Democracy with a Vengeance

A few years ago I was traveling by bicycle through Yugoslavia.

There was some  commotion going on. Riots, shootings, confusion and my friends in Italy had warned me not to travel through at that time, but I wanted to get to Greece and that was the best way to do it. 

Since I had lost my maps as usual-- early one morning I found myself in the town where the most intense troubles had been--and were still happening.

My bike had broken down and I needed a repair shop and found one in the center of the town where the riots had been held the day before.

I arrived before the shop opened (it never did open that day) and some neighborhood kids demonstrated for me the events of the previous evening with sound effects and action. Must have been pretty exciting for kids.

When someone who knew about bicycles had arrived he invited me to his garage to fix my bike and I went along. He soon had a small group of friends collected and someone who spoke English arrived.

Of course they thought I was an American spy and so they told me that they were VERY interested in democracy.

 "We want to have a democracy like you have in America!" Their spokesman said.


"It seems to work for us." I said.

"Yes. We of the (whatever it was) race and religion are the majority of the residents in this town and so after this revolution (or whatever it was) we are going to have a democratic government and the first thing we are going to do is have an election. We will vote about who lives in this town and since we are the majority we will decide that the minority must leave town. And if they don't we will kill them."

Democracy with a vengeance.

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Here's something different:


Some of you readers of this blog  live very far away and I thought it would be interesting to make a four-panel decorative drawing available to you--a cooperatively-made poster for your apartment wall perhaps. Something you could print out for yourself in color.


Part of this idea is just to see if it could--or would--be done by someone--anyone--since this blog is not seen or read by vast numbers of people!

To make it a little bit mysterious and to build a bit of suspense, I thought it would be fun to send the four-panel picture one quarter at a time on four consecutive Fridays--starting today with the top left panel and continuing next Friday with the top right panel and so forth.


I have drawn the panels on standard 8 and a half by 11 inch copy paper with color pencils. 

YOU could print them out on your color copier on the same size paper, and voila--we would have an instantly mass produced wall decoration!


Here is today's installment:

Let me know how it goes.


Best wishes, Tomasito.

Hi.


If you scroll back to my post on June 17,  number 24 of this current series you will read that I plan to transmit by Internet a four-part poster--that is, ONE poster with FOUR sections.


Last Friday I posted the top left-hand section. Today I will post the top right-hand section.

In the next two Fridays, I will post the bottom two sections.  YOU print 'em out in glorious color and we will have cooperatively posted and printed a cool "work of art". Right?


 Got it? 


Here is this week's installment: 

I wonder how this is going to look? Don't you?



Tomasito


 

Cooperative Poster-- Bottom Left Quarter.

Hello.

Here is the next installment of our "cooperative poster".

Only one more to go! See you next week.

Tomas

...

Hi.


If you scroll back to my post on June 17,  number 24 of this current series you will read that I plan to transmit by Internet a four-part poster--that is, ONE poster with FOUR sections.


Last Friday I posted the top left-hand section. Today I will post the top right-hand section.

In the next two Fridays, I will post the bottom two sections.  YOU print 'em out in glorious color and we will have cooperatively posted and printed a cool "work of art". Right?


 Got it? 


Here is this week's installment: 

I wonder how this is going to look? Don't you?



Tomasito

July 4, 2011

 Redding, CA. (Tomasito photo)

Happy Birthday, USA!


I wonder about this country on this Fourth of July.


We bought a cheap package of hot dogs and some squishy soft buns which I like to eat with brown mustard. We are mostly vegetarians now but the taste of hot dogs is a once-a-year treat which I really enjoy--they taste just like I remember and all the kid memories come flooding back--and wasn't it all fun?!


Now, I wonder about this country. 

Happy?


I guess I don't know much about my fellow Americans any more.


I even dreamed I was back in the navy last night--riding in a bus with a bunch of young sailors in work dungarees--just like in the days of my youth--but I wasn't young any more. I was just back in the navy from some administrative fluke. We were stationed somewhere in California guarding some mothballed ships.


One of the men in my dream, a tall, husky chap with teen-age zits, was talking about "War Number Two"--which I realized was not the big one of my childhood--but the one in Afghanistan, "I guess that is how they talk about it now." I thought in my dream. "I better pay attention since I should know how to talk war with my fellow Americans now I am in the navy again."


The odd part of this dream is that I was NOT a war-time sailor. I was a navy man in the few short years when this country was NOT at war--the breathing space between Korea and Viet Nam.


Ever since then this country--my country--has been at war constantly. Americans have spent so much money on war we don't even know how to spend it on peace anymore. It seems Americans are not interested even slightly in peace. Everything about America is war and violence. 

And greed--don't want to forget THAT magic word.

For all of us American "Human Resources", like coal or wheat--used, burned up and discarded--working for faceless bureaucracies for pitiful wages--commuting hours in dangerous frustrating traffic so we can pay exorbitant rent and ever higher prices for everything--or the out-of-work hopeless citizen--the on-the-run illegal alien--this "land of the free and home of the brave" is only a stupid joke in poor taste.


1776-2011. 

That's quite a life. Now I wonder how many more years it will take for America to grow up.

. .

Pliny

 Ghost. (Tanya photo)

" I think they are lucky whom the gods have given the gift of either doing something worth writing about or writing something worth reading, but those who have done both are the most blessed of all." 

(Pliny the Younger writing of his uncle Pliny the Elder in a letter to Tacitus, c 93 CE.

Ashen Sky--the Letters of Pliny the Younger on the Eruption of Vesuvius illustrated by Barry Moser

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Doctors and Medicinemen

 Rocks and Yucca. (Tomasito photo)

"Doctors study what man has learned, I pray to understand what man has forgotten."  

Vernon Cooper, quoted in Wisdomkeepers, by Steve Wall and Harvy Arden.

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Minor Liberation

Brother Joe--the retired Lutheran minister and missionary-- recently sent me a book: "Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time", by Marcus J. Borg.


Mr. Borg is a professor and historian of the Christian tradition. Brother Joe calls him "a really outstanding Bible scholar".


Borg makes a very good case for some de-mythification of Christianity.


From his historic and linguistic research it  is clear that many of the iconic details of the old Jesus story may be simply borrowings from other mythologies current in the first century Mediterranean locale of the story.


There were really no wise men following stars, no angelic choirs, no virgin birth-- in fact not much of anything that many people think of as God's Word Truth. It was all made up by well-intentioned writers  to make the Gospel story more interesting.

Borg suggests that Jesus was probably a "spirit person" similar to native American sages like Black Elk and Crazy Horse or maybe Edgar Casey. Jesus was a human person concerned with spirit, compassion and sincerity and breaking down some of the class barriers of his day.   Jesus probably did not see himself as a Son of God born of a virgin, etc.


I know there are a LOT of knee-jerk "Christians" who will be totally appalled and furious about the ideas  so coolly laid out in this little book since it strikes at the roots of the Santa Clausy Jesus mythology so beloved by the merchants of Christmastime and the  churchianity and the bibilotry so prevalent in the One Way protestant groups--not to mention the bone-conservative Catholic and Orthodox folks.


No fear though. I have a strong hunch that the Christianity Juggernaut will keep on a-rolling for some time to come--the Borgs and so forth will not cause even a miniscule  bumpitty-bump of it's mindlessly squashing  wheels.

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