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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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.

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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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Flagstaff Revisited

 Old Town Alley, Flagstaff, Arizona. (Tomas photo)

Yes, we visited Flagstaff, Arizona on our recent "Journey to the East".

For some unknown reason Flagstaff figures fairly prominently in my life journey and I don't know why, but  I can't seem to get far enough away. 

I somehow always manage to return for a look-see every few years.

Many, many years ago I even studented myself in this northern Arizona town for a two dose period--long enough to get a "master's" degree in English. At the time I didn't see the joke of getting an advanced degree in English in this out-of-the-way place so very far from England.


Flagstaff  was a lot smaller then and Northern Arizona University--which is now a pretty big deal--was then very small potatoes.


To make ends meet, I had a job as a night clerk at a motel out of town to the east. The motel was called The Crown and it was fairly new. Oddly enough it still exists but is very much changed as is the entire scene. The motel has a different name and they have added a restaurant (called the Crown Restaurant) and they have paved the parking lot--but the old cowboy-style Museum Club is still in business next door--still serving the town's drunks as it did in those long-ago days--though I suppose they are a new crop of drunks.


We found "Old Main"--the old main building of the university -- still  standing.

I used to pick up my mail there and the NAU  administrative offices there as I suppose some still are--but the important new buildings of the university are now being built further and further away from what used to be the Flagstaff  town center on old Route 66. In fact to reach the newest buildings is quite a hike for the few pedestrians who might still walk from town as we did.


If you are the grasping type--hoping to re-experience something good from the past--all it takes is a short trip to some well-remembered site which you have not visited for years-- to realize  very clearly that nothing--but nothing--stays the same and that "this exists only because of that" as the Buddhists say.

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Authentic Change

"Authentic change always means stepping into the unknown."

"The Evolution of Consciousness" Swami Rama, Rudolph Ballentine, MD, Swami Ajaya

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Truth is

"...you should long for the perfection of yourself. The deity is within you not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught."

Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

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Musical Thought

 Musical Thought. (Tomasito photo)

"Therefore the music of a well-ordered age is calm and cheerful, and so is its government. The music of a restive age is excited and fierce, and its government is perverted. The music of a decaying state is sentimental and sad, and its government is imperiled."

Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

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Good Words 4

 Good Words Four. (Tomasito photo)

"Hatred is never appeased by hatred in this world; it  is appeased by love. This is an eternal law."

The Buddha


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Japan Tsunami

A few days ago the people of Japan experienced a terrible earthquake and tsunami.


Since the disaster occurred in broad daylight and since so many Japanese carry cell-phone cameras amazing movies were made of the mass of moving water carrying houses, ships, cars and literally everything before it.


Some 18,000 people were killed and an atomic power plant was damaged so badly that leaking radiation has caused grave concern.


My cartoon above expresses the grief of the survivors who gathered to bury the dead.

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