Kaddish

For David Franklin née Queen 04 04 1944 – 24 03 2023

You suffered much in your life. Being you was not an easy task. There was so much more to you than that outwardly jolly fellow who couldn’t stop telling jokes and who when we talked turned into a straight man for my remarks. We laughed well together. And that laughter sometimes distracted you from your suffering, your preoccupation with making things work right, which they seldom did for you because, after all, you were a spendthrift and often a mark for the unscrupulous in your midst.

Who were you really underneath all those layers of brain? You carried so much with you in that skull of yours, the images of your life in West Virginia with Grandma Peachy and the folks who cared for you like your father and mother refused to do;

Your forced detention in a family with three other brothers who never understood what it meant to be the one who could see through all the rot and the lies and yet who traveled with eyes open wide from Fort Bragg to a Saigon in the midst of a hopeless war,

Where you lived in a compound away from the bustling center of town with your warrior father and his misplaced wife and yet you swam in the intellectual waters of the French Lycée making friends with the Vietnamese boy Bo who became your guiding light into the world of knowledge that was hidden in the gems of French literature and the mysteries of Vietnamese lore.

The transmutation was complete when you returned to the tarred streets of North Carolina and the bullying American high school system that would not relent unless you were a football star or had a hot car or knew how to make money in streams and stacks, a talent you lacked.

The talent you had was for remembering things, like the fact that all who follow the Bible must be Hebrews because that is the book of the people, so you converted at 18 and learned the rites and the words and in the temple you found a home with outcasts who, like you, have always been outside and yet were able to survive.

With your special skill for languages you survived in the Air Force because they sent you to learn Russian and transformed you into an important asset for the machine of the state that always needs to know all about the enemy.

And so you were on the road again to the northernmost tip of the northernmost island of the Empire of the Sun, where with your headphones on your head you heard codes and the voice of Boris and the other pilots who took to the air from the island a few kilometers across the water from where you were.

Privy to secrets you could never reveal, you had a secret of your own that you only revealed to people you could trust, which never included members of your family because they had been brainwashed into believing that purity was white and sin was doubt and loyalty had nothing to do with compassion.

Your job allowed you to escape from scrutiny and move with elation to the city of brotherly love and the university that would give you papers describing your expertise in the deciphering of languages both Slavic and Latin.

You worked for them and for those who would use your skills and then were finally ready to leave the hellhole that had become your travails in Washington D.C. with the wild religious fanatic wife and the soon-to-be-abandoned son who would later turn to alcohol and rant that the addiction was your fault.

You had faults. You knew your faults. You cataloged your faults often in conversation and yet you were unable to fix them all, as I suppose you actually tried to do from time to time. But some faults are too delicious to abandon.

Somehow you were able to discover a way to reveal to your half-brother the existence of yourself and this nudged him toward the road which went from India to London and back, by bus, by train, by encounters that could have ended in jail or death or a poor girl getting pregnant with a stranger like me.

But through it all you remained yourself, your eyes always open and your game always cloaked and hidden behind so many layers of deception that even now after all these years it’s impossible to really know who you actually were and what you actually did and for whom you were doing it.

My suspicions were always wrong and yet I know I am right when I say that behind that mask of rebellion there was a loyal citizen in love with freedom and the rights of man and the hope of democracy, tempered by the lure of Karl Marx and the visions of equality that his manifesto transmitted to those who dreamed of a future that would never arrive in your lifetime.

But the language skill enabled you to infiltrate the post-Soviet free-for-all in Moscow and the Stans, and to solidify your image you even allied yourself with an Olga, who made it seem as if you were an OK vodka-drinking pal of the new order and so were able to slither past many a mistrustful eye and eventually escape the ruthlessness of the Bratva when they grabbed control of the system from within.

You flew back and forth like a busy bee from East to West, from D.C. to LA and finally to Saudi where your new career evolved into a long tenure teaching the spoiled children of millionaires the History of the World Part 1.

You liked to stoke the fires of political discourse with your professed belief in all things revolutionary while you enticed the same rhetoric from others so they could be defined and described and identified should it be necessary to do so.

Which is why I avoided belief and avoided disbelief and never said anything which could be construed or misconstrued by them or the other them, and you probably understood me better after I mentioned the day you took me to the Soviet Embassy in Rome and we walked through the gate and then in through the door and you showed me the rotunda ceiling and we walked out and I noticed the open window across the street so dark and aimed directly at us and I knew then, and you somehow couldn’t remember this moment, so I knew then and you knew then that I knew.

Good and bad are terms that really are like white and black but mean nothing in a life which is grey and shades of pink and blue and impossible to really judge by any non-deist standard since we all drift freely toward the solid white and then drift back toward the solid black and only maybe the saints reach solid white and the devils reach solid black, but we and you are clappers in a bell and we chime and swing from side to side and only stop when the ringing stops, like it did for you almost a month ago.

I saw the photo of your foot protruding from under the blue sheet that covered your corpse as it lay there inside the oven awaiting the flames. It was your foot. I could see it was part of you. It was as if I could recognize all of you in that foot, the sole wrinkled and the toes pointing toward the ceiling of the oven, well, not the ceiling, but the side of the rounded ceiling because the foot was angled slightly to the right, your right, your right foot, exposed, the other one covered by the sheet.

And in that foot which would soon be consumed by flames like the rest of your body, the skin getting crisp and then charred and then finally decaying into ash, like your bones and all those internal organs which had given you so much trouble in your final years, all eaten by fire and consumed by heat, like going to hell I guess, though you were already beyond any possibility of feeling anything, in that foot I could recognize all of you, all the strangeness of your life.

We are still here. For how long? We walk in the sun and under the raindrops and feel the wind and breathe and see the sky and hear the birds call. They are not the same birds that were here in the garden last year. Maybe one or two. The rest are new, born recently, the old ones dead or moved away to some other garden. Feathers and bones and skin and bones and all the tangible parts still here soon to be gone to join the ashes and the dust that rides the wind.

Your ashes, David, are in a white marble urn. Gene Rose asked me if I wanted it. I said No, she should carry out your wish to have your ashes scattered in the ocean or under a growing tree.

What would I do with your ashes here in the cold and rainy northland? My garden is no place for a man of your intellect and your disregard for conventional behavior. I could not have done what you did with your life. You earned so much, threw away so much.

Did you waste your life? We all waste our lives somehow. We never really live up to our true potential as human beings. Some get closer than others. I always think of Shakespeare in that regard. But didn’t he waste his life too writing verse and making up characters who live only on a stage if they live at all.

You were a strange guy David. I really only knew the flash-in-the-pan that you directed at me. I never spent that much time in your company without wanting to not be in your company. There was something about you that made me uncomfortable. You were dangerous. Like your father was dangerous. Like your uncle Ray was dangerous. There was, underneath that skin and those brown eyes and layers of brain, a potential murderer.

We traveled together for weeks from Amsterdam – where you made me wait for hours at the railway station and I stood there being approached by men who thought I was waiting there to get picked up for a quick nasty moment in a public toilet – before you emerged from beneath the ground climbing the stairs among a throng of commuters and I was finally able to exit and breathe fresh air without feeling trapped.

I remember when you disappeared in Belgrade and I wandered around near a park where you said you would meet me and saw you appear in the doorway of a hotel nearby, and I wondered what that might mean, although actually I knew very well what it meant and kept it secret to myself because there was no need to confront you with anything that would mean nothing anyway because it was you and you would have lied your way out of it.

You were a very good liar, like my mother, who was not your mother, like your father, who was my father. I have always been surrounded by very good liars. Naiveté attracts liars like honey attracts hungry bears. Neither one of them can ever get enough of the sweetness that exudes from the source. Not that I am sweet like that, but I don’t lie in the same way. I hide. I am afraid and have learned how to hide behind innocence and behind shyness and behind stupidity. That’s how I survived my journey at your side.

In Istanbul I found a girl who wanted me and she slid under my covers in that communal sleeping room where you slept not so far away and where she slid me into her with the hope of attaining some form of pleasure that you destroyed when you woke and saw what was happening and gave such a groan of disappointment that the girl looked at you, stopped her movements and slid off me.

Later, as we wandered around town the four of us, you with her friend, a young man who acted like her guardian, me and her looking constantly for a nook or a cranny where we could continue what had been interrupted, it became clear that you and her friend were conspiring to keep the two of us sex-hungry animals from consummating our desires.

I don’t remember her name. She melted into the past as we boarded a small bus which was actually a white van with a few rows of seats. It held 8 passengers and trundled through stony mountainous Turkey, to Cappadocia and then to eventually arrive at the border with Iran where we boarded a bus.

Being with you and your conversation destroyed my solitary view of the world and distracted me from my thoughts so that what had been a journey of discovery from New Delhi to London turned into a journey of forgetting on the way back.

As more and more westerners joined the caravan to India on the busses from Tehran and through Afghanistan, you made conversation with others, the kind of people I had avoided on my journey to fetch you. I still didn’t talk much, but you did, and with Frank Lawatsch you organized the group into being able to buy tickets for the train together and for the bus together and I went along for the ride because that’s what I always did when you were around.

Years later when I came to visit you in Philly, after you had once again left me stranded, this time in New York at the pier, where you said you would pick me up from the ship I had sailed across the Atlantic on from Europe. But when I called you in Philly, you answered the phone and acted as if it was normal for me to wait for hours on you and told me to take a Greyhound, get off at the station and Spruce Street wasn’t far from there.

You and Charlie and two girls had been watching the results of the election, a landslide victory for the man who would soon have to resign from his presidency. I had seen the headlines in New York: NIXON TAKES 49 STATES. It was the beginning of the end for the United States. Soon after that they would lose in Vietnam and now they are losing their democracy.

By the time we got to New Delhi, the scene was set for you to have long conversations with my mother about how your life had been with the man who had fathered me. It turns out that it was much better for me not to have been a member of your household.

A week before you died you told me how much you hated your own mother. Cold and mean, you said. Like the brother you hated because he was Daddy’s boy. You were kicked into a closet by your father the violent drunk, and hidden from view. From all you said, it was safer there too.

In India you saw what you had to see, the Taj, Old Delhi, the Red Fort, and you went fishing for eels with Sergei and Gennadiy, who you were able to converse with in Russian. Strangely, they showed up at my mother’s apartment shortly before I left to go get you. We were invited to their place to drink vodka and eat little tidbits. I left and when I returned with you, they showed up again.

The reason I never was called for duty to any cause is because I reveal everything when asked. I reveal secrets. I haven’t revealed yours yet, have I? Maybe I won’t. Maybe I will. The clever ones will know anyway just from how you behaved when you saw me enjoying la femme.

And then you flew back to your homeland and I was able to breathe freely again. In a way it’s how I feel now. You have been reduced to ash and I am still breathing freely.

You took me to North Carolina and on the bus on the way down from Philly, you confessed. It was not so shocking. I had suspected as much. It made no difference to me.

When we arrived at the Fayetteville bus station our father (Our Father) spied from behind a corner using his learned technique of only exposing one half of his face and using only one eye.

He came out grinning, put me in a headlock to show me he could kill me with a twist and let me go because I didn’t get angry, didn’t use an escape technique, and so I passed his little tests.

To the chagrin of your mother, I presented him and and Ray with my mother’s present, a bottle of Johnny Walker Red. You and me and he and Ray finished it off that very same day.

That was it. One picture of his 5 children together and conversation that has long been lost in space and time. How I met my father.

You and I met again from time to time over the years, once when I ran in anger and fear from Portland, Maine and you came and rescued my books and took me back to Philly with you, to clubs, to find a job, to find an apartment, to eventually go to Baltimore and Jean Proudfoot and then to Los Angeles and all the rest, the start of my life living with words.

When you came to me here in Hamburg, you met my family, my friends and did what you always do, made them laugh and charmed them to your side. You couldn’t settle here because you body was decaying and the price here to slow down that decay was too high. So you returned to the Kingdom of Sand and they cut you open and sewed you back up and finally, after you had dome your 20-plus, you could stop teaching the brats and go to a place where you were sure to thrive.

Tbilisi wasn’t it. You almost died there twice. So they put you on a jet back to the red white and blue where the blues were all you got from your profligate alcoholic child.

Off you went again to find a place where your life could continue with some final success. Like famous Uncle Sol in that e.e. cummings poem Nobody Loses All The Time, you found Dumaguete City in the Philippines (your new Philly?) and there you managed to have a successful happy life until, well, you know, until you didn’t have life anymore.

You leaned heavily on me in your final years, on my conversations with you, on the contact which I sometimes found trying and yet maintained because although I cannot say I ever loved you like a brother – a concept I will never understand – I found I could not be rude to you and abandon you like you had been abandoned by your father and mother and your other brothers, Daddy’s boy, the junkie who overdosed, the agoraphobic one, and your son, the alcoholic and his super-religious mother who you rescued from a life of misery in Poland.

You are still in my memory, and the memory of some others of us here on earth. Eventually your memory will fade, like mine will and like it will for most of us, even, eventually for Shakespeare.

You suffered much in your life, David.

Your suffering has ended.

*****

When Nothing’s Sacred Anymore

From the album Raw

with pepper spray, CS gas and stun grenades in fists
armored men in black confront those fools who will resist
batons at the ready, helmets on their heads
step by step, marching toward those who will soon be dead
angry women, their children too,
doctors and priests, me and you
is there something we can do?
when nothing’s sacred anymore

wannabes and veterans linked by rusty chains of hate
thirsty for blood which will feed the dying state
with automatic rifles, dressed up in camouflage
impervious to reason, their lives a persiflage
black balaclavas surround their eyes
heads full of putrid rotten lies
is there somewhere we can hide?
when nothing’s sacred anymore

enforcers who wear acronyms steal little kids from schools
break into homes and churches cause they’re following the rules!
rules made by rich men who own the politicians
in empires of old they were called the patricians
they still own slaves, and kill at will
money gives ’em power, power gives ’em a thrill
will they ever get their fill?
when nothing’s sacred anymore

we dare not whisper names or ten lawyers will pounce
the pound of flesh demanded is weighed out ounce per ounce
judges in black silk lead the inquisition
secure because they know they have a lifetime position
the punishments never fit the crimes
private prisons are the new gold mines
where’s the reason? where’s the rhyme?
when nothing’s sacred anymore

no burden of morality holds zealots to account
empathy cannot be found, not even in a trace amount
denial builds a wall logic cannot penetrate
so genocides and holocausts are easy to perpetrate
fill the stadiums, fill the camps
fill mass graves with tramps and scamps
in this night, who’ll light the lamps?
when nothing’s sacred anymore

where’s the reason? where’s the rhyme?
will they ever pay for their crimes?
is there something we can do?
are you with the red, the white or the blue?
is there somewhere we can hide?
will we ever turn the tide?
in this night who will shine a light?
when nothing’s sacred anymore
when nothing’s sacred anymore

DAVID

The joke David told me on Saturday before he died was, he claimed, a true story. It went like this:
A Republican congressman was questioning a doctor during the Covid-19 hearings. The question he asked the doctor was the following:
“Doctor, if you die in your sleep, is it true that you don’t know about it until you try and wake up in the morning?”

David in Hamburg 2010

David in Dumaguete City, Philippines 25 March 2024

Mashhad to Tehran

Part 2

Bus travel is always interesting. You sit in a vehicle with a community of strangers and yet you are separated from them, in your own seat, next to the window or next to the aisle, sometimes with someone sitting beside you, sometimes alone. I liked sitting alone. But on the journey from Mashhad to Tehran the bus was full. Not packed. Full. And not everyone was going to the capital. People got on and off in between.

Iran was very different from Afghanistan. People dressed differently. The men dressed like Greek men did, grey trousers, white shirts mostly with the sleeves rolled up a little because these were working men traveling to take something somewhere, on business of some kind, or to visit family. Women were on the bus as well. One or two wore a head covering, a white cotton extension of their clothing that was thrown casually across the head, covering only the back part of the dark hair that flowed underneath. These were obviously not professional women, office workers or women with jobs that would require clothing that was approaching fashionable. But none of them wore black robes and none of them were veiled and neither the men nor the women displayed any kind of religious fervor.

Some of the same near-hippies I had seen on the bus into Mashhad were also on this bus. Young, dressed in the loose shirts and pants they had bought in India in order to mirror the Indian style of dress, guys with longer hair, not Jesus locks, without beards — beards hadn’t become fashionable yet — who sat more or less together in small groups. Some of them knew each other. Some of them just stuck together for the comfort of being with people who looked like them, talked like them, thought like them, and were just as anxious to get back to tell their stories, show off their trinkets, and slowly melt back into life in their own country, their own city, their own family.

Not me. The purpose of my journey was not to go back to anything. I was going to London, to meet my half-brother David. I had vaguely heard of him once or twice from my mother, but nothing specific had ever been revealed. Until his letter arrived. It was addressed to me, but my mother had opened it and read it. I didn’t know anything about the letter until she decided to show it to me. A rectangular envelope, white, with my name written in blue ink over the address of the Italian Embassy in New Delhi, a bunch of multicolored stamps, some with the stars and stripes on them, stuck not very neatly in the top right-hand corner, cancelled by two black circles which indicated that both the US postal service and the Indian postal service had OKed their veracity and their correct value for the journey the envelope and its content had taken by air from the USA.

Its content.

Its content changed the way I perceived the world. As I read the letter, I stood with my back to the broad window and the glass door which led out to the balcony. My mother stood at the opposite end of the room against the white wall. She watched me carefully. When I read the sentence that broke through the fog of lies my mother had enveloped me in for almost 25 years, I looked up and saw her watching me for a reaction. A cold shower of goosebumps spilled over me from the top of my scalp, down behind my ears, down my neck, over my shoulders and all the way down my legs until the tingling reached my feet. I had been asleep for so many years. I was awake now. I was in a new life. Disoriented. The woman watching me was my mother. I didn’t know her. I couldn’t identify her as my mother. She was a woman watching me for a reaction. She was aware of what had just happened. She was waiting to see how the situation would develop. She said nothing. She just stood there, vigilant.

I read the letter through to the end. David wanted to meet me. We were, according to him, brothers. Half-brothers. I corrected his words as I read them. What I couldn’t correct was his age, the date of birth he had written in the line that had cracked open my world. He was three-and-a-half years older than me. Older.

I looked up at my mother again after I finished the letter. She had the beginning of a smile on her lips. The kind of smile you imagine a fox has after you find out that what you believed was your pet red bushy-tailed dog was actually a sly chicken-stealing predator. I looked at the letter again and realized it had arrived at least one week before she let me see it. She said: “He called. He is flying to London.”

And I was on my way to meet him.

Bus travel is great because every once in a while there is a bathroom break and you get to walk around outside in the fresh air – in Iran of course it’s heated air on the road from Mashhad. But slowly we were climbing and the air was getting cooler with each stop. The longer stretches were for sleeping. Then after the bathroom breaks and tea breaks and a walk, I’d be refreshed and could carry on reading until I got drowsy.

Sometimes the seat next to me was empty, sometimes a man would get on the bus and sit next to me after a polite greeting and a polite smile and him packing his carrying bag or bundle wrapped in cloth in the overhead luggage rack. There was never any attempt at conversation. My various seat companions were as uninterested in conversation as I was, and that made the journey pleasant for us.

Being an only child is a privilege. All the attention was on me. All the love was mine. No competition from any siblings made for peace and quiet but, because my mother was such an extrovert, one of those people who suck the air out of a room when they enter it, I became an introvert. Being an introvert is also a privilege. I can sit alone in a room or in a crowd and be happy thinking my own thoughts. Introversion enabled me to become a creative person, to dream up stories, to observe the world without being distracted by a screaming younger brother or sister, and not being dominated by a brother or sister who was born before me.

The lie I had been told was that my mother and father divorced soon after I was born and he went back to the USA to continue his career in the army and then remarried and had more children. He was a captain (that part was true) and he had been stationed in Trieste after the war. Trieste was occupied by the British, the Americans and the French. The fourth occupying force, the one that had the harbor and the southern coastal area along the Adriatic was Yugoslavia. In that aspect, at that time, Trieste was like Berlin. But instead of the Soviets, it was Tito’s Yugoslavia that made up the last quarter of the international occupying force.

My mother’s lie held until David’s letter arrived. And though I had been bathed in the shower of cold reality and truth after reading it, I was not at all anxious about my relationship with my mother. David was not her child. I was. Yes, she lied. It was part of her professional competences to be able to lie convincingly. She was in the diplomatic service. That’s what they do every day. They lie convincingly so that the foreign nation they are dealing with will engage positively with them. Of course the nation they are dealing with lies as well. Both know that the other is lying. Both accept the rules of the game and get along anyway. It was only me, naive, trusting, who believed everything my mother told me and never once doubted it.

That naiveté and firm trust in my mother’s lies helped me get through grade school and high school unscathed. Had other children at anytime sensed that I was lying or covering some dark secret, my life would have been filled with insults that burn more than fire and brimstone. Being a True Believer (in my mother’s lies) made me invulnerable. The long bus journey to Tehran, plus being an introvert, made the situation absolutely clear to me. Later, when I found out about where she had been and what she had gone through during the second world war, I understood that her mastery of the skill of the perfect lie had been the reason she survived. And she used that mastery to help me survive as well.

Eventually, the bus reached the outskirts of Tehran. The bare landscape gave way to rows of buildings along the side of the road, then to taller buildings, then to traffic that crowded the bus from in front, from behind, and from each side. We were back in what people like to call civilization.

The chaos of civilization becomes apparent once you get off the bus – this time at a real bus station where lots of other busses were parked. Noise. That is the defining characteristic of civilization. The chaos of disorderly noise. Nearby, people were talking loudly in order to be heard, all around me the sounds of cars fighting traffic, horns blaring, scooters racing by, motorcycles breaking wind in rapid bursts, this being the permanent hum of life at an ear-shocking loudness that would not decrease in volume even during the dark hours of the night in this, the metropolis, the capital city of a civilization more than 10 times older than the one now dominant across the Atlantic.

Because I was Travellin’ Light I had no problem with luggage. But I was also traveling fast, and so I wasn’t looking to stay in the city for very long. My priority was to find a bus that would take me onto the next leg of my journey, to Tabriz and then from there to Erzurum in Turkey. From Erzurum there was a train that could take me to Istanbul, and from Istanbul I would be able to hop on the legendary Orient Express to London.

I asked the bus drivers – as usual always more than 3 in order to get the right answer – and eventually found out that there was a small office not far away where I could buy a ticket for a bus to Tabriz. That rather dark and cluttered office was run by a very friendly man in a white shirt that had obviously been worn all day and was therefore well-wrinkled, sleeves rolled up to show forearms with an abundance of black hair, his face with the obligatory black mustache, a head of black hair, slightly curly, greying at the sides like the stubble on his chin. He told me that the bus would only leave in the morning, early, at six.

Luckily for me, he spoke good English, and intuitively understanding my condition, he said: “I close the office in 2 hours. Come back. You can sleep over there.” He pointed to a rather ordered array of bulky green canvas sacks that looked like they could be bags of letters. But they had no printed indication that they were part of an official postal service. “Clothing. Made here in a factory. For the shops in Tabriz.” He followed the answer to my unasked question with a smile. “I will wake you in the morning.”

I had the ticket in my pocket and left my rucksack on the bags that would be my bed that night and walked out into the chaotic evening that was descending on the energetic and totally nonthreatening big city. I trusted the man in the office, I trusted the myriad faces around me – most all of them men – and I trusted the delicious street food I found not far away. I was careful to remember landmarks so I could find my way back to the ticket office. The writing on signs was illegible to me. Arabic numbers were not a problem because those I had learned to decipher, as I had a few of the letters of the alphabet, but words were another thing altogether.

Iranians speak a Persian language called Farsi. Farsi is an Indo-European language related to English through an ancient history that you can look up for yourself if you like. But Islam conquered the country and eventually (over about a century or two) more or less erased the native religion of Iran, Zoroastrianism, and the Arabic alphabet became the standard. Still, because the Iranians have a history that outdates Islam by a couple of millennia at least, there are cultural remnants of Zoroastrianism, the most obvious and most popular being Nowruz, the Persian New Year celebration that takes place at the Equinox, usually between the 19th and 21st of March each year.

Well-fed and happy that I was able to find my way back to the ticket office, I settled onto my bed of bags for the night, with my faithful green blanket to cover me, while outside the locked office the noise of life continued unabated.

Sometime before six, the office door was unlocked, the friendly ticket man came in, made Turkish coffee on a hotplate, gave me a cup of the brew and then led me out and around the corner to the bus that was going to take me to Tabriz. I shook his hand and he patted me on the back, gave me another friendly smile and I stepped through the door into the bus.

The Zone of Interest

The Zone of Interest is a film that every German child should be shown at the age of 15. Yes, they will not understand why the screen is black for so long at the beginning, and they might get a little restless because there are no chase scenes. But the longer they watch, the more they will start to understand exactly what Hannah Arendt meant by “Adolf Eichmann and the banality of evil.”

Martin Amis wrote a novel that has the same title as the film, but apart from the title and the location, Jonathan Glazer has managed to tell a story that stands on its own and is more powerful than the one informing the plot of the Amis novel. No spoilers here for people who want to read the novel. The novel depicts a love story in the shadow of Auschwitz. The film doesn’t. Not by a long shot.

The film is in German. Jonathan Glazer, the director, doesn’t speak or read German. He had to trust his actors and the script translators to bring across the dialogue in such a way that it made sense to the viewer. For those of us who understand German, the dialogue is superb. The set magnificent. The costumes perfectly in tune with the time. No Hollywood over-dressing, no star-friendly makeup or hairdressing. Just normal people in a normal setting. Except of course, it’s Auschwitz.

Yes, the film has English subtitles for the American and British markets. Too bad. Because they were embedded in the copy of the film that I saw, they were sometimes a distraction. But they were small enough to not be a major distraction. And, as all subtitles, they are only accurate to a point. Subtleties of meaning and turns of phrase that are akin to idioms function differently in every language.

Christian Friedel, who played a photographer for the Berlin police department in the hit series Babylon Berlin, is absolutely believable as the German Nazi commandant Rudolf Höss. No Hollywood over-acting, no “I’m the bad guy” posturing. Höss (the historical personage) was the commandant of the Auschwitz death camp. He knew what he was doing there, and he knew his job was to exterminate Jews.

Friedel who, like Höss, sports what is known today as a Hitler-Youth haircut, shows us an efficient camp commander who has to jockey to keep his post by using his political connections in Berlin. Nothing different from the vicissitudes of a manager heading a branch – an important branch – of a major corporation. His job is to make the camp run smoothly, which means the killing has to be done efficiently and cost-effectively. His meeting with the designers of a new rotating oven system for the burning of corpses is no different from a meeting a manager would hold who needs to order new production facilities.

“The optimal position for a business is to be both effective and efficient, whereby the right goals are pursued and the organization is being run in a cost-efficient manner.” Friedel, who plays Höss as one would play a senior manager who has the desire to control, and also the will to indulge himself in the pleasures of life – horses, prostitutes, flowers, lilac trees – is trying to be both effective and efficient. He’s running a business for the corporation.

The corporate entity is the NSDAP, with Adolf Hitler at the helm. The main product is Death. Not indiscriminate death; this death is aimed specifically at Jews and other undesirables, as laid out in the corporate guidelines written by important members of the board of directors, like Himmler, Goering, Goebbels and of course the CEO and Chairman of the Board Adolf Hitler. These corporate guidelines – aka The Final Solution – were handed down to managers like Höss. He made sure the SS men and soldiers under his command carried them out faithfully.

Sandra Hüller, who has won the European Film Award for Best Actress, plays Hedwig, the venal wife of the camp commandant. Like her husband Rudolf, she came from humble beginnings and is now living “the ideal National Socialist life” in the extended Reich (empire) that Hitler has created for the benefit of “normal” Germans like her.

When her husband is ordered from above to transfer to Berlin to take up what is actually a more important post, her lifestyle is threatened and she urges her husband to put up a fight against the political actors who have caused this upsetting situation. If not able to stop the transfer then to at least make sure that the house where she and her children are living is not given to the new commander who is to replace Rudolf.

We don’t see any killings. We don’t see any torture. The only scary moment for Höss and his children is, – while he and his kids are bathing in the river – when he finds human remains. That gets him out of the water fast, and he scoops up his children and runs back home with them.

And what a lovely home it is. A three-story house with heating installed to fend off the snowy winters. A backyard with green grass, a small swimming pool for the kids, with a slide, a gazebo where Hedwig and her lady visitors can sit and sip tea, and flowers, flowers, everywhere. The most beautiful flowers you can imagine. Red, white, and the very special golden yellow Mädchenaugen. Coreopsis. Girl’s eyes. Beautiful two-tone flowers with a protruding brown-maroon heart. This makes the flowers resemble the iris and pupils of a girl’s eyes.

Only if you have no sense of irony can a description of that flower have no effect on you. As when Hedwig puts a bunch of sheer petticoats on the table and instructs her Polish servant girls to “take only one,” while she goes to her bedroom and unwraps a full length brown mink coat, tries it on, and studies herself in the mirror while wrapping it around her like the models do in advertisement photos.

Later, when chatting with her lady neighbors – wives of other camp officers – they gossip about an overweight woman who picked a dress which had been worn by a Jewess half her size and didn’t fit properly, but she insisted in having it anyway because she “loved” it and was going to go on a diet in order to be able to fit into it properly. And then Hedwig shows her Kaffee Klatsch girlfriends a diamond ring. “Guess where I found it? In the toothpaste.” They laugh and comment “How clever,” and “Yes, they are clever.” Then Hedwig tells them that she has ordered more tubes of toothpaste.

In German there is a word that describes these women: gierig. The official translation is “greedy.” But what they display is the same as what a kid who has hardly ever tasted chocolate displays when he is taken to a chocolate shop for the first time and told he can choose whatever he likes, but not too much. His mouth waters because he’d love to eat every single piece of chocolate in the shop, but he knows he can’t, so he acts shy and chooses the 2 or 3 pieces that look delicious and he can savor later.

These women are hungry for the luxury items their captives brought with them to the camp. They are thirsty for the recognition they will get from their neighbors when they show off their pillaged dresses and rings and fur coats. And they are proud of their standing, as the wives of officers who are high enough up in the ranks to be able to “afford” to treat their women to these little trinkets. Meanwhile Hedwig and Rudolf’s children play at night in bed with the gold fillings from extracted teeth.

Do you understand now what is meant by the banality of evil?

While all these scenes of what could pass for a normal domestic life play out in front of us, right there, at the back of the splendidly flowered garden is the gray cement wall of the camp, with a roll of barbed wire at the top. The soundscape, which remains well in the background is punctuated from time to time by distant gunshots, the occasional shouted order, a muted scream before a gunshot ends it.

The constant rumble of the crematorium is also muted. That’s the production line working 24/7 to make sure that deadlines [pun intended] are met and orders are fulfilled. From time to time we see clouds of dark smoke emanate from the towers where the bodies are being turned into ash that will then serve as fertilizer for the garden.

Höss is an excellent manager and his skills are finally recognized by the powers that be. He is reassigned as the head of Auschwitz in order to manage the new big job that only he can take care of so efficiently: 700,000 Jews from Hungary must be disposed of urgently, and a contingent of them must be pared off as slave labor for the commanders who need them. Höss is the man who can deliver.

If you are 15 years old and you see this film, it might take you a while to fully grasp its significance. But, as time goes by and you see the world around you in a clearer light, you will begin to realize that you are surrounded by people who will grasp at any opportunity to get more out of life than they have now. And these are your neighbors. These are people you grew up with. These are the “normal” people who are able, like the Trumpista neofascists of today, to live with the cognitive dissonance of the death camp that borders the backyard as long as their private “gier” is being satisfied.

EVERYTHING WILL BE OK

YOU GOTTA CHANNEL ALL THAT ANGER
INTO CREATIVE ENERGY
WRITE A POEM, LEARN TO PAINT
MAYBE MUSIC WILL SET YOU FREE
DON’T PICK UP A KALASHNIKOV
A PITCHFORK OR AN AX
AND STAY AWAY FROM THE MANSIONS
OF THOSE PEOPLE WHO PAY NO TAX

FORGET THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
THAT WAS PEOPLE LOSING THEIR HEADS
FORGET THE 10 DAYS IN OCTOBER
WHEN THE WHOLE OF RUSSIA TURNED RED
AND NEVER THINK OF MAO
OR HOW CHINA WAS WON
JUST KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT
AND KEEP YOUR HANDS AWAY FROM THAT GUN

EVERYTHING WILL TURN OUT FINE
IF YOU TOE THE PARTY LINE
EVERYTHING WILL BE OK
IF YOU DO AS I SAY

THE POLICE ARE HERE TO PROTECT YOU
FROM YOUR OWN STUPIDITY
THEY ONLY USE A BILLY TO BEAT YOU SILLY
IF YOU BEHAVE THREATENINGLY
STAY HOME IN FRONT OF YOUR SCREEN
WATCH PORN OR REALITY TV
AND GO VOTE FOR WHOEVER YOU WANT
AFTER ALL, THIS IS DEMOCRACY

JACK OR JILL OR JANE OR BILL
CHOOSE WHO YOU LIKE BEST
EXPRESS THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE
AND I’LL TAKE CARE OF ALL THE REST
DON’T WORRY ABOUT ANYTHING
YOU’LL GET YOUR JUST DESERTS
YOUR HAPPINESS LIES IN OBLIVION
AND I KNOW HOW MUCH THAT’S WORTH

YOU’VE BEEN LIVING IN
A UNITED STATES OF ILLUSION
YOU’VE BEEN LIVING IN
A UNITED STATES OF CONFUSION
YOU’VE BEEN LIVING IN
A UNITED STATES OF OBSTRUCTION
AND NOW I’M HERE
TO TAKE AWAY YOUR FEAR
AND SHOW YOU THE WAY

EVERYTHING WILL TURN OUT FINE
IF YOU TOE THE PARTY LINE
EVERYTHING WILL BE OK
IF YOU DO AS I SAY

OUR REVOLUTION WILL BE TELEVISED
SPONSORED BY AT&T
STARRING THE NSA, FBI, CIA AND ME
SO PLEASE LET ME INTRODUCE MYSELF
I’M YOUR PRESIDENT FOR LIFE
AND THIS CUTE LITTLE BARBIE HERE
IS MY TELEGENIC WIFE

I’M ON YOUR SCREEN TO THANK YOU
FOR THIS HONOR YOU’VE GIVEN ME
AND TO REMIND YOU HOW STRONG WE ARE
BECAUSE OF CHRISTIANITY
AND IF YOU DON’T BELIEVE IN JESUS
AND ALL THE GOOD WE’VE DONE
WE’VE GOT A HOME FOR YOU IN NEVADA
IN AREA 51
YOU’VE BEEN LIVING IN
A UNITED STATES OF ILLUSION
YOU’VE BEEN LIVING IN
A UNITED STATES OF CONFUSION
YOU’VE BEEN LIVING IN
A UNITED STATES OF OBSTRUCTION
AND NOW I’M HERE
TO TAKE AWAY YOUR FEAR
AND SHOW YOU THE WAY

EVERYTHING WILL TURN OUT FINE
IF YOU TOE THE PARTY LINE
EVERYTHING WILL BE OK
IF YOU DO AS I SAY

*****************

If you liked that, then you will like this too:

https://archive.org/details/rogues-gallery

The Naked Conservative

Ambrose Bierce in the Devil’s Dictionary: “Conservative, n. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.”

The High Priest of people who like to call themselves Conservatives is a man by the name of Russell Kirk. In 1953 he published a book, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot. This book not only serves as the Bible for the modern Conservative movement, it is also a manual which outlines how the strong Father must exert his authority over the unruly masses under his watchful eye. The masses are ignorant of the wisdom the Father possesses. He has this natural wisdom because of his exalted position as the head of the family – a position ordained by the Master, i.e. God – and he has a divine responsibility to make sure that his masses of ignorant and unruly children follow his dictums, ideas which have been handed down through history and are aligned with the power structure of male over female and Father over the rest of the family. The family, for Conservatives, is the society we live in and the Father is the ruler over that society.

Conservative ideas are hierarchical in nature and must be enforced with strength. That might even call for violence from time to time in order to purge society of the unbeliever and teach the recalcitrant a lesson they will never forget. In idiomatic form it equates to: Spare the rod and spoil the child.

Kirk handed down 6 basic commandments for the followers of the Conservative Faith. Let’s have a look at what they are and what these commandments actually mean when stripped of their eloquent camouflage.

N.B.: Although there have been and may well be in the future, some females who fit into the Conservative mold, e.g. Margaret Thatcher, it is the male who is touted as the one who should be and should remain dominant if the system is to remain stable and in place for the longest time possible, i.e. Eternity.

Now let’s play some strip poker and see what the Conservative Mind looks like when it’s naked!

1. Transcendent Order
   First, the Conservative generally believes that there exists a transcendent moral order, and the ways of society ought to conform to this moral order. In other words, God is at work here. His “natural law” is the enduring moral authority. This moral order is codified in the Good Book.

Take off your hat buddy!
This sounds quite pleasant to your ears if you are a Deist and True Believer in the words written in one of the books that serve a religion. The Christian version of “moral order” is essentially written in the various “books” of the Old Testament. The Bible is full of contradictions as regards the “moral order.” Anyone who has spent time reading the document knows this.

Despite these contradictions, what is “moral” has gone through various interesting transformations since Constantine made Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire. The gods and goddesses of the pre-Christian empire were notorious for their licentiousness, their vengefulness and their fickle dispensation of fortune, both good and bad. Christianity brought along with it the Jewish God of the Old Testament, the only God, a dispenser of furious vengeance, an intolerant Master who demands absolute obedience to his will, even going so far as to order his subject Abraham to kill his son as an act of submission.

This is the Father model that Conservatives love. The absolute monarch, ordained by God to rule over his subjects. If the divine will of the Master is not submitted to without question, wrath and punishment is sure to come. And it has come often enough since Constantine’s time, especially when Rome insisted on converting the conquered to the new state religion. Non-compliance was rewarded with a quick trip to Hades for the pagans. For recalcitrant converts who didn’t want to be under the yoke of the new masters, Hell was their reward.

What about Jesus? What we know about Jesus from the research done by Michael Hudson and others, is that he was a reformer who wanted to get rid of perpetual debt slavery and bring back the Jewish tradition of the Jubilee Year, the year in which all debt was forgiven and all seized property was returned to its former owners. In other words, a complete reset. A restart. A chance for people to get it right this time and not fall into debt that destroyed them and their family.

Constantine and the “fathers of the church” erased that aspect of Jesus and changed the word “debt” into the word “sin” so that owners of debt and property would not be forced to return anything and debt slavery could continue unhindered. Jesus was transformed from a reformer working for the liberation of the common man from earthly slavery into a divine being liberating mankind from the burden of sin, which is there from birth, thus following orders given by the almighty Father and dying in order to free us all from our sins instead of our debts.

Suddenly, with the adoption of the doctrine of “original sin” you were guilty for just being born. Leverage for the people in charge of the state religion, leverage for the people in charge of the state. “Sinners” had no standing and could be punished any way the authoritarian leader, the divinely ordained “Father,” saw fit. The fact that those in power were (and still are) the greatest sinners and just as licentious and fickle as the gods of the pagans made no difference, because by a simple confession to a man who took the oath of omertà, all could be forgiven.

2. Variety
   Conservatives believe egalitarianism belongs to radical systems that destroy long-established social institutions and modes of life. They are convinced of the need for social classes, differences in material condition, and many sorts of inequality. The only true form of equality is equality at the Last Judgement.

Take off that tailored shirt!
God – the Christian God – never leaves the Conservative Mind. Embedded in the skull along with the Last Judgement is the simple, geometrically sound and efficient pyramid, with the all-seeing eye of the Master at the top. The wealthy and wise leaders, the merchants and the military are up there, and the base consists of the masses who toil under the watchful eye of the Master(s) who sit (divinely ordained) at the pinnacle.

The Roman version of Christianity seems to have always been rather corrupt. Popes had mistresses and illegitimate children, powerful families got their brothers and cousins installed in the highest offices of the church, greed was endemic, and so, eventually, reformers like Luther and Calvin, became whistleblowers. Aristocrats from the northern parts of Europe realized they could use this schism to break away from the control hitherto exerted by the southern oligarchs. Max Weber put pen to paper and came up with what he termed “The Protestant Ethic.” He said that Protestants were successful and loved by God because they attached value to hard work, thrift, and efficiency. Calvin said that success in worldly endeavors meant that God loves you and you are headed for eternal salvation.

Conservatives believe there are natural distinctions among men, leading to inequalities of condition. The only equality is equality before God and the courts (which conveniently follow the laws written up by the rich and powerful); anything more leads to “servitude and boredom.” Therefore, inequality is necessary to uphold the status of the rich (the successful blessed by the Lord) and ensure the domination of the poor – sinners unrepentant and not worth saving because, since they are not successful, must therefore be lazy and/or stupid.

3. Freedom and property are linked.
   Without private property, the state is unstoppable. Redistribution of wealth, by taxes or other means, is not economic progress. Men need property to secure their rights, discharge their duties, and limit government.

Take off that wife-beater and show us your muscular chest!
Money talks. The landed gentry who fashioned the Constitution of the United States made sure that money would continue to talk by making it impossible for the voting public to elect the leader of the nation directly. Men (most always men) appointed by the rulers of individual states – electors – are to be sent to congress to deliver the results of the vote in their particular state. These electors are, however, allowed to not follow the will of the voters in their state and can give their vote to a candidate their state had not preferred. It hasn’t happened often, but it has happened. The candidate for President in 2020, who actually lost the battle for electors in the states, attempted to send faux electors to congress in order to manipulate the system in his favor. He also attempted to force the ceremonial tallier of the preferences expressed by the electors to nullify those preferences and declare the loser a winner.

4. Social Continuity
   Conservatives uphold the principle of social continuity, a community of souls. Change may not be a good thing, and though it is sometimes necessary, it must be gradual and discriminatory, never “unfixing old interests at once.” Revolution is a cure that kills.

Unhook that Gucci belt and drop those Dolce & Gabbana pants!
If you have a community of souls, then there must be someone in charge who looks after those souls. Nikolay Gogol showed us how that concept could be successfully manipulated in order to ensure that the masters remained the masters and that clever men could become masters by using the ambiguity inherent in the system to cash in.

Let’s just leave God in the background for a moment because now we are dealing with earthly things, despite the souls.

Redistribution of wealth is akin to revolution. To give anything of value to the unwashed unsuccessful rabble, as the original Jesus attempted to do, is anathema to the Conservative Mind. Edmund Burke, a member of Kirk’s Pantheon of Conservative Thinkers¹, was appalled and frightened by the French Revolution. After many years of climbing the ladder of the social system in Britain, he had finally arrived at being able to pal around with well-known thinkers and at the same time be of service to important aristocrats and anything that threatened his newly attained rank in life was horrifying. In France the new revolution was truly a “cure that kills.”

Burke reasoned: If a king is a divinely appointed head of state and the aristocratic system that supports it, peopled by the rich and successful, is made up of the chosen, the saved, then any attempt to take away the basis for their power – their wealth – must be stopped at any cost. Well, that meant of course at the cost of the lives of those trying to enable redistribution, before the blade of the guillotine meets the heads of the elite.

In England during Burke’s time – Kirk’s Conservative Garden of Eden – debtors were imprisoned and thieves were hanged. Later, when it became convenient to empty the country of these reprobates, they were all shipped to penal colonies to work as indentured servants, i.e. slaves, for the elite colonial masters who were exploiting the new territories by stealing natural resources and murdering the indigenous.

Taxes are evil – on the other hand, this evil of taxation is not applicable if taxes burden the unsuccessful and redistribute wealth upward. Government must be limited – limited to the exploitation of the underclasses by the elite. Only thus will the state run efficiently, with the successful at the helm. Ergo, debt slavery is fine, and even actual slavery is fine, as long as no Spartacus appears on the scene and tries to change “the natural order.”

5. Prescription
   Things are the way they are for a good reason. Past generations passed on these customs and conventions, and so why should these things change. Customs and traditions serve as a check on anarchy. People who advocate change for the sake of change only lust for power. Power has been in the hands of the Fathers who rule with divine authority and that should not change. “The individual is foolish, but the species is wise,” Burke declared.

Are you wearing cashmere boxers? With your initials in gold thread? Strip!
Translation: “That’s the way we’ve always done it, so why should we change now.” Strangely enough, this slogan has become the slogan for doom when applied to a business entity. Every consultant firm in the modern world will tell you that if you don’t change how you do business, you will fail. Innovation is the mother of success.

OK says the Conservative Mind. As long as The Father controls the business and the tradition of the hierarchy can be maintained, then the technical aspects of how the business functions can be modified. And when innovation is born, then it can be born from a mother, but only because the seed was planted by an all-powerful Father. Of course this type of change is only acceptable if quarterly profit continues to rise and the workers don’t get uppity.

But never apply this dictum to society. Society should not change at all if humanly possible. Any change in the fabric of the social system must be slow and always benefit the structure that is in place: the Masters and Priests, Merchants and Military, and keep down at the bottom women and the slaving unwashed and ignorant Subjugated Masses.

Money goes up, shit comes down.

6. Imperfection
   No perfect social order can ever be created because people are imperfect. To aim for utopia is to end in disaster. If the old institutional and moral safeguards of a nation are forgotten, then the anarchic impulses in man break loose. All that we can reasonably expect is a tolerably ordered, just, and free society, in which some evils, maladjustments, and suffering continue to lurk.

A chastity belt? Seriously?
Imperfection of course resonates nicely with the concept of original sin. Original sin can be washed away by baptism into the faith when you are a baby, but according to modern evangelical Christians, a second, maybe even a third or fourth baptism is necessary in order to be “born again” into the Kingdom of Christ, the figure who has been adopted (and adapted) by these groups and transubstantiated into a Warrior King fighting at the head of the Christian Army of God against unbelievers – non-Christians – and those who do not kowtow to the authority of the ordained ruler, who must be rich, white, and the king of the nation, ordained by God and the elite, the successful ones who know how to lead.

The evil, maladjustment and suffering that continues to lurk in an imperfect social order, the social order that the Conservative Mind fixates on, are only evil if they upset the class system that is in place, are only maladjustments if women and people of color and human beings with diverse sexual proclivities seek equality, and suffering is for these people alone. Suffering lurks as a possibility for the elite because recalcitrant rebellious members of society are plotting to diminish the wealth and power of the successful captains of industry and the hereditary dispensers of political power and wisdom. And this type of suffering must be avoided.

Bring me the bolt cutters.
All of Kirk’s Conservative Commandments have one underlying factor: God. The God of Protestant Christianity mostly. There are plenty of Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians and Fundamentalists from many other religions who adhere to The Strict Father Principle. Opus Dei and the Taliban for instance. But it is the material success of Protestantism in its various forms, mostly evangelical these days in the USA, and its permanent grip on government and the corporate world that determines the direction politicians are guided toward in the modern political environment.

The Conservative Mind is a closed mind. Milton Rokeach explained the difference between an open mind and a closed mind in his book The Open and Closed Mind, written in 1956. It has become the core source for investigations into how dogmatism effects the the brain, how truth and bias work, and what the consequences of authoritarianism can be, as well as numerous other studies into how the brain sorts information.

Capitalism has one important and over-riding dictum embedded in the heart of every single corporation: The corporation exists to “maximize profit for its shareholders.” One might add Malcolm X’s phrase: By any means necessary. When the 6 Conservative Commandments and the profit dictum are combined, the consequence is a rigid, authoritarian, faith-based, closed-minded system. In this Social Darwinist, brutalist, anti-humanistic system there is no room for the non-believer and the rebel. Either you conform or you are eliminated, one way or another. Inevitably, after the Conservative can no longer maintain control through manipulating the “electoral” system to his ends, he will dispense with the velvet glove and expose his iron fist.

It’s no wonder that the country which describes itself as the beacon of democracy always supports as many dictatorships as possible in Africa, Asia, and South America. Authoritarian systems are rigid and unchanging and therefore can be counted on to provide the service needed in order to keep the pyramidal structure intact and ensure governance by the elite, under God of course.

And so now (2024) we arrive at the point where dictatorship by the divinely chosen Christian leader of the United States is going to step up on the world stage and announce the new Crusades of Christianity, to be enforced by violence if the current financial domination no longer holds sway.

The authoritarian Father model that dominates the Conservative Mind leads inevitably to a coercive system that is closed within its dogmatic and fundamentalist cocoon.

With no sense of irony at all, Conservatives refer to this absolute bondage to authority and rigid tradition as Freedom.

The Truth will set you free!

1. John Adams, the Romantics such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Southern Conservatives Randolph and Calhoun, Liberal Conservatives Macaulay, Cooper, and Tocqueville, Conservatives with imagination: Disraeli and Newman and Critical Conservatives: Babbitt, More, and Santayana. We can add William F. Buckley and his generation of right-wingers to the list as well. ↩︎

COMPLAINTS

It’s time to get stuff off my chest and just complain out loud, which is what I hear so many people around me do all the time.

Weather
As the sun heads towards its zenith, summer up here in the northland comes in fits and spurts (30°C yesterday, 15°C today). In Hamburg we hardly ever get a steady spell of warm or hot weather. It’s a roller coaster ride, up into the near 30s and then down into the near 10s. Unfortunately for me, I grew up in Los Angeles where you were certain that when the sun was shining (almost always) that it was going to be a warm if not really hot day. Moving to Kenya and India didn’t change that expectation, so it’s burned deep into my psyche. Now of course each time I see the sun shine outside my window I think it’s going to be a pleasantly warm day. Not true in the northland. The sun can shine and it can be cold outside in June. It’s annoying and the cause of renewed disappointment, despite the fact that I have lived here longer than I lived anywhere else.

Germans
The obvious next choice, because I’m definitely not German. I live among them and I can understand them and I really like the social system they have built here with all the nets to catch people when they fall from grace with the capitalist system. But I’m getting sick and tired of speaking the language. Each day I think in English, read English, speak English whenever I can and watch films in English, not to mention my daily baseball condensed game recap of Dodger games on MLB. Then at some point during the day I’m forced to speak German. It’s OK for taking care of transactional stuff, but as soon as I’m in the large family dinner situation, I just can’t interact with the conversation going on at the table between the 8 to 10 people gathered around for the meal. I’m not witty in German because I can’t get the retort out quickly enough. It comes to me 10 or 15 seconds too late. By the time I have it prepared, the conversation has moved along and I’m forced to remain mute. Also, the tone of my voice is different. There are people who think that when I speak, I sound like I’m complaining or angry. Well, the truth is that I can’t use the same mellifluous vocal patterns I use when I’m getting paid to narrate an image film or a car commercial for the international market. And when I’m with my (few) native-speaker friends, I can jib and jab and make cultural references that we understand and laugh at without any hesitation. The little redemptive aspect at the moment is that there is a 2-year-old grandchild in the family and I speak only English to him. Thankfully, he’s starting to understand, and the family accepts the concept.

Not Germans
Hamburg is a melting pot of nationalities, which is one reason why it’s so cool to live here. If you sit in an outdoor cafe (even when the sun is not shining) you can hear people speaking all sorts of languages: Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Ukrainian, Danish, English, and all sorts of African languages that my linguist brother can sort out by region. Turkish is of course like Spanish is in Los Angeles, the most common second language you hear in the street. Turks were imported as cheap labor many years ago, like the Italians were during WW2, and now the second and third generations of Turks are integrated nicely into the system. Of course they still face lots of prejudice from Germans who still have the mistaken notion that they are “pure blood” residents of the country. The new authoritarian right-wingers have not changed their opinions of Turks, nor of Italians or Jews or any other non-Germans, but these days they are concentrating their ire and aiming their political arrows at the poor people our wars and economic models have driven from their homes in Africa and the Middle East and caused them to become refugee migrants.

Race
There are no “races.” Race is a construct. It has no basis in science. It’s bullshit used by malevolent politicians to atomize the electorate and make sure we don’t unite to throw out the elitist oligarchs and their complicit political lackeys. About 10 minutes of an anthropology lesson will disabuse you of any racial misinformation you might have picked up along the way. The present population of the earth is made up of one race only: Homo sapiens sapiens. We evolved from Homo sapiens sometime between 160,000 and 90,000 years ago in Africa before migrating, first to the Middle East and Europe and later to Asia, Australia, and the Americas. During this wonderful migratory journey we either killed off or bred with the Homo sapiens still hanging around and now we are the dominant, actually the only human race on the earth. Through our migration we adapted – over a long long time – to the environmental conditions of the region we settled in and skin pigmentation changed, hair growth and body form changed, facial characteristics changed, and so we have all the various Homo sapiens sapiens that you see today. One race with many varieties of packaging!

Americans
I’m Afraid of Americans by David Bowie should probably be the World Anthem, along with All You Need is Love by The Beatles. If you are not afraid of Americans, you should be. Along with their favorite sparring partners, the Russians, they are in love with war and power, both nations believing deep in their hearts that Might is Right. Symptoms of that disease are the liberal firearms policy that exists in the US and the worship of mercenary groups in Russia, like Wagner, who advertise their brutality and use it to attract the powerless and the criminals to their ranks. Only the weakest personalities exert their need for power through the barrel of a gun. Americans are Maoists. Mercenaries are amoral psychopaths. American Evangelical Christian fundamentalists are a Cult of Death, fast and furiously speeding down any road that will lead to Apocalypse. Be afraid of Americans. The current group of politically dominant Russians are just greedy and brutal, not necessarily apocalyptic. Which doesn’t make them better.

AI
Artificial Intelligence is an oxymoron, because by self-definition it is artificial, therefore not real, and also therefore cannot be intelligence. In reality it should be called MIRPC, Mathematically Induced Random Phrase Collocation. AI is the supra-brand name, nothing else. People are trying to market the supra-brand under sub-brand names that should excite the buyer by incorporating words like chat or draw or music. MIRPC will get more refined as time goes on and many unsophisticated minds will try and use it to pretend that they are sophisticated. The protests against this technology being used in education are superficial. Nobody would care about MIRPC if there wasn’t such an emphasis on hierarchical placement through the writing of papers that have the same function as examinations. Kids used to use Cliffs Notes to write essays about literature that they couldn’t be bothered to actually read. MIRPC collocates all the various notes providers plus all essays written about the book or story in question and vomits it out in a form that seems to make sense. It only makes sense in actuality if the parameters of the system remain as they are today. Change the parameters and the MIRPC is defeated.
When you want a job, you go in for an interview. Interview the student about the subject matter. A human being asks a human being questions and a human being replies. Either you know or you don’t know. Let people partner up and make a presentation about the subject matter. Two, maybe three people work together and come up with a way to present their knowledge to a group of people, including teachers, and through talking, acting, presentation of pictures and sounds, the group delivers their knowledge (or lack thereof) to an audience. Questions can be asked and answered. Human beings interact. Machines are defeated. Change the system.

Politicians
9th Circle of Hell for all of them, even the cute ones that you think are “progressive.” Until representation becomes a civic duty, like serving on a jury, and all representatives are chosen by lottery, with service limited to 2 years, you can reserve professional politicians ice block seats in the Treachery section above Satan’s chamber in Dante’s Hell.

Family
Raised by a single mother (before it became fashionable), my experience of family was watching a movie and eating pizza at home in front of the TV while my mother was out at a party with her friends. Now I have people around me who all grew up with brothers and sisters and have no idea how pleasant it is to be an only child. They think we are spoiled and selfish. Not necessarily true. An only child has no competition for love from the parent, tantrums have a tendency to actually bring results, and single mothers feel guilty because they think the only child is suffering from loneliness, especially if the mothers grew up with siblings. I was never lonely. I read books. I played with my toys. Masturbated. Learned the lyrics to all the songs on my mother’s jazz records. Went to the park to play baseball. Interacted with kids I didn’t have to see when I was at home. Only had to go visit old Italian people with my mother sometimes on a Sunday, dressed in a white shirt, tight collar, black clip-on bow tie, and play with their grandchildren in a garden with swings and croquet mallets and balls and wire arches with younger children and girls as young as me (7 or 8) in white fluffy-skirt dresses who I didn’t fall in love with (except for one, once, a blond who I only met that one time) and the dark-haired very beautiful but silent girl who my mother and the old folks tried to pair me with because, well, that’s what the older generation of Italians used to do.
These days, as one of the oldies, I enjoy speaking English to the youngest member of the family. Other than that, I can’t get a word in edgewise when all 10 sons, daughters, sons-in-law, wives, official grandparents, as well as spouses they married later, are sitting around the dinner table talking over each other about subjects (mostly food and soccer) that mean nothing to me. Many years ago I presented the family with The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (in German). Both volumes remain in their thin Saran-wrap and have recently been transferred to my library where they sit dustless and virgin next to my oft-thumbed, bent-paged bible-like rice-paper edition of The Complete Works.

Dogs
In Germany people are allowed to bring dogs into cafes and restaurants. Disgusting, as far as I’m concerned. A dog not only likes to smell the butt-holes of other dogs and lick their own butt-hole and penis, they piss and shit wherever they like and their human companions have to pick up the shit while it’s still warm by thrusting a hand into a black environmentally friendly plastic bag, wrap the warm and maybe softly squishy shit in the bag and then dispose of the bag – usually in somebody else’s trash can. Or, hey, by accident, the bag drops on the sidewalk and they just leave it there because the dog is pulling them on down the street. And please, don’t get me wrong, it’s not the dog’s fault. Dogs are just happy being dogs. It’s the humans that annoy me. First of all, the permission to bring an animal into a place where people are eating is a permission that was granted by humans to humans. Dogs didn’t ask for it. It’s against the law to take a dog into a supermarket. Dogs didn’t protest and say: “Hey, if we can go into cafes and restaurants then why not supermarkets?” They just accept it, like their humans do, and stay leashed up outside and wait. Some whine about it because obviously they are aware of the dissonant logic involved. But most are rather well-behaved and sit or lie on the sidewalk peacefully. Surely they could and would do the same thing outside of cafes and restaurants.

Cats
Coco was the only cat I have ever really liked. We had her twice as a sleepover guest for three weeks each time. The first time she was only a few months old, had been snatched from her home on a large estate in France and had been relegated to house and garden life in a big city. Hamburg. The house that was her new home was large enough and not far from a canal with lots of tall grass and reeds, but it was also a couple of streets away from a hospital where she would wander in and walk the halls in her grey and white fur uniform, drawing purrs of admiration from staff and patients alike until her owners finally came to look for her. Later they put up a picture with a phone number for when she came back, which she did on a regular basis.
The second time her humans brought Coco to us was during the Christmas season. They were gone on vacation and couldn’t or probably didn’t want to take her back to the Chateau in France with them in the car along with their huge friendly hound, with whom Coco had a good relationship by the way. Of course during this second visit she crossed the threshold into maturity and entered her first full phase of heat. This changed her personality temporarily. She became a friendly, loving, snuggling bundle of hormones. Normally she wasn’t unfriendly per se, she just didn’t need constant petting or excessive human contact. Because we live in an area that is not near a canal or fields of green, and is between some busy streets, we were forced to keep her indoors so that she wouldn’t wander away, until one day I went to a pet store and bought her a body harness leash. She loved it. When I went to get it from where it hung to take her for a walk so she could sniff and piss in our little front garden, she would purr and stroke her body against my leg and let me slip the harness over her head and onto her body without resistance. Finally, when we were outside, she didn’t try and slip out of the harness or strain to run away. I kept her on a long loose leash and let her go wherever she wanted in the garden and mostly she kept to the flower beds and the grass. Once or twice we ventured out onto the road in front of our house where, because of the gates at each end, there is no traffic. She was a princess of a cat, with long white furry legs and that regal hauteur that went so well with her grey crown and the white around her eyes and little pink nose.
Coco went home to her humans after Christmas and the New Year, was neutered, ran away a few more times, got a collar with a phone number and a name pendant, slipped out of the collar on a regular basis, kept wandering, getting returned, until her fickle humans got tired of going after her and told the people who found her to keep her.
Coco was not a cat to complain about, and she deserved to stay on the grounds of her French Chateau where she could have had an adventurous life and bred to her heart’s content instead of being kidnapped as a baby and taken to a foreign land in the cold north.

Graffiti
It is everywhere. Personally, I think it’s silly and don’t regard it as artistic in any way, though I concede that you need a certain amount of skill in order to create the colorful completely illegible swirls that are randomly plastered across fences and sides of buildings. The little squiggly types of graffiti (also illegible) that you see in busses and trains and on corner walls of buildings are like dog piss. The poor animal can’t stand another animal’s smell attached to the territory he considers his and so he pisses over it and a bit higher up if possible to show he is bigger, stronger, better. Graffiti, if it is going to be placed on a wall or on a monument of some kind should either be political or obscene in nature. Ideally, both: Fuck Capitalism! • Cunts Rule! • Don’t Be A War Hole! • Peoples Is Legals! • God? No!

Hair
I do not approve of shaved pubes. Pubic hair is good. Lots of pubic hair is better. OK, trim it a bit if you want, but don’t style it, unless of course you plan on parading your pubic area in front of the public for praise or profit. • Personally I prefer smooth hairless legs and armpits that have been left to nature from the start of maturity. That might have something to do with the era in which I grew to maturity. • Beards are itchy, can cause bad skin to develop or have a tendency to be grown in order to hide bad skin or weak chins, or to make a fashion statement which emphasizes manhood, like the Taliban and other fundamentalists are prone to do. • Hair color I understand, though I would never do it for myself. Anyway now that my hair is tending toward white, it would be silly to douse it with henna or some other agent. • Shaving can be a task, but after doing it, the face is clean and smooth and your true external face is made visible. You have nothing to hide. • Hairlessness seems to have become a fashion statement and is supposed to hark back to elitist Rome and sexual freedom, but you need to remember that body lice were common in ancient times and one of the treatments was ridding yourself of bodily hair, especially if you were a soldier, like Caesar, on the road, living in encampments with limited access to fresh water. You live in a new era, with running water and soap, you don’t need to shed your body hair, just bathe regularly and keep clean so lice, fleas and scabies won’t be a problem for you.

TV & Movies
2000 channels and nothing on. That’s how much nothing has changed since Springsteen made his statement in 1992 with Fifty-Seven Channels and Nothin’ On. I watch film and series pretty regularly because I like listening to the English language in all its various accents. What I’ve noticed is that the plots are getting simpler, the characters are getting dumber, and the violence is increasing in brutality and in its graphic depiction. What I long for is a mystery crime thriller where the detective (male or female) does everything right while following the trail of clues and yet a twist always comes because the criminal was clever enough to lead the detective down a false trail, which forces the detective to re-calibrate and finally, after a number of following the right clues along false trails, through cogitational dexterity the detective arrives at the solution because the clues were real, just not interpreted correctly at the time, and catches the criminal without a fistfight, a gun battle or a deadly encounter of any kind, the criminal showing respect for the cleverness of the detective and accepting the defeat with composure.

Modes of Transportation
I don’t fly. I did, from time to time in the past, but now I don’t need to and refuse to get on an airplane. Being sealed in a metal tube 50-thousand feet up in the sky is not a pleasure. On a train which stops from time to time and would allow me to pull an emergency stop lever if I wanted to, I am connected to the ground and can spend time looking out the window at the passing scenery or get up and walk the length of the train and back, hang out in the dining car, or use the toilet as often and for as long as I like without people thinking I’m trying to join the Mile High Club. • Cars are problematic because either you are ruining the climate with CO2, or causing lithium to be scraped from the surface of Earth by oil-burning machines. Electric vehicles depend on the lithium batteries that are then made and, unfortunately, as it now stands, there is an electric car manufacturer who is making billions from your need for a safe environment and is an authoritarian Neo-fascist. • I ride a bicycle. I wear a helmet and yellow safety gear. Of course I live in a flat city where any place I want to go is only about 15 or 20 minutes away from where I live. We have bike lanes. They have improved greatly in the past 10 years. I avoid riding in the street if there is a bike lane that is on the sidewalk. I’m not a fan of speedy riders on racing bikes in full cyclist gear. I’m not a fan of reckless speedy riders who think that they have the right to do anything they like at any time they like. Arrogant fuckers. I certainly don’t wish anyone harm, but those idiots seem to forget that 2 tons of metal are more dangerous than 12 kilos of metal wires and frames topped by 80 kilos of bones and blood covered by a thin layer of skin.

I’m not finished… so sit back and relax. Brew yourself a nice cup of green tea from Vietnam: https://viet-tee.de/en

Letter to Thomas

Dear Thomas,

As I mentioned before, I like it when you use the term “fantasies” with the word “conspiracy.” I discussed this with some linguist friends and they agree that when one allows “theories” to be used, legitimacy (or the possibility of legitimacy) is lent to the subject being discussed.

However, what you and everyone else seems to be missing is that all the talk about “conspiracy” and debunking of statements coming from the people who are putting their fantasies out into the public sphere is actually nothing but a distraction.

It is a well-planned distraction. These people have learned much from Edward Bernays, “the father of public relations”, from Goebbels (who studied Bernays) and of course also from Sun Tzu and battlefield generals like Hannibal. When attacking the Romans and winning decisive battles against them, Hannibal always distracted the Roman legionaries before attacking. Once they were distracted, he attacked where he wanted to. Their surprise rendered them weak at the point of encounter and their lines of defense were broken. Battle lost.

This is what is happening right now.

The authoritarian right (Putin and Erdogan included) are cleverly distracting thinking defenders of freedom by baiting them with little tidbits of nonsensical trash that seem to need some kind of rational reply or analysis. These bits of bait only need to be ignored.

Book banning, anti-LGBT(etc), gender arguments, or whatever hot topic is being promoted on social media is nonsense and only there to distract and to stop thinking people from concentrating on the most important aspects of the fight against the new authoritarians.

And what are these important aspects?

The most important aspects to reveal are the identity of the leaders and their chain of command as well as the battle plans of the authoritarian army that is in the field to do battle against freedom and free thinking.

How can this be done?

This is not difficult. The data is there. We know who and where they are. What is missing is a site that puts the data together in a simple organigram that exposes the organizational breakdown structure (OBS), including its leaders, general membership, propaganda arms and financial flow charts.

This can be done in the same way that the FBI does it with analysis of New York’s Five Families.

If you can show the world who they are, where they sit in the power structure, where the money is from and where it is going, you can also expose the battle plan, the array of the troops at their command and make it possible to attack the most vulnerable (and important) people in the power structure effectively by exposing the factual truth of their activities.

The J6 nobodies are “Fussvolk” and a great distraction. Without their generals and chain of command, these dunderheads are nothing but fodder, like the Wagner convict conscripts sent to die in Bakhmut.

A linked set of websites can be set up that expose the structure and its constituent parts. Let’s say one site is all about leadership, another site all about finances, another site all about propaganda, a site about members, both loosely and rigidly attached to the command structure. And all the sites linked to one another so that it is easy to go from one to another and each site can be updated by the specialists who work on that site.

Detective shows put the photos of suspects up on a board. The faces, the names, where they fit in as suspects, what their motives are, and what relationship they have to the crime.

The crime in this case is the forcible destruction of freedom of association, freedom of speech and freedom of thought. Democracy just happens to be the governmental form we have used thus far to attain these freedoms. So by destroying democracy through authoritarianism, these criminals also delete freedom from society.

A thorough analysis of the Nazi regime structure as well as the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei NSDAP (National Socialist German Worker’s Party), we know how the party was structured, who its principle actors were and from where the money flowed.

We also know how the government was structured.

And how the police state was organized.

Are you going to tell me it’s not possible to find the structures and the actors behind the authoritarian movement that is sweeping across the world right now?

Come on, you are better than that.

We are all better than that.

*****

Some previous articles that go along with this topic:

Despotism: A warning from 1946

WW III: The War Against Democracy

Early Onset Stupidity (EOS)

Also as Connected to Plot Failure in Film & TV

Many articles and discussions center around Early Onset Dementia (EOD) and how devastating it can be for family and friends, not to mention for the person actually debilitated by the disease. That got me to thinking about an equally destructive and even more widespread disease: Early Onset Stupidity (EOS).

EOS has been almost completely ignored by science and the media. In fact, I may even be the first to brace the subject in this way. Of course people complain about poor education systems and the politics of planned ignorance in which logic and self-realization are not only shunned but actively suppressed. But no one, as far as I could find, has tried to understand the EOS disease that is at the core of these policies and is so obviously the driving factor for the general lack of any public stimulus for intellectual thought and discourse. Educated people are present, but they are not valued. This begins with the absolute lack of respect for teachers and professors and anyone, really, who attempts to spread knowledge which is not directly connected to a function that can enable a person to do a job and therefore make money, which always entails working for someone, usually a company or corporation, so that this entity can make twice or three times more money from the work done – when compared to the salary earned by the person who actually does the work.

EOS begins in childhood. School and family are crucial to its spread.

The Beverly Hills (CA) school system has always been among the highest-ranked in the country. Rich people want their kids to learn stuff so that they can take good care of the fortunes which will be passed along later. Good Shepherd, also known as Beverly Hills Catholic School (BHCS) in those days, was run by nuns, the Holy Cross Sisters. That’s where I spent 8 years of my childhood.

The first three years were wonderful for me. My second grade teacher, Miss Helveston, was young, dynamic, good looking and, besides the basics of math and writing, she also taught us my favorite course, Phonics. I was a whizz at Phonics. After all, I had 4 other languages in my ears while I was growing up in Zagreb: Italian (mother), Serbo-Croatian (my best friend Ranko Boric), French (Kindergarten), English (my mother’s American friends), and German (my nanny, from an old Austrian family stuck in Croatia after the Austro-Hungarian Empire disappeared). Phonics was interesting because it presented me with sounds. I loved the sounds in languages. Still do. In fact since childhood I have only learned foreign languages from listening, not from reading about them in a book and then learning how they function. Miss Helveston was so pleased with me and I with her that my mother invited her home, where we had coffee and cookies, and then my mother even tried get her into the film industry where, as a functionary of the Italian Consulate in Los Angeles, she had many connections. I often wonder if that was the reason Miss Helveston vanished from my life after third grade.

In any case, Phonics was gone, Miss Helveston was gone and the nuns took over and taught us what all good children should learn, arithmetic, history (mostly American), English (which meant grammar and writing) and plenty of religion. The Bible stories, all approved by Imprimatur of the Catholic Church, were actually quite riveting sometimes. The illustrations were in color and excellently depicted Jesus as a baby in Mary’s arms, Joseph working as a carpenter with a pre-pubescent apprentice Jesus hewing a log, and then the wandering Jew Jesus with his band of long-haired and bearded followers in their flowing many-hued robes. How many of us Catholic School kids ended up looking just like that merry band of men in the 60s flower power era?

EOS was most visible in those days outside of school, among my friends. Most of them were from school, which meant that they were Catholics and strongly anti-Semitic. That didn’t come directly from the nuns, though they did hint that Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus. Well, at least the group of Pharisees who were asked by the Romans what should they do with him. The antisemitism came from inside the family. One family, the McCann family, had 5 boys. Dick McCann, the second youngest boy, was in my class. He wasn’t very bright and did as little as possible in school. All his older brothers had gone to BHCS and, except for the oldest who was training to be a lawyer, the rest were what you could call “fuck-ups.” I remember Austin, the second-oldest leaning out the window of a passing car and pointing a .45 automatic at us kids walking home. I ran and hid behind an open garage door. EOS had definitely hit that family hard. The father was a lawyer, but obviously that made no difference. The mother was a loving darling and allowed us to make as many Wonderbread PB&J sandwiches as we wanted after school in their kitchen. That didn’t seem to have any effect.

I played Little League baseball, and then PONY League as well, and most of the friends I made in baseball were Jewish. I felt comfortable with them. They weren’t as dumb and reckless as Dick and a few of the other boneheads in my class. I was a good player, so I had some credibility among them. One of my childhood neighbors was Brian Epstein. I spent a lot of time playing board games at his house. His parents were fine with me being a goy. What they didn’t know, and what I didn’t know at the time was that my mother had seriously Jewish family roots through her own mother, and that therefore I was technically Jewish, since the religion is passed down through the mother.

Not all of the nuns were bad teachers. Actually, only one that I can remember was really horrible. It had nothing to do with the teaching of material, which she more or less did according to the guidelines set out by Sister Willomena, the principal. What made “little dynamite” truly despicable was her vile character. She would attack anyone, anytime, on the slightest provocation, whether it was real or imagined. She had a short fuse, and it was, as far we were concerned, because all of us in the sixth grade were either just as tall or taller than she was. Yes. That is how her stature compared with ours. And she hated us for it with all her virulent energy. And she was extremely energetic.

But we only suffered under her dictatorship for that one year. The next year was enlightening because we delved into real literature and were encouraged to read books. In fact, there was a contest of how many books you could read in a month. Maria Roach always won. She read tons more than the rest of us. But two to three books a month was the average for the class. EOS was being fought through exposure to literature. Of course it made no difference to the McCann-types in the class, and there was a solid group of them.

Maria Roach and Dick McCann

An encouraging moment came for me when we were asked to pick a short story and read it in class. Most everyone picked stories that were three to five pages long, so more than one could be read during the lesson. It was obvious from many of the stories that they had been picked by parents eager to let their children shine. Edgar Allen Poe and O’Henry and Mark Twain among the choices – most of us kids would never have known about them.

On Monday, with about 15 minutes left to read at the end of the class, I was asked. I had some thin and rather small, about 4 inches x 5 inches editions of a series of short stories that my mother had gathered from somewhere and brought home. I chose the thinnest of the lot and it turned out that my story was by Nathaniel Hawthorne. It was classed as a short story, but it was considerably longer than the stories of the others. So, even though the pages were small, there were 35 of them in total, and it turned out that for the whole week, at the end of each class, I had to read from The Great Stone Face. It was like I was the link from day to day and kept the drama alive until Friday. For me it was a wonderful experience. I was able to delve into a remarkably interesting story and also be a bit of a stand-out for the week. The nun running the class had given me a good role and I was able to mesmerize the students (most of them) with the story and my voice, inflecting, learning how to introduce drama and nuance. Unconsciously that was the beginning of my training for a later career as a voice-over specialist and a radio play writer and voice actor. The detailed training came at St.Mary’s School in Nairobi, years afterward, where the drama teacher singled me out and trained me to recite poetry for an inter-school competition in which (despite my American accent) I garnered a joint-second place!

While in our special Beverly Hills Catholic School anti-EOS atmosphere we were learning all about classic literature and history beyond America – after all, how could a Catholic school evade the Roman Empire and its eventual fostering of Christianity and its forcible spread throughout the empire, including the conquest of Jerusalem on more than one occasion – not everyone else was so lucky. In most of the rest of the country the black and white TV era had a firm grip on the minds and habits of the children and their parents. Father Knows Best, Ozzie and Harriet (the Nelson family, with teen idol Ricky), Gunsmoke and I Love Lucy. Leave It To Beaver was for us kids directly, showing us how as “good” youngsters we could thwart the “bad” teenage older brothers and bring balance and justice back from the edge of destructive behavior. Nothing taxing for the brain and straight white-man morality. After all, even Lucy didn’t really break away from her subordinate role as a “good” housewife until later, after everyone realized that Desi had cheated on her.

By 8th grade we were starting to look like people.

There weren’t (and still aren’t) any mainstream programs that challenge the intellect and try and broaden the scope of the normal American individual. The airwaves – public and private – are filled with reality show nonsense and programming which doesn’t disturb the status quo. EOS is woven into the fabric of each show and video one might wander into. I won’t even start talking about the FOX network, which should really change its name to the EOS network.

Early Onset Stupidity, a disease which has been cultivated in the USA and exported abroad to any nation corrupt enough to import it, has been a staple part of the American experience since early colonial times. In fact, colonialism anywhere in the world could not have been possible without EOS-infected populations. Thomas Hobbs, with his Leviathan was a major instigator and pervaded EOS by influencing and thereby infecting the power elite of the 17th century. He preached that men were only power-seekers and that was how things were, so do what you want. If you win, it’s OK. If you don’t, you were too weak.

Who in their right mind would want to go out and conquer some unknown place on the earth? Right mind being of course a mind with self-awareness, logical abilities and a sense of what is morally good, while possessing knowledge of what is evil. Anyway, maybe some right-minded people would go, but definitely not in the multitudes that actually went after the elite infected them with the Hobbsian view of life.

Which brings me seamlessly to plot criticism in some of the films and TV shows I have been watching recently.

My preference in TV and film (as well as novels lately) has been for mystery and crime. Not real crime. The fantasy kind, where Danny Ocean or his sister figure out how to break into a place that holds the ill-gotten gains of evil people. Mysteries are intriguing because you are constantly trying to figure out who did it from the lack or over-abundance of clues presented. It keeps the mind active while watching the banality on the screen.

Luther, with Idris Elba, was a series that I loved to watch. But probably, like most people, it was Ruth Wilson’s murderous character (Alice Morgan) that kept me coming back for more. 20 episodes of brilliant writing and acting that never had me asking WTF? The new film however…

First of all, dear Alice is nowhere to be seen. The evil multinational serial killer is beyond Joker evil, and the motivation for people to allow themselves to be used by this monster is pure EOS in its most virulent form.

You have a secret. EOS-driven, you allow this secret to occupy a space in the digital world. Since the digital world is open to anyone with +/- knowledge of how the internet works, your secret can be found and you can be exposed. Ergo: Blackmail. Well, a self-aware and logical person would first of all not put a secret out there in the virtual world. Second, should by some twist of fate a secret actually come to exist in the virtual world, a non-EOS-infected person would say: Fuck you. Expose it. It can’t possibly be worse than jumping off a building in Piccadilly Circus with a GoPro filming me splatter my brains on the sidewalk. So, without EOS-infected masses of “shame-filled” individuals, the plot of Luther: The Fallen Sun wouldn’t stand a chance.

Action scenes are action scenes and today they are expertly constructed and carried out. No problem with the techniques and the emotional impact of the scenes themselves. But now we get to another point that rankles. Luther, who has been railroaded into prison by the monster serial killer Robey, informs DCI Odette Raine, the new head of Serious and Serial Crime, of what is going on and how dangerous this person can be. Luther more or less does all the work to catch the monster, but DCI Odette is reluctant to embrace the intelligent Luther. She is obviously at least partially infected by EOS. This is brought out quite succinctly when Robey manages to kidnap Odette’s daughter. This happens in Odette’s apartment, at night, while Odette is busy hunting the criminal and Luther. Now, if you are not infected by EOS and you understand the nature of the online-addicted victims of this monster, the first thing you do is send someone from work (police) to go get your family members (daughter) and bring them to a safe location in the station because (if EOS has not yet invaded you) you know that what makes you most vulnerable to any monster you might be chasing is your family.

So when the daughter gets grabbed, I think, WTF? for the second time in this movie.

The only hopeful, maybe redemptive aspect of this movie is the fact that at the very end, the secret services want to enlist Luther. Idris didn’t get or (more probably) didn’t want to be Bond, James Bond. But now we might get a super-spy Luther as a future reward. Hopefully the new non-Bond Luther scripts will be devoid of EOS plot moments. And will somehow re-integrate Alice, the most interesting TV character the BBC ever featured.

Meanwhile, although there are many more shows I could critique for their EOS-infected writing, I will move on to The Watchful Eye. Mariel Molino is excellent in this show. She has a website (https://www.marielmolino.com/) and IMDB says she has worked in both Mexico and the USA, but she is not really well known yet. This show should make her very well known in the business. Most of the time she has a good, scary sometimes, mystery-solving personality, which wants you, as a viewer, to have her win. But there are some rather EOS moments that don’t actually work for a veteran mystery-watcher like me. The most egregious EOS material woven into the story is the occasional appearance of the “ghost” nanny who is the mother of “Ruby” (really Mrs. Ivy) the illegitimate daughter of the original Mr. Greybourne and who actually owns the whole building. This ghost can be heard crying by Mrs. Ivy and can be seen and heard by Molino’s character Elena Santos.

I don’t mind plotting to con rich people out of a precious stone, a ruby, which turns out to be Ruby the illegitimate daughter. And I find the mystery surrounding the evil families who have inter-wed in order to maintain their power, not all bad. But then, after the constant reappearance of the ghost nanny, comes the most imbecilic moment of all when Elena Santos reveals to her awful and obviously untrustworthy brother that she is planning to run away with 5 million bucks and from whom, why and how she is to get it. Directly after that we see the EOS-infected brother report back to his/their loathed (by Elena) and recently released from prison mother, who has been previously described as the original fount of evil in the family.

Eliminate the horrible brother and the useless mother from the story and Elena Santos, as a solo orphan, can be a complete well-rounded character, on her own, fighting against the corrupt world of moneyed power and trying to navigate her way to safety and freedom. But no. The writers and producers believe that they must cater to an EOS-riddled audience – their targets. Any carefully crafted and intellectually challenging plot twists and turns would create brain-freeze in the sad EOS-infected morons who believe in ghosts and other-worldly spirits. These sad consumers couldn’t stand the spasms in their frontal lobes brought on by awakening their curiosity about new areas of thought and would reflexively press a button or hit a key and escape to some reality-besotted island or other in the Archipelago of Stupidity.

EOS is a serious disease which should be studied by more qualified researchers than me. They will be sure to find more sinister causes for its virulent spread in society than a lab leak or an animal market. Racism and antisemitism was normal in Spain many hundreds of years ago (https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-racism-was-first-officially-codified-in-15thcentury-spain), and without orders from above – the church and the royals – EOS would not have spread through the land and eventually through the world. Later, when the European fascist movements (fed by their success in Franco’s Spain) took up the racist and anti-Semitic chants and spread EOS among Il Popolo and Das Volk in their countries, the infected masses were used as fodder for wars that eventually came back home to bite, and bite hard.

El Greco – Toledo. Public Domain

And now, with the new batch of authoritarians in Russia and the USA (as well as Hungary and Poland and China, etc.) the battle cry is once again: “Them – of impure blood!” and “Us – the pure ones and rightful masters.” Same as the 14th and 15th century in Spain and Portugal, then eventually all the colonial powers seeking to convince their EOS-ridden populations that it was OK and not a sin to wreak genocide on the non-persons of the new lands they were conquering. And even after conversion to Christianity or whatever religion the conqueror touted, the newly converted were still not accepted as pure and as important as we, the original “We” of the conquerors.

EOS is infecting everyone these days. Inoculate yourself with knowledge.

QAnon and The Puntinesque Rightists

The new breed of fascistic right-wingers are like good circus dogs. They bark and dance on their hind legs and jump through fiery hoops whenever their master holds his whip high. Their master. Who is their master now? DeSantis? Kim Jong-un? Putin?

Personally, I think it’s the guy who’s behind QAnon.

Q

No, seriously, maybe it’s not even just one person. You know. Think about it. When the secret services of any country want to mess with people’s brains, they always get a bunch of mad scientists together and plot scary shit. Like testing hallucinogenic drugs on people. Ken Kesey got into one of those tests. He needed the money. He’s the guy who wrote One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.

OK. So you don’t read books. I now feel as if I have passed into a future dystopia.

Wait, I haven’t finished with the QAnon stuff yet. Think about it. For the “enhanced interrogation” idea that the Bush and Cheney people wanted to use, they made sure the weirdest psychos got together and planned out a program they were certain would make anybody talk. The Russians do it, the Chinese do it, and every little tinpot dictator as well as the Kings and Ayatollahs do it. You know the song, but I’m not going to sing it.

They get a team of psychopaths and sociopaths together and they decide that maximum pain is what really works to make people talk. Their historical model is the Inquisition. Apparently they think it worked really well because so many Jews and Muslims converted to Christianity. They forget the fact that most of those converts just kept up their religious practices in private. Crypto Muslims and Crypto Jews.

Which has nothing to do with cryptocurrency, by the way.

Think about it. QAnon is much too well-organized for it to be just some loon out there dropping acid and then sending off-the-wall texts to his followers on Telegram. Notice I didn’t mention Twitter? That’s because it doesn’t exist anymore. The name has been changed to Twatter. Really. Because of the Twat who bought it.

Billionaires like him are much too dumb to be behind QAnon. No. Really. Billionaires are like Zombies. They’re fixated on sucking money out of everyone on the planet. QAnon is not a money-making enterprise. Uh, no, wait a second. Of course it’s a money-making enterprise. It wouldn’t be there if it wasn’t. But that’s not it’s primary function. You have to look at QAnon and see that it functions in the same way a TV evangelist does. The evangelist’s primary goal is to enter people’s brains and stir, mix, blend and shake them up so that eventually the 10, 20 and 50 dollar bills will flow into the evangelist’s tax-free wallet.

QAnon is the same. The primary purpose is to burrow into a brain, stir, mix, blend and shake. And Hey Presto! Another sock-puppet!

The people behind QAnon are exactly the same as the people who dreamed up the Inquisition. Of course. They must be. It doesn’t matter if they’re working for a religion or for the Americans, the Russians, the Chinese or any other country. In fact, all those countries are OK with QAnon because it serves to make the job of controlling people easier.

QAnon uses influencers just like TikTok. Yeah, I guess you can say that QAnon is a TikTok for psycho-fascists. The Q Collective, as I like to refer to Q, mines the data, sifts through it to see what has worked well in the past and dreams up new shit to test the effect it has on its captive audience. You call this captive audience Trolls, I call them A-holes. Trolls are those funny little guys with blue hair. Much too cute. A-holes are young punks and undereducated adult gun-worshipers who mostly hate women because no women want to be near them. Some of these guys are what people call Incels, guys who are so afraid of performing poorly in sex that they claim they are being made Involuntarily Celibate. Incel is the short form for that.

A-holes is a much better description for all these people. They spew hate and make threats and spread the QAnon brain rot through the virtual world while claiming that they are victims.

I don’t really know who is behind QAnon. But what surprises me actually is that nobody seems to be placing the International Rightists in the same basket with the Putin Right. They have the same agenda. They have the same talking points. They suck on the same types of oligarchic money tits. Each one of them: Kari Lake, DeSantis, Orban, Meloni and the other ones popping up all over the place should be constantly placed side-by-side with Putin and his ideology. This, if done on a coordinated daily and constantly unrelenting basis, will eventually get through some of the thicker skulls and may also elicit some interesting denials and responses from the right-wingers. The liberals who think all you need to do is talk it out, have to see the world the way it is of course, but the disenfranchised also need to be wooed by good old fashioned social(ist) democratic policies that limit the wealth of the oligarchs and corporations.

Drumming up a storm of Putin=DeSantis, Putin=Lake, Putin=Meloni, Putin=AfD Putin=Orban, etc., can throw a very useful spanner into their works.

Start the drum roll rolling and see what happens.

---

Oriana Fallaci and Alexandros Panagoulis

I didn’t act like a mad fanatic and I’m not a mad fanatic. Both I and my comrades acted as instruments of justice. When tyranny is imposed on a people, the duty of every citizen is to kill the tyrant.
–– Alexandros Panagoulis

Athens, September 1973
Oriana Fallaci
INTERVIEW WITH HISTORY

Nut Job? Me?

Covid-19 (one of its variants, obviously) came to visit me two weeks ago and only yesterday did I finally test negative again. It was hell. Seriously. No light flu-like version because of protection offered by my four vaccinations. But it is very probable that because of those vaccinations I’m here now and able to talk about the horrors of my experience. Well, I’m not going to go into detail, but I had a high fever for at least 4 or 5 days, breathing was difficult, but I was able to develop a technique that facilitated regular and fairly shallow breathing, combined with a type of mental mantra accompanying the ritual of “in through the nose, out through the mouth” while my fevered brain pictured a light source I could focus on in order to hold the breathing ritual in place.

The fact that I had to resort to this yoga-like ritual should already give you a clue to how deep down I had to go in order to fight the nasty virus. No, I am not religious. I didn’t pray. I used techniques of body control written down thousands of years ago, tried and tested techniques, and they proved sufficient for my needs during my illness. I use the bits and pieces of these teachings as I need them and I do not give them mystical powers. They are body-related techniques that can help in certain situations. Nothing more.

After the fever finally broke, I had a huge explosion of energy. That was when I wrote my previous article, late into the night, feeling like a superman with a super clear brain able to see everything so well, especially the political landscape. I was still riddled with Covid of course and the next day body weakness took over and I slept three times for at least 3 or 4 hours in each sleep session. Exhausted. My anger, however, was rising on a daily basis. I was angry that Covid had chosen me, I was angry at the lady who brought it into our house, I was angry at the lady relative in our family chat who said: Männergrippe when I announced that I had Covid. I was not familiar with the term Männergrippe, so I commented on the description by saying that Covid had no gender, it attacked all indiscriminately. Then I found out that Männergrippe was just how some German women describe men complaining of their ailments, imagining them to complain loudly about little things – unlike what women do. That infuriated me even more because I had announced Covid, not some sniffles or a hangover headache. And I hadn’t complained at all, had only made the announcement. My anger was on the rise again.

During the tail end of the two weeks I went to the test center 3 times, even got a PCR test, but I was still positive for the virus. My anger started turning inwards and I could feel the depression begin. No action for my body. No improvement in my status (though I was feeling better as far as fever and coughing were concerned). Anger at everyone and at the whole world. Reading about the war in Ukraine and the atrocities and the constant drivel of right-wing propaganda here and in the USA was having its own negative effect. Or positive effect if anger and irrationality can be seen as the positive result of negative news.

Confused? I was most certainly.

My imagination was trying to figure out a way Russia could be nuked out of existence while the rest of the world survived intact. And then my mental foot hit the brakes, hard! That’s how nut jobs think. Me? A nut job? I could feel myself morphing into a nut job. More anger and crazy thinking would soon have me trolling right-wing sites and commentators, maybe even threatening them with grievous bodily harm. This could not be the person I wanted to become, not a mirror image of the right-wing trolls who are thick as swamp mosquitoes in the social media jungle.

How could I avoid that fate?

First of all, as luck would have it, I have absolutely no presence on social media. No Facebook (still counts as social media though it’s getting to be obsolete), no Instagram, no Twitter, no TikTok, nothing. Second: I don’t subscribe to anything or anyone. No news feeds, no following anyone. And third, my web-browser functions most of the time in Private mode, has at least 5 AdBlockers and, when I want to, I use VPN from riseup.net. So, although I could remain anonymous while trolling, I am just not really that off my rails enough to do it. Yet.

Anything is possible of course. I sent some pretty weird shit out to some people I know; a couple of them are journalists who previously made some positive comments about stuff I sent. But there has been silence from them since I sent out a short piece wherein I claimed (satirically, ironically, humorously, I thought) that actually Russia had it all wrong by attacking Ukraine and claiming it belonged to Russia because it was Catherine The Great who conquered all that territory and she was actually German, so if anyone has a claim on the territory it should be Germany. Ha ha. Nobody laughed. Nut job? Me? Well, I suppose I can’t blame anyone for thinking that, since the argument was pretty ridiculous and the way I worded it sounded like I was serious. I wasn’t, but people need to know up front that you are “just kidding” or cancellation is swift and most times permanent.

Then I wrote the article about right-wing kill lists, kill squads and how bloodthirsty those people are turning out to be. From a distance or 10 days or so, it now does sound a tiny bit hysterical. Not necessarily wrong. Not necessarily nut job material. But kind of hysterical. I was really angry at the time. My fever had been replaced by rage at the injustice of children being separated from their parents and transported to Russia to be given to who knows what kind of family of true believers in the nationalistic bullshit that dominates Russian propaganda. It is the aim of these monsters to actually expunge all memory of Ukrainian parents from the lives of these children. Oh, and you think that is difficult to do? Not really. During the two weeks I have been ill, I haven’t seen or talked to the new baby in the family (he’ll be 2 years old in a few weeks). Yesterday, after my negative result, I saw him again for the first time. It took me over 5 minutes of talking and playing with him for his memory to come back. “DANNY!” he said at last as the memories of our previous encounters returned to his consciousness. I could suddenly see the memory in his eyes. He smiled and understood it was me. And that is after only 2 weeks. Think about how it will be for the stolen children after 2 years, 12 years, 20 years. No memory of the past will remain if they are young enough when they are ripped away from home.

And what about the parents? Were the parents simply killed? First take the children then kill the parents, or what? Nobody talks about the parents and what has happened to them. You certainly don’t think they are living it up at some Black Sea resort near Sochi, do you?

You see how easy it is for the anger to grip and the possible nut job to emerge? I can sense my irrationality just below the surface. I’m not immune to Covid, I’m not immune to irrationality. The question is whether or not it becomes a rational choice or whether one just slides into it, crosses a vague line that one sees but the line is so vague that it’s only when you are on the other side of it that you notice, and then suddenly you have to make a conscious choice to go back, to return to rationality. And of course it is so much easier to just continue, to march into the land of crazy and join the celebration of the irrational, which I imagine is like a never-ending new year’s party, with balloons dropping and fireworks exploding and a non-stop flow of liquor and drugs and the heady feeling that now, now, now something earthshaking is going to happen, and it’s all going to change suddenly into the perfect utopian future or the perfectly dystopian future where death and destruction become normal, and it’s all because of me, because of my comments, because of what I have said or written or thrown out into the world. Me. Nut job.

Written words are actions because they have been written, and actions have consequences. So by gripping rationality instead of the irrational, I accept the consequences. The consequences of being rational. And for the most part, the consequences of being rational are that you remain frustrated and angry. Why? Because irrationality acts and destroys and has no moral compass and doesn’t care about the destruction it causes. In fact, irrationality is drunk on death and destruction and the people in its grip cannot imagine that they can ever lose because the cumulative effect of this death and destruction gives the irrational a power that blinds it to everything else, especially to rationality.

Rationality has the impediment of logical thinking, the weighing of good vs. evil, the contemplation of law and justice coupled with coherent argumentation which results in a discovery of the truth and putting injustice and evil to rest. But of course that only works when both sides agree to be rational. Truth has been made relative and it is my truth that is most important, not yours (or the truth).

Everyone (?) knows that war is an irrational answer to – most of the time – greed. Greed is often cloaked in ideology or religious doctrine, or both, and it attempts to give the perpetrators of irrationality a mask to hide behind, a system of belief to use as a reason for their irrational behavior. Anyone with a smidgen of rationality can perfectly understand that stoning a man, woman or child to death is completely irrational. And yet, there are people who are convinced that it is OK to do that because it is written in a book that they think is either sacred or is the law. It gives them a reason (which they mistake for rationality) to perpetrate the most hideous crimes.

So, the question arises: When must irrationality be opposed with violence (especially when you understand full well that violence breeds violence, breeds irrationality) in order to rid the scourge from the world? At what point could everyone agree that going to war against the Nazis was not just OK, but that it was a good thing, a thing that had to be done? Had even rational people become nut jobs at that point?

When will it be time once again to use violence to oppose the irrationality which is trying to dominate the world? Is that time now? Is it never? When? And will we decide by committee or individually?

That’s where I’ll leave it for you to think about, because I certainly don’t want to open myself up to the charge: Nut Job? Me?

Insurrection 2.0

Kill Lists, Kill Teams, and the
Bloodthirsty Horde of Ignoramuses

“The difference between willful ignorance and true self-deception is subtle, but important. Willful ignorance tends to be more adaptive than self-deception. Willful ignorance is a cognitive strategy that people adopt to promote their emotional well-being, whereas self-deception is less controllable and more likely to be detrimental. Although willful ignorance and self-deception sometimes help individuals to avoid unpleasant facts, in the long run, it is usually better to confront reality than to avoid or deny it. Because the self-deceived person fully believes things that are untrue, she has fewer resources for correcting her course when her erroneous beliefs lead her astray.”

Americans are strange people. They tend to have respect for a system that was put in place almost 250 years ago by oligarch landowners (slaveholders). The system was fashioned for a “republic” and is termed a “democracy” although it is quite clear that democracy was absolutely not wanted by the framers of the American constitution. The fact that it is still called a republic by so many people is only possible because of the vague echoes of the Roman republic (e.g. the Fasces wrapped in laurel branches on the rostrum of the House of Representatives), which retained the SPQR (the Senate and People of Rome) logo even after the empire became the vehicle for serial emperors (serial killers all) and their fellow oligarch supporters who were always jockeying their families into position to become the next dynasty at the head of the most powerful military juggernaut in history. Even Mussolini used SPQR to make his regime look as if it was a continuation of the old republic. Modern Italians, with a self-deprecating sense of history now translate it as: Sono Porci Questi Romani (These Romans are Pigs!)

We (those of us with a minimal awareness of reality) all know that the opponents of democracy (even the pretend kind of democracy that the American constitution has provided) have been on a trajectory to overtake control of the system since the public assassination of JFK, the mini-explosion of Barry Goldwater in 1964 and then the wild rout of any social-thinking forces that still existed in 1980 with the insertion of Ronald Reagan into the halls of power. Of course it is quite clear that Reagan was only a figurehead. His head was empty and got emptier as his second term ground to a close. He could still recite his lines though, and that charming smile and wave of a hand mesmerized the fools who actually believed that if you sent money up, some of it would trickle back down again and help the not-so-fortunate. The Sopranos should have cured everyone of that twisted thinking: Tony Soprano: This thing is a “pyramid” since time immemorial, shit goes downhill, money goes up: it’s that simple. I should not have to be coming here “hat in my hand”, reminding you of your duty to that.

Since 1980 the eternal pyramid scheme has been renamed and has acquired a veneer of theoretical economic respectability as neoliberalism. Brazen greed and the rape of resources, with a parallel destruction of any social benefits for the working populace, has a legion of Madison Avenue culture warriors cutting through the media landscape, clearing a path broader and more devastating than Sherman’s march toward the sea. The new ideology of greed has wrapped its tentacles around the whole world. The first experimental feelers were sent out to Chile under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. The rape of the Chilean economy was so successful that soon the method was being refined and further disguised through the benevolent-looking auspices of the IMF and The World Bank. And then, the final breakthrough, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the injection of rampant capitalism into a system that was already so corrupt that the nomenklatura immediately transformed itself into the new oligarchs and, were it not for the intervention of Vladimir Putin, would have been run as a subsidiary of Standard Oil and Chase Manhattan Bank.

No, this is not going to turn into a positive argument for Vlad. It’s just a reality observation. Without him, Russia is, as John McCain said: a “gas station masquerading as a country”. [Yeah, sometimes the worst guys have the best quotes.] So now, although Russia is still a glorified gas station, it has been able, through the willful ignorance of the pro-democracy forces in the US (as well as in Europe) to push a very poison needle deep under the political skin of the whole world.

Have absolutely no doubt:
Putin and Trump are working toward the same goal: Autocratic domination.

Autocrats are united in their fear and hatred of any society that opens a path to social justice. This was true of all the empire-builders throughout history, and it is still true of autocrats wherever they may be, the Philippines, China, Brazil, Florida or Hungary. Sitting on top of the pyramid is where an autocrat wants to be. From there (mostly) he can look out over the world and see fellow-autocrats sitting atop other pyramids, smile, wave, and secretly (or not so secretly) plan their destruction and domination.

The war against Ukraine is not accidental. The expansion of China into Tibet was not accidental. The domination of Central and South America by the Monroe-doctrinaire Americans is not accidental. An aggressive nation doesn’t arise suddenly one day after breakfast with an extra cup of coffee that got its dander up and unintentionally caused it to invade its neighbor or sweep across a continent and eliminate its indigenous people, or get rid of a bunch of humming monks who thought their harmony with the greater oneness of the universe could save them from Mao’s dictum: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” Autocrats know this. And as noble as it might have been for the communists of China to fight against the Japanese imperialist forces, you must understand that this phrase is at the very heart of modern autocratic thinking. “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” And, coming back to the United States now, we know for sure that the anti-democracy forces are going to implement this belief very literally as soon and as often as possible.

Kill Lists
Oh, you are either really willfully ignorant or blindly self-deceiving yourself if you think there are no kill lists being circulated by the ignorant hordes and the malicious murderers that worship at the altar of God’s Own Party. Why do you think that armed vigilantes are recording license plates and filming people who are going to vote early in elections? Are you naive enough to believe that these people are only engaged in some kind of “civic duty”? You are either too young or just ignorant enough of history to remember that Tricky Dickie Nixon had an “Enemies List” and actually tried to move against those enemies during his presidency. His dark side was ruled by J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI, a cross-dresser (nothing wrong with that, Edgar) who had a maniacal need to have something nasty written down about anybody who was near the levers of power.

These days all the kill lists are being circulated on the dark side of the internet. With access to police data-bases and actual serving military, the compilers of these lists are preparing the post-electoral landscape to reflect their deeply desired bloodbath of purification of the American populace to remove those of non-Christian beliefs, and especially those who are atheists. The non-whites will either be subjugated into the new slaves (and be rewarded nicely if they adhere to Christianity) or will get herded into the narco-ghettos of big cities where they will either die from overdoses, from starvation, or from gang violence, since gang leaders are both willfully ignorant and self-deceiving, believing that their dominance of a certain “turf” bestows some kind of magic power upon them and allows them to make deals with the Dixie and other mafias so they can live like little kings on top of a heap of trash.

If only the pro-democracy forces in the USA could learn from the resilience of the people of Ukraine. What that bombed and battered populace is standing up to now in their war against an aggressor that is not just twice as big and powerful, but more than ten times as big and powerful than they are is not just praiseworthy, it is the closest thing we have to the ideal of the little guy standing up to the bully in the playground. The pro-democracy forces in the USA are the little guy and the anti-democracy forces are the bully, that is more than clear. Just look at the bullies that God’s Own Party has placed in the media limelight. The impunity of these people is astounding. Well, it’s actually no different from the impunity of Franco, Hitler, Mussolini, Bolsonaro, Urbán and Putin, and you can fill in a whole list of other madmen who have captured center stage for themselves.

It is therefore imperative that the pro-democracy forces must organize themselves in home defense units comparable to the ones the Ukrainians organized prior to the invasion and which helped them weather the first horrible storms in the battle for Kiev. What skills do you have? Are you a doctor, a nurse, a good driver? Do you have military experience? Know your neighbors. Are they pro or anti-democracy? Will they support or hinder you in the upcoming civil strife?

To some I’m beginning to sound like a survivalist who is now going to tell you to stock up on food and ammunition so that when the apocalypse hits, you can survive for a few weeks. I don’t want to alarm you to that extent, because the civil strife will not be apocalyptic in the sense of being comprehensively destructive for everyone everywhere all at once. It will probably be more like some of those California and Oregon forest fires of late. A deadly inflammatory situation here, another one there, and the competing media stoking the fires so that their constituents will be inflamed against the other side. Certain regions will have a de facto martial law imposed upon them, even if it’s not called martial law, just a “curfew” from sunset to sunrise in this or that part of a city. With police in control. But whose police are they?

In Washington you can be sure of only one thing: paralysis. Political paralysis. No pro-democracy politician will ever risk his or her status and political future by actually standing up and organizing the forces of democracy against the political lunatics in the anti-democracy faction. The ancient men and women who sit on their hundred-million-dollar thrones are not going to risk anything to support “true” democracy. The few young representatives who just might do that will be among the first to be targeted for destruction of one kind or the other.

Kill Teams
In Nicaragua they called them Death Squads. They were taught their trade at the School of the Americas, and they learned well. The modern-day kill teams in the USA have been trained in the armed forces, sent to practice their trade in Iraq, Afghanistan, Africa, and other obscured locations. And those overweight and under-educated white boys that didn’t have the balls to take risks in the wild world beyond the US, joined police forces and militia groups near home so they can now open-carry their penis-extending ARs and AKs in public. These people are not only willing to use their weapons, they are eagerly waiting for the representatives of God’s Own Party to give them the green light. And that flashing green light will come, not after an electoral win, but after an electoral loss. If the balance of political power tends toward the anti-democracy forces after an election, the guns will stay silent for a little longer. However, if unexpected losses occur because somehow the populace has awoken to the imminent danger, the “clear and present danger” of anti-democratic forces, then the first trigger-happy ignoramuses will begin to claim victims.

The kill teams are out there. It’s convenient these days to fear groups that call themselves silly playground names like Proud Boys or 3% or whatever idiotic moniker they dream up. Those are readily identifiable groups and can be fought in a conventional way. No. It is the undefined and unnamed squads of professional killers who band together in murky associations for both ideological and monetary reward who are the greatest menace. Like the Wagner Group in Russia, these professional killers are only in it for their own cynical purposes. They may wave the banner of Christianity at the masses, but it is gold and power that they are really interested in, and they are more than willing to rape, torture and kill their way to the fortunes they seek. Think of Erik Prince and his private army of mercenaries.

Oligarchs are rich, yes, but most of them are stupid enough to believe that the soldiers they employ will never be disloyal enough to turn on the master. The condottieri of the late middle ages in Italy should disabuse any rich person of that silly belief. “The most fearsome of the mercenary armies was the Great Company, its leader, the German knight, Werner von Urslingen, whose motto was ‘Enemy of God, of Pity and of Mercy.’” Sounds just like The Wagner Group motto: Death is our business – and business is good!

Just as Wagner Group financier Yevgeniy Prigozhin (while pretending to be Putin’s buddy) is starting to make a move to take over from Vladimir Putin and make Russia his own private fiefdom, any American mercenary killer with a remnant of grey matter brain cells will have designs on the power structure in the USA. The flaccid American oligarchs who own sports teams and plan to own city and perhaps even state governments, support their anti-democracy cheerleaders with dark money and “innocent bystander” expressions when they get named or shamed. Within the blink of an eye their media friends make sure that the tables are turned immediately so that the accusers are accused, the whistle-blowers are named and shamed and as soon as possible the storm is determined to be in a teacup, and all goes back to business as usual. The pyramid scheme eternal. Money goes up, shit comes down.

Bloodthirsty Horde of Ignoramuses
It’s certainly not “only in America” but America probably has the most comprehensively stupid – that is, under-educated and miseducated – mass of citizenry in the world. And this stupidity is not accidentally caused by unavailability of education or decrepit infrastructure that prevents schools from being built. It has been engineered into existence.

The destruction of the university system was begun in 1964 when Reagan became governor of California. Slowly but surely he started jacking up fees for students. Today, going to state university is just as expensive as going to a private one. As soon as opposition to the war in Vietnam took hold at the university level, this destruction through fees was made a nation-wide model. Then, with each subsequent post-Reagan administration the rot crept down from the university level, to the city-college (JC) level, to high schools and all the way down to the grade school level, so that now if you send your kid to a Christian faith school where they are steered clear of any kind of logic or critical thinking, those schools can suck on the tax tit of the city, county or state and federal government without having to meet even the lowest standards of general education. OK. The kids might be able to read a text message and recite a couple of bible verses, but please don’t expect any of them to know anything about science, history or art.

These are the ignoramuses who populate the stagnant pools of American cultural society. They are transfixed by reality shows and 15-second Tik-Tok film clips while they ride gas-guzzling monster trucks to the end of the Death Spiral Highway, “And believe in whatever may lie/In those things that money can buy”. The difference between these ignoramuses and other ignoramuses of the garden-variety is that with the flick of a media switch these bastions of consumerism can be turned into a bloodthirsty mob of predators ready to maim and pillage. All they need are simple directions to be pointed in. Once upon a time we were amused and slightly horrified by the Westboro Baptist Church and its crazy little mob of anti-gay warriors. Now all a local anti-democracy proponent has to do is say: “Drag Queen” and masses of armed rock-throwing fanatics appear within the hour at whatever location is indicated. They are there to prepare the bloodbath for public consumption. And the cameras will be rolling because prime time says: If it bleeds, it leads! Should a gun-toter be killed, the media will make him a martyr. If a drag queen is dragged through the streets chained to the back of a mega-truck, she’ll be labeled a provocateur trying to groom children.

Like the Putin machine in Russia that has convinced an untold number of Russians that NATO is planning to invade Russia and turn all their children into homosexuals and transsexuals, the anti-democracy forces around the world use issues of gender and women’s reproductive freedom to prepare the killing fields for the bloodbath they so eagerly await.

Being well-meaning and willfully ignorant has now become a liability that can be fatal. Without some pretty quick organization at the basic level for the citizenry among the pro-democracy forces, the initial devastating shock of loss that the first attacks from the anti-democracy forces create, will cause a depressing loss of faith in the possible final victory of democracy, true democracy. But it is precisely the arrogant hubris of the aggressor (and the ingrained rot of corruption) that ultimately also causes his downfall. The Ukrainians were shocked. But they were not over-awed. They fought off the enemy around Kiev and in the ensuing months have mounted a counter-offensive that is on the verge of reclaiming most of the territory they once lost. Of course they have had help from allies in America and Europe.

Who can the pro-democracy forces in the USA count on getting help from? From Canada. From Mexico. From Europe. From pro-democracy movements everywhere.

Organize now. Create the basic network. Be ready to move into action. Evil doesn’t wait for an invitation to enter, it tries to break down the door. Fortify that door. Barricade yourself against evil. And after the first wave has hit, be ready to counter-attack.

True democracy will emerge from the rubble of the old system.

May I suggest:

The Man In The High Castle: Fight For The World You Want

An Open Letter To The American People

Exercise your brain!

[Keep it short, like their attention span!]

Dear Americans,

A rather important election is going to take place in the U.S. during a time when about 50% of Americans are miseducated, drug-swillers, war-mongers, gun-worshipers addicted to gasoline for their massive cars and trucks, concerned more with trolling on “antisocial” media and at the same time say their daily prayers to the God of Capitalism without realizing that the largest corporations as well as the oil industry can only survive because they all suck at the tit of crony socialism with cash and endless credit provided by their minions in government, be it state or federal, and these same deluded masses (now certainly more than 50%) actually believe the most illogical and absurd picture ever promulgated to the public, that is, that if you try hard enough you can “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.” Pull on your own bootstraps long enough and only two things can happen, either you tear out the straps or you fall on your butt.

https://www.leunig.com.au/works/recent-cartoons/325-bootstraps

A comforting idiom from many on the progressive side of the spectrum: The darkest hour is just before dawn. That of course depends on how far north or south of the equator you live. Up here in the northland, dawn takes a long time to arrive and it starts more than an hour before it has crept in and you notice that it’s daytime again. Same with sunset in the summer. I lived 100 kilometers south of the equator for a while. Sunset and sunrise are both sudden, and more or less around 6 a.m. or 6 p.m. year-round. So this darkest hour that the U.S. is currently experiencing isn’t before dawn, it’s around midnight, and there are many many hours of darkness to get through before a new morning arrives.

Still, there is a ray of hope. Although the dark ages in Europe lasted about 800 years, authoritarian dictators usually lose their power after about 35 to 40 years. And if they are over 50 when they take control, you can count on their demise and death in about 30-35 years.

So, Dear American People, you can rejoice that whichever benign or ruthless authoritarian takes over your country in the next few years, he or she can only last for a maximum of 40 years anyway. And think of all the fun you can have joining an underground resistance and learning how to fight the new fascists [now were they rightists or leftists?].

Seems like the demonization of Russia and China has turned the U.S. into a mirror image of both.

Boa Sorte!

Want to know how despots die?

Check this out: https://www.livescience.com/41224-how-dictators-die.html

Baseball, Buddhism & Capitalism Ltd.™

When I was a kid growing up in Los Angeles, the Dodgers came to town. It was a life-changing experience for me. The Hollywood Stars and the Los Angeles Angels were our teams before the Dodgers arrived. The old Hollywood Stars stadium was smack dab in the middle of Hollywood, not far from the Pan Pacific Auditorium where all the best shows were put on for people much older than me. Both stadiums were a short car ride away from where we lived in West L.A.

Gilmore Field and the Fairfax neighborhood in Los Angeles

Farmers Market is still there. Neighboring parts of it have been turned into an outdoor mall that reminds me of those streets you find in Disneyland, all pretty and unreal-looking, full of casual consumers in a daze of buying fever. And the Pan Pacific became CBS Television City, appropriate I guess for the next-door neighbor of the Hollywood Stars. A few years after the stadium had been leveled, I went and stood on the place where the pitcher’s mound had been. I stood there and looked around at the nothingness that surrounded it now. A moment of enlightenment for me; a minor Zen satori moment about the transition of life from something we experience as tangible to the nothingness of the intangible.

Though I wasn’t born in the USA (and kids at my school didn’t let me forget it), I very soon fell in love with the game of baseball and discovered, after Little League tryouts, that I was good at it. Turns out that when you end up being the catcher on your team (a position nobody else wanted), you start to understand the strike zone quite well. And you learn how to see the ball in flight and how it spins. When you’re an 11-year-old and becoming a hitter, that is quite an advantage. My batting average reflected it. I decided then and there that I would make baseball my top priority.

Every day after school I went to the local park and played catch, shagged fly balls, took grounders and played in pickup games with all sorts of different people. One of the guys I practiced with a great deal was a guy who went to my school. Tony. He lived near a PONY League park that had lights! That was so absolutely great for us because we could stay there in the dark (after 6 pm in the winter) and still see the ball. We would take turns pitching to each other. Tony was a real pitcher. I wasn’t, but I was good enough for batting practice and Tony smashed plenty of balls into the extra-high fences in left field that allowed us to fetch the balls because they didn’t end up in the bushes on the other side. There was a white line about halfway up the fence that told you when it was a home run. Tony hit many home runs off me.

The next season, when I was 12 and in my final year, I was one of the players who was actually picked by a team that wanted to be a contender for our Little League title. This made me rather proud. Tony and I were picked to play on different teams and, as fate would have it, in an important game against his team, which was one of the best, I came up to face him with the bases loaded. He was good, and he was fast and he was certain that he could throw the ball past me. Unfortunately for him, he threw one down the middle and I connected with it and it sailed directly over our field’s much lower and closer center field fence for a grand slam. I remember jumping high in the air with joy before I got to first base. That was the game-winner and I even got a line in the local paper that reported on Little League results.

Tony never asked me to practice with him again.

Roxbury Park, view from center field

The Hollywood Stars and the Angeles had gone and the Dodgers had come to town. I mourned along with everyone else after the crippling accident that ended the career of Roy Campanella. He was a catcher, like me. And Campanella was definitely an Italian name, like mine. I identified with him. But for their first few years the Dodgers played at the enormous Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, with that very short and 42-foot high left field fence. It was an absurd place to play, but left-handed hitter Wally Moon didn’t think so. He mastered the art of the Moon Shot and helped the Dodgers to a World Series win.

We had a real team in town now. Koufax, Drysdale, Gil Hodges, Duke Snyder, Pee Wee Reese, a whole gang of players we all wanted to emulate on the field. And in those days there were 8 teams in each league, and at the end of the 154-game season (National League, the American League already had 162), the 2 teams with the best records played each other in the World Series. It was all over before the middle of October, before the cold and rainy weather started in the eastern half of the USA. We had eternal sunshine in Los Angeles, and sometimes even some of the hottest days of the year in October, what with the Santa Ana winds blowing from Mexico through the southern part of the state up to L.A. So winter didn’t mean much for us baseball kids. We continued playing through until the 2-week rainy season in December or January, depending on the year.

No, I never became a professional baseball player, though I was an All Star in PONY league in both years I played, and I was doing well on the Junior Varsity baseball team in high school until I got kicked off the team by an over-disciplinarian coach after I argued with the umpire on a close play at the plate. After all, I was just emulating the major-leaguers, but obviously the coach didn’t see it that way. Anyway, the summer after that incident we left the USA and I was gone for 10 years, living in Africa and India but reading about the Dodgers whenever the chance came.

Dhamek Stupa in Sarnath

It was during that breathing time away from the American mind-grinder machine that I started exploring literature, music and history. India provided me with plenty of opportunity to explore religion as well. Buddhism was interesting. I traveled to Varanasi, splashed myself with the holy water of the Ganges and took the short taxi journey to the Dhamek Stupa in Sarnath, a few kilometers away. It’s supposed to be the place where the Buddha sat and spoke with his first disciples. I walked around it a few times with hundreds of the faithful, like I was supposed to, and thought about what Buddhism meant to me. That’s when it hit me: “It’s like baseball!” Actually, now that I have a historical perspective, I would turn that around and say “Baseball is like Buddhism.”

At least it used to be before all the extra teams, the big money and the recent rule changes. Meditative qualities were necessary before instant replays and screens began to dominate. You had to remember what the pitcher had thrown at you last time you met. And the pitcher had to remember what got that hitter out or allowed him to get a hit. It was all in the mind. Some discussions of course with coaches and other players, but it was your mind at work, meditating on the action of the ball or the action of the bat. And then came the ultimate empty-minded concentration. The pitcher as he starts his windup and the batter as the ball is released and starts its journey toward the plate. There is no more thought from either pitcher or batter at that point. It’s a pure moment of being in the now, a Zen moment if you will, because there is action involved and automatic reaction, thought-less reaction. And then it’s over, either because the ball has not been hit or because it has. Then the whole process begins over again.

Of course in the game there are winners and losers. Only the real Buddhist-influenced Japanese and Koreans allow for tie games, which are called after 12 innings in the regular season and 15 innings in the playoffs. But even the old extra-innings feature of baseball, the one where a game could, theoretically, never actually end, go on for days, months, even years, was an essentially Buddhist feature. These days they allow a phantom to arrive at second base so that the game can more quickly end in a win. Where’s the fun in that? And now instead of the two teams who have literally busted their balls all season long to arrive in first place, with the best record able to be mustered in a season (now 162 games long), these teams have to face some second-rate wannabe-champion who won ten or even 15 games less than the best during the regular season. I have no problem with these “playoff” teams playing a round-robin tournament against each other for 3rd place, but the two top winning teams in each league should be the ones to go on to the World Series. They deserve it after surviving the long grind from April to the end of September. And if a game goes into extra innings, there should be no phantom runner at 2nd base. Either they should be allowed the chance to go on forever, or they should insert the 12 or 15 inning rule and declare a tie.

Stamina and concentration used to be the hallmarks of the game. Of course there is still stamina and concentration there, but it has been, to my mind, negatively modified by the screens and the over-abundance of teams and the profit-driven owners. Yes, owners were always rich, but now they belong to the oligarch class, like Roman Abramovich and the other billionaire owners of soccer teams in England. Here in Germany, although it is also a money-based game, the soccer teams cannot be owned outright by one person or company. They are all cooperative associations owned by the cooperative. And that must remain at 51% or more.

Which brings me to Capitalism Ltd.™

Proponents of capitalism always resort to the “entrepreneur” card to argue as if only through the magic of a brilliant founder can a company ever be made into a successful enterprise. This is of course false, as any cursory glance at the thousands of successful cooperatives around the world can show you. But let’s cater for a moment to the capitalist true believers who worship the likes of Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Morgan, Bezos, Gates (who founded Microsoft with the now-forgotten Paul Allen) and Musk (who actually joined the Tesla party after it was founded by two other guys, Eberhard and Tarpenning).

So let’s go along with the prevalent capitalist mythology of the entrepreneur who has a brilliant idea, is honest and hard-working and builds up a company that dominates a certain sector of the economy. What about all the help the entrepreneur got to do that from the people who actually put in the work on a daily basis, who took care of the mail, the product distribution, the engineering, the accounting, the human beings who made sure the enterprise was running as smoothly and efficiently as possible on a day-to-day basis? OK. They got a salary. Fine. But often it wasn’t much, since the guiding principle in capitalism is to make as great a profit as possible with as little expenditure as possible. So if human beings cost too much, you cut the payroll, and presto you have an uptick in profits. If the company becomes a publicly traded corporation, the stock price ticks up each time jobs are cut. Profit!

Now we can all rail against capitalism because of its deep-rooted unfairness, but let’s put that aside long enough to look at a different possibility. Why not put a time-limit on the ruthless practices of a capitalist enterprise?

Let’s call this Capitalism Ltd.™

My proposal is to put a time limit of 10 years on all new capitalist enterprises. Let the so-called entrepreneur run wild for 10 years doing what the mythologized role says he/she is supposed to be doing, starting a business with energy and intelligence until it is built up into a powerhouse of efficiency and profit. Well, my proposal is that you’ve got 10 years to get that done. In year 9, the transition begins, from privately owned enterprise to a cooperative, where the people who work in it  each get an equal share and, in year 10, the company is fully transitioned into a cooperative. The original entrepreneur is now faced with a choice: “Should I stay or should I go?”

Staying will bring the entrepreneur into an equal relationship with all his/her coworkers. The profits made during the time running up to the transition can remain with the entrepreneur, but everything after that goes into the common kitty for everyone in the company. The entrepreneur might even still be viewed as an essential piece in the function of the enterprise and may be given an important post like CEO or CFO, but the difference in salary will have been voted on by the members of the coop and you can be sure it will not ever rise to 300 times that of the lowest-paid worker.

And what if the entrepreneur decides to go? OK. The money made personally by her/him over the previous years is money that can be kept (that is, the salary but not yet the profit, which has to go through forensic accounting and must remain in escrow until it is proved to be above-board). Thank you and goodbye! Now this entrepreneur can either go off and start another enterprise or live on the money made without working ever again.

This Capitalism Ltd.™ system would allow for the mythologized role of the entrepreneur to continue, but would also provide all the people who help that myth to flourish with an incentive to do their best and look forward to a future where they can actually benefit from the time and energy they put into the enterprise for 10 years.

Ah, you say, what about the con-artists who build a business up for 5 years and then let it fail before the transition? Easy. Besides a reasonable salary as the CEO for a new business (never more than 30 times the salary of the lowest paid worker), all profits from the enterprise must be held in escrow until the transition is complete. Should the business fail before the 10 years are up, the profits accrued up to that point will be distributed fairly to all the employees, and to the entrepreneur, after a forensic accountant’s investigation into the circumstances of the failure.

So, if we put this Capitalism Ltd.™ system into place we could have sports teams that belong to the players and the people working for the team, banks that belong to all the people working in them, basically public banks, major enterprises, even arms manufacturing firms and aerospace companies which belong to the people working in them, and still allow the mythical capitalist entrepreneur a modicum of freedom to indulge her/his intelligence and energy into starting a business which makes a profit. The good thing here is that in the end that business also benefits the workers who kept it running. That results in a general spreading of wealth that brings peace, prosperity and satisfaction to a huge portion of the population. It also makes people aware that helping the less fortunate in society is actually of benefit to everyone. It might even cause the arms and aerospace co-ops to not favor war because, well, we can get along just fine without it.

That’s approaching a Buddhist mindset, isn’t it?

So the game of capitalism can go into extra innings without phantoms designed to kill off the competition and when the transition comes into a co-op, it kind of even ends in a tie without anyone feeling hurt or resentful. In this way the inherent evil nature of capitalism is corralled and transformed into a benefit for the many instead of the few. Maybe, as a side-benefit from the democratic nature of the cooperative, governance at the state and country level will become more democratic as well.

Why not try it out for a couple of hundred years and see what results?

Let me know how it worked out.

BASED ON LIES

Words are in the video which begins at 3:48

WORDS & MUSIC

DANNY ANTONELLI

WW III: The War Against Democracy

Authoritarians On The Rise

Authoritarians on the rise: world map from Freedom House

This world map from Freedom House illustrates the trends around the world toward more democracy or less democracy. Interesting enough is the depiction of Australia as heading in the negative direction away from democracy. The fact that the United States has been labeled as neutral, that is, not shifting one way or another, is certainly not anywhere near accurate, given the latest political decisions against civil liberties taken by various states, especially Florida, Texas and Arizona. And Canada is not really that far behind. The oil-igarchs have the country in their grip and won’t let go without a fight.

My personal view is that WW III began on the day that The Orange Menace was elected with the help of the authoritarians, which includes the homegrown American oligarchs who funded his campaign and the foreign oligarchs who assisted through their electronic warfare. The election of Joe Biden has only given the authoritarians more time to get better organized for the final push (Putsch), which will come after the November elections in the USA or in the general election of 2024.

As in the years leading up to all-out war in the last century, the authoritarians have a long term plan, with incremental pressure being put on democracies everywhere. Their desire is that eventually the democratic systems will crack and then break under the constant pressure. And if there happens to be a rebellion against the threat of authoritarian rule (e.g. Spain) then the criminals gang up on the democrats and use all the force at their disposal to try and get rid of them. Hitler and Mussolini were happy to help Franco and get some of their soldiers battle-tested, as well as use some of their new war machinery and see how it performed under true test conditions.

Instead of Spain, this time around it’s Ukraine. Russia is testing out its new equipment, getting its soldiers battle-tested and at the same time testing the will and spirit of the democracies which remain in Western Europe. As we can see from the map, not all of them are immune to a drift toward authoritarianism. And some of them are already well on the road to one-person or one-party rule. Intolerance has already poisoned Dutch and French politics, and Poland – were it not for the pressure Russia is currently exerting on them (and NATO and the EU) – would be more than happy to enact even more drastic anti-democracy legislation and whip up even more hate against non-Christian foreigners. Serbia is like a mini-Russia and the rest of the Balkans are always teetering on the edge of a precipice.

In the case of politics, money is the root of all evil. Since 1980 and the election of that Ronald (McDonald) Reagan clown, oligarchs have been given free rein to double and triple their fortunes, with minimum control about how they do this. Almost all the monopoly laws have either been superseded or ignored so there are no more checks and balances against making money, as they say, by hook or by crook. The pandemic allowed most of these billionaires to increase their fortunes even more while income for normal people either stagnated or disappeared altogether. And now, with war once again increasing profits across-the-board, oligarchs are laughing all the way to their well-hidden bank accounts run by well-disguised shell companies.

The brazen impunity of it all is worthy of a despot’s role in a Greek tragedy. Hubris, of course, has never disappeared from the world stage. And these days it is arrogantly out in the open. Pronouncements from authoritarians like the Brazilian Bolsanegra, the Hungarian Crooked Sausage, the Russian Mad Hater and the God of Immortal Stupidity of the USA are featured in headlines and long articles, with photos of these criminals. The fact that people who espouse ideas like theirs are even allowed to be heard or read about is an error of catastrophic proportions. Their pronouncements should never be heard and their pictures never seen in countries that want to remain democracies. Their silence would be, in this case, golden.

Though there have been minor setbacks lately for the authoritarians in France and Slovakia, be assured that pressure in both of those countries will rise with every subsequent election. The good thing about living here in Germany is that Nazi symbols and propaganda are forbidden by law. None of the authoritarian parties can step over that line without serious consequences. Which is exactly how I wish it were in those bastions (?) of democracy, Great Britain and the USA. Free speech is a cornerstone of the post-war German constitution, but anti-democracy propaganda is a threat to the very existence of free speech and a state with a democratic society, therefore hate speech and anti-democratic rhetoric has no place in the discourse. As everyone with any sense realizes, once authoritarians take over, free speech is placed in a tomb with all its proponents.

Brazil is next on the agenda for the authoritarian movement. Bolsanegra (Black Bag) is preparing to “win” the upcoming election by declaring the vote fraudulent and using the corrupt military to cement his position in power. That is clear to anyone who has half a brain as regards the political situation in that country. Short of executing his whole family and his entourage of sycophant generals, there is little that can be done to stop the coming terror. And it will be a terror worse than the previous Argentine terror. These days the amount of data gathered over social media and electronic footprints puts in mortal danger anyone who has ever uttered a word against the criminals. Bolsanegra has already said there was not enough killing last time around. Torture isn’t enough as far as he’s concerned. You have to liquidate the opposition, like the two best-known Masters of Destruction did. But it has to be more like the mess the paranoid Russian Master left behind because the pedantic Germans left too many accurate records. That can turn out to be a problem should – heaven forbid – a counter-revolution succeed in the near future. Better to have everything done under the cloak of the darkness woven by proper propaganda.

So, if you want to avoid being put on the list and ending up in a stadium in your city, delete your social media accounts, don’t post any images of yourself on the net, make yourself as difficult to follow and trace as is possible these days. And stay vigilant, because sooner or later these criminals will come for your democracy. Be sure of it. As Neil Young once said: Rust Never Sleeps! And authoritarianism is the deadly rust attacking democracy worldwide.

I’d like to dedicate this next song to the authoritarian lapdogs now working to overthrow democracy in the USA, some of them are even in wheelchairs, but that is of course not their greatest disability:

Danny Antonelli lives in Hamburg, Germany

How to Win a Propaganda War

by adapting the illustrations of A. Paul Weber

Paul Weber was one of the most virulent anti-Nazi and anti-war illustrators of Germany in the 1930s. The Nazis eventually sent him to prison for his activities. But he emerged once again after the war to illustrate how things had not really changed.

What I am going to attempt to do here is take some of Weber’s most hard-hitting illustrations and imagine how they could be used or adapted to win the propaganda war against the most virulent new strain of authoritarian thinking and action to have emerged around the world since the 1920s. Skillful illustrators and cartoonists as well as animators should study the work of Paul Weber for inspiration. Follow the link to the website of the museum which is dedicated to him here in Germany, in Ratzeburg, not far from Hamburg. And if you are ever in the area, do go and see the wonderful collections available there. It is most definitely worth the pilgrimage. The pictures used here [not for profit] are from the illustrated biography by Helmut Schumacher & Klaus J. Dorsch which was published in 2003 and is available as a pdf download here.

So let us begin.

The illustration under the headline is from the title page of an anti-Nazi article published in 1932 by the Widerstandverlag in Berlin. The title, when translated, says: “Hitler the doom of Germany.” So you can see that Germans were quite aware of what was happening and what was going to happen. Just like we are today. We can see where the likes of authoritarian leaders like Orban, Trump and Putin are going to lead us – to our collective doom. Widerstandverlag translated is “The Resistance Publishing House.” Where are the resistance publishers today? And are they getting through to anyone except those of us who already understand what the consequences are going to be if we allow these criminals to continue along the path of least resistance?

Some major publications have made hard-hitting illustrations and photo collages that have been used against Putin and Trump. But how cool would it be if we printed the above illustration, replacing Hitler’s image with Trump or Orban or Putin or Le Pen, in the form of a baseball card, with true facts and figures on the backs of the cards, so they eventually become collectables and thus even get through to the youngsters being influenced by the poison ideas of the right.

Auftakt 1932

From the same illustrated article as the Hitler picture at the start we have Auftakt, which means “Prelude.” Everyone knows what is going to happen when the main part of the program begins. But now it’s 1932 and it’s only the prelude to the horrors which will follow. The warning is clear, but the music of Mr. Death is enchanting to the multitude. The same as today. The masses of people who are enchanted by the death cult that is the Republican Party in the USA, the AFD here in Germany and the other right-wing parties across Europe who promise new power to the powerless and yet advocate anti-vax and anti-mask policies which put the health of all at risk. The worship of the gun as the final arbiter of any argument marks the epitome of cultish thinking everywhere.

What if someone were able to take this illustration and transform it into an animation, maybe 20 or 30 seconds long with Mr. Death playing the melody from Chopin’s Funeral March. There must be some super slick animators out there who could do justice to this picture.

Bestechlich 1930

Remember H. L. Mencken? His Notes on Democracy was translated into German (Mencken had German roots) and Weber illustrated an important argument: Bestechlich means “corruptible,” and as we have seen in all democracies, the rich have a way of making sure things go their way, either through direct bribery or through indirect bribery by contributing to the campaigns of those they know will work to make them even richer. This particular illustration also includes the clergy, who pay no taxes for the wealth accumulated by their institutions or, like in the USA, for their independent “church.” The promise of salvation is only guaranteed if you pay. The Reformation was supposed to have cured religion of time off (indulgence) in Purgatory for a monetary fee.

I’m quite certain plenty of you can think of how to relate this picture to the present.

Das Ende vom Lied: Der Sumpf 1933

“The End of the Song: The Swamp” is where all the party faithful end up. We have heard the prelude and so we know where it leads, but the poor delusional souls who believe their cult leaders hear only the beats of the march, and so they march forward until they enter the swamp, only to sink into the quicksand. How can we make them see that they are marching to their own undoing?

What if, again, someone creates a short animation in which the Nazi salute emerges from the swamp once, twice, three times, to slowly get sucked down, down, down, until all the saluting arms disappear and the mud bubbles that emerge from the swamp burst, with a feeble voice croaking out “We won! We won! We won!”

Der Spekulant auf Heldentod 1934

“The Heroic Death Speculator” is known to us all. He works in the arms industry and in politics, the one gets contracts from the politicians and the other gets money to remain in power. It’s a profitable two-way street. I would put the death speculator on a baseball card, with facts and figures on the rear about death from war, pandemic deaths allowed through lack of caution and death due to poverty which could so easily be eliminated if the death speculators would just pay fair taxes on their windfall profits.

Das Leichentuch (Leviathan 1941/42)

“The Shroud” is an illustration of the book by Thomas Hobbes. Published in 1651 it is about the structure of society and what Hobbes believes to be legitimate government. It argues that there is a social contract and that society should be ruled by an absolute sovereign. Well, this is the inevitable result of unlimited power in the hands of an absolute sovereign. You can see how history has illustrated this and how it is being illustrated once again by the absolute ruler of modern Russia.

Obviously here the main character is the one dragging the shroud over the bodies. Another baseball card or animation, with the main character perhaps looking over his or her shoulder with a grisly smile. Putin? Trump? Le Pen? De Santis? There are, unfortunately, so many to choose from.

Der letzte Privatier (1944/49)

“The last privateer.” This is the final delusion of the oligarch. Oligarchs believe, deep down in that warped psyche of theirs, that when the earth has been reduced to ashes everywhere, there will still be a place where they can live safely behind a high wall and live a wonderful life. Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio depicted such a life during the the Black Death, probably the epidemic of 1348. Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death showed the results of such fantastical thinking.

Surely someone can place an oligarch’s mansion or subterranean hideaway into this context and illustrate the final result. Or, better yet [warning, self-advertising imminent] you can read my play Sheol. Use that for your illustrative or animation inspiration.

Die Diskussion im Boot (1948)

“The discussion in the boat.” Oh, we talk about it, we write about it, some of us make suggestions about how to use illustrations to win a propaganda war, but what are we actually doing about it?

One of the things which annoys me about talk shows and their hosts is that there is this absurd attempt to give the other side a chance to express their opinions. Why? How are the opinions of “the other side” being treated on the Murdoch Media Empire? How about in Putin’s Russia? In Orban’s Hungary? Here in Germany one cannot publish Nazi propaganda or use Nazi symbols in public. I’m quite happy with that. We know what happened here. Most of us have been to a death camp. These are not nice places. Don’t be fooled, the neo-authoritarians do not hesitate to use brute force. Remember Argentina? Remember Chile? It’s happening next door to you in Mexico and next door to me in Ukraine.

Stop talking . The boat is sinking. Do something!

Deutsches Verhängnis (1931)

“German doom.” Everyone knew what was coming and yet paid no attention. And it’s coming again. A short animated film of an endless stream of the Trump/De Santis/Putin faithful marching over the hill and into the casket of doom, which never fills up to the brim because it is bottomless!

…und kommen nach kurzer Pause wieder (Widerstand 1934)

“…and we’ll be right back after this short break.” They are already back.

Rückrad raus! (1951)

“Out with your spine!” The “democratic” parties have lost it I’m afraid. Their corporate masters have been busy for years removing spines. The razor-sharp knife they wield is money, and too many of our purported democrats are willing to lie down and have their spines removed.

Surely an animated short film no longer than a minute can come from this, with your favorite corporate villain holding the blade while your favorite politician submits willingly to the treatment.

There are so many more possible illustrations, but I will end with these two:

Der Staatsfeind (1956)

“The Enemy of the State” is, and always will be, the poor person. You have nothing, you have nothing to lose, therefore you are the enemy of the state that gives you nothing. Add this to your baseball card collection, with facts and figures about poverty in your country.

And last but by no means least:

Triumphzug der unsterblichen Dummheit (1955)

“The triumphal procession of immortal Stupidity.” A potentially wonderful animation that shows the dumbest of the dumb carrying their god “Immortal Stupidity” on their backs, enjoying their triumph over logic and love. In full color of course, with an endless procession!

Don’t let it happen.

Get to work!

Danny Antonelli lives in Hamburg, Germany

Oligarchs United vs. Atomized Civilians

Dr. Medford: “When Man entered the Atomic Age, he opened the door to a new world. What we may eventually find in that new world, nobody can predict.”

If you haven’t seen Them!, a black and white masterpiece of horror from 1954, then you should. Is it outdated? Probably, if you are a fan of CGI-saturated modern sci-fi films. Is it still relevant? Only if you believe in the danger that nuclear weapons pose for humankind. And of course if you have ingested William Empson’s 7 Types of Ambiguity, you will be able to find in the film many resonances with our society today and specifically with the symbolism presented by the giant ants.

Humor me. Watch the movie (again) and imagine that the giant ants are the oligarchs we have created since the beginning of the atomic age. Then ask yourself if you empathize with Them! or if you find the conclusion justified and necessary in order to save humanity.

It has become increasingly clear to me that since the war in Ukraine began in February that although the western powers are going after the Russian oligarchs with a vengeance, our own oligarchs continue to make money hand-over-fist and normal people are paying for the war and its consequences of wheat shortage, oil shortage and a shortage of human empathy. Oh yes, we are being nice to the Ukrainian refugees here in Europe, while at the same time making asylum and life in general difficult for any refugees from countries the western powers have destroyed in the past 30 years. Besides continuing to feed the war in Yemen and not feed the people of Afghanistan.

You must remember that the oligarchs, like the giant ants, are all born from the queen and their only reason for existing is to serve the queen. They are united in that endeavor. Now, in case you are ready to understand the queen as a symbol for capitalism, then you can surmise that the only reason oligarchs exist is to serve the capitalist system. The system is competitive, brutal and hierarchical. Capitalism (the queen) is at the top and all must serve to keep her fed and keep the system alive. And, everything goes to maintain the system. Which is why we are in the predicament we are now in. There is an inherent belief that by feeding the queen, the colony will survive. Which may be functional in the case of ants, but when transferred to the reality of capitalism, we see that this type of behavior is self-defeating and probably suicidal. You cannot rape the earth and imagine that you will survive when all you need to feed upon is gone.

I’m not a politician (thank you!) and my powers of divination are not perfect, but I have been close to achieving the Casandra effect on myself after I wrote the libretto for Trump, The Musical back in 2019 and more or less described the result of that monster losing the election. Of course because people were scared and then had the excuse in early 2020 of the pandemic coming along, the musical never hit the boards. But at least it was written and published before the January 6th fiasco, which proved that I was looking at Trump and his cronies from the correct angle.

Since the end of WW2, the propaganda machines both East and West have been working overtime to destroy any glimmer of solidarity which might arise among the working people. And I include the petite bourgeois among the working people as well because they don’t really have the luxury of decades of inherited wealth to relax on so that they can rise to the class of “idle rich.”

Advertising, or public relations as Bernays liked to call it, has only one basic purpose, and that is to inject you with envy and to make you act on that envy to purchase a product. Which product you purchase doesn’t matter, as long as you purchase one. Your job is to be a consumer. After 9/11 Bush II ordered Americans to fly to Disney World and enjoy themselves. Consume! Be entertained! And even the semi-rational economist Robert Reich wrote: “The theory is that we demonstrate our resolve to the rest of the world by investing and consuming at least as much as we did before, preferably more.”

And now, with mask mandates and other COVID-19 restrictions being lifted here in Germany and around the world, we are expected to once again go out there and consume as much as possible to keep the pennies from heaven falling into the pockets of the oligarchs.

They are united against us. And we are envious of each other and atomized into little ineffective groups, little right wing hate groups, little liberal love groups, little reformer groups, little groups of conservatives, or conservationists. It doesn’t matter which group you belong to, you are in a small ineffectual fringe group that will never have any real impact on policy or on the stranglehold that the oligarchs have on society. However, if by some mischance your little group grows beyond its fringe character and starts to have an effect (e.g. Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter), then you can be certain that the whole system will focus all its energy on ridding itself of the growing opposition. Ruthlessly.

Now the oligarchs are having a war so that we can be afraid once again and forget what is really dangerous to our survival: Them! The giant ants (oligarchs) that rapaciously destroy everything in their path.

The comments I have made lately on my radio program, FREE WHEEL, are things I had to get out into the world. They’re not earth-shaking and certainly won’t change reality for the better, but they had to be said. And you can be sure that I will continue to speak my mind in the future.

FREE WHEEL is a radio show I produce and host twice a month on FSK in Hamburg, and on Radio StHoerfunk in Schwäbisch Hall and Crailsheim. Both stations are local commercial-free public broadcasters.

At the beginning of each show, after the first song has played, I provide a short intro where I talk about what is moving me that week and outline what is coming on the show. Below are the latest intros to the shows following the invasion and the beginning of the war on 24 February 2022.

FREE WHEEL StHoerfunk 2022 02 24

NOTE: This program aired on Thursday, 24 February, just as hostilities between Ukraine and Russia got underway. The news items in the program have become swiftly outdated, as is all news during a war.

But I did choose the right kind of music: EVERYTHING IS BROKEN!

Well, I am genuinely surprised that Putin has decided to move troops into Ukraine. I’m not shocked, because politicians have stopped shocking me. But I really thought that Putin was smarter than that. He just blew all his deals for energy transfer to the west. OK, the price of oil is through the roof again, so the oil oligarchs east and west are set to make huge windfall profits again. But all the other trade stuff that was going on is now being swept away. How stupid.

Tonight you’ll get some information about the current political situation from Democracy Now and Al Jazeera. Before the radio play Bill Hicks lightens up the mood a little with his humor. The radio play is Audio Diaries. And all the music this evening is about things that are broken.

FREE WHEEL 2022 03 17

As the war drags on and the news gets worse each day, maybe we should all be thinking about the consequences of war, all war, no matter who starts it or who wins it, because us, we, the people, we are the ones who always lose. Normal people always lose every war that has ever been fought. Normal civilians die in greater numbers than any of the soldiers in the front lines. Towns and cities are bombed into rubble. The soldiers escape, or are taken prisoner, the people die, either from the bombs and bullets or from starvation and neglect.

The kings, the oligarchs and their super-rich cousins are heading for their shelters, for their hideaways, anticipating the nuclear end of life on this planet. They assume they will survive to begin anew. Once the cataclysm begins, it’s lights out for everyone. The fact that the privileged feel immortal is a symptom of the insanity of our time and the past times, when kings and queens actually believed in their “divine right” to rule over others. Now it’s the oligarchs, the elite, not just the Russian ones, all of them, all over the world, who are salivating at the prospect of the trillions in profits to be made in the post-war era. If there is an era to follow.

I say, take away all the assets of all the oligarchs everywhere on earth and give the money to the victims of war, us, we, we the people. Then watch how quickly all the wars stop.

Martin Luther King tells us why he’s against the Vietnam War. And that is why we should always be against all war. Just before FrameLab talks about American Authoritarians vs. American Democracy, General Smedly Butler delivers the warning he gave to the American people back in the 1930s about fascists wanting to take over the government of the USA. We should be listening closely to what he has to say. The danger is still there, and greater than it has been since the 30s of the last century.

All the music has something to do with war.

FREE WHEEL StHoerfunk 2022 03 21

What is happening in Ukraine should not be happening at all. Everyone knows that. Personally, I oppose all wars and all oligarchs everywhere, and especially the merchants of death who profit from selling the guns and bombs that kill civilians.

According to Bloomberg, the cumulative wealth of the richest Russians in the world has gone down by almost $90B since the start of the war. Meanwhile, America’s 704 billionaires have gotten $1.7 trillion richer—57%—over two years of the pandemic. Almost all of those wealth gains will go tax-free. According to Forbes, the wealth of only the 3 richest oligarchs in America (Musk, Bezos and Gates) is $594 billion, a total that is greater than the wealth of the 100 richest Russian oligarchs combined at $558 billion. [CounterPunch https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/03/18/roaming-charges-45/%5D

Ian Bremmer talks about What the War in Ukraine Means for the World Order. SUDS continues at the end of this hour. And all the music today is by Peter Gabriel, once-upon-a-time from Genesis.

In the second hour:

Today is the Equinox, when the day is as long as the night (at the Equator of course), and it is the official first day of Spring. Enjoy it. The sun is coming back and the flowers will bloom and green will return into our lives. Well, as long as there are no nukes bringing an end to everything.

Ian Bremmer continues to talk about What the War in Ukraine Means for the World Order. And Peter Gabriel keeps on delivering interesting music.

FREE WHEEL 2022 03 24

It’s all about propaganda these days. What you see, what you hear, what you read. There is no subtlety at all on the Russian side. It’s just blatant barefaced lies. On the other side – our side – we let failed Generals and old cold warriors tell us what we should know because after all they are the wise and knowledgeable, despite the fact that they were wrong on Afghanistan, wrong on Iraq, wrong on practically everything they have said over the past 30 years. But these fools are the ones that the media calls on to tell folks that Putin is a war criminal. Well, yes, he is a war criminal. But so is G. W. Bush, and especially Dick Cheney. And there are many, many more sitting on thrones and in the seat of the Chairman of the Board all around the world. If you are making money from war, you have a share in being a war criminal. Why? Because war is criminal. War is a criminal enterprise. It always has been and always will be.

Normal people do not want war. They are only driven into war by the masters of propaganda, who use war as an excuse to stay in power. So with this war now we are supposed to forget about inequality, about how oligarchs East, West and North and South made trillions during an epidemic. We’re supposed to forget how oil companies are destroying the environment, and we are supposed to pay more for the old world-destroying energy while hitting the pause button on renewables.

When you let psychopaths rule the roost, this is the result.

Fred Hampton, Malcolm X, Al Jazerra’s Listening Post; all of them will try to open your mind to the fact that we are still all slaves of a system that loves to make money from destroying lives.

The music is really good.

Capitalism feeds the oligarch.

Life continues.

The refugees from Ukraine are pouring into Germany. A good friend of mine is down at the intake center acting as a translator. She is half-Russian, half-Scottish. A native-speaker of Russian and English (with a sweet Scottish accent). She was interviewed on German TV the other day and almost broke down in tears right there on camera. It’s not easy for people who have basic human empathy. But the oligarchs are not saying anything at all, they aren’t down at the centers aiding the refugees, delivering truckloads of food and clothing and providing room and board in their empty villas and empty apartments (good investments!).

Next week we’ll be getting some new neighbors. Ukrainians are moving into the apartment which is free next door. Our neighborhood isn’t going to turn them away or ask them to stay the hell out.

But what if they were from the Congo, where war has been raging from the day that the Belgians were forced to leave? What then?

What Remains by Danny Antonelli

Normally I wouldn’t try to explain anything, but with this LP I feel I should at least let you know that it’s autobiographical, inspired by various past events and people I met. Some of them I loved, some I wished had never been born. I’m at that age where an autobiography is getting to be appropriate.

What makes my life worth recounting? Well, I’m not sure how instructive or entertaining it might be for you, but for me it’s a necessary part of “know thyself.” And of course my son is curious about who his father is and what his father lived through. I’m still curious about those years my mother lived through before I was born. Unfortunately I don’t have much hard evidence and no autobiographical notes from her to make the story clearer. And I didn’t want to leave my son with that kind of foggy darkness to deal with. Of course he will have to try and figure out just how truthfully I’m telling my story.

After all, we all bend the truth whether we want to or not, most often because our perception of the past reality has gone through the prism of the years that followed and been colored by subsequent layers of emotion from similar or conflicting events. But no matter, the attempt is what is important, and the result is that some glimmer of truth comes through and perhaps it’s enough so that the fragmented mosaic does come across as a picture worth looking at. I certainly hope so.

Enjoy!

DANNY

Angry Old Man

A sorry religious zealot of the left

Dachau

I got blocked!

“Sadly nothing but ranting and bitterness. I’ve had enough and have blocked you.”

A guy I called a friend and a mentor, someone I’ve known since the early 1970s, someone I have lots of respect for because of his skills, someone who now spends his retirement days reading philosophy, from Plato to Hannah Arendt, someone who seemed to me to have an open mind has now confirmed what I suspect is really at the core of his being: his admiration for the power of the strong leader, the kind of strong leader he always tried to show himself to be and which, to a certain extent, because of his professional duties, made him successful in his field. In certain fields and situations leadership must be clear and strong in order to get the job done because you are dealing with a group of people who need to be able to work together as a harmonious whole in order for the result to be esthetically satisfactory. That does take determined leadership and a certain strength of character to be able to assume the mantle.

But when does strong leadership morph into the autocratic reign of a dictator who has no tolerance for dissent? Dissent is seen as disobedience, rebellion which has to be quashed. Blocked. Cancelled. Remain unheard. Outside the castle wall the peasants may yell and scream, but within the king can hear nothing and the feasting goes on unabated. Outside the plague can rage and people may die. Inside the serenity is unbroken and the servants continue to serve the master.

Once, a long time ago, I asked this onetime friend who he would like to work for if he had the chance. “The King,” he said with a grin.

Serving the King

Am I an “angry old man”? Sometimes, yes, I am. My anger runs hot for a while and then cools off. Most of the time I’m not angry. Sometimes I am just confused. Right now I am bewildered. I cannot understand how I could once again be so naive as to not realize that just because someone has a skill that I respect it doesn’t necessarily mean they have an open mind.

This guy, who purports to be steeped in philosophy, cannot see how the political situation which now confronts us around the world is in need of urgent attention, in need of a reset to the basic tenets of humanism. Did not the message of Hannah Arendt resound in his brain – the dangers of fascism and authoritarianism? How can you read anything that she wrote without wanting to stop the renewed onset of authoritarianism? Or is he only reading her work to better be able to tear apart her arguments against the onset of authoritarianism? That is a possibility.

Am I “a sorry religious zealot”?

How did he come to that description of me? Read part of the email text I sent him before he blocked me:

Samuel Fuller was there at the liberation of Falkenau: https://youtu.be/DujN3Aj8qpY
Your father and my father fought to end the Nazis.
My father was at a camp liberation.
I went to Dachau and I sat and cried because the dead speak to the human inside.
The Murdochs and their ilk want this to come back. Listen to them and you can hear them repeat the slogans.
If there is fear, then it is justified if this is the result.

In a previous email, after he had sent me an article from the New York Post which ranted that “The left is pushing fear to advance its agenda”, I answered by saying that the Post was a Murdoch rag and that Rupert was a proto-fascist. Perhaps that, combined with the images I sent him from my visit to Dachau made him uncomfortable and thus I must somehow now be a religious zealot.

(Left, sitting on the edge) Crying at Dachau: Does that make me a religious zealot?

Truth of the matter is that I went to Catholic schools for about 10 years altogether. I was never a True Believer because there was nothing that ever happened after prayer or confession that changed things for the better. Though I must admit that confession is a wonderful exercise in psychological house-cleaning. But I never had a mystical experience brought on by prayer. (Later with drugs there were some interesting moments – but I digress.) And basically I’m an atheist at heart. Or maybe you could say I’m one who tends toward the pulsating, or cyclic universe theory. Big Bang. Expansion. Cooling to almost absolute zero (nobody has gotten there yet or shown that it can be gotten to in reality) and then contraction until the next Big Bang. Then it continues like that. Bang. Expand. Contract. Bang. Everything gets reconstituted. Maybe consciousness returns. Maybe it doesn’t. No matter… or rather matter, dark matter, energy. All that stuff mixed in the blender over and over again.

When I lived in New Delhi I remember reading a book that had a wonderful illustration explaining the creation and dissolution of the universe. The first picture was of the head of a dragon, in profile, looking right, its mouth wide, spitting flames. The next picture was of the flames spinning and forming a ball which, it was explained, is the universe. Then along comes the dragon again, opens his mouth and swallows the flaming ball. And this repeats endlessly. I remember thinking at the time: “That’s an illustration of the pulsating universe theory.” It is linked to Vedic thought, but I’m not a Hindu, and not a Buddhist (which grew from Hinduism).

Graphic of the oscillating or cyclic universe (from Discovery magazine)

It’s all speculation as far as I’m concerned. Death wipes all knowledge from your brain so you will never know. No afterlife. But I guess the pulsating universe theory kind of gives me some consolation.

“of the left” I can agree with to a certain extent. I am definitely anti-capitalist. Capitalism evolved from feudalism, so I guess it’s a bit better, given the Enlightenment and freedom and democracy getting revived. However, the Overton Window has shifted so far toward authoritarianism that even Social Democrat and Green political parties, both of which support capitalism, are considered to be “of the left.” Communists don’t get any respect these days, not even from parties like the Linke in Germany, and anarchists are seen as jokers or madmen who are in “cloud-cuckoo land” as Mad Maggie used to say. [https://youtu.be/K-BZIWSI5UQ – Elvis Costello – Tramp The Dirt Down]

What bothers me most about capitalism is the inherent cruelty that is woven into its doctrine of profit maximization. Social Darwinism is at its core. Here in Hamburg the trade ethic of the Hanseatic businessmen was to arrive at a win–win game not a zero–sum game. Why? Because they want the trade to continue. It can only continue when both parties win. Modern neoliberal capitalism has evolved into a zero–sum game. I win. You lose. “The Winner Takes It All” as ABBA melodically put it. But if the winner does take it all, where does that leave the loser? With nothing of course. Add to that the doctrine of self-responsibility for everything, and not only are you a capital L “Loser,” you are also now responsible to make something out of the nothing you have been left with.

The guy who used to be my friend uses Social Darwinism as a prop. He would like me to think of him as “the King of the beasts.” Trouble is that if you really want to use Darwin’s model to explain your success in the neo-liberal capitalist system, then you should revise your pictographic reference because the most successful beasts these days are rats and cockroaches and sharks, and recently, viruses. Lions are being shot by the little Trumpensteins of this world and will soon be extinct in the wild.

Germany hasn’t gone as far down the road into radical Social Darwinism as the United States. The elite are still educated well enough to heed the warnings that Bismarck issued, urging his fellow elites to remember how things went in the French Revolution. Share with the underclass and your head will remain attached. Let’s hope that the elites continue to act with that in mind.

Maybe the basic cruelty that inhabits the soul of the capitalist is what motivates “my friend” to admire strength and to adhere to a belief that because of success in his career, the material reward and honors it has supplied him with, it makes him the better person. He is skilled in his profession. He is intelligent. I sincerely admire his abilities. And his function as a mentor for my own development has always been appreciated. Through work and complements his role as mentor has been repaid in various ways and I know that made him realize that his presence was appreciated. It is certainly not his abilities that I find discomforting.

Despite all the friendly exchanges through the years, I know much about his life that, well, is not what I would want to talk about in a public forum. Once, I asked him about success: “Can’t you be successful if you are moral?” “Sure,” he said with that same sly grin, “it just takes longer.” His personality enables him to deal with the system in a way I could never deal with it.

My personality is such that I knew I would never survive in Los Angeles, in the Hollywood that is at the center of the city. I’m not a rat, cockroach or shark. I’m also not good at discerning what is façade and what is the real face that is presented to me. I’m much too naive. You need to understand the system and be able to navigate through it, use your skills for the profit of others and not be sorry. There are hundreds, probably thousands of supremely creative people in Tinseltown, and I’m sure that many of them have been able to create and survive well without adhering to the dogma of Social Darwinism. I couldn’t do that, so I left the city and I left the country and found a home in a place that still adheres more or less to the win–win game. It’s been good for me. I’ve been able to have some modest success and live in peace.

I’m not rich. But that was never my goal. The freedom to create what I want to create has been at the core of my being. Almost a hundred radio plays, lots of albums, and plenty of work as a words-man for the entertainment industry. “Oh,” you say, “he sold his talents as well.” Yes, just like my “friend” I am for hire and I can work very well as a professional. That’s not a problem. In fact I admire the professional, whatever the field. And that was one of the reasons I admired my once-upon-a-time friend. It’s what surrounds the professional, the shark-infested waters the professional has to swim through in the entertainment Mecca of the world that I, personally, cannot abide. Here, the waters are also filled with sharks, but there are shark nets to keep them away from us bathers.

Being blocked has been, in one way, a liberating experience. Many years ago, when I left Hotel California and got away from the direct influence of “my friend” I felt happy to not be under what I had already discerned was his rather authoritarian regime. I needed my freedom and leaving was how I found it. First Lisbon, then Hamburg. A couple of times I went back to visit, renewed my direct contact, but was no longer under a spell. My old mentor, like the statue in the dream interpreted by a previous Daniel (31-35), has revealed himself to have a heart of stone and feet of clay.

More the pity.

Danny Antonelli lives in Hamburg, Germany

They Lurk Among Us

The anti-vaxxers in our midst

Women wearing surgical masks during the influenza epidemic, Brisbane (1919).

Since leaving Los Angeles and coming to Europe in the 1980s, I have been very active working in the music business as a lyricist, librettist and songwriter. Working often in the studio as a lyricist in the late 80s and 90s with heavy metal bands, I discovered that these guys (and girls BTW), who let it all hang out on stage and through their music, are really for the most part extremely polite and excellently trained musicians. On a visit to the home of one of the guitarists I saw his classical guitars and Bach sheet music in a corner. “Oh yes,” he said, “I practice Bach and the classics all the time. It’s how I stay fit with my fingers.”

Over time I have gathered respect for musicians and composers because most all of them that I have met and worked with were people you could talk with about all sorts of interesting things, not just music. So when I started working remotely (because of the pandemic and lockdown) with the composer whose name I will not mention, I had no reason at all not to believe he was also one of the OK people. He gave me no cause to think otherwise. Actually, because the project we were working on had a positive message for the world, I thought he belonged more to the category of the good guys than anything else. And the work was fine. I did my job well, there was no friction. The usual give-and-take between composer and words-man took place, and my work was praised and recognized, so all that was good.

The pandemic kept rolling along and I and my family and my friends here in Hamburg all got vaccinated, and though life hasn’t really returned to normal again, it is taking on a semblance of normality. We show our vaccination certificates when we enter a restaurant – masked-up – and we still step aside when people approach us on the sidewalk out of respect for their space and ours. All these common courtesies are becoming normal now. And I thought they were normal most everywhere.

The American Soldiers in Presence of Gas during World War I (1918).

News began filtering through about anti-vaxxers in Berlin going into the streets and people being arrested at big events where they mingled without masks and without vaccinations. At first I thought: “Well, idiots are everywhere.” Then I read about how the right-wing was joining the demonstrations and in many cases actually driving the demonstrations and I started putting two and two together. The warning lights started flashing in my brain. In the US the Trumpistas were amping up their messaging, the uproar was spreading through their Red State strongholds and even the normally passive mainstream media was sounding (somewhat muted) alarm bells, which always had a codicil of false equivalence between the violent gun-toters on the right and the unarmed antifascist protesters on the left.

Then I got invited to visit the composer because our project was now going public and I should be there to claim my 30-seconds of fame. So I traveled for 7 hours by train – masked-up all the way – and on the next day met the guy and his wife. The first thing he told me was that in the area where he lived not many people were strict about wearing masks and that he and his family had not been vaccinated.

And then the grooming started.

Being a tolerant type of person, I let him talk. The more he talked, the more I retreated into myself and began to observe. He wasn’t just explaining his own point of view to me, he was subtly trying to convince me that his beliefs were founded in fact, founded in science, and that because he was such a brilliant person and had studied chemistry for a semester in college that he was qualified to judge the overwhelmingly positive results of vaccination as bogus and as the hideous manipulation of Bill Gates and his billionaire cronies who own all the governments around the world and want us to be digital slaves to their empire.

Now I am not a Bill Gates fan or an apologist for billionaires or Big Pharma. My personal opinion is that, like Jonas Salk once did with the polio vaccine, the COVID-19 vaccines should be patent-free and be distributed where needed for the actual low cost of their production, or just distributed for free to the people that need it. Why not? It’s not as if the Big Pharma companies are going to go bankrupt because of it. They screw people (especially in the USA) out of billions each year with the jacked-up prices they charge for drugs that were developed with government subsidies in university settings and then sucked up by pharmaceutical companies for private profit-making.

These are no doubt greedy and nasty people, but Bill Gates and his cronies are not putting nanobots into your bloodstream so that you can be tracked and given commands to obey their wishes. That’s completely unnecessary. Public relations, aka. advertising, as developed by Edward Louis Bernays and the Madison Avenue crew has been changing people’s minds very effectively since before the first World War.

It came as a shock to me when I realized the guy was an anti-vaxxer. Then he started spouting other conspiracy theories and I began to get really angry. Angry at him. Angry at myself. How could I have misjudged him so terribly? Why didn’t I see this coming? And then, with more reflection came more clarity. I had missed the telltale signs that had been there all the time. He might as well have told me directly soon after I came into contact with him; maybe he was telling me in his own surreptitious way. I remembered the bits and pieces he told me about his childhood, his studies, his activism. I realized he had always been on that unsteady fringe of people who see chimera in events that are not paranormal at all. And, after meeting him and spending some real time with him, I got the impression that maybe he is not just a wrong-thinking nut-job, maybe he is actually a very calculating manipulator who wants to get as many people into his net as possible so that he can push them into doing what in the end will lead to his own self-aggrandizement.

I can’t be 100% sure, but now I suspect he was fabulizing when he told me that in high school he took up a cause: to save a forest in his district. He went to a meeting of the local administration and, according to him, harangued them for 3 hours with facts and figures and other material in an attempt to convince them to reverse certain decisions that they had already made. The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that no group of administrators anywhere in the world would sit patiently for 3 hours and listen to a high school kid spout facts and figures about anything.

So why did he tell me this story? Was he building a myth about himself, about his supernatural ability to get things done? His indefatigable work on our project was an example of his willpower and stamina. He raised money through crowdfunding, he organized online support, he got people from the USA to come on board, he was able to get newspapers to write favorable reviews, to get the project into the public sphere so that it is recognized as a worthy event. And my name was mentioned of course – fleetingly – but mentioned, so I was not being denied as a contributor. But he did fail in one major part of his campaign, and that was his attempt to get himself recognized and become allied with a group of people who belong to a major internationally supported movement. They turned him down flat. Wanted nothing to do with him. And now I wonder: What do they know that I don’t know?

In our most recent telephone conversation he expanded his anti-vaxxer stance to now include a radical political stance. He joined the new dieBasis, a German political party peppered with Querdenker (lateral-thinkers), Reichsbürger (almost identical with Sovereign Citizens in the USA), former aficionados of the proto-fascist AfD, and even some who would consider themselves on the Left of the political spectrum. Why would he do this? Because, he said, he wants to help get rid of the illegitimate government that rules his German state. Like the federal government, his state government needs to change the way it governs and allow people to not be vaccinated, not have to participate in lockdowns, and to not follow any rules that limit his own personal freedom.

Das Weib (De Sfinx) (1899) by Edvard Munch.

This is of course allied with the same talking points that are popular with the international right-wing racist and anti-Semitic elements: bailouts for the Jewish bankers, refugees being let in to dilute the racial dominance of the tribe that has lived here longest, licentiousness tolerated through gay marriage and support for transgender people… The same war cry heard from the governments of Hungary and now Poland. And of course it has been amplified by the right-wing echo chamber in the USA.

My last, and what proved to be futile interaction with him was when I sent him a link from a very interesting piece in the Intercept on how right wing pharma companies are cashing in hundreds of millions by getting their deluded minions to buy what they tout as cures for Covid. The article mentioned a group called Frontline Doctors who shill for the pharma companies. I thought that if, as he told me, he is interested in finding out some truth about it all, this article would open the door for him.

He wrote to me and said: “The article you sent me doesn’t really fit to what I do know about Ivermectin.” So, instead of giving him an opportunity to gain knowledge about how he and millions of others were being exploited, he actually tried to find the right-wing Frontline Doctors and strengthen his confirmation bias with their propaganda. “The website of the frontline doctors first seemed to be blocked, so it was difficult to get to know what the frontline doctors think about themselves, but finally I managed to read it.”

This experience has taught me a few important lessons:

#1. Just because someone has a skill set that you respect, it doesn’t mean they have an open mind.

#2. The pretzel logic these people are entangled in is nothing new, it has always been here, it’s just that we are inundated with its visibility due to the social media landscape that has come to dominate our lives.

#3. Getting angry and verbally abusive – which I did not do – only strengthens their confirmation bias.

#4. Laughing out loud at some of the ridiculous ideas that he proposed – which I did do to his face – didn’t faze him at all.

My conclusion is that in the best case scenario I am dealing with a deluded guy who is just trying to get people to like him and so he joins these groups that have weird ideas because they are all like him. The worst case scenario is that he is a manipulative psychopath who is using various popular movements to grab attention and fame and power to himself so that he can stand above the crowd and be admired as a mythical hero, no matter how twisted his motives and means of getting to the top.

Actually, the more I think of my time spent in his company, the more I am relieved that I was able to escape unscathed and get back home without any lasting damage. And yes, I’m done communicating with him on this subject. I don’t want to alienate him completely because of the project, which I pray will have a positive effect on people, but you can bet that I will be very careful in how I interact with him in the future. It will be strictly limited to business and the project.

After all: No use throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Emergency hospital during influenza epidemic, Camp Funston, Kansas (1918).

Seriously Funny: Die PARTEI

Party politics satirized with panache

Democracy without hooks
(in German the swastika is called the “Hackenkreuz” – a cross with hooks!)

Germany goes to the polls on September 26. It’s a Sunday. Shops are closed. Nobody works except bus drivers and train drivers and airline pilots and bakery staff (half-day) and of course police and firefighters. After all, Germans love fresh bread rolls and sweet buns for Sunday breakfast!

Welcome to Germany. Rational and serious, and yet there is a registered political party that you can actually vote for if you are so inclined – Die PARTEI – that satirizes the whole process and the other political parties with incredibly intelligent posters and internet campaigns. In the spirit of the late great George Carlin (who in my opinion would appreciate their humor greatly) they deliver truth wrapped in motley (as did Shakespeare BTW).

A sober (and for Americans, sobering) fact is that ballot information and your invitation to vote is delivered to each individual over 18 who has citizenship. It comes automatically for the first election after your 18th birthday. You don’t need to register with any party or as an independent. Voting is a basic right. Since your address is registered at your local community administration office – a process you (or your parents) go through when you rent an apartment or buy a house – the voting information is delivered to your mailbox at least a month before the election. The letter tells you that if you want a mail-in ballot, please inform the authorities now and they will send you one right away. And it really arrives within a day or two after you apply for a mail-in ballot. And all voting is by paper ballot. No electronic voting!

Hope is the last to die. But it dies. — Nico is a real candidate in Berlin.

The political landscape in Germany is as fragmented and dangerously tilted to the right as everywhere else in the world at the moment. And so, the existence of the Die PARTEI is a breath of fresh air in the debate which has lately turned into a bland imitation of Corporate Democrat policies from the SPD and Greens, to neo-liberal hardline capitalist policies from the FDP, and shrill anti-democratic yelling coming from the CDU, CSU and AfD about the dangers of the socialist communist immigration policies of the so-called leftists (SPD & Greens) who are more center-right than anything else. But since the Overton Window has shifted so far to the right, even the Linke (nominally a Leftist party) is included at the leftmost edge of the window. In actuality, though they do have some genuinely leftist members, the bulk of the party espouses the program of the 1960s SPD, social-welfare and inclusiveness. Over the years the Linke have shed most of their image as leftovers from the old DDR (German Democratic Republic). But they are still shouted down as radical revolutionaries who would lead us all back to Soviet-style slavery.

Don’t do any bad shit with your “cross” (your X)

Die PARTEI cannot take the other parties seriously because they can see, as we can all see, that the capitalism these parties worship has brought us to the edge of ruin. War, pestilence and poverty are on the horizon for everyone, and the policies espoused by the toadies of the corporations will not hold back the imminent destruction of rational society.

And so the posters and the program of Die PARTEI. They are serious, like George Carlin was serious. But like George Carlin, they are intelligently funny as well.

Nazis kill. (However, if instead of the period there had been an exclamation point, the whole meaning would have changed to “Kill Nazis!” which of course would have enabled criminal charges for “inveigling to murder”. This way, it’s just, as noted at the bottom of the poster, “Friendly information from Die PARTEI”.

Die PARTEI program for the Bundestag elections 2021

1. Wirecard for everyone!

People without income & assets can use it to pay for whatever they want. We finance the project through reserves, which of course do not exist. This works, because balance control by the federal authorities does not take place.

2. Existence maximum 10 million

Wealth above the 7th zero is systematically capped. And redistributed from the top 1% to the 99% of the social underclass (congratulations, you are one of them!). If you don’t enjoy life with 10 million, you don’t deserve life.

3. 2% target for education

53,030,000,000.00 for the broken Bundeswehr (armed forces). Every year. We don’t want to put the money into steel helmets (or like the Greens, into environmentally friendly killer drones), but into the minds of young people. Nothing could boost our “resilience” (Annegret Scheiß double name) more!

4. Fare evasion must remain affordable

The “crime” of fare evasion is reduced to a misdemeanor (€1.99). Every year, around 7,000 German citizens go to jail for “fare evasion,” some of them on foot. The 200,000 proceedings per year keep our courts from more important matters: bribery of CDU politicians, mask affairs of CDU politicians, illegal possession of weapons by CDU politicians.

5. Promoting the elite

Bologna, Bachelor, Master? Will become history. We feel more committed to the educational ideals of European intellectual history than to the exploitation interests of European industry. Students should again study for 15 semesters in peace and have time to take an interest in politics and society. Note: Under the age of 30, one should avoid regular work!

6. Unconditional basic income? Yep!

A welfare state instrument whose time has come. 70% of EU citizens are for it, us too. Two members of the PARTEI in the Bundestag & EU-Parliament have been testing a BGE (basic income) for years at a significant level – and so far have not been able to discover a single disadvantage.

7. Shut down Amazon!

Unfortunately, we have to shut down Amazon due to sustained market failure. In 2020, the losers, with 44 billion euros in record sales (EU) generated a loss of 1.2 billion euros (but only in their tax haven Luxembourg, smiley!). Tax due: 0 billion.

8. Photoshop ban now!

Anyone who knows Volker Bouffier – known through the PARTEI poster “How sexy can politics be?” –, Annalena Baerbock, Frau von Strolch or Philipp Amthor only from posters, could, upon a surprise meeting in reality, be fatally frightened. Especially in the case of Amthor, who actually looks like he does on his posters.

9. Compensate Deutsche Wohnen!

Article 15 of the Basic Law requires appropriate compensation for the socialization of housing. Vonovia and Deutsche Wohnen each receive 1 pack of Merci, 1 extended middle finger and 1 short, honest applause from their former tenants (8 pm, balcony). Apartments are there to live in, not to generate dividends for ominous asset managers in the Caymans.

10. Postpone war with Russia & China

In times of a global pandemic & global ecocide, we really don’t have any capacities for such nonsense as bloc formation, enemy image constructions and trench rhetoric. Those who are keen on confrontation (Stoltenberg, USA, Greens, Spiegel, SZ, Sascha Lobotomie, etc.): Free-fire on Erdogan, Bolsonaro, dictator Orban or baby-Hitler Sebastian Kurz.

11. Beer price freeze

The PARTEI supports a nationwide beer price freeze and the strengthening of the “Bestellerprinzip” (customer principle). For this purpose, a beer price index is to be established. The cap will come into effect as soon as two indicators occur simultaneously somewhere in the economy: a great thirst and a verifiable glass-empty rate. In preparation: kebab price freeze (3 euros)

12. Fuck-off bounty for SUVs

The ugly city tanks are not only an aesthetic imposition, they also make the second largest contribution to the increase in global CO2 emissions. (In Berlin-Kreuzberg alternatively: “Abfuckelprämie” fuck-off reward).

13. Green Point for nuclear waste

Nuclear power plants are included in the Dual System. Operators are obliged to take back fuel rods and packaging and to pay for the disposal of the waste produced.

14. Climate

Global warming must not exceed 1.5° Celsius per year under any circumstances. To this end, Die PARTEI will call on all relevant branches of industry to consider a voluntary commitment within the scope of their respective possibilities.

15. Peace, order, health

To protect the public, road crossings, high-voltage pylons, cliffs, construction & bathing sites, train platform edges, bike paths and banana peels will be secured nationwide by effective signs with the inscription “Karl Lauterbach warns…”.

16. Gendering will become mandatory…

…for all age groups born after 2000. For the others, a transition period until 2090 applies. RepresentatiX of both groups are recommended to be a little more tolerant in the discussion. (After the election: “by decree”). Smiley!

17. Commitment to justice

The PARTEI demands the implementation of all-embracing universal total justice, or at least twice as much justice as the SPD. Complaints about alleged injustices are to be suppressed with all force. In order to underline the social importance of justice, Hamburger SV (soccer team) will be relegated every year in the future, to wherever.

18. Animal welfare

Animal testing will be stopped. Animals are there to be found cute and eaten up. Lip gloss, ass make-up, organic jam and drug cocktails are now to be tested on top athletes, who are used to all kinds of substances. Or in Bibi’s Beauty Palace. Beer testing remains free.

19. Medical care in rural areas

In view of a genetic match of over 90% between pigs and humans in rural areas, it is only natural to transfer medical care in Germany’s manure belt to veterinarians.

20. Moderate Epistocracy

In referendums to leave the EU, referendums to introduce a presidential system, and presidential elections in the U.S., three general knowledge questions will precede them on the ballot. E.g., “What is the name of the capital of Paris?” Ballots with less than one correct answer will be considered “invalid.”

21. Upper limit for refugees

The refugee ceiling will – in keeping with the wishes of the CDU/CSU parties – be redefined every year: Germany may not take in more refugees than the Mediterranean.

22. G1 school system

School-leaving certificate preparations and examinations are far too time-consuming, which is why we are calling for the reintroduction of the emergency school-leaving certificate: students will be tested at the blackboard for half an hour at the beginning of June, and the solutions will be published on the Internet beforehand. Afterwards: chill.

23. Ending the Care Crisis

The shortage of nursing care and the consequences of overwork among professional nurses will be regulated by a rotation model: Nurses who have become incapacitated due to overwork become patients and then nurses again, and then patients again, and then nurses again … Thanks to the ingenious financing system for new nurse positions via health insurance funds, the affected nurses also generate an appropriate share of their salary, which they can then immediately return to the health insurance funds.

24. Corruption & Lobbying

Corrupt parties will no longer be allowed to profit from donations & sponsoring, corrupt politicians will be deported to Azerbaijan. Income from secondary activities for members of parliament will be deducted from their assets – as is the case with Hartz IV [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartz_concept]. The 290 deputies of the PARTEI in the Bundestag, the EU parliament and the municipalities will sign the politics code of Plattform Pro. Incidentally, we are of the opinion that “profit from lobbying must be destroyed” (Marco Bülow, MdB).

CDU: not Christ-like;
SPD: not social;
Greens: not ecological
 FDP: not liberal;
Afd: Not an alternative;
Die PARTEI: Not funny!

Danny Antonelli lives in Hamburg, Germany.

Satan Doesn’t Exist

شیطان وجود ندارد

Aka (German): Doch das Böse gibt es nicht

Aka (English): There Is No Evil

My ticket!

This past weekend I attended the Fünf Seen Filmfestival which is held every year — this is the 15th year — at various little towns around the Starnberg Lake (Starnberger See) in southern Bavaria, about 25 kilometers from Munich. It’s a summer resort for both the rich elite and the proletarian masses that live and work in Munich. For the proles, it’s easily reached by S-Bahn #6 (surface train) that travels every 20 minutes both out to the lake and back into the city.

Starnberg’s fame is derived from Ludwig II of Bavaria (of the Disney castle fame) and “Sisi” the Austrian Empress Elisabeth. Ludwig was engaged to Sisi’s younger sister Sophie, but the marriage never happened. Sisi’s castle in Possenhoffen is where all the action was in those days and the tragedy and comedy of these members of the aristocracy has been described in numerous books and films, the most notable films being those directed by Ernst Marischka. He gave the starring role to a teenage Romy Schneider and it made her famous worldwide.

Sisi’s castle in Possenhoffen seen through a hole in the hedge

Photo: Danny Antonelli

I was there because I was invited to come and see the premier of an oratorio film of which I am the librettist: Our World is On Fire. As is the custom at these events, the composer and I did a Q&A after the showing of the film and, speaking on behalf of all the librettists through the ages, like the ones who worked for Mozart and Verdi and numerous other famous composers, I can report that the two questions I was asked, and the 30 seconds I used to answer them, went down extremely well in an audience that at least understood the meaning of the word “libretto.” My previous experience with a much younger crowd, after I mentioned the fact that I wrote the libretto, was: “Uh, huh. What’s a libretto?” And I suppose that’s not an unfair question to ask in this day and age, since not one of the older people at the premier could actually name a librettist attached to any of the opera composers. I know, because I asked them.

But this isn’t about me, though I seem to have smoothly made it partially about me. It’s about a film I saw on Friday evening, a film that I knew absolutely nothing about and was curious to see because, well, I am a fan of Persian culture, I like the people, I traveled through Iran twice back in 1971, by bus and train, and I heard that this film had raised the hackles of the ayatollahs and that the director had been jailed because of it. “Ha,” I thought, “sounds like something that will happen soon in the USA when the Christian Taliban take control.” Let me have a look.

So, with the memory of the black and white jiggling camera of the film about the Chilean coup, The Battle of Chile, which I saw at a midnight screening in Los Angeles at the Nuart, I went into Doch das Böse gibt es nicht with patience and the expectation of having to sit through some rather sneaky camera angles and dangerous situations on the street with soldiers and police.

I was very wrong. The camera work is professionally excellent, the lighting in the interior shots, the technical aspects, the shots in public, the framing, the acting, everything was flawless and was of the highest standard for a contemporary film. The exteriors were remarkable, the midnight streets of the capital, the extraordinarily beautiful countryside, the forested hill country, nature in its unadulterated beauty. It was simply full of beautiful pictures. And the atmosphere, with sparse musical accompaniment, was kept thick with tension and foreboding.

If you know the Italian singer, Milva, and her version of Bella Ciao (text in translation here), then you can imagine how well that song fit into the various scenes in which it was the main theme.

And the actors? Superb. I had to read the German subtitles because my knowledge of Persian is non-existent. However, since it is an Indo-European language I was able to hear some familiar phonemes from time to time and so my auditory comfort level was assuaged. Although the writing now used in Iran is an Arabic script, the language doesn’t have harsh guttural sounds common to Arabic and German or, for instance, Dutch.

Both the men and women acting in the film made me feel that what they were saying and feeling was absolutely real. Their facial expressions, their tone, their gestures, perfect, not at all artificial. Not “acting.” It didn’t have the documentary feel of The Battle of Chile, but I was and still am convinced that everyone in the film had either been directly in the situation on view or had experienced the situation from an extremely near perspective.

The film is about the death penalty in Iran. It was directed by Mohammad Rasoulof and won the Golden Bear at the 70th Berlin International Film Festival in 2020. I didn’t know any of that beforehand. And I’m glad I didn’t. In fact, if you’ve read this far and really want to see the film, then I suggest you go now and try and find a place where it’s possible to see it, either in a cinema or online.

Photo by Danny Antonelli

It’s a combination of four short films on the theme of the death penalty and its effect on people. There are some almost-spoilers coming, so beware.

Because I went in without preconceptions, the first of the four films (at the time I didn’t know there would be four) got a bit boring. I was waiting for something to happen. There was this middle-aged man, balding, a greying beard, going home from where he worked in this walled place, with sliding metal gates and an underground parking garage. He gets home with the huge bag of rice they gave him from work, goes out to the mall to do some more shopping with his wife and small daughter, their conversation limited to the banalities of everyday life. I kept waiting for the point, the action, my American film nature demanding a car chase or an explosion. But nothing. His daughter falls asleep in his arms at home. His wife sleeps quietly next to him in bed.

At 4 a.m. his alarm rings, he gets up, washes, gets in his car and goes to work in this strange place with the huge metal doors and the underground garage. He walks down some narrow corridors to a small room where he makes tea and has a sparse breakfast while behind him on the wall a row of lights turns red and a buzzer sounds. He looks through a small window in the wall next to the row of lights. He pours his tea and drinks and eats and then the row of red lights goes off and a row of green lights beneath them comes on and the buzzer sounds again. He looks through the small window again and then his hand moves to a large button under the rows of lights. He presses it.

This is where I have to digress to Hannah Arendt for a moment. In her long report and discussion of the Eichmann trial in Israel, she brings up some very interesting questions regarding guilt and the feeling of being guilty. How did Eichmann feel about what he had done?

Eichmann’s own attitude, it appeared, was different. First of all, the indictment for murder was wrong: “But I had nothing to do with the killing of the Jews. I never killed a Jew, or, for that matter, I never killed a non-Jew—I never killed any human being. I never gave an order to kill a Jew nor an order to kill a non-Jew; I just did not do it.” Or, as he was later to qualify this statement, “It so happened . . . that I had not once to do it” — for he said explicitly that he would have killed his own father if he had received an order to that effect. Thus, he repeated over and over a statement that he had first made in the so-called Sassen documents — an interview that he had given in 1955 in Argentina to the Dutch journalist Willem S. Sassen, a former S.S. man who was also a fugitive from justice, and that, after Eichmann’s capture, was published, in part, by Life in this country and by Der Stern in West Germany. He said that he could be accused only of “aiding and abetting” the almost successful annihilation of the Jews, and in Jerusalem he declared this annihilation to have been “one of the greatest crimes in the history of humanity.” The defense paid no attention to Eichmann’s own theory, but the prosecution wasted much time on an unsuccessful effort to prove that Eichmann had once, at least, killed with his own hands (he was supposed to have beaten to death a Jewish boy in Hungary). It spent more time, more successfully, on a note that Franz Rademacher, the Jewish expert in the German Foreign Office, had scribbled on a document dealing with Yugoslavia, made during a telephone conversation, which read, “Eichmann proposes shooting.” This turned out to be the only “order to kill,” if that is what it was, for which there existed a shred of evidence.

Eichmann in Jerusalem—I
By Hannah Arendt
February 8, 1963

In Doch das Böse gibt es nicht one must question whether guilt should be felt if someone is forced to actually carry out the death penalty. In the film there are at least two instances where guilt is such an overriding factor that it induces actions that are in themselves extreme and which we, as observers (or at least I, as an observer) felt were completely justified. One action involves a soldier trying to escape his predicament, and another involves a woman who breaks off true love because of the predicament a soldier was in.

In the final story of the four we are shown how a young girl, about 20 years old, who has grown up in modern Germany, tied to her cell phone and happy to be visiting her “uncle” in Iran, reacts to the truth of the predicament her “uncle” was in and his reaction to that predicament. She cannot understand, cannot forgive, and yet one has the feeling that perhaps understanding will come to her in the end because of her strong connection to the life of animals in the natural world. She reminded me of all the “Eco” people and “vegans” here in Germany who are so self-righteous in their indignation at anyone who doesn’t live according to their standards. And yet, they cannot dispose of their mobile phones or give up their holidays on “Malle” (Majorca), not to mention all the other trappings of a comfortable 21st Century life.

By the way, Doch das Böse gibt es nicht could be translated into English as Of Course There is No Evil. But the actual transliteration of the Persian title Satan Doesn’t Exist is to my mind better than the titles crafted to sell the film to the western audience. Because of course Satan doesn’t exist, even though in Iran the United States is always referred to in the state-run press as The Great Satan.

The film deals with real people like you and me and with the state’s hold over us and how we react to this hold over us. The system is so large and so all-powerful that it is practically impossible to escape its demands. In Iran military service is obligatory if you want a job or to get travel documents. While you are in the military you must follow orders, no matter how gruesome they may be. It’s no different for us here in the democracies that tout freedom of speech and freedom of action. The United States has the largest military in the world, incarcerates more people than any country on earth and its soldiers can face dire consequences if they bring injustices to light (Bradley Manning, Reality Winner, etc.). Besides that, the United States also carries out the death penalty whenever possible. Here in Europe the death penalty has been eliminated, but our economies are absolutely dependent on selling armaments to despots all around the world. And our comfortable lifestyles depend on those arms sales, and the chemicals used to destroy the planet, etc., etc.

How guilty do you feel? Is the fact that I ride a bike instead of drive a car OK and should make me feel less guilty of destroying the environment? Why haven’t we, over 7 billion people on this planet, forced the relatively few thousand billionaires to give it all up and change the system so that there is no war profiteering and no destruction of the environment for profit? Is there a difference between a Dick Cheney or a Bush or an Obama and an Eichmann? What about the people who give the legally approved lethal injections to prisoners on death row? What about policemen who kill? What about all those wonderful “thank you for your service” guys who kick down doors and destroy families and take home fingers or ears as souvenirs? Are they that much more guilty than the administrators of the system?

Satan Doesn’t Exist.

Or…?

EVIL EYE – REVIEW AND INTERVIEW

By Karen Lloyd

Artist: Danny Antonelli
Album: Evil Eye
Vinyl collector’s item: 8 tracks
Streaming: 13 tracks (8 album tracks + 5 Bonus tracks)
Featuring: Matthias Strass, Freddy Schlender, Christian Sass, Andy Nock, Peter Pollmann, Ulrike Esser, Julius Esser
Released by: ATMAN LC 01692
Streaming version: UPC/EAN 198000578039

The Evil Eye vinyl album opens with Notes From Underground, a sleazy story about drugs and crime, with biting guitar lines laid down by Matthias Strass. It’s a blues song that comes really close to the razor cutting edge of metal music, but the story keeps it firmly in the blues genre.

Blessed with a warm, fluid voice that is at home with talking the blues, Antonelli found his ideal backing musicians when he connected with the four featured guitarists and Peter Pollmann. Their technical excellence, wide range and expert backing are all on display in Evil Eye.

All of the tracks on the album are self-written. The inspiration obviously comes directly from Danny’s life and from the blues artists he grew up with during his life in the United States. The overall ambiance of the album is darkness with irony and humor thrown in, you might say like storm clouds overhead, but all of them with a shimmering silver lining that let’s you hope for better times after the clouds pass. The album has a raw nerve blues vibe throughout.

The album was recorded during the pandemic year, so the musicians mostly had to play from home. The live track Lookin’ For Someone was recorded at Peter Pollmann’s art atelier, with Ulrike Esser and Julius Esser contributing. On most of the songs, Peter Pollmann is on backing vocals. Andy Nock contributes backing vocals on the songs where he is also featured as guitarist.

Highlights abound, but the bouncing Lonely Man – with Christian Sass providing the guitars – could make anyone want to get up and dance, while Beware of the Evil Eye – with Andy Nock’s subtle almost jazzy arrangement – is an object lesson in how to meld mystery and superstition into a dark tapestry of warning. Antonelli’s vocals on Gone With The Wind – with Freddy Schlender’s virtuoso performance on guitar – is a good example of his Sprechgesang style of delivery. Sprechgesang is an expressionist vocal technique between singing and speaking and Antonelli uses it to enhance his particular art of storytelling.

Evil Eye is a superb release and a fitting tribute to the blues which has been carried lovingly forward by so many fine artists everywhere. Magnificent stuff.

An Interview with Danny Antonelli
By Karen Lloyd

Danny Antonelli

Tell me about what inspired you to write a blues album?

My mother had a great collection of jazz records, with people like Nat King Cole, Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald and of course Louis Armstrong, and through all of those voices I could hear the roots that the music came from. Later, when I went to university in Durban, South Africa, the student union had a vinyl record of John Lee Hooker. I must have played that record at least a hundred times. There he was, the man, the guitar, him alone, with his foot keeping time on the floor, and he was telling stories. Most of the stories were not happy-ending stories. And being an introverted kid, I felt I understood him and he understood me.

Was that in the 60s or 70s?

Of course it was the era when the British bands broke through into the world of popular music, so I was getting blues and rock and roll from them as well, even though they were processing it through their own life experiences, mostly growing up in working class Britain. So though they slicked up the sound a bit and added youthful enthusiasm, they were able to bring the message across.

Later, when I got into the Chess recording artists, especially Willy Dixon and Muddy Waters, and Bo Diddley, and all those other wonderful singers and players, I was able to understand the superstitions that suffused so many of the songs. I was born from an Italian mother and an American father. Superstition is a part of life from both of those cultures. So I guess the title of the album, Evil Eye, comes from the Italian side of the darkness, but there are plenty of superstitions from my father’s side too because he came from West Virginia, near the Ohio and Kentucky border, in moonshine country, and good luck and bad luck were real to those people. Unfortunately for most of the people living there – still today – bad luck is the norm.

What have you learned about the blues?

You don’t learn about the blues. You experience the blues. It’s in a song and it has an emotional impact. Maybe you learn from the emotions that the song pushes around inside you, maybe you don’t. But in any case, you feel the lightning strike and you know when a spell has been cast and you’re glad when you wake up from the dream, especially when you are bathed in sweat, soaking wet, and you are happy when the song is finished and you have been able to express your pain and worry and the reason for your depression. Getting it out there is the therapy you need for your soul, and if it works for you then maybe it will also work for some of the people listening to you deliver the news. John Lee Hooker did it for me. He delivered his news and I understood what he was talking about. I felt it. That’s all there is to it.

What was most surprising to you about making this record?

How helpful and enthusiastic the guitarists were who brought this record to life. All four of them are incredible musicians. Matthias Strass and Freddy Schlender are top-notch professionals working in musical theater and in various bands, and they heard the songs I offered, chose one each and really got into the music and delivered fantastic guitar tracks. And they are really nice guys as well. I’ve worked on other projects with them, mostly country music stuff, and you can always count on them to deliver their best, no prima donna bullshit. Solid friendly guys.

Christian Sass has played in blues bands all his life. He feels the music completely. He knows just how to get to the core of the beat, the root of the riff, and delivers the correct feeling every time. He’s the guy you want with you on stage because you know his rhythms, his riffs, his solos are going to fit perfectly into the weave of the song.

Andy Nock. What can I say about him? He’s been a friend of mine for more than 20 years. We met while he was still living in Hamburg and we played together on various projects. I understand the songs he writes. He understands mine. We give each other the most helpful criticism we can. And neither one of us is offended if the advice isn’t taken. But mostly it is taken. That way we help each other get better as songwriters. Andy is an exceptionally skilled musician. He has played all kinds of music, but the blues has always been woven into his being. He gets it. He gets me. We get each other. What could be better than that?

And Peter Pollmann? I understand he helped you produce the album.

Peter and I worked together in the 80s when he was the singer for First Affair. Then in 1989 we recorded a track – Deutschland, Deutschland – that was the inspiration for a number one hit by the German band Fantastischen Vier. Our best collaboration was when we performed as O Zone, a trio, with Ulrike Esser who plays cello and violin on the Evil Eye album. By the way, Peter’s son Julius also plays percussion on the album, so the generational leap is there as well.

Peter graduated from art school and was extremely helpful in the design of the album cover. His ears are excellent too, so he was able to listen to the mix of each song and give his input. Of course his background singing on the album gives it that little extra that makes each song complete.

There is a streaming version as well as the limited edition vinyl record, is that right?

Yes. Peter and I were determined to make a high quality vinyl record that could then become a collector’s item for people who love actual physical records and who love the blues. We picked out the 8 tracks that would fit within the time limits of the vinyl record and ZIS, the record pressing company, also provides download cards for all the songs on the record. So you can either play the vinyl on your record player or save the disk and download the 8 tracks for play on your phone or whatever other medium you use to listen to music. By the way, there is an insert in the vinyl record with all the lyrics and pictures of the musicians who made the dream a reality.

Obviously there also had to be a streaming version so that a wider audience can enjoy the music as well, so we crafted together 5 Bonus Tracks. That makes 13 tracks for the streaming version – magic and superstition again! Of course the streaming version is available on all the platforms you can think of, Spotify, Apple Music, TikTok, Deezer, Amazon, all the usual and unusual suspects.

Is there a particular moment or memory that stands out for you?

You mean for the album or for my life?

For the album.

The song By The Time I Get To Heaven is special because it’s only me with Peter backing me up. He’s a real singer, so it makes those moments in the song when he’s there very special. Also, the song itself is special because it gets to the heart of my world view. Listen to the lyrics. I’d love to hear a real soul choir do the song. That would be an experience!

Thank you for talking with me.

Thank you!

Slamming The Slam

Poetry requires contemplation,

not instant praise or instant damnation

I’ve never been to a poetry slam. I was invited to participate in one by my university students. They liked my work and wanted me to take part in a “slam” to bring the words to a wider public. I appreciated their admiration, and I understood their purpose, but as I told them at the time: “It’s not a proper forum for poetry.” Why? Because a poetry slam is a type of competition. It takes place before a vociferous audience that wants to see a knockout, like in a boxing match. They are not there to contemplate, ruminate on the words, savor the syllables and let the visions play within their own brains to evoke new pictures, pictures they have perhaps never thought they could see in that particular way.

Under the greenwood tree
Who loves to lie with me,
And turn his merry note
Unto the sweet bird’s throat,
Come hither, come hither, come hither:
            Here shall he see
            No enemy
But winter and rough weather.

Who doth ambition shun
And loves to live i’ the sun,
Seeking the food he eats,
And pleased with what he gets,
Come hither, come hither, come hither:
            Here shall he see
            No enemy
But winter and rough weather.

William Shakespeare, Song: Under The Greenwood Tree (from As You Like It)

I’ve seen bits and pieces of poetry slams on video or in films and each time I’ve been disgusted by the atmosphere surrounding the performance. And that’s what a slam poet is engaging in, a performance. I can understand that some people would like to hear the poet read, to hear the poet’s voice. But not all poets are great performers, and though their material may be good, it gets punched and kicked by less skilled and yet better performing people who enter the fray in a slam so that they may wear the mantle of “poet.” Slams are not about the material per se, they are about how the material is presented, how the performer uses the time and place and the predilections of the audience to make the stage a focal point for gestures, for screams and whispers, for the same kind of display that a clown makes in order to constantly grab the (decreasing) attention span of the audience, which has come to see a spectacle, not to sit quietly and contemplate the words.

Poetry slam judges

That is, however, not my greatest argument against poetry slams. The worst thing about poetry slams is the fact that they play directly into the capitalist need to make everything a competition. You are either a winner or a loser. The loser retreats shamefully into the shadows, the winner is crowned with glory or, if available, money! Competition at every level justifies the obviously murderous qualities of capitalism, its constant and never-ending obsession with “more.” More of this, more of that, and especially more profit. So, in order to feed this need, competition is seen as the Social Darwinist method best suited to instill the greedy itch of capitalism at every level of society. No more quiet contemplation of what the words might signify, and at how many different levels they may resonate (7 Types of Ambiguity), just loud rowdy crowds and blood on the floor so that a winner may emerge and wear the crown. If the crown can be worn by the performers at these spectacles (similar to the last gladiator standing in the Colosseum), then the captains of industry and the politicians at the top can wear crowns as well and they will be accepted as winners in society. After all, Britain and some of the European countries still have actual kings and queens wearing crowns.

The chasm of inequality that is a trademark of neo-liberal capitalism today is what made feudalism so great for the few who murdered their way to the top to become feudal lords and monarchs. And yet, in those societies poets were able to somehow woo and subdue the gentry. Among the poorer people, poets wrote lyrics that became popular songs that the underclass could sing when in their cups or in gatherings that would eventually turn political and cause the fall of the feudal system. There was no copyright on the words, no large companies gathering the profits, no distribution network owned from top to bottom by a corporation that had worldwide tentacles that gathered pennies from anyone wanting to sing the song or recite the ditty.

‘Of every kinnë tre’ is a simple song or medieval poem about desire. A rough (and inferior) paraphrase is: ‘Every kind of tree, the hawthorn blossoms sweetest; she shall be my lover, the fairest of every kind.’

As an artist, I’m a member of GEMA and of VG WORT, two non-profits that collect royalties for me. Once upon a time I wrote for bands and artists who were under the control of corporate music firms. OK. I have worked inside the system. I’m not special. If I write a song or the lyrics of a song, the corporate publisher takes 50% of my earnings. If I am clever and powerful enough to make an administration deal, they get only 10%, like an agent, for enabling the distribution of my work. But hell, the big corporations own the distribution channels from top to bottom. It’s not like they have to ask somebody to “please play the song” or “please publish the words”. And we all know that if you play a song often enough, people will get used to it and think they like it. They may even like it. It may even be a good song or a nice piece of writing. But that doesn’t justify the 50% take. And I’m talking now about the percentage taken here in Germany. In other countries, you can actually sell the song and never have any of the profits from its distribution. A little like the predicament that painters are suffering from. Sell the paining once and it’s gone. You see nothing further, even if it sells for $100 million two years later.

Poetry slams prop up rapacious capitalism at the infrastructure level of culture, at the level where people should be encouraging each other to grow as artists, to get better at their word construction, at their images, at their tone, and at providing each piece of work with the ambiguity that enables it to resonate through time. Poetry slams are like the happenings of the 60s, a one-off performance moment that may or may not have some artistic value.

When The Revolution Comes…

Slamming slams probably also has something to do with my dislike of rap music. Don’t get me wrong, I love the work of The Last Poets. Jason Ankeny wrote: “With their politically charged raps, taut rhythms, and dedication to raising African-American consciousness, The Last Poets almost single-handedly laid the groundwork for the emergence of hip-hop.” And the early hip hop artists managed to maintain some interesting imagery and a decent cadence to their rap. For me, the final epic performance of rap was Straight Outta Compton from NWA. It was a masterful and electric performance which brought to an explosive end the politically active generation which started with The Last Poets in 1969 and finished with NWA in 1988. After that, rap just comes across like diarrhea of the mouth, a spewing of as many words as possible while following the monotonous beat of a drum machine. Maybe something is being said in there, but from what I can gather from the bits and pieces I’ve heard, it’s mostly just boasting about sex, violence and drugs. Who cares? I certainly don’t.

Fuck The Police…

The celebration of wealth and fame that passes for rap poetry today is disappointing. The fact that you can have “influencers” taking up space in the media world makes it obvious to what a degree of degenerated culture we have descended. It reminds me of that scene that was edited out of Roma by Fellini. Alberto Sordi is in a restaurant, enjoying a meal with other upper middle class patrons, and a wedding party, while out in the piazza a demonstration turns into a riot, with the police whacking anybody within reach of their truncheons. A blind man stands in front of the little fence behind which the restaurant is located and blocks Sordi’s view of the riot, and so Sordi yells at him: “Get out of the way blind man! Let me see! Go!” [My translation from the original Italian.] The fact is that all those privileged patrons in the restaurant can’t really see what is going on. Not the real politically charged trouble behind the demonstration and the obvious police brutality. And so it is with rap after Compton. People seem to be blind to the true political nature of oppression. There may be a little shining light here and there, and once in a while the word “freedom” crops up, but mostly it is a celebration of capitalism at its very worst, placed on a stage covered in gyrating bodies pierced by rings and studs and draped in tons of bling. These are the glittering rewards of rapacious capitalism that we should all strive to possess.

You may have some good and relevant arguments about the evolution of poetry through the ages. And you may have earned a Masters or a PhD explaining these arguments to the academic world. Please continue to do so, and if you like, send me links to your sound and logical arguments. Maybe they will enlighten me. I’m not interested in disputing these claims. During my studies I read all sorts of analysis and comment on poetry. In the end, I went to the poem and let it work its magic (or not magic) on me. For example, I fell in love with The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798). Paradise Lost (1667) bored me to tears. Except the parts with Satan, who is the only real character in the story. All I can go from is my personal experience and my visceral reaction. As regards a poetry slam, it just makes me nauseous to contemplate it as a forum for poetry. “Slam” and “Poem” are contradictions in terms. You can slam a door. You have to open a poem.

I’m not going to be pontifical about this. Perhaps from time to time something good emerges from these performances, but if the root is poisoned then I’m afraid the fruit may be poisoned as well.

Where has my smooth brow gone:
My arching lashes, yellow hair,
Wide-eyed glances, pretty ones,
That took in the cleverest there:
Nose not too big or small: a pair
Of delicate little ears, the chin
Dimpled: a face oval and fair,
Lovely lips with crimson skin?

Poetry is not a competition.

FOREVER LOCKDOWN

The best days we’ve had on the planet for the past 100 years (at least) were during the first few weeks of the world-wide lockdown, with almost no airplanes flying, people ensconced in their little boxes, no traffic, no human interference with the environment – well at least not as brazenly as before and after the lockdown.

2020

2021

I’m not a great fan of human beings. Most of them are filthy and loud and captured by magical thinking of one kind or another. Many are besotted by brutality and view cruelty as part of the natural order. Of course there are people who have empathy and are altruistic to a certain extent and strive to make the world we live in a better place. I’ve met plenty of them. They are usually the ones who get herded  into football stadiums in Chile, get thrown out of helicopters into the sea in Argentina and get murdered by gun worshipers and police in the USA. Empathy and altruistic thinking are seen as fatal weaknesses in character these days by the rising tide of authoritarians around the world.

https://youtu.be/_P1wIpu0lTc

So, what do we do? Is there a way to maintain empathy and altruistic behavior and still resist the darkness of fascism? It happened in France and in Italy during the second world war. The Resistance in those countries took up arms to fight the evil that had risen to power. The same in Spain during the war against Franco. Read Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. Many good people were there to fight. Many good people lost their lives. In Italy and France the resistors returned to family life, despite their losses, after the war was over. They didn’t expect utopia, though most of them did support the communist parties that flourished in the post-war period in both of those countries. In Spain they had to wait until the beast expired in 1975 – “Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead!”

The lockdown in 2020 was a period of calm and meditative peace imposed on everyone, not with an iron hand, with troops patrolling the streets, but through a worldwide lightning flash of reasonable caution. Of course you had the usual gaggle of complainers, but even they stayed out of the public sphere, somehow knowing that during this moment of general caution it would be foolhardy to step out of line. And for what seemed like an endlessly wonderful moment in time the dolphins returned to the canals of Venice, ducks took over the streets with their long line of babies trailing behind them, the green world crawled back quickly in the most unexpected places to give us a glimpse of how easily nature will wipe out all traces of humankind once we eliminate ourselves from the planet.

Summer 2021 has now hit the northern hemisphere and here in Europe people are getting ready to go on vacation. They will be traversing from north to south and east to west and reveling in their ability to travel – by car and by plane mostly, as before – to the same old hot and crowded destinations to do the same old sunbathing on humanity-drenched beaches, dance in packed hotel discos, eat what they regard as exotic food (unless they’re Brits, who eat the same old crap they eat back on their island home). And COVID-19 variant Delta is already weaving its way through Europe. Lisbon was on lockdown once again a few days ago; anti-vaxers, mixed in with the partially vaccinated, are triumphantly spitting out their droplets at the European Championship public viewing locations; masks are seen less and less in public; caution is knowingly or unknowingly being thrown to the wind. American baseball stadiums are at full capacity. The CDC is spinning its wheels in the deep sand of controversy. The Old Joe pot is calling the Putin kettle a killer while pretending the USA is still the shining beacon of democracy in the world.

Denver

It feels to me like I have a front row seat in the theater, watching a play so absurd that Ionesco would have had to acknowledge he could never have ever written anything more baffling. It was only a few weeks ago that I watched Rhinoceros (1974), with Zero Mostel, Gene Wilder and Karen Black. Wilder was as wild as he was supposed to be and Mostel the epitome of the absurd, and yet, it made much more sense to me than what is afoot in the world today. The text that appears at the beginning of the film could apply perfectly to the political absurdities being carefully woven in the present by those who abhor critical thinking and the application of logic to discourse.

“What you are about to see could never take place.

Several eminent scientists have assured us of this fact.

For, as they are quick to point out … the world is flat.”

Eugène Ionesco

The tragedy of the absurd in our terrestrial society is that what we are seeing is taking place. The country that used Operation Paperclip to build up its military might with Nazi scientists, has succumbed – or is succumbing quickly – to the ideology that enabled those scientists to throw ethics in the trash when pursuing their deadly projects for the Old Reich. The New Reich, financed by the same types of oligarchs who financed the previous one, actually has people in the core of its military and political system who believe that a nuclear war can remain limited and can actually be successfully carried through to victory. MAD – Mutually Assured Destruction – has disappeared from the political vocabulary. War is the new perpetual profit machine, but a slight flash of reason was exhibited by General Martin Dempsey, despite his normally belligerent mien, when he was able to pull the US back from getting mired in another sand trap in Syria back in 2013.

What a beautiful breathing moment for the earth when the lockdown started. One week in and I felt the tension release in all the muscles of my body. Two weeks in and my Buddha nature was awakening. Three weeks in and I felt as if this would finally turn out to be Satori for humanity. Then the lockdown eroded, slowly but surely people found ways to make work possible again. Here in Hamburg the infrastructure, roads, bridges, rails, were the first things targeted. A good idea actually, since traffic had practically disappeared. But then came Zoom work and conferences and cars returned and now, here we are, back to summer vacation with pollution rising, forests burning, oil still being sucked out of the earth for profit, and the authoritarian pea-brainers sitting in the catbird seat ready to dictate the dystopian future to mankind.

The next lockdown will not be so wonderful I fear. Our names have been gathered by big data, our political predilections have been profiled, we are all targets now, for industry as consumers and as potential converts or victims for the new batch of Grand Inquisitors.

Auschwitz of course!

Forever Lockdown is on the horizon, but not the kind of lockdown I was so happy to have experienced in 2020.

Danny Antonelli lives in Hamburg, Germany

The Rise of English as a Global Language

by David Franklin

The fact that all varieties of English now dominate the world of international communications is practically indisputable. Whether we are involved with international trade, diplomacy, aviation, technology, transportation, or almost any field of human endeavor, English will most likely be the major medium of information exchange for the foreseeable future.

Is this due to the fact that the English tongue has inherently superior features and qualities that have elevated it to this lofty position? That contention cannot be supported by any objective linguistic criteria. This modern descendant of ancient Anglo-Saxon has nothing unique in its structure, vocabulary or syntax as a language that would distinguish it from any other natural language. Granted the grammar has been greatly simplified from the time when it possessed noun declensions, grammatical gender, adjectival agreement with associative nouns and other features which made the acquisition of Anglo-Saxon a formidable task for the non-native learner. Still, English as a language presents similar contradictions in its grammar, syntax, phonology and morphology that seems destined for all natural languages.

As with any phenomenon, the advent of the predominance of English has multiple sources. We may list the far-flung but moribund British Empire as the reason, but the world’s largest land empire ever was the Mongol empire. Yet the use of the Mongolian language is basically restricted to the confines of the Republic of Mongolia, the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia and pockets of speakers near these areas.

Alexander the Great of Macedonia once conquered large swathes of Europe, the former Persian Empire in Asia and North Africa. This did leave for some time the lingua franca known as Koine, a variety of Greek, throughout western Asia, northeastern Africa and southeastern Europe for several centuries (circa 300 BCE to 300 CE). Greek replaced Latin as the official language of the Byzantine Empire in 620 CE, but was replaced with Turkish with the fall of Constantinople in 1453. It has mostly disappeared and plays no significant role in modern Middle Eastern and North African society, although it has left its legacy on Modern Greek. (1) (2)

The greatest extent of Alexander the Great’s Empire which did not survive his rule.

The Roman Empire is the one that perhaps is the greatest purveyor of linguistic hegemony next to English. Although Latin itself was the medium of communication throughout Europe for over a thousand years and has left an impressive legacy, it no longer occupies a meaningful position. Even at its height, after the fall of the Roman Empire, Latin was only the resource of a miniscule minority of educated people. Latin, however, left its progeny in the form of modern so-called Romance languages that, from a lexical perspective, could conceivably include our own Modern English. However, English is conventionally categorized as a Germanic language. But the spread of Spanish, Portuguese, French and Italian cannot be lightly dismissed as insignificant. These Romance languages dominate South America, a whole continent, as well as large tracts of Europe and Africa. Sadly, these magnificent languages which project huge artistic, literary, scientific, architectural and technological accomplishments are not mutually intelligible.

A map of the Roman Empire at its height. The linguistic legacy of Latin is mostly preserved in the Italian and Iberian Peninsulas, Gaul (modern France and Belgium), and influential in English and other peripheral languages. 

Although Mandarin Chinese has the most native speakers of any language in the world, and has produced the world’s oldest continuing civilization, its arcane writing system precludes quick learning to the uninitiated. Without a significant orthographic innovation, the possibility of Mandarin Chinese becoming a linguistic force in world-wide communication remains highly remote. The foreign learner is presented with a seemingly overwhelming task in memorizing an extremely convoluted system of symbols that defy simplification.

From this linguistic map of the People’s Republic of China, it is obvious that there is an array of dialects, which are more properly labeled as Sinitic (Han) languages. Besides these Sinitic languages are the languages of ethnic minorities, including Uighurs, Mongols and Tibetans.

Finally, the sublime Arabic tongue, the language of the Holy Qur’an, for many centuries played the most important role in international intercourse and development. The highest levels of human learning emerged and were promulgated from Baghdad in the east, across the whole Middle East, the North African Maghreb, across the Straits of Gibraltar to the soaring heights of the Pyrenees Mountains in the west for nearly a millennium. Arabic learning enriched mankind in medicine, astronomy, chemistry, navigation, engineering, architecture, literature, etc.

Why is Arabic not the world’s language now? This is partly explained by the fragmentation of the Arabian polities and the rise of non-Arab forces in the Muslim world, e.g., the Ottoman and Mughal empires. The sacking of Baghdad by Mongol hordes and the division and occupation of Arab lands by European imperialists debilitated for many centuries any possibility for renaissance of Arab greatness. This fragmentation of the Arab peoples produced a wide range of confusing dialects that have been united only by a quasi-artificial Modern Standard Arabic, which is rarely spoken conversationally. A non-native is presented with a choice of learning a language rarely spoken but universally understood in the Arab world, or a local dialect that will limit that learner to narrow areas of this region. (5)

Within the area of many of these dialects are sub dialects. The divergence among these dialects is so great that mutual intelligibility is tremendously hampered or non-existent. 

English, on the other hand, has a fairly phonetic script, a descriptive grammar that largely reflects the usage in the English-speaking world and dialects that are easily comprehensible throughout the speech community. Thus, English affords accessibility to the proficient learner of functional communication with all other proficient speakers of English.

All regions of the world have at least one country where English has an official or semi-official status. Therefore, we can say that English is a world language. Here, in the Arabian Peninsula and Gulf area, English plays an essential role in commerce. Saudi Aramco, the premier oil company of Saudi Arabia, uses English as its own official language. This is also true of a wide range of enterprises in this region. There are millions of workers and business people who have flocked to this area of the world. Mostly, they come from former British colonies, such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka or from the Philippines, a former U.S. possession. All of these countries that these workers represent have strong ties to the English language. Their presence here intensifies their use of English, since they must communicate with a wide range of other nationalities of other speech communities.

Throughout Sub-Saharan Africa, most former British colonies have adopted English as their official language. Even Rwanda, a former Belgian colony, adopted English in 1996. Almost all Sub-Saharan countries are multi-ethnic, exhibiting a number of local languages. English unites them all, and as an outside language, it can be seen as an equalizing force, since it represents the same challenge to all local citizens. It does not, therefore, give a linguistic advantage to one ethnic group over another. (2)

These reasons mentioned above are not the sole reasons or even the most salient reasons that English has come to dominate the linguistic landscape. The most compelling contemporary forces for the expansion of English supremacy lies mostly in three particular areas: economics, culture and technology. After the diminution of the British Empire at the end of World War II, there was only one real economic powerhouse: the United States of America. The U.S. was faced with a Cold War opponent, the Soviet Union, which, although a military and political power, lacked the economic power to truly compete with the U.S.

The other Allied and defeated Axis powers were completely engrossed in the rebuilding of their infrastructures and economies, devastated by the war. The U.S., on the other hand, was enriched by that recent conflict and used this economic muscle to exert its nascent superpower status on the world stage. The U.S. was highly active in rebuilding Europe and Japan, which garnered prestige and influence in this new world order.

This map of the world shows the areas where English is either the official and major language, as in the United States and the United Kingdom. However, there are a number of countries where English is either widely spoken or official to unite a range of other language speakers.  

Hollywood also was producing a cornucopia of films that were the envy of the world. American pop culture along with its industrial strength quickly filled the void left by the collapse of the old pre-war powers. American consumer products, from toasters to televisions to automobiles, were made available to the rebounding societies from the end of World War Two until the late 1960s. Gradually, American consumer production started to expand out of the United States to developing nations. U.S. factories began to close as consumer products were outsourced to Japan, South Korea and other new venues. With this expansion, the language was shipped to these new industrial producers, as well as to their customers. This was the beginning of globalization on a massive scale. (2)

American and British pop culture became overwhelming in the 1960s and 1970s with the burgeoning youth culture and the emergence of the old powers from the ashes of war and the liberation of African and Asian colonies from their European masters. There was an amalgamation of more and more affluent societies around the world into a new youth (“hip”) culture of music, dance and cinema. Television and radio waves were broadcasting the new youth themes to every corner of the globe. This was coupled with the advent of relatively cheap jet air travel that mixed youthful vagabonds around the world. The Beatles, Rolling Stones, the Supremes, Abba and other musical groups were fashionable on every continent.

In the summer of 1971, my brother and I travelled overland from London to New Delhi by train, bus, and occasional taxi. Across Europe, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan into India, all along the road we continually met other travelers from a large number of countries, mostly youthful, like ourselves. We never lacked for conversation about the current cultural scene. Almost all of our fellow travelers were as conversant on the contemporary cultural scene as we, no matter whether they came from Japan, Brazil, Italy, Iran, Jordan, Denmark or the then-Yugoslavia. My brother is a writer of stories and songs and, at that time, a great proponent of the human fusion in a new universal youth culture. We never lacked the possibility to speak English with these travelers, most of whom were students, like ourselves.

The overland route undertaken by the two intrepid brothers from London to New Delhi in 1971  

Our postwar, boomer generation laid the foundation for our children to develop in the most earth-shaking of all technological revolutions that has occurred in this millennium: the advent of the personal computer and the internet. The effect of these two accoutrements to the advancement of our new civilization cannot be in any way trivialized. The use of technology in our daily lives for practically all of our activities is facilitated by the use of the smartphone, personal computer and the internet. Information can be acquired on the most arcane of subjects just by “googling” it. The explosion of information exchange can only be compared with the invention of Guttenberg’s moveable type printing press, which availed the world of knowledge and led to the industrial and scientific revolution, to which we are all the heirs. (3) (4)

Now, with international travel a commonplace activity open to a broad range of the world’s citizenry and the even more accessible internet, English has the place of preeminence among the world’s languages. One language must be chosen, and, as we have discussed, it seems to be English. This has happened not because of any particular feature of the language itself, but merely the confluence of many factors in our history. English is just one of the humble tongues spoken by humanity, but by a twist of fate now dominates world communication.

There is much to be done to make English even more accessible, for example orthographic reform and systemization of irregular grammatical features. But, that which we have today, seems to be responding to the Earth’s need for a common linguistic denominator (2). English quite probably will continue to play the role of the world’s language, despite the demise of the British Empire and the dimming of the preeminence of the United States on the world stage.

Eventually, the United States itself could fall victim to the fate of previous empires and morph into other political entities, as the Soviet Union, the Ottoman Empire, and others have done. However, the centrifugal political forces that would pull this mighty behemoth apart would not obviate the need in this highly interactive and technologically expanding global cohesiveness for a common language. That is the strategic advantage for English.

David Franklin currently lives and teaches in Saudi Arabia. He is a Linguist with a background in Slavic Linguistics and has an MA from the University of Pennsylvania.

***

In this essay, the text is by David Franklin. There are no direct quotes. However, there is wide paraphrasing in the text, which is referenced by a number in parenthesis. The number is associated with the references given in the Bibliography below.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Joseph, Brian (1999) article on Ancient Greek from the Encyclopedia of the World’s Major Languages: H. W. Wilson Publishers.
2. Crystal, David (1997, 2003) English as a Global Language: Cambridge University Press
3. http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm
4.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_in_computing
5. El-Shibiny, Mohammed (2005) Dynamics of World Peace: Dorrance Publishing Co., Philadelphia, PA, USA

True Aryan Brotherhood

By David Franklin

I’m proud of my Aryan brothers and sisters. A small band of people who spread out from western Central Asia to conquer far and wide. The Aryans have left their DNA, languages, and cultures onto continents that were already rich in languages and cultures. The religions that they promulgated have guided billions of people over the millennia and enrich us to this day. The Aryans are one group of humans who have joined the whole human family with their gifts and their thefts, their wisdom and their foolishness, their strengths and their weaknesses, their sweetness and their bitterness. In short, the Aryans are one component of mankind, like the woodwind section in the Symphony of Humanity. They are just as essential to the magnificence of our species as are the other components; not less, not more.

How would or how could such an invaluable branch of the human family lend its name to some of the most egregiously evil ideologies that have been visited upon our planet in the past century and a half? The irony is that it was not the Aryans that provided the nomenclature itself to movements that advocated the very suppression of the true Aryans.

What is the origin of the term Aryan? It is from an ancient Sanskrit word, arya, which means a noble or honorable person. The Persians, or Iranians (Iran is itself a derivative of the word aryan) took the word to describe themselves. These are Indo-Europeans who spread east from Persia and settled most of the territories of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nepal, northern India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka.

This particular branch of the Indo-European peoples are most closely related to the Baltic and Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe. Indeed, modern Lithuanian is the closest living language to Sanskrit, which has a high number of recognizable words to ancient Sanskrit. The second closest language to Sanskrit is Latvian, the other living Baltic language.

The usurpation of the term Aryan to designate a mythological super race of people, was the offspring of conflating two distinctly different disciplines, genetics and linguistics. This is somewhat understandable, since ethnically related peoples mostly speak related languages, e.g., German and Dutch, Portuguese and Spanish, Arabic and Hebrew, Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese, isiZulu and isiXhosa, etc. This totally ignores the possibility, actually a reality, of dominant ethnic groups imposing their languages on vassal ethnic groups. This latter scenario has occurred frequently and globally since humans developed different languages, and pursued imperialistic ventures.

The impetus for this term to be applied to the racist theories and memes that developed over the past centuries started with the discovery in India of Sanskrit and its relationship with other Indo-European languages. In 1786, an English scholar in India, Sir William Jones, delivered an address that stated his strongly supported research that the ancient Indian tongue Sanskrit was obviously a relative of Classical Greek and Latin. This began a widespread desire in European academic circles to explore all the aspects of this phenomenon, including its origin. There grew a number of hypotheses and theories from where this language had arisen.

One of these hypotheses was that the Proto-Indo-Europeans had come from Northern Europe, perhaps Scandinavia, thousands of years ago. This theory was based on the racist belief that the Indo-European people, also known as the Indo-Germanic or Indo-Aryans, were a race of blond, blue-eyed, physically and mentally superior beings. The propagators of this hypothesis, most Germans, preferred the term Aryan. They believed that the original Aryans had come from the reputed continent of Atlantis and had settled in northern Germany and Scandinavia.

Unfortunately, this theory found a great audience in the United States as a justification for slavery. In Britain, it was also widely popular as an apologia for imperialism, as it was also in France. Perhaps the most widely noted and articulate proponent of this theory was Arthur de Gobineau. The most infamous disciple of Gobineau’s discredited theory was the Nazi leader, Adolf Hitler. This theory formed a major basis of Nazi Germany’s official ideology. Subsequently, this led to the phantasmagoric horror of the destruction of populations across Europe, most notably against the Jewish population, but included others as well: Roma or Gypsies, Slavs, physically and mentally impaired citizens of all ethnicities, and homosexuals.

These primitive and unsophisticated pseudoscientific racial theories were not extinguished after the defeat of the fascist troglodytes in 1945, but have lain dormant (and no longer so dormant) in Western societies. Rightwing fringe groups in the U.S., such as the American Nazi Party and the Ku Klux Klan have clung to them for their justification of racial superiority. Psychological studies have indicated that members of such groups are largely motivated by a feeling of isolation and powerlessness. Generally, these are those from the non-college educated working class, who have seen their once secure economic status greatly reduced. Other factors show a tendency to violence and narcissism that has been exacerbated by feelings of disenfranchisement over civil rights and affirmative action legislation. This latent infection was brought to the surface with the election of Donald J. Trump.

The great irony is that immigrants and refugees from Aryan backgrounds, coming to the West from the lands of southern Central Asia and South Asia (notably Afghanistan and India), are classified as people of color. They face the risk of encountering the bigotry of ill-educated hooligans and thugs who proudly proclaim themselves as Aryans. The Aryan Brotherhood, which recruits in prisons, has grown to an estimated 15,000 – 20,000 membership with several million dollars in assets. Other racist hate groups, as well, refer to themselves as Aryans. Their very lack of awareness of this ignorance is testimony to their undeveloped education and literacy.

Yes, I am proud of the Aryan peoples, as I am of all my other brothers and sisters in the troop of Homo sapiens. Whether they are Austronesian, or Semitic, maybe Nilotic, or Khoi-San, Latin/Celtic, or Sino-Tibetan, it makes no difference. A person is distinguished by character and appreciation of our common humanity. Our very existence as a species is in an existential crisis with the looming climate change challenge. We have no time to distinguish among ourselves for the most petty of reasons. We must reject the idiocy of racial mythological tropes. Our common future rests upon our common purpose to survive together. We must reject the pernicious bile of racism, nationalism, or any notions of ethnic superiority, and forge an alliance of all of our species to save ourselves. This is an imperative that we cannot ignore.

David Franklin currently lives and teaches in Saudi Arabia. He is a Linguist with a background in Slavic Linguistics and has an MA from the University of Pennsylvania.

Crisis! Crisis! All The Time!

It’s a life or death situation!

News headlines, whether in print, online or on some form of TV, choose the crisis mode to deliver their message. Humans are conditioned to respond with high alert to situations which could possibly threaten their existence. And so if you want people to pay attention, make the message contain a crisis. This has been true since that famous shepherd boy cried “Wolf!” and since Chicken Little announced that “The sky is falling!”

But with me crisis fatigue has already kicked in.

Back during the days of the First World War, soldiers suffered from battle fatigue, which today has been transformed into PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). If you are a George Carlin fan, then you know his bit about how that transformation took place. Nevertheless, the operative word here is fatigue. I’m tired of living in crisis mode all day, all night – all the time. I sometimes dream of running outside maskless and hugging random strangers. That’s like standing on a bridge over the Mississippi and staring down at the muddy water and thinking: “I could dive in and swim all the way to the Gulf.” Those are suicidal thoughts. And that’s what battle fatigue and crisis fatigue induce; they induce suicidal thoughts. And many soldiers who suffer from battle fatigue (PTSD) actually carry those thoughts to their illogical conclusion – well, illogical as far as I’m concerned. I’ve been paying my dues for this shitty existence since I was born; I’m invested. I’m not going to cancel that investment now after all these years. Who knows? It might turn out to be worthwhile living after all. I’m curious.

I’m certainly not curious about an afterlife. Anybody with a small grain of logic knows that myth will not pan out. So as long as I’m conscious, let me see what happens next.

I’m just tired of the continual crisis. Some people want to use the plural, crises. But it has been just one long crisis since the dawn of people. Find food, fight off predators, move to another stretch of land because it has become untenable here… it never ends. Although, I must admit that there have been periods when I have been oblivious to the crisis that was constantly continuing in the background. It was real for adults and it was affecting my mother. Mostly, when I was growing up, until I was about 11 or so, I didn’t feel the pressure of crisis. But then my mother got married to a guy who turned out to be from the dark side of life. I guess that’s why I was sent to military school for a year; and boy did I learn about crisis while I was there! A permanent reign of crisis was all that made that place function. It was one year of horror for me – although I did have one bright moment in which I caused a crisis for someone else.

I loved baseball but was obviously too young to play for the school team (comprised of 16-18 year-olds). But for some reason, late in a losing game, the coach put me in as a pinch hitter against the pitcher who had been overwhelming everybody. I was so jacked up by the opportunity that I was first-ball hitting and hit a fastball right up the middle, on the ground, through the pitcher’s legs, over second base and into center field. The look on the pitcher’s face was one of complete astonishment that was instantly replaced by anger, the “if looks could kill” kind of anger. Yeah, crisis for him, no doubt, as I stood on first base in my gray school trousers and a long-sleeved baseball undershirt and my no-spike school shoes, grinning from ear-to-ear.

Moments like that were rare. Soon afterwards the crisis of military school was over and the crisis began of who that man was that my mother had married. She separated from him. He went to jail. He died in jail soon after. My mother was a happy widow. I had no idea what had happened or how it had happened nor why it had happened. It was obviously none of my business, and it didn’t seem to be a crisis anymore for my mother. She was pleased by how it had gone down.

Then one night we were awoken by jets breaking the sound barrier over our house and we were soon all sitting around the black and white television listening to President Kennedy announce what measures the United States would take if the Soviets didn’t get their missiles out of Cuba. The Cuban missile crisis had broken into my consciousness.

That was it. Crisis became a permanent part of my conscious life. Of course when I got older I was able to wipe crisis away temporarily with alcohol or marijuana. But hangovers were always a crisis and moments of paranoia under weed were even more of a crisis. No, I never tried LSD or any of the addictive shit that was floating around. I would never have survived any crisis involving that stuff.

Leaving the United States helped a lot to lower the crisis level. It’s amazing how being no longer exposed to the news media and to Americans helped me get a fresh perspective. In Africa I found out that people actually lived life on a daily basis, mostly happy. Africans smile a lot. At least they used to in the 60s before multinationals brought crisis, gutted their economies and displaced farmers into cities and made crime a worthy profession.

Recently, Boris the Bozo Prime Minister of Britain recited the creed in front of his ministers in a Zoom meeting: “greed” and “capitalism” helped UK’s vaccine success. That’s Straight-Outta-Wall-Street. [Gordon Gekko is named after the gecko: it has no eyelids, sheds its skin regularly and is a polyphyodont, like a crocodile.] Greed is not good.

Hieronymus Bosch should know. He depicted it perfectly in his painting of the Seven Deadly Sins. It’s right there between Envy and Gluttony. And if you are praising one of those sins as something beneficial and accepting it as an important component of capitalism, then perhaps you have just exposed your dark side to the world.

The dark side of capitalism (and of Bozo Boris) has been evident from the very beginning. In fact, capitalism feeds on crisis and greed. It needs crisis in order to “grow” and greed to keep its acolytes busy accumulating more and more and more. In other words, it encourages greed because that is the driving force behind its existence. Temperance, equality and justice are anathema to capitalism. A person dominated by greed (aka: avarice) is in a constant state of crisis. No matter how much that person has, it is never enough. It can never be enough. It’s the quintessential need with a bottomless cup. The classic old diners and American cafes knew how to push that greed button that is in each one of us. Seems though, that with the current price of coffee, the bottomless cup of coffee is disappearing. Not so the bottomless cola cup. Many fast food outlets rush you toward diabetes with offers of endless cola refills. Basically the bottomless cup syndrome, but with deadly sugar-based junk.

OK, so if crisis is at the heart of capitalist greed, does that mean I have to get greedy, just greedy enough to cross into the realm of being set up for life, so that one day I will emerge without any more need for greed and crisis? Those are two really powerful drugs. Much stronger than alcohol and weed. It’s really no wonder that Wall Street has so many cocaine and speed and even crack addicts. Greed feeds on need. Greed addicts are so needy they are never allowed to go to rehab. Greed becomes such an essential part of the personality and lifestyle that if it is eradicated or the flame somehow gets extinguished, the addict shrivels up like a prune and wastes away.

Without torturing logic too much, I can come to the conclusion that if capitalism is eliminated, then greed will for the most part go with it. It might prove to be more difficult to eliminate greed before capitalism is eliminated, but the result would be the same: temperance, equality and justice. Reasonableness and equanimity. That’s what I need in my life. Especially equanimity. Being constantly under the pressure of crisis only pushes me toward suicidal thoughts and physical illness, like the proverbial stomach ulcer brought on by constant worry. Who needs that shit? Not me.

Unfortunately we are all wedged into the capitalist world empire which is dominated by greed and crisis that seems to function like a perpetual motion machine. Does the second Law of Thermodynamics apply to greed and crisis? Of course. The kinetic energy for crisis diminishes over time and so the machine must be fueled with an even greater sense of crisis (thus increasing the fuel used). Eventually the fuel needed is so great that it is no longer obtainable. Then, either this human machine self-destructs (atomic war to end all human life) or fatigue (aka: entropy) enters to such a degree that greed is conquered by temperance, equality and justice so that reasonableness and equanimity can take over. Once that happens, we are in a state of equilibrium. And equilibrium can last a long, long time because entropy is minimal in a system that has attained equilibrium.

I’m suffering from crisis fatigue. So that is where I want to be. In a world that has attained equilibrium, full of people who have attained equilibrium.*

Jean Hélion • Equilibrium (Equilibre)

*No, not like the 2002 Sci-Fi film with Christian Bale and Emily Watson!

Danny Antonelli lives in Hamburg, Germany

The White Tiger

Revolution only begins when you eliminate your corrupt masters and free yourself from the yoke of servitude.

The White Tiger is a film with a message that could not be any clearer. Evil is everywhere. Even you, the goodhearted, have a portion of evil within. It all depends on how you wield that evil. Is your evil used for the greater good? Or is your evil used to perpetuate the servitude of millions in a system that is so corrupt that it can no longer be reformed through good laws and good deeds? Good laws can obviously never come to pass because the political process has been so corrupted that the mega-rich and the politicians work hand-in-hand to perpetuate servitude and corruption, which is in the end beneficial to both of these groups. Good deeds are like the proverbial farts in a hurricane. They dissipate before they can be in the least bit effective.

Based on the bestselling novel by Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger is the story of a driver who works for a rich Indian couple. Attaining the position of driver is already quite a feat for him, since he is from one of the lower castes and is, like most of the people in his village, condemned to live in poverty and at the mercy of a landlord who has absolute control over the village. The system under which the protagonist lives is feudal. It is an evolved modern type of feudalism that allows the villagers to earn money in any way they can, but then, following the feudal/mafia playbook, the landlord gets a portion of whatever the villagers may be lucky enough to earn. Of course the landlord – through henchmen – is the ultimate arbiter of life and death as well. In fact, Yanis Varoufakis thinks we are currently entering the age of techno-feudalism.

Corruption is a major theme throughout the film. Not only the corrupt landlord who pays off politicians to curry [no pun intended] their favor and avoid paying taxes, but the corruption of the main character as well, who weaponizes a rival driver’s religion (Moslem) so that he can ensure his own rise to number one driver in the family. Thus ensuring his transfer to New Delhi as the driver of the landlord’s eldest son.

In the early 1970s I lived in New Delhi, the lucky son of an Italian diplomat. In those days Italy had some juice because Indira Gandhi’s son, Rajiv, was married to Sonia, an Italian he met at Cambridge. She wasn’t politically engaged in those days, but the system worked then as it does now – it’s who you know, not what you know. So I was privileged on two counts: one, I was a European resident; two, my mother was a diplomat. I played tennis on the grass courts of the exclusive Ashoka hotel; all my clothes were made by tailors who copied designs I gave them from magazines; our cook could prepare a meal for 8 people on very short notice. There were no supermarkets, there were no computers, nobody used credit cards. India was modern on the surface, in Delhi at least, but it was like it had always been once you left the metropolitan areas. That’s why it was so easy to shoot the 1972 film Siddhartha there. They didn’t have to look hard to find locations that looked exactly like they did during the Buddha’s era. Nothing had changed since then. Not really.

Was I an evil part of the system back then? Am I still an evil part of the system now, even if I don’t live there anymore? To both questions I’m afraid that I must answer: Yes. Now of course I measure my culpability according to how much of my participation was conscious back then and how much of my current participation is willful.

In 1970, I was barely conscious of the existence of a “system.” My consciousness would have been like that joke about the old fish talking to the young fish:

Old fish: Water’s a bit chilly today, isn’t it?

Young fish: What’s water?

Yes, I was unconsciously culpable. I had been dragged to the country from my mother’s previous posting in Nairobi, Kenya. In our residence in Jor Bagh, next to the golf links, not far from the Oberoi (Hilton in those days) hotel, and just down the road from where the Italian Embassy was located, I had nothing to do all day except play the piano and read James Joyce. It took me three months of reading as much as I could each day to get through Ulysses. Because of the status of India as a “third world” country, books were incredibly cheap. From a book stall in Connaught circle (officially known as Connaught Place) I was able to buy my copy of Ulysses for 10 rupees. In those days that was less than a dollar, if you traded dollars on the black market. And everyone traded on the black market (except for the people from the American embassy who – under penalty of American law – had to exchange their dollars at the official rate). Many years later my mother explained the system used by the Italian embassy at that time. Before payday, near the end of every month, each employee would tell one of the commercial attachés in the embassy how many rupees they wanted for the next month. The attaché would tell them how many pounds they would have to transfer from their account – in London – to another account – in London. On the first of every month a man would arrive with a briefcase full of rupees and each employee would get the amount they had ordered. All of course at black market exchange rates.

In The White Tiger we see how corruption works at the village level, the local political level, and at the national level. We see who benefits from it directly and indirectly. And, yes, it is never the impoverished people at the bottom of the system.

In the USA (and here in Europe), the impoverished are in plain sight, everywhere; every day you see them but you look away because it makes you uncomfortable. You are part of the system that bestows certain benefits and you don’t want those benefits to disappear. Does that make you evil? Well, maybe. But probably, like your colleagues and neighbors, and like the protagonist of The White Tiger, you are trapped in servitude and don’t know how to escape without losing everything that you have somehow, through hard work or cleverness or just dumb luck, gained. You might even be quite wealthy (not a billionaire of course), or a business owner. And yet you are still in servitude. You are both a servant to competition and to the whims of the rigged capitalist marketplace.

Our protagonist in the film, Balram, has an aptitude for learning. He can read well as a child and he has prospects, the possibility of a scholarship to a better school. But the system keeps him in servitude, first to his family, so that they have money to survive (of course a portion of his earnings must be paid in fealty to the landlord of the village). Being quick-witted, Balram sees an opportunity to become the second driver for the landlord’s family, and he grabs that opportunity, at the same time thrusting his family deeper into debt to the landlord.

As driver number two, he is assigned to chauffer the landlord’s son and his wife. Both of them have recently returned to India from the United States, and both of them are very liberal in their treatment of Balram. However, Balram, trapped in his coop of servitude, tries to maintain the distance he knows is necessary for survival in the ancient system that traps him.

Let me just say at this point, without providing you with any spoilers so that the film has its proper impact on you when you watch it, that Balram is predominantly a good soul, doing what he thinks is right, for the reasons he thinks are right. Until, one day, he decides to free himself from the coop and no longer be a servant. Most reviews I’ve read about the film (after seeing it!) call him an “entrepreneur” instead of a revolutionary. Stuck in servitude to the capitalist system the review writers dare not speak the word: revolution.

Balram is a revolutionary of the best kind. He uses his power for evil in the best way he knows how, in a system that will allow him only one route to freedom for himself. He uses that route to benefit others and to free them from servitude as well.

Early on in the film, when his acumen as a young student is correctly ascertained, a teacher refers to him as a white tiger, an animal born rarely, only once in a generation. And when Balram goes to a zoo and for the first time actually sees a white tiger, trapped in a small cage, he faints. This is the moment in which he understands the meaning of Saṃsāra and has his Moksha (enlightenment); and from that moment on he has only one path to tread, the path toward liberation of himself and his fellow servant class from the endless chain of servitude that has fettered them for millennia. The fact that he uses the means at his disposal – the capitalist system – to initiate this liberation, makes him, yes, by current definition an “entrepreneur.” But his entrepreneurship is in the service of a revolution which will free servants from their chains, not bind them eternally.

In that sense, in The White Tiger the message of Buddha and the message of Marx coincide: In order to throw off your worldly chains, you need to wake up and be a revolutionary in your own right.

In my opinion, the trailer gives away a bit too much, but if you must watch the trailer then:

Danny Antonelli lives in Hamburg, Germany

The Secret History Redux

Comparing one Great with another Great

Although the comparison I’m going to make between the recent ruler of the Empire of the United States and an ancient ruler of the Roman Empire is mostly based on the Anecdota or, as it is more commonly known, The Secret History by Procopius, “commonly classified as the last major historian of the ancient Western world,” it is important to remind one and all that evil deeds perpetrated by (mostly) men have been recorded throughout history, and one of the people who did this marvelously not so long ago was Henry Fielding. Besides writing hit novels which were turned into hit films, Mr. Fielding also wrote a study of evil genius with the title: The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great. I urge you all to read this wonderfully written history of a “Great” man. In fact, Mr. Fielding’s explanation of just how great the “Great” are, is quite enlightening:

“… a set of simple fellows, called, in derision, sages or philosophers, have endeavoured, as much as possible, to confound the ideas of greatness and goodness; whereas no two things can possibly be more distinct from each other, for greatness consists in bringing all manner of mischief on mankind, and goodness in removing it from them. … We hope our reader will have reason justly to acquit us of any such confounding ideas in the following pages; in which, as we are to record the actions of a great man, so we have nowhere mentioned any spark of goodness … .”

By the way, both of the precious histories mentioned are available from Project Gutenberg.

Now, having established that there is no goodness in greatness, I shall proceed with my comparison between Justinian I, also known as Justinian The Great, and the former ruler of the current world empire, Trump I, also known to himself and his loyal followers as Trump The Great.

While we wait with bated breath for The Secret History of the United States to emerge from the pen (or rather these days from the keyboard) of a born-again Procopius or Fielding, I’ll just make you aware of the superficial and yet most telling aspects that unite the two great men who are the subject of this comparison.

Justinian (real name Petrus Sabbatius), who was emperor from 527 to 565, actually started influencing the course of the empire during the reign of his predecessor Justin I, in a similar fashion to Trump (middle name John), who began influencing the political direction of the United States during the reign of Obama I. Both took advantage of the powerlessness of their predecessors, the one because Justin was not able to rule due to his lack of intelligence, the other because Obama was not able to escape the clutches of a Senate that would not let him rule for the good of the people – although there is no substantial proof, yet, to make us believe that Obama actually wanted to rule for the good of the common citizen.

The simple and obvious fact that both empires were, and had been for a long time, corrupted by money, is no longer a doubt in the thoughts of any rational person. And the fact that the corruption of the institutions of government were dramatically increased during the rule of Justinian and Trump, is also obvious. However, it is still instructional, for those who can be instructed by history, to make a comparison between the two great men, in which goodness never shows its face, or when it attempts to do so is slapped away by brutal anger.

Procopius begins his narrative with a preface which contains these lines:

“Who, among posterity, would have known of the licentious life of Semiramis, or of the madness of Sardanapalus or Nero, if no memorials of them had been left to us by contemporary writers? The description of such things, too, will not be entirely without value to such as hereafter may be so treated by tyrants; for unhappy people are wont to console themselves by the thought that they are not the only persons who have so suffered.” Hopefully this will be an impetus to whoever may write the new Secret History.

Procopius at first describes the weakness and corruption of Belisarius, the general who played such a major part in the wars of conquest of the empire. Belisarius was admired for his conquests (and reconquests), then disgraced, then returned to favor. “Belisarius, although none of the charges brought against him could be proved, was removed by the Emperor, at the instance of Theodora, from the command of the army in the East.” But then, as circumstances changed, he was able to get command of an army once again and tried his hand at reconquering Italy, which had fallen into the hands of the barbarians. His campaign there was unsuccessful and yet he didn’t go back to Constantinople in disgrace, as should have been the case.

The general closest to Trump, who also played a major part in the conquests (and reconquests) of the current empire, was Michael Flynn. Like Belisarius, Flynn was a successful general, disgraced because he lied to the FBI, then rehabilitated through a presidential pardon, which enabled him to become one of the key post-election advisors urging the use of military force to keep the loser of the election in power. Even though Flynn had a clean slate once again, he, like Belisarius, failed in his new mission of reconquest and, also not disgraced, has faded into shadows that may prove to be more dark and dangerous than the spotlight he was in before.

One of the basic tactics used by the Romans was “divide and conquer.” The United States, like the territories ripe for conquest, and like the Roman Empire during the time of Justinian, was (and has been for quite some time) in a similarly perilous state. Procopius writes: “In the former part of my history I have explained how the people had long been divided into two factions. Justinian associated himself with one of these, the Blues [the other faction in those days was the Greens], which had previously favoured him, and was thus enabled to upset everything and throw all into disorder.”

Trump associated himself with the current Red (not-communist) faction in the United States and was able, likewise to cause chaos and throw everything into disorder. And, as in the case of Justinian, not all members of the faction agreed with his methods. But, also as in the case of Justinian, Trump was able to terrorize the Red faction rebels into submission and thus gain dominance over the factions and impose his will. “Everything was everywhere thrown into disorder; nothing was left alone. The laws and the whole fabric of the State were altogether upset, and became the very opposite of what they had been.”

During the short, yet extremely destructive rule of Trump I, descriptions of the government such as those provided by Procopius were appearing in the writings of many in the opposition: “The government resembled a despotism, not a securely established one, but one which was changed almost daily, and was ever beginning afresh.” And as regards judges appointed by the Red faction in accordance with the will of Trump I: “The judges gave sentence on disputed points not according to what they thought to be lawful and right, but according as each of the litigants was a friend or an enemy of the ruling faction … .”

The new ruler of the Empire of the United States, an old man who has a younger person waiting in the wings to take over should he die or his mind fail, has extremely limited power to change the course of the ruination of the empire. Although the presidency is imperial and has been so for a while, it still depends on the Senate in order to enact major changes in the laws disfigured and corrupted by the previous imperial president. It is also doubtful if the younger person waiting in the wings will be able to do anything at all worthy of the descriptive “goodness” should death or loss of reason afflict her current imperial master. According to the mindset of the Red faction, she is considered unclean because she does not belong to their idea of a perfect American as regards color of skin. That, in addition to the fact that she is a woman, makes her totally unacceptable to the Red faction, and of course to a significant number of the powerful men in the Blue faction as well, which somehow allowed her to be the heir apparent because they still needed to convince many Americans with her skin-tones to side with the Blue faction against Trump I.

During the time of Justinian there was a ruinous plague, which Justinian caught and then recovered from, just like Trump I, and there was the same disregard from both men for the lives of the citizens ravaged by the plague. In all sorts of ways the two men were similar. Even in physical appearance. Justinian was “neither tall nor too short, but of a medium height, not thin, but inclined to be fat. His face was round and not ill-favoured, and showed colour, even after a two days’ fast.” The orange face of Trump I is never going to be forgotten.

Procopius does drift at one point into the non-rational, describing Justinian as a demon made flesh: “During his control of the Empire, numerous disasters of various kinds occurred, which some attributed to the presence and artifices of his evil genius, while others declared that the Divinity, in detestation of his works, having turned away in disgust from the Roman Empire, had given permission to the avenging deities to inflict these misfortunes.” But what Procopius describes as the workings of an evil spirit incarnate is relevant to bringing the point across to the many who have always been rather superstitious and gullible, like the current crop of MAGA Christian followers of Trump I. In their case, however, they don’t see him as a demon incarnate but as a savior who will bring on the Rapture.

Luckily, for the world, the tyrant Trump I was limited to ravaging the world directly for only four years. His legacy of evil will endure for many years still, but his direct influence is, for the time being, halted. Had he survived as Emperor until he was 83, like Justinian, it is doubtful if the world would have been able to ever recover from the devastation he initiated.

Procopius really does go on and on with his enumeration of the excesses and corrupt activity of Justinian, and without a doubt you have already spent hours if not days reading and hearing about the corrupt activities of Trump I. So, although I really could continue to show you the parallels between these two tyrants, I recommend that you read The Secret History for yourself and find the commonalities between these two “Great” men (and their wives, by the way).

Before I finish, I would like to leave you with one more quote from Procopius. To my mind it describes both tyrants to perfection:

“These excesses took place not only in Byzantium, but in every city of the Empire: for these disorders were like bodily diseases, and spread from thence over the whole Roman Empire. But the Emperor cared not at all for what was going on, although he daily beheld what took place in the hippodrome [today: television], for he was exceedingly stupid, very much like a dull-witted ass, which follows whoever holds its bridle, shaking its ears the while. This behaviour on the part of Justinian ruined everything.”

Danny Antonelli lives in Hamburg, Germany

The Golden Door

A different kind of poem for the start of the Biden & Harris presidency

The Face of Madame Liberty on the Statue of Liberty

The Golden Door

you work each day like a chain gang slave
earn just enough to buy an early grave
the boss eats steak and drinks Champaign
and sends his goons in if you complain

you’re drunk and high on the American Dream
believe you’ll rise to the top like cream
free credit means you’ll pay and pay
no wonder you pray for Judgement Day

the jails are run for profit my friend
one false word and your sentence never ends
don’t dare use logic, stop making sense
because thought crime is a capital offense

knock knock
on The Golden Door
nobody opens it
any more
the ones inside
are happy and well
the rest of you
can go to hell

you are the tired
you are the poor
the masses huddled
from shore to shore
the homeless refuse
the wretched lost
the cheap labor
the tempest tossed

The Golden Door

this country is a business for profit my friend
when I buy or sell you, I make money to spend
if you want freedom, learn to wheel and deal
if you want fame and fortune then learn how to steal

knock knock
on The Golden Door
nobody opens it
any more
the ones inside
are happy and well
the rest of you
can go to hell

knock knock
on The Golden Door

The Golden Door

Another legal setback for Airbnb

And some comments about infrastructure renewal during Covid-19

Below this rather longish introduction, you will find my translation of an article from the Hamburg Tenants’ Association – yes, we have such things here! Almost all tenants belong to one. The article is about a decision in favor of the tax authorities in Hamburg, against Airbnb, which allows the authorities to get data from the platform relating to the transactions made between the landlord, the customer and Airbnb. It is important to point out that Internet platforms like Airbnb, Uber, Amazon, etc., do not like to pay tax, very seldom do, and because of their successful (up to now) ability to conceal the data which they use to make money flow between themselves and other Internet platforms, they thus also encourage people who use these platforms to avoid paying tax.

OK, I agree with you that tax can be uncomfortable to pay at times. But especially here in Hamburg, I actually see the results of my tax payments in infrastructure renewal, and in social services, which actually make things a bit easier for people who are getting older, like me, and young people who have perhaps not finished school and are somehow still able to be channeled into apprenticeship programs so that they can at least develop a skill that will take them through life. Manual professions like carpentry, plumbing, electrician, etc., are all supported in one way or another through the taxes I pay, because all apprenticeship programs send their apprentices to vocational school as well as give them on-the-job training. An apprenticeship usually lasts about 3 years. Then of course you can become a journeyman and eventually a Master, which takes about 7 years in all. In fact, I recently spoke with an architect who hadn’t had a brilliant high school career, so he served an apprenticeship as a bricklayer. He got through that and then was able, through a city program, to go on to technical college and study architecture. Now when he steps onto a construction site, he can converse with the bricklayers who build the walls and foundations, and not only can he see what is right or wrong, he immediately gets their respect because they can see he knows what he’s talking about. He is one of them.

Covid-19 has screwed up all sorts of things here and everywhere else. Most people are chained to their home screens and can only go out to buy groceries or walk through the park to get some exercise, and all that with masks on. Yet, from the very beginning of the lockdown, in March, here in Hamburg, infrastructure all over the city has been renewed. On almost every main street you travel in the city, road construction, sewer renewal, bike path and street parking construction, water mains renewal, cable being laid for electricity… it has been going on almost non-stop for nine months. And now that an even stronger lockdown has been announced, infrastructure renewal has exploded again. Here is a map from the 6th of January showing all the places where infrastructure renewal is taking place in Hamburg.

https://www.hamburg.de/baustellen/

I don’t drive a car, so I don’t have to worry about traffic. But at the moment people are stuck at home, mostly, so traffic is reduced anyway. You can see the few hotspots on the map. Think about how quickly the city government jumped at the opportunity to get basic services into shape! That’s why I’m so impressed. Sure, politicians are not always the role models we want, and often they are quite nasty people underneath the broad smile presented on TV. But hey, as long as I can see where my tax money is going, I’m not going to complain too loudly about traffic or loud young men smoking during break in front of the vocational school down the block from where I live.

One of the side-benefits of this non-stop work on streets and bridges and sewers is course for the construction workers on these projects. I think that if you are any kind of a manual worker, the city needs you now and you can get a job. Many of the workers are not German. Today, as I went past a truck that had a crane on it that was supporting a huge wooden reel/spool for laying electrical cables, I saw a blind man being assisted past the truck by one of the workers. The worker spoke German with a strong Latin-American accent. He helped the blind man safely across the street and to the bus stop. Then went back to work.

You can’t do infrastructure from home while sitting in front of a screen. Working in the fresh, cold, wintery air – with masks – isn’t as dangerous for workers as sitting at home doing nothing and having no income. After all, schools are closed, shops are closed, cafes are closed. Redoing infrastructure is a great idea.

https://www.hamburg.de/baustellen/

Now that I’ve had my say about that, let me get to the point about these privateer Internet platforms: My personal opinion – that many people I know agree with – is that the companies that run these platforms need to pay taxes in the countries where the transactions take place, e.g., Germany or France or Italy, and, if possible the companies should be broken into pieces with their parts being subject to the laws of the country where they actually do the business. For instance, if Airbnb in the EU was to be broken into 27 pieces, with each piece registered in a particular EU country, then the company would be subject to the local tax system. Transaction profits could still be made, but each year the platform company would have to file a transparent tax statement in the country in which it works. All the internet platforms, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, etc., should be in the same boat.

Looks like the EU, now that we are finally rid of foot-draggers Britain, might just be able to undermine the tax-free pillars the giants have used to build their castles. It’s something to fight for over here. And over there, in the new but same old America, you might be able to do to your Internet privateers – through clever city, county and state tax systems – what the EU has done to Airbnb.

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Another legal setback for Airbnb

The accommodation broker must transmit tax data to German authorities

(vs) Dishonest landlords of vacation rentals will be facing prosecution in the future. Anyone who fails to pay tax on income from private rentals via Internet portals such as Airbnb must expect to be tracked down by the tax authorities. This is made possible by the final ruling of an Irish court. “In cooperation with the Hamburg tax authorities, the Federal Central Tax Authority, various other German states and the tax authorities of the country in which the portal is based, an Internet platform has been obliged, as part of a so-called international group request from the Hamburg tax investigation office, to hand over to the German tax authorities the required tax-relevant data for numerous German landlords who have rented out their living space via this Internet platform,” the Hamburg tax authorities recently announced.

Behind this dry announcement lies a small sensation. Because, thanks to this international judge’s ruling, companies such as market leader Airbnb will be forced for the first time to pass on data from rentals to German tax investigators. “It’s another legal setback for Airbnb, which makes the business model of renting out vacation apartments less attractive in Hamburg, too,” says Tenants’ Association Chairman Siegmund Chychla, welcoming the ruling, which has a signal effect: “First, the group had to put up with the obligation to register providers. Then the European Court of Justice ruled that short-term rentals via Airbnb can be restricted throughout Europe. And now the providers’ data will be disclosed to the tax authorities as contractual partners of the group.”

Hamburg’s Finance Senator Andreas Dressel also rejoiced: “This is a great success for the Hamburg tax investigation department. Nationwide, this is the first successful international group request in connection with rental turnover via Internet platforms. Thus, an important breakthrough has been achieved in clearing up this considerable dark field.” The data now received would help, Dressel said, to track down income previously concealed from the tax authorities in order to subject it to taxation.

The tenants’ association demands that the city now exhaust all legal possibilities – not only to collect lost taxes, but also to stop the undisclosed, and thus disorderly subletting, with sanctions. “Now Hamburg can also use the data records to estimate how high the number of unreported cases is of vacation rental providers who have not registered,” says tenants’ association Chairman Chychla.

MIETERVEREIN ZU HAMBURG

Mieter Journal 4/2020 – Page 27

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Danny Antonelli lives in Hamburg, Germany

AMERICA SUCKS

That’s the title of a poem I wrote back in the 1970s when I was living in Los Angeles and aspired to be part of the post-Beat Generation. In those days I had read all the good guys, Proudhon, Bakunin, Max Stirner, Orwell’s books about being down and out as well as his sojourn in Andalusia. I had a rudimentary grasp of Marxism. Tito and the Italian Communists were still doing the world a favor and being part of the non-aligned movement, not siding with the Soviets or the Americans. Just a few years earlier I had traveled from New Delhi to London and back to New Delhi, overland, through Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey without a hateful word or glance being raised against me. Of course I was traveling on an Italian passport, so that was an advantage. The Americans crossing the borders did get some hard stares and long waits and extra backpack checks before they were eventually waved through to the other side. No wars were being fought. I traveled alone by bus and train, mixed in with the locals and nobody ever treated me badly. In fact, I was able to sleep in a bus station office one night in Tehran because the bus I needed to take would leave at 6 in the morning and the bus station manager figured it would be easier for me if I slept there. Kindness.

Danny 1973 • Green Card photo

When I got to America in 1972, it was Nixon’s country, even though he would be forced out soon. After a year or so in Baltimore, I made it back to Los Angeles, where I had spent my youth, growing up in Beverly Hills (not the rich part) and where I eventually enrolled in LACC, which then got me to Cal State Northridge (CSUN) where I studied English Literature. My friends were all in the entertainment industry, TV, films, advertising, and the fact that I was leaning left politically didn’t faze anybody at all. Leftism was OK. Jane Fonda was a leftie and still working in movies, so what was the harm? Of course I took film classes, worked on student films as a boom-man and grip, wrote scripts, like everyone, but was so beguiled by the Beat Generation, which had been introduced to me in Durban while I was at university there, that I wanted to be Gregory Corso’s poetic heir, be Ferlinghetti’s godson, be published by City Lights and careen across the United States in a wild Kerouac/Kesey journey that would bring my work to the eyes of every American.

Things went otherwise.

My script about an anarchist who steals a battlefield nuke from NATO and tries to blow up Paris was “not the kind of material suitable for production.” My script about a coup in Africa (entitled Coup!) disappeared from the table when my agent went to a script meeting. He said: “Sorry,” with a twisted smile. A few years later I saw the title as a novel, set in Africa, with a plot more-or-less like mine, but cleverly elaborated and changed so that in case my script ever turned up, no copyright infringement could be claimed. Hollywood at its finest. America Sucks.

Meanwhile, I was reading my poetry at various small bookstores in Hollywood, with and without jazz guitar accompaniment. Usually, America Sucks would close out my reading. It drew various types of reaction. Smiles, frowns, some embarrassing side glances, once in a while an angry stare, and once, from a gay poet who followed me to the podium, a humorous comment: “I like to suck!” The laughter he got was a smooth transition to his homoerotic verses. He was a good poet, with great images. He ended up being a professor of literature at a Midwestern university.

I ended up being a lyricist for pop, rock, metal and country music in Germany.

A couple of my friends went on to fame and fortune in the entertainment industry, and we are still friends today. The difference between us is that they were able to understand the system they were dealing with from a practical side. Their skills were needed in the industry, and they made sure their skills were being paid for very well. I was naive. I believed that it was only technical skills one had to develop. Write well and you will be rewarded. But the skill my friends had developed, beyond the technical skill, was the ability to understand how the system actually functioned and how the people in the system did business. One friend of mine, who writes music for films, will not write one single note of music until he sees the money on the table. The other, who works in animation, learned how to make himself indispensable to the company’s success, thus ensuring that he is not shit out of the system at age 50 because his salary is too big.

My naive idealism, my dreams of belonging to a new generation that could never be what the old generation was, drove me to travel abroad, to a place where I felt more at home: Europe. After all, I’m a European, not an American, even though I was deeply affected by the American culture (or as one of my friends terms it: the American subculture). I was born in Italy. I spent my early life in Zagreb. When I was in second grade at Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills, Dick McCann screamed at me: “You lost the war!” I didn’t know what war he was talking about. It didn’t matter, really. It was made quite clear to me that no matter how well I played baseball (I was an All-Star in Little League and PONY League), no matter how well I was able to surf Malibu, to blend in, I was not an American, and I never would be an American. Then my mother got transferred to Madagascar and my Beverly Hills High School career was broken up just before my junior year, just before some of my schoolmates would not be able to beat the draft despite their rich parents, and some would end up dead in Vietnam.

Boy was I glad then that I was not an American. America Sucks.

From Madagascar, we went to Nairobi, Kenya and I ended up getting a better education at St. Mary’s than I had at Beverly High. I read Shakespeare and the Bronte sisters, was a prime debater, won an elocution contest, and was encouraged to write an article for the yearbook. And it’s where I first started to learn to play the guitar. This was followed by two years of unrewarding university studies in Durban, where my leftist leanings and my love of the Beat Generation, as well as my fascination with drugs, were all nurtured. Sure, there was Apartheid, but we broke the barriers by going to the Blue Note after midnight where an all-black jazz band played to an all-white audience of university students mixed in with jazz-lovers. Boy, it was great to feel like a rebel with a cause, until of course my drug habit kicked me into psychosis and a stint in the Pietermaritzburg asylum, where I was eventually able to recover enough so that my mother could pick me up and take me back to Nairobi.

In Pietermaritzburg

We traveled by ship, stopped in Mozambique, the Comoros islands and in Zanzibar before we landed in Mombasa. I was on a heavy Stelazine Thorazine regimen, but was able to eat a bowl full of shrimp peri-peri in Lourenço Marques with pleasure as my mother and I watched the sunset from the restaurant terrace before riding back to the ship with our driver, George Washington. We sent a hundred postcards from Zanzibar on the day before the revolt which overthrew the Sultan. Our friends got postcards with the Sultan stamps and the new revolutionary government date-stamp. We sent them very valuable philatelic material. I wonder how many of them realized that?

Hieronymus Bosch • Haywain

When I finally escaped from America again in 1980, it was on a romantic journey to Lisbon, where I would write my first book while ghosting a book (for money) for a Syrian businessman. Besides that, I also taught English to a Freudian psychiatrist. It was really fun, because when people asked me what I did, I always replied: “I go to a psychiatrist, and he pays me!” It was my secret pleasure. And it always caused consternation in people. These were mostly people from the music business in Lisbon who wanted to go international, so they would hire me to write lyrics for them in English, for cash of course. No credit. I didn’t mind. I needed to pay rent and eat. Until one day I played some of my songs for one of the publishers and he took me to play live in front of a singer and her manager. They took one of my rock songs, recorded it with Portuguese lyrics, released it as a single, and it shot to number one. With my name in the credits!

Don’t worry. It didn’t make me rich. After all, Portugal is a very small market and 50,000 sold copies of the single made me about $500. Which was enough to buy me a ticket to Germany, the third largest music market in the world. In Hamburg I found that I was not only needed, but that my skill could be well rewarded. And, in contrast to the America Sucks music scene, I got both name credit and money, even when it wasn’t in advance. And then I got lucky. Another number one hit. But this time in France and Belgium with a song for which I wrote the lyrics. But don’t worry, it didn’t make me famous (or rich actually), but it did help me survive for a few years while I didn’t give up my day job as an English teacher and translator.

Believe it or not, you don’t make millions in the music industry with every hit record, especially if your total share is only about 12% of the author’s part. What? Yeah. The original lyricist gets 50% (actually 25% because the publisher takes half), the sub-lyricist (me writing in a different language from the original) gets half of that 12.25%. It’s OK pay for a few hours of work, but it won’t put you in a mansion and a Rolls. Nor will writing for heavy metal bands and pop groups that want to break into the British and American markets. One of my good friends in the German music industry told me lately that even Nena, with her American hit 99 Red Balloons got shafted by the America Sucks music industry. Let’s put it this way, she got less for her hit song over there than I got paid to write lyrics anonymously for a popular German metal band signed with SONY. Over here, she made tons of money with that song in German and the album and other hits and other albums, which eventually got her a seat as a judge in one of the casting shows that are now so popular. But the America Sucks music industry took what it wanted and said what it always says when your lawyers tell them you want your money: “Sue me!”

Yes, I’m still over on the left field side of the diamond, near the track in front of the fence, taking home runs away from people who try and tell me that capitalism is god’s answer to how humans should comport themselves. The latest homer I took away was the argument somebody made about how generous and kind billionaires can be. Besides the generosity of Microsoft’s founder Bill Gates in regard to a vaccine, this person quoted the 4 billion dollars donated by MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of the world’s richest man, Amazon owner Jeff Bezos. Now I am certainly not against wealthy people giving away their money. In fact, I wish they would give away more of it, or even just pay their fair share of taxes. Not paying tax is often a prime source of their wealth. The fact that MacKenzie Scott has decided to give lots of money away is a good thing. “In April 2019, Scott posted her first ever tweet to lay out terms of their divorce affecting shareholders. She gave him [Bezos] 75% of their Amazon stock and voting control of her shares, which left her a 4% stake in Amazon worth $38 billion or so at the time (as of early October [2020], her net worth is more than $60 billion). Overnight, she became one of the richest women in the world.”

Her decision to give away a bit over $4 billion came as a surprise that made other billionaires snarl at the betrayal they felt from a senior member of “the club” that George Carlin mentions and reminds us that “you ain’t in it.” What she has decided to do is to give her donations to charitable organizations that can then funnel the money to those who need it. That’s one way of doing it. Hopefully it will be effective. But it begs the question: Why does this need to be done? The answer is that it needs to be done because America Sucks, and sucks big-time. With a functioning social net and Medicare-for-all, as well as a progressive tax system which reduces the billions in profits to (at the very most) a million in profits for shareholders, the system would be a shining example to what can be done in the world if people are fair to each other, distribute wealth to those places where it is needed instead of funneling money into disastrous wars and the destruction of our habitat.

Of course I am still the naive idealist who went back to Europe where the social net still catches a lot of people, despite the holes that have been poked in it by the capitalist true-believers over the past 20 years. Yet I am happy to be in a place where the wrathful sociopathic energy of the capitalist is confronted with legal barriers that cannot always be overcome with huge amounts of money.

The sad thing is, that though I wrote that poem almost 50 years ago, it’s still true: America Sucks.

Danny Antonelli lives in Hamburg, Germany

NPD USA

Narcissistic personality disorder as a national trait

The Mayo Clinic describes NPD as:

a mental condition in which people have an inflated sense of their own importance, a deep need for excessive attention and admiration, troubled relationships, and a lack of empathy for others. But behind this mask of extreme confidence lies a fragile self-esteem that’s vulnerable to the slightest criticism.

Describing the national character of the United States as narcissistic is nothing new. Kuni Miyake wrote an insightful article in the Japan Times back in 2018 in which he came up with NND (Narcissistic National Disorder) to describe the United States.

The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology published a paper with the title: “Narcissism and United States’ Culture: The View from Home and Around the World” in which it is made quite clear that narcissism is a trait which is not only excessively prevalent among the people in the USA, but is actively encouraged throughout the culture, especially with its worship of the rich and famous and their extravagant lifestyles. In America this narcissistic plateau can be reached only if one is ruthlessly concerned with oneself and one’s own satisfaction. Lack of empathy for others plays a huge role in all this of course. Americans see this narcissism in themselves and their peers, and people from around the world regard the US as a nation of narcissists mainly due to this evident lack of empathy.

Color lithograph by J.S. Pughe • Library of Congress statement: No known restrictions on publication.

Since most people are not familiar with the political situation in 1899, a quick description of the cartoon might be helpful: Uncle Sam stands on a map of China, which Germany, Italy, England, Russia, and France (Austria in background sharpening shears) want to cut up; Uncle Sam clutches the Trade Treaty with China and says: “Gentleman, you may cut up this map as much as you like, but remember that I’m here to stay, and that you can’t divide me up into spheres of influence.”

Published in Puck on August 23, 1899, the cartoon emphasizes the role the United States played in enforcing what was known at that time as the Open Door Policy. It prevented any country from creating an exclusive territorial trade zone in China and ensured that all countries involved could trade on an equal footing. It saved China from being cut up into pieces like Africa had been, and the Chinese were permitted to get tariffs for their goods, but they were not consulted on whether they were in favor of the policy. It was imposed upon them from above, with the United States once again making sure that its own national interests were protected.

Uncle Sam is “Putting His Foot Down” in an unmistakable gesture of authority, in the belief that he is the most important and the most powerful person in the world. The Mayo Clinic description of NPD fits so well, it’s uncanny. And, the operative narcissistic phrase here is in the caption: I’m here to stay, and … you can’t divide me up into spheres of influence. In other words, I’m the boss! an attitude that has not changed since then and, after 4 years of the most brazen narcissism a president has ever shown to his people and to the world, it is even more prevalent among the “folk” of the US than ever before. A prime example of this is the racism that has now come out of the closet into the public sphere.

Racism has all the traits of narcissism listed by the Mayo Clinic, with the most important being: a fragile self-esteem that’s vulnerable to the slightest criticism. Every white supremacist has fragile self-esteem and hates any kind of criticism, especially if it’s true. Yes, it’s true that white people have enslaved and maltreated and exploited people who they deem to be non-whites for hundreds of years. Bring this truth to the ears or eyes of a white supremacist and their fragile self-esteem cracks open the protective shell and lets out the demon living inside. This demon has been released aplenty during the past and looks like it will continue to haunt us well into the future.

The governing capitalist elites of the United States are no different. They know that their positions of power are only attainable because they have acted with a complete lack of empathy for others, herding wage slaves into factories to produce goods which will enable an accumulation of enormous profits that will never be fairly distributed among the “folk” for the benefit of the many instead of the few. Why should this profit be distributed anyway? It was capital than enabled it! Capital may have been the yeast in the dough, but labor enabled the manufacture and distribution of the goods. Yeast does not grow the wheat, harvest it, grind it into flour, add the water, knead the dough or heat the oven or put the kneaded dough in the oven, nor take it out when it has reached the right consistency and is finally edible. Without the labor and the natural world the raw material comes from, no bread. Capital is, like yeast, an ingredient, but all it does is consume the sugar in the dough and burp out carbon dioxide gas and alcohol called ethanol. This gas gets trapped inside the bread dough due to the presence of gluten, thus making the dough rise. The alcohol gets evaporated in the baking process. Dough that uses yeast rises slowly and for a longer period of time. The more gas that forms in the dough, the higher the dough will rise and thus, the fluffier your baked bread will be.

So if capital is like yeast, why should we consider all the burped out holes in the bread as its right to an enormous return from the bread when it is sold. After all, the yeast only creates places where there is nothing present but air: i.e. an inflated sense of their own importance. And if you think about it, yeast is not a necessary ingredient at all. Bread can be baked without yeast. It’s called no-yeast bread. And of course there is matzo as well. Flour and water.

The capitalist doesn’t distribute the profits from the sale of produced goods because that money is needed to buy up and control the natural world where the raw materials are hidden or available in plain sight, and to exploit the labor of the local population in order to get those raw materials and transport them so that the goods can be manufactured by labor at a profit for the people who have a deep need for excessive attention and admiration. The people living on the land to be exploited have no say in how the materials are mined or gathered – either they cooperate or they will be eliminated from the game. That’s what Uncle Sam is telling the Europeans in that political cartoon. The fact that the Chinese have absolutely no say in the matter doesn’t even need to be mentioned. It’s a given. After all, they don’t count. They are only the ones who will provide the labor and the raw materials. They belong to the non-white underclass. The Opium Wars of the 19th century, instigated by Britain and then Britain and France working together, reduced China to a country with absolutely no say in its own destiny. And they didn’t have a say until Mao went on his Long March (against the fascist Japanese) and took the land away from the colonial capitalists who would have liked to return after the ultimate defeat of Japan and Germany. Of course this liberation of China from the grip of the western capitalists has been a long-lasting insult to the fragile self-esteem of Europeans and Americans, and a battle for revenge has been in progress ever since the establishment of the PRC (People’s Republic of China).

The English Imperial Octopus (Public Domain)

Do other nations suffer from narcissistic personality disorder? Of course. Nations around the world act in their own self-interest all the time. Many nations believe they are special. And authoritarian leaders of countries cannot cease to exhibit their deep need for excessive attention and admiration. That includes Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. However, not since the demise of the great empires has there been a nation as powerful militarily and as narcissistic in its national policy as the United States. Americans actually believe they won the second world war all by themselves. They believe their ideals of freedom and democracy should be the political religion governing the world. The fact that their antiquated system of government was constructed to protect an oligarchic status quo is not even in the periphery of their consciousness. Other nations have crafted together more egalitarian forms of democracy, with less influence from the oligarchs sitting above. Eliminate the Wild West cowboy capitalists and egalitarian democracy should stand a better chance of success. Without Uncle Sam and his heavy boot stomping on the earth to tell us all who is boss, we might have a real chance at getting to a place where egalitarianism is possible.

Oh, but the narcissist will tell us: It’s for your own protection that I wield my power! No, it’s to protect profits and oligarch narcissists that stifling trade deals are crafted and countries like Bolivia are treated like vassal states, while countries like Cuba and Iran and Venezuela, who refuse to cooperate with the capitalist powers that be, are punished as renegades, and every attempt is made to force them to pay for their lack of respect. A complete lack of empathy for the people who live in those countries is part of the package of assertion of dominion. No wonder torture is back on the agenda in the USA, it has been used as national policy for decades: You want the pain to stop? Cooperate!

The French Communist Party got the message long ago and even created propaganda posters against US imperialism and its threat to colonize France. The current French government is, however, full of non-empathetic narcissists and continues to do all it can to thwart the will of the people while allowing the American capitalist octopus to slide its menacing tentacles into the European Union.

No! France will not be a colonized country!
Americans stay in America! (Public Domain)

Frankly, like many people who no longer live in the United States and among Americans and the constant stream of nationalistic propaganda they are subjected to through their media channels, I have grown tired of the constant whining from American oligarchs that Europe has no right to force them to pay a fair share of taxes on the enormous profits they make from cyber business and franchise business in Europe. Google and Microsoft and Apple and Facebook demand to be recognized as the greatest thing that was ever given to mankind. Living here in Germany it reminds me of the Deutschland Über Alles that was once so prominent in the thinking of the people here and still finds expression in the national anthem, as well as in the way fans regard their national football team. [Aside: Why do you think Uber chose that name for its company? They most probably would have kept the umlauts over the U if they could have gotten away with it. After all, their business model is predicated on being Über Alles.]

Unfortunately, we are going to be stuck with American narcissists for a while yet. The German narcissistic personality disorder system collapsed rather quickly. The American NPD system is taking a bit longer to collapse. The hollow center will fold in on itself eventually and will cause disarray and chaos, but maybe that inflated sense of their own importance and that deep need for excessive attention and admiration will dissolve into a realization that cooperation for the good of all will save Americans from further destruction in the future.

Don’t hold your breath!

Psychology Today gives us “8 Ways to Handle a Narcissist”, but it’s not going to be easy to get the United States to recognize that it can benefit from professional intervention.

Danny Antonelli lives in Hamburg, Germany

It’s Only Talk

25 November 2020

Now that the transition, like an old Model-T, has finally sputtered to a start and people are beginning to assume there are enough committed honest electors to guarantee Biden will be voted in on December 14th, progressives are protesting loudly at the choices that the president-elect is making for his cabinet. Nobody in the new regime, or in the media that supports it, is listening to their cries of woe and accusations of betrayal.

Betrayal? What betrayal? It was quite clear about one-minute after Old Joe was shoe-horned into the role of challenger that if he managed to slip through the cracks in the Unmentionable One’s façade that it would be business as usual: Wall Street, War and Weasel Words about strengthening unions, bolstering green energy policies, saving the environment from exploitation by unscrupulous business interests. Reconstitution of anti-trust laws that would break up big tech firms and kill current monopolies are only the dreams of people living in Thatcher’s cloud cuckoo land.

You can’t say you didn’t know that increased budgets for the military will continue, weapons will be sold to authoritarian regimes that can (or can’t) afford to buy them, as long as they pledge due fealty to Uncle Sam’s Dollar Emporium. New Cold Wars will be pushed along so that the enemy from without can supplant the current enemy from within (people of color and progressive individuals). But don’t think that the enemy from within will slip out of focus. The state’s protection of private ownership of productive resources through the use of its police apparatus, both local and federal, can be ratcheted up at will, and if it is being seen to be done by reasonable people like Biden or Harris, nobody will lift a finger to help the beleaguered progressive forces demanding change, be they milquetoast socialists of the Bernie and AOC type or street activists like the Occupy Wall Street masses who have been dispersed but have not been forgotten, for you can be sure the law enforcement databases are going to follow those unfortunates throughout their lives.

POLONIUS: What do you read my Lord?

HAMLET: Words, words, words.

So many wonderful words pour out from enlightened minds with rational arguments – e.g. Chomsky. If followed, even partially, their ideas put into action would promise a better future for mankind. Pearls before swine? It’s more like diamonds dumped into the sewers to be mixed with all the shit emanating from the imbeciles who will, as usual, be speeding the world toward oblivion. The torrent of lies during the past four years has washed away truth as well, since no one seems to have an attention span long enough to pursue truth into the alley where it lurks or listen to it speak longer than it takes a TikTok clip to play. To the below-average thinkers who overwhelmingly populate our world, it’s only talk. Noisy meaningless talk. It’s not their fault they can’t figure it out. The system has been re-constructed so as to deny people the education they need in order to be able to figure out what is true and what is not. All in the service of capitalism.

The American capitalist has slavishly adhered to Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and intensified it into a neo-liberalism that has turned hyper-capitalism into the over-arching goal of every wannabe billionaire on the planet. Anyone who dares speak a word in criticism of the scourge of capitalism is immediately thrown into the company of the twin demons Marx and Kropotkin, when in truth many of today’s hyper-capitalists are more like Max Stirner and the anarchist proponents of propaganda by deed because they never ever shy away from direct action when it is in the interests of capitalism – with which they identify intimately. Must that not be the reason we have so many wars and why our planet is eager to choke its human inhabitants to death as soon as possible?

Statue of Pyotr Kropotkin
Russian scientist, philosopher, writer, economist, activist and communo-anarchist
CC0 Public Domain

Yes, I express my dismay like a pessimist would. However, a pessimist is not someone who thinks the glass is half empty. It’s someone who realizes that when the water has been swallowed there will be no more water to drink. And our life-water is being swallowed, again, by those thirsty for power, thirsty for money, thirsty for domination. It’s nothing new of course. This scratching and kicking to reach the top of the greased pole has been underway for millennia. Hieronymus Bosch depicted the consequences of the 7 deadly sins so extremely well, and the torments awaiting those who over-indulge their lust – in the right-hand panel of his Garden of Earthly Delights.

What seems quite clear to me is that no matter how loudly the pious rich proclaim their adherence to Weber’s Protestant work ethic and to a religious faith, they cannot possibly believe in any kind of Christian deity or afterlife. Would a real Christian act like they do? Other religions – that I know less of – also have teachings that urge their followers to behave with humanity toward others. My only conclusion can be that we are dealing with a hard core group of non-believer narcissist sociopaths who are living in their own private version of 120 Days of Sodom and are loving every minute of it!

King Crimson sums up very nicely the cacophony of complaints and recriminations – mine included – that echo over our progressive and regressive media landscape these days: Elephant Talk.

ELEPHANT TALK

King Crimson

Talk, it’s only talk
Arguments, agreements
Advice, answers
Articulate announcements
It’s only talk

Talk, it’s only talk
Babble, burble, banter
Bicker, bicker, bicker
Brouhaha, balderdash, ballyhoo
It’s only talk
Back talk

Talk talk talk, it’s only talk
Comments, cliches, commentary, controversy
Chatter, chit-chat, chit-chat, chit-chat
Conversation, contradiction, criticism
It’s only talk
Cheap talk

Talk, talk, it’s only talk
Debates, discussions
These are words with a D this time
Dialog, duologue, diatribe
Dissention, declamation
Double talk, double talk

Talk, talk, it’s all talk
Too much talk
Small talk
Talk that trash
Expressions, editorials
Explanations, exclamations, exaggerations
It’s all talk
Elephant talk
Elephant talk
Elephant talk

P.E.D. – Post-Election Depression

Out of the trenches and into the What?

Yesterday there was a moment of euphoria when Biden was declared the winner of the presidential election. I’m not denying that moment. My partigiano endorphins celebrated their release from four years of political captivity, coursed through my body and I walked from room to room, up the stairs, down the stairs, with a new energy. My wife smiled at me (she does this sometimes), WhatsApp messages were coming in with funny gifs about the biggest loser. My brother in Saudi Arabia, who has gone through a number of cancer treatments and defeated the big C so far, was afraid he’d die without ever seeing the maniac in the shining house on the hill be evicted. He was celebrating with the most widely imbibed forbidden substance in the kingdom. Then I went out into the garden, filled the birdbaths with water, looked up into the late afternoon’s gathering darkness and the euphoria was gone.

At first I thought it was because these autumn days get dark at 4:30 in the afternoon and the nights are colder and the pandemic has not relinquished its hold on the world, only gripped it tighter, somehow instinctively knowing that it was time to flourish again, to hit these ignorant arrogant humans with a sucker punch during the holiday season when they will once again want to gather in large family groups and in places of worship to celebrate their religious freedoms.

We were saved from pagan Halloween this year because of Corona, so it hasn’t been all bad. And personally, I never go to church on Christmas Eve with the rest of the family to hear the choirs sing, which has been a family tradition since forever. The Hamburg churches are famous for their superb choirs and their pre-Christmas concerts, especially in Hauptkirche St. Michaelis (St. Michael’s Church), it’s tall bell tower and clock visible from everywhere in the city, because no building in Hamburg may be built so tall as to obscure it from view.

I consoled myself last night with a couple of Liam Neeson action films (Run All Night, The Commuter), had trouble getting to sleep because of them, but slept late into the morning. Perhaps my post-election depression infiltrated me again because today is the 9th of November, Kristallnacht, and once again, after dark, as every year, we will go to Bornplatz and put down some tealights on where the synagogue used to stand before the Nazis defaced it and then tore it down in 1939. The Jewish community in our neighborhood – Grindel – consisted of hard-working tradesmen, shopkeepers and manual workers and this was their synagogue. It was also the synagogue of the Jewish doctors, lawyers and businessmen who lived in the upscale neighborhood of Rotherbaum, which borders Grindel. As in every community of rich and not-so-rich, the political affiliations were split between far left and far right. Oh yes, there were Jews on the far right. Many Jews still could not believe that they would be targeted, after all they were staunch upholders of the status quo and it was the communists and socialists that were being removed.

Jewishness was only one aspect of the existence of these people, and unfortunately it was seen as the only aspect that had any relevance, so the Nazis focused on that and churned up wave after wave of hate against this invented internal enemy.

Bornplatz, Hamburg on 9 November where the Synagogue once stood

Monday is the one day in the week where I go out to teach English. It’s a short 15-minute bike ride from home and it’s quite invigorating, also because the damp air bites a bit and sharpens my perception of the world around me: the lines of cars still on their way somewhere even though it’s almost noon, the few other full-time bike riders like me, most of them wearing helmets, many in bright yellow jackets. My excuse for not wearing a helmet is that it makes me more careful. It probably doesn’t, because I landed on the road once – luckily no traffic – when my hand slipped off my grip during a rainstorm, and once I landed on my head when I tried to jump a curb and it was higher than I thought and my wheel didn’t clear the edge. That got me a sizeable gash above my eye. The doctor who took X-rays wittingly told me that he had looked into it and could see nothing at all. We laughed together at that one. But I was able to secure the X-ray photos and use them as an album cover, which was a kind of consolation.

The sky looks like vaporous cement, the Alster lake is bereft of sailboats as I ride over Kennedy bridge, and I get to the company where I’m going to teach today just before noon. At noon the church bells in the city ring for 5 minutes to commemorate Kristallnacht, Germany’s own 9/11. My lesson goes smoothly. We laugh a lot and my mood is good for a while, until, back at home again, I reflect on what the future may look like. At the moment we are in semi-lockdown here in Germany. Restaurants and bars and cafes are only allowed to sell takeaway during November. I suppose bars are actually just closed, because who wants to go and grab an overpriced drink and take it home?

It occurs to me that part of my problem could be that I was anticipating a stronger, more violent response from “He Who Must Not Be Named.” In fact, last year at this time I was in the middle of writing the libretto for a musical about The Father of Lies in which violence and counter-violence results in a denouement that is both satirical, funny and profoundly disturbing. Throughout 2020, I felt like a Cassandra, dreading as well as relishing the fulfillment of my apocalyptic prophecy. The people who read the libretto laughed all the way through, but neither my publisher nor theatres were willing to get it on its way to the stage. Of course the pandemic was a big hurdle for the theatres that got the piece, but it was my publisher who kept saying “Let’s wait until the election.” Now the election has happened, the Beast and his malaficiers got their just deserts and my finale is like fireworks in a rainy sky: still colorful and explosive, but who is going to brave the rain to watch?

My composer is currently in bed at home with back trouble and under heavy medication. It looks like my only possibility is to release the libretto as an e-book on Amazon so that it can die neglected on a web page until some future generation decides to exhume it as a curiosity from a bygone era.

But that’s just one aspect of the depression (or is it really just melancholia?). My partigiano endorphins crawled back into their hiding places quite quickly because they know the war on us simple people is in no way over. The oligarchs have pulled off another successful Bait and Switch. We are once again the marks. They have given us a useless bundle of paper in a multicolored cloth and we are supposed to believe that wrapped up in there are the riches we have been waiting for so patiently over the past four years.

Immediately after the semi-debacle for the Democratic Party, the corporate hacks peered through their telescopic sights, flipped on their range finders, then zeroed their lasers on the few free-thinkers still left and the few newly elected. Murdoch’s media machine will now have unbridled freedom to concentrate on anyone who wants a radical or even a modest change to ethic-less capitalism. Of course the other media outlets, owned by the other oligarchs will whittle patiently away at The Squad and the newbies until, like Jeremy Corbin, they are either defeated at the polls or removed from the party to which they currently adhere.

The con is back on. My P.E.D. has its hooks in me and I can’t shake it off. So many years in the trenches and now What? I am not one for the streets. I saw what happened to that old guy, how he was knocked down by the cops and lay there bleeding as they marched over him. I’m in Germany. We don’t have guns at home, ready to use on any person who comes unasked to our front door. My radio program is on a non-commercial channel that gets about as many listeners as a bar band on a Thursday night – before the pandemic. The articles and songs and stories I write are more like sessions used to be with my therapist, who I can no longer afford. All around me, my generation is dying off, memories of Woodstock and the 1968 almost-revolution in Europe all carefully reworked into novels and films so that it’s now just a jumble of hallucinatory sex and mind-rotting drugs and idealistic illusions which terminated in Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Helmut Kohl.

However, like Sisyphus, I know that stone has to be rolled back up the mountain in the perhaps vain belief that maybe next time it will reach the top and finally roll down the other side, into the Promised Land, where we will be able to live in peace and harmony like the Bonobos.

Danny Antonelli lives in Hamburg, Germany
www.archive.org/bookmarks/FREE%20WHEEL

Despotism: A warning from 1946

Archive dot org, which I’m sure many of you are already familiar with, has been able rescue films that record history, like the films shot during and after both of the World Wars, and of course it has rescued countless a-historical but highly entertaining Noir films from the 40s and 50s (some of my favorites among them!).

But probably one of the most important films for us today is a slightly damaged version of a film entitled Despotism. It was made by Encyclopedia Britannica Films, in those days the top informational filmmaker for schools and universities. And it made the film Despotism to inform the upcoming generation of the perils that exist in the world we live in, and to show them how to recognize despotism when it is on its insidious path to take over the democratic system.

Unfortunately, as events in the present are showing us, this film has not been shown in enough schools since 1946, otherwise we might not be in the situation we are in today.

You can view Despotism yourself here and here – and I encourage you to do so. The first link is to the Prelinger Archive collection and has an extensive shotlist and transcript from which I have gathered some important shot and narration information for this article – which is, by the way, only written as a quick guide to the film, not intended as an exhaustive review. The Prelinger Archive version of the film has some sync problems, but is still OK to view. The second link is to the Community Video site, and it has a version of the film with no sync problems, but is bereft of the shotlist. So if you need to, you can copy the shotlist from the one site and watch the film on the other.

In a no-holds-barred beginning to the film we are shown a sliding scale (00:14) which slowly goes from top to bottom:

Public Domain

And carefully chosen words follow from narrator James Brill, who stands in front of a wall chart with a big map of Europe behind him:

“Well for one thing, avoid the comfortable idea that the mere form of government can of itself safeguard a nation against despotism. Germany under President Hindenburg was a republic. [outline of Germany] And yet in this republic an aggressive despotism took root and flourished under Adolf Hitler. [maps, flags, swastika]

Because archive.org is an open system, many negative or near-negative comments about the film have been posted on the Prelinger Archive site by people who call it everything from “obvious Jewish Marxist propaganda” to “accurate and frightening”. Why? Well, you have seen how the film begins, now look at the shocking follow-up to that beginning:

“When a competent observer looks for signs of despotism in a community, he looks beyond fine words and noble phrases.” (00:54) Then you see a picture of a group of people reciting the pledge of allegiance, saluting the flag, hands over hearts: “… for which it stands, one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all.” And while they speak the words “with liberty and justice for all”, the crossfade comes and shows a hanged man. (00:58-01:09)

Public Domain

Many Americans were not and are still not able to emotionally deal with the juxtaposition of the American flag and the Pledge of Allegiance ritual with the picture of someone hanging from – perhaps – the branch of a tree that has an uncanny resemblance to a scaffold. And, if you study the picture of the shadow figure hanging from the rope (which undoubtedly has a hangman’s noose), you can discern the typical forelock that was so popular among young whites of post-war America. Does that forelock rescue the picture from a racist bent?

It’s a shocking juxtaposition in its own right, even if you are not American. And it comes so early on in the film that it sets a tone, a tone that will continue throughout.

Despotism is only a ten-minute film. It was meant to be shown in a History class or a Political Science class or in a class that in my day used to be called Civics. (I just had a look to see if Civics still exists, and it does!) Although Civics seems to be obligatory in the high schools of most states, it is hardly ever taught for more than half a year. Only 16 states require a Civics exam to graduate. One of those states is Colorado, which seems to have a rather comprehensive course for its students: “Because all Colorado high schools must teach one year of civics, teachers are expected to cover the origins of democracy, the structure of American government, methods of public participation, a comparison to foreign governments, and the responsibilities of citizenship.”

I wonder what effect it would have if some high school teachers in Colorado took 10 minutes to show their students Despotism. (What effect would it have on you if you were stoned while watching it?)

Pretty quickly after the shock, a quick explanation of how despotism can come about, once again using the sliding scales we have been introduced to, but this time with the titles RESPECT and POWER.

“A careful observer can use a respect scale to find how many citizens get an even break. As a community moves towards despotism, respect is restricted to fewer people. A community is low on a respect scale if common courtesy is withheld from large groups of people on account of their political attitudes; if people are rude to others because they think their wealth and position gives them that right, or because they don’t like a man’s race or his religion.” (01:26)

Skillfully woven into the narration is a short clip of two khaki-clad men in jackboots and military-style caps, strutting down a city street, guns on their hips and obviously harassing people on the street. That is followed by a boss entering his office and walking quickly past his employees without uttering a word of greeting before going into his office, which is marked Private. And then the clincher, an reservation form for a holiday resort:

Public Domain

And immediately we are at the heart of the matter of what is extremely relevant for us today, because our whole world is getting lower and lower on the RESPECT scale. Common courtesy is withheld from people all the time, and not only because of their political attitudes, their lack of wealth, their race or gender, but for any number of perceived travesties, in public spaces, on busses, subway trains, in traffic – too many horror videos to mention just one – and on social media. You’ve all seen the crappy moments that are filmed for likes or LOLs or just to elicit rage. And this rage spreads through social media channels and fuels acts of violence. And then the acts of violence are filmed and passed along as well.

Along with a graphic depiction of the POWER scale as it goes down from shared to concentrated, we get the following narration:

“A power scale is another important yardstick of despotism. It gauges the citizen’s share in making the community’s decisions. Communities which concentrate decision making in a few hands rate low on a power scale and are moving towards despotism. Like France under the Bourbon kings, one of whom said, ‘The state – I am the state.’ Today democracy can ebb away in communities whose citizens allow power to become concentrated in the hands of bosses. (03:13) ‘What I say goes. See, I’m the law around here. Ha ha ha!’ The test of despotic power is that it can disregard the will of the people. It rules without the consent of the governed.” Does that I’m the law around here. Ha ha ha! sound familiar?

Public Domain (03:40)

The sequence that comes after, about voting and how votes are treated, has a cleverly crafted flag that adorns the wall, with the math symbol (≠) in what we can assume – even though the film is in black and white – is a red circle. And here we also have the re-emergence of our khaki-clad keepers of order from a previous clip, with official armbands and eagles on their military/policeman caps.

Symbols of power are extremely important today, as they have always been. Some are external, like flags, badges, guns, vehicles, uniforms (brown, green, camouflaged, dark blue, black); some are only there if you look for them – watches, cell phones, jewelry, shoes – and some are kept hidden and shown only to the select few who are privy to the halls of power in whichever system they exist. Those are the people who are allowed to view TOP SECRET, EYES ONLY documents, and other such private and sensitive material (like the photos of a dead Bin Laden? or snapshots of a dead Khashoggi before he is disposed of?).

Voting is a process that even despotic regimes like to use to show the world that they are not so bad after all. Now whether or not your vote has any meaning is totally dependent on the form of government you are under. In nominally democratic societies, people have a tendency to believe their vote is meaningful. In some European countries turnout is high. And from time-to-time there is a change of direction away from despotism toward democracy. But these days, as Noam Chomsky once showed us, our consent to be governed is often manufactured through the power of advertising and propaganda perfected first by Edward Bernays, the “double nephew” of Viennese psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, and then refined by Joseph Goebbels and later by the Mad Men on Madison Avenue.

The makers of Despotism are no slouches when it comes to giving maximum visual effect to the words that come after we have had a quick visual and aural dose of Hitler and his saluting minions.

“In a downright despotism, opposition is dangerous whether the despotism is official or whether it is unofficial.” [this all comes over a montage of pictures showing a sign which reads Camp 33 for Political Offenders, then a man with a hood over his head and a noose around his neck, which is followed by what are obviously Ku Klux Klan men backlit by the flames of a burning cross. (04:13-04:23)]

The film is around its halfway mark now. So to keep this readable, I’ll give you a quick run-through of what comes next.

First we get the ECONOMIC DISTRIBUTION scale that can go from balanced to slanted. Income and land ownership are dealt with first: “Where land is privately owned, one sign of a poorly balanced economy is the concentration of land ownership in the hands of a very small number of people.” Taxation is also addressed: “Another sign of a poorly balanced economy is a taxation system that presses heaviest on those least able to pay.” All of that illustrated by stacks of coins and pie charts. (04:48-06:30)

The INFORMATION scale comes in at 06:35 and goes from uncontrolled to controlled with these fine words: “A community rates low on an information scale when the press, radio, and other channels of communication are controlled by only a few people and when citizens have to accept what they are told.” And when these last few words are spoken, under uncontrolled a little subheading appears: critical evaluation. Next, we get the subheading for controlled which reads: automatic acceptance.

So now you can conclude for yourself what it means when we know that only 5 major corporations control all the media in the USA. Not that other western democracies are that much better off.

A quick covering of how teachers are trained, how propaganda is woven into school systems and how the general public can be persuaded to believe what the government wants them to believe ends with a depiction of how official censorship works.

Public Domain

Today’s censorship works more subtly than that because it takes place in the head of the journalist and is linked to career opportunities and political affiliations. But the power of money was well-known in 1946 as well. “It is also possible for newspapers and other forms of communication to be controlled by private interests. ‘I thought I told you to kill that story. It’ll cost us a lot of advertising.’”

Then comes a final review of the most important points covered in the film, with the main question being: “What sort of community do you live in? Where would you place it on a democracy/despotism scale?” The RESPECT and POWER scales are next, followed by the ECONOMIC DISTRIBUTION and INFORMATION scales and we are told that the lower these are, the closer we come to despotism.

The end is a curious collage of images which begins with this crossfade:

Public Domain

You see how the United States blends in as the scale reaches its nadir, toward despotism, in a perhaps not so subtle message that there is something wrong in a country which, even in 1946, is giving signs of concentrated wealth and power, concentrated land ownership, intolerance, and a voting system that does not conform to the important aspects of democracy: all discernible signs of a slow and steady march toward despotism.

So tell me: Where would you put the US and other western democracies in relation to despotism today?

***

Democracy, the companion film, is from 1945:

https://archive.org/details/Democracy1945512kb

Mashhad to Tehran

Mashhad is a big city. After spending so much time going through semi-desert landscape and the dusty bare towns of Kandahar and Herat, it was disconcerting to be back in what was definitely civilization. And it wasn’t just the big city traffic and the big city buildings, it was evident in the people as well. Of course I had to go and visit the Shrine of Imam Reza. That was obligatory. Not because of any religious reasons, but because it is there, a massive complex that not only contains the tomb of Imam Reza (a very important figure in Shia Islam) but it is also considered the largest mosque in the world. There is another mosque in the complex, a museum, a library and four schools that teach religious matters.

To walk through the mosque – as in India at important shrines – I had to put cloth covers over my shoes to prevent my soles from scratching the marble surface or tracking dirt over it. And also, most probably, to avoid insulting the shrine, since it is considered insulting to show the sole of the foot or the sole of the shoe to someone. The locals, who mostly wore open-toed sandals during the hot season [When is it not hot?], left their sandals at the side of the entrance, but heathen westerners like me were allowed to just slip on cloth covers and enter to enjoy the wonder of the mosque. And it is a wonder. Like the Taj Mahal, it has intricate inlay work all around the imposing main entrance and all around its many balcony portals. Of course I didn’t take any pictures, since I was determined to hold all the pictures of what I saw in my head so that I could write about everything later from pure memory. Well, this resplendent beauty and complexity defies memory, at least exact memory of every detail. All I can say is that I was overwhelmed. And I was very happy to spend as much time inside as I could because it was much much cooler than outside in the relentless sun.

The centerpiece was of course the tomb of Imam Reza (who by the way is Ali ibn Moosa a descendant of Muhammad). It is set in a chamber that is adorned with inlayed texts in the walls and turquoise filigree inlays over the arches. UNESCO has declared the whole complex a world heritage site because of its historical architectural beauty and of course its cultural value. You know what? Go find some pictures of it. They are everywhere on the Internet.

After my refreshing and awe-inspiring tour of the mosque, I stepped back out into the glaring sunshine and was immediately drawn to the fountain in front of the mosque. I sat down on one of the cement seats that surrounded the fountain and let the slight breeze that filtered through the fountain stream and over the water in its pool refresh me. I dipped my hand into the water and spread it over my face and hair and bare arms. Then I sat there and stared at the imposing entrance to the mosque. Not far away from me sat a young man in traditional clothing, a roomy white top and white trousers that also had lots of room for the circulation of air. He smiled at me and came to sit next to me. His English was excellent and we got into conversation. He was a theology student but was able to speak about all sorts of things, and he was definitely not a narrow-minded fanatic of any sort. In fact, he was quite up-to-date as regards the state of the world and world culture in 1971. I was a little surprised because I thought that he would have been more intent on trying to convert me, but he wasn’t trying at all. In fact, he said that one of the most important aspects of learning to be a mullah was understanding the world and what people thought, all sorts of people, whether they were religious or not. It was his duty, he said, to talk especially to foreigners and find out how they looked at the world, what made them tick, and how, if necessary, he could one day be of help to someone from that foreign culture.

I was impressed of course. The young man couldn’t have been much older than me. He wasn’t sporting a heavy beard, just some wisps of light brown down along his chin line and over his lip, though he did have head-covering against the sun, a large white skull cap that also served to identify his religious status. He was extremely polite during our whole conversation and asked very direct and penetrating questions about what I thought about certain scientific aspects, like the journey which had recently been taken to the moon. My interest in science had always been rather keen, so I was able to talk quite freely in that area and he took in my answers like a sponge absorbs water. But my time in Mashhad was limited. I had a bus to catch to Tehran. So, as a parting gift he gave me directions as to the shortest route to the bus station and I thanked him and walked away, leaving the massive complex and the student of the world who would one day be an advisor to his parishioners behind me.

Yes, there is a train service between Mashhad and Tehran, and I took the train on my way back to India, but this time I rode on a bus.

***

And since this a little over a year later than the last entry, I am going to add a little biographical note about my mother. Why? Why not? I’ve mentioned her a few times and I thought it might be proper to at least give you a sketch. She was much more complex than I can possibly describe her, and though I have worked on a few stories and even a script treatment that covers an aspect of her life during the second world war, I keep running into aspects of her that actually make her more of a mystery to me instead of less of one. Maybe that’s how it is with everyone. What you see is only a tiny fraction of what is, like the dark matter that is most of the universe. We can’t see it, but now we know it’s there.

This year, on the 1st of March, I cut my hair.

After 5 years of rebellion against my mother’s wishes, I finally had enough and went to the hairdresser I used to frequent 5 years ago. She was happy to see me, and we laughed a lot and I got handed my pony tail (curly hair pony tail) as a souvenir. I took it home with me, showed my wife, photographed it, but after about a week of just looking at it, I finally threw it in the trash.

My mother would have turned 104 on 19 March, so I decided that she should have a quietly reassuring birthday glance through the wormhole of time or from one of the parallel universes and see me with hair that hasn’t stopped shocking her since she was 99.

I actually went to visit her grave for the 100. I thought that was the least I could do. She’s entombed in a wall with lots of relatives over and beside her, so she can’t be feeling all that lonely. Anyway, I did knock on the marble wall, just in case, you know, but there was no reply, which was both reassuring and a little disconcerting. I mean, I assume she has been slowly disintegrating in there since 1992, but what if she just up and left?

During her lifetime she moved around a lot. After growing up about less than a kilometer from where she’s allegedly entombed, she never stopped moving. When her parents finally allowed her to come to Rome, when she was 7, she went from school to school, never spending much time in any of them, mostly because she was restless and far too smart to put up with the nonsense she was being taught. Finally, when she got to university, she became a track star and sportswoman. For 5 years she was the fastest woman in Italy in the 100 meters. After that, war, and the diplomatic service kept her running from place to place, city to city, and while I was growing up in BH, from apartment to apartment. We lived in 14 different apartments in 11 years. Well, one of them we lived in twice, with a few years in between the moves in and out. In her retirement in Umbria she moved apartments at least 5 times and finally just gave up apartments altogether and started traveling from hotel to hotel around Umbria. She slowly divested herself of worldly goods and in the end had one red Samsonite suitcase where she kept her clothes and a pair of knee-length boots that she kept mentioning to me in the months before she had her stroke. “The boots, the boots,” she would say. “Don’t forget the boots!”

By the time she was ready to take her leave, I had difficulty in locating where she was, she had moved so often. Finally I found out that she was in hospital and made it down in time to see her. She couldn’t talk because of the stroke. But she grabbed my arm with the hand that still worked and sat me down, and through stare-command ordered me to shut up and watch. Slowly, over the next 5 days, she slipped away.

But she had one more trick up her sleeve. Her pension check arrived on the day she passed, and in order to collect it, I had to travel to Perugia with my cousin, a postman, and talk with the postal authorities, who were the ones who would cash the check. It being Italy, the doctor in the hospital, understanding the situation perfectly, wrote a very clear and precise letter which stated that due to medical reasons, my mother was “immobilized” and not able to travel to collect her check, so her son was going in her stead. My cousin the postman did most of the talking in Perugia and after about an hour of smiles and nods and suspicious looks and shrugs and hand gestures, they gave me the check, I cashed it, and we drove back to my “immobile” mother.

So, being the trickster and super-intelligent lady she always was, and of course restless as as a fly, or a cockroach caught in the open during daylight hours, I can’t really vouch for her true whereabouts. The weather is quite good there and I had the word WILLPOWER put on her marble wall so that people would at least know that if the wall crumbled and there had been no earthquake, then she was most probably on the loose. I haven’t read about any tornadoes or menacing dust devils traumatizing people in the area, so maybe the marble wall is still holding her back.

The question remains: For how long?

PS: “The boots.” Yeah, well, of course I got the suitcase after the funeral and went through it. Nothing really to keep. I even contemplated giving the boots away until I thought: “Hmmm.” Being knee-length boots, in order to keep their shape, she had stuffed crushed up newspaper all the way down into the feet of the boots and up to the tops, which were made of a fine soft leather. The boots were obviously expensive. Maybe that was why she kept them? Anyway, slowly I removed the wads of newspaper and, lo and behold, down at the bottom of the boots, on the inner soles of both, was cash money in nice crispy Italian Lira. In fact, it was just enough money to pay for the funeral, where I read her favorite Shakespeare speech: “To sleep, perchance to dream,” and the wake (I invited all the local relatives, about 15 people) which we held  in a very good restaurant, as a  four-course lunch with plenty of wine after the funeral.

BASHO MOMENTS

a cat, no, rabbit
under a bare lakeside bush
winter-sculpted roots

turtles by the shore
black shells glisten in water
three stones in the lake

a murder of crows
peck for hidden snowdrop bulbs
before they might bloom

the wet gravel path
runners slosh past on thin mud
I walk toward my Spring

equinox is near
winter hides and then appears
blackbirds are singing

footsteps follow me
I turn my head and nothing
nothing steps closer

lines I speak out loud
sound real like the crow’s cackle
and mean just as much

just a willow tree
branches black against the sky
tendrils long for Spring

Next: Tehran to Erzurum

To Herat and then to Mashhad

One of the things I have realized since I began writing about events that happened almost 50 years ago, is that memories slide into each other and compress. During a seven or eight hour bus journey, not all moments are clearly distinguishable. Arriving in the next hot dusty city seems just like arriving in the one before that.

There were no bus terminal buildings in Kandahar like there are in modern cities. The bus stopped and there were other buses parked nearby on a big dusty square off the side of the main road. There was a kind of trestle table with bottled drinks on it about 15 meters away and a couple of the European passengers (who I avoided all contact with) were looking at what was on offer. Some of the brands looked familiar, like Coca Cola, but there was no way that anyone with a little sense and will to survive would ever buy one of those bottled invitations to diarrhea or food poisoning or worse. Although the caps were all firmly on the tops of the bottles, the contents looked suspicious. The colors were strange. Shades of red and green that didn’t look like any cherry or lime I had ever seen bottled. And the Coke, well, it was definitely black liquid of some kind, but it looked flat and muddy. So I gave the turbaned vendor a nice smile and moved across the dirt square to the tea stand where all the Afghans were gathered drinking tea out of earthenware bowls.

You can’t travel through this part of the world without treading in the footsteps of Alexander the Great. In fact, as I found out later, Kandahar was founded in 329 BC by Alexander the Great who named the place after himself, as he often did, calling it Alexandria Arachosia. Apparently there was already a small settlement there called Arachosia.

The purpose of my journey was to get to London as quickly as possible and pick up my half-brother David who had written to us in India and said he wanted to visit. He has good memories related to our return journey through Turkey and Iran and Afghanistan. My memories of the journey toward London are untainted by the presence of any kind of companion, so they are my memories alone, even though, as I said, they are probably distorted by the passage of time.

Anyway, next stop was Herat and I wanted to get there as quickly as possible. Finding out which bus actually was going to the destination you wanted was a matter of talking to three or four or even five or six different people. Nobody wants to disappoint you, so you get many different answers and all of them sound promising. What you need to listen for however are two or three answers that are the same, that refer to the same bus leaving at nearly the same time and to, if possible, the same driver, one who is visible and has not disappeared and “will be back shortly.”

While doing this research it is important to remain polite and smile and thank the people who give you the information. Maybe some people lie to you on purpose, but most just don’t know the answer and provide you with an answer that sounds like it will help you even if it won’t. They are being nice and trying not to disappoint. So, through the process of gathering more information than needed, I finally got the answers that were consistent with the truth and found the driver who would be taking me to Herat. And, as usual, the bus would be leaving in the early evening, about an hour before sundown. This would mean that somewhere along the way, also as usual, the bus would pull to the side of the road and we would sleep there until sunrise when the faithful would exit for prayers and the Kafirs, like me, would stretch their legs, have a smoke and get ready for the next long leg of the journey.

No, there was no water in plastic bottles that you could carry with you. I drank large quantities of tea before getting on the bus in the evening. During the journey the bus always stopped at small roadside settlements where more tea and simple food, along with naan, Afghan bread was available. You get a taste for naan. It’s a long wide flat bread and you tear it into smaller strips and use it to pick up the food on the plate and bring it to your mouth. Well-cooked vegetables were what I ate most with the naan. No meat. My method for choosing food was to see what the older Afghans ate and then order the same. Most of the older men restricted themselves to vegetable dishes with naan. I did the same. Meat was available, mostly roasted over a coal fire and skewered, a kind of shashlik. The smell was always good. The pieces of meat were small and well cut and skewered on a piece of iron with a flat handle. Still, nothing for me, even if it was lamb, like it was supposed to be.

The hours I spent on the bus were not wasted hours. Since I had no companions and avoided all contact with the other Europeans on the journey, I had time to think and gather in the landscape, which changed from brownish desert to green fields and back to brownish desert. This was flat land mostly. We went through some semi-mountainous regions, but it was mostly flat and mostly brown along the way. Just before we entered Herat, the green returned.

Now here is a point where memory compresses so that I’m not exactly sure of where I was when I went to a Hammam. What I do remember is that the building seemed huge to me, like a fortress, with thick mud walls. Inside it was humid, in contrast to the dry heat outside. There was hardly anyone inside, but one of the men, who had a thin cotton sheet wrapped around his waist, came to me and showed me to a private cell, where there was a trickle of water flowing, and a bowl to gather it in. The cell was of concrete, about three meters long and two meters wide. It had a concrete bank where I could sit and a hook in the wall where I could hang my clothes.

My first instinct is to say that this Hammam was in Kandahar, where the drink stand was as well. And where I had arrived at more or less the hot part of the day. But it could have been Herat. I remember that in Herat I walked about before returning to where the buses were, and from around a corner a rather corpulent man appeared, dressed in shabby brown western clothes, a wrinkled suit jacket, baggy pants, a round face, head balding on top, his eyes concentrating on me, his smile trying to charm me, though it looked more like a serpent’s smile. In his hands, which had stubby little fingers, he was kneading a large lump of something that looked like light-brown dough. He hung close to the wall and tried to coax me to follow him around the corner, all the time saying: “Hashish? You want hashish? Good hashish.” He kept kneading the light-brown mass and showing it to me, like an offering. And kept that snake stare on me, hoping to transfix me. I gave him an angry look, turned away and immediately went back to the buses.

That bit was definitely in Herat. I remember distinctly. But where the Hammam was located is not clear. At any rate, being in that cement cell was a wonderful experience. For the first time in days my pores opened and the sweat rolled out. The man who led me to the cell had given me a tiny bar of soap and a thin cotton washrag. I scrubbed myself with soap. It was simple yellow soap that didn’t foam up so much, but it did the job. I soaked the washrag in the water and scrubbed away days of dirt, enjoying the humidity after pouring bowls of water over my head and body to clean away the soap.

I sat on the cement bank and leaned against the wall, relaxed in my nakedness, enjoying the privacy and the sound of the water trickling from the tap onto the floor and along the groove in the floor to the drain. I’m not sure how long I was in there. Maybe an hour, maybe a little less or a little more. Perhaps because it was so enchanting and so unique for me, my memory has placed it in a location that is not tied to geography, only to experience.

Outside – and this I remember very well – in the dry heat of the day, I felt like I had been reborn.

Getting to Mashhad from Herat meant crossing the border of course. In those days Iran was under the Shah, a rather non-benevolent dictator supported by Anglo-American oil companies. Only about ten years later would the Islamic revolutionaries drive him from power. The border crossing had army personnel everywhere and it was clear the customs people were not going to put up with any crap from anyone. We all had to get off the bus, walk through the checkpoint, show our passports and wait until the bus joined us on the other side. Once again, being an Italian citizen had its advantages. I got a nice smile from the guy who checked my passport and the one word: “Italiano!” before he waved me through.

Back on the bus, we found we had some new passengers, two young men who were tall, had well-tended short hair, were rather light of skin, handsome, energetic and spoke perfect English. They stood up in the aisle and enticed the young European passengers, encouraging them to join them in a short tour of Mashhad when we got there, to stay in a student hostel over night. They said they were university students on vacation. Some people responded in a friendly manner and the young men would sit with them and talk and laugh. Not me. It was obvious to me that these guys, very fit and of military age, were certainly not just a couple of college students taking a bus to Mashhad from the border. I took out a book and buried my nose in it, so they had no chance to engage me in conversation.

A few kilometers after the border crossing, the bus was stopped by an army patrol. A young guy in an army uniform, with crazy eyes and a white bandage around his neck, entered the bus and went down the aisle, all the time sniffing like a dog and swinging his crazy eyes from person to person. Apparently he didn’t get a whiff of what he was sniffing for and he turned around and went back down the aisle and out. But an old Afghan man had been taken from the bus. The baggage compartment had been opened and his suitcase was on the ground, open, and full of cartons of cigarettes. In a few moments the baggage compartment was closed and the bus started back along the road to Mashhad. The old white-haired and white-bearded Afghan stayed back there with the soldiers.

NEXT INSTALLMENT: Mashhad to Tehran

 

’til Fire and Brimstone Fall

Forty-four songs from one of the best songwriters in country music.

http://www.atmanrecords.de/danny-antonelli/songs-by-danny-antonelli.html

You can listen to all 44 songs on the player that is embedded in the link above.

 

Kabul to Kandahar

The ride up through the Khyber Pass to Jalalabad was, as I said, frightening, but at the same time awesome, in the old meaning of the word — it filled me with awe. What kept hitting me along the way every time I dared to look out the window of that bus was the sheer magnitude of the mass of stony earth we were climbing on this zig-zag path along its outer edge. And to think that so many invaders of the Indus Valley had come through the pass, heading down of course, and had conquered the people who had been living by that mighty river.

But I was glad to be through with that and finally on my way to Kabul. I arrived late in the evening and found a hostel of sorts, where I took a single room rather than a group room with 6 beds.

In those days I avoided drugs of any kind. I had drug years behind me. And I would have some drug years again in the future. But in 1971 I wasn’t interested in any of those things. I was learning how to see and hear and be without the blur that drugs induced. Certainly I wasn’t against drugs, I have never been one who wants to ban them. In fact, I believe that all drugs should be decriminalized, made legal, and be available in pharmacies for anyone who wants to take them. If you are not a responsible person, then too bad, you die of an overdose or you go to a hospital to endure a cure. The only purpose in banning a substance is to jack up its price on the black market. Rather get it pure and at the lowest possible price, generic and unbranded if possible. It’s your body, destroy it any way you like. As long as drugs are not “pushed” onto the buyers, then where is the problem? Ideally, 50% of the profits from their sale could be sent into the health system so that we can all benefit from the maladies of the few, because there is no way that suddenly millions of people will start injecting heroin just because it’s available for five bucks a shot at the pharmacy down the road.

Anyway, Kabul was just a stop on the way to Kandahar. There were buses leaving every day, so one wouldn’t be so hard to find, but I wanted to rest up a bit before starting on the next leg of my journey. In those days Kabul was a peaceful place. The streets were wide and the people walked most everywhere. There was a king as head of state, Mohammed Zahir Shah, who was a modernizer. Women worked as doctors and lawyers and were able to move about freely without wearing special clothing or covering their heads. At least that’s how it was in Kabul when I was there. I saw women in skirts and high heels and men in business suits, and although from time to time I also saw a woman in a burka, it was more of an exception than a rule.

The country had always been clannish and tribal and I suppose that hasn’t changed. But the new element that crept in after the Russian invasion was the religious fanaticism. It was used as a tool to excite and motivate resistance against the “godless” communists, but it has since become a cancer in the body politic of the nation. Even in Pakistan, where religion had been used to split Pakistan away from India, it was not really openly visible. I had the impression that religion in these countries was like religion in Italy, a part of their lives and culture, but nothing to scream and shout about.

I only had that one rucksack with me, washed-out green like an army rucksack but nowhere near as large. A couple of pairs of underwear, some t-shirts, an extra pair of jeans, two pairs of socks. If I needed something more I would be able to buy it along the way. Clothes were cheap everywhere. The cotton fabrics came from India, most probably smuggled in so that no tariffs applied, and I had already learned in Africa that you should never wear anything synthetic in those climates, it would stick to your skin because it created a kind of sauna around you.

Yes, I was a cigarette smoker in those days, and cigarettes were cheap in that whole region, so I bought a carton of unfiltered cigarettes, which I determined not to break into because I wanted to deliver them unbroken to my half-brother David when I eventually got to London. The Afghans used a type of tobacco called naswar, a kind of snuff which they took a pinch of and placed under their lower lips or snorted. That was definitely not for me. Once upon a time I had tried chewing tobacco and it burned my mouth and made me vomit. But I stuffed the carton of cigs into my rucksack and only bought single packs to smoke along the way. Actually, during the trip I hardly smoked at all. I didn’t have that much time on my hands, even though the bus journeys were extremely long.

In fact, the journey from Kabul to Kandahar turned out to be much longer than I expected.

On my second day in Kabul I went down to what you might call a bus station. It certainly didn’t look anything like where Greyhound buses left from. It was just a place where there were lots of buses and lots of drivers and lots of people all more or less haphazardly gathered in one rather spread out location. I went from group to group and asked about a bus to Kandahar. They told me the next bus would leave early the next day. But I kept asking different people until I got the answer I wanted, which was that a bus would be leaving after lunch, which meant around two in the afternoon. I went to the bus and the driver and found out where to get a ticket for that bus. Since it was already after ten in the morning, I went to a nearby restaurant and sat down, drank some tea, smoked a cigarette, read my book (I always had a book with me) and then around noon had lunch (rice and some lamb curry), a postprandial cigarette, more tea and read another chapter of my book (probably something by Somerset Maugham, because I felt that after reading Ulysses by James Joyce while I was in Delhi – it took me six months to do that – that I was allowed some literary entertainment from an author who had passed through exotic lands).

I went back to the bus I was supposed to take to Kandahar and a small crowd of potential passengers had already gathered there. All of us were obviously anxious to get going. It was already past two in the afternoon and the journey to Kandahar is about 480 kilometers (about 300 miles). The road is on a flat surface all the way, with no mountain passes, but the buses were not capable of traveling faster than 80 km/hr (about 50 mph), and even if they had been capable, you wouldn’t want them to go faster because of the poor state of the buses and the unknown competency of the drivers.

So we were looking forward to at least a six hour journey, perhaps longer, depending on the condition of the road and if we stopped often along the way. The road turned out to be in pretty good shape, even though I heard that after the war with the Russians the road was practically unusable for most of its length.

At four, we boarded the bus. At just before five we left the station. We managed to get to the edge of Kabul around the time it got dark and that was when the bus driver pulled over to the side of the road and said that we would be spending the night there because it was much to dangerous to drive through the night. Nobody complained. I had a double seat to myself so I used my rucksack as a pillow and stretched out over the seat and fell asleep. It was cheaper than another night in lodgings.

The next morning just after sunrise we were on our way. After about 50k we stopped at a roadside shack where tea and flat Afghani bread was on offer. It was a wonderful breakfast. And behind the shack, a little way up the sandy hill, there was a place where we westerners went to pee while some of the religious passengers went to pray facing Mecca. In fact the bus stopped two more times that day for prayers, which gave the others among us a chance to stretch and pee. Smoking was allowed in the bus.

The only other remarkable moment of the journey was when, sometime after we had covered a little more than half of the distance, and we were in the middle of nowhere, just sandy plains on the left side of the bus and some sandy hills on the right, the bus stopped. It wasn’t a prayer stop and it wasn’t a toilet stop. It was just a stop, with the motor still running. Nothing but dusty plains and sandy hills. We waited about 5 minutes. Then, like an apparition, the turbaned head of a man appeared over the ridge of the hill. He grew taller as he emerged and I could see that he was toting a cloth bag over his shoulder and an ancient-looking musket-like rifle in his hand. He came determinedly down the sandy hill and the driver opened the door for him. He gave the driver a slip of paper which might have been money or might have been a ticket, I don’t know, and he came down the aisle of the bus and took a seat on the right about halfway up.

The driver closed the door and we were off again to Kandahar.

Our new fellow passenger was a man of a certain age, wiry, a sun-browned face, a thin grey beard and an isosceles triangle of a nose, large and strong with wide nostrils, as if breathing through it in the sandy environment was essential in order to filter out the dust particles in the air. However it seemed that those nostrils were also essential for the intake of some naswar, because after placing his rifle in the overhead baggage rack and his cloth bag on the seat next to him, he took out a round tin, put a few grains of its contents on the skin of his hand behind his thumb and inhaled through his nose. This did not cause him to sneeze. But it did cause him to sit up straighter. Then he pinched more of the naswar  between his thumb and forefinger and placed it between his lower lip and his teeth, closed the tin, put it away inside some hidden pocket of the many folds in his roomy khet partug. (If you want to know exactly what that is, look it up in the encyclopaedia.) After about 10 minutes, he spat on the floor, a big green glob that landed directly in the middle of the aisle.

Three hours later we were in Kandahar. When I got off the bus, it was 40 degrees (C) and dry as a bone.

NEXT INSTALLMENT: To Herat and then to Mashad

Interlude:
On the journey, mostly by bus, I slept a great deal. After reading a few pages in the heat and bouncy noise of the bus there was nothing else to do. The view out the window was always the same: dusty brown landscape stretching to the horizon, with no vegetation, but with an infinitely deep periwinkle blue sky. Sleep means dreams, and dreams turn into poems:

disjunction

disjunction
tottering defenseless
emerald plain
she is a sorceress
drunk on submission
ejecting her soul
into evensong
red blood alarm
flight from anchorage
clouds on the horizon
death watch
lights of destruction
she is a bird
oh
any old bird will do
then down
ambushed
on the ground
thief thief thief
ergo
dramatis personae
egg-shaped eggs
and three cousins from
sweet houses of voice
singing hallelujah
hallucinating godhead
but she
(our witch our)
quiet rather aphonic
united with sky
hooked fingers blue-green
frowns oppose moons
night crashes headlong
and her soul (soul?)
is not a bird
just a wandering thought
in the hermetic void
of finite infinity
ta ra

****

 

 

The Road To Kabul

From the Pakistani side of the border, I took a taxi to Lahore. It’s about a half hour drive and it was hot and I was tired and after talking with the driver for a few minutes, I fell asleep. I was sitting in the front seat, with my olive green backpack between my legs. I chose the front seat so as not to play the Pasha, but it made no difference to the driver. After our short conversation, and after I fell asleep, he must have rummaged in the pocket of my backpack because later, after he had dropped me off at the bus station, I discovered that a cassette tape with many of the songs I had written in Delhi was gone. I remember having pushed it into one of the outer pockets of the backpack at the last minute, thinking that maybe I would be able to listen to it again in Europe. But it was gone, and all the songs were gone too. Me with my guitar, singing into the cassette recorder. I was sad and angry when I found out, but there was nothing to be done about it. And nothing else was missing, so I let it go. Of what use could it possibly be to him anyway? Maybe he could sell the cassette to somebody for a few rupees, and the new owner might even listen to it once before recording over the strange music he found on it. But its real value was next to nothing. I can’t even remember which songs were on it.

Two years later, in Gary, Indiana, I would have a quarter-inch tape with new songs I had recorded in a studio in Philadelphia taken from me along with my guitar and my backpack. In that case, I had been hitchhiking to Chicago from Cove Gap, West Virginia, and the last guy I got a ride with through Indiana left me at a level crossing after sunset where a train was supposed to stop on its way to Chicago. A train eventually did stop there but the conductor came down the steps and blocked my way onto the train and I ended up trying to hitchhike my way out of there, got picked up by four guys who packed me into the middle of the backseat of the car and then proceeded to rob me at gunpoint, leaving me to stand in front of the headlights of their car with my back to a garage door.

Before that, while we were riding toward the place where they would unload me, one of them kept saying: “Let’s kill him. Let’s kill him.” But the leader of the four — who was so small he could hardly see over the steering wheel of the car — looked into the back seat and said: “You won’t tell anybody, will you?” Automatically, I said: “No, I won’t.” And so they let me out after taking my pack and my guitar and I stood there in the glare of the headlights and out of the side of my eye I saw a wire fence about a foot high and scraggly bushes and somebody yelled: “Run!” and I dove to my left over the fence, rolled through and under the bushes and was suddenly running through a passageway between some apartment houses. I stumbled blindly along, panic shooting through my body along with the adrenaline of still being alive. It was a hot summer night and I saw that one door was open behind a screen door, a television on in the background. I knocked on the aluminum frame and said: “Please, can you call the police, I’ve just been robbed.” The man looked at me and shut the door in my face.

Later, after I finally convinced a couple of girls to call the police and the police came and picked me up, I remember how they stopped in an alley and asked me a series of questions about where I was from and whether I would come back to testify against the robbers if they were caught. I mentioned my mother of course and the Italian consulate and that I would come back at any time to testify and that must have convinced them that I was just an idiot who didn’t know anything about Gary, Indiana and not some drug dealer who had made a bad deal. So at the precinct where they went in to make their report, one of the cops gave me a dollar and I called my friend in Highland Park, a suburb of Chicago, and he drove down to Gary with his brother and a German shepherd and picked me up. About seven months later a police report arrived at my mother’s house in Seattle and it said that there had been no solution to the crime committed against me and that the case had therefore been indefinitely suspended.

I believe the tape with my songs on it was just as useless to the guys who robbed me as the cassette tape was to the taxi driver in Pakistan. The guitar might have fetched a few bucks, but it certainly wasn’t precious, and the rest of my stuff, my clothes — mostly shirts, a pair of clean jeans and some underwear — might have served a purpose for somebody for a while, but all-in-all it hadn’t amounted to much of a catch for them. Not even the fifty-something dollars I handed over in cash could have made their night very interesting. And how many years of that life outside of jail and still alive did they have left after I was gone?

Lahore has not remained in my memory at all. I got on a bus for Peshawar and promptly fell asleep again. Pakistan was not beautiful, not a tourist paradise and the drive through run-down city neighborhoods and scruffy villages certainly did nothing to keep my interest. So I slept.

In Peshawar, I found a cheap hotel near the bus station, ate some flat bread dipped in vegetable curry and went to my room. It had a wooden chair and a bed without a mattress, a rope-spring bed. These types of beds were very common in India and Pakistan and, as I  found out later, in Afghanistan as well. The hemp rope spring is tied starting at the left most hole at the head of the bed, then back and forth the length of the bed. At the right-most hole at the head of the bed, the end is carried under the rail and inside the post to the first hole in the side rail. The rope is woven over and under the rope going lengthwise. The rope spring is tightened with a straining wrench, repeatedly in the same order in which the rope was woven until the end is reached. At this point, the rope is wrapped around the wrench to secure it and tighten it and then tied with a secure slip knot as close to the outside of the rail as possible. Rope springs stretch with time so they need periodic tightening. But this rope spring was good and tight and I had a roughly woven grey wool blanket with me which I spread over the roped bed. I used my backpack as a pillow. After I propped the back of the wooden chair against the door handle, I fell asleep without any problem.

The next morning, very early, I found a bus that would take me as far as the border crossing to Afghanistan, a place called Torkham.

Jamrud Fort, on the outskirts of Peshawar, was the official entrance to the Khyber Pass. Set high above the road, at a perfect military vantage point, with thick stone walls, the fort watched over the gateway entrance to one of the world’s oldest known mountain passes along an important trade route between Central Asia and South Asia as well as being a strategic military location and an integral part of the ancient Silk Road. Darius, the Persian king, had been here, and Alexander the Great, and Genghis Khan! And now here I was on a rickety bus, ready to make my way up one of the most famous roads in the world!

Of course I didn’t have a camera, because in those days I was determined to remember everything I saw and thus eliminate the need for a camera, which only rendered real one instant of a journey, anyway, and not the whole experience. Sometimes I think that maybe a couple of photos would have been interesting in terms of documentation, but then I also think that a camera would have been a liability because of its value as booty for thieves. Better to carry nothing of perceptible value. No gold or silver chains, no rings, no sunglasses, no shiny objects that might attract unwanted attention. And that included not dressing like a hippie. I wore blue jeans and a khaki military-style shirt of thin cotton, and custom-made boots of sturdy brown leather that had square toes but were otherwise like cowboy boots, with leather uppers that went halfway up my calves. Those boots were made for me by a cobbler in New Delhi and they served me excellently for years. They finally fell apart after being immersed in water and then dried in the California sun, years later after I returned to Los Angeles.

Going up the Khyber Pass in a rickety bus is not a wonderful experience. The view is awesome of course but death grins with every curve and at the approach of every bus and truck. After 20 curves and about 50 trucks you finally experience fright fatigue and fall without thinking much about it into ultimate Hinduism and say to yourself: “Life will be so much better next time!”

The bus stopped in Torkham and we all had to get off and find another bus that would take us the rest of the way, through Jalalabad to Kabul. The most frightening part of the bus ride was over. The road from here on out would be fairly straight and without steep drop-offs at the side of the road. But this little village was also the place where you could buy counterfeit weapons of every kind, from ancient British Enfield rifles to modern Kalashnikov knock-offs. I walked around the open marketplace where everybody, I mean everybody, had some type of weapon slung over their shoulder. I saw an astonishing variety of guns hanging from wires strung across under the cloth roofs of the stalls, the guns hanging like dried rabbits or geese or lambs stripped of skin in an outdoor meat market. It was weird to be among so many armed men and so many guns, and yet not for a moment did I feel threatened by anyone. The bearded men in their shalwar — loose pajama-like trousers — and kameez — a long shirt or tunic — most all of them with some type of  headgear, a kufi, Peshawari cap, turban, sindhi cap or pakul, their traditional headgear, walked and talked with each other calmly, a few of them curiously looking at me, but not in an aggressive way. After all, I was the stranger here, the anomaly, with no beard, no weapon, no head-covering.

As I strolled past the stalls, the men inside smiled and waved at me to come in and have a look at their wares. I nodded and smiled back, the palm of my hand going to my heart, and kept moving. Then I came to a series of small wooden shacks, with open doorways, each with a smiling hat-less man standing in the doorway and waving at me to come on in. There were no weapons hanging, in fact nothing really to be seen, so I approached one of the huts and the smiling man walked in and I followed him. There on an unpolished wood table about a meter back from the doorway were five tallish stacks of rectangular slabs of hashish, each slab about 30 centimeters wide and 50 centimeters long and probably 2 centimeters thick. The slabs on the stacks were slightly different shades of black, with the slab on top of the darkest stack on the far right of the table sporting a large five-pointed gold star. Right next to that stack was a balance scale, a brass T with two round brass plates attached to the ends of the T with fine chains and a series of weights in a wooden holder next to it.

“Here. You try,” said the smiling man and proceeded to pick a slab up from the middle and light its corner from the sole burning candle in the room. Sweet hash smoke curled into my nostrils and I bobbed my head and smiled and quickly left the shack. Outside, the heat seemed slightly less intense and my perception of my surroundings became sharper. But I knew why, and I knew that it was imperative that I return to where the buses were gathered for the trip to Kabul. Sure, even that short sniff of hash smoke had its effect, but I knew there was no way I was going to survive this journey without being as connected to basic reality as possible.

The buses were ready to roll, and after handing over a handful of rupees, I got on the bus for Kabul.

*********
Reality Now is a song I wrote in 2013, which includes the scene about the robbery in Gary, Indiana.

Reality Now

I’D RATHER BE LUCKY

ROCK music, with a heavy guitar touch and lyrics that mean something, as usual.

Listen

New album released on 01.01.2016 and available from all the usual digital outlets for download or streaming, including iTunes, Amazon, Deezer, Spotify, Juke, etc.

A booklet for the album is available as a pdf file.

Let me know you bought the album and I’ll send you the booklet.

Enjoy!

One of the songs:

 

Crossing The Border

Getting to the India-Pakistan border was not the problem, crossing it was. After taking a taxi from Amritsar to the border crossing, I walked to where the Indian border guards were checking passports. There were quite a few people waiting to cross, even some Europeans. When it was finally my turn, the guard looked at my passport, checked the various pages and smiled: “Italiano?” I nodded and gave him my best Italian smile. “I’m sorry sir,” he said as he returned my passport to me. “You need an exit visa.”

I didn’t get upset, but I was incredibly surprised. An exit visa? That meant that once you were in India they wouldn’t let you out unless you had permission to leave. It was insane. But it was India and its bureaucracy and there was nothing the guard could do about it. “You will have to go back to New Delhi, sir, and get an exit visa.” There was no way I was going to go back to New Delhi. I asked him if there was an administrative center somewhere nearby. He said that about 10 kilometers away there was a town where an empowered administrator was located. I got the name of the town and, with my green rucksack in tow, I took a taxi to that little town and to the administration building.

The town was rather insignificant, and the administration building was small, unpainted and occupied by a man who sat behind a large empty desk in a room only lit by the maximum of daylight which could get through windows encrusted with years of dust and dirt. Nobody had cleaned anything on or in this building for a long long time. But the man sitting behind the desk was smiling and seemed happy to see me. I sat down and told him of my predicament. He said that unfortunately he could not help me because unless he had a directive from New Delhi, he couldn’t issue an exit visa. So, unfortunately (still smiling and leaning his head slightly to the side) I would have to go back to New Delhi.

“If you get approval from New Delhi, however, you can issue an exit visa?”

“Why yes of course sir,” he said, his polite smile not fading in the least.

“OK,” I said, “then call Mr. Singh, the Foreign Minister, he is a good friend of my mother, Mrs. Milena Antonelli, from the Italian Embassy. Tell Mr. Singh that Mrs. Antonelli’s son is requesting authorization for an exit visa.”

His smile didn’t go away, but somehow it lost its shine. He also didn’t seem able to find his voice.

“Please,” I continued, “call him right away because it is getting late and I want to cross over the border today before they close it for the night.” I gave him my #1 smile as encouragement.

He cleared his throat and slowly got up. He had managed to find a little more of the shine in his smile before he turned away to go into the back room to make the phone call, since there was no phone on his desk in the front room. He almost forgot to take my passport with him, but I pushed it toward him across the table and he came back and reached for it and said: “I am going to make the phone call now.”

While he was gone I had time to look around the bare room. No file cabinets, no other tables, a light bulb under a shade in the center of the ceiling, but it was off. The corners of the room were really dark, but my eyes had gotten used to the darkness and I could see the dust which lay across the floor and the window sills like fine grey powder. When my eyes wandered back to the desk, I noticed something that hadn’t really penetrated my consciousness while I was busy talking to the man. On the right side of the desk there were tiny little balls of what looked like the smallest raisins in the world. Then I started to feel slightly nauseous. Those weren’t raisins, nor were they mouse droppings. They were rolled up buggers, snot, which he had either flung or dropped on the right side of his desk. More than half of them were already gathering dust, so they had been there for quite a while. I instinctively pushed my chair back a few inches from the desk.

The man returned with a large friendly smile pasted across his face. He had been gone for about ten minutes, and he looked satisfied. Courteously, he returned my passport to me and said: “Your exit visa has been approved.” He paused for a moment and then added: “That will be 40 Rupees.” His courteous smile remained in place. The visa was there on the page in English and Hindi, the stamp was official, the signature was fresh. I smiled back and handed him the 40 Rupees, shook his hand (despite my misgivings about which hand he used for his snot) and found another taxi to take me back to the border.

Sitting in the back seat of the taxi for the 10 kilometer ride back to the border gave me time to assess what had just happened. There was no way in the world that the administrator from a little town near the border would risk making a call to a Foreign Minister. First of all, he would never get through all the secretaries that formed a ring of bureaucratic protection around the exalted man, and secondly, he would never risk his job by identifying himself as the one who refused to give an exit visa to the son of a friend of the minister. So, he sat in the back of the building for what seemed to him the appropriate time for a phone call to get through to the minister and for a brief conversation to have taken place, and in the meantime he put the visa in my passport, stamped it and put his signature on it. For his trouble and just to make it all look official, he took 40 Rupees and was glad that I hadn’t asked for an official receipt.

Both of us had emerged with no loss of face and with some reward. Bad karma had been avoided and maybe even some good karma had been earned.

The guard at the border was not the same one I had seen before, so there was no smile of recognition, but there was a courtesy smile and a “I hope you enjoyed your sojourn in India and that you will one day return!”

“Yes,” I replied. “Yes and yes!” Then I stepped across the line and walked the short distance to the Pakistani checkpoint.

©2015 Danny Antonelli

NEXT: The road to Kabul

*******************

What follows is the poem Camilo Quadros, from my book Conversations with my dog

©2015 Danny Antonelli

1971

In 1971, I was living in India. In New Delhi. My mother, who was an attaché with the Italian embassy, had been transferred there from Nairobi late in 1969 and I was dragged along with her, as always. I never really got used to leaving people behind, but I had done it often enough so that once it happened, I got over it rather quickly. And this was all happening in the era before the Internet and emails, so one could only write letters in order to stay in touch. And I had already discovered that teenage boys did not write letters. Or if they did, they wrote only once and never again. That had been my experience after we left Los Angeles for Antananarivo, Madagascar. One letter from Dick McCann and nothing after that.

In India, I remember writing a thick many-paged letter to a friend in Nairobi and handing it to a guy behind the counter at the hotel we were staying at, along with some money for the postage. Only months later did I realize that the money had probably gone into his pocket and the letter had been posted to the trash. By the time I realized that (having now been in India long enough to understand how poverty worked) it was too late to try and reestablish a connection with my lost school friends in Nairobi.

New Delhi was hot and smoggy and when it wasn’t humid, it was dusty with grains of sand swept in on the wind from Jaipur and its sandy desert landscape. There wasn’t much for me to do there. So I spent about 6 months reading Ulysses by James Joyce and playing the piano and once in a while going to Connaught Circus to search through the book stalls and find gems of English literature at knockdown prices. Books were being dumped in India at next-to-nothing prices in order to help the youth of India learn about English literature. After all those years of British domination, the main object of every middle class family was for their children to get a good Anglo education, with A-levels that would allow them entry into a British university. Even I had studied for and obtained two Cambridge A-levels during my time there: English and History.

Even though I had traveled down to Goa and spent a few weeks naked on a beach and had subsequently traveled to Benares and had a book of poetry published, time had passed slowly and I was feeling uninspired and getting depressed. Then suddenly my depression was shattered by a letter that my mother got from my half-brother David. Somehow, after years of searching, he had discovered that my mother was in New Delhi and he decided to make contact. In his letter he said he was going to travel to London and would like to then continue and come and visit us in India.

It dawned on me that this was my golden opportunity. I told my mother that I would go and meet David in London and then bring him back to Delhi.

In 1971, flights for normal people were expensive. A $500 flight to London from New Delhi would cost about $2900 today. Yes, seriously! That’s why we traveled mostly by ship. It was much cheaper. In 1972, when I returned to Europe from India, I went by ship and it cost me $350. It should have only been a 12-day journey through the Suez Canal to Genoa, but the Egyptians and Israelis decided to have a war, so we were rerouted to go down the west coast of Africa and around the Cape, and so the journey lasted 32 days instead. That means it cost about $2000 in today’s money. That’s about $62 per day, with full board — three meals a day and wine with lunch and dinner!

For me, traveling by plane would have been much too expensive. Traveling by ship was not practical at that time, so I decided to travel overland.

India and Pakistan have been fighting with each other since partition in 1947. In December of 1971 there would be another conflict. But by then I would be back home.

The main obstacle to the journey would be crossing over the India-Pakistan border. I had heard it was possible, though it was slow going. In fact, a few months before David’s letter had arrived, I was going to travel back to Europe with an Italian guy and his girlfriend. They had a VW van that was tricked out as a camper and I rode along with them as far as Amritsar but then was so ill that they had to put me on a train back to Delhi. Actually, I wasn’t really ill at first, I was disturbed by the guy. There was something about him that had begun eating away at me shortly after I had agreed to go with him and the girl. Maybe it was the fact that the girl – who must at one time have been extremely beautiful – had had one half of her face burned so that her skin looked like melted plastic, all buckled and pocked.

It wasn’t her or her face that bothered me. She was a brave soul to move around in public looking like that and having to deal with the reactions of people who saw her. And she was a sweet girl. She bore her affliction with equanimity. No. It was him. There was something about him that made me uncomfortable soon after we returned from a visit to the Taj Mahal. It was like he felt responsible for the way she looked. He was taking her on this long journey from Italy to India and back to give her a glimpse of a world that she would perhaps never see again. He was taking her back to Italy so that she could begin a long process of skin graft operations which would try and repair her face to make it acceptable to European eyes. And then, perhaps, after having done his duty by her, he would feel that he could leave her.

The longer I was in his company, riding in the van, the less I trusted him and the more determined I was to escape. So I made myself look and feel ill. And by the time we got to Amritsar, I looked so ill that he couldn’t help but let me get on a train back to Delhi. He was angry of course, because I was going to help pay for the journey back to Italy. And maybe he sensed that I was exaggerating my discomfort in order to get away. But it worked, and I made it back to New Delhi. And then I spent almost a week in bed because my wanting so badly to get ill actually got me ill!

NEXT TIME: Crossing The Border

*******************

What follows is Chapter 2 from my novel Shoot The Albatross

2.

Heat.

Humid August oppressed anything obliged to move. My cotton shirt was plastered to my skin. Outside, the white marble mirrored a dancing sun that blinded the pilgrims who had gathered to worship at this shrine to motherhood.

I leaned my shoulder against a cool interior wall. Eyes adjusted to the darkness, I watched her. She was shuffling around in the special cloth boots and inspecting the marble latticework of the fence that enclosed the false tombs. She traced her fingers over the inlaid slivers of pink jade which had been worked into the marble as an endless chain of flowers. Eventually, the chain drew her attention up toward the perpetual night of the famous dome. She cocked her head to one side and listened as the dome faithfully echoed the rustle of cloth, camera clicks, sighs and whispers. Then, step by step, she disappeared below to inspect the chamber where the young bride and the old king were buried, side by side, in identical marble caskets.

Together, they came up from the tomb. Again I was startled by her disfigured face.

“Fire,” her husband said. He looked on avidly as I inspected the smoky crescent moon on her forehead. It edged down as far as the bridge of her nose and then sliced across one cheek. The flesh within the crescent was pocked and scaly, like charred pigskin. On her other cheek a soft layer of down reflected the sun.

Her eyes were emeralds. They shifted nervously from him to me. Then back again to him. Then to me.

One of her eyebrows was gone, along with the eyelashes. Her hair was dusty blond and cut straight at her shoulders. She might have been beautiful.

“I’m writing,” he said, forcefully marking time with his bony hand, his fingers spread against the sky, slicing the air between us as we walked through the narrow streets on our way back to the hotel.

I looked at her and decided.

“The book begins … ,” he droned.

The back of my hand brushed her wrist as we walked. Her eyes burned into mine, half fear, half curiosity.

*****

New Delhi to Istanbul 1971

©2015 Danny Antonelli

It’s Always Been This Way

It’s Always Been This Way

What Remains by Danny Antonelli – Release Notes

My autobiographical album WHAT REMAINS
is now available on over 20 outlets around the world, including:

AMAZON
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dmovies-tv&field-keywords=Danny%2BAntonelli%2B-%2BWhat%2BRemains

MEDIAMARKT
http://musik-download.mediamarkt.de/search?criterion=Danny+Antonelli+-+What+Remains

DEEZER
http://www.deezer.com/album/10989832

iTUNES
https://itunes.apple.com/de/album/id1028997150

UPC: 3614594336840
Label: Atman Lc 01692
Release Date: 09/01/2015
Price: Front One
PPD: 5.45€ / 7.7$ / 4.85£
Public: 9.99€ / 10.99$ / 8.99£
Danny Antonelli – What Remains