Midsummer morning mutterings

These titles of books and films were sliced from the receipts of items that I recently yoinkt from my library. Also when you glance back over this list after reading the following entry, it sorta summarizes its contents. All this was unplanned.

O my dear, dear diary,

Please give me the strength to dare to begin this entry in a way that is similar to the way that I have started out previous entries, so that I can know that I truly have nothing newfangled to say.

(OK: Boilerplate Mode activated.)

Can someone remind me what our intent was in coming to Earth? I can’t tell if we’re supposed to be helping each other or harming each other.

Look at the ants: they don’t even get dressed in the morning; they’re born with their black armor on; and they grow up and go to college and bear children and create strong nations, but they don’t even need banks or money. And they don’t make war. (Actually, they do make war, I vaguely recall.)

Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise. She, having no guide, overseer, or ruler, provideth her meat in the summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest.
     How long wilt thou sleep, O sluggard? when wilt thou arise out of thy sleep? Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep: So shall thy poverty come as one that travelleth, & thy want as an armèd man. (Proverbs 6:6-11)

But humankind is totally against cooperating. If sugar cubes were our prime desire, we wouldn’t share our sugar cubes with anyone, even if the total amount of sugar cubes that a human would need for an entire lifetime was 300 cubes, and if an individual (such as, say, a billionaire) were to stockpile more than 300 sugar cubes, the cubes’d just go to waste, all humans would rather keep their extra cubes and let them spoil rather than adopt a system that could distribute the unneeded excess to those in need. (Does sugar go bad, by the way?)

So I’m reading this book by Nick Turse: Kill Anything That Moves. It’s subtitled The Real American War in Vietnam. I don’t remember where I heard about it — I just recall that someone mentioned it, and so I requested a copy from our local library, not expecting to read it all the way thru but just willing to give it a chance. Well now that I’m a couple chapters into it, I can tell it’s gonna be one of those books that devastates me, yet which I won’t be able to avoid suffering thru, straight to the bitter end.

The same thing happened with Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty — everyone was talking about that book, so I checked it out solely from a sense of duty, not expecting to read more than a chapter or two and maybe dip around in the rest of the tome (it’s really big, with many pages); but it was so engrossing and so well written and so crucial to our time that I couldn’t put it down. And that’s how I became an expert on all things economic. (Together with reading David Graeber’s Debt, and a few other titles.)

Now, with the addition of Turse’s Vietnam exposé, I will never be able to unlearn the fact that raping and slaughtering children and women civilians was actually the norm for U.S. troops rather than a wild exception. Before acquiring Turse’s book, I assumed the My Lai massacre was a rare occurrence. It turns out, that was pretty much standard procedure. (Thank God that Hitler was defeated in World War II, otherwise HE woulda been the one doing all the atrocities.)

*

Do I live in the jungle? Why is it so noisy outside? The sun isn’t even up yet and the birds sound like a twittering industry; and there’s coyotes howling and llamas grunting; while distant cats are dying & resurrecting.

I bet what causes this cacophony is that the light from my reading lamp is able to be seen thru the front window of our house, and all the wildlife assumes that it is the sun.

*

Did you ever notice that the eye never closes? Only the eyelid drapes itself over the eye, but the eye remains “on”. It never shuts off. What we think of as the intermittent periods of rest during sleep (“a little shuteye”), or the blackness of blinks, is just the eye beholding its proximate lid-flesh rather than the outer world. To grasp how unnerving this is, consider the way it makes one feel to be told “Do not be alarmed, but that being at the far side of the room will not stop staring at us.” Well the eye IS that being.

—Why the fuck hasn’t that stupid kid stopped staring at me since I got here?
—Which kid? That one?
—Yeah, it's bugging me.
—Hey little twerp, stop staring at my friend while he's eating, OK? It bothers him.
—Yeah, don’t look at me, even when I’m not eating. Don’t ever look at me.

[Dialogue between Officer Sunshine & Officer Duke, from the film Wrong Cops (2103)]

The only people who have any respite from this tyranny of vision are the divinely blind (Milton; Homer; Borges; etc.), who, being poets, have figured out a way to disconnect or at least blur out the evil eye’s signals. (I use the word signal only to accord with tradition — it’s really all noise.) But the price that blind geniuses pay for their radical innovation is that the EAR now becomes the oppressor. The despot’s throne abhors a vacuum.

“Don’t you fuckin’ look at me!” [Arises and extinguishes the candle.] “NOW it’s dark... Stay alive baby; do it for Van Gogh.”

—Frank Booth, from the film Blue Velvet (1986)

The reference to Vincent van Gogh is because — and I don’t consider this information something that will spoil the fun of the movie for anyone who hasn’t yet seen it, because it’s a detail that appears near the very start of the story; but if you’re one of those fools who thinks that it’s better NOT to read the libretto before attending an opera, then feel free to pout while I disclose the following — I say, Frank Booth’s mention of Vincent van Gogh has to do with the fact that he (Booth) cut off the ear from the kidnapped husband of his current victim.

Van Gogh was a painter. Painting is a visual medium. Van Gogh is rumored to have severed his left ear with a razor. The ear is an organ associated with sound. Ludwig van Beethoven was a composer of music, which is an aural medium. Near the age of forty, Beethoven abandoned his sense of hearing; altho, as far as I remember, he did not physically remove his own inner ear. My understanding is that Beethoven wrote some of his finest compositions after losing his sense of sound. I think this proves that the imagination is sufficient unto itself — nevertheless, tho it does not NEED objective sensory perceptions, it loves to make love to objective sensory perceptions.

Also it might be worth noting that U.S. troops during their mayhem in Vietnam were known to sever the ears of civilians. Now here’s an excerpt of an article from the local French newspaper Le Forum Républicain, dated 30 December 1888 — roughly seventy years after Beethoven achieved his deafness — in an English translation that you’ll have to forgive me for finding on Wikipedia (source):

Last Sunday, at 11.30 pm, the painter Vincent Vangogh, a native of Holland, arrived at Licensed Brothel No. 1, asking for Rachel by name, and gave her his ear saying: “Keep this object preciously”. He then disappeared. Informed of this fact, which could only be that of a poor insane person, the police went the next morning to the person she found lying in bed, who showed almost no sign of life. This unhappy man was admitted to the hospice as a matter of urgency.

Now Vietnam was a civil war, so why was the U.S. there? Is the U.S. secretly a subsection of Vietnam and I just never knew it? No, the Upper-class Leaders of the U.S. at that time lied to their countrymen and told them that they needed to fight against Communism. This is doubly sad, because the system of Communism is supposed to be a threat that We the People can level against our Upper-class Leaders, saying: “If you keep maltreating us, we’ll just ditch your beloved Capitalism and turn to Communism.” But instead, during the Vietnam era, the Upper-class Leaders told the downtrodden masses of the United States: “Go to war, please, we beg you, on our behalf, and slay the people of Vietnam, so that the dreaded Communism doesn’t arrive here & make us all equaller; for if that happens, the result is unthinkable: perhaps we the Upper-class Leaders will lose our leadership and be just like you regular folk, if Communism is installed; then you regular folk would live decent lives and no longer fret about meeting your basic needs. Therefore, go: kill, kill, kill. Run along now. I hereby draft you into military service of behalf of the Upper-class; or rather to serve this great nation the U.S.A., which allows our corporations to sell weapons to both sides of every battle… yes, and, um… What else was I going to say? Ah, now I remember: Do this for the sake of freedom & democracy, hahaha.”

I wonder if we were lied into the U.S. Civil War? I bet we were. For we were lied into every other war. We were lied into World War One; we were lied into World War Two; we were lied into Korea (and the U.S. developed and used chemical and biological weapons and disease-spreading insects and germ warfare — I’m citing no proof for any of these facts, purposely so that I can appear as a crackpot; I’m really the Devil); we were lied into Vietnam; we were lied into the Gulf War; we were lied into the War in Afghanistan; we were lied into the Iraq War; and recently the Upper-class warmongers have been trying to lie us into war with Venezuela and Iran.

And that’s not to mention Russia. The entire Cold War was a lie; and now they’re trying to reignite it (refreeze it?)...

And I only listed the wars that are popular on TV; there are many more wars that not even I myself know about. Consider the Second U.S. Intervention in the Somali Civil War. I was unaware that that even happened. Just think: in order to have a second intervention, you must have once performed a first intervention.

And I worked alongside Somali immigrants at the eyeglass factory; so I guess we all sorta got swallowed up by this racket. Why are we working here; what are we doing? Are we supposed to hate each other or love each other?

One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression

[—from Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell]

And the aforesaid factory was owned by Japan. That’s no joke.

Japan and Germany were our enemies in the Second World War; but now they’re our best friends. And Russia did more than the U.S. or any other ally to win the 2nd World War, but they’ve ever since been treated as suspect.

So much clandestine aggression, so many lies. I wonder if there ever was a war that the people who fought it actually wanted themselves to fight. Right now it seems that maybe even the initial war that started this affluent nation, the so-called Revolutionary War for American independence from Britain, was a bit of a scam.

Meanwhile the actual people who live in every country simply want peace. Take any regular citizen from any country, and bring them into contact with any regular citizen from any other country, and the two individuals will always take to each other: they’ll form a friendship and play checkers with each other every Saturday. They’ll read their country’s best poetry to each other, and share the art that their respective cultures created. They’ll remain impressed with each other; and they’ll honor each other. But then when the overseer, the Upper-class Leader from each of their different homelands, arrives and says “Time’s up, fools, I’m sorry but ya gotta start fighting each other: this is wartime.” Then the two peaceful citizens get up from their chairs — they don’t even finish their game of checkers; which is a shame, because Bob was just about ready to say “King me!” (See note below.) Instead, Leland and Bob arise from the table and go shuffle back to their native realms, where they don the uniforms of their very proud nations, and they head over to the nearest tropical island, via black helicopter, and rape and kill children. They commit wholesale slaughter, instead of daring to distrust their newscasters.

NOTE
regarding the outburst “Christ me,” for anyone ignorant

In the game of checkers, when your checker gets all the way to the other side of the board, a second checker is stacked atop the first, and this double-checker becomes a king. This means it can now skulk in both directions and make lustful affronts whithersoever. Before it is “kinged” it can only enjoy consensual rutting.