THE MISAPPROPRIATION OF LITTLE WHITE LIES CAN MAIM AND EVEN KILL - Jonathan Swift
I'm certain some of expertise and genius have heard the sad tale before: A person of some skill and creative imagination decides to honor his parents the best way he knows how to do: By accomplishing, in my case, what my father wished for his own life, what my father could not accomplish as a data processing manager at the U.S. Postal Service.
My father? He longed to have been a writer all his life. Why not honor my father by becoming a writer as a way to say, "Here, Daddy. I will become your best wishes because I love you to the skies and back!"
I've told the story: I would wake early on a weekday morning--and see my father busily reading literature. He had a tattered first edition paperback of Kerouac's "On The Road". He read Henry Miller's "Tropic of Cancer, secreted away copies of Miller's "Sexus", "Plexus" and "Nexus". Certainly, my father had an interesting taste in literature in 1967. Those tastes today likely could fit into the Outlaw School of American Literature.
I did squirrel away an inheritance after my father shot himself in the head with a .38 Special on September 29, 1970: His "novel", poorly written, pen on paper, unreadable cursive, folded into two pieces, and titled "Gerard". Seems to me he offered me a vocalized summary of his book.
He'd written it while a United States Navy radio operator who provided rear-guard surveillance duties at the Battle of Coral Sea, and later in Saipan, and still later in Okinawa. Doubtless, his radio operator's job was complex: He had to work with code talkers: men who spoke in a language indecipherable to enemies, mainly because Native American languages often did not have dictionaries or grammars.
Hence, because my father had a yen for those past accomplishments in speaking English to code talkers, as a U.S. Postal Service data processing manager who played a part in the USPS's first experiments with computer technology (complete with punch cards, stacks of which he gave me) he learned American Indian Sign Language, and hired a deaf secretary, an action that earned enough public admiration that he was commended by president Lyndon Baines Johnson for his commitment to providing stable and amenable working conditions for the disabled.
Hard to top that in a current (and currency) world whirl of self- and selfish- interest. Amirite?
Remember? That's highly radioactive material that can kill if touched by conservative plutocrats scared shitless by the possibility that popular music might escape their irritable grasping for more, and then more, and then still more, an activity of excess that demands control of all forms of mass media, especially pop music in the United States, Land of the Free.
Don't worry. Censorship like that is SoCiAl. It's "immune" from the law, and apparently, from the First Amendment: buy it, shut it down, protect thyself from self-fulfilling prophesies concerning the "commies" or something dumb like that.
More ironic is that my father was also going deaf. But he happened to be a highly intelligent and proactive human being: learning ASL helped employ a woman with a hearing disability. It must have been really cool to watch him signing dictation to his secretary. And, while he was slowly going deaf himself, I remember how he went to a costume party dressed as Harpo Marx.
As Marx, my daddy looked pretty funny with a fuzzy white wig on his head. his bicycle horn? Honk! Honk!
Yeah, daddy was a hit.
The punch cards? The novel? Lost to theft-by-corporation: While transitioning from homelessness to "life in the real world" after nearly five years of relative horror, relative freedom from obligation, while a caring friend of mine (a socialist?) gave me $250 to help pay back rent for my Public Storage obligations.
What happened? Anxiety from that transition (homelessness to housed transitions suffer close to an 88 percent recidivism rate due to the upswing of stuffed emotional trauma from being stigmatized by society for being unfortunate), led me to an old stand-by stopgap: I drank much of that money away. The rest? One dollar hamburgers, the Texas Burger, from a Wendy's down the street from where I lived.
Really? Did a homeless vagrant have trouble readjusting to the mainstream? Oh boo hoo hoo.
That reaction, and recourse to drinking down anxiety and trauma, is a Bipolar-adjacent syndrome called by psychiatrists "self-medication".
Yup, yup, I was a mess for nearly a year. Hard times: Lost possessions via underpayment to Public Storage (the new assistant district manager cared not for transitions or adjustments; he only wanted his money), a torn-up office couch, and a mattress on the floor. Boy! Isn't reentry to the mainstream fantastic?
I was terrified.
I remember sitting up all night for many months and listening to Art Bell of Coast To Coast AM, and that kept my mind on spurious information and conspiracy theories, few of which hold water, unless of course, as metaphors for other types of alien invasions, etc.
Regardless, no matter the issues, I continued to write. I'd begun writing at 13. Possibly earlier, really. I made up and drew my own comic books. Clearly enough for me at least, I had "the creative bug". The creative bug has never left me. And why should it? Should the creative bug just get out of the psyche when "adulthood" comes calling?
That kind of adulthood is surrender. And as an outlaw poet acquaintance of mine once said, "Submit but never surrender!" Get your writing to publications, but don't allow them to force you into compromise.
Independence, however, in the commercial world, while much hyped by rightist "conservatives" and rightist libertarians, is actually nothing but hype when the humanities are involved. Poetry? Who needs it?
All this time--from my life as "homeless man in the library eight hours a day" to today, I've been interested in how what is called Reason has been instrumentalized into a tool of what is known as "management". Maverick political scientist Sheldon S. Wolin labeled the consequences of the imposition of instrumentalized Reason a name:
Managed Democracy.
Another label he coined: Inverted Totalitarianism.
What's that? According to Wolin, inverted totalitarianism involves a democratic-republican face underneath which reside the autocratic values of run-of-the-mill capitalist values. I'm not wholly sold on that concept, but I can understand interpreting today's often unbalanced intertwined relation between capitalism and democracy in such a way. Wolin's ideas, some of which are now beginning to really gain steam, especially among those of us who are critical of capitalism while remaining loyal to its ideals no matter how far capitalists stray from whatever leading principles the fads of conventional currents should but often do not command them to follow.
Does democracy need a manager? Some awfully furious "conservatives" (who are all business all the time and thus do not qualify for that honorific) believe it does. Why so? Because those all-capitalism-all-the time versions of "the new man" don't like being told what to do. What? A regulation? Let's bully it out of existence because there is money to be made.
Fine. Who gets hurt? Why does that who have to get hurt in some bum rush for more and more? Who. Really. Knows.
Another observer of current strains in a traditional rivalry between capitalism and democracy, David Rothkopf, has written numerous books in regard to how capitalism and democracy either relate in a healthy or in a dysfunctional way. He's also written extensive studies on how the social and the political also either relate or become vying adversaries for "turf".
But what does that have to do with my long-upheld two jobs situation? The employee goes home, eats, rests, then goes to work at kitchen table, writing and learning to write until either 10 p.m. or late into the night, depending on how hard inspiration strikes. For years. And years. And years. Through employment and unemployment, plenitude or hunger, alienation or not.
Hey. I did get a few letters to the editor into alternative newspapers! Ain't it great? Love the support. Even when one knows plenty and thus has plenty to add, "the agenda" which has now conquered American journalism has no room for those who actually know a few things and also know how to write about those few things in a relatable way.
Yeah, yeah. the STEM-dependent advocates of what Italian communist Antonio Gramsci once advised for a wholesale remake of higher education into solely technical and productivity subjects; they'll troll those of us who actually know political science is one of the humanities. Funny, too. Yesterday, I read an article in the November 2025 issue of The Nation that details how the University of Chicago has all-but-shut-down its humanities opportunities. Apparently the opportunity cost of maintaining the human element in a world of too much capitalism is so much that it is to be vanquished in favor of fancy architectural excesses as rad and beautiful buildings. The UC library, The Nation reveals, does not allow people to actually browse the stacks. Why?
Probably "for the sake of automation": Why bother with allowing humans to wander the approximately four-thousand-year wide agora of knowledge when a machine can select a volume to spit out of a cage like the crazy sluggo-job in Orwell's 1984?
STEM-dependence: three-legged animals out to hog the culture right out of us. For the money.
I had to learn how to write poetry the hard way: Because I lacked the funding to continue into higher post-graduate MFA-style education in creative writing, I ACTUALLY WENT TO THE PUBLIC LIBRARY, checked out books, AND READ THEM. Can you believe it?
Lucky for me, Frances Bell, one of the most noteworthy librarians in the United States at the time, stood eager to assist me with reading advice: She was in charge of the poetry in the Humanities Division. Like my father, Frances longed to be a writer (of poetry) herself. Frances, always struggling to get me to wake up and see the world's intimate relation between life and language, often to no avail, never lost patience. To this day, I do not know why she didn't lose patience. I was a little rowdy as a 20-something to cultivate the tranquility necessary to even begin a poem that offers the overworked and tired "a safe space", a place to go and be rewarded via contemplation and imagination. Nope. I was busy being an outlaw, a punk, a troublemaker and rabblerouser, a personification I labeled "a literary terrorist".
It was fun. I learned a little. But I had years to go.
One of Frances' best friends once stopped by to give me some advice: "As you mature both intellectually and as an adult," he predicted, "your poetry will improve."
Unforgettable. I am happy to have met people like Frances and her friends. One coworker, Steve Housewright, lived with an avant-garde musical composer, Jerry Hunt, one of Philip Glass's friends and colleagues. The environment at the Dallas Public Library was, and likely is, a rich one for aspiring devotees to a craft we call poetry. A craft. As in "done by hand", not by some AI machine that shucks humanity and inspiration in favor of "some audience kudos and props!" Dumb tech bros: they see everything in black and white bits and bytes. That definitely bites. At least when the arts and letters are concerned. I don;t know how many poets much more accomplished than I am who laugh outloud at tech folks with AI poetry machines--which can calculate, but not qualify.
Oops. I must have used an "ideologically incorrect" concept: what is quality? A price label? Or a human experience? If the latter, whose experience is "better" than the others? And which one is allowed more status: vocation or avocation?
On the so-called front of the plastic arts--painting and sculpture--most people I know who are perhaps "excessively creative" work as artisans during the day--simply to feed themselves.
No government support for the people who cultivate and garden the culture. OH NO! THAT IS NOT TO BE HAD!
We know from where that nonsense ushers. It ushers from some dude in Georgia who writes crappy pulp novels he claims are about war, gallantry, and power: Newt Gingrich. And more, we in the creative community know exactly what Gingrich wants for we creative individuals and groups:
To pay the piper by "sell, sell, sell". Really? How come there is almost no pay, pay, pay? According to Gramsci again, an important observation about the fascism he lived to tell about: Fascists will seek more than anything to destroy the autonomy of the subject classes (not moneyed elites) in order to force them into a state of dependence, not independence. Hence, no valuable critiques and critics who not only take an adversarial stance that defines independence, but expands and allows a culture to grow. Nope. Not that. We must color between the lines or be socially or culturally imprisoned by third-rate writers like Newt Gingrich.
I do applaud him for trying. He does not applaud me or anyone like me. In fascism there is no such thing as reciprocity.
I read the letters and newspaper columns of Italian communist Antonio Gramsci not as a true believer but as one who has C-H-O-S-E-N to study the harbinger of the American New Left. Right. That's the leftovers. Old hat. The used-to-be's, correct?
Why so? Because that's what the more fascist oriented want the Official Culture to believe.
Here's a bit of a notes-summary from reading his writings about forming blocs:
"Deus absconditis--hidden God, i.e. per Gramsci and predecessors, if a superstructure (like a concept or a majority-accepted conceit or social construct) overlays what he determines to be "the actual structure" (always economic to him), then a theological interpretation of on-the-ground conditions hides the actuality behind a masquerade: However, while religion is a socio-cultural construction, basic right and wrong simply are--no matter how interpreted by either religion or an economic abstraction."
I get it. If an economic interpretation (homo economicus) overlays all we understand about a state or a civilization, but also underlies variants of theological thought, that is nothing but a pretense, a masquerade, a sort of Trick-Or-Treat Halloween visitor: Gimme some treats or I'll pull a trick you might not like!
"Hence," my note goes on, "we see Gramsci's point: his socialism must always be dynamic, not abstract or conceptual. He tried to link that with his notion that the Marxist dialectic is in fact the basis of civilization...Interesting observation: Ethnic identity politics and social mores appeared almost serendipitously alongside "national conservatism" and its focus on white dominion, re nationalism. Two of a kind? Call and response?" "Facts of culture are not culture itself." "Gramsci suggests that ethnic politics as part of the cultural struggle for hegemony (dominance or critical mass) between its presence as an aspect of capitalist dominion versus what is actual, while not necessarily real can be used or instrumentalized via empiricism to thus produce social/cultural stimuli taken from the whole conflict on the struggle's front and then paired with practical reasoning to serve as a weapon or tool of that struggle for dominion." "The tactical key to the struggle, then, is to aggravate both offense and defense in order to inflame and irritate. (state-as-force v revolution-->to libertarian use of "non-coercion" to undermine the state. See: Lenin".
Is that a lot to swallow? Gramsci is noteworthy for his concept that communist revolution should only be loosely based on Leninist internationalism, but rather be tailor-made for each country's society.
If that's the case, the reactionaries on the American right are falling in line--as planned. Hey. How's that weather?
Shhh! Don't allow independent writers tell this story. That might bust some design--as Old South, Catholicism, Protestantism, neo-Nazism, and "post-Soviet" communism vye for complete control of the US-as-latest-lamb-chowder. The US, supposedly "the coveted bitch of the playas on the scene".
Now that's laughable.
Funny how the short-sighted ignore the obvious in favor of spreading fear of communism while at the same time marching to the tune of the New Left, a movement that never disappeared at all.
Sigh. But what does this have to do with my vocation/avocation problem? It has to do with the possibility that many independent writers and especially poets can serve as proverbial canaries in the coal mines--all subsidiaries of Charles Koch and his "team playas".
What's weird is that, after I finally gained an opportunity to move out of the shelter 2001, I eagerly joined a program specifically designed to aid those with mental health issues that are either homeless or in danger of being so. While that program is like Section 8, it comes with two necessities for those of us prone to panic attacks or outright manic episodes: advocates and caseworkers. It's a good system for those of us willing to work.
You know: to better ourselves and our lives.
Here in Dallas, most Section 8 housing is handled by a little fiefdom called Dallas Housing Authority. It's been accused all too many times by rightist critics of being too lenient in allowing dopers and crack dealers places to create dope houses. Which might be true. Thus, should anyone act out or get uppity, DHA is liable to pitch "the offender" to the streets. This is why I have opted to remain in the housing program that protects something called...
my self-interests. Which, apparently, are of a much lower station on the caste bar that commandeth all things--at least in its collective mindsets, swingsets, and concretized settings.
My job as a poet is a difficult, complicated one. Using words to create a kind of art is difficult. As writing, though, its use of metaphor and connotation aren't really much different from the skills journalists deploy: they're only deployed in a way designed not necessarily inform with facts and data so much as to elucidate, describe and foster the human element.
Sans that, a citizenship of zombie machines might welcome a Skynet situation where the robotized and three-legged STEM-dependent can follow Gramsci's diktats that all education must depose of all but courses in productivity, economics, accounting and mathematics.
That way, a culture is alienated from itself. What a wonder!
Wonder indeed. An employee or a professional rides home from a hard day, half exhausted from simply trying to keep nose above water, only to find a "freedom" in fast food or TV or maybe drinks at the bar or social time with friends, girlfriends or lovers. Maybe that's enough. After all, who needs the entirely plebeian vocalizations of Luciano Pavarotti here in an American culture oft misinformed to the degree of ignorance of the Old World mission of opera: entertainment for the plebeian masses.
An acquaintance 20 years ago, a relatively intellectually-ignorant woman I had befriended as a sort of friend via alienation, scored a job working for The Dallas Symphony. She sometimes passed out tickets to symphonies and other events offered at the gloriously beautiful Morton H. Myerson hall.
When the woman offered me two tickets to see a DSO performance of Shostakovitch's Symphony No. 5, I leapt a the chance to hear my favorite symphony life. A Vietnam veteran friend of mine and I, casually dressed as would any bohemians (or, like, people), drove through baking August heat to hear the performance. I remember being a sweaty mess as I found my seat and then reveled in beauty.
What's the 5th about? It's one commissioned by Stalin himself--to celebrate the Red Army victory at Stalingrad, by far one of the most deft surprise attacks in all human history. And Shostakovitch, complaining all the way via musical gesture at the irritant of being forced to compose for a brute, completes the job to the point that, sometimes,when I listen to Vassily Patrenko conducting the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra's version of the work, I'll discover tears.
After all, without that stunning surprise attack, the West would no longer exist. Yes, the West was that close to extermination at the hands of an entirely-reactionary autocratic mess of a government. Yeah, yeah, the Nazi Wehrmacht was an amazement of efficiency and effectiveness; the government sucked eggs. Really lousy. Nothing but servile wannabes for Hitler's attention out-competing one another. Idiocy, Inc.
Whatever. Most tyrannies and dictatorships coerce independent writers into either silence or collaboration. And when a culture war tightens up against independent voices, what happens is quite interesting; the target voices become shrill, loud, colorful, very very bourgeoise and operatic or performative.
Little pets who do a trick for Dear Leader.
Of course, resistance to that kind of ideological narcissism has always amounted to mice in the walls eating the electrical wires. Those noted to being "non-cooperative" or "nuisances" may end up caught up in dragnets when, after all, the conventional culture, usually under the gun itself, refuses to protect the dissident by bringing them into visible protection. Worthy poets of the Soviet variety: both Akhmatova and Pasternak won Nobel Prizes, and Stalin couldn't liquidate them because then the world would see through his lies that the USSR was the culture upon which the world's should be modeled.
Akhmatova to Stalin: "You will learn to fear me." He did.
Stalin's apparatchiks scoured the poetry of Pasternak for clues to the political dissidence they seemed to sense. How can one find dissidence in a poem about lilacs?
Hilarious. What is fun about the use of metaphor is that tyrants only see what they want to see. Metaphor is after all squishy and uninterpretable. That's why they're metaphors, not signs attempting metonymy.
Which job must independently creative individuals and groups choose?
Right. Let's let the narrowed minds of ever-concretized ideologues order us to become their pets or meet extermination in an American gulag called ostracism.
Concrete shoes? Lots of ideologues wear theirs to work every single day of the week, especially Sundays.
Poems never were made-to-order or Ukranian brides ads in the backs of adventure magazines. For some reason, America's rightist pretenders to "conservatism" find that important factor in culture hard to stomach.
Hope that tastes good enough to give them pause in the newly-planned evangelical skulk into Hollywood and the arts so that all the movies will be about this:
Warrior Jesus. Quite a costume for the Prince of Peace.
