014, the world lost Pete Seeger. The world is the lesser for that loss. The accolades for this giant of folk songs and herald of all causes just, are pouring in from around the world. He is celebrated for regularly showing up at mass protests, for singing songs so transcendent (“This Land is Your Land,” “We Shall Overcome,” “Where Have All the Flowers Gone”) they are sung in many foreign languages all over the earth and for his mentoring and motivating of millions of people and children.
Nobody can think globally, anymore than one can seriously imagine one’s own death. And so when Fukushima exploded three years ago and as our skies and oceans became laced with toxicity, none of it seemed as real as the trivialities of my life.
Ariel Sharon was a serial mass murderer, engaged in massacres of unarmed victims in four countries, of all ages and conditions. He was a “hero” for hundreds of thousands of Israeli Jews who settled on land and in houses seized from Palestinians in the West Bank. He was praised by Western leaders at his funeral for his violent, lifelong opposition to Arab nationalist movements throughout the Middle East. That he was a fanatical upholder of Jewish supremacist policies and practices did not go unnoticed by wealthy Zionist donors in the US.
For eight years, Ariel Sharon, former Prime Minister of the State of Israel from 2000-2006, has been kept alive, though he has been in a comatose state, unable to talk or communicate naturally. The Times of Israel, the Huffington Post, Haaretz, and Britain’s Guardian have recognized his impending death.
Blood stabilized. Still damn low; but high enough for me to escape the disinfected halls of Dr. Creed.
The Bakery Girl and BEING cabbed me home. BEING’s Big Media gig ended. He got a job at “Video, Video” movie rentals, working Four PM-Midnight. Apartment days, we watched TV, snacked creme-filled cakes till BEING had to slog off to “Video, Video.” Work.
Early nurse’s aide collected blood. The patient to the right of me moaned all night begged mercy. Still dark. The usually pleasant semi-noise of pre-dawn amplified to unpleasant by the wheeling of stretchers and machines; insistent patients buzzing the nurses’ station. I was not clear enough to know exactly where I was in terms of life’s journey as I waited for the sun, but it sure as hell wasn’t Egypt.
In “The Mandela Barbie,” BBC journalist and investigative reporter Greg Palast’s eulogy of Nelson Mandela provides a rare breath of sanity in the media stampede to remake a legendary Marxist revolutionary into an icon of free market capitalism. According to Palast, “The ruling class creates commemorative dolls and statues of revolutionary leaders as a way to tell us their cause is won, so go home.”
At last Plantman was led to the vault of The Accused. The walls and door were three feet thick, but the vault was air-conditioned, lest The Accused succumb before The City could legally VOID him. The Official punched the key-code and the door yawned open, revealing a cot, a toilet, and a small table which held The Accused’s beloved African Violet, “Rose.”
