THE MISAPPROPRIATION OF LITTLE WHITE LIES CAN MAIM AND EVEN KILL ~ Jonathan Swift
Enthused by a visit to a local clinic for prescriptions this morning, I had a lovely conversation with Eureka, age 74, a "hippie nondescript" woman carrying a copy of Tom Wolfe's "The Pump House Gang".
Alerted by that, and by big, silvery rings with big jewels on each of all four fingers of her right hand, I smiled, and spoke up:
Actually, I don't remember my "big opening", but I do recall mentioning Tom Wolfe's series of gonzo journalism. I've only read two of his colorful reports--"The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test" and "Bonfire of the Vanities", I did say something along the lines of, "I wanna read his "Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing The Flak Catchers", his "colorful report" on the "red shift" that took all the attention away from the Summer of Love and focused on....
"Remember when the real hippies gave way to the freaks?"
She raised a question with her eyebrows.
"The real hippies were really nice people. Their entire statement was, 'Can't we simply be ourselves?'"
Eureka nodded. Let's call her Eureka.
"That second wave is what we called the freaks," I said. "All about revolution for the hell of it."
She grinned.
"Abbie Hoffman made that point. I took it to mean, 'Let's give them a taste of their own paranoia as a protest against the war.'" I did receive a nod. I believe in nods.
I told her about the two real hippies I got to know when I was in junior high. Carl and Jennifer still echo inside me.
"They dressed in clothes from the 1920s," I chirped. "Top hats and flowery dresses."
"Oh yes."
"I still like the real hippies. Why not allow humans to live as they choose to live?"
Maybe I was referring to the all-pressure-all-the-time to "get out and be productive to the point you demonstrate your willingness to sacrifice all your personal hopes and dreams--if you wanna get by while you're still alive". But maybe not.
After listening to the perpetual riot act from commercial America, I have almost always wondering where in God's green earth is a dreamer supposed to fit?
Apparently there is no money for dreams. Or so it seems.
I remember taking a temporary job at Piet Marwick, one of Dallas' "premiere" advertising agencies. All I had to do was file, and round the "sweatshop" delivering the mail, and really looking and hoping I could make a little money from what I do the best.
"How do you get a job as a copywriter here?" I asked. "I have a degree in communications, and I focused on news writing and editing--"
"You don't wanna work here," the woman (not coyly at all) said. She smelled of cigarette smoke.
"Why's that?"
"Because they'll drain you dry and when you no longer produce, they toss you."
Wow. That was an awakening. Now, come to think of it, I can see the possibility of verity in the woman's own statement. You have imagination. Your imagination and knowledge get married and begin to produce inspiration. You act upon the hope embedded in inspiration. And then look:
Someone out for money all the time works you half to death as if you're sewing skirts in Indonesia. Way to go, "all American" way.
Not exactly pro-American at all, in my opinion, for after all, the colonists were also working themselves into early deaths because, if they didn't, there would be consequences--straight from the "divine right" crowd directly into the hearts, minds and aspirations of the colonists.
How did the 13 colonies beat the pants of the finest army in the world?
I-M-A-G-I-N-A-T-I-O-N
See the redcoats? Oh, don't they just look so dandy. Spotless red coats. Groovy hat, expensive rifles.
"All must march in a big line," says the 18th Century equivalent of "The Man", and line up they do, up a big hill. We all know what happens next: a supposedly ragtag band of ne-er-do-wells, not exactly wearing the latest in European fashion couture, have a nice duck-shoot right there in the suburbs of Boston.
Ethan Allen? He's the guy who used a form of guerrilla warfare to defeat British troops. He also was a fine commander of conventional tactics, those he used at Fort Ticonderoga.
How is it then that scrappy, disorganized, and--let's not forget--imaginative individuals could take down highly-disciplined troops?
Ask Crazy Horse. Mao did. Crazy Horse taught that commie commander practically all he knew. Sure. Maybe he was a "Wall Street fashionista" in that he sported a nifty hardbound copy of Sun Tzu's "The Art of War".
I have two copies: One is a paperback. The other is a colorful comic book version. Teaching tools? Or something like gold cuff-links?
This collides almost perfectly with something odd that occurred only a week or so ago. After visiting another professional contact, I bused to a grocery store to pick up a few products: not much, enough to get by a while. Near five o'clock in the afternoon, that grocery store, a quite popular one to the now-fashionable East Dallas crowd, the place was crammed with young professionals who were it seemed to me really antsy to get back to their homes.
Why so much anticipation to get off the leash? I thought work is supposed to be enjoyable. Actually work is a sort of duty. Duties are mandates: not intended to be pleasant at all. If duties were pleasant, they wouldn't be called duties.
Wait. Am I some kind of philosophic know-it-all? Nah. What's up here is the "product" of many years contemplating my inability to fit neatly into the working man's lifestyle. Not that I can't. But I'm still somewhat of a wild-haired hippie at heart. I like to be seen as myself. And for myself. And by myself: the "product" of living life as well as possible. Off with the chaff, on with the wheat.
This is not to say I don't like the dressage. Ha! Funny comparison, right? For many years, as a white collar "jockey", I'd hit the bus at 7:30, arrive at my station at 8:00, work tired until 10:00 break, then race like the wind toward lunchtime.
I actually did enjoy endless filing. Too bad I was hungover almost every day. Not that I didn't devote time to my first love of a vocation: writing.
I'd arrive back at the apartment I'd dubbed "the bomb shelter" at around 5:30, nap a little (tired and exhausted), eat supper, and then hit the kitchen table where I'd write (or try to write) until around 9 or 10.
What? You have imagination? TO THE GULAG!!!!!
Seriously. When will the childish ever grow up and realize we don't have to stand at attention 24/7?
Eureka and I talked gonzo journalism for around five or 10 minutes. I mentioned Wolfe as "this side of Joan Didion", her eyebrows raised, and I said, "She hated hippies". Laughs. Then I mentioned having recently read her tale of being hit hard by grief, "The Year Of Magical Thinking". Again the raised eyebrows.
"That was a short book," I retorted. Again, laughs.
Eureka listened. I could see compassion in her eyes.
"Did you know that the Colorado country where Hunter S. Thompson lived is reopening his case?"
"No, I haven't heard that?" The question why lurked in her eyes.
"Seems his fans are finding it hard to believe he'd commit suicide," I said. Then the editorial statement:"Some people are pushed, geared-up, to commit suicide, I think..."
The pharmacist called my name. Eureka told me a great deal with exceptionally few words, as I stepped away with one of my typical smart remarks, I noticed lovely beads around her neck.
"Are those rocks?"
"These are ceramics. I made them."
"They're beautiful."
She smiled. Few people in a public mental health clinic seem very imaginative on the saner side of hallucination and paranoia. When one is deeply insecure, of course, one is going to have serious issues with change, with imagination, and with creativity. I feel sorry for those who are so over-the-barrel in terms of mental health.
Of course, blaming those with mental health issues here in Texas every single time someone lividly angry or frustrated beyond belief by, well, either change or "accidentally on purpose" oppression such as high prices, scant opportunity, and worse, a sense no one is listening enough to...
...here it comes again:
Care. To care.
Why is that?
As a finale, I remember (I did tell Eureka that my father in Denver claimed to be associated with the Denver Beats") quite often how my father one afternoon in 1967, hooted on a Sunday afternoon, "Let's go look at the hippies!"
Oh yeah! This would be our Sunday afternoon drive. Daddy knew exactly where the hippies were being themselves: Lee Park. Big crowds of onlookers turned Haskell into a gridlock of fuming automobiles, some there to watch hippies bathing in the Turtle Creek lake's fountain. Most hippie were naked, and thus, many onlookers were there to see naked girls.
Me? I was thrilled. My little life as a 12- or 13-year-old stood at attention with all kinds of family and $$$ oppression. At the time, I didn't understand why I couldn't have a Schwinn Stingray bike (my family couldn't afford one) at a period where kids weren't human without one. I didn't understand why I couldn't get away with the finest paisley shirts, or fancy Beatle boots (I think daddy splurged to get me a pair of Wellingtons, a really nice gift I hardly appreciated until I began wearing the black footwear around school), or why some girls only went out with the boys whose families owned big $$$.
Jennifer, the hippie: "When you get older, you're gonna be a GREAT hippie."
She had to have been a 20th Century prophetess. How else to check out of social oppression? Make love, not war. Hippies never really meant to be "bothersome". But to some of our more antiquated and somewhat enslaved humans, the hippies were dirty, filthy, and whorish. Apparently, the Make War, Not Love crowd is out for a monopoly here in 21st Century America.
That's tragic. Without the comic mask of the famous theatrical emblem of happy/unhappy, a perfect emblem for tragedy of the "performative" type.
This is why so-called "leftovers" like Eureka are to be valued, not subjected to scoffing by hell-bent work-advocates whose shoes are too tight. Hell. Maybe their feet are too tight.
Lee Park and Stagger Lee both come to mind here.
Here's a hint: One can check out and be a nonconformist without displaying the latest fashions. An editor/mentor advised that to me in 1981, the year of the Ray Gun Administration's "convenient idiot" phase of US history.
Look! That "commie pinko" isn't working!
That's "boss". Totally. Radness.
Funny how our experts seem to know nothing or next to it in regard to the sort of slang they find offensive.
But out in the real world, the air can be fresh, full of singing birds, and yesterday, I began seeing monarch butterflies fluttering southward for their "winter vacation" in Mexico.
Always, always, be happy with what you have, because true bounty begins in the heart and mind and soul and gut and of course bodily instinct.
Can't judge a man by his shoes.
*
Terror usually gets a hearing in 2025. Probably even after Christrmas as before.
Not out to sound cosmic now, but what truth is there that all strangers are fearsome?
Foreigners, in reality, live among us. Every single citizen, too,has been a foreigner in a way.
Too cosmic? Why, then, does alienation or nihilism lead to anyone's sense of estrangement? Why do fear tactics intimidate so that many flee to anywhere (or anyone) that promises safe-haven from what may be a conspiracy theory, probably a strategy?
You know: accidentally on purpose.
Among faith-based people, why is fear more important than claiming faith in the individual, his (or her) right to resist the intimidation. Typically, hypocrites using faith as a weapon are actors, actors who get the games they play--behind podiums, surrounded by guardians, all to bark from a safe place how everyone must be afraid?
There. That's "cosmic".
In 2005, a buddy offered me an opportunity: He knew a man, an Afghan-American, refugee--not from the Taliban but from 1979 the Soviet incursion into his former country--the day before Christmas.
David (he was ashamed to use his true Afghan name of Daud because he was afraid all the time in 2006) spoke ESL English fleeing Kandahar at age 12. But hel had trouble with reasoning and organization, both dependent upon stronger mastery of language. He needed assistance in writing a research paper.
Assistance indeed. Assignment rules required David-Daud to employ the American Psychological Association style book. His graduation depended on a deft mastery of a strict research paper form. He did not possess mastery. He had to develop a hypothesis from postulates, two English words which may have confused him.
What's it like for a country boy from Central Asia to go to town with a paper about science; science that always deploys the scientific method? I cannot begin to imagine that quandary for a foreigner living inside an unwanted box-full of "terrorism".
Let's make a long story shorter: Subsequently, both David and I struggled through a complex process too complex to a man who spoke Pashto in his home, with his family, an aspect of his family's family values.
David was ashamed to admit to Americans he spoke Pashto as his first language. His tongue in English was ESL. Concepts surrounding scientific methods had not been taught when he was a boy in theocratic-dominated Afghanistan in the 70s, I'd assume.
In my experience, however, students albeit slowly aspects of scientific methods, even in analyzing poems and stories and Shakespeare.
Confession: I worked as a barista for six months. . . .
Question: Why isn't literature as taught in public schools noted as an instrumental skill? Isn't analysis a critical thinking process that can be learned through the liberal arts? That's propitious to those with futures in business.
Whatever. David and I made an agreement. He made an offer; I accepted the offer.
Square business.
What was in it for me, "a grand teacher of scientific research"? Each week, David paid me $20. With a perk: Each week we toured the best hamburger spots in the city. Fun. And tasteworthy.
Study, first at my apartment, then at his university: We commensed an intellectual fist-fight.
Struggle. Every session. He'd sometimes argue. I'd take to my computer, find information we'd both need to complete the assignment. To be honest, I knew little of the American Psychological Association's rules regarding production of competent research papers.
I learned quickly.
Not too difficult. Structure is important me, a person who studies and writes poetry and short stories; liberal arts. I soldiered on with my difficulties in "getting it", as did David. I'd coach him on language usage. On what the paper's each component meant--and why so.
After a near-battle royale (took place in a study carrel at his university, I believe we got the job done: Got'er done!
To me, our work stood as passable. And the hamburgers were great--as well as $20 a week. I'd only then begun receiving a disability check: back trouble, Bipolar; and another factor: aged-out at 51.
Too old? Seriously?
Two years later, 2007, when I nearly died of leukemia, David appeared at the room's doorway wioth a gift: a big Island Burger from a Richardson establishment. Giant, greasy, filled with Thousand Island dressing. I remember laughing over such a delicious mess.
Note: No terrorism involved itself in the process of teaching the foreigner both inside and outside how to find agreement. Two-point-five Muslims in the world, only a few disgruntled people--kind of like our domestic ones.
David's family invited me to an Afghan wedding. Father of the bride offered me an honored place in the banquet line: first dibs. Some attendees watched, afraid of me, a white man. Yet the bride's father allayed well-founded fears: filled my heart.
And the dinner was awesome.
*
Addendum: Directly after the struggle for the English language (small way), David asked me to assist him with his accounting studies.
"I don't know much about accounting," I told him. I was sitting at my junk-and-paper overcrowded kitchen table. "You're going to be an accounting major. Shouldn't you do that yourself?"
"But the $20!"
"I'm OK at English. Terrible at math."
Possibly David had enjoyed our dual accomplishment he wanted to do so again. My thought? I think he was so insecure about all his subjects that, as in the research paper biz, he wanted me to do much of the heavy lifting.
"You won't help me with my accounting!"
"I'm sorry. Can't help with that one. . . ."
David stormed out of my apartment. I tried calling him a few times. No answer. Awfully mad. Maybe such an attitude is common among some people. I don't know. But one thing was and is clear to me: I have enough trouble managing my own life that attempts at becoming a manager for a university student may have been more his ambition than mine.
One interesting factor regarding culture shock: David's attitude toward women. Though we never discussed that aspect of his struggles to become (whatever he believed about becoming someone), the last place he took me was to a real down-low bar on the edge of Garland. Horrible. Scary too.
David seemed to enjoy the place. Where he began his tale. How he had met a woman there, how she took him home with her, how he couldn't help but notice her apartment was a tornado of used tissues.
"I think she might have been a cocaine user," he said.
"Maybe more than that."
He suggested he needed love. Most men need love. I often believe I need love. But pickups and hookups in lousy bars is no way to find love.
During our sessions at my apartment on Bowser and Knight, David gave me the impression he was bad with the ladies. He'd said things. Things I did not appreciate. And, when the bartender at Absinthe messaged me to inform me Erykah Badu was in the bar: "I want you to meet her! Hurry over!"
I wasn't about to bring David to see the bartender. She was way pretty. David's presence before her likely would have resulted in some nasty comments from him, I feared. Turned out I was correct. A woman I knew apparently had an ugly experiences with David and his comments about women, possibly her, a pretty lady who, as I've experienced with her as an acquaintance, wouldn't take the nastiness without fierce blowback. I'm laughing about that part.
"He says all kinds of nasty things to women. Like me. I hate that man!"
I would have loved to have met Erykah Badu. I've only heard a few of her raucous songs--at least deeply enough to really think about what she communicates. I did see her live at a Dallas Museum of Arts free concert outside the museum.
Awesome. Straight. And then "men who believe American women should be treated as they possibly may be treated in Afghanistan."
Missed opportunity.
*
As homeless men--late 1990s in my case--contrary to Official Public Opinion, which propagandizes that homeless individuals aren't too smart, my running buddies and I (among many others) nevertheless found a variety of ways to register "editorial commentary". Unlike the many navel-gazers who play with abstract "Legos" in a humbuggery that oftentimes is so meaty one needs Heinz 57 steak sauce just to get it down, many homeless individuals kept it quite simple. And metaphorical.
Certainly. These commentaries. From homeless men. Are unwanted. Undesirable.
Caught up in worlds of officialdom, my then-community could casually vulgarize every little thing outrageous to homeless people. Between the lines. As an antonymous contrast.
Officialdom insists: We should emain positive on all counts. But competent writers know that the spaces between the little words are as important, or more so, than the little words themselves. So is life in the real world.
For me, life often got weird fast for us when we (bums, hobos, tramps, street people?) were consigned to places off-the-page, courtesy of white spaces in fancy office chairs who may sport Armani while sweating out an opinion.
I could spot "editing mistakes" in the very model of editorialization. This is the active world of humanity. As could my running buddies.
Official commentary regarding people laid low by either themselves or circumstance was tiresome to all three of us. Homelessness is a transitory situation, not an otherworldly judgment call on who we were or are.
Choices: each and every day and night. Endless.
Officaldom in many cases? More on that later. Now for sports!
Our cast of characters:
Louisville Flash, a kind, if slightly disabled, man. He'd not only been homeless for more than 30 years, he'd grown up an orphan.
Or Burt: He'd been homeless across the country for even longer than Louisville. I think his nihilism had transformed into a pioneer's liking for continual change and challenge. Pilgrims. Pioneers. Robinson Crusoe. Not one of the Muppets.
And myself. How'd I get "put down" so easily? Numerous factors contributed to my experience: a misbegotten failure of family support; my savings went to zero. Importantly, my doctor-ordered and mandatory 14 months on Welfare ended.
Biggest factor? No telephone.
How does anyone call to ask about job openings or to even do something so rash as to arrange an interview without one? No phone may mean: "Possibly unreliable, irresponsible, and thus a poor hiring choice."
Kismet?
I had skills. I performed well as an office clerk. My intelligence? Apparently, or so I sometimes tell myself, irrelevant to the working world.
Let's never forget Virgil. He was raised this way: no heat, no A/C, no running water, no bathroom facilities to grow up around. Virgil did not want to use a scatological commonplace and instead shouted his outrage this way:
"CATTLE CRAP CATTLE CRAP CATTLE CRAP!!!!"
We loved that. Virgil's only claim to employment fame is that he once drove a cab.
Now, time for Homelessness Editorial Commentary:
1) Every Christmas, those who care about homeless people always offer a bargain bonanza of underwear, socks, warm-ups, sweatshirts, tee shirts, long-sleeved and even sweaters. The famous and late Pastor T. D. Jakes' led a largesse crew. flatbed truck, live Christian music good food offered. RV loaded with clothing.
Some scooped too much. Yet officialdom used "roach control" as a reason to lose the free clothes.
Editorial comment: The mile-and-a-half to downtown bore litters of discarded clothes. Eyesore. Unsightly. Word that "the homeless" are unclean derelicts. Look at all that fine clothing strewn across the bridge over the freeway! Those wastrels!
Who wasted what?
2) Dallas City Hall boasts a large, bronze sculpture by famed artist Henry Moore. I like the piece.
But...since public restrooms are unavailable (excuse? don't encourage them), some homeless people used the art as a bathroom. That naturally enraged Moore. He placed cameras, sound detectors, and cameras to protect his art. The creative arts and determination are partners.
3) The worst editorial comment, more vulgar than no restrooms, involved goldfish. City Hall possesses a lovely round pool full of large golden carp. Someone caught several, gutted them, scraped the meat off golden carp, then left the evidence.
Upshot? Why wouldn't one individual who has encountered horrific stigma be exactly as intelligent as anyone else? Homelessness isn't about stupidity. I'll suggest another issue: the naivete of those who stigmatize their neighbors for some lack of personal responsibility. Homelessness is too complex an issue than any one-answer problem.
No, homelessness is not permissible--especially to those ghettoized so thoroughly they aren't allowed a ghetto.
Homeless people may be unintelligable to those more fortunate. But that state demands intelligence--every single day and night.
Stigma and discount combine with fear to dehumanize. We should never forget that strangers deserve compassion and understanding.
Security for Moore's sculpture? Hear it? "Please get out of there now!"
I agree with that. The arts also need protection and do not need to be rendered homeless.
*
The long trudge from the shelter, the Austin Street Center, a large arena donated by many in an insistence all aid homeless men--and women, and their children--oftentimes now seems more a saunter than anything.
Yeah, predawn Deep Ellum, Dallas' then-reemerging alternative entertainment district, could never have been immune to the wind. So it was, for two winters, a big chilly and blowsy breeze, in winter often in the low forties (which is cold to Dallasites), we'd linger along our route down Elm Street, our destination Chase Tower, one of the city's tallest skyscrapers.
Down a ramp on the Ervay side sat a comfortable and warm Starbucks, a pretty, glassed-in and popular destination for those quick for a cup of coffee.
On the other side of one partition, a table for four. Burt, Louisville, Virgil and myself sat there. Quietly. After all, outside gifted us homeless men only icy breeze early in the mornings before the Eric Johnson Public Library at Ervay and Young opened. Refuge from the wind.
I believe it was Burt who informed me that homeless people can qualify for food stamps. That puzzled me at the time. Subsequently, I learned SNAP is a need-based federal program that, more than anything, considers a prospective recipients financial condition to aid in alleviating hunger and also to assist in individual health maintenance.
Nevertheless, Burt is the one who had a Lone Star Card, the State of Texas "credit card", more convenient than the tiny books once issued. Each morning, then, we'd stop at "the inconvenience store", a label we joked--where we purchased Styrofoam cups of regular old coffee.
Nice! Warmth in our hands. A great way to begin anyone's morning. Far better than MD 2020, the inexpensive and fortified wine known in the homeless community as "Mad Dog". Way better than one named Diamond Red. Whoa. That latter stuff could be harsh. I tried it once. That's outside of this story.
Down that ramp we'd go. Coffee! Sometimes Burt would splurge on chips or a tiny pack of chocolate chip cookies. Sharing is caring. And we respected that tiny semi-underground mall. A lovely place. Many tables filled with busy workers all having quick breakfasts courtesy of a place called Wall Street, the offering most familiar to me during my working days being a muffin with sausage, egg and cheese. If I had money, I'd buy one; usually not.
Quietly, we sat and talked "at a low roar", mostly funny stories, jokes, and sometimes verbal horseplay--just like anyone else. That's important.
For some reason, I'd purchased a blank book. I'd draw with a small Sharpie. Most were angular, sharp corners, polygons dancing on pure whiteness. That calmed me.I'd relax, head down, listening to my murmuring buddies. I'd look up to hear news or comedy. Oftentimes also sports and weather. Just like on TV, but far more realistic. At least for us. Every day a new drawing. I still have that completed blank book. I turn pages and remember the kindness of those mornings most of all.
Not that I'm "a profoundly great artist". Who'd wanna be "the homeless Van Gogh" anyway? Starry nights? I remained indoors. Outside was crazy.
Whatever. The Starbucks baristas enjoyed our presence. If I had some real money (I worked often if I needed money), I'd buy myself a "Tall", 12 ounces of glory.
"Wanna try this stuff?" I asked Burt and Louisville. Virgil was already adamantly against "that bitter stuff".
"Sure."
Thus I poured my friends a sip. No one but me liked Starbucks. The coffee shop's offerings, after all, taste different from the regular coffee.
"You like that?"
"It's OK."
Two pretty, young college students from Wall Street befriended us. A blonde with wavy hair looked like Drew Barrymore. Hence, her nickname was "Drew". Her friend, a pixie cut wonder curious about my drawings, always complimented my angular black-and-white depictions of...what?
"Kitty Girl". Her nickname. She liked cats. Usually, during what I took to be the young ladies' break, Kitty Girl would glide from her station to visit us. That meant so much to all of us. Why not include the excluded? Young, idealistic and an artist herself, Kitty Girl once leaned over my blank book and drew her own drawing.
A treasured possession.
Soon, however, word got out in the homeless community that Chase Tower's underground mall was "a meetin' spot", and some long dining tables filled with sometimes too rowdy horseplay. To be honest, I do not blame anyone seeking shelter from icy and often noisy winds. No matter. Someone complained (typically outraged at "the gall of us!"), and one icy morning a security guard "rousted" us.
Starbucks employees turned to glower. Neither Kitty Girl nor Drew had to see the quiet scene of the push out.
Yup. We were disappointed. It was cold outside. I think that day, the temp was in the low forties.
Was that a moment for revenge? Nah, not really. Other than this:
"Hey. I used to temp in this building. On the 31st floor!" I think that's where the temp office was, but...
"I know the key code for the restroom up there!"
Amazed stares.
"5-2-1!"
Then we abandoned the tower. Unless one of my buddies needed to use the restroom.
*
On the great big stage, a madman rails, whines, attacks, labels, slanders, and even issues threats. People believe him. Who knows why they do. Perhaps it has to do with his debonair presentation. Maybe it's like the "strategy and tactics" of any run-of-the-mill mob boss that has them basically ready to lose their lunches through the back doors of whatever it is that they do with what they call other people's lives.
Strategy? Gather dirt on both allies and rivals. That way, if friend or foe defies mobby's ego, mobby can deliver the dirt--like the legendary vacuum cleaner salesman in all those near-ancient cartoons: Here. You defied me. Have some dirt. The clean-up will only cost $250,000,000.
Oh look at it: Seven zeroes all in a row. That's a lot of zeroes falling for the consequences of cowardice. So yeah. Let's play "bothsiderism" and turn "friend+foe in deep doo doo" into an ideology that is sure to keep whatever's under the rug down where whatever should never have been placed.
There he is again. He's making loud noises. He says he'll sic some imaginary force beyond any and all belief on anyone who opposes his childish neener-neenerism.
There. A fresh ideology. Solid as rock. Just say neener-neener and, like a whip, those involuntary troops attend as in standing around attentively at strict attention as the US Constitution burns with real savor for whoever's God this week.
Neener-neener! Now! Get up and march out of fear of all that dirt. Perhaps what some people I know have suggested: that the madman, corrupt, blunt, a veritable blitzkrieg of vulgarity is nothing more than a symptom of supposedly free citizens who have taken so much bait that the rat-traps that surround them--the oil and gas industrialists, the big banks, the accounting firms, you name it, even the NFL--is ready and all-too-willing simply to eat the corrupted alive and then grind up the bones to make a good foundation for, say, a pointless ballroom.,
Those of us who actually took political science studies seriously know beyond doubt that any human construct neither immutable nor actual. The worst of today's offenders of what is little more than a self-interest crowd's conceit is called liberty. Which is weird. Yes, savages, brutes, killers, thieves, all kinds of uncivilized maniacs, most of which had free reign before something called civilization existed--they had a sort of liberty. Today's abstraction? It's fake. Fake liberty is nothing but the kind of excuse Trick or Treaters might use tonight: "But Daddy! Can't we stay out all night and soap the sides of all those limos down at the hotel?
The late Harper's editor Lewis Lapham produced an entire collection of essays about excuses: "Hotel America". Who knows if the wonderful writer, editor, and human being had grown cynical in his later years? I used to write to him. I was obsessive. I was so angry about years of rejection ("for a good cause") that I really needed some kind of support. Was I a good writer? Yes. Was I "in the know"? Not all the time. But then Homer, the spoken word master of both The Iliad and the Odyssey was blind.
Only ignorant know-it-alls would believe he was a sort of Mister Magoo who stumbled around to tell tales to old ladies and Greek Hoplites. Perhaps he spoke inarticulately. The greatest writers are often personally inarticulate within the higher reaches of a social strata that is apparently always "on the reach".
Right. Let's get some bozo's son a nifty job as a Hollywood screenwriter. No one will know the difference.
Mobby? Think: Herman Melville's Moby Dick. Or stoop to wonder when a recent book, "The Haves an Have-Yachts: Dispatches On The Ultrarich", by Evan Osnos, an amazingly competent staff writer for The New Yorker. I almost fell out of my chair when I read one tale of his--about a very wealthy man who hired the Rolling Stones to play for his son's Bar Mitzvah. Imagine it: You're right on the edge of the Age of Consent and The Stones are playing a totally cool song: "Shattered"
Jagger intones, "I can't give it away on Seventh Avenue!" Cool, Daddy. What's Seventh Avenue in 1978?
Whoa. Sex education at a Bar Mitzvah. It's all good. . .
Or take some of the wondrous quandaries faced by those of us who cannot honestly appreciate art as a vehicle of both Truth and Beauty. Hey! Why's all that junk on display? Isn't that some artist's cookware? Why is it dirty? Look at that banana stuck to the wall with duct tape! So expensive! Who'd do such a thing to art?
Wait. Does this author know friends who establish a neighborhood for themselves: galleries and studios and warehouses, and then a bar, then another bar, and then some fine dining?
Why yes the man with an approximate $12,000/yr income actually knows people involved in the arts. Even he, the low-bottom financier, is involved in a sort of art: poetry. Is the man a competent writer?
Depends upon what the most powerful and wealthy say about it.
What happens to the artists who have somehow managed to build a smallish community where they can foster mutual support? Next thing you know, as testifies Bianca Bosker in her memoirs of both reporting on and siding with the New York City arts community, a book titled "Get The Picture", all hell ensues.
Outclassed! By big big nouveux richies who love to display their stuff and abuse what power they have--all to get more toys. Trick or treat!
While Bosker's memoir of her wonder and travail with the New York arts community is pleasant and often comical, her intent (the slant, the angle, which strikes as "atypical" or unofficial) is deadly and funny--especially when we read between the lines and one-liners in Bosker's witty writing: The instant an arts community establishes itself as a potential arts district, in come the landlords, the developers, strange others, especially the fly-by-nights. They move on the art districts, as said someone determined to be famous, the only one famous left on Planet Earth 2; they move on the neighborhood "like a bitch."
Don't worry. I'm not famous enough to even speak, I sometimes suspect. As if fame mattered anything in comparison with telling the truth from my point-of-view, my sometimes eccentric slant, my angle, my choices.
Hence, what the official world finds is lousy treatment. Those with power, in other words, and the ability to see and know all, could maybe and perhaps see editorial commentary from those often hardscrabble-poor artists who constantly end their hopes for a neighborhood are coerced into moving here and there, mainly away from what they have worked so hard to achieve--all to get away from compulsive obsessives of the dollar kind.
What's weird about that? Let's take it from naturalist and paleontologist Loren Eiseley, now known as possibly the finest essayist since Emerson. In the late 1950s, Eiseley complained, dammit. He labeled money-addicted fools as "world eaters", otherwise known as men and women who sometimes (not always) believe their money is far more important than all the truth and beauty to be found anywhere on Earth. Their very own, personal Earth 2s.
Earth 2? Like that? Their versions of Earth 2 are slouchy, of low status, common.
Such is the bum rush for high status. Ah, c'mon. I'm joking. Can't you tell?
Harried artists: Why not serve the investors utter crap? Put a high price on a banana with some duct tape forming an obvious X, and bingo, we'll also get wealthy. While it's entirely possible someone in on that victim-victimizer vicious circle clearly reads the editorial statement that is plain as daylight to those who have been on "the bottom end" of the klieg-lit runways of being seen or unseen, moves to assist artists being victimized with big smiles. Otherwise, schnooks who see art as a way to dodge taxes as investments; they too snap up "investment material". They're abashed, some say, artists are in some kind of "junk phase". Society. Degenerating. Right there in the blameworthy galleries of artistry.
Who knew?
Hence, upset due to someone's coat-hangers hung on a stolen length of picket fence. Hence, worries about someone piling used clothes into a pastel mountain of discards. Hence, people who hang garbage bags shaped as bodies from the hanging handlebars of an old time bicycle. Give us crap, the gestures intone, and you'll get crap. Reaction from those who may/may not be perpetrators? Where has all the best art gone?
Art and the beauty of opportunity costs.
That's nutty, they're nutty, I'm nutty. This brings up a question: What's it like to get what some call "a nut-check"? For those unadorned with street slang, a "nut-check" is a disability check for someone with mental health issues.
Yeah, that slang is a true snarl, but when people on the streets of Dallas, Texas, use it as part of socialized comedy on the sidewalks, everyone laughs. Hilarious. At the right moment, it's a good one. The old appropriately inappropriate isn't merely between the lines. In the case of the country's poorest, inappropriate is as readily found between the lines of culture vultures as is the supposed appropriateness. Not a monster in a Scottish lake--maybe.
Nut-check is, in terms of the eternal otherwise, is a commentary on how those without any common sense at all treat those of us with illnesses like Bipolar 1:
Who knew the inappropriate were being appropriate? Appropriate for whom? Their crowd versus "the only crowd that matters". Hilarious, such culture clashes.
How many more times do I have to turn around to read some billy goat out there blaming "the mentally ill" for violence often wrought by people maimed by suffering and anger? This happens in Texas all the time. Name a mass school shooting and dagnabit! Some crazy idiot did it! Rage, you say? Ah, c'mon, get with me on this. Let's talk them over dinner at Dallas' The Rustic.
The Rustic is a popular (and luxuriant) steak house all about cowboys forced to live rough in the great big city. The business likely locks its dumpster to keep homeless humans from scrounging around in search of food.
The Rustic is situated on a former field that, once, had been left open for the second half of a massive granite sort of London Bridge, a wonderful abstraction that would greet all drivers from the north to a city all about the belief that Dallas, Texas is actually more Europe than Europe is.
Sometimes suspect Dallas is far and away like a living embodiment in concrete of the classic Led Zeppelin song, "Whole Lotta Love". The Dallas variation is slightly improved: "Whole Lotta Bucks".
The bridge's second half remained unbuilt for over a decade. Apparently, planned real estate is also a victim--of the 1987 savings and loan / oil crisis combo platter. To be built or unbuilt; what was the question?
Hence, some real estatist (new ideology warning!) genius decided to use the field as a real estate deal masquerading as a golfing range. Heaven forbid if a golf ball ranges over the net and crushes an SUV on the way to Easter dinner. That would be a lawsuit.
Once, artist friends and I meanly joked that it would be royal fun to place rubber golf balls on the range simply to fool big shots into believing they're all Arnold Palmer. Send pics? Sorry, but at the beginning of my career as an outcast (ah, c'mon, they were joking all along!), the the Internet was probably still in a federal office at DARPA.
As homeless people, just like some of the most powerful people in the whole wide world, we'd laughingly label someone a nut-check.
"Oh look! That nut-check's gotta limo!" No, we were not bitter. Like the US Supreme Court's so-called mission to "call balls and strikes", we had a truly objective point-of-view. Unwantedness steels the mind. Just as all kinds of rubber golf balls make it through the "shadow docket". People got hurt? Call the United Nations, buddy.
I got my "nut-check" in 2005. From 2001 through that wonderful day, I'd been practically living on grass clippings. I got food stamps, a friend helped me by providing back-breaking work I readily performed for the $130/mo I could earn, and I did eat OK. Not grandly. Like at The Rustic, where the real cowboys in three-piece suits, cowboys who invariably commit a cowboy sacrilege: Never stand under a cowboy hat with your hands on your hips. Sissy? Indeed--to a real cowboy. Sometimes the hands-on-hips stance can result in fightin' words. Or used to.
Such is the lore of the poor.
Lovely speechifying: "Man, you've got so much talent. What happened? Are you afraid to show what you can do?"
Who's the nut-check? The one pointlessly alluding to one's position or status as "a loser and a failure"? Or the one who doesn't take it as fightin' words?
My old friend/lover Barbara Harkness: "When someone bullies you, hit them, and don't stop hitting them until they're on the ground.
Interesting POV oft' ignored by political royalty in Congress? Yup. Yup. Yup.
I do live with Bipolar 1, a hereditary disorder. However, this nut-check beat the Bipolar by learning to manage the Bipolar--all in order to save sanity from a real itch in the brain no one can scratch. All so I could improve myself. Nut-checks or not. I think my nut-check amounted to around $800. I could still work if I could, but not more than another $800. Or I'd be cut-off. By nut-checks.
"Gimme your tired and wrinkled greenbacks / gimme them now / I need me some antique Dusters from the Seventies! /Gimmit to me, Nowsville!"
When a country is so full of nut-checks that the nut-checks are determined to so starve out the poor to the point the poor become servile and ready to "get with the program" or "the pogrom", or maybe become eager to fight another dumb war all to protect the wealthy nut-checks (which may be on its way, courtesy of the chief nut-check), what is "the requisite course to save the United States"?
Of course! Get atop a really expensive soapbox in the US Capital and flap your lips.
That'll git 'er done!
Courtesy, a microdot. And a nut-check who apparently "came up in the world" via "free stuff" nut-checks tend to call "unnecessary". What's left to say?
"I knew it!"
*
Why would I not be surprised no one ever bothered to ask me why I wrote a poem I consider a breakthrough poem I wrote, submitted, and found an acceptance by a relatively new literary journal, Book of Matches.
First, a sort of disclaimer. Beginning with a horrific and traumatic Bipolar Disorder trip beyond the stratosphere (yes mania can actually traumatize, as can the stigma returned to those who live with Bipolar by those who neither understand nor care), I landed in a frightening part of North Dallas, a neighborhood called Five Points.
At the time, the neighborhood, which has always been near the very top of the DFW metroplex's violent crime statistics (hey! lovely for sensitive types, eh?), was excessively violent. An onlooker or even a spectator can tell an area is violent when 1) A huge lit up sign on the median of the intersection of Forest and Audelia that says, in bright lights, WARNING! CARJACKINGS OCCUR IN THIS AREA, you know it's time to maybe already know exactly how to watch your back.
One morning, for instance, early January 2016, As I neared the corner while on the way to a grocery store up the hill, I heard noise to my left, turned, and...what??? A knot of shouting men: cheering a fistfight in the center of a hurricane made of skin, sweat and true outlawish revelry.
It was icy outside too. Foggy. Generally ugly weather. What to do? Look straight ahead; don't let that knot of attention pull you into some creepy game happening on a Sunday morning when most people go to church.
Worse, being a white man in a majority-Black neighborhood had me standing out like a wingnut holding an entire intersection down so the concrete didn't start moving. Honestly, I was like a bright light on the wrong morning of darkness.
Lucky for me, my housing caseworker, Richard Lane, had grown up in Oakland--during the days of the Black Panthers. He knew a number of those men. But he was too young to have participated in that vigilante and desperate attempt to enforce proper police behavior in Black neighborhoods.
Yeah. That's often the untold story of the Panthers: Sick and tired of asking the police to protect their neighborhoods, begging the cops to quit arresting young men for traffic violations, the Panthers armed, some carrying machine guns, and with the aid of a police monitor, would be directly on the sidewalk to monitor arrests.
Was that revolution? Against what exactly? How is it one can be allowed to dislike the action of both the Panthers and police? That sort of major league dust-up is what is called a dysfunctional codependence: attachment theory: forming dysfunctional attachments to, well, scary things--like revolution in the abstract. Hell, we see that all over the US Capitol these days.
Those children need therapy.
Let's go further here. Antonio Gramsci, an Italian communist, deeply impressed by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, began theorizing how such events could be modeled to meet political, cultural, economic and social circumstances in a country quite unlike the former Russian patriarchy.
Patriarchy: The idea that the little, defenseless peasants need a Father Figure--like a Caesar or Czar. Patriarchy is by far the most primitive form of rulership ever devised. Here in the US (not USA), many on the supposed left are accused of misusing the word as if it is neither fact nor an honest epithet. Then we see the Captains of Industry contribute millions to turn the White House into a piece of real estate, complete with a dance hall.
What's next? A saloon with sheriffs and floozies and dancing ladies and old men with Cold 45's stuck between their stuck-out rib cages?
Conceitedness, as demonstrated by that ding-a-ling extravaganza, is far and away not a synonym for "conceit"--as in government is a conceit, i.e. we all know government does not occur in the natural world but all agree that the form we have helped devise for ourselves is the best one, the one that fits our collective constitution (or temperament--as per Emerson) as the one we're willing to agree to form relations with:
Kind of what Gramsci angled for with his idea of tailor-making a "maximalist" approach to fomenting revolution (violent or better, peaceful, even under the radar of the fear-bots of everywhere "USA").
Is that what occurs when violence such as what I witnessed in my early days as a white denizen of Five Points begins to hit what could be called a critical mass? Enough to push over the entire system?
And who these days is crying what the Revolutionaries For The Hell Of It of the Sixties shouted?
SMASH THE STATE!!!
Wowie. Rightist mimicry has hit a new low. But pushed by what? Magnetized by what? Ironic, is it not?
None of this is either here or there. Bottom line: I was desperate to find a secure attachment to something or someone kind and beautiful, someone to aid me in my wishfulness at the time that I was worth maybe even one goddamned nickel.
I had a crush on the poet who is the force behind the journal. An Internet crush. Ah, yes! Dysfunctional Attachment, theorized almost exactly as whatever "congress" means to Michael "Jackson" Johnson, a speaker of some house somewhere.
At first, the amazing poet seemed to bite: She too was desperate, lost in a failing marriage. Not that she didn't love her husband; it was only they had drifted apart. She'd gone "liberal arts", and from what I learned from her, he'd gone STEM all the way. A mismatch?
I dunno. The latter must be best, just as Melania has urged us all to be. Funny that Gramsci and his comrades were busy urging Italy to form technical schools to build up a strong domestic manufacturing base upon which a true worker's autonomy from the powers-that-be and thus use the power of numbers to change the direction of an Italy they, well, theorized.
After all, when the bottom falls loose from underneath you, or from underneath a country's economic security, what is one or many likely to try?
Attachment to something both solid and validating. Kind of like US 2025. On a personal basis--exactly what I was trying to do?
Now. Now that the preparatory context here has been established, I'm going to return my narrative in one of those "you must remember or else" kinds of traumatic experiences that occurred in either 1991 or 1992: Kicked out of AA due to the fact I couldn't stay sober (every time I tried the stress sent me into a Bipolar episode), and kicked out after I'd made a number of editorial statements designed to deliver a strong message to so much superficiality, the ensuing summer of 1991 I believe was hot, dry, nasty, hurtful and full of excessive drinking.
The event occurred on the date the Southern Methodist University Literary Festival began. Whatever that is supposed to mean is one of those "clashes of coincident information" that seem to happen to me all the time here in Big Duh.
However, after the initial nosedive of losing the entire solidity and security I had in my life, I did find it exciting to note Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the legendary San Franciscan poet who, though he claimed (and it's true) that he never was a Beat poet, visited SMU for--get this!--an afternoon poetry reading at one of the university's smaller auditoriums.
What does one do when one has no money and one wants to get to an event important to one?
One walks. Through blazing afternoon sun. Around a mile-and-a-half. I began much earlier than the event--because I wanted to at least dry off before attending a poetry reading by the man who began City Lights Bookstore on Bayshore in SF. Pretty skeevy neighborhood as I remember. Even the Vesuvio Cafe, where Kerouac and his fellow poets, many of them homosexual, always gathered after readings. No issue there, really. There are some cultural commentators who believe Beat was actually an early haven for gay men. So be it. I'm down with that.
A blazingly hot afternoon in the hot Texas sun will coerce one into dizziness. I walked every step. I knew a side route, one I'd used many times while riding to White Rock Lake by bicycle. In that era of disenfranchisement, my 12-speed had two flats. Yay. Eh?
Eyes glazed. I spent time in the auditorium's public restroom, frantically wiping the sweat of my skin. I did use a little aftershave lotion to kill the stink.
I had always admired Ferlinghetti's poetry. While many of the more doctrinaire poets refuse to take his work seriously, while at the same time pretending to back some movement in the world of US (not USA) poetry to lower complexity and thus attract more readers or listeners, I could see how Ferlinghetti wrote for his audience. I wonder sometimes if he even cared about "making it bigtime with all the big shots".
Are poets supposed to fit their liberty and their freedom into cruel shoes just for the Hell of It?
Anyway, why would one be disappointed in the dearth of the importance of audience on a weekday in the middle of the afternoon?
At least I got a front row seat. But I forgot to reveal the event of the title of the poem published by Book of Matches: On the way there, scorched, sunburned, lost in a "big sweat", I'd found the beginnings of a new development to be built on a tiny triangle of lost real estate: Near Monticello, as I took a side street about 20 feet from the grand smog creator dubbed Central Expressway, I found a slab of flat and wet concrete. Some sort of surveying operation, I imagined, had ended that day because the sun was so hot. The sun was a little too hot.
Enthused by an anticipation I and my shrunken head could barely contain, I knelt in the weeds and inscribed something bold--with a stick ready to serve as a cuneiform stylus, I wrote the phrase:
BLUE SKY BEAT ME AGAIN
Then I left it. I've always wondered what happened to it. Probably "a hassle" to the all-knowing STEM creatures enlisted to develop real estate.
BLUE SKY BEAT ME AGAIN
Here I am, front row near three or four MFA students. Empty seats all the way to the back of the auditorium--where sat well-dressed Highland Park and University Park attendees and English professors:
Two rows of guests and four people in the front row.
Needless to say, how is it one is stunned when one is nearly insulted by the sporadic attendance and almost contemptuous time slot for one of the more important figures in 20th Century US (not USA) poetry?
How must one feel if one is to be seen as a poet?
Who cared? I wanted to hear a legend. I heard a legend. In his own voice. Delivering perhaps the finest spoken word reading I've seen before or since.
What did Ferlinghetti do so uniquely? He used no less than three endstop/enjambment vocal tactics: uptalk, downbeat and the midpoint between the two.
How is one to approve of such a grandly "odd" way of speaking? I do know I sat amazed at the imaginative quality of Ferlinghetti's vocal style. By using those three intonations, Ferlinghetti lifted his black-and-white transcripts into a practically astral dimension.
After all the horror I'd been given at "the store" of a recovery group, after learning my life was again about to be crushed by "coincident incidences", I honestly believe Ferlinghetti's reading that afternoon restored my spirit, and no, the spirit wasn't offered the typical Big Duh Earl Shieb. No veneer to that vocalization. I almost cried.
Pausing at the end of one poem, Ferlinghetti paused to lecture the crowd: "What I think poetry at this festival needs is a spirit a little more like Abbie Hoffman's "Steal This Book".
Near-silent gasps from the reptiles in the back.
Seriously? A small segment of university students and anti-war activists pump their fists and threaten a revolution, a little akin to some outlaw on Gunsmoke murmuring, "Now yer gonna dance fer us!", and 25 years later, wealthy conservatives are still a-quiver in fear over that?
Revolution. For. The. Hell. Of. It.
Scary! So scary it seems sometimes the fear-bots have nothing better to do for the hell of it beyond freaking completely out the window.
Chuckling to myself, I smiled big from the front row. I'd felt that way for a long long time and here one of the US's true literary heroes agreed with me.
Such is the Big Duh. Reactionary as a rotten apple to the core. Still the same as it was in 1963--only underground. Should we be afraid of "a wholly-owned subsidiary of Weather Underground"? What is the weather like under those fancy clothes anyway?
For me, the weather back to the apartment was pretty scorching. But one more thing. As SMU graduate students were busily selling copies of many of Ferlinghetti's finest books, even some of those "very scary" City Lights paperbacks, Ferlinghetti sat in a cushy chair a distance behind the sale. I strode around the sale and offered him my card. It was a nicely printed haiku. I still have a few around.
Ferlinghetti seemed taken aback and appreciative together.
After I expressed my own appreciation, I returned to the ever-busy sale. And what did I do?
I stole one of Ferlinghetti's books, "These Are My Rivers", a collection of new and classic Ferlinghetti poems.
Book in hand, I wheeled around the sale and Ferlinghetti signed the copy.
Then I was back in harsh, dizzying Texas sun.
"BLUE SKY BEAT ME AGAIN" is a longish poem that in a way recalls the events leading to that moment:
Is there no way to objectify this tramping isolation?
I’m at the head of a three-mile trudge.
Hieroglyphic representations of a gone, beaten heart
bleed through reason for hours.
Hot sun
has shafted its silver-gray light until I am too oceanic.
Me, the risible mystification, unworldly quanta
inside each surprised electron, orbiting
a wilderness of dreary aches....
You won't find that in any demonstration, at least not yet. Publication may take money, honey.
*
Hilariousness is a German vagrant appearing at Austin Street Centre. See it? Centre. Not Center. Who pays an ownership's rent? Cent--regarding NOTHING.
A supposedly homeless Cherokee buddy--Bobby, his real name--we called him Bloody Feathers after a character in Larry McMurtry's send-up of the life of Billy The Kid, a boy who, in the laughworthy entertainment, wouldn't hit the side of a hill at 50 yards. Gert, the name of the German traveler-in-vagrancy, had confessed he was on his way to the Northwest: no questions asked. Gert had always wanted to meet an "Indian".
Thus after nearly three months of running alongside Bobby, who ran alongside with me, and with a few of my true running buddies (Bobby or Bloody Feathers: definitely a pleasant companion for the time we spent with him--until he disappeared "to work", only to return with a large, squarish head brace he told us had been put into place after, during a construction temporary job, he fell off a ladder and broke his neck)...
...Gert, who Bobby called "Girt" as I called him "Gort"--from"The Day The Earth Stood Still", black-and-white version, a great 1951 sci-fic B-movie about the oddity of a Venusian arriving with a robot who, at the moment humanity reveals it cannot live peacefully, would destroy the earth:
To Gert: Klaatu barada nikto! At least once a day. Like a multivitamin.
I remember Gert fairly well; the most focused moment when I mentioned that Germans, who seem to have an especial appreciation of the Native Americans and their fate at the hands of the US Army, a military driven of course by real estate entrepreneurs who saw the Great Plains and all farther west a perfect hunting ground for dirt, capitalized, occurred one summer day, 2001, when I revealed to the German that Bobby was apparently a full-blood Cherokee. This is when I bestowed the McMurtry name of Bloody Feathers upon Bobby.
Gert, who had been fascinated by old time novels about cowboys and "Indians", seemed thrilled to recognize books like those of one Eric Linderman: a novel alluded to in an essay collection by Eric Iverson, "When Indians Became Cowboys: Native Peoples and Cattle Ranching In The American West". Most early Eric Linderman novels (he apparently wrote under a number of pseudonyms) are likely fairly cheesy, at least according to the fiction librarian of early 1980s era Eric Johnson Dallas Public Library; novels that may or may not reveal how white people pictured Native Americans prior to 1900.
According to Issue one, Volume 101, in The American Historical Review (February, 1996), something stands out: "General readers in search of what the [Iverson] book promises will perhaps wonder about references to Clifford Geertz...". Geertz, a fairly famous cultural anthropologist and social scientist who focused on "deep description" analyses of the context and subjective interpretations of various native groups from Bali to North America.
As do some social scientists, Geertz deployed the famous work by Ludwig Wittgenstein, "Tracticus Logico-Philosophicus", a thin volume that in a way expands on Kant's idea that "pure Reason" is flawed because our reflections, and our perceptions, are influenced by both past events and their influence on how humans subjectively reflect on both present and future.
Wittgenstein's suggestion that one's language influences one's thoughts may or may not work perfectly when white men attempt to be objective in terms of how the Native Americans (there are hundreds of tribes that interpreted symbols differently from one another--so how's that supposed to be digested via a book?) view their (not our) realities?
That sort of deployment has been tried since the early 1950s, and at least in my interpretation, the imposition of Jungian frameworks into the mythological mindsets of cultures that are alien to German, or Western, experience--that seems faulty. Anyway...
I find the name-similarity between Gert and Geertz a little odd.
Gert immediately recognized many 19th Century American novels about Native America--as do, he said, most Germans.
I'm certain present-day Germans, even here in the 21st Century, are infatuated by the North American "genocide"--where from the discovery of America through even present times some estimates of the culture clash and extermination routines (of culture to societies to political interpretations and more) run to one sum I found appalling: 250,000,000 dead people, most from disease such as those infamous smallpox-tainted blankets Catholic priests are alleged to have handed out to early Native Americans "to help stave off freezing temperatures".
If that's verifiable it certainly pokes one great big hole in "pro-life". In my opinion.
Gert, standing in the sunny plaza in front of that massive library building, thrilled beyond measure that he'd been "walking with the Indians" for around two months. There Gert was, standing as if still a doctrinaire German schoolboy, feet firmly planted together like a prep school denizen's, laughing in surprise. All that time, his search for Native America resulted in, well, never call it synchronicity or even kismet or shazam, or serendipity.
Regardless, my curiosity over Gert's apparent illegal presence in Texas and the United States fueled some suspicion. Nice guy. Rather beefy. A little bit of a paunch ("El Raunch-O Poncho!" as one prospective college girlfriend, Liza Boyes, exclaimed back in 1974: crude, vulgar, messy, sloppy, descriptor of sexually explicit behavior or lacking refinement--oje como va--check out how it's going; one way of staking a claim in leaving hippiedom and heading toward Chi Omega...or Tri-Delta), reddish-blackish-whitish Scot plaid, long-sleeve even in summer--and then...
..that suspicion. What was Gert doing in America.
By that time, I was "lead reporter" for Endless Choices. What did that mean? I was "the only reporter". But I did accomplish plenty in well-chosen words, even if my publisher, Clora Hogan, had to tone my rhetoric down if I got too passionate or even angry over what I'd found. Which is what editors do; unless editors are on "automatic pilot". What. Ever.
That August, when catlike curiosity got me, I used a pay phone to contact the Dallas-Fort Worth German consulate. I told her about a German man illegally here in the United States. Answer? An earful. "It is none of our business what a German citizen is doing!"
Wow. But unsurprising. My so-called experience with Germany was already pretty weird. When I worked for a law firm called Gardere & Wynn, the only Dallas law firm noted in the Warren Report, I'd ended "temping for the Germans". Nineteen ninety-two, summer through December, then finished case two days before Xmas. In Thanksgiving Tower's 26th floor. Next door to Bunker Hunt's unmarked office, the one with the nice Russian receptionist.
While my work merely involved conducting legal summations: going through documents to document the firm's possession as a defendant, sometimes I slipped "too far into detail". Go faster! If you see a copy, mark "copy", move on. There was an entire warehouse of the German defendant's documents. I shall go no farther than that, other than the fact I noted that all the women in the war room were blondes. The American representative would step in once a month to dress us all down: we'd stand in a line as if at attention.
Wowie.
Noted: the German billionaire didn't feel like responding to plaintiff interrogatory requests.
After my quick call to the German consulate in 2000, I told Gert. Gert was unhappy with me. As I passed by his spot on the floor of Austin Street Centre (no cash, no nothing!), Gert shot one of the darkest, most horrific scowls I'd seen during that entire months-long encounter. Bar sinister--as in "I could kill you."
Next day, Gert was gone. He'd notified no one.
*
THE LOVING WONDERS OF BARBED WIRE
By Gordon Hilgers
My first experience at being a Colorado cowboy occurred when I was four-years-old. It was weird to me, even then, that I'd get hung-up atop a hurricane fence the first halfway warm day after Christmas, 1958.
You see, Gunsmoke, the TV show starring (at least in my head) Matt Dillon, typically aired in black and white. Color had not been invented until the mid-1960s. Regardless, as a photograph, likely snapped later by my mother or father, indicates that by late 1959, I had joined the cowboy race, so to speak: See me? I'm kneeling, two toy six-shooters ominiously directed at the cameraman (or woman), toy cowboy hat, brim lowered, apparently to shield my eyes from blaring sunlight, "high noon", and the look on my face?
Meaner than a copperhead.
But why? Why the dramatics? I was only at that time five. Next to me, however, immediately to my left, my baby sister, only months old, lay coddled and possibly asleep as her protector stood his ground--while kneeling.
Let's say I'd taken to my knees. Scotch plaid shirt--red. The TV behind me.
This is a treasured snapshot; a Polaroid I believe. Faded, only 60+ years old...
..and thus we hurtle the young hero back in time to that warm day after Xmas.
Dressed as a big shot cowboy (in a semi-urban near-exurb near Golden, Colorado), I stride like a giant into the backyard, silvery sheriff's badge in my back pocket for "safety purposes", and meaner than any wild man, I "mount" the hurricane fence, the borderline, and "mount my horse"--which after all was a pretend horse, only the crest of a faded galvanized steel bar atop diamond-shaped grey links.
There. Atop the fence, totally legitimate as a high sherrif atop my steely steed, I recall, I pulled my cap gun, ready to fire a warning to outlaws of my imagination, and then...what?
The badge. The one stuck in my right back pocket, a badge with a pin to fasten a tin facsimile of something that may or may not have been for real in the 19th Century--it opened under pressure from the rocking back and forth on my mighty steed of a fence.
Owwww!
I began to shriek. That needle on my backside had me angrier than any other old cowboy who's got his tail up while arguing with something called reality.
I'm shouting! Mommmmmmmmmmm!
Seemed like hours before mommy came to rescue me from my adventures on the high plains east of the Rockies. Yet the "trooper" approached, pulled the badge's pin out of my tail, and laughingly lowered me from my infantile fantasies, not to crush those tough-boy reveries, but to get me back indoors.
I don't know if I scored a coke out of the deal. Whatever. I soldiered on....
Here in Texas, 2025, the last of the red-hot cowboys appear almost everywhere: There they are, tight black jeans, barrel chests, tight plaid shirts, some with yokes spanning their shoulders, all mean and stuff, squinting in the darkness of where they stand, big black cowboy hats on their heads, and worst of all...
...hands on their hips.
What are they doing wearing hats designed to stem sunlight from a dusty trailblazer's eyes? Hands on both hips, where are they this time, possy or not surrounding them?
These "everything is bigger in Texas" pantywaists are about to pay up at a Mexican restaurant.
Hands on hips? Verboten in the world of the actual cowboy. Why so?
That gesture is a relatively obscure signal: I am a great big sissy.
Which is like pinning a note on your opponent's behind: KICK ME.
How do I know this Great Big Secret? I worked with real cowboys when I turned 16. Hard work. Mucking (cleaning) stalls. "Claying" stall floors to maintain some cleanliness and a firmer foundation for show horses. Tossing sawdust chips over that soft clay foundation. Watering champions every morning at seven. Walking nervous stallions and fillies.
Horses do talk back. If they like you, they may play by pretending to try stepping on your foot.
None of that is of real consequence to the vitality of the ever-urbane Dallas cowboy. See? He's got him an oversized pickup. He's speeding to get to the red light first. He's zooming in and out of gridlock as a steeple-chaser. Watch out. Black Bottom Bill is riding the very sun--even if he has no idea who Phoebus was.
Today, barbed wire is invisible. Patented in 1867 by a man named...what? Lucien? Later improvements resulted in what is now common fenceline--not to block expensive black or red pickups--but to keep cattle inside a paddock or behind the line: a single (often rusty) barb intertwined with two stiff wires.
Why barbed wire? Because otherwise cattle or horses are smart enough to push through a fenceline otherwise.
OK. Define "livestock" for us. The old wooden fences are now almost extinct but they still exist. Define "fence". Define "a wire". Define "the prevention of out-of-control nomads used to actual liberty".
Define this. Cowpokes.
Let us all now grant me cowboy immunity: I ain't no cow-herder; never intended to be that. As a non-cowboy, I am allowed to hold opinions on "cowboy hero as fashion statement". I do honor cowboys and ranchers. My grandfather was a rancher. He owned almost an entire northern New Mexico mountaintop. My grandfather assisted local Navajo and Pueblo--as an optometrist. He traded with many fine people, including individuals. Of course, my grandfather was indeed rugged and rowdy in a military way. How could it be he was enlisted by Pershing to help lasso Poncho Villa?
Dallas by the way is car country. As said before, it'd take the jaws of life to save someone from the security of your basic metallic carapace out on the old highway.
Know any true cowboys? Honest. Those men and women are still working hard. They're different than the city slicker view of such men. I doubt many are too interested in being heroes.
Cowboys work in a world where fashion is similar to holding one's hands on one's waist. Funny how pop historians distort what occurred in order to mix and match what qualities the cowboy holds high.
Remember the commercial where ranchers at camp taste a hot sauce they deem inauthentic? "Git a rope!" one says.
I wouldn't go that far. I respect history in a city that broadcasts "heritage" while backroom leadership works almost tirelessly to eradicate whatever it is that actually happened.
I don't think J. R. Ewing is part of their club.
*
Let's play deconstructionism. Deconstructionism can have many meanings, most of which involve a subject who is at liberty to define his (or her) subjective valuations of words, phrases, signifiers,what is signified and the resulting significance or, as French postmodernist pioneer Roland Barthes labeled this process: signification.
Significant, eh?
Yes, signification is important in a world where many right here in the US play it fast and loose with words. So. Just for grins, let's tear a word apart:
amoral / a moral / am oral.
Choose one. Possibly instrumentalize the significance of each option for maximum ideological impact.
Frank Luntz, if you're out there listening. . .
Years ago, when I clerked in the Dallas Public Library's Humanities Division, I'd sort the mail. I'd sort books. I'd put labels on new books, or those donated by individuals or even those posthumously offered to the US public.
One time, I paused to read a segment of a book that targeted Adolph Hitler's use of the word, decent. Apparently, he and his agitprop team worked on that one quite a bit: What is decency? Who makes the value judgment? Who has the power to define or redefine a word?
Let's see: decent / de-cent. Maybe to de-cent means to cause deflation: Centum in Latin means "100". In German, "decent" is "anstandig", means civilized, decorous, reputable, honest, moral or integrity. That's a real mouthful of value judgments: Who defines what is civilized, reputable, honest, moral or of integrity?
Was that world, or this country's language, subject to those with power? Whatever happened to "tell
truth to power? Is it now "tell power to truth"? Why so? When did vocabulary, language and context become instrumentalized tools of political or ideological combat?
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