The Elusive Carrot

 During these troubled times, Concoda's ongoing synopses of contemporary economic matters makes more sense to me than most others.

https://concoda.substack.com/p/is-this-ever-going-to-end

Concoda's most recent blog included a few profound analyses that prompted my responses. A little while later, I got the wild idea to transform my comments into a blog entry of my own, which is herein submitted to you, the reader, to consider and to ponder. 

In other important matters . . . happy holidays. Don't forget get to go out and spend as much money as you can because we now live and breathe and have our working in a Consumption economy. That means the more $$$$ we turn loose, the more #### float around to keep everybody fat and happy. 

This economy is different from the old 18th/19th/20th century version, which was an arrangement of agricultural/industrial Production-based progress that geometrically generated self-perpetuating wealth creation.

Whereas, nowadays we only have, mostly, people consuming and consuming and presuming that what goes around comes around . . . like, as Paul sang it many years ago, the fool on the hill.

Meanwhile, this fool, yours truly, was found to have posted these comments on the world wide whoopdee-doo web:

1. Re: “Until, among other things, we revive America’s once-mighty manufacturing arm . . .”

Good luck with that.

2. Re: “The Fed’s commitment to “stable prices” has become a euphemism for a rising S&P500, turning investors into donkeys eager to reach the next carrot on a stick. . .”

The good news there is: donkeys and elephants are working together on this project, unlike their other agenda items.

3. Re: the detachment of empathy, and “. . . our financial futures rely on one stock market index mimicking an Evel Knievel stunt-jump.”

Recall that Evel was jumping over the Snake River, named after Evil’s great great great great snake grandfather, who originated the idea that empathy is the mother of contention, if you happen to be capitalist instead of progressive, which gets back to the conundrum of those elephants and donkeys chasing the same carrot while the plebes catch buzz on junkfood tictoc twitter netflix metastasized gaming the system leisure instead of working together to make the world safe for bureaucracy, while the barons of wal-world and walstreet issue official statements to the the effect of let ‘em eat cake.

Glass half-Full

The Kyle Takeaway

You play with AR; you will get burned!

Every photo I saw of Kyle Rittenhouse during his trial—every photo— revealed a kid who was in over his head, a kid who was clueless about the dangerous fray he was walking into when he sauntered out, that fateful night in Wisconsin, looking for a fight.

That assault weapon in Kyle’s hand was no child’s toy. Kyle learned that lethal truth the hard way. He came damned near to a prison sentence. You could see it on his face—just how close he was to a prison sentence, or worse.

Deer in the headlights.

But then a jury delivered him. The look on Kyle’s face revealed: a kid in over his head.

You play with AR: you will get burned.

Kyle was in over his head when he left his home on that fateful night with a lethal assault weapon. 

Kyle was in over his head when his first victim’s death provoked a  a mad reaction from people who were nearby.

Kyle was in over his head when his second victim’s death provoked more mad reaction from people who were nearby.

Kyle was in over his head when his third victim’s injury provoked more mad reaction from people who were nearby.

Kyle Rittenhouse was in over his head when he found himself to be a national spectacle as defendant in a court of law. 

Kyle Rittenhouse was in over his head when he was acquitted of killing three human beings, even though he knew he had killed them.

And gotten away with it.

Kyle Rittenhouse will still be in over his head when he becomes a tool of the rising fascists who are presently conspiring to take over the republican party and ultimately to take over this country. 

Reminds me of a verse from the prophet Daniel (11:38): "(they) will honor, instead, the god of forces.  

By Force . . . the force of bullies, bullets, thugs, clueless pawns with lethal weapons in their hands . . . our republic will be shaken to its core until the foundations of this republic crumble. . .unless we can turn the trend of treachery around.

Kyle’s victims in Kenosha were as deer in the headlights.

Now he is the deer in headlights—but not the headlights of hunters spotlighting wild game. 

The lights on Kyle now are the lights of a hyped-up media frenzy, which amps up, even more intensely, demanding an explanation of what the hell is happening in this country, this country where two activists who thought they would be heroically stopping an “active shooter”— Rosenbaum and Huber became, instead, the fatal victims of a clueless kid who wandered into a firestorm of political warfare with an assault weapon, the lethality of which he had no comprehension. He probably saw himself a vigilante in a Kenosha video game. But Kyle had to learn the hard way:

You play with fire; you will get burned!

Kyle Rittenhouse may grow up soon. He may mature beyond his deer-in-the-headlights cluelessness.

 Maybe Kyle will find deliverance, having been through the fire. Maybe he will rise above the depths of depravity that conspire to entrap him in their fascist fanaticism.

Maybe he will no longer be in over his head; maybe Kyle will see the light of confession and repentance.

Maybe Kyle will see the light, take the middle ground, seeing both sides of this tragic divide that tears our nation apart.

That’s what I saw in ( the photo of) Kyle’s face at the moment of the verdict— a kid who knew that he had received mercy when he knew he should have gotten severe judgement.

May he grow in peace.

Glass half-Full 

Jim Crow Religion 1963

 In the year 1963. From chapter 4, King of Soul:

 This Sunday morning, Aerlie and her friends visited the other church, the big one with the tall steeple and rich brick exterior in the middle of downtown Jackson.

        People can maybe change their minds about a thing or two but there is a certain impediment amongst the monumental edifices of history; it gets built up as an obstruction to justice and mercy and thereby renders the processes of righteous change quite difficult.

        Institutions crop up in society like trees, and once they get rooted in the wild and they grow up to be immovable trunks, these botanous growths can be quite a stupendous presence that hinders the seedlings down on the forest floor. Men cut them down in order to make best use, but in some cases institutions can be pruned instead of cut down and thereby by n by suit the purposes of men like for instance the ornamental trees in the town square, the magnolias, the azaleas, camellias. You can prune them and they’ll do better, produce more loverly flowers and generally garnish the surroundings with myriads of beauty and provide nesting opportunities for the bluebirds of happiness.

         In the South, one institution that needed to be dealt with—and it was, so to speak, at the town square—was  the Church, because down here in Dixie, it’s a big deal.

         So this Sunday morning, just a few days after the killing of Medgar Evers, Aerlie Mufroe and her NAACP friends timidly traipsed  up  high stone steps and entered into the high holy place of the white folks’ worship.

          What they found out was: Bad idea.

          But wait a minute. As there’s a silver lining around a cloud every now and then, they discovered something special about the institution of Church in southern society, and as even a blind squirrel finds an acorn every now and then, so they were able to find one good nut amongst the hard-shelled congregants of First Baptist Church, and it happened this way:

         This little old lady spoke to the usher. She said, “Please let them in, Mr. Calloway. We’ll sit with them.”

         To which Mr. Calloway replied, “Mrs. Dixon, the church has decided what is to be done. A resolution has been passed, and we are to abide by it.”

         The impediment was, as we were saying before, the institution thing. Sometimes they have to be pruned in order to thrive better. Toward that end, Mrs. Dixon replied to Mr. Calloway, “Who are we to decide such a thing? This is a house of God, and God is to make all of the decisions. He is the judge of us all.”

        In other words, this wasn’t about what men think they have to do. This wasn’t about the committee’s resolution. This wasn’t about President Kennedy trying to convince Gov. Wallace of anything, or about Congress legislating some heavyhanded proclamations upon Ross Barnett, the Governor of Mississippi. It wasn’t about all that Federal Guvmint intrusion and contusion.

         This is about God and men, and women too. Here were two intrepid Christian women whispering in the back of the church, one white and one black, and they were trying to convince poor Mr. Galloway to just let the tide of history come gushing through the main entrance of First Baptist, but he wasn’t going to do it because he was just, as Cousin Bob had sung, just a pawn in the game.

          So Aerlie, even as determined as she was to make a dent in the way things were, surveyed the scene. She took stock of the situation, sized everything up, made a quick assessment of the situation, the plusses and the minuses, the risks and the benefits, and so she decided that this thing wasn’t going to happen without a big counter-productive  blowup because Mr. Calloway and the other ushers threatened to call the police if Aerlie and her friends didn’t leave.

          Even though they were Christians. On both sides they were.

         “We appreciate very much what you’ve done,” said Aerlie to Mrs. Dixon, and the black folks walked away from the white church.

          Not to be outdone, someone suggested they try another church. So they did. A few blocks away, they visited the Episcopalians.

         Two ushers were standing in the back of the church when Aerlie and her friends entered. Uh-oh, here we go.

         But lo and behold and I say unto thee, the usher looked at Aerlie and he asked, “May we help you?”

         “Yes,” said the young college student. “We would like to worship with you today.”

        ““Will you sign the guest list, please, and we will show you to your seats.”

         So they sat down; the church service went without a hitch. When it was over, the minister invited them to visit again.

        That’s one small step for woman, one giant leap for man’s religion.

Glass half-Full

Jews Pass the Mantle of Praise

 In July 1944, Allied troops discovered a Nazi extermination camp at Maidanek, Poland, where thousands of Jewish people had been gassed to death with zyklon-B gas.

Years later, Alexander Werth reported on the Nazi atrocities that were uncovered there. His description of the gruesome scene was  published in John Carey’s Eyewitness to History (Harvard University Press, Cambridge University, 1988)

Werth’s eyewitness account included this description of the nazis' systematic looting of the Jewish people:

“. . . the victims’ luggage and the women’s clothes were sorted out, before they were sent to the central Lublin warehouse, and then on to Germany.

    “ At the other end of the camp, there were enormous mounds of white ashes; but as you looked closer, you found that they were not perfect ashes: for they had among them masses of small human bones: collar bones, finger bones, and bits of skulls, and even a small femur, which can only have been that of a child.”

Years later, after the establishment of Eretz Israel, the descendants of surviving Jews erected a memorial to these—and all—Holocaust victims. At the entrance to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem stands this memorial:

The words carved therein are from the biblical book, Ezekiel, chapter 37:

“ I will put my breath within you and you will come to life . . .”

Meanwhile, back at the ranch , about an hour’s drive from the Maidanek bones site in Poland, a large congregation of celebratory Polish Christians are motivated by the Yahweh-inspired contribution of the Jewish people, so they borrow the ancient, divinely-inspired  118th psalm, to praise and celebrate El Shaddai, who anoints their born again spirit of biblical praise with Holy Spirit joy,  resurrected in joyous declaration : 

     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWPPedsKMUc

Glass half-Full

A Very Special Veteran

On this Veterans's Day 2021, I am recalling a very special man who performed a very special military duty in Europe, 1944, before returning to his home in Jackson, Mississippi:

Medgar Evers.

Here's a scene from 1960's Mississippi, from chapter 5 of my 2014 novel, King of Soul:

  If ghosts could speak, they would probably confirm what Uncle Cannon was saying. As he sat on the lowered gate of his black Ford pickup truck, with one leg on the ground and the other swinging beneath the tailgate, the old Mississippian spoke some of his thoughts about the state of affairs in the state of Mississippi. His friend, Geehaw Kent stood listening.

      “The murder of Medgar Evers was a tragedy: he was a young man,” Cannon said. “He had slogged his way across Europe, along with thousands of other Allied soldiers, to arrive triumphantly in Germany and then knock the hell out of the Nazi war machine. So he contributed to that great collective effort through which we won the big war. But then he came back to Mississippi and was told—what the hell—to  go to the back of the bus.”

       “So, at the end of his homeward journey, Medgar entered, almost involuntarily, into another great war, but it was a war of a different kind. It was an old war that had been started by old men. That is to say: men who we think of as old because they had lived and died in the prior era, and yet some of them were still living—men who, in days past, had retained, even cultivated, the prejudices and the limitations of their ancestors. . .” Uncle Cannon blinked both his eyes at the same time—it was a tic he had.

       A flock of crows were making a ruckus in the nearby hickory, but he paid them no mind. An old meat bone that had, somewhere along the line, found its way into the bed of his pickup—he picked it up and tossed it away. His dappled hound dog promptly sprang to retrieve it. “Bandit!” he called to his dog, for no particular reason except to spur him on. Bandit was obsessive about the bone, as if his life depended on it. At the dog’s sudden bolt, a few of the crows lit out from their tree.

       Uncle Cannon continued, “. . . men who had inflicted—mostly from ignorance, but not entirely—those cultural cruelties of the institutions they were born into, They were men and women whose cultural prejudices propelled them into condoning atrocities that they themselves had not even bothered to analyze, or reconsider in any way. Restrooms and water fountains for coloreds, separate schools, restaurants—all that societal baggage they just took for granted, as if that’s the way it had always been in this world. Their great-great grandfathers had brought the Negras to America in slave ships. It was a helluva  evil thing to do, but that’s what was happening at that time; there were atrocities just as bad, among the Africans themselves, going on over in Africa, that enabled the slavetraders to do what they did. That’s what started all this trouble we got now.  It goes way back; and so, consequently it will take a long time to rectify. You don’t undo centuries of sin in a year or two, or a federal judge’s court order or two. ”

P.S. I was a child growing up in Jackson, Mississippi in the 1950's, when Medgar Evers returned to his home after serving the citizens of our nation.

In 1963, he was shot dead in his own front yard by a white supremacist who was hiding behind a bush across the street.

On this Veterans Day, let us remember that millions of our men and women have fought, and many have died for this nation, and for our principle of liberty, that all men and women can be, quoting Dr. MLKing, "free at last, free at last; thank God Almighty we are free at last!"

King of Soul 

Don't Ever Give Up

1938. A Brit politician tosses a hunk of Bohemian meat at the nazi Beast in a vain attempt to satisfy the beast’s blood craving.

The sacrifice doesn’t work.

1939. The Beast and his thug minions make their move on Czechoslovakia. World War II begins. 

People in central Europe get sucked in, nation by nation, to the Hell of War. 

Even so, in the midst of extreme pain and tribulation, life goes on for most folks in the affected area, insofar as it is possible and necessary. People work; they trudge on, raise children, try to make it all work from day to day, even though shit happens and the world implodes around us and the bombs explode around them, death takes over in some places, while . . .

Life goes on. People live, people love, people strive to live from day to day, while the world falls apart around them.

1939. A two-year-old girl toddles around in her parents’ apartment in Prague, Czechoslovakia, while Europe enters its period of third reich destruction and extreme sacrilege.

1989. In the long-standing history of Czech demands for liberty, Vaclav Havel and other dissidents assembled in Wenceslaus Square to demand liberation from oppressive Soviet domination.

 2012. The 2-year-old girl who had been toddling on her parents’ floor in Prague while the Czech way of life was being blown to smithereens in 1939—that child, having grown up, served her adopted country, USA, as Secretary of State and Ambassador to the United Nations . . .

That girl, now a mature woman, published a book about her life, a life that included memories of her home in Prague, a great city in the Czech nation that had, in days past, defeated—with a little help from me friends— the damn nazis in ’45 and then later, also, the ejection of the soviet communists during the Velvet Revolution of ’89 when nary a shot was fired. . . when Vaclav Havel and a million other brave Czechs shook off the bondage of totalitarian regimes with a bloodless, “Velvet” revolution. 

So you see, the Czechs, along with the Slovaks, the Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, even the Ukrainians and Byelorussians, the Moldovans, Greeks, Bulgarians, Romanians, Macedonians,  Albanians, Yugoslavians, Bosnians, Croatians, Serbians, Hungarians, Slovenians, Italians, Swiss, the Spanish, not to mention the French and British, the Belgians and Dutch,. . .and of course the very Germans themselves and the Austrians, with a little help from me friends the Stars & Stripes . . .

they kicked the nazis back into their holes and the soviets back into Russia. 

And after all that, when Madeline Albright—the previously-mentioned 2-year-old of 1939 Prague— published her 2012 memoir, Prague Winter, which gives an account of all those world-shaking events, . . .

  Madeline concluded her book with these words of encouragement: 

“I believe we can recognize truth when we see it, just not at first . . . and not without ever relenting in our efforts to learn more. This is because . . . the good we seek, and the good that we hope for, comes not as some final reward but as the hidden companion to our quest. It is not what we find, but the reason we cannot stop looking and striving, that tells us why we are here.”

Amen, sister!

Glass half-Full 

Time for SpotiTuny

'T’was many and many ole moons ago

in Nashville and Asheville studio

the Lord inspired a song or few

that we now want to turn you on to: 

There’s my anthem of the Underground,

a Railroad tune of locomoting sound;

and an ode to our fragile Deep Green earth,

revealing some concern but not much mirth.

Then comes a ringing strings Sunshine fling

with as much brilliance as I could busily wring.

But then my message wails with tragic demise

as seen through Sitting Bull’s Eyes.

Then there’s a hike to that ole Mountaintop Pisgah peak

with Moses, Dr. MLKing on an inspiration streak.

Lastly comes a jangly guitar rendition

as we strive to Follow the Way expedition. 

You can hear these tunes now, or listen if you dare to;

just click the Spotify or iTunes link if you care to.

 

     https://music.apple.com/gb/album/1593898714?app=itunes

       https://open.spotify.com/album/3LUD5LhKEYaGyoiInHzVo1

Glass half-Full

Fox and Rabbit Tales

In this snippet from historical fiction, we find Uncle Cannon and his buddies conducting their gab session in the Friday night card game. The story is found in King of Soul, chapter 7. The year is 1967.

Listen in:

 “I wonder how many American soldiers it will take to make it happen?” asked Willie.

       “Time will tell,” Uncle Cannon agreed.  But this whole dilemma reminds me of the story that Uncle Remus told about the B’rer Rabbit and the Tar-baby.  B’rer Fox was trying to catch B’rer Rabbit, so he fixed up a contraption called a Tar-baby, and he put it out on the road where he knew B’rer Rabbit would soon be passing by.

        “By n’ by, B’rer Rabbit come a-prancin’, just like B’rer Fox knew he would be.  When B’rer Rabbit saw Tar-baby, he greeted the critter. But Tar-baby didn’t say nothin’.”

       B’rer Fox, he lay low.

       “B’rer Rabbit, after several efforts to engage Tar-baby but without any success, got mad. He thought he’d teach Tar-baby a thing or two, so he reared back and punched him bad. But of course, Tar-baby persisted in his mutativity, and B’re Rabbit just got madder and madder. And the madder he got, the more he got stuck on Tar-baby, hopelessly unable to free himself.

       “Did the fox eat the rabbit?” asked Geehaw Kent.

       “That’s as far as the story goes,” replied Uncle Cannon.

Smoke