Retain the Tester amendment

BEFORE the United States of America became a great producer of modern goods and services, our ancestors were farmers. This growing nation of innovators and organizers was fed by a westwardly-migrating population of planters and tillers.

A billowing spirit of agrarian productivity grabbed our nascent nation by the scruff of the neck; it thrust our great-great-great grandfathers and grandmothers out upon fertile prairies and verdant valleys with rakes and a hoes and a teams of grunting oxen and mules. Even from the start, we were a mobile nation, yearning to be free, and aiming to busy ourselves with gainful agriculture.

Along the road, we organized, we mechanized, transportized our ways and means of producing food on a massive scale, over two centuries of intensely fruitful labor. We produced, with much toil and sweat, the vast system of food production and distribution that we have today.

We clueless Americans--each one of us--need to take a studious walk up and down the aisles of our nearby grocery stores. We need to consider the vast array of foodstuffs available at our fingertips. We must understand that all of this didn't just happen for us while we were adolescents sipping fizzy sodapop, looking for some kind of excitement while mommy and daddy were at work so we'd have dinner on the table.
Two centuries of developing industry and agricultural innovation made our supermarkets what they are today. This was no small feat. It turns upon a vast system of food distribution that is, guess what, slowly becoming, from a planetary standpoint, too expensive, and ultimately unsustainable.

In the decades ahead, we must get back, at least partially, to local food production; it's the only way out of our present breakdown. Agriculture requires land, water, and work. What are more and more folks needing these days that they don't have? Work. What else do those unemployed cadres need every day? Food.

Put the two concepts together, y'all. Now is the time for all good men and women to get off their twinkie obesities and find something to do besides the same-old-same-old whatever's available down at the state unemployment office. Read 'em and weep, America. Times are hard, and will not get better until we fundamentally change they way we do things. What can YOU do today to sustain life for yourself and those whom you love? Take another disappointing trip down to the employment office?

If we'll look around, we'll see that between the parking lots and driveways and big boxes we still have some earth beneath all that pavement. Maybe it's time we start using those spaces for something besides collecting rubbish and growing weeds. Even grass--what good is it compared to alfalfa?

Now we stand upon the precipice of an obsolete, collapsing monetary-industrial system. We will never again produce, on a massive scale, the wheels and widgets and whatnots that drove our pride and our paychecks empowering us to glide through those cornucopious A&P aisles.

Many of us have already figured this out, and are doing something about it. Have you been to a local farmer's market lately? There may be someone there with whom you can barter or trade for food so you won't have to be spending so much of your hard-earned $$ just to keep dinner on the table. Not only that, but what about your carbon footprint? Oh, but that's another compost pile of worms...

Anyway, here's what actually what got me going on this rant this snowy Saturday morning. When the US House of Representatives takes up the food safety bill that the Senate (SB 510) has passed, don't let our lawmakers strangle local farmers with burdensome regulations that are appropriate only for mega-producers. We don't need the feds interfering with grassroots commerce. Let the citizens of our townships and cities decide for themselves what locally-grown produce and food they are willing to take a chance on eating.

Don't let the Reps weed out the Tester amendment. If you don't know what that is, google it. It's time you found out what's going on with the food.

Rage against the Machine

Is it a function of getting old that one becomes increasingly alienated by the decline of morality and culture? Or is it that the age we live in especially decadent?

Recently it was brought to my attention that Katy Perry had some genius crew doing pr and songs and videos for her. So I, the pushing-60, stick in the mud, party-poopin dinosaur, checked out Katy's hot video online, Teenage wetDream, or something like that.

This dynamite little idol will definitely get your juices flowing; it's so much more potent than the playboy stuff we used to tear into when I was a teenager. So here's the pop diva herself looking like a million bucks although she's probably worth a billion to her handlers, riding in a hot convertible with her GQ model fako chauffer/boyfriendpimp and they go and get it on in a hotel room. He pulls her panties down and the guys in the next convertible and all the thousands of frothing voyeurs online are getting excited and then the damned thing ends with her being sad and lonely as she watches MrCool-squeeze taking out his rage on a punching bag.

And I'm wondering, what's he so mad about if he just had a piece of Katy Perry?
Then, a few clicks later, and along comes a bunch of glees doing the gay version video of the same song as if that were every post-adolescent boy's dream.

What a nightmare.

So once again I ask:
Is it a function of getting old that one becomes increasingly alienated by the decline of morality and culture? Or is it that the age we live in is especially decadent?
Is this the liberty (libertine) American culture that we're exporting with our gay troops a la lady gaga to the Muslim countries we occupy? It's no wonder they're terrorizing the hell out of us.

Maybe burqas are better than the in-your-face high-tech hurly-burly burlesque that buries us with bullshit bikini bimbos and their clueless jigolo jerks.

Have you eaten your unemployment check yet?

BEFORE the United States of America became a great producer of modern goods and services, our ancestors were farmers. This growing nation of innovators and organizers was fed by a westwardly-migrating population of planters and tillers.

A billowing spirit of agrarian productivity grabbed our nascent nation by the scruff of the neck; it thrust our great-great-great grandfathers and grandmothers out upon fertile prairies and verdant valleys with rakes and a hoes and a teams of grunting oxen and mules. Even from the start, we were a mobile nation, yearning to be free, and aiming to busy ourselves with gainful agriculture.

Along the road, we organized, we mechanized, transportized our ways and means of producing food on a massive scale, over two centuries of intensely fruitful labor. We produced, with much toil and sweat, the vast system of food production and distribution that we have today.

We clueless Americans--each one of us--need to take a studious walk up and down the aisles of our nearby grocery stores. We need to consider the vast array of foodstuffs available at our fingertips. We must understand that all of this didn't just happen for us while we were adolescents sipping fizzy sodapop, looking for some kind of excitement while mommy and daddy were at work so we'd have dinner on the table.
Two centuries of developing industry and agricultural innovation made our supermarkets what they are today. This was no small feat. It turns upon a vast system of food distribution that is, guess what, slowly becoming, from a planetary standpoint, too expensive, and ultimately unsustainable.

In the decades ahead, we must get back, at least partially, to local food production; it's the only way out of our present breakdown. Agriculture requires land, water, and work. What are more and more folks needing these days that they don't have? Work. What else do those unemployed cadres need every day? Food.

Put the two concepts together, y'all. Now is the time for all good men and women to get off their twinkie obesities and find something to do besides the same-old-same-old whatever's available down at the state unemployment office. Read 'em and weep, America. Times are hard, and will not get better until we fundamentally change they way we do things. What can YOU do today to sustain life for yourself and those whom you love? Take another disappointing trip down to the employment office?

If we'll look around, we'll see that between the parking lots and driveways and big boxes we still have some earth beneath all that pavement. Maybe it's time we start using those spaces for something besides collecting rubbish and growing weeds. Even grass--what good is it compared to alfalfa?

Now we stand upon the precipice of an obsolete, collapsing monetary-industrial system. We will never again produce, on a massive scale, the wheels and widgets and whatnots that drove our pride and our paychecks empowering us to glide through those cornucopious A&P aisles.

Many of us have already figured this out, and are doing something about it. Have you been to a local farmer's market lately? There may be someone there with whom you can barter or trade for food so you won't have to be spending so much of your hard-earned $$ just to keep dinner on the table. Not only that, but what about your carbon footprint? Oh, but that's another compost pile of worms...

Anyway, here's what actually what got me going on this rant this snowy Saturday morning. When the US House of Representatives takes up the food safety bill that the Senate (SB 510) has passed, don't let our lawmakers strangle local farmers with burdensome regulations that are appropriate only for mega-producers. We don't need the feds interfering with grassroots commerce. Let the citizens of our townships and cities decide for themselves what locally-grown produce and food they are willing to take a chance on eating.

Don't let the Reps weed out the Tester amendment. If you don't know what that is, google it. It's time you found out what's going on with the food.

Oyl and Dreidel

Zechariah described this vision, or event, about 2500 years ago:
"
Then the angel who was speaking with me returned and roused me, as a man who is awakened from sleep.
He said to me, 'What do you see?' And I said, 'I see, and behold, a lampstand all of gold with its bowl on the top of it, and its seven lamps on it with seven spouts belonging to each of the lamps which are on top of it. Also, two olive trees by it, one on the right side of the bowl and the other on its left side.'
Then I said to the angel who was speaking with me saying, 'What are these, my lord?'
So the angel who was speaking with me answered and said to me, 'Do you not know what these are?' And I said, 'No, my lord.'
Then he said to me, 'This is the word of the Lord to Zerubbabel saying, 'Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit,' says the Lord of hosts.

'What are you, O great mountain? Before Zerubbabel you will become a plain; and he will bring forth the top stone with shouts of "Grace, grace to it!'"

Also the word of the Lord came to me, saying, 'The hands of Zerubbabel have laid the foundation of this house, and his hands will finish it. Then you will know that the Lord of hosts has sent me to you.'
'For who has despised the day of small things? But these seven will be glad when they see the plumb line in the hand of Zerubbabel. These are the eyes of Lord which range to and fro throughout the earth.'

Then I said to him, 'What are these two olive trees on the right of the lampstand and on the left?'
And I answered the second time and said to him, 'What are the two olive branches which are beside the two golden pipes, which empty the golden oil from themselves?'
So he answered me, saying, 'Do you not know what these are?' And I said, 'No, my lord.'
Then he said, 'These are the two anointed ones who are standing by the Lord of the whole earth.'
"

Can't you hear Jerusalem moan?

The people of Israel have cultivated a heritage of literacy for thousands of years; it's one reason they are, as an ethnic group, so comfortable and proficient with the communicative arts. Hebrews have been talking, reading, and writing for a long time. Beginning with Moses, Solomon, and other biblical documentarians, their meticulous oral and written histories constructed a potent cultural tradition that has matured like a fine vintage over time. The Jewish religion has also spun off two other major peoples-of-the-book--Christianity and Islam.
Hey, like it or not, Moshe, it's what happened. Read 'em an weep. We're all riders on this bumpy monotheistic bus.

The Torah/Bible documents how that deep heritage manifested as an ancient kingdom. But Israel was, as kingdoms go, relatively short-lived. Right off the bat, after three kings, the country split, and it never regained that golden age magnificence of Solomon's forty-year flash in the pan. Israel and Judah hobbled along for a few centuries until the Greeks humiliated them and the Romans subjugated them.
In 70 AD the army of the Roman empire dispersed Jewish nationalism to the four winds. For nineteen centuries after that forced diaspora, faithuful Jewish passover observers spoke of celebrating their feasts "next year in Jerusalem."

Jewish identity went under-canopy, and into a kind of fervently prolific survival mode. Beneath diverse banners of other empires and nations, Jewish culture managed to proliferate and mature in a richly productive way, even without the benefit of native soil and eretz. In spite of the odds stacked against them, Jewish people even managed to prosper beneath the adverse radar of alien hegemonies. There's a lot to be said, I tell ya, for having a strong tradition of literacy, and a God to inspire it.

Along the way, though, some other peoples got jealous of the inexplicably improbable Jewish well-being. Adolf Hitler and his band of Nazi thugs scapegoated the Jews in a fiercely destructive milatarism; but it backfired on them, and it was the feuhrer's lying face that was found lieing in the ashes of a formerly noble German heartland in 1945.

Then, lo and behold, miracle of miracles, it came to pass that, in its darkest hour, Jewish culture, in its severally metamorphosed forms--from the Hassidic to the Socialistic--resurfaced as a nation-state.
We know they made a lot of people mad in that nascent process, most notably the Palestinians, but that was an old argument. It wasn't any walk in the park, you know, when the Jews and Philistines were going at it for the same real estate way back in times of old. Yeah, yeah, aw go on, tell me about it. Some things never change.

But here's where the contemporary shi'ite hits the fan. That ancient Jewish tradition is based, let's face it, on religion and racial identity. It dropped back into the modern world like a square peg from a round-hole universe. In today's terms, it's politically incorrect. I mean, think about it--is anybody even allowed any more to found a society based on race and religion? Democracy, equality, and multicultural tolerance is the going thing, the world-approved plan, these days.

When extremist Jewish groups insist on forcing their settlements upon a wannabe Palestinian west-bank state, and when an Israeli government slowly but surely corners a whole group of indiginous people into second-class citizenship, the world brands the Israelis as racist, religious bigots. The people of Israel are going to have to decide if they want to remain a cultural entity that has successfully navigated through perilous environs for thousands of years--or are they going to actually take a chance on this nation-state democracy thing?


It's a very risky proposition, because the Palestinians will most likely, over time, outnumber the Jews in Israel and, given half a democratic chance, vote them out of power. And the Israelis know this. So political correctness is ultimately a losing strategy, and democracy will not fly in east and west Jerusalem. You might as well cast the notions of equality and brotherhood out to Gahenna.

I think they should just go back to the God thing. That's what their stubborn cousins, the Muslims, are doing. Mosaic Law and Shari'a will promulgate each other to death, until the grace of God doth move upon their holy blood-stained mountain.
Disclosure: My God is a Jewish carpenter.

Robby's dream

From chapter 25 of Glass Chimera:

" Robby had a dream.

It was the hammer and sickle thing. Freedom verses Slavery: Embryos crying out for personhood, but being herded instead into chimeric concentration camps under glass, their chromatic hammers swinging with molecular blacksmithery, forging the plasmidic implements of a bogus new world.

Eggs of Women crying out for fertility and progeny, but instead being scythed into Auschwitzian abyss.

And he heard their singing:

Hmphh .. . Ah .. .Hmphh .. . Ah .. .

That’s the sound of the men working on the chain

gang.

That’s the sound of the men working on the chain

gang.

And he knew the grunts of thousands of men a-groanin’; he heard the songs of millions of women a-moanin’, giving birth. He heard the cries of their wounds, the pangs of their wombs. Slaves, they were. He heard them singing. Don’t ya hear Jerusalem moan? Don’t ya hear Jerusalem moan? No, it weren’t all voluntary. No, Virginia, it weren’t all voluntary. Hmphh .. . Ah .. . Hmphh .. . Ah .. . Pull that barge. Tote that bale. He saw the burlap cotton sacks dragged upon the ground. Hmphh .. . Ah .. . Hmphh .. . Ah .. . He heard Moses demanding of the pharaoh, Let my people go. He heard Moses demanding of the pharaoh, Let my people go. He heard America singing, follow the drinking gourd, follow the drinking gourd.

He saw the strong brown arm of Washington Jones pull his great grandfather from the flood that swirled about a faltering riverboat. He felt the loss of footing as the boat careened upon raging waters, felt the lurch as the boat hit the mama oak and came to a sloshing, creaking crashing halt.

He saw, beyond the torrential horizon, the sod ripped from prairies by oxen teams, and he heard their bellowing, the cracking of the whips as Herculean animals strained and primordial prairie grasses became torn, the black earth turning up its wormy, smarmy loam to be kissed by the sun and drenched by the spring rains, the winter snows, the corn’s roots, the wheat’s shoots. He heard America singing, strains of music born of the resolve of freedmen, homesteaders, pioneers, farmers, Scandinavians, Scotch, Irish, African, indentured to the soil, and to their hopes for promised land.

Oklahoma! He heard Oklahoma, thousands of homesteaders spread in expectation across the dawning prairie horizon, buckboard wagons, horses, mules in anticipation of that great sounding signal from Uncle Sam, brought forth beneath the billowing skirts of fertile farming women, freckle-faced children in the shaded wagons, oxen in the sun, horses on the run.

Freedom? Yes, some were free, but ‘t’weren’t all that sweat dripping into from free brows, Virginia. Much of it had come slitherin’ in wet slavery drops of toil and blood and tears.

He heard low, slow, insidious munching of the dreaded boll weevil, chomping into oblivion acres upon millions of acres of lily-white wads of forced servitude.

He heard, like God, innocent blood crying out from the ground.

He heard the clanking of chains, the clashing of cultures and civilizations. Can you hear the Cherokee moan? Can you hear the Chickasaw moan?. He felt the tearing of their platted cords, the stomping of their ancestral hordes. It was a mournful cry heard round the world.

He heard the low, slow voice of Willie’s embryonic call, Freedom!

He heard the high, spry response of Bo’s ironic refrain, Freedom! blasting forth in totipotent nuclear song. The strains were there, ringing in his dream, clear as a splitting bell, bringing forth the clarion knell. He knew he heard the song; then it was gone.

"

Reggie, king of the Seattle saw

Daughter Katie was out in Seattle a few days ago, prowling around with her video camera. I was tagging along. We tapped into the mother lode of our world's most unique people when we met Reggie, king of the Seattle Saw.

Many years ago when the seasoned, dobro-playin' blues man first slid into his niche as a saw-singer, he had not yet attained the level of virtuosity that he has today. But in those early days he was excited about the saw and its unusual musical possibilities, so he got out on the street playing one anyway. He just couldn't wait. I know that feeling. I'm a little like Reggie in that regard--throwing my novels out at the marketplace kinda half-baked. I like his approach, anyway...

Reggie Miles has mastered the musical saw since those first days of inspired learning. You can see and hear for yourself the exquisite tenderness with which he draws the bow across his blade.

Two days ago, November 22, sitting in a quiet spot at Pike's Place Market, Reggie told us a few tales about his musical adventures. Back in those early days of learning the instrument, when he was playing on the street and still making a lot of "mistakes," he found himself lol whenever he'd hit a .wrong note. As it turned out, his good natured, roll-with-the-crosscuts demeanor prompted some listeners to laugh with him. He said they often had a "laughfest."

What a great attitude about life. We need more folks like him in America if we're gon' turn this ole wreck around.
"Saw ya later," said Reggie as we parted ways after a few fascinating hours with this unique artist of the springy steel.

Carey Rowland, author of Glass half-Full