IT'S WORTH A TRY

Check out The Brad Blog for more info. What the hell ...

Brief blog note: I'll return to regular posting -- or whatever passes for such a thing -- one of these days. It's just too fucking hot right now.

GROOVING WITH KRISHNAMURTI

Frequently overwhelmed by the unbearable pressures of living in this Neo-Con controlled asylum of the damned, I’ll sometimes reach desperately for some sort of intellectual anesthetic -- that is, other than of the distilled and/or brewed varieties -- a literary diversion, if you will. Anything that re-balances my sensiblities, something that’s both inspiring and perspective-building. Well, this week I dug up a 30-year-old paperback of writings by J. Krishnamurti, entitled Commentaries on Living. With a title like that, it must have something to say. Just what that is, I haven’t yet figured out completely … anyway, here's a brief sample:

Have you noticed, in newspapers and magazines, the amount of space given to politics, to the sayings of politicians and their activities? Of course, other news is given, but political news predominates; the economic and political life has become all-important. The outward circumstances -- comfort, money, position and power --seem to dominate and shape our existence. The external show -- the title, the garb, the salute, the flag -- has become increasingly significant, and the total process of life has been forgotten or deliberately set aside. It is so much easier to throw oneself into social and political activity than to understand life as a whole; to be associated with any organized thought, with political or religious activity, offers a respectable escape from the pettiness and drudgery of everyday life. With a small heart you can talk of big things and of the popular leaders; you can hide your shallowness with the easy phrases of world affairs; your restless mind can happily and with popular encouragement settle down to propagate the ideology of a new or of an old religion.

Politics is the reconciliation of effects; and as most of us are concerned with effects, the external has assumed dominant significance. By manipulating effects we hope to bring about order and peace; but, unfortunately, it is not as simple as all that. Life is a total process, the inner as well as the outer; the outer definitely affects the inner, but the inner invariably overcomes the outer. What you are, you bring about outwardly. The outer and the inner cannot be separated and kept in watertight compartments, for they are constantly interacting upon each other; but the inner craving, the hidden pursuits and motives, are always more powerful. Life is not dependent upon political or economic activity; life is not a mere outward show, any more than a tree is the leaf or the branch. Life is a total process whose beauty is to be discovered only in its integration. This integration does not take place on the superficial level of political and economic reconciliations; it is to be found beyond causes and effects.

Because we play with causes and effects and never go beyond them, except verbally, our lives are empty, without much significance. It is for this reason that we have become slaves to political excitement and to religious sentimentalism. There is hope only in the integration of the several processes of which we are made up. This integration does not come into being through any ideology, or through following any particular authority, religious or political; it comes into being only through extensive and deep awareness. This awareness must go into the deeper layers of consciousness and not be content with surface responses.

-- J. Krishnamurti, Commentaries on Living

BRIEF DISPATCH FROM HEE-HAW NATION

What's that song they used to sing on "Hee-Haw"? Doom, despair, and agony on me ... or something to that effect. I can't seem to flush that tune out of my head these days, which isn't much of a surprise. Whenever I glance at a newspaper headline or unwittingly catch a snippet of "news" on TV or the radio, or am otherwise reminded of the cesspool of desperation and loathing the Bushoids are rapidly transforming this country into, saturated images of Grampa and Buck Owens and Minnie Pearl and BR-549 play merry hell with my shredded sensibilities. And, of course, that famous song lays over everything, like the stench of corruption on a room full of Republicans.

OK, after a few moments of Internet research, my memory has been "refreshed" -- it goes something like this:

Doom, despair, and agony on me/ Deep dark depression, excessive misery/ If it weren't for bad luck, I'd have no luck at all/ Doom, despair, and agony on me

Not exactly high art, but it certainly captures the barest essence of the times -- not to mention the no-man's-land of gloom inside my withered skull.

Christ, I need a drink.

EMPTY PAGES

Bullshit overload has, once again, left me wallowing in a wordless void -- it's too much, too much. The despair is palpable, and has left me ... well, an empty page, of sorts.

To make matters even more depressing, take a look at these two articles at Guerrilla News Network:

USA Out-Flanked in Eurasia Energy Politics?

Energy Geopolitics 2006

Read 'em and weep -- I don't know how much more of this crap I can take.

THE FEW, THE PROUD, THE BLOODTHIRSTY

How’s this for an utterly black & white, no-compromise, in-your-face statement of breathtaking simplicity: anyone who volunteers to bear arms for the government of the United States of America -- especially, especially, since the catastrophic results of the 2000 “election” -- is, without question, a sickeningly stupid goddamned motherfucking blood-swilling asshole ...

Now that I have your full, unvarnished attention, let me just add that I’m absolutely and completely serious here.

I realize how appallingly offensive these words are, within the debased epoch we find ourselves -- this obscene era of widespread mental illness, where violent militarism is hoisted up onto some unassailable pedestal of respectability. We’re not supposed to criticize the war machine, or the over-worked morons and blood-crazed killers who keep it rolling; we are supposed to slap cheap Chinese-made yellow ribbons on the ass-end of our SUV’s and incessantly regurgitate meaningless, platitudinous bullshit about how we must unreservedly “support our troops,” no matter how many Einsatzgruppen-style atrocities they commit against unarmed civilians. We’re required to believe that the stress and tension of combat, and the calamitous effects of multiple deployments on the psyches of individual Marines and Army grunts, offers up a framework of “understanding” as to why such vicious crimes as the Haditha massacre (and countless others) occur. Our uniformed minions perpetrate mass murder and are slavishly enshrined as “heroes” who, unfortunately, make “mistakes” in the heat of “battle.”

Well, you’ll have to pardon the hell out of me for the severity of my skepticism, but there is no justification -- none, under any circumstance -- for executing unarmed men, women, and children. Children, for fuck’s sake. Only soulless, degenerate Nazis would bother to construct rationalizations and spew apologetics for the gunning down of pregnant women, six-month-old babies, and old people in wheelchairs. But the troops are under monumental stress, they say; some are enduring their second and third tours in Iraq, we’re constantly being reminded; Bush lied us into this war, so the ultimate responsibility is his, the pundits tell us; the Marines in Haditha were understandably reacting to the death of one of their comrades is another common talking point; war is war, and so on and so forth. All of these angles and perspectives are absolutely true enough, as far as they go, but are altogether irrelevant when it comes to ... pointing a machine-gun at a poor woman and her children, and pulling the trigger.

Beyond the fact that these obscenities have taken place -- and continue to occur on a regular basis -- I guess what sickens me the most is that the perpetrators are all volunteers. They’re not conscripts, forcibly compelled to be the hatchet-men for the Neo-Con apparatus of destruction, but free agents willingly participating in this madness. Nobody held a gun to their heads, or jumped out of a helicopter and slaughtered their families in cold blood, to force them to enlist. No extraordinary methods of coercion were required to get these bastards in uniform, other than offering them the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of murdering unarmed Arab civilians with impunity. If these guys really wanted to “serve their country,” or to score money for college, or were motivated by any of the myriad of other reasons why normal people join the military, such impulses can be indulged without the necessity of becoming a bloodthirsty killer. In fact, most modern military occupations are highly technical in nature, and well removed from the desperate exigencies of killing and dying, to greater or lesser degrees. These bastards could have signed up to be, say, Air Force medical technicians, or Navy computer programmers, or who the hell knows what else. But no -- they purposely chose to be rifle-toting ground-pounders, allowing themselves to be thrust into an untenable situation of extreme magnitude ... so they could point their M-16’s at old people, and blast the heads off of women and children. They’re fundamentally no different than suicide bombers or German SS troopers, or any other such example of human scum. If they had even a tiny amount of native intelligence, or at least a modicum of common sense, they would’ve been able to discern what the advent of the Republican/Neo-Con dictatorship had in store, for them and the rest of us. They should have refused to actively participate in this evil scheme of domination and destruction, but they deliberately made the decision to be the praetorian enforcers for the would-be worldwide corporatist empire. So fuck them -- just as is the case with their vile and loathsome Masters, they deserve neither our respect or support.

So, to all those veterans out there (and, just to be clear, I happen to be a veteran myself): if you’re offended by anything you’ve read here, well, that’s just too bad. I simply won’t be an apologist for mass murder -- particularly when it’s committed in “my” name by uniformed ignoramuses under the official sanction of an illegal regime of neo-fascist motherfuckers in DC. If you need torturous justifications for the deliberate slaughter of Iraqi (or Afghan, or Iranian, etc.) civilians, I have no doubt that there are plenty of far-right mush-brained blogs and web sites out there, all ready and eager to stroke your delusions and massage your stupidity. Don’t expect to receive that sort of treatment here.

A QUICK AND DISGUSTING UPDATE: As if all this horrible bullshit wasn't bad enough, check out these photos at Raw Story, and prepare to puke yourself senseless ...