Jack Burns Lives!

hoo, hoo-oo, hoo, hoo

At first, the sound is faint. Traveling through his single exposed ear, through the tympanic membrane, the vibrating sound then passes the malleus, incus, stapes and on to the cochlea, the auditory nerve and finally the brain. The miracle of hearing, even when asleep.

His brain recognizes it as sound, a familiar but untypical sound. He awakens slightly but quickly goes back to sleep as his brain concludes “dream.”

hoo, hoo-oo, hoo, hoo

The brain once again extracts and processes the information from the auditory nerve, but now more alert, the brain delivers an accurate answer: “owl, not a dream.” Now awake, the man listens for confirmation and hears the sound again, this time using his brain to identify location and type. The brain delivers more data and the man concludes it’s in the pin oak tree behind the bedroom. The call doesn’t have the distinctive aw of the Barred owl at the close, so he identifies the call as that of the Great Horned owl.

And there in the cool, dark of the January morning, perched on a solid but moist branch of the oak, not far from the trunk, sits the owl calling to its mate. It’s nesting season in the Delta, and this owl is one the man has never seen but has heard, usually in January and February.

Now fully alert, a wave of nocturnal excitement passes through him. He nudges his wife.

“Allison.”

“Uh…”

“Allison.”

“What?”

“Listen…it’s a Great Horned owl.”

…well, I was more thrilled than my wife to hear my long lost friend had returned. I don’t think she was too keen on being awakened at 3:00 AM by her bird-nut husband.

This particular species will maintain a territory or nesting area for as long as eight years. Some captive birds live more than thirty years, although wild ones generally live less than fifteen years. I’m not exactly sure how long this one has been around, but it’s been here, off and on, for at least five years. They’re fairly territorial, so the chances are good this is the same bird. He’s shared a bounty of food with a Coopers hawk that also seems to enjoy our critter friendly domain.

Every day should start with the calls of our avian friends.

I enjoyed Hayduke’s recent post about the ruling economist class and invite you to read it if you haven’t already. As I read it, it made me think about all of the people I’ve recently met that have mentioned economics in one way or another. A child majoring n economics. Going back to school to get a second degree in economics. Reading books by economists.

It’s as Hayduke says. There’s some strange obsession with it, as if it moves and dictates what happens in the world. And perhaps to some degree it does, for after all, doesn’t it seem like everything in the world these days revolves around markets, growth and profits?

So it seems. But as is often the case in life, things are not as they seem. When the market closes for the last time, people will finally realize the world is not run by economists. Biology is the big momma. You can have all the spreadsheets and forecasts in the world, but when all is said and done, the earth only has so many resources and every single bit of economic growth man can muster is ultimately depends on resources the earth offers.

Why this insistence that the earth is getting ready to slap humanity, as we often say in the South, upside the head?

We’re ignorant. We can’t change. Even when we act like we’re trying to get our act together, we do stupid shit. Exhibit Number One: the “green” movement. Really nothing more than a way to keep the machine moving and to make more unneeded stuff.

Why are we so ignorant? One reason is education. We’re (humans in general, but especially in the United States) poorly prepared to deal with today, much less the future. We don’t understand how the world really works. How everything is ultimately dependent on biological and geophysical balance and how economics must be bound within that reality, via steady-state, sustainable economic policy. We just don’t get it.

I began to sense back in the ’70′s a shift from liberal arts educations to more business, economics oriented educations. As the world became more enamored with globalization, growth and technology, it seemed to become less concerned with poetry, biology, music, art and history. Parents were terrified of their children becoming liberal arts majors and perpetuated the myth that if you majored in liberal arts, you’d never get a real job and be destined forever to deliver pizzas to your former classmates that supposedly made better choices.

Suddenly, we found ourselves in a bizarre, Blackberried world completely obsessed with money and profit, big houses with multi-car garages and lavish vacations, and no one wanted their little Billy to be ill-equipped to keep up with the Joneses.

According to a Yale Alumni Magazine article, thirty-five years ago, business accounted for 13.6 percent of the nation’s bachelor’s degrees By 2002, that number was just under 22 percent, and by now, I’d be willing to wager it’s over percent. So, more than a quarter of all American bachelor’s degrees are in business.

That doesn’t include economics. When you add that, it’s probably well over percent.

In 2005, The Wall Street Journal published a story that stated the du jour major for undergrads was economics. Some schools are publishing statistics that show the numbers of economics majors doubling, even tripling.

In the same period, students seeking liberal arts educations dropped dramatically. English accounted for almost 8% of degrees in 1971, but sunk to 4% by 2002; history had 5% “back in the day,” but now only represents 2%. Foreign language degrees have also shrunk considerably.

So, this is the state of the state. Obsession with money. Poorly educated young people incapable of making changes, because they don’t understand how the world really works. Their apathy is driven by their ignorance.

You may say “Look at how involved young people are in the upcoming election! They’re fired up for change! Don’t tell me young people don’t know what’s going on, and that they can’t change things. They can!”

No. I’m afraid the vast majority do not. They’re focused on Iraq but don’t really understand the deeper drivers behind the Iraqi situation or why Clinton or Obama will not (can not) change American imperialism. They’re focused on global warming but don’t really understand just how dramatically their lives are going to have to change in order to make a dent in what’s happening with climate change. And they’re too obsessed with side-line issues like abortion or worse yet, American Idol.

Yes, there are a few, a tiny few, learning permaculture. Learning real life skills and eschewing the trappings of what Abbey called syphilization. They’re investing in their lives, not future fortunes. But I fear there are too few of them and too many business and economics obsessed twenty-somethings willing to do whatever it takes for their piece of pie. CPA’s and bean counters. Not enough bean growers.

I’m incredibly more impressed with a bike riding kid that is a craftsman, that can write, sew and grow food than a kid with an bachelors degree in Business from Harvard. In less than twenty years, the Harvard kid may be looking to the first kid for some help.

World stocks nosedived today, and according to Yahoo News, “the losses on the blue-chip stock indexes of Germany, Britain and France alone amounted to more than $350 billion, or roughly the size of the combined economies of New Zealand, Hungary and Singapore.”

The DOW will crater, just one domino of several, and according to Jim Sinclair, a panic is about to occur with emergency action coming in days. He’s telling to people to buy gold, but as my friend Hayduke says, I’d rather invest in my life than emergency schemes to protect monetary wealth.

I’ll happily settle for shelter, a garden, a good shotgun and ammo, a canoe, fishing poles and accoutrement, food storage, access to clean water and wood. I’ll need my books and some good wine.

Our economic system, in fact our entire system, is like a terminally ill patient. They symptoms have been there for some time, untreated. Even ignored. But we’re now approaching the end, the point of no return, because we’ve allowed the disease to metastasize and spread to the vital organs. The lust for money and power has eaten away our brain to the degree that there doesn’t appear to be any reasoning or sensible cognitive function remaining.

Most Americans naively believe technology can save us.

So we now find ourselves hospitalized, no longer self-sufficient, fluid drained from our abdomen weekly, on intravenous pain meds and with close monitoring.

A few people gather in the hallway, whispering about what a good society we had. Where we went wrong, what could have been done, assigning blame, and guessing how long we have. Others completely deny the obvious.

And like a patient, we will briefly rally. Sit up in the bed, have some hopeful conversation, avoid the necessary talk about what’s really happening, and lapse again into semi-consciousness. Maybe another brief rally, followed by coma and finally, death.

What’s happening with the economy is the death rattle. It’s a warning about what’s to come. A society that’s propped up by a cheap, non-renewable energy source and that lives by the philosophy “if you ain’t growing, you’re dyin’” will not last. In fact, it will most certainly bring death.

But amazingly, no one at the Fed or in the big brokerage houses appears to be connecting the dots. It’s the most amazing case of willful denial and ignorance I’ve ever witnessed. Even as oil climbed to $100pb, it’s still “Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead, matey!”

So, here we go. As some of us have been saying for a long time, Peak Oil will ultimately mean recession and then crash. Combine that with global climate change, shrinking aquifers and the stubbornly stupid insistence that technology can save us, and you have what some call a real mess. But people apparently don’t like the truth.

I call it blessed relief. Maybe we’ll come to our senses. And remember, in death there is life. Ultimately, something better, a sustainable society, awaits us.

On the east side of town, fifteen miles beyond the Chickasaw Bluffs, where the Chickasaw and Hernando de Soto once trod, beyond the mighty Mississippi and the dark, fertile Delta, the Caterpillar 854G diesel engine roars. Smoke billows from its 880 horsepower engine as the 200,000 pound machine lumbers across the land, pushing dirt into huge piles in preparation for the final, human assault.

First came the speculators. Then the engineers and the bankers. Followed shortly thereafter by lawyers, more surveyors and government lackeys. All for their piece of the pie.

Many of the animals, veterans of earlier takeovers, moved early. They’d seen it before and instinctively knew it was time to move on. But to where? Others, less experienced with the invasions of featherless bipeds, stayed. The raccoon waited until night, scampering backward down the tree and across the forest floor, moving northwest, toward the Wolf River, turning east, following it for almost a mile looking for food and a suitable place to nest. Finding none, it traveles another two miles before it stopping again to rest and survey for a new nest.

For those that dallied or waited for the forest machines to arrive, the scene is horrific. The big CAT snaps trees like matchsticks in a terrifying cacophony of noise and violence. The nuthatch and cardinal make a hasty escape, along with the Morning dove, fleeing as a group. Chipmunks, slumbering in their winter dens beneath the soil, are crushed under the weight of steel and wood and compacted earth.

At night, the place seems devoid of life except for a few colonies of unicellular and multi-cellular organisms surviving in the soil and puddles of water created in depressions of mangled earth. It’s deathly quiet, and you can feel death all around you.

During the day, it looks like someone dropped a bomb. Twisted clusters of trees, piles of earth, the smell of diesel fuel. The former home of various forms of life turned into a horrid wasteland so a privileged few can pocket their precious profits.

After the 854 completes its work, an army of concrete workers and carpenters take over, building a human conclave of dizzying proportions. Hundreds of homes, thousands of square feet each, packed with modern conveniences designed to eliminate even the most cursory amount of effort on the part of its pampered occupants. Lights that turn on by themselves. Auto-play art that changes depending on who’s entering the room. Fireplaces that start with the push of a button from a remote control. Bang & Olufsen theaters. Four car garages, pools, fountains and sprinkler systems that suck water from the alluvial plane in such prodigious amounts that the once seemingly endless supply of cool, clean water in the Memphis Aquifer is threatened.

A gluttonous feast for mostly wealthy white folks, built at the expense of the former inhabitants and with cheap, Mexican labor.

It’s a strange juxtaposition we have here in the Delta between the natural and the unnatural. Between life and lifestyles. Life hanging on in the midst of creeping industrialization. The Delta is a immensely beautiful and mysterious river valley characterized by vast broadleaf deciduous and needleleaf evergreen forests, fertile soil and widely varied fauna and culture. It’s home to the great Mississippi Flyway, the longest avian migration route in the Western Hemisphere. We have clean water, good soil and a moderate climate. But it’s also home to an absolutely, positively completely and irreversibly fossil fuel dependent corporation that helped create and enable the “gotta have it now” mentality. There are hoards of intermingling developers, bankers and lawyers doing unnecessary, profit soaked deals in private clubs, deals designed to keep the non-sustainable machine moving forward.

Some call it progress. I call it hell.

Back in the Delta, just south of downtown Memphis and the industrial quagmire on President’s Island, a Brown creeper makes it way up a towering American elm searching for insects. Urocyon cinereoargenteus, the Common Grey fox, stops to smell the base of a Southern Yellow pine, eventually marking the tree with its urine, its ears and nose alert to any potential predator or prey. There’s also a vast pool, created by a small tributary of the river, where a mallard drake calls to his brothers and sisters, encouraging them to land and congregate with him, wisely avoiding the flooded and decoyed rice fields just four miles away.

And soaring above it all is the Red-tailed hawk, carefully surveying the landscape with its keen eyes for wintering juncos in a small clearing between the river and the forest.

Life, in its simplest, rational and most glorious form, goes on.

I frequently feel as if I’m fighting for a hopeless cause. That ultimately, at least in my lifetime, the growth maniacs and economic cultists will win. Growth will continue unabated, more habitat will be lost, the planet will continue to warm, human populations will continue to expand and the whole damn planet will eventually look like Detroit. Highways everywhere. Massive, energy intensive skyscrapers. Windmill farms across the prairies. Nuclear plants. More damn dams. Subdivisions as far as the eye can see. Bodies piled up in the Middle East like bales of cotton in the Delta.

“This successful life we’re livin’ got us fueding like the Hatfield and McCoys….”

Try to get away? Where you going, pard? Millions of others will be thinking the same thing. If you think waiting ten years to raft the Grand Canyon is bad, you may one day have to wait years to get a hiking permit in the Smokies. The parking lot at Arches will be constantly filled to capacity.

Why should we have any hope? Why should we even expend the energy fighting? Look at the Presidential race. It’s a farce. The media is against us, pushing the “approved” candidates, the with all-important growth ad infinitum imprimatur stamped on their foreheads. Growth cultists have hijacked the term “green” and are now successfully using it to sell even more stuff and to develop so-called sustainable methods designed to keep the machine moving forward (backward). Turning natural resources currently used for food production into resources to support automobiles. And at the highest levels, economic madmen are twisting, manipulating and maneuvering the cogs and pieces to make the rich richer while the rest of us wallow in their pits.

Just yesterday, I read where the plan is for U.S. troops to remain in Iraq until at least 2018. People cheer wildly when they hear Mike Huckabee talk about instituting a Christian constitution:

“I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution,” Huckabee told a Michigan audience on Monday. “But I believe it’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living god. And that’s what we need to do, to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than try to change God’s standards so it lines up with some contemporary view.”

Say what?

Is anyone paying attention, here? Are humans really this fucking stupid?

I guess so. (more on that in a subsequent post)

I’m hesitant to use the word “fight” since it has so many negative connotations, but fighting obviously doesn’t necessarily mean the use of violence. It doesn’t have to be wasted energy. It can be, as Gary Snyder has said, it can be “standing against the tide; refusing to flow with it.” An interesting and appropriate position in these times. Taoism teaches “going with the flow,” in nature, but when something is so completely and clearly against nature, I believe you must stand against it. You have a moral imperative to resist.

So why even try? I mean, what’s the point? Why not just get all you can for yourself, hoard and stick your big middle finger in the air and say “fuck you” to the whole world. Load your gun, stock up on ammo and supplies and try to hunker down on whatever pitiful little piece of land you can find.

Here’s why.

We can’t just lie down and do nothing. We can’t just let these bastards walk all over us and the voiceless. The lynx. The polar bear. The jaguar. The owl. Songbirds. We have a moral imperative to stand up and be heard! Even to make our own, brief existence more palatable. Just to be a thorn in the side, a pain in the ass, to those that want to destroy life for their own economic benefit.

And dissent develops democracy. You can’t have democracy without dissent.

Last night, my seventeen year old son, stated that “we’re going to have to resort to real revolution.” Meaning violence. I responded by telling him that violence wouldn’t work. It would only bring more violence, and that the ability for the citizenry to successfully resist with arms ended with the invention of the Gatling Gun. The enforcement arm of global capitalism is well armed. In fact, it has 14 Ohio Class submarines that can effectively end all life on the planet. But they don’t need a Trident sub to handle a bunch of peaceniks that want clean water, clean air, decent food and egalitarianism. All they need is a single battalion of militarized, jackbooted goons with tasers to control the streets, while their bosses sit in their ivory towers and control the world.

Welcome to Abbey’s Good News.

In the end, the ultimate end, our side does win. Us folks that want a sensible world where humans live in harmony with the planet and don’t try to kill everything that moves while piling up unnecessary profits in process. Humans can’t continue their industrial domination of the planet for much longer. The fossil fuel boondoggle will end and the planet will stand up and knock us back on our fat, gluttonous asses. Bruised and humbled, we’ll learn how to live in place, how to live sustainably, or we will cease to live. It’s pretty simple.

And speaking of sustainability and living in place, no amount of industrialization, within the context of our current virulent strain of growth capitalism, is sustainable. There is no such thing as sustainable industrialization. It depends on a new-renewable resource and it is the ultimate oxymoron. Abbey’s dream of “a nation of self-reliant farmers, craftsmen, hunters, ranchers, and artists” is probably a false hope. That can never again be recaptured as long as growth capitalism is allowed to exist, mutate and metastasize in a fossil fuel dominated world.

After the Age of Oil? Well, that’s another story.We can talk about steady state economics and the world of simple capitalism, barter and trade after this aberration is past.

Be heard. Be LOUD. Take heart in the fact that although we may never live to see the fruits of our labors, balance and sensibility will ultimately be restored.

One of the reasons I love winter is that is signals the return of some of my favorite songbirds. Especially two species, the Pine and Prairie warblers.

Most warblers prefer the tropics in the winter, but many hang around the Mid-South, apparently finding our moderate winters and food supplies acceptable.

We have two birds, one of each species, that have been visiting now for three winters. I feel fairly certain it’s the same two birds I see year after year, because I only see two, and it’s common for birds to visit the exact same spots, year after year, during their migrations.

Over the years I’ve struggled with my decision to keep feeders, realizing the birds don’t really need the feeders and also realizing that feeders can actually cause some harm in certain situations. Feeders must be kept clean to prevent disease, but even clean feeders can cause birds to unnaturally congregate. Some friends at Audubon tell me not too worry about it, but my worries are no so easily dismissed.

I suppose it also creates another hazard for the birds, in that I commonly find a collections of feathers tossed haphazardly across the ground. Birds that dally too long often become food for Coopers and Red-tailed hawks. I suspect it’s the juncos and Morning doves that are most susceptible, since they feed on the ground and in groups.

But in the end, the joy of seeing my avian friends perch outside my kitchen window or near the patio is always too great, and I replenish the feeders and ignore my guilt.

They like the seed, and I love seeing them.

Abbey threw beer cans out the window and threw rocks at rabbits. I figure I can feed the damn birds.

Little River, Great Smoky Mountains

When I left East Tennessee seven years ago, it was a year too late. I was excited to be headed west, not quiet as far west as I wanted, but anything west of the Tennessee River seemed like an improvement.

Most of my reasons for leaving were business and financially related, although I was convinced, and apparently rightly so, that Knoxville was a town going nowhere. A town suffocating under the crushing weight of over development, traffic and human greed. For a brief, fleeting moment, I naively thought Knoxville could become a special place known for its greenways, intellectual qualities and environmental awareness. Instead, it, like too many places, cast its lot with the growth machine and the bulwark of the community, the University of Tennessee, lead the way.

I’m told by a professor friend, things are now so bad at UT that the professors are going to have a “vote of no confidence” of the President to show their displeasure with the direction of the school. It seems that really important academic areas are to languish, so the University can fund more research into profit motivated boondoggle known as alternative fuels and its ever expanding athletic empire.

Sustainability, writing, music and art are taking a back seat to Fuel Cells and Football. But that’s what most people want, because most people are frankly ignorant. Hopelessly ignorant.

I do have many fond memories of this place, a beautiful landscape of rolling hills, forests, flowing rivers and that well known ancient Proterozoic uplift best known for its incredible diversity of flora and fauna covered by a wispy, smoke-like fog. I met wonderful people. Shared incredible moments with my wife and children on snowy days in the Smokies and in our cozy, Cape-Cod styled home near the University.

I remember our creeky wood floors. Jack Johnson’s ghost. Our neighbors. The large trees that surrounded the house swaying back and forth during storms. Quiet afternoons reading on my deck with Buster the cat and Chewie the dog. Baseball at Lakeshore Park. Swimming at Court South. Our Halloween party. Cross country races on Cherokee Blvd.

Climbing to Spence Field and Gregory Bald and exalting in the glorious, fall sunshine. And best of all, perhaps my most favorite memory, was a brief magical moment near Clingmans Dome. Sitting at 6600 feet on a snow covered path with my wife, surrounded by snow covered trees and icicles, I held her soft, sweet hands and gently but passionately kissed her while the afternoon sun warmed our bodies. The place was beautiful and was so the moment.

“Why leave,” you may ask.

Although we made some life long friends there, one of the biggest issues for me was the people. There’s quiet a passel of ignorant, mean rednecks. I generally like rednecks. Come from a long line of ‘em. But I don’t like mean ones that don’t have a lick of sense. And then you have Oak Ridge and its nasty nuclear power industry, and those gawd awful TVA coal fired plants all over the place. Dumb, mean rednecks, dirty air and nuclear weapons production sort of spoiled everything else.

Over the years, I’ve returned to the park on a handful of occasions, each time promising myself it would be my last. My brother-in-law and other friends would entice me, usually for backpacking, and I found the allure of the mountains too much to resist. Yet, each time I came away saying it would definitely be my last visit to the Smokies. As Abbey would say, people were “loving the park to death.” Too many people, deeply eroded trails, lines of cars stretching for miles and crowded campsites.

And compared to the west, I frankly found it boring.

How does a nature lover find the most biologically diverse park on the continent boring? Within nearly 800 square miles, there are over 10,000 different species. From the southern hardwood forests at 875 feet moving upward to the spruce-fir forests at 6643 feet along the 70 plus mile stretch of the Appalachian Trail, you’ll find the same amount of forest diversity as you would driving from Georgia to Maine. Over 100 native species of trees, 1500 flowering plants and over 230 avian species.

I reckon it’s just a case of “been there, done that.”

I find the east, in general, lacks the color of desert, even in the glorious springtime when the hillsides are covered by white, pink and red rhododendron, or in the more famous fall and its harvest colors. The Smokies lack the wide open expanses of the west. The grandeur of the Sierra Nevada or the Rockies. It’s heaven for a biologist, but I prefer the open spaces. The hot sun. Red rock. Cacti. Dust. And I prefer the diversity of people in the west. American Indian, Spanish, Mexican and Anglo. Cowboys and vaqueros. Saloons. Ghost towns. My own, romanticized and fictional view of things I refuse to disturb with historical facts I’ve buried away somewhere in the recesses of my bizarre brain.

Yes, I’m in love with the over romanticized, often fictionalized west of cowboys and Indians. The real history of Geronimo, the Texas Rangers, Comancheros, The Sioux, Puebloans, Kit Carson and Edward Abbey. The make-believe world of Cormac McCarthy, Woodrow Call and Hayduke.

And as was the case with Abbey, I find the Four Corners region has it all. Mountains, high desert, canyons, rivers, history. I can see golden aspen in the fall and snow capped 14,000 foot peaks. Red rock and cacti. It’s like no other place on earth.

I did, however, return to the Smokies this month, for what I feel certain is my last time. My brother-in-law was once again the instigator, inviting me to accompany he and his son on a loop hike in Elkmont, the first section of the park I explored back in the early ’90s.

As I walked out, via the Sugarland Mtn., Huskey Gap and Little River Trails, I had a different feeling than ever before. Enjoying the pleasure of hiking alone, it was quiet and in this quiet I said goodbye to the park. Thanked it for harboring me and for allowing me to cut my teeth on its trails. For sharing its clear, cool water and its bountiful diversity of life.

Returning to the crowded parking area, I turned around, looked back at the trail and said “goodbye,” figuring my absence was the best gift I could offer this special place. And with a quick turn of the key and the ignition of the engine, I drove forward, not looking back. Looking only ahead, leaving behind some bad memories but taking the good ones with me.

It’s been really shocking to see how the major media players and the two, dominant ruling parties work in unison to silence and attempt to eliminate the only two Presidential candidates talking about “change.” Real change.

And the reason, of course, is those groups don’t want change. They’re all doing pretty well with the status quo and don’t want anyone or any new ideas mucking up the recipe.

I really don’t know why I’m shocked, however. I expected this. Would have been more shocked if a decent candidate really emerged from the rubble, but to see it play out, to see how the whole system is manipulated is really quiet amazing.

McCain, the guy that claims he’ll “chase bin Laden to the gates of hell,” taunted Ron Paul recently sarcastically stating “they’d miss him tomorrow night,” when referring to an upcoming debate. Where’s the backlash? The condemnation for such a mean, puerile comment? The man is a first class asshole and gawd help us if he and his hair trigger finger obtain more power.

Mitt Romney, when asked about the need for a third party, offered up perhaps the lamest excuse I’ve ever heard, asking people to take a look at “countries with multiple parties and all the problems they have.” He says the Republican party needs a “big enough tent for all people.” Wow. That’s really an unbelievable statement that completely defies logic.

And then there’s Huckabee. Perhaps the scariest of all of ‘em.

Obama and Clinton? No changes really. Just fewer bombs, fewer deployments and maybe a little help for some poor folks. Otherwise, mark my words. The taxes will keep rolling in and be distributed to the defense contractors just like always. In the words of David Byrne, “same as it ever was.”

Flip through today’s New York Times, a paper I subscribe to, and all you see are the same names. No mention of Ron Paul or of Dennis Kucinich, the only two candidates talking about real change. Former Liberterian Paul is particularly troubling for the GOP, because they can’t stand having anyone preaching peace in their God and blood camp. Worse yet, he wants to eliminate the IRS, our modern day Gestapo that extracts huge sums of money from the citizenry and turns it over the privileged few. The taxes paid by the upper tier are little more than the admission fee.

Ever wondered why there was such a war against the mafia? It’s because the IRS wouldn’t tolerate competition.

Ron Paul was actually booed by GOP supporters during one of the debates (the one he couldn’t be finagled out of) when he mentioned “giving the Iraqi people their country back.”

And in the background, the Times is helping keep the din the war drums noticable by providing a completely one sided report about a few Iranian speedboats (probably dinghies) taunting three U.S. warships conducting war games just off the Iranian coast. Excuse me, but I think the U.S. guvment would have some major problems with some country floating warships off the coast of Santa Cruz or Destin, Florida. Just who the fuck do we think we are?

I’ll tell you “who.” We think we rule the world, and for the most part we do. But let’s be careful to define “we.” We is not you and me. “We” is a small group of extremely powerful and wealthy people that hand pick the candidates they know will do their bidding once in the Oval Office. Once their in the halls of Congress. Every once in a while an oddball that tries to help common folk and keep the peace slips through, but that also serves the purposes of The Powers That Be, because it provides the bogus system with a facade of legitimacy.

The United States government is not a democracy and never has been. It’s a representative republic controlled by the wealthy, powerful few. They’re the ones represented, and their hand picked representatives have no intention and no responsibility to follow the general will of the people. And if you don’t believe me, follow the money trail, I mean, after all, we basically have a defense contractor (Cheney) running the country and directing our Village Idiot.

My friend, Hayduke, calls this system the news-entertainment-media, and he’s right. That’s exactly what it is. Push the hand picked candidates and their seemingly endless stream of meaningless sound bites, power words and drivel, as well as the approved propaganda about the boogeyman du jour. You know. The seemingly endless stream of enemies out there just ready to take over America and “change our way of life.” Keep the people preoccupied with Hollywood non-sense and hope to god they never find a library or do the unthinkable and get a liberal arts education. Shit, people might figure out what’s going on, and then would would they do!

Send your babies to business schools and let ‘em live lives of blissful but profitable ignorance.

Their motto, in the word of Hollywood icon Arnold Schwarzenegger, “Listen to me now and think about it later.”

Well, maybe not. It’s more like “do as we say and don’t think at all.”

Unfortunately for Washington, some of us are thinking. Some of us realize that democracy has nothing to do with what happens in Washington. Democracy is what happens everyday in our communities. In our bioregions. We don’t need CNN, MSNBC or closed meetings (caucuses) to decide how we should live. In fact, to live and to live well, we should eliminate those things and before it’s too late.