In Honor Of the Land Ho's Of The New-Old West!

THE MISAPPROPRIATION OF LITTLE WHITE LIES CAN MAIM AND EVEN KILL - Jonathan Swift

Pure fun.  A kind of garage culture, defined as "anything is possible if it's automated or vehicular", at least for the purposes of this rant, seems to exist inside the highest reaches of what only can be labeled as "money culture".  

No one has to be "against money" to observe the distortions obsessive/compulsive possession as money creates zombies of otherwise fine men (and women).  The possessed.  What do the possessed want to do?  

Possess every little thing, every single shiny object, and thus, at least in some of the more malevolent cases, possess others, possess the lives of strangers, possess, possess, possess: a sort of sickness.  

I call such pushovers for that kind of wealth acquisition to be the sort of zombie-vampires one sees in AMC's The Walking Dead.  

Here in Dallas, for example, a move by property developers is now out to swallow a classic building by a highly respected Japanese architect: I. M. Pei's oddly shaped Dallas City Hall.  I remember when the building--big, angular, forward jutting, and a little like the bow of a huge Japanese battleship streaming into Dallas-as-harbor--celebrated its completion.  

"The International City!"  That was the booster-talk of the time.  I am not certain Dallas, Texas, actually qualifies as an international city in the technical sense.  An international city is one that has designated itself as autonomous or semi-autonomous, and thus disconnected or sovereign, z sort of city-state that is not part of any larger nation or state.  The Free City of Danzig qualified, as does the Free Territory of Trieste; Krakow, Tangier, Shanghai, Beijing, the building of the United Nations, and...

Dallas?  Seriously?  Who knew Dallas possesses its own currency?  Or is a law to and of itself? 

Wait.  Back in the 1980s, when Japan was outperforming the United States in heavy manufacturing etc, Dallas suddenly became "all-powerful"! A competitor with Japan!  Who knew a city that began as the only legal red light district this side of Las Vegas, Nevada, possessed such a status?  That's right: a city of whorehouses.  When trail drivers hit the tiny, nearly unpopulated area next to the ever-stagnant Trinity River, they approached the place for some stuff:  a room, a hot bath, lots and lots of demon rum, and of course the ready and willing ladies of the night.  

Supposedly, that's arcane history.  When the city began to grow in the early 20th Century, that after Dallas, now a fashion capitol, made and shipped Confederate military uniforms to all places at battle stations in the defense of slavery.  All kinds of tunnels still crisscross the western end of the downtown business district.  The tunnels at the time of the US Civil War included small-gauge railroad tracks with which to ship in cotton, and ship out completed military gear.  I once worked in Founders Square in western downtown Dallas.  At one wall in the lovely building's atrium--in the basement--sits a wall.  Behind it: a tunnel.  

One goes right under the famed Triple Underpass where JFK was murdered.  

Dallas suddenly "The Japan of the Old West".  Weird, eh?  It's not that the heritage of the city is abominable; no, it's part of the Old West.   Even if the Southern Baptists invaded the town in the years after the loss of the Old South in the Civil War didn't like Dallas' reputation as a sort of buckskin Riviera for cowboys and trail drivers dusty and thirsty after months of pushing cows toward Fort Worth--that doesn't mean Dallas has to cover up: Whoa, naked heritage!   

I definitely bet that early version of a red light town qualifies as "international city" all the way.  No laws, no rules, no nothing but the buying and selling of women, and later, of slaves, and of course, of all the land some of the city's biggest "world eaters" can get their hands on. 

I guess one way to "buy freedom" is to buy all the land out from under the United States.  Right: democracy as an impediment to obsessive-compulsive people who simply do not know how to just stop it.  

From what I've heard, the property that serves as the foundation beneath Dallas City Hall was once a public meeting place where people gathered under the trees to discuss public policy long before the town was wealthy enough to support the building of public edifices with which to celebrate how freedom frames licentiousness masquerading as liberty.  

Buy that! Liberty is love is for sale.  

What's weird about liberty is that, once liberty has been sold, it is no longer liberty.   I think for example about how an entire ideological mass movement in the United States, 2025, is based on an argument in defense of "natural law".  While there is a reality where Nature abides by its own set of laws--that's usually chaos, savagery, and a world before civilization--once Nature's laws are instrumentalized into an ideological tool, Natural Law is no longer natural.  Nope.  It's another tool, instrumentalized in order to "get some stuff".  That's called instrumental reason, and it's a tool of dominion. 

Right.  Declare oneself as a defender of natural law, and what do you get?  Troglodytes in expensive suits in huge mansions with walls and security guards, alarms, and enough luxury to surround anyone with a sense of King's X out and away from the realities all around that someone.  

According to the ideologues, "natural law" trumps "civil law", and most especially the federal government.  This is quite similar to an evangelical platitude that man's laws are subservient to God's Laws.  

God?  Or Nature? Maybe both.  Apparently, only an elite few, those "natural law dependent", have the money to purchase both and put them on a shelf in case "the government" interrupts their hoarding. 

What's especially ironic is the ideological mass movement's leaders have employed the domination tool of ideology in order to command and control "subjects" (not citizens) buy confining all ideologically naive individuals, families and orders, including corporate ones, into a box that can be conveniently moved around to the liking of those dogmatic and doctrinaire "movers", those who know exactly what those "backdoor limitations" can do for them, not for their self-declared "charges", i.e. the soldiers of the movement, the expendables, the ignorant, politically naive, and the old stand-by of Ronald Reagan's "true believers". 

Don't cross that boundary line!  That's the essence of ideological enslavement.  Adhere to it--at all costs--or else.  

Totalitarianism 101.  

In that regard, once an ideology, an excellent organizing tool, has taken hold and has become solid, all else, all we call freedom or liberty, is under the thrall of "the box".  

Nice going, guys.  Any other ways to imitate Stalin or Lenin?  They too employed ideologies in order to "keep the subjects from getting uppity".  

Dallas City Hall, shackled on a big box in the public square: Who's buyin'?  

Why would property developers want such land so badly? Is there magic in the ground?  If that's the original spot where early Dallasites gathered--what's up with privatizing more heritage?  One explanation of course is "for the dirt of it all!".  We know how that goes: make the dirt private, and then expand one's power to the point where even eternity will not bear the weightiness of the need to possess everything and anything in sight, and probably beyond sight.  

Power.  Wealth.  Wealth gap.  Power gap.  The South shall fizz again!  

For some reason, I managed to stop to laugh about the TV show "Designing Women".  Don't talk about the agenda, just do the agenda.  Apparently, the ladies of the plantation all used mental telepathy to control the...

...property. 

Seriously?  Probably not seriously at all.  War from the four corners of the earth = excessive wealth = instrumentalized money for the sake of raw power.  

Rawlings.  That is a now nearl-forgotten Old South slang term for Plantation Slaves who had been flayed until their backs were bloody, scarred, and likely, left unhealed.  Thence, should a slave make a break for freedom, the blood and scar tissue would be "no problem, goblin!" for slave hunters with bloodhounds.  

Pink.  Flayed.  

I suppose that's one way to "whiten up" the Blacks.  

"We are hear to raise the savage races into civilization!" might have been the defensive whorling wave of excuses and alibis.  After all, according to such non-thought, only whites have the civilization.  Blacks, browns, and other subjects of 19th Century political and economic imperialism "just couldn't have" what was narrowly-constituted as liberty.  Oops!  That requires a mentality that judges "inferior races" as animals. That cannot think.  Even if animals are known to dream.  

Bestial. Not among the savages.  Among the troglodytes enslaved by false pride, arrogance, hubris, vanity, and of course, economic violence. 

Interesting, eh?  The most doctrinaire of the ideological mass movement slightly summarized earlier declare something called "the non-aggression principle" or NAP: Should a conveniently-defined "oppressive or coercive force" endanger the obsessive-compulsive overreach for more stuff as a means of self-interested power, well, well, well, that's automatically wrong and is thus to be targeted in the name of self defense.  

Wow. Who could have concocted such a lame excuse--all to protect excessive grabbiness for more money and its translation into....

Totalitarianism 101.  

???

Furthermore, I also learned that rumors abound about a group of real estate developers also have their eyes on The Bridge, the city's first non-evangelical or religion-based homeless shelter.  That's something I know I fought for as an advocacy journalist in 2000-2002.  At the time, I remember, Dallas' then overwrought disdain for what some termed as an invasion of homeless tramps, bums, whatever, had also granted Dallas a number-one winner position: One of the meanest cities in the United States as interpreted by its general and often officialized treatment of unfortunate humans without roofs under which to lay their heads.  

Didn't Jesus self-describe in such a way?  

ENOUGH OF THAT!  Those who "command the Bible, especially the New Testament" need to keep that one down and out. 

A nice bumper sticker: INSTRUMENTALIZE JESUS.  Right.  Turn the widely-proclaimed Son of God into another tool that is found only in the higher circles of hardware stores.  Which of course sell construction equipment and earth movers.  

Matthew 4: 11: Jesus, quietly studying his situation and his understanding of his mission as a newly officialized rabbi, way out in the desert where he can get a little peace of mind--he's taken to a mountaintop.  He can see everything from the peak.  This is where Satan suggests that if he, Jesus, bows down to the devil, he, Jesus, will have dominion over all the earth.  

What did Jesus say if we used today's euphemistic parlance:  

"Meh."  He declared his kingdom was not one of temporal authority.  Nope.  Jesus wasn't a real estate developer.  Odd too that he lost his temper in the Temple when he found moneychangers selling animal sacrifices in the foyer of the Holy of Holies.  What happened next?  Jesus was executed for vandalism.  

Then, weirdly, when ancient Rome, the all-purpose instrumentalizer and commercial power, began to droop from overextending its empire to the point the empire was indefensible, who came along?  

A group the Romans named Vandals.  How apropos.  

Weirdly, at least in contrast to Catholic Church agitprop, the Vandals, although a peripatetic civilization that had no need for real estate possession, turned out to be more civilized than the moribund remnants of a once-powerful republic.  Especially odd is that the Roman empire thrived because the republic it violently replaced had provided it a solid foundation from which to...get more stuff.  

We hear horrific stories about Attila The Hun.  How savage he was.  Maybe because he defeated the once-valiant Roman legions, he was then impugned through history as a horrific savage and bloodthirsty military leader.  Nah.  He merely established an empire--just as had Rome.  

Way to go, ideologues of 2025 U.S.A.  Anyone challenge the need to go all grabby in an excessive way is conveniently labeled the instant it begins to mount arguments to push back the grab-asses: socialist!  Prepackaged, fill-in-the-blank fear tactics.  

Usually those with the most to fear when reality comes calling use fear tactics.  As if socialism in the US was a threat.  It isn't.  But then, what with left and right serving as little battle banners the unrighteous right deploys as a defense of the either-or totalitarian variety, what about the foundational structure of how reality relates to the human lives left to struggle at the hands of the compulsively grabby?  

The root conditions don't change.  How we interpret root conditions is subject to Ptomkin Village proportions of a pent-up change that, left unaddressed, will spill over not only the grabby wealthy (lots of wealth is not grabby) but all over every citizen's life.  

Not a fine place to end a republic in favor of acquisitions.  

So.  Developers are rumored to be pushing from behind the scenes the destruction of The Bridge--because that secular shelter was, in the wanton eyesight of that group of developers, in the wrong place.  What is supposedly "right" for that bunch?  

More condos!  Next to the Farmer's Market!  How lovely!  Let's make the unfortunate move their asses!  They don't have any money anyway!  

When I first "was rendered" homeless by circumstances I did not know how to control at the time, much of those circumstances being "the early stages of Bipolar Disorder recovery", I remember how a homeless woman took me to the Farmer's Market. 

"You won't get any fresh vegetables or fruits at the shelters," she told me. "Go to the Farmer's Market if you need those!  Most stalls offer people samples!"  

Great idea.  She and I wended our ways through the crowded market, reaching for slices of apples, of oranges, of carrots, squash, even spinach leaves.  Wonderful.  Fresh vegetables and fruits are essential to omnivores such as human beings.  

Until we reached the stall of the guy called "the Watermelon Man".  I took a sample.  But I was not dressed appropriately.  The Watermelon Man snapped at me: "GET OUTTA HERE YOU GODDAMNED BUM!" 

Welcome to Dallas, the International City.  All the Jesus prattle and pabulum--faked.  All the liberty--only for the moneyed elite.  All that freedom?  Takes money, honey.  Or something.  I really did feel that way, and to this day, I have not forgotten how it felt to be laid low and to want to rise up and better myself through a difficult and painful situation--only to be labeled a goddamned bum, and then rousted by some idiot-head with a long silvery knife.  

On a Sunday afternoon.  

I'm certain I took it too hard.  The Watermelon Man was only one deeply self-interested individual.  Like many, perhaps, he was afraid of the sight of poverty.  America, in that sensibility, is not about "those people".  We, in other words, as homeless individuals, were kinks in the conduit, buzz-kills, outsiders who messed with comfortable illusions of superiority and pride of place and means.  

So yeah.  Move a secular shelter away from where developers want to build.  In 2001, when the City of Dallas was planning for The Bridge, the same malcontented developers were incensed at people like me, people who stood to defend perhaps the most ghettoized community in DFW: homeless community.  

Yes, a community.  A sovereign-by-default community.  One with a need for defenders, not land ho's.  

NIMBY, a.k.a. Not In My Backyard", apparently does not play when developers begin twaddling with the "back yards" of homeless people and their advocates.  Do you feel a pain in the ass?  Call the SEC or the FHA.  Even if both are "under new management".  

At least your complaint will be part of the historical record.  As in who really wants a commercial empire to shift into a political one via a propagandistic foray of scare tactics of some kind of vast socialist conspiracy.  

Here's a fun axiom: "If you can't join 'em, beat 'em."  Maybe that was the under-the-breath motto of 19th Century white supremacist slave owners.  

After all, almost all adults want their innocence back.  Those who still possess it due to their strength under the chaos of "natural law" are reminders, apparently to those who can't seem to preserve their own innocence.  

Finally, Thanksgiving Day.  My sister, brother-in-law, and I are speeding along a rural road near Celina, a small exurban area north of DFW.  The last few years, the ride, to me, thrilled: 

Old cedar and juniper forest, with oaks, blackjack oaks, pecan trees, and lovely fields full of rolled hay and Angus cattle grazing, weather nice, the treescape on both roadsides an amazing, exhilarating experience for me.  

I live in an urban area with some local greenbelt nearby.  Nothing of that compares to driving down a winding rural road full of so much nature as to be nearly intoxicating.  

However, this ride northward into exurbia took me into a saddening surprise: Plowed forest, plowed fields, barren dirt, no cattle in many spots.  Why?  

Development.  

It's as if no urban sprawl is enough urban sprawl.  I've mentioned in earlier entries that, in 2010, as family and I flew from New Mexico to DFW airport--at Thanksgiving's aftermath--nearly half the journey eastward was filled with a vast urban city of incandescence.  Granted, the plane had slowed.  Yet, given the rate of air pollution, and in this case light pollution, what is up with all the metropolitan sprawl?  

Likely, the usual reason is at play: big money to be made.  Cut whatever down, plow under the grass and wild weeds and sunflowers and havens for rabbits, bobcats, coyotes and foraging animals, and look: 

More money to be made.  

No one I know, not even myself, objects to someone moderately making money off real estate.  But the now excessive urban sprawl in the DFW area is out-of-control.  

Endless expansion is like an old science fiction novel:   Explorers searching for Earth after hundred years of silence from the planet home of their ancestors finally find the place: What once was lovely in their imaginations had been replaced by unsettling reality: The entire planet was wrapped in a coat of steel and concrete.  And all inhabitants were gone.  

In other words, way to go, development obsessives; way to go.  And no, Jesus isn't going to clean up after you.  Give up on that excuse.