The End of Monstrous Means

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justice  justice

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                           scotconsumer

 

 

The End of Monstrous Means

   I was watching dear CSpan this morning and Ron Suskind of One Percent Doctrine spoke at also dear Politics and Prose Bookstore in <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Washington DC. He spoke of the notion fiatted by Darth Dick Cheney, paraphrased, ''if there was even a 1 percent chance of terrorists getting a weapon of mass destruction — and there has been a small probability of such an occurrence for some time — the United States must now act as if it were a certainty'' ‘making suspicion, not evidence, the new threshold for action.’

   This was a horrible but important talk which was chilling9 (cf  Vonnegut’s icenine in which a drop of the stuff turns everything to ice). However the piece that I want to remark upon is the notion Suskind brought up near the end of his talk. He mentioned that George Kennan of the Marshall Plan and of Cold War ‘containment,’ wrote that if we wanted to “preserve a moral departure point,” we could not allow the means, however noble the ends, of ‘more Dresdens.’

   I’ve been haunted not only by Dresden, a firebombing in which some 40,000 civilians were incinerated, but by the hideous firebombings and firestorms of the great wooden cities of Japan before Hiroshima (150,000 civilians dead) and Nagasaki (80,000 civilians dead).

“On March 10 1945, the US abandoned the last rules of warfare against civilians when 334 B-29's dropped close to half a million incendiary bombs on sleeping Tokyo.  
  “The aim was to cause maximum carnage in an overcrowded city of flimsy wooden buildings; an estimated 100,000 people were 'scorched, boiled and baked to death,' in the words of the attack's architect, General Curtis LeMay. It was then the single largest mass killing of World War II, dwarfing even the destruction of the German city of Dresden on Feb. 13, 1945.  . . . Even the city's rivers were no escape from the firestorm: the jellied petroleum that filled the bombs, a prototype of the napalm that laid waste to much of Vietnam two decades later, stuck to everything and turned water into fire. … ‘Canals boiled, metal melted, and buildings and human beings burst spontaneously into flames,’ wrote John Dower in War Without Mercy. People who dived into rivers and canals for relief were boiled to death in the intense heat. . . . The bombing incinerated over 15 kilometers of central Tokyo, left over a million homeless and opened the curtain on an orgy of destruction in the final months of the Pacific War that included dozens of similar raids on Japanese cities and culminated in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August. When the droning of bombers finally stopped on August 15, 1945, nearly 70 cities had been reduced to rubble and well over half a million people, mostly civilians, were dead. LeMay reportedly said: “If we had lost the war, we would have been tried as war criminals.”  [David McNeill, Japan Focus.] 66 other Japanese wooden cities the size of Houston and Baltimore and Chattanooga and Chicago were firestormed.

     Anyhow, the idea that will make us human as last is the grokking that you can not separate ends and means. Mr. Suskind mention a phrase from the Hebrew Bible: “Justice. Justice. This you must pursue.” One justice for the ends. One justice for the means. Suskind continued, “If you forget about the conflict of ends and means, you’ve missed it.”

  In their no doubt zealous desire to “protect the American people,” our leaders have spent the precious reputation of a country which tries to be better. (Now this is an illusion. I was certainly never taught in school here in USA about the M69 napalm firestorms in 67 of Japan’s wood, straw and paper cities.) How ever faux, the world saw us as somehow trying to be just. Now our Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and our general hysteria and grotesque hubris have made us distrusted and disgusting. It’s all about means and ends. Your ends can not be nobler than your means were. Amnesia and/or rationalization can blur the memory, but we must fight for means that, if not, forlornly, serene, are at least not vile.

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7 Earth . Caban . Earthquake. Heron . East . tzolkin 135 07.03.06 mon

932 days/2y6m18d left/1364  

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the education-obsessed world begins today with you ..

.. let’s spend the $820,000 per minute Military Budget on education instead

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Viscera .. the Obsidian Arts

  Viscera .. the Obsidian Arts

 

   “Spirit, mind, heart — this is the trinity that people seek to comprehend, to tend, to organize. Then their life will be sweet, will be serene, will be complete.

   ” Why is this not so?” Because of what no one can bear to attend to. Because of what seems ‘beneath us’ as civilized persons.
   Viscera. We ignore or disdain viscera to our implacable, even ferocious danger.
   “By ‘viscera’ I mean ‘the guts.’ All the gluck under the heart. Forfend that our highfalutin' philosophy discuss intestines. We are too fine. We are evolved. We have a big brain, a Big Brain. We cherish our heart, we polish our soul.

   “Yeats speaks to the neglected viscera when he says that 'we end where all ladders start, in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.' I would suggest that he meant the viscera here, the ‘basement’ of the heart. But ‘viscera’ doesn't fit the irresistible rhyme of his lines.

   “Tonight I come to laud viscera — where 'ladders start.' I suggest that unless we educate and placate viscera, we will only pretend to be civilized.”

   Risma smiled at the fashionably arrayed intestines seated before her in the Laugh Institute's lecture hall. The Laugh Institute had busts and statues of her heros in alcoves around the room. Rowan Atkinson, John Cleese, Dame Edna, Patricia Routledge. Risma had always said that she didn't quite trust the Christian Bible because it didn't have enough jokes in it. Risma smiled warmly at the audience and allowed herself an invisible shrug because in spite of the sartorial efforts of the humans she perused, none of them was as elegantly dressed a bag of guts as her perfect, silver Burmese cat companion, Frolic.

   “We want to be generous, kind, patient, even holy. These are not the top four words on Viscera's agenda.

   “In probably the dumbest and most dangerous move in human history, Christianity decided to divide the elemental forces into God and the Devil. Holy moly, what grotesque havoc and hypocrisy that has wrecked upon the hapless world.

   “Twenty centuries have been spent damning viscera instead of educating it.

   “Viscera cannot be defeated anymore than air can be defeated or water can be defeated.”

   Risma smiled, “Once I walked down a long wide hall in the old San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. There were modern art paintings hung all along this wall. I noticed as I moved from painting to painting, my first response was what I began to understand as purely visceral.

   “I liked this painting. I didn't like that painting. I found myself nodding or shaking my head, making in my gut a mute, immediate, pre-verbal meeting with the painting. I could then go on to speak in heart, mind, or spirit terms why I liked the painting.

   “We are swept away on the tide or mud slide, avalanche or forest fire of viscera because in the aeons before words, viscera ruled our survival.

   “In the beginning wasn't the word. The word came very late. The viscera can still make a fool or monster of any of us.

   “Let's take a moment here to uproot a poisonous myth. We are typically taught that spirit is ‘finer’ than matter. That matter is coarse. That matter imprisons spirit.

   “We see tomes of charts which show spirit at the top of a line, and mind and heart below. Of course, few mention the viscera whatever.

   “A more useful, and truer, diagram would show a horizontal line with spirit at the left and then mind, heart, viscera.

 

 ♦ spirit  mind  heart  viscera ♦ 

 

With this horizontal template, we can begin to deal in our actual experience. God and Devil are not separated — as there can be no metaphysical separation. Now we begin to deal in truth, however awkward or even embarrassing.

   “If we only honor the eviscerated God, we end up with horrific spasms like World War II where the most intellectually advanced people, the Germans, fell into the grip of a visceral force they could not deny. They had training in the mind and spirit, but the non-linear, tricky and mischievous (at best), bloodthirsty and bestial (at worst) Visceral Forces overwhelmed their puny rational defenses and drowned us all in an orgy of devastation before those forces were sated.

   “These horrible collective devastations pale, to me, before the dread secret personal harm we, in visceral throes, daily wield upon those most precious to us.

   “Viscera fuels both wonder and terror. And in so far as you do not fill your life with wonder, both petty and enormous terrors will leech or lurch into the vacuum.

   “In my studies, I can say that viscera is willing to fuel wonder rather than terror, but it will burn.”

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postscript .. I call this fable Viscera .. the Obsidian Arts because we need to study these forces and patterns without prejudice. It is true that there are temptations to too much of this dark elixir, but too much of the thin abstinences of the spirit can lead to a spiritual anorexia which is disdainful of a fatter, a jollier ebullience — as if primness and grimness were more holy.

 

I use 'Obsidian Art' rather than Black Arts because Obsidian is the onyxiest black and doesn't have the historical baggage of the satanic studies. Obsidian is about the next quantum of humor, not about the study of hurt. Hurt already has its addicts. One of their favorite phrases is 'collateral damage' — as if such a thing were conceivable.

 

I'm convinced we can educate viscera to obsidian art — brutal art even. Art doesn't kill anybody. When we grok that difference, we might be out of the LithoDumbness Age. Viscera can be enticed to prefer very dark wit to physical pain, but you can't namby-pamby it up or it'll just jump the levee. And I think you're going to have to ante up more lust than your public probity has hitherto been willing to embrace. You have a choice: dead &/or mutilated people or obsidian humor, art, & lust. Until we are fiercely honest about this stuff, I hope you enjoy Taps.     

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If you know an agent, editor, publisher person who would handle this kind of pogblogian material, please let me know at .. pogblog@yahoo.com

………….<^>……………..

It’s an honor to have you visit pogblog. Do comment.

…………….<^>……………..

Check pogblog’s Glossary for brave & nefarious words.

copyright pogblog 2005 all rights reserved

Please send pogblog’s link to your friends:

http://pogblog.blogharbor.com

5 Deer . Manik . West . tzol 187  12.05.05 mon 

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the education-obsessed world begins today with you

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Back Down the Coal Mines

Back Down the Coal Mines

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    In order to study the possibility of having a just worldcould everyone have the luck and luxury of a superb education and we still get the grotty jobs done – I washed windows from 1979-2000. I proved my point. (See below in fable Justice.)

    I then taught community tv to amateurs for five years. Last February I got laid off with three other folk as a fairly desperate cost-saving measure. I got all my remaining 17 teeth extracted, have dentures now, started my blog, and am pursuing getting my book published. Dentures are obscenely expensive even with the dear help of a great dentist who is a friend of a friend of mine. I’ve been spending my meager savings.

   My old window washing partner is a housemate, and recently I started walking door-to-door flyering to help him build what became his business when I went to the tv station.

   It made sense to have both of us squeegeeing in this big seasonal push til Dec 24. I put on my overalls, bought a new bucket, and a few rolls of Select-a-Size Bounty paper towels for mopping up. My first job back was construction clean-up on a mansion. Holy Moly. Construction clean-up is three times harder than window washing because all of the razor-blading and super scrubbing.

   Painters, by the way, who say through their rovianally deceitful lying teeth that the overspray they have mangially managed to get on 90% of the windows inside and out “is water-based and washes right off.” No X 1000. But of course they are gone skulking and cackling off to the next job, leaving the hapless window washers to scrape and scrape, ever unable to get all the damn specks off. There are as many micro-specks of paint on an over-sprayed window as there are visible stars on a clear night. Just it ain’t poetical.

    There was one painter “who could paint in a tuxedo” so fastidious and blessed was he. Most of the rotters don’t want to take the time to mask off the windows – time-consuming, profit-eating, it’s true. But the windows can never look really right, so it’s slimy of them. My line about painters is that they “go on the down-escalator.” (In case you don’t do cryptic jokes, as apparently many don’t, that means “go to Hell.”)

   You cannot properly wash windows with vinegar and water and crumpled newspaper. Cheez, where that old moldy chestnut got started, I don’t know. You can’t wash windows at all, truth be told. There are guild secrets, and I ain’t telling. I will tell you that you have to use the only true Ettore brass-channel squeegees. You’re on your own from there. Ha Ha. I like thinking about the mess you’ll make – especially the pompous blowhards among you. My petty revenge on the far-right Limbaugh knockoffs tinct with their nouveau grandiosities.

     Where I grew up we had the most sublime snobbisms about the nouveau riche. Boors who had in the last generation or so come into big money with no corresponding big heart or decent manners. You could always spot them by their volume, their dreadful clothes, and the way that they treated the ‘servants’ like ‘servants.’ Old money knew how short was the march to the guillotine – that they depended upon the servants, and they treated people like treasured companions, never like ‘servants.’ It was always so intensely embarrassing to see some nouveau porker ordering people around instead of asking them gratefully.

    We now have a passel of hideous nouveaus like Limbaugh and others with no graciousness nor rapier wit neither. It’s all bludgeon and holler with these people and the skin crawls. They bluster because they sense that they’re missing some secret handshake and they are. Like mosquitoes with bullhorns, they’re irritating. They never have anything compelling or memorable to say, but they sure are loud about it.

   Anyhow, this mansion was one of these great toads that squats upon the landscape without grace. (I’m not against big in dwellings, only ugly.) It’s the kind of place Arnold Schwarzenegger would live in. On steroids.

   It’s like going back down the coal mines again. It’s very hard work. I am sore in parts of my aged body which I didn’t know were there to ache or stab or creak. I’ve been so exhausted that I couldn’t even write except scurrilous stuff in my log to my fav pal who can take obsidian humor almost as good as he can give it. (He whimpers some, glassjawilly, when I strike back without pulling my punches. But give him credit, generally he can follow any thread and take any sharpened darkness.)

    I’ve been living on Stilton cheese with mango and ginger bits, — ye gods, how dee-lectable. And on milky organic <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Darjeeling tea. If you’re going to drink fifteen cups of tea a day, it needs be clean and clear. (I get so happy when I can go to an ordinary supermarket and buy Horizon organic milk. Back in the ‘50s, my dad was a pioneer in commercial-scale organic farming and gosh would he be thrilled to see it hit the Safeways. Having been raised by cows rather like Mowgli was raised by bears and tigers, I only drink whole milk. Whole milk is naturally about 3.4% butterfat. People think that they’re saving all this fat by drinking 2% milk. Ha ha. It’s good marketing, but silly. The whole milk does allow for better calcium absorption tho. Holsteins, which we used to milk, give about 3.4% butterfat milk. Holsteins are the black and white splotched ones – modern art on the hoof.)  

   My housemate's and my big push is to wash as many windows as we can between now & Dec 24 because for a month after that, it drops off to all but nada. I presume that somewhere in here I get back in squeegee shape. I’ll let you know.

   [I hope you’ll check out Justice below. If you grok it, you can help change the world.]

          

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Note: This deceptively simple fable is what I paid my life, my fortune, and my sacred honor for. Learning the answer to the question of Whether we can have a just world – not whether we will have a just world —  is one of the big questions of history, and I answered it with my sinew and blood .. ..

Justice 

Justice is a bell. Justice is a mocking bird who rehearses song at midnight in belief in dawn. Justice is heartbeat. Justice is blood. The essential real deal. Joy and purpose.

The first paper I wrote in college was “What is Justice?” I never guessed I would spend or pay my life and my very teeth to answer that question.

Somewhere in the Pleistocene of my twenties, a stone-tablets question appeared to me with an eerie and wistful persistence: Can we have a just world? Can we really ever have a just world or will the elite, mainly white, always have to have a filthy little secret, a permanently under-educated class, mainly non-white, to get the grotty jobs done?

I believed that education is the highest value and riches. Education was my mansion, my bullion. I lived a life of astonishing – thunderstruck — vividness because education opened my mind, my heart, stuck my fingers in the socket of the universe. Raw joy. Wild joy. Delicious joy.

A human right, I thought, this simple untarnishing joy. A self-evident human right. The key to this joy, the necessity to this joy, its breadth, delicacy, and leopard strength, is education.

So, I asked, could a person have the best possible liberal arts (tolerance, then appreciation for individual differences) education and do one of the non-glam jobs? Or, again, would we have to have this unspoken-of-class to wash our windows and collect our garbage?

I’d been a high school English teacher for ten years when this question appeared like Excalibur in the stone. Could there be a just world?

As the universe unscrolled for me the layers of this question, I wondered who I could ‘study’ to the True Answer? Eventually I knew it was true that I could only know the sinew and blood of the answer if I studied myself.

I could not go into the dear Peace Corps or Vista for two years and then back again after this useful dabble to the luxurious enclaves of academe or corporate, the gated worlds of group health plans and pensions.

Was education sufficient? Was it the highest value? Could I demand the inalienable right to a splendid education for every human being on Earth?

Well, twenty-one years as a self-employed window washer later, like the Ancient Mariner, I can hold you, hapless Wedding Guest, with glittering eye and say, adamantine and emerald, “Yes. Education is the Grail, does suffice, is armor, is amour, is hope, does not rust.”

Every hour of all those days was made more lively and tender and delectable because of the mirth, courage, insight, and wonder that education offers.

There is no smidgen of a question that education guarded me in dark nights and brought holy mockingbird song to my dawns.

I bought the answer to this great question, the Justice question, with the hours of my life. If I had it to do all over again, I was asked recently by a handsome rich Canadian who had drunk six martinis and was eating pistachios, would I do it over again? Lose my teeth, not go to the doctor for twenty-six years, face this pensionless old age?

I considered his question soberly. “To have earned in my flesh the burning answer to one of the great questions of our new millennium, it was worth my life. I can say ringingly to my species that every single human being’s life time is just as valuable to herself or himself as any other human being’s. That tolerance, then appreciation for individual differences is the daily lesson and the ‘point.’

Education can make the life hours even more fun and more searingly interesting. Curiosity is tasty. You don’t have to ‘follow your bliss’ for money.

Of course it’s absurd and obscene that the poor and the self-employed have no health insurance. Of course eventually we have to figure out how to share around the grotty jobs. Of course poverty utterly sucks. Of course I’d rather have a car with air conditioning.

If I hadn’t been so distilledly educated, I probably wouldn’t be besotted with the etymology of words and wouldn’t have known that ‘frolic’ means ‘swift gladness’ or that ‘rhapsody’ means ‘woven song.’

Justice is a bell. Justice is a mocking bird who rehearses song at midnight in belief in dawn. Justice is heartbeat. Justice is blood. The essential real deal. Joy and purpose.

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If you know an agent, editor, publisher person who would handle this kind of pogblogian material, please let me know at .. pogblog@yahoo.com

………….<^>……………..

It’s an honor to have you visit pogblog. Do comment.

…………….<^>……………..

Check pogblog’s Glossary for brave & nefarious words.

copyright pogblog 2005 all rights reserved

Please send pogblog’s link to your friends:

http://pogblog.myblogsite.com

4 Cane . Ben . Reed . East . tzol 173 . 11.21.05 mon

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the education-obsessed world begins today with you

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The Horizontal Model & the art of collaboration

Horizontal

The Horizontal Model and the art of collaboration

An introduction: equality of qualities

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    G.Ro TesQ had been rescued from the thin air of the Grueling Heavenly Realms. Back home on Earth in new washed if not new-minted simple humble happiness, G.Ro had returned to laud the Horizontal.

    “I am G.Ro TesQ,” she said quietly as she gave the keynote speech at.the ConCon in the millennial Earth Year 3000. ConCon was the global.consciousness convention that convened annually in these times. “All of Earth's old troubles came from the Vertical Model which had

kept its heel on the throat of the human spirit for centuries.

    “Simply turning the axis of understanding to horizontal solves 99% of both human horror and human awkwardness.

    “First consider the range of densities our consciousness crisscrosses in a life's experience. We have spaceless/timeless thought. We have dreams, daydreams, fantasy, imagination, memory. We have the precious. moving kinesthetic present, seemingly sequential and solid. Now, in the dominant Vertical Model, as invisible as space, our religions have posited a non-solid, spiritual realm which is above us–is better, purer, less gross than our terrestrial experience, all muck and rut.

    “Of course, conveniently, the priests, monks, gurus, and shamans had the key to our escape.

    “What I'm about to tell you is radical because I have searched the literature of the globe and that literature is invariably full of the higher self or the soul or spirit, all more valuable and more wise than we sluggish, lesser, benighted earthdwellers who will ascend' in death or enlightenment to our truer selves.

    “If we see consciousness vertically, a ladder to be climbed, we are falsely forced to see ourselves on the lower rungs staring up at the compassionate rump of the priest, guru, monk, shaman who precedes us to the heights.

     “If, on the other hand, we rotate the axis of consciousness to be sideways, we can more correctly and coherently see the spectrum of our consciousness as including all the densities with no greater value implied. Just as in light, ultraviolet is not better than infrared, our less-dense experience is not better that our solid experience, only different.

    “The old Vertical Model organized millions, then billions of people for millennia. In a rough sketch, the Vertical Model puts God up in Heaven & the Devil down in Hell. God & his angels in idealized pure heaven and us down on gross, coarse Earth. The lower chakras are coarse energy, the upper increasingly more sublime. We are basically a colony of heaven. And when we refine ourselves enough, we'll get a white robe, join the junior ranks of the choirs of angels and be allowed to kiss the big toe of God. And then when we've really refined our unruly consciousness, we get to dwell in the vast seamless rippleless nirvanic stillness for our Good Behavior. Thus, depending on the phase or fullness of my rage, the virulent or pesky Vertical Model came about because the daggone Head got an inflated or puffed-up view of its importance to the whole system though it can not even digest a single groat–not a single grain of barley or grow a single toenail.

    “The higher self doesn't have digestion and mucus and dirt under the fingernails. One could wax as rhapsodic about digestion as about Christ consciousness if we were less prissy and overfastidious about what qualities we invited through the spiritual front door.

    “A simple shift of 90º¸ puts us in the new Horizontal Model where all the considerable ills of the vertical hierarchical model fall away. The Horizontal Model shifts the axis of metaphysical, ethical, epistemological, psychological, economic, and sociological understanding from hierarchical to equal-and-various.

    “The Horizontal Model is a model of collaboration. In the Horizontal Model we discover the preciousness of the immanent vs the transcendent. The immanent is an indelible relationship with the brilliant manifested world, recognizing mobius how it's lit from within. The transcendent energy is too thin, not sufficient, not sufficiently engaged, leading to spiritual anorexia. True compassion must be horizontal. No judgment, only evaluation. The body is not neurotic or restless or even greedy. It is the ethereal which keeps pushing the adrenalin button or drives the body to eat when it is not hungry. All sins are sicknesses of the soul. The excesses of the soul. The most natural state for the body is joy. What body would choose suffering? It is the confused or thwarted soul which incurs morbidity. The ethereal drives the body to visceral or lower chakra disturbances or distress when it pushes the sweetness buttons past grace and elegance and delight. The ethereal drives the body to anorexic or upper chakra disorders when it idealizes deprivation and detachment.”

    G.Ro TesQ chuckled, “Certainly constructing the Horizontal Model requires a lot of naps. Perhaps it is because, catlike, I take so many naps that I don't have this head/intellect/spirit prejudice that infests the holy and alternative literature. Napping, my head's not at the  top, it's not higher, it's just to the left and my feet to the right. These distinctions are not trivial. The hidden prejudices in the language deeply affect our profound feelings of value. I sometimes think I should wear a shoe upside down on my head as a hat to remind us to keep our heads on the ground.

    “Your horizontal waking brings democracy not just to politics, but to thought and feelings, an equality of qualities. We need to bring all our qualities and talents–woven–to bear on the moving present. The emerald earthflame in each molten molecule. The honey in each enchanted molecular dance.

    “We need to internalize and eternalize this new model, the horizontal spectrum. Co-llaborate. Co-amaze. Co-applaud. Co-kindle. Co-ignite. Co-weave emerald strands of enchantment from whatever qualities apply to the precious moving present.

    “Co-cheetah. Co-wall. Co-play.

    “Immanent not transcendent. Co-radiant.”

 

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If you know an agent, editor, publisher person who would handle this kind of pogblogian material, please let me know at .. pogblog@yahoo.com

………….<^>……………..

It’s an honor to have you visit pogblog. Do comment.

…………….<^>……………..

Check pogblog’s Glossary for brave & nefarious words.

copyright pogblog 2005 all rights reserved

Please send pogblog’s link to your friends:

http://pogblog.myblogsite.com

3 Cane . Ben . Reed . East . tzol 133 . 10.12.05 wed

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the pro-peace world begins today with you

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Justice & Education .. the Most Important Fable

Note: This deceptively simple fable is what I paid my life, my fortune, and my sacred honor for. Learning the answer to the question of Whether we can have a just world – not whether we will have a just world —  is one of the big questions of history, & I  could only answer it with my sinew and blood .. ..

Justice 

Justice is a bell. Justice is a mocking bird who rehearses song at <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />midnight in belief in dawn. Justice is heartbeat. Justice is blood. The essential real deal. Joy and purpose.

The first paper I wrote in college was “What is Justice?” I never guessed I would spend or pay my life and my very teeth to answer that question.

Somewhere in the Pleistocene of my twenties, a stone-tablets question appeared to me with an eerie and wistful persistence: Can we have a just world? Can we really ever have a just world or will the elite, mainly white, always have to have a filthy little secret, a permanently under-educated class, mainly non-white, to get the grotty jobs done?

I believed that education is the highest value and riches. Education was my mansion, my bullion. I lived a life of astonishing – thunderstruck — vividness because education opened my mind, my heart, stuck my fingers in the socket of the universe. Raw joy. Wild joy. Delicious joy.

A human right, I thought, this simple untarnishing joy. A self-evident human right. The key to this joy, the necessity to this joy, its breadth, delicacy, and leopard strength, is education.

So, I asked, could a person have the best possible liberal arts (tolerance, then appreciation for individual differences) education and do one of the non-glam jobs? Or, again, would we have to have this unspoken-of-class to wash our windows and collect our garbage?

I’d been a high school English teacher for ten years when this question appeared like Excalibur in the stone. Could there be a just world?

As the universe unscrolled for me the layers of this question, I wondered who I could ‘study’ to the True Answer? Eventually I knew it was true that I could only know the sinew and blood of the answer if I studied myself.

I could not go into the dear Peace Corps or Vista for two years and then back again after this useful dabble to the luxurious enclaves of academe or corporate, the gated worlds of group health plans and pensions.

Was education sufficient? Was it the highest value? Could I demand the inalienable right to a splendid education for every human being on Earth?

Well, twenty-one years as a self-employed window washer later, like the Ancient Mariner, I can hold you, hapless Wedding Guest, with glittering eye and say, adamantine and emerald, “Yes. Education is the Grail, does suffice, is armor, is amour, is hope, does not rust.”

Every hour of all those days was made more lively and tender and delectable because of the mirth, courage, insight, and wonder that education offers.

There is no smidgen of a question that education guarded me in dark nights and brought holy mockingbird song to my dawns.

I bought the answer to this great question, the Justice question, with the hours of my life. If I had it to do all over again, I was asked recently by a handsome rich Canadian who had drunk six martinis and was eating pistachios, would I do it over again? Lose my teeth, not go to the doctor for twenty-six years, face this pensionless old age?

I considered his question soberly. “To have earned in my flesh the burning answer to one of the great questions of our new millennium, it was worth my life. I can say ringingly to my species that every single human being’s life time is just as valuable to herself or himself as any other human being’s. That tolerance, then appreciation for individual differences is the daily lesson and the ‘point.’

Education can make the life hours even more fun and more searingly interesting. Curiosity is tasty. You don’t have to ‘follow your bliss’ for money.

Of course it’s absurd and obscene that the poor and the self-employed have no health insurance. Of course eventually we have to figure out how to share around the grotty jobs. Of course poverty utterly sucks. Of course I’d rather have a car with air conditioning.

If I hadn’t been so distilledly educated, I probably wouldn’t be besotted with the etymology of words and wouldn’t have known that ‘frolic’ means ‘swift gladness’ or that ‘rhapsody’ means ‘woven song.’

Justice is a bell. Justice is a mocking bird who rehearses song at midnight in belief in dawn. Justice is heartbeat. Justice is blood. The essential real deal. Joy and purpose.

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10 Jaguar . Ix . Ocelot . Panther . North . tzol 114 . 09.23.05 fri

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