It was a time of great and exalting excitement. The
country was up in arms, the war was on, in every
breast burned the holy fire of patriotism; the drums
were beating, the bands playing, the toy pistols
popping, the bunched firecrackers hissing and
spluttering; on every hand and far down the receding
and fading spread of roofs and balconies a fluttering
wilderness of flags flashed in the sun; daily the
young volunteers marched down the wide avenue gay and
fine in their new uniforms, the proud fathers and
mothers and sisters and sweethearts cheering them with
voices choked with happy emotion as they swung by;
nightly the packed mass meetings listened, panting, to
patriot oratory which stirred the deepest deeps of
their hearts, and which they interrupted at briefest
intervals with cyclones of applause, the tears running
down their cheeks the while; in the churches the
pastors preached devotion to flag and country, and
invoked the God of Battles beseeching His aid in our
good cause in outpourings of fervid eloquence which
moved every listener. It was indeed a glad and
gracious time, and the half dozen rash spirits that
ventured to disapprove of the war and cast a doubt
upon its righteousness straightway got such a stern
and angry warning that for their personal safety's
sake they quickly shrank out of sight and offended no
more in that way.

Sunday morning came -- next day the battalions would
leave for the front; the church was filled; the
volunteers were there, their young faces alight with
martial dreams -- visions of the stern advance, the
gathering momentum, the rushing charge, the flashing
sabers, the flight of the foe, the tumult, the
enveloping smoke, the fierce pursuit, the surrender!
Then home from the war, bronzed heroes, welcomed,
adored, submerged in golden seas of glory! With the
volunteers sat their dear ones, proud, happy, and
envied by the neighbors and friends who had no sons
and brothers to send forth to the field of honor,
there to win for the flag, or, failing, die the
noblest of noble deaths. The service proceeded; a war
chapter from the Old Testament was read; the first
prayer was said; it was followed by an organ burst
that shook the building, and with one impulse the
house rose, with glowing eyes and beating hearts, and
poured out that tremendous invocation


*God the all-terrible! Thou who ordainest! Thunder thy
clarion and lightning thy sword!*
Then came the "long" prayer. None could remember the
like of it for passionate pleading and moving and
beautiful language. The burden of its supplication
was, that an ever-merciful and benignant Father of us
all would watch over our noble young soldiers, and
aid, comfort, and encourage them in their patriotic
work; bless them, shield them in the day of battle and
the hour of peril, bear them in His mighty hand, make
them strong and confident, invincible in the bloody
onset; help them to crush the foe, grant to them and
to their flag and country imperishable honor and glory
--

An aged stranger entered and moved with slow and
noiseless step up the main aisle, his eyes fixed upon
the minister, his long body clothed in a robe that
reached to his feet, his head bare, his white hair
descending in a frothy cataract to his shoulders, his
seamy face unnaturally pale, pale even to ghastliness.
With all eyes following him and wondering, he made his
silent way; without pausing, he ascended to the
preacher's side and stood there waiting. With shut
lids the preacher, unconscious of his presence,
continued with his moving prayer, and at last finished
it with the words, uttered in fervent appeal, "Bless
our arms, grant us the victory, O Lord our God, Father
and Protector of our land and flag!"

The stranger touched his arm, motioned him to step
aside -- which the startled minister did -- and took
his place. During some moments he surveyed the
spellbound audience with solemn eyes, in which burned
an uncanny light; then in a deep voice he said:

"I come from the Throne -- bearing a message from
Almighty God!" The words smote the house with a shock;
if the stranger perceived it he gave no attention. "He
has heard the prayer of His servant your shepherd, and
will grant it if such shall be your desire after I,
His messenger, shall have explained to you its import
-- that is to say, its full import. For it is like
unto many of the prayers of men, in that it asks for
more than he who utters it is aware of -- except he
pause and think.

"God's servant and yours has prayed his prayer. Has he
paused and taken thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is
two -- one uttered, the other not. Both have reached
the ear of Him Who heareth all supplications, the
spoken and the unspoken. Ponder this -- keep it in
mind. If you would beseech a blessing upon yourself,
beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon a
neighbor at the same time. If you pray for the
blessing of rain upon your crop which needs it, by
that act you are possibly praying for a curse upon
some neighbor's crop which may not need rain and can
be injured by it.

"You have heard your servant's prayer -- the uttered
part of it. I am commissioned of God to put into words
the other part of it -- that part which the pastor --
and also you in your hearts -- fervently prayed
silently. And ignorantly and unthinkingly? God grant
that it was so! You heard these words: 'Grant us the
victory, O Lord our God!' That is sufficient. the
*whole* of the uttered prayer is compact into those
pregnant words. Elaborations were not necessary. When
you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many
unmentioned results which follow victory--*must*
follow it, cannot help but follow it. Upon the
listening spirit of God fell also the unspoken part of
the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words.
Listen!

"O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our
hearts, go forth to battle -- be Thou near them! With
them -- in spirit -- we also go forth from the sweet
peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O
Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody
shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling
fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help
us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks
of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay
waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire;
help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending
widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out
roofless with little children to wander unfriended the
wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and
thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy
winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail,
imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied
it -- for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their
hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter
pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way
with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood
of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of
love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the
ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore
beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite
hearts. Amen.

(*After a pause.*) "Ye have prayed it; if ye still
desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High
waits!"

It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic,
because there was no sense in what he said.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Twain apparently dictated it around 1904-05; it was
rejected by his publisher, and was found after his
death among his unpublished manuscripts. It was first
published in 1923 in Albert Bigelow Paine's anthology,
Europe and Elsewhere.
The story is in response to a particular war, namely
the Philippine-American War of 1899-1902, which Twain
opposed. See Jim Zwick's page "Mark Twain on the
Philippines" for more of Twain's writings on the
subject.



=====
http://www.iww.org/

__________________________________________________
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"Making the men forget everything there was, or could be, outside
their present surroundings was an advantage to the Company, just as
it is useful to a dictator when he wants to suppress the people he
governs so much that they become completely uninterested in political
life and feel themselves lucky because it is no longer necessary for
them even to think or take on any kind of personal responsibility.
The sheep feels best, safest, and happiest in the flock, where it has
nothing else to do but graze, grow wool, and give birth to lambs.
Once the new office workers had reached that stage, when their
intellectual capacity and their ambition had become like those of
sheep in a flock, that was when they had begun to be useful and
reliable pillars of the Company they worked for and which paid them
their salary."

---from TROZAS by B. Traven

"Christianity gave substance to the sacred but the nature of the
sacred (…) is perhaps the most elusive thing that happens between
people. The sacred is nothing but a privileged moment of communial
oneness, the convulsive communication of what we ordinarily stifle."
(G. Bataille, The Sacred)

This moment of "communial oneness" can be found today at a concert,
in the panic gaining a crowd and, in its most degraded form, in great
swells of patriotism and other sporadic outbursts of the union
sacrée. Manipulate it, and you can do any dirty deed. One may presume
that in a modern war, unlike what happens in backward capitalist
nations such as Iran, only a minority would actually participate. The
rest would only watch. But nothing is for certain - the manipulation
of the sacred may have some good days left in it, because the sacred,
to date, has been the only powerful moments offered as manifestation
of man's irrepressible need for togetherness.
As much as they have furnished a more or less imaginary niche outside
of class struggle, mystical practices have been known to cement
revolts. This is demonstrated, for example, by the role of the Taoist
trance in the resistance of central power in imperial China, voodoo
in slave uprisings, or millenarian prophecy. Although contemporary
mystical pursuits play a counter-revolutionary role because they are
merely one of many ways the bourgeois individual turns inward, the
fact remains that mercantile banalization of every aspect of life
tends to empty existence of its passion. The world we live in asks us
to love only a jumbled bunch of individual inadequacies. Compared to
traditional societies, this world has lost an essential dimension of
human experience - the powerful moments of oneness with nature. We
are condemned to watch pagan festivals on TV.
But it would be ridiculous for us to advocate a return to the past,
to its joys which, history has taught us, are repetitive, cause of
illusion, and short-sighted in character. When capital tends to
impose its exclusive reign, looking elsewhere than revolution
for "communial oneness" and "convulsive communication" becomes purely
reactionary. That capital has made everything banal gives us the
chance to liberate ourselves from that specialized sphere known
as "sexuality." We want a world where being carried away, out of
oneself, exists as a possibility in all human activities - a world
which holds out the species to love, and individuals whose
inadequacies will be those of the species and no longer those of the
world. The stakes of the game today, what is worth risking death,
what could give another rhythm to time is the content of life in its
entirety.

full:http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/3909/moral/moral.html

Killing an Arab






Myself and J decided to take the day off and attend the anti-war
rally in Perth on February 15th. We took some papers along to give
out and announce the anarchist WA Yahoo Group
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/anarchistwa/ , and a tape of music we
thought might fan the flames of resistance. We also took a camera and
a bottle of water.




We jumped in the car and drove off to the train station. It was only
10am in the morning and already 90F degrees -- in the shade. The air-
conditioned train was welcome. We tooled into the City all coolly;
and finally stepped out at the central Perth station.




Whoosh! It was hot again. Hot is wearing. J had a sweat bead falling
down her back about every two minutes. Myself, I was merely boiling.
(Demonstrations during global warming are such fun. )




We took the escalator up, and looked for people from RRAN [Refugee
Rights Action Network http://rran.dhs.org around DIMIA [The
Department of Immigration....




Nobody was there yet.




We decided to peruse the marketplace. Today, some ideas were for sale
in Forest Place.




J and me sauntered around, noticing varying Trotskyist factions (3 of
them) -- displaying their wares. (I even saw a copy of Lev
Davidovitch Bronstein's "Transitional Programme", price unknown.)




The Greens were there in force. Such happy, smiling people -- the
Greens. We even saw some Democrats -- Never saw the ALP. Oh well. The
Communist Party of Australia was there-a small group of Stalinists
all decked out with yellow hammers and sickles, all on deep red
banners.




At my brief encounter with a guy from WSWS (see: http://www.wsw.org),
I told him that what we Wobblies (....see: http://www.iww.org/ ...)
thought we needed social ownership of the means of production under
democratic control AND the abolition of wage-labour. Yeah, we also
wanted a system of production for use and need.




Then J and I went off to look for a clean toilet. This turned out to
be not as easy to find, as we had imagined. We were in Centre Perth,
yet when we looked in the department store, whose directories
promised rest rooms, we still had not a clue as to where these might
be, on any particular floor. So, we stormed back through the train
station-- to the Art Gallery where coolness once again greeted us, as
a relief.




We felt all good inside once more and headed back to DIMIA, as we
were keen to see whether our pals had shown up yet, where we had
agreed to meet.




They were there, and gave very insightful speeches to those who had
gathered.




After the speeches, I think people were wondering what came next.
That was when I decided to play my recorded music. I had this really
loud tune, where the voice of Abbie Hoffman starts raving about how
all prisoners are political prisoners in America.




The song is "Time has Come Today". (It's the Steve Earle version on a
cd titled, "Side Tracks".)




I thought it quite appropriate, considering the speech just given. I
was told to turn it off because we couldn't hear the chant we were
about to do to go down to the marketplace of ideas and present
ourselves, which was fair enough.




My partner was asked if she would help to hoist the banner and carry
it along. She complied.




Then we marched down a flight of steps, to the assembled crowd.




Our message to shoppers and gathering anti-war troopies alike was
that we should be giving food to refugees and not bombing
Iraq: "Food, not Bombs" . I got in to it. Lots of people clapped for
us as we passed. None were hostile.




Out on the plaza, it was sun, sun, sun -- again. We'd gone through
half of our water by now.




Unfortunately, the organizers of this rally had decided to pull a
fast one on me. They decided to have the liberals ALL (that's
liberals with a small "l") speak to us, before the action. So, we
stood there in the sun for a while and I began playing my tape. Then
someone on a centre-stage began to speak. I turned the tape machine
off, as a matter of courtesy.




She presented a choirs who went on to lead us, through an array of
what sounded to Negro spirituals. I guess they were meant to get us
all into the mood for what would follow. J was bemused at the degree
to which the organisers -- and the singers? -- were regrettably
imbued with a mood of religiosity. The flavour of the singing was
very folksy-religious. J's ears have been more attuned to Sex
Pistols, of late.




Then the speeches began. There were continual appeals, on the part of
Nationalist Spirit, which essentially boiled down to: "This is not
Australia's war. This is America's war."


Nobody on the pulpit mentioned the fact that both nations were
controlled by their respective capitalist classes -- which would have
been more to the point and would have seemed a little less blandly
opportunist.




The good part was that at least one speaker, from a Trotskyist group
called Socialist Alliance, (who was also a trade-unionist), recounted
the history of numbers in the anti-Vietnam War movement in Australia.




He told the crowd that the anti-war movement was way ahead of where
it was back in the 'old days'. He told the truth there!




-security guard at the demonstration, and a former student from our
martial arts gym-there were perhaps close to 20,000 people gathered
in that marketplace-That is 20,000 people against a war which the
government of the capitalist class was only ABOUT to commit to.




This shows that our awareness has progressed, for, back in the days
of the beginning of the Vietnam War, the crowds coming out for ant-
war demos were smaller. "Now," the speaker told us, "Look at us.
We're here in these great numbers and the war hasn't begun yet!"




As good as some of the speakers were, after an hour of the dominant
nationalist-liberal kind of haranguing; in this kind of heat, I was
ready to leave.




It had became apparent that we, the madding crowd, were going to have
to endure even more liberal claptrap - before we'd be allowed to
demonstrate our anti-war feelings in the streets of Perth.




Then, it happened. A spokesperson for the Christian faith gets up and
mourned the lack of more Christians religionists at the event.




"This is not a just war," the man uttered, with a pious and
reverential tone, which would have rivalled that of GW Shrub
himself.. He went further by pulling out a scrap of paper to explain
what was a "just" war is in Christian terms. Hmmmm....too bad! J
started to shout out her anti-Christian sentiments..... looked around
for a megaphone. She now wants to own a megaphone, for personal
protection against reverential and well meaning....[.....]. Well, you
know what I mean...!




I guess that me and J are tired of being treated to slop.




We packed up, tuned on our tape recorder and circulated amongst the
crowd, playing the Cure's "Killing an Arab", as an ironic --
statement. "I'm alive; I'm dead; I am the stranger; Killing an Arab.
I can turn and walk away or I could fire the gun: Staring at the sky,
staring at the sun.....". We thought this well depicted something of
the absurdity of American soldiers invading Iraq, after having rained
800 cruise missiles on the citizens of Baghdad - This with the help
of their Australian comrades in arms.




Of course the song depicts nihilism, : "Whatever I do it amounts to
the same: absolutely nothing!"




Come to think of it, isn't that what war is good for-absolutely
nothing.




We then made our way back to the train to the gentle buzz of Phil
Och's "A Small Circle of Friends"., on the tape recorder.




WHOOSH (under the train's air conditioner)! We became all coolly
again!

Marx in the first volume of Kapital, pages 91-92 in the Chicago
edition (Charles H. Kerr, Co., 1906)provides a key to interpreting
this piece.

Regards,
Mike B)


»»Those ancient social organisms of production are, as compared with
bourgeois society, extremely simple and transparent. But they are
founded either on the immature development of man individually, who
has not yet severed the umbilical cord that united him with his
fellow man in a primitive tribal community, or upon direct relations
of subjection. They can arise and exist only when the development of
the productive power of labor has not risen beyond a low state, and
when, therefore, the social relations within the sphere of material
life, between man and man, and between man and nature, are
correspondingly narrow. This narrowness is reflected in the ancient
worship of Nature, and in the other elements of popular religions.
The religious reflex of the real world can, in any case, only then
finally vanish when the practical relations of everyday life offer to
man none but perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations with
regard to his fellow men and to nature. The life-process of material
production does not strip off its mystical veil until it is treated
as production by freely associated men, and is consciously regulated
by them in accordance with a settled plan. This, however, demands for
society a certain material groundwork or set of conditions of
existence which in their turn are the spontaneous product of a long
and painful process of development.««

Shot in the Arm

July is hot on Parris Island.  It's especially hot out on the parade
deck.  You don't need the red flag to tell you that.  The gravel
pavement of what would otherwise be known as a parking lot, was sun
soaked that late July.  A blackened tarmac holds heat like an iron
skillet.  Fire burns up through your boots.  God help you, if you put
your socks on too quickly that morning.

"Right Oh-blike--march!"

On command, our heels hit the pavement in unison.  Off we went at a
forty-five degree angle, forward from where we came.  We were still
shouldering our M-14s to out left.

"Right show-derr–H'arms!"

This went on for another hour.  Normal morning's work in Marine Corps
bootcamp.  After this, we'd put our M14s back into the locked rifle
rack in the centre of the Quonset hut, otherwise known as the squad
bay and exchange platoon chrome domes for our own soft, green utility
caps.

We'd been in movement since five am, getting dressed in the required
ninety seconds, cleaning the squad bay, making our beds, cleaning the
head and then off  and running to the exercise course; climbing up 20
feet of rope; scaling obstacles, doing 100 push-ups; rocking back and
forth on our bellies, hands clasped behind our backs, growling like
mad dogs for two minutes and then, exhausted, but poker-face strong,
running back in platoon formation to the cadence provided by one of
our three drill instructors.  Then, we showered and policed the area
around the squad bay, looking mostly for old cigarette butts, field
stripping them of their paper, poking same in our pockets after
emptying the tobacco dutifully on  the deck.

"Fall out girls.  You shits.  You'll never make it as real Marines.
You sorry bunch of momma's girls.  Get out there!  On the double.

"Oh, so you think that's funny do you, Wiggins?"

"No Sah!" came Wiggins' shouted reply.  He was a white farm boy from
Mississippi.  He scored 80 on the intelligence test we were all
given.  I'd gotten 132 and I was not smart.  Otherwise, why would I
be here.

"I can'T hear you, Wiggins!"

"NO SAH!"

"That's better.  Now get your fat ass out there, you fucking fahm
animal."

"YES SAH!"

And from the outside, "Dress Rah-ite–Dress!"

We had to be in a perfect line of shoulders, arms bent right, elbows
length from the next guy.  As our arms crooked, we looked straight
down the noses of all the guys to the left and moved, until we
achieved–perfect alignment.


"Ten-shun!"
"Rye-eat–face!"
Fore-werd–march!"

The mess-hall was a five minute march, a breeze really, considering
what the rest of the morning was like.  After folding our covers in
our back pockets, we sidle-marched  in unison, down the chow line,
looking straight ahead like robots lest we catch 100 punishment bend
and thrusts from one of our DIs; carrying our square metal trays with
five indents stamped into them for food.  Waiting mess men in
accident stained whites stood behind steaming bins of chow and dished
out what we nodded for when we passed them.  I got the scrambled eggs
and bacon along with a little shit- on-a- shingle.  We sat and ate.
No talking was allowed.  When we finished, we got up; banged out
trays on trash cans in the mess hall; throwing milk containers and
the like into them then, placed the trays and flatware on a metallic
ledge where they were quickly whisked away by a Marine on kitchen
patrol so that they could be washed.

After the march back to the squad bay, we were told that today we'd
be getting our shots.  There was some commotion after that
announcement, but it was trampled immediately by a barrage of
epithets.

"You fucking girls got some complaints?"

"No sir."

"What did you say?  I can't hear your miserable asses?"

"YES SIR!"

"You're in MY platoon, recruits.  You're going to shine today.
You're going to get your shots and you're going to like them.  DO YOU
HEAR ME?"

"YES SIR."

"WHAT?"

"YES SIR!"

"You're not going to embarrass me in front of the other drill
instructors from the other platoons now..."

"no sa..."

"Shuddup, unless I'm talkin' to you, you miserable pansies.  Now,
nobody, I mean, none of you little girls are going to faint on me
today, are you?"

"NO SIR!"

"Good.  Now fall out."

We marched about half a mile under a blasting, muggy sun which made
us sweaty wet..  I'd never been to this part of the base before.  It
was tree lined.  It  looked surprisingly civilized.  It was there
that we saw or first woman in a month and a half.  She was a BAM, a
broad-assed Marine.  Not the best looking woman in the world, bit
still.  She was walking up the stairs into a building with some file
folders under her arm.

The shop shot was only a few paces up.  There was already a line.
Some of the other platoons had gotten there first.  We had to wait at
attention for about half an hour.  Then, our DI said, "At ease."  And
we loosened our backs a bit.  Our line started to move.  It was
slow.  About one step every 30 seconds or so.

"Wiggins just fell down.."

"Who are YOU talking to, recruit?"

"NO ONE SIR!"

"Get your ass up there to the front of the line.  You're going to get
yours now."

"YES SIR!"  I said.

The DI took me by shoulder and pushed me up to the front.  "I'll be
next after Davis and Jones," I thought to myself.

"Get your shirt off, Marine," a Corpsman said.

I took my utility shirt off and rolled the sleeve of my t-shirt up.

"Both sleeves Ballard."

I rolled the other one up as well.

Two Corpsmen were sitting in straight chairs to either side of
Davis.  They each had hydraulic pistols which they put up to  Davis's
body at his biceps.

`Thunk!' the pistol's rubber hose undulated as the antibiotics and
vaccines were shot into his arms.  Each guy got two shots in each arm
for a total of four.  What they contained was dutifully put down in
our medical records.  It was said that amongst the shots one was for
the plague, the old scourge of medieval Europe.

Davis was told to put his utility shirt back on and Jones came up for
his.  Then, it was my turn.  I had seen Jones' eyes go up in his head
when the shot guns made their `Thunk's the second time.

My arms hurt after my shots, but it wasn't as bad as I'd imagined it
might have been.  After the shots were administered to our platoon,
we marched back in formation to the squad bay.   Our DI s seemed to
soften for the first time since we'd arrived.  They told us that we
could straighten our gear or  lie on our bunks for the rest of the
afternoon until evening chow.  They left the lights off in the squad
bay.   It did seem cooler that way.  I lay down.  My head spun a bit,
but not as badly as Granger's, I guess, cause he threw up three times
and missed chow altogether that evening.  I slept deeply until I
heard the DI s come back.

"Ten-shun!" the house mouse yelled as he saw the first DI enter the
squad bay.  It was 1963.  Kennedy was still alive.

Parisian Solstice '98


Early morning swallows screeching
flying twisting twirling
though their insect breakfast gliding
whistling passed their echoes rising
off the buildings and the roofs
of Paris all around me

I shiver in the half-night air
first light beams its dawn becoming
brightening roosting pigeons' faces
cooing in the gentle breezes
as the City wipes its eyes
and comes awake
another day

its first of summer to be sure

Traffics' loud vibrations pushing
through the air outside my landing
blowing courtyard roses bending
'romas wafting gently waving
then I see her 'neath the iron
cold old metal twisted grating
single slinky black cat hunting
belly low
upon the grasses
dark and green and quiet-peering

an errant bird is yonder stirring

and then she gazes at my perch

I look down
I see her there
as I sip my schwarz Kaffee
on this fine Parisian morning
solstice sun so strongly streaming
on the house-meant tallish buildings
reflecting once again on being
the how
the why
of who I am
and who I was
and who I might be
and of another night of sleeping
in the arms of eve's delight
living fleeting drama dreams



**********
Mike Ballard, 1998

RECRUIT

no poetry
no art
no music
small heart

no books
no scars
but friends and cooks
and bars


A Plague on Peace

On satisfaction a plague
a fever and an ague
Thoughts are fashioned by a mood
Deeds are born of disquietude
Greatest works of art and pride
Robbed from souls unsatisfied
May tortured moods forever stew
In man and world, in them and you.

Conversation

Unless we speak with warming heart
With equal thought on equal plane
Conversation dies as Art
And is reborn a jabbering pain.

Long monologue and declamation
However gay or wisely sane
Scotch the glow of conversation,
It's fire quenched by weary rain.

Hey,

Come by and see what is new at philosophical creativity.

There is some plenty good stuff here, and all are welcome!


http://groups.yahoo.com/group/philosophicalcreativity/

Spain at war : the Spanish Civil War in context, 1931-1939 by George
Esenwein and Adrian Shubert. London & New York: Longman, 1995, 313
pp. $22.95
To remember Spain: the Anarchist and Syndicalist Revolution of 1936
by Murray Bookchin. AK Press (22 Lutton Place, Edinburgh, Scotland
EH8 9Pe; POB 40682, San Francisco CA 94140-0682), 1994. 69 pp.
[[sterling]]4.50 or $6.

'Tis really a pity that more workers don't know about the Spanish
Civil War and the social revolution which began to erupt out of it;
especially as revolutionary unionists played such a significant role.
Two books have come out recently which can help remedy our collective
amnesia about Spain. One is very personal and partisan, while the
other maintains a scholarly distance. Read in tandem, they provide a
reasonably well-informed view of what actually happened when civil
war ripped the veil of legitimation from ruling class authority and
social revolution came to fruition.

Murray Bookchin is the author of two lengthy essays which have been
bound together by our fellow workers at AK Press into To Remember
Spain: The Anarchist And Syndicalist Revolution Of 1936. As a long
time anarchist, Murray naturally makes his observations and
reflections on the victories, defeats -the rights, the wrongs, the
lefts -from his own partisan perspective. Be that as it may, readers
will find an abundance of useful insight in these essays. As an
example, Bookchin quotes from Hegel's youthful work on positive
Christianity to make a point about how the mentality of servitude is
ingrained or not in people who learn from others. What makes it
especially fascinating is that Murray is making this observation
amidst his discussion of anarchists and charismatic leaders like
Durruti:

"Hegel brilliantly draws the distinction between Socrates and Jesus:
the former was a teacher who sought to arouse a quest for knowledge
in anyone who was prepared to discuss; the latter an oracle who
pronounced for adoring disciples... The difference, as Hegel points
out, lay not only in the character of the two men but in that of
their `followers.' Socrates' friends had been reared in a social
tradition that [and here is where Hegel begins] `developed their
powers in many directions. They had absorbed that democratic spirit
which gives an individual a greater measure of independence and makes
it impossible for any tolerably good head to depend wholly and
absolutely on one person... They loved Socrates because of his virtue
and his philosophy, not virtue and his philosophy because of him.'
[End Hegel] The followers of Jesus, on the other hand, were
submissive acolytes: [Hegel again] `Lacking any great store of
spiritual energy of their own, they had found the basis of their
conviction about the teaching of Jesus principally in their
friendship with him and dependence on him... Their ambition was to
grasp and keep this doctrine faithfully and to transmit it equally
faithfully to others without any addition, without letting it acquire
any variations in detail by working on it themselves."

Murray also carries around his share of ideological baggage, which
impels him to make remarks like, "The limitations of the trade union
movement, even in its anarcho-syndicalist form, have become
manifestly clear. To see in trade unions (whether syndicalist or not)
an inherent potentiality for revolutionary struggle is to assume that
the interests of workers and capitalists, merely as classes, are
intrinsically incompatible." Mr. Bookchin believes that the
recuperative tendencies of capitalist reform make and re-make the
worker over in the image of "obedience, hierarchy, the work ethic, an
authoritarian discipline in the working class as a whole; indeed, in
many of the `emancipatory' movements as well."

Is there then nothing to be done, according to Mr. Bookchin?

No; not unless we abandon hopelessly outdated strategies like the
self-organization of the working class into unions whose goal is the
abolition of wage-slavery and instead adopt Murray's strategy of
organizing a municipally based green socialism. Forewarned is
forearmed, fellow workers.

However one may evaluate Murray Bookchin's conclusions, To Remember
Spain is generally fascinating, thought-provoking and informative.
The philosophical/tactical ruminations are worth the purchase price
for workers interested in remembering the past in order to avoid the
mistakes of the present and future.

In Spain At War: The Spanish Civil War In Context, George Esenwein
and Adrian Shubert present a subject-structured approach to history,
which takes into account not only the anarchists and syndicalists and
a variety of left, right and center Republicans; but also the major
players in the Nationalist camp -the monarchists, the Catholic
Church, the fascists, militarists and plain vanilla conservatives.
Compared with Bookchin, Esenwein and Shubert offer a refreshingly
distanced tour through the labyrinth of Spanish political warfare.

Providing readers with this decade-long account makes it easier to
see how the various contending forces involved in the class conflicts
of '30s Spain navigated and justified themselves during the
turbulence leading up to and including the civil war and revolution.
This history also makes clear the defeat of our class-conscious
sisters and brothers in Spain, and the fact that it had more to do
with the numerical, military and technical superiority of the
Nationalist rebellion than any philosophical failings of their own.
This is not to say that they soft-peddle the help that Franco got
from Hitler and Mussolini or the Communist Party of Spain's role in
blocking with the liberals of the Republic to repress the emerging
social revolution. In essence, Shubert and Esen-wein's scholarship
confirm what Bookchin pronounces vis a vis the Communist Party of
Spain. It was neither communist nor a party, but in reality an
instrument for the promotion of Soviet foreign policy goals with its
membership reduced to a gaggle of murderous, pro-Soviet liberals. The
book is however, more than the exposure of Stalinism to the
dispassionate light of historical analysis.

Spain At War is much broader and more comprehensive. It includes an
extensive analysis of foreign intervention and foreign policy and
their impact on Spanish activity. The Republic's liberals would
probably have acted quite differently, if they had known that the
capitalist democracies were going to let them twist in the wind in
order to appease the capitalist dictatorships under Hitler and
Mussolini. On the other hand, the militarists under Franco would
probably not have had a very easy time of defeating the forces of the
Republic, if it had not been for the aid and comfort giving to them
by the German and Italian States. The clear connection between the
Franco's victory and the beginning of World War II just five months
later becomes all the clearer as one finishes Spain At War.

As Esenwein and Shubert point out, during the first three decades of
the 20th Century, Spain had been sharply divided between forces
trying to push it out of feudalism on to a higher and freer plane and
those who were attempting to drag it back into a vortex of
obscurantist traditions. As these elements clashed, class-conscious
workers broke through to the forefront in the struggle for progress.
The workers organized in the Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo (CNT)
those associated with the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI), and the
militants of the Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) were all on the
cutting edge of emerging, vibrant socialist revolutionary impulse in
Spain. Reading about the Asturian miners' organizing and their
general strike of 1934 is both inspiring and instructive:

"This announcement was the occasion for the Socialists to launch
their much heralded rising against the fascist threat. It was a total
failure everywhere... except Asturias, where the radicalism of the
miners carried the movement far beyond what the socialist leadership
had intended and turned it into a full-scale social revolution."

Keep in mind, this strike was organized two years before the Spanish
Civil War began. Nuggets like this one are what keep pulsing through
the pages of this work and make it well worth the read. Spain At War
can add formidable memory to any worker's class conscious arsenal.
Thus, whether to ally or to disdain alliances, whether to strike or
hold off, how to treat national/ethnic oppression, liberal and/or
religious tendencies - in short all the questions which tend to arise
during the fast-breaking events which force themselves on workers
during revolutionary moments - they're all here, fellow workers, in
this excellent recounting of Spain's brightest and darkest days of
the 20th Century. The task is to synthesize that knowledge and to
critically apply it as we make our way along the path towards freedom
from wage slavery.

-- Mike Ballard

observations on september 11, 2001
penned by
Mike Ballard on September 12, 2001
**********************************************************************
murder is not a legitimate political weapon
murderers should be jailed for life
they're bad for our health

fundamentalism is a dangerous ideology no matter what its dogmatic
flavor

oh suicidal self-abnegation is your name only kamikaze
if I thought the "u.s. is the great satan"
then i'd guess i'd think that god was on my side
especially if I was dirt poor and ignorant

"gott mit uns" was inscribed on the belt buckles of german soldiers
who took off to smash the USSR on june 22, 1941
hitler "heroically" shot himself four years later
feeling betrayed by "his" deutsches volk

now let us hear the war cries coming from the bravest of the future
non-combatants
many of them "our" leaders
"let us prey," they say out loud for the teevee audiences of the world
half devoured children dripping from their mouths

I was walking through the park and the people were aghast to see the
liquid coming from the tree trunks.

` What is it?'

` What could it mean?'

The liquid oozed, then began pouring out, as if from internal
buckets.

` Maybe we're supposed to drink it.'
` Maybe so. Let's do it.'

And so some of them began lapping up the substance with their
tongues.



I stood back with some others, wondering all the time whether they
had been brave or foolish. I felt uncomfortable. I sensed myself
becoming anxious. A decision had to be made.







I awoke with a start. The moon shown through onto my room's white
walls. I needed to pee so badly that my gut ached. My body felt like
it had turned into a quivering wet concrete sidewalk, heavy. My legs
seemed to be to attached to lead weights. Sleep was still upon me.
The urge was to roll over and ignore the pressure of urine on my
bladder by assuming a new, more comfortable position. I tried it. It
worked for about five minutes, but the discomfort was still
noticeable enough to keep me awake. I looked at black night sky, the
stars shining through my open window. It would be cold outside the
covers. My feet would recoil at the touch of the icy floor.

I took the plunge. Moving the covers aside, I turned to the edge of
the bed, foot curled, toes and heels to the cold linoleum floor and
made my way to the bathroom.  Relief was immediate.  But now, I was
awake, maybe for good on this dark, star-filled night.

As I entered the kitchen, I coughed.  My ribs still hurt from the
previous day's grappling session at Cobra-Ksha martial arts dojo.  I
hadn't been aware until that moment that I had gotten damaged in
those training matches.  That part of the session had only lasted
fifteen minutes. ` All in a day's.....,'  I thought as I scooped two
tablespoons of New Orleans style chicory blended coffee into the hemp
filter which sat, still damp from rinsing, in my drip coffee
maker.  ` Three cups equals nine,'  I thought, still groggy, pouring
water into the back receptacle of the coffee machine.

I lived in a second floor flat with two women.  All the rooms of the
flat had white walls. The card appended to the wall closest to me
said, ` Don't be a stranger. Come on out. There are people out here
who want to see you.'







The house dog started barking. One of the women yelled from their
room for the dog to quiet down. The other woman came down the
corridor and asked the woman, who had yelled, whether she had felt
the presence of a spirit. She said, `No!  Go back to bed.'

But the dog began barking again, after the one woman went back to
bed. So, I got up from my chair where I was sitting waiting for the
coffee machine to finish its cycle. I went around the corner  and saw
the poodle running around the study, almost as if it were chasing its
tail. But it was a frantic run, a crazed run. I called the dog out
and she immediately jumped over the entrance to the room and as she
did, a light-greenish fire leapt up to singe her belly.  She looked
up at me wince-whining like lonely dogs do.

I decided to walk through the flames. They looked cool to me and when
I passed through the doorway, they really didn't burn.  When I got
inside, the room was brilliantly lit. Another little, yellow dog  was
yapping at my feet, jumping up towards my lap and panting. Then, I
saw her. She was sitting on her boudoir bench applying her makeup.
She looked into her large mirror and saw me standing there.

` What are you doing here?'

` I just came in.'  I said stupefied.

` I can see that,'  she said. ` Why did you come in?  This is my
room.'

` Well the dog...,'  I started to say.

` What dog?'

I looked down. The little, yellow dog was gone. It had literally
disappeared. And the room had taken on a darkened aura, as if it were
flame lit. Indeed, I spied a gas light on the room's red velvet
walls. Meanwhile, the woman continued to apply her makeup. She
applied white strips of a paint-like substance first,  to  the bridge
of her nose and then curved it up the left side of her cheek.

` Well?'  she asked impatiently.

` I'm not sure,'  I replied.

` Get out!'  she shrieked.

I turned and exited through one door into a long hallway. ` Where the
hell am I?'  I thought.

Then, another woman appeared, approaching me from down the hall. Her
black shoulder length hair bounced, as the determined click-clack of
her heels echoed hard, from the wooden floor. By the time her face
met mine, she was saying, ` My name is Nancy.  What's yours?'

She was pretty in her own way, smallish, intellectual looking, horn-
rimmed glasses framed her light blue eyes. She wore a low cut blue
blouse which displayed
a white, fat-fingered cleavage. She wore her blouse  tucked  loosely
into her pleated black skirt, which, as it happened, was hemmed just
above her knees. Along with this, she had pine wooden pumps on with
thin white leather straps secured to her feet with silver buckles.

She told me straight off that she relished  seeing  people who
deserved  punishment, tortured, painfully before their deaths.

I blurted out that my name was Mike. I didn't tell her that
executions sickened me. I suppose that I wanted to hide my true
response to her pronouncement.

Then, of a sudden, the door opened down the hall and the woman with
the white stripped makeup on appeared and starting running towards
us. Nancy stood her ground and got into a  karate pose. The other
woman was tearing her dressing gown from her shoulders as she ran.
Nancy waited, crouching slightly, ready to pounce. And then they met
in mid air, snarling like two sabre tooth tigresses, Nancy drawing
her long fingernails down the other woman's cheek. A banshee level
scream issued from the other's mouth and she ran back to her dressing
room, slamming her door. Nancy took my hand and we walked towards the
other woman's door. Then, she dropped my hand and punched the heel of
her shoe through the wooden door, shattering it. As she pulled her
leg  back quickly, the door splintered into a pile of sawdust.

The other woman was again seated at her dressing table, again re-
applying her white striped makeup. She turned, glaring at Nancy as
Nancy snarled, anticipating the kill. Getting up from her boudoir
bench, the other woman stretched her right arm out, swooping it out
from her gown, her black jewel eyes, blazing. Her fingers spread full
towards Nancy, as she hissed.   Nancy's body turned fluid, smashing
with a sickening ` Splop!'  against the room's back wall into a
perfect square. All that was left of her was a blue, white, pink,
red, black Kandinsky-like painting.


http://www.glyphs.com/art/kandinsky/comp6640.jpg




Terrified, I turned and noticing the green flames, I leapt, heaving
my body through them, tumbling out onto the carpeted floor of my
apartment. As I lay there, the little white poodle came up to my face
and licked  blood from my temple.

  I awoke again with a start. The moon's brightness still showing
through onto to my room's white walls, my gut cramping with piss.

"Where's my black coat?" she said.

Have you gobbled it up?"  Frances was bored.  When she was bored, she
wanted dry Shiraz.  The drier, the better.  She thought of Egypt
during drought.

"I found it!"  she said, exiting bedroom with a hieroglyphic walk.
She
put it 'half-on', draping it languidly over her shoulder and proceeded
to march towards the doorway.

"You got the keys?"

"Yeah babe.  You got yours?"

"No."

The door slammed shut behind them and a dish fell off its soapy loft
into the stainless steel wash basin.  She looked disdainfully behind
her.

"Don't worry, Joops.  I will get to it!"

"Shee-it.." he gasped from his partially perforated windpipe.

"Talk like that and that neck hole you've got will be more than
partially perforated,"  Frances warned sternly.

Joops unlocked the passenger side door of the old, tanned Hyundai and
Frances hopped in, reaching over to unlock the driver's side door.
It wouldn't open.

"Kick it!  The damn thing's been jamming since the attempted hi-
jacking last week."

Joops punched the door open with a push-kick which severely dented
the frame.

"But it opened..., " she smiled.

"Good thinking, Frances,"  he shot back

"That's MY job."  she laughed.  "Onward Joops!"

"Yaz Bazz," came his sardonic reply.

The tires spun a dirt cloud into the air and they were off, down the
driveway, sliding into the empty street.  They zig-zagged through the
traffic, honking "keep clears!"

"I feel sick,"  Frances sighed.  "Too much cream pie yesterday.  Can
you please drive a little slower?" she pled.  "I think, I might
throw-up."

"Whoah..." Joops whispered aloud.

"Not that slow,"  Frances complained

"It's a goddam roadblock--put your glasses on girl!"  he said as he
pumped the spongy brakes on the Hyundai........

By emulating whatsoever has power over them, many Beings hope to attain some
power for themselves.

Today, it is common to emulate the machine.

However, in the past it may have been more likely to emulate a rhino or a
dinosaur, or something that had killed your only son.

But I -- I didn't want to emulate anything -- I wanted to go back to a time
when things were far more simpler.

I found myself back in the 1940s: Here I was , the eldest of eight siblings,
moorish, dark, working as a nursing hand -- a nursing assistant?--inside a
large hospital. I cleaned the floors, I mopped everything--that was my
long-hour day-time work.

And, that I did not think of it, was my redemption.

Nights-- in this time-- spelt freedom, and I had a smooth, brown suit, but
also a silk dress, bright red. First I wore the brown suit, which looked
like it may have been cut out of military material. It was snug,
well-fitting, and disguised its origins quite well. I'd come to meet a
friend, who worked at the local parliament. He was a darling of physicality,
his suit fit him like a glove, and allowed a certain, undaunted
flexibility --with none of that terrible military starchedness.

The man who wore it was sure of himself -- and so I followed him. First up
the shallow wooden steps, right up through his apartment. Well it was a
house with soft, blue carpets, somewhat worse for wear, but not noticeably
ragged. And there was no separation between myself and him, rather we
climbed the steps together in a sort of close-formality, and I could feel
his animal presence, sort of like the warmth of radiation. And, I was at
such a distance as to keep myself warm, away from hours of cold hospital
work and the memory of its emptiness, and that was why I followed by him, so
very closely.

There I was wearing my red silk dress, and fine shoes, and I'd forgotten all
about the brown attire, for I was wearing fine attire, and we were on our
way to a party, along with all the other guests.

We'd catch two vehicles, and they would take us there-- but then the man I
had been following jumped into a black coach, and there was barely enough
room for him to fit inside. The window seemed to compress against his head.
The cab was crowded and the glass that caught his breaths --mist against the
icy irradiation-- was like perspex.

So, I sat in the next coach, with the rest of the cocktail group -- as it
seemed we were going to a formal party. I was concerned -- yet fell back
into neutrality, caught up in the journey itself--expecting our rendezvous.

The driver said, "oh, no, the other cab has exploded--Its been totally
destroyed!"

I assumed it must be behind, because I couldn't see it. He had a rear-view
mirror, he would have been able to see it. Only it was ahead--and it was in
a torrent of fire and debris.

Down on the other side of a chasm--I ran down the slope and past the
slippery body fluids that marked its track. I thought to myself, "I really
don't want to see the bodies"--as I made my way down, past the emergency
workers, who were already cleaning up.

One of them took me aside, in a young woman's tone of matriarchal sympathy,
said, as though she had read my thoughts, " My dear, I don't think you
will -really- want to see their bodies."

--

http://www.iinet.net.au/~scratchy/disintegration.html

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/diogenesthecynic/

Premises:

To Act against one's own individual interests is by definition
Irrational. (Rationality never deliberately inflicts self harm or
works towards self-contradiction).

However, habitual Irrationality can become ingrained via social
forces (the norm) in the individual over time, with the result that a
sense of humanity and, in particular, the identification of
rationality with one's own humanity and self-fulfillment is lost
temporarily, or for good.

Once one has lost one's sense of one's own humanity, one cannot get
back anything from others, unless those others have become overtly
self-sacrificial and/or genuinely Irrational (lacking in self
preservation inclination or skills, or is sick, themselves.
The ability to prevent harm occurring to Self or Others has then been
impaired, and is either partially or  totally lacking in the
individual actor, due to damage incurred directly by the lack of self-
indentification with one's own organic and spiritual desires. So,
whenever anyone willingly sacrifices  their own humanity or self
preservation, or (in the case of the forced absence of choice) their
own conscious desire for their humanity and self-preservation on
their own part, they are acting irrationally.

-------------------

The irrationalism of patriarchy.

------------------
Patriarchy defines the sexual hierarchy of human society since at
least the dawn of civilization.  The societal relation which has been
developed by humans living within this hierarchical norm has branched
in many directions. In the foremost instance, patriarchy has been
expressed within the sphere of production as men oppressing other
men.  They do not directly oppress women because for the most part
women are/were sequestered within the family unit.

One must expect that within partiarchy there is always a denial of
other men's individually-founded sensibilities, for the sake of (an
often  spurious, but sometimes genuinely-rewarding) "social"
rationality.

Still, it is the case that a well-functioning patriarchy (without too
many jarring social upheavals, and/or poverty) may be gentler to
women than it is to men. This is because women may not be directly
manipulated in the public realm, but are treated indirectly, through
the home front.

The woman remains nonetheless trivialised..

As long as Society functions smoothly, the trivialisation of women
doesn't matter: After all, the males are also trivialised in their
jobs, in so far as their individual needs and desires are devalued in
favour of the "matter at hand"-- usually by  the bosses' and
companies'  needs and desires.

But supposing that a woman was to face a real problem?  Within
patriarchy, because women are trivialised as a matter of course, she
will probably  have no recourse, and no easy solution to her problem.

When a woman in Jordan (an extreme kind of patriarchy, perhaps) is
raped, this is not considered to be a separate and real problem quite
apart from general categories, already pre-established, of males
functioning in relation to other males.  (Women are always a
secondary appendage to anything rational or "real", in a patriarchy).

Male oriented categories of harm, in this case, relate to "problems
of family honour", and possible feuding hostilites between groups and
tribes.

Unfortunately, only such pre-existing patriarchal categories are
considered "rational" --( in this case the same as "publically
sanctioned" and/or socially inviolable)--and only those solutions are
societally legitimated.  If a solution is not publically sanctioned,
nor recognised as stemming from a legitimate claim of righteous
indignation, then it is generally considered by patriachal value
systems to be "irrational".

Not being permitted to oppose something that is not in their own
interests renders women "Irrational" by STRUCTURAL  definition.
Being killed in order to "cleanse the family honour" is something
that every rational woman would oppose.  And yet the woman  is forced
to accept a state of Irrationality, compelled as she is (by force of
social circumstance) to affirm the interest  -- that of her family,
according to Patriarchal "Rationality" -- that opposes  hers.

She is SITUATIONALLY irrational, therefore, since she is not
permitted to base her existence on her own voluntary choices within
the objective, materially-existing conditions in which she finds
herself.

*HER* rationality can only be expressed through the negation of these
historically developed and accepted social norms.

According to Sartre, she has Choice: to act Rationally (that is, in
her own interests) or Irrationally.. -- [ie. she is "condemned to be
free."]

But, as previously assumed, to accept a fate which is not within
one's own interests is Irrational, by definition.  Yet, to accept
one's own individual rationality -- in this instance -- will probably
ALSO spell social condemnation and THE VERY SAME  punishment -- (up
to and including)  death itself.

She absolutely cannot become a party to an Act of Irrationality that
would condemn her -- a rape victim -- to Death, in order to atone for
her family's "dishonour".

----------------
The "other" side of the coin within the Patriarchal realm.
------------------
To see a man who has genuinely lost a real sense of his humanity --
his individual sense of his own feelings and desires --  try  to
reclaim some sense of the importance of his own identity through
harming and criticising, and oppressing others, is sad and even
terrible.

One knows, straight away, that this type of approach is extremely
likely to fail, just as anything which does not stem from an
individual's voluntary sense of choice, the ability to choose right
from wrong, is destined not to reward the Actor in question.

He is alienated fundamentally from himself, and therefore trying to
find the "something missing"  he is after, but he is doing this
through the direct infliction of hurt and sorrow upon others.

What this man who has turned towards oppressing others really wants
is an inner-sense of himself as a valuable human being with a right
to choose voluntarily for himself.  Yet even to himself, he seems to
have lost this quality, irrevocably.  He has learnt, though his own
practical experience, regrettably, that it is through direct force,
as well as formal rules and regulations, that voluntary choice (the
ability to choose rationally) is either given or taken away.  He
himself is no longer the arbiter of his own choices.

Specifically, he knows that what he most wanted has been taken away
from him. Now, he feels he must oppress others, in a direct attempt
to get something --"anything" -- back.  This was the way that he,
himself, was treated by that which he understands to be the
publically ordained "system".  ( It has betrayed him, though).

When one is Rational, one must resist any temptation to give away
one's rights to make voluntary decisions as free individual.  The
Woman who is Rational and is oppressed (and ditto for  the Man who is
oppressed) knows this as a reality of profound self preservation,
deep down, instinctively.

Yet, most choose to act Irrationally.  The contradiction causes a
psychological sickness within the individual ( alienation from self)
and this sickness comes to set the standard for the "norm" in society
at large.

The woman who is being hurt by all of this must reject this male who
is trying to inflict damage against her, but only in so far as his
efforts are intended (directly or indirectly) to hurt her.

She knows that if one loses one's sense of Rationality as an
individual autonomous human being one then succumbs, just as if by
willing submission, to all sorts of violation carried on this
Irrational storm of death. Many a violated Arab woman is compelled to
submit even to the worst of violations: Death.



By Mike B and Jenny A

Some years ago now, we had a bad experience when my boyfriend --
David -- and I walked into our favourite pub.

We had always enjoyed visiting this local watering spot, but today
something was different.   A menacing stranger stood at the door, and
his frame blocked the whole entrance, or so it seemed, for he was a
massive 6 feet tall, and as wide as a giant.

My boyfriend said, "Jenny, come away from there!"  The man had a
fierce and disturbing stare.  It looked like there could be something
wrong with him like he was on speed or something, because he didn't
seem to register our presence, although we spoke to him nicely and
asked him if he would mind moving a litle so that we might sneak
past.  In fact it seemed like nothing would move him, not even the
patron of the pub who muttered to himself as he hovered nervously
nearby, and looked at us apologetically, before hurrying off back
behind the bar, for his own safety's sake.

"Excuse me," I said, trying not to make a scene.  "Can we get past?"

He moved a little bit, but just enough so that we could  barely
squeeze by his large frame.  Sweat was dripping off him from the
closeness of the contact, as it was now dripping off us, too.

Somehow we managed to squeeze past him, inch by inch, to make it
through the door.

Fifteen seconds taken to get past him seemed like five weeks.

When finally we made our way in through the entrance, David was
already  looking exhausted.  Just pour me a pint of Guinness!" David
requested the barman, with a deep and panicky sigh.

He sunk his face into the Guinness, without stopping to pause for a
moment, and I calmly asked for my usual drink --a  glass of cool
chardonnay.

Just then, we looked up, and who would be in front of us but the
menacing stranger.  The first thing I noticed was his nostrils -- I
was looking up into them;  so wide, hairy and inflamed.  Then he
emitted a deep rumble from his throat, which sounded like, "YOU'D
BETTER COME WITH ME, BITCH!"

It shocked me.  I smelt his sweat and just then, and  I instinctively
dropped my wineglass.

"Hey, there!" somebody shot out from behind me, as if to distract the
stranger.

Right then, I was so startled that I turned suddenly, and let my arm
fling out, across the bar, as I made a right hand turn.

I turned sharply; but I was angry, and my hands formed tightly into
fists.

Before I knew it, the menacing stranger was leaning over the bar,
looking stunned, as blood dripped from his tongue from a spinning
backfist to the back of the head.

The sight of the blood excited me, so that  I decided to finish him
off before he had a split second to react.

I turned to face him square on, and gave him a right upper-cut, which
made him  look at me with bewilderment, fright and rage.

As quick as a flash, I shoved him in the nose with a determined left
palm thrust -- which caused little trickles of blood to ooze out
everywhere!

  I reached out behind his neck to finish him off; just as he was just
beginning to recover with a wide streetswipe towards me with his
clenched right fist.

That was my best chance, and so I moved in close to hold him tightly
around his neck.  Then  I forced his head down again, and again, as
leaning back, I gave him the sharp  taste of my  knee in his groin,
seven or eight  times.

We still go to our favourite pub, but I doubt that menacing stranger
will be bothering David or I again, after the police came and took
him away, as a known thug who had been threatening others in the
area.

So, we can now go to our favourite pub in peace.  The patron of the
bar is pleased too, as he often offers David and I a free Guinness.

--- In philosophicalcreativity@y..., "thrillracer1" <thrill01@i...>
wrote:
> cute pic, but those into child porn would have a field day with it.
> who is that kid?
*****************

No porn intended or even thought of.  It's an old family pic.

Mike B)

cute pic, but those into child porn would have a field day with it.
who is that kid?

PROPAGANDA


The drive down the peninsula was relatively sane.  The radio was set
to KGO, talk-radio.  I needed some company and 81am was the "choych
of my choyce".

The atmosphere in the City had left me feeling alienated.  The demo
was good; but what good did it do?   Ah, that was the seemingly
eternal question.  What the hell good did it do? The converted had
demonstrated their ire to `world' but who in the society knew in
their minds, must less in their guts what we, `these creatures' were
speaking of.

"Freedom for Guatemalan Political Prisoners!  Save the indigenous
peoples of the Americas!  Down with  genocide!"

Sure, I had screamed in unison with the others in the ten thousand
strong demo. I knew nobody and nobody wanted to know me.  No, not
really, not in the way that they'd want to go have a beer and discuss
everyday life.  Their unity with me and others in this `parade' was
based on slogans.

Nothing was being felt.  So distant, it all was.   Individuals in
the `parade' (for that is what it amounted to) remained firmly
ensconced in their own private orbits.  Community was missing;
perhaps, I thought subversively, " stolen in the night by an order of
the `Blanco Mano'–Mission District branch, of course."

The women demonstrating were on their guard, lest you commit a sexist
act up to and including raping them and the men were loath to find
themselves being set up for a homosexual encounter or worse a
conversation with a computer programmer.   Ok, so I'm being a bit
glib.  Still, the spirit of being in solidarity with the oppressed
did not translate into real human contact in the streets.

Perhaps those non-participants who watched us knew that.  They were,
after all, the proletariat, the people some of us were trying to lead
or at best to educate, agitate and organise.

Mostly likely though, they didn't.  Most likely they just went
along.  That's what most did.  They just went along.  After all,
wasn't it the case that WE lived in the freest society in the world?
Didn't this very demonstration prove that?


Outside my driver's side window, I saw the usual procession of
Beamers, Macs, Fords and Chevies passing me on the left.  I preferred
the right,  the slow lane.  As I glanced forward again, I saw it: a
large black truck tyre tread on the road.  The  driver of the Buick
ahead had manoeuvred into the left just in time to avoid running it
over.  In a second, my instinct moved my hands to turn my steering
wheel just enough to miss the retread.     As I checked my rear view
mirror, I spotted the car behind me swerve and hit the guard rail.
My eyes turned back to the road in front of me.

"There's nothing I can do," I rationalized.  "Somebody with a cell
phone behind me will call the cops."

With that, I continued my way home, driving near, then passing SFO;
but not before a Mexicana flight thundered over my head.

"The wind must have changed.  They usually don't leave that close to
the freeway."

Meanwhile KGO was talking to me, "The Giants lost 5-4 to the Mets.
Bonds hit his 37th home run of the season.   More on the game, after
this..."

"Harry?"

"Yes, Sally."

"Have you heard about the sale on leather couches this weekend at
Freedom Furniture............"

The KGO commercials seemed to fade into my subconscious as I spied
Picasso on a billboard advertising the new iMac.  "THINK DIFFERENT",
was the message.  Every time I had seen or thought about Picasso
since 1972, I always dredged up my own copyrighted image of him
looking ironically at his Communist Party card as he painted another
canvass which Zhadnov would have undoubtedly have denounced as
obscurantist--if Pablo had been living within the Soviet `sphere of
influence'.   Big IF there.  He preferred France and the Stalinists
were glad to have him more or less silently on their side.

What the heck could you say about a guy who always strove to inspire
artistic integrity and who was now being used as an advertising image
for a `rebel' computer corporation?    I was just glad that I had
read that some nut in CREEP–the Committee to Re-elect the President
under Nixon-- had sent a very sarcastic note to the CPUSA, claiming
happiness that Picasso had died.

Happy?  Why?   Well, both sides in the Cold War used Pablo for
propaganda purposes and as far as I'm concerned–a plague on both
their houses.   Their manipulations meant nothing to me.  His
artistic expression blasted THEM to pieces.

Mendacity and propaganda are inseparable.  THEY are always trying to
use my mind as a tool in their legitimation factories.   When they
proclaimed, "Freedom", then I could assume THEY meant just the
opposite– simple market subservience or even slavery.  They were just
using  people like me and the people whom I held in high esteem as
tools in their legitimation factories.

I was nearing Redwood City as such, I knew that I would be losing a
lane.

"Tourists," I said to myself as I looked at those less prepared than
me.   I was ready to move left.  Turning my  signal on, I advanced
into the next lane.

copyright, 2002, Mike Ballard

Genesis of Stupidity
by
Michael Thomas Ballard


----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------


the thumping strum
beating the floor
with their strong leather shoes
a lonely flute
a green valley
smoky green
it was
white fog
on lushly moist trees and grass
mostly grassy hilly mounds
the haunting voice
yesteryear's love
a place
calling harmonies
make the life
make the life now
spontaneity
grab the life of it

he sat down at the dinner table wondering why the forks had to be on
one side while the spoons were on the other.  the butter dripped from
his big yellow corn cob—stringies in his teeth.

"How come I get stringies in ma teeth Pa?"

"Quiet at the table Jerry."

"Children should be seen and not heard," Aunt Mabel's popcorn voice
rolled out like slow gravel.

Eeee-dults were always saying that.  Especially, they were saying
that when you asked them a question.  They meant, "shut-up".  They
really meant, "I don't know and you're a pest for asking, you little
imp."

I wanted to be an imp.  I wanted to fly up into that calendar photo
on the kitchen wall calendar.  I wanted to see that green valley from
the top of those lawn like knolls and scream my lungs out
with `infernal' questions; to pose them to the leprechauns, the
little people, so magic, so free.

But I stayed quiet.  Didn't want my ears boxed.




----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------

Copyright : copyright Mike Ballard, 2001

At 2:58 PM 11/3/02, nastasia s wrote:
>Hi!
>Well, i have seen your Forum in the Web and thought it
>would be nice to be a member. is it okay with you?
>Regards,
>Anastasia
>
Yes!  Please join in the fray!!

:)

sind Sie deutscherin?

--

New stuff:
http://members.iinet.net.au/~scratchy/AUTOBIOPIX.html

Hi!
Well, i have seen your Forum in the Web and thought it
would be nice to be a member. is it okay with you?
Regards,
Anastasia

__________________________________________________________________

Gesendet von Yahoo! Mail - http://mail.yahoo.de
Ihre E-Mail noch individueller? - http://domains.yahoo.de

Ni dieux, ni maitre

Forget the old THOUS
let's play not just leer
the gods are all dead now
we've nothing to fear
we've ALL yet to seize
we've ALL yet to be
Let's fly
let's be free now
not to be bound
like dogs on a leash
NOR masters of hounds
Tout au contraire!
To live the great life
that's our desire
running together
not with the liar
sweat fucking love
rough riding a whirlwind
twisting our bodies round
passion drenched see dreams
exploding all shackles
Soyons réalistes,
demandons vos rêves!!
c'est le meilleur
ni maitre ma chérie
ni maitre ni dieux

Mike Ballard copyright, 2001

Go to this web site:http://www.crimsonbird.com/writers/fiction.htm

If everything discrete is a frontier, then the limits
of space are the points outside
                 a and b, the amount of matter that separates a and b
extends or narrows the limits of
                  space. Put a lot of points between a and b, and space
expands, limit them and space
                     contracts.Tom could see that everything was grey,
because his eyes had not been
                     developed yet to see nothing. Yet there was
nothing before his eyes, and so he
                                                      registered it as
grey.

                  After a while it looked like little sequins moving in
front of his eyes, because he
                                       was unaccustomed to seeing
nothing for so long.

                        He closed his eyes, and felt kind of queasy,
the sensation of "nothing".

                 But in his minds eye, he saw something, his visions of
himself from the past, memories
                  of people he had met, all clearly, more clearly than
he could have seen them in real
                 life, as there was nothing else to distract him. They
seemed quite material, rounded,
                 and subject to gravity. He could not tell which way
the pull of gravity. It must have
                                                been coming from his
mind's eye.

                 He would place one of his imaginary figures, ten
metres away from his mind's eye, and
                  then another figure nine metres away from his mind's
eye, so he would start to build
                     up a little bit of density, and then another seven
metres away from his mind's
                                                        eye..and so
forth.

                 He was claiming space for himself, first a modest
distance of ten metres, and then the
                       space within that inner radius, nine metres,
eight metres, seven metres....

                   The universe was expanded, although inert -- for
each person was a potentiality of
                     consciousness, who could in turn expand the
universe by placing figures around
                  themselves in a certain radius. Those who could place
the figures the fartherest out
                  caused the explosion of material objects, outwards.
However, first the space within
                                            the closest vicinities must
be claimed.

                     This was Tom's imaginings--and he knew it wasn't
real, but he couldn't help the
                   positing of his mind's eye, because his eye received
onlly nothing data. The atoms
                    that created him had to be willed into some
concrete form by some dynamic effect,
                                              essentially material and
explosive.

                  The animal eye must be integrated by will, unifying
into one will the various stray
                           atoms, and will must have one goal to
perceive the forms around it.

                  Tom had to recreate the universe-- but he could think
of no other way of doing, than
                                                      by himself
exploding.

                   And he was already too late-- he was already an
evolved creature with no option to
                                                              explode.

                    He knew this well enough as he stood at the edges
of the universe. How did he get
                     here, and who'd put him here? Had a deity done it?
It may have been part of an
                       experiment, but Tom was no scientist, but rather
the subject of experiment.

                 He wondered how long he'd stay here, out in the
corners of none-space. In the far-off
                 distance he saw what looked like an orange ball
exploding, and its stringy fragments,
                     in the nothingness, thousands and thousands of
miles away. There was no way of
                  measuring how far away it was. It could have been
very close, or it could have been
                                      very far away-- and who knows how
big it must be.

                  Perhaps it would reach him eventually -- as he stood
on the edges of the Universe?

                  In the mean time, he was caught up in this
embarrassing Idealist state, where he was
                  unable to integrate atoms from any other Idealist
creatures--which were, after all,
                  creatures of his own imagination! That this condition
implied no option for personal
                    growth began to dawn on him. The communication was
totally introspective. He was
                     speaking to other Idealist creatures in his head,
as he voiced every thought.

                    Worse than that, he could not voice any thoughts
materially, for the air wouldn't
                 carry his verbal vibrations. The realisation of this
fact dawned on him slowly, as he
                  somehow came to feel anew the old, familiar,
sensations of his physical body, as it
                 was, caught up in an abstraction of "non-space", but
yet as a physical, living (though
                 non-breathing) and despairing animal. And then the
realisation that *he* wasn't going
                  to explode, and that he hadn't exploded seemed to
forbode well, though it meant that
                    he, too, was an Idealised creature, formed with all
probability in someone else's
                 thoughts, and he knew then that this inner space of
his was now entirely dependent on
                                                    him for its
subsistence.

                  Yet he was still an overdeveloped creature from
another universe, and knew that this
                   new universe, in the distance somewhere, exploding
silently, would have no use for
                                             him, in his present
material state...

                    His one immediate thought was that he was on the
outer edges of Dante's hell, and
                                         maybe he would freeze to death
as a result.

                                           Yet this didn't happen; not
immediately.

                 He wondered how long it would take for this to happen.
In his vision, in the distance,
                   everything unwound at an inactive snailspace, and so
he wondered again how long it
                                         would take for anything to
actually HAPPEN.

                             What would it take for him to sustain life
in his new condition?

                  Right then he adjusted his overalls and laughed
aloud-- that laughter carried over a
                     thousand stars however -- for the atoms were just
beginning to form that would
                                                   construct the new
universe.

                     And with this thought in mind, Tom fabricated, in
his own --Idealist-- personal
                                      universe, a longing sigh ...of
peaceable relief.









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