Kerouac: "all thru playing the American"

Bus
East
Poem written on a bus April 1954
from S. F. to New York



BUS
EAST Society has good intentions Bureaucracy is like a friend

5
years ago - other furies other losses -

America's
trying to control the uncontrollable Forest fires, Vice

The
essential smile In the essential sleep Of the children Of the essential mind

I'm
all thru playing the American
Now I'm going to live a good quiet life

The
world should be built for foot walkers

Oily
rivers Of spiney Nevady



I
am Jake Cake
Rake
Write like Blake

The
horse is not pleased Sight of his
gorgeous finery
in the dust Its silken
nostrils
did disgust

Cats
arent kind Kiddies arent sweet



April
in Nevada - Investigating Dismal Cheyenne Where the war parties
In fields
of straw
Aimed over oxen At Indian Chiefs
In wild headdress Pouring thru
the gap
In Wyoming plain
To make the settlers
Eat more dust than dust
was eaten In the States From East at Seacoast Where wagons made up To dreadful
Plains
Of clazer vup

Saltry
settlers
Anxious to masturbate The Mongol Sea (I'm too tired in Cheyenne -
No sleep in 4 nights now, & 2 to go)



Jack Kerouac

'What religion tells you to occupy a country and kill its people?'

In that 'should be infamous' CBS 60 Minutes interrogation, near the end Scott Pelley, doing his best Abu Ghraib interrogator imitation, repeatedly and inanely badgers Ahmadinejad to say what he admires about Dear Leader Bush. Finally Ahmadinejad strikes back pretty f@#$kin brilliantly. Here's the transcript in case you missed it (emphasis added):

PELLEY: What trait do you admire in President Bush?

AHMADINEJAD: Again, I have a very frank tone. I think that President Bush needs to correct his ways.

PELLEY: What do you admire about him?

AHMADEINEJAD: He should respect the American people.

PELLEY: Is there anything? Any trait?
AHMADINEJAD: As an American citizen, tell me what trait do you admire?

PELLEY: Well, Mr. Bush is, without question, a very religious man, for example, as you are. I wonder if there's anything that you've seen in President Bush that you admire.

AHMADEINEJAD: Well, is Mr. Bush a religious man?

PELLEY: Very much so. As you are.

AHMADEINEJAD: What religion, please tell me, tells you as a follower of that religion to occupy another country and kill its people? Please tell me. Does Christianity tell its followers to do that? Judaism, for that matter? Islam, for that matter? What prophet tells you to send 160,000 troops to another country, kill men, women, and children?

You just can't wear your religion on your sleeve or just go to church. You should be truthfully religious. Religion tells us all that you should respect the property, the life of different people. Respect human rights. Love your fellow man.

And once you hear that a person has been killed, you should be saddened. You shouldn't sit in a room, a dark room, and hatch plots. And because of your plots, many thousands of people are killed.

Having said that, we respect the American people. And because of our respect for the American people, we respectfully talk with President Bush. We have a respectful tone.

But having said that, I don't think that that is a good definition of religion. Religion is love for your fellow man, brotherhood, telling the truth.

[Oh my gawd what will our boy Pelley say as a comeback to _that_?]

PELLEY : I take it you can't think of anything you like about President Bush.

AHMADEINEJAD [finally dismisses the stupid question]: Well, I'm not familiar with the gentleman's private life. ...

By the way, in case many of you aren't fully aware of Bush's planned criminality, the U.S. is planning "Full Spectrum" Mass Murder Against Iran. What we plan is reported here pretty clearly:

Study: US preparing 'massive' military attack against Iran. The neocons rationalize that just attacking Iran's supposed nuclear facilities will leave Iran too many options for counterattack. Besides the fact that the basic 'problem' for the neocons and Israel is that Iran is an economically powerful and united state. Here is an excerpt from the article:

The paper, "Considering a war with Iran: A discussion paper on WMD in the Middle East" - written by well-respected British scholar and arms expert Dr. Dan Plesch, Director of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London, and Martin Butcher, a former Director of the British American Security Information Council (BASIC) and former adviser to the Foreign Affairs Committee of the European Parliament - was exclusively provided to RAW STORY late Friday under embargo.

"We wrote the report partly as we were surprised that this sort of quite elementary analysis had not been produced by the many well resourced Institutes in the United States," wrote Plesch in an email to Raw Story on Tuesday.

Plesch and Butcher examine "what the military option might involve if it were picked up off the table and put into action" and conclude that based on open source analysis and their own assessments, the US has prepared its military for a "massive" attack against Iran, requiring little contingency planning and without a ground invasion.

The study concludes that the US has made military preparations to destroy Iran's WMD, nuclear energy, regime, armed forces, state apparatus and economic infrastructure within days if not hours of President George W. Bush giving the order. The US is not publicising the scale of these preparations to deter Iran, tending to make confrontation more likely. The US retains the option of avoiding war, but using its forces as part of an overall strategy of shaping Iran's actions.

* Any attack is likely to be on a massive multi-front scale but avoiding a ground invasion. Attacks focused on WMD facilities would leave Iran too many retaliatory options, leave President Bush open to the charge of using too little force and leave the regime intact. ...

... Plesch and Butcher dispute conventional wisdom that any US attack on Iran would be confined to its nuclear sites. Instead, they foresee a "full-spectrum approach," designed to either instigate an overthrow of the government or reduce Iran to the status of "a weak or failed state."

blathertown, noalternativeland

I wanna waste a fuckofalot of time and blather on and on about the stuff near the end of the following blatheringmoron comment:

isn't part of the point that the US is not only discombobulating the fuck out (5.60 / 5)

of Iraq, but that it's also discombobulated the fuck out of the US?

Don't recall the exact quote, but it's at the end of the Shock Doctrine film....about the best way to survive the shock treatment is to be aware of what is going on.

But the subtext, for me at least, is the contrast between what is going on in the leftwing blogosphere and that statement. I think you can hardly deny that leftwing bloggers -- whatever else most of them may or may not be--are some of the most informed of American citizens, esp when it comes to sham government and corporate involvement therein. We are the ones most acutely aware of what is happening.

So we sit around wasting time on petty squabbles and personality cult issues in what we'd all have to agree has been a pretty ineffectual "movement" in terms of getting anything done.

Seriously, what have we really "accomplished" here? Aside from wasting a fuckofalot of time, blathering on and on about nothing. (I include myself in the broadstroke condemnation).

Is this just a coping mechanism?

Is it the only thing we can come up with in our sham-shocked state of paralysis?

Sometimes I think so.

by blatheringmoron @ Sun Sep 23, 2007 at 09:41:42 AM PDT

Well, I think you're right at the end there, except for the "sometimes" part. Let me splain ya.

There are roughly two reasons why somebody who really wanted 'TO DO SOMETHING' would come to an in-fact lefty blog like this:

1. Cuz he/she hadn't figured out what the hell was exactly was wrong with the US and/or how the hell exactly to fix what he/she knows is wrong. Confusion by confusion, a 'DO SOMETHING' lefty blog would argue and discuss and throw around evidence and ideas till it got reasonably close to best answers.

2. Shehe has got "1." basically right but can't figure out the power thing, how to marshall forces and create the real world changes that we've all figured out need to be accomplished real soon.

3. Figuring out the facts of the relationship between 1. and 2.

By and large, I don't see any of that here, or at myleftwing, or at booman, or much of anywhere. Essentially, even here, we have a self-selected group comfortable with the 'fact' that on no major issue is the let's say Dennis Kucinich position wrong. On "2" above, I think the consensus position is that there is no hope, so why contemplate the gory details. As for "3" that would've involved working on either or both "2" and "1".

The left will need to rethink or just compromise on its standard 'Kucinich' positions (not that I ain't probably gonna vote for him) if it is to have any success at "2" above. I think it's obvious, despite it never being discussed, that the compromise would involve the 'white working class' and its 'special interests'. Here or anywhere else 'lefty' we haven't taken even the first step toward figuring out what to do about that, in other words about "3" above. I tried to with The U.S. Power Matrix & An Immigration Test but got ignored at boomantribune and at politicalfleshfeast (by everyone except David Byron), and got the politically correct and racism-tinged 'misunderstanding' and abuse treatment at myleftwing.

Not that immigration is the heart and soul of the change and compromise the left needs to make in order to create a winning AND LEFTIST (it's not about dkos-DNC compromises) electoral coalition, there's a lot of other hard work to do too, populist work. But there's no taste for that here. Yup, we're in blathertown, noalternativeland.