FIVE COROLLARIES TO NAOMI KLEIN'S SHOCK DOCTRINE:
(Opportunist leaders will use any manufactured or natural crisis to create dictatorships.)
Just for laughs let's say none of the dire warnings will come to be:
Edgar Cayce and Nostradamus will be wrong, the West Coast will not be broken up in 2018 into Iceberg size chunks, the scientists who think they can figure the PROCESS called global warming feedback loops with grade school math instead of exponents and "Al Gore rhythms" will be RIGHT (hollow soundtrack laughter), the United States won't go broke on the next few hurricanes, forest fires, wars and earthquakes....hey wait a minute we already can't pay the bill on Puerto Rico and a tax bill just passed that will increase the deficit and finish turning us into a third world country, and the Pres is driving out productive immigrants, decimating the State Dept and taunting N. Korea to provoke a war that at least will make him a wartime (unimpeachable) president and put us under martial law and more likely, according to Daniel Elsberg, will be a nuclear holocaust ending human life on earth....(what a relief! I don't think I coulda took much more!) But maybe that's just me, just lookin on the bright side.
So let's
say most of that hasn't already happened AND we dodge ALL THOSE BULLETS AT ONCE! (WOW! BOYS AND GIRLS!)
Giving you all the above and THEN some! The brokenness of national governance will still be naked (as we are all now one oligarchy naked under the mass of men who lead lives of loud ignorance (sound of Trump-ets) and the dictatorship of dollars with no sense), the effects will still be third world U.S. poverty and an international disaster. Trump is just a symptom, a DISTRACTION creating more DISTRACTIONS that mask the real problem, the system that enabled the fraud of his hope that springs infernal. Get him out, the damage is done, the myth of the mess of mass of idiots is still in charge, nothing but more sellouts to replace him....
What hope? What refuge? Other than our thousands of years old default position: taking care of each other in small groups and local communities? Or taking community and government that has been broken from the top down and rebuilding it from the GROUND (of our being and seeing) UP.
What's "from the top down?" Economic Hit Man:
The list of Mayors and governors affirming their allegiance to the Paris Climate Accords and the Sanctuary Cities movement is in the hundreds and counting, as are small native and citizens groups such as the little Cavalry unit led by Wesley Clark Junior at DAPLE:
Yes it's just ritual, just Theater, but Theater MOVES us to a place where we can SEE. Ritual moves the body to a place where it can MOVE with change. These things help us get rid of our shit so we can go and do and be.
And citizens' initiatives across the U. S.. Agree. Agree, disagree, the best argument for survival of government of the people needs to go, is in fact going LOCAL. Some are suggesting that since net neutrality failed, we need to build our own internet. Or move to municipal internet. Or just move. But where? No more safe places.
So take a stand? Because (Howard Zinn) "You Cant Be Neutral On A Moving Train" and "You gotta stand for some thing or you'll fall for anything." ?
https://www.recode.net/2017/12/14/16779166/net-neutrality-trump-internet-fcc-california-new-york-states-lawsuit
If post-truth stupidity rages like a runaway fire, what are the essentials for a discussion about rebuilding community from the ground up?
Here followeth Casa Goofy Internationale's corollaries to Naomi Klein's tyranny survival tips:
FIRST:
ACCENTUATE THE POSITIVE
(By our License Plates shall yew know & fund the State & us)
REENST8
Have Mayor and Council implement Municipal internet.
Have Governor and Legislature withhold state taxes look into or create loopholes and dedicate the funds to state healthcare and welfare, Planned Parenthood, any other national services gutted by the tax bill.
Establish a 501c3 tax deductible fiduciary as a state agency to receive funds from private donors and then be able to deduct those amounts from any taxes the state owes. Channel these funds also to services to fill the void in National.
Congratulate yourself on facing facts and then on any little thing you do about them. Don't give up hope.
NEVER GIVE UP HOPE. Because hope, false or true, broken, borrowed or blue, has kept us alive all these millennia, and I believe our greatest hope comes from:
COMPASSION, as in the "No More Deaths" and Sanctuary Cities movements. What these actions are saying is borders may define the results of war, money and other (negative) power games but love, caring for others, and recognition of other people's common humanity is what defines community.
If you wanna stay POSITIVE, and Especially in Southern AZ, you gotta hava SENSA YUMA! GROANNNNN but have fun by makin fun of em! F'm if they can't take a joke. Joke m if they can't take a F (It's what Trump would do.) . FUNNNd A CLOWN SQUAD. (I know one.)
SECOND
ELIMINATE THE NEGATIVE
2 more license plates:
(Construe vanity plate fees as donations to the State 501c3)
NVR2L8. 2CORDN8
(Construe vanity plate fees as donations to the State 501c3)
Use martial arts philosophy. Don't fight harder fight smarter. Agree with the enemy, let them think they are winning (Custer at The Valley Of The Little Bighorn, (Remember?) "Rope A DOPE (Remember?)) " until you can use their energy against them. Reserve violence as the very last resort because it invites & justifies a coup & detainment. Right outa the Nazi playbook, son, son, son right on into jail. Can you say, "Si se puede." Boys and girls?! I thought you could. What does this mean in particular?
City & State hire Auxiliary Legal Team to work with the Attorney General's office to keep the Feds busy trying to justify all cuts resulting from tax bill, all punitive measures & violations of constitutional rights. Bring MULTIPLE SUITS against the National Government. Keep em busy. The best defense is an offense. (It's what Trump would do.)
COORDINATE with the hundreds of Mayors & Governors mentioned above. Cite City & State DUTY TO PROTECT the health & Welfare of citizens.
Establish online COMMONS for submission of on point URLS, articles and discussion. Make role models for our local pols of the members of the Mayors' Alliance, governors, citizens' groups and individuals who DON'T take Trump's media algorithm derived bait of bread and circuses and generally JUST DO everything the Fed should have been doing the past century. Make lists with addresses, contact them. HOLD OUR LOCAL OFFICIALS TO THEIR STANDARD! Give us rooftop gardens, and solar, and feed the homeless, take care of the sick and needy. Tell them: YOU HAVE ONE JOB: the health and welfare of the community (which is part and parcel of the community of nature).
THIRD
Another license plate:
CMUNIK8
In any disaster, (interior or exterior, current or INCOMING!!!) communication is key to restoring community. First you have to get REAL QUIET. Then words might have a chance of meaning something. I haven't been a good example lately, but I think you can start with the bare basics of communication, first COMMUNICATE within: ignore DISTRACTIONS and those so called leaders who manipulate them. Stay focussed on the consciousness that's important to you, that's spiritual survival. Next focus on those people closest to you and move outward from there.
Ignore yo mama, DO talk to strangers, but carefully, start with weather, garden, pets, politics last. Concentrate on what we CAN agree on.
TALK to local elected officials, ask, "Where do you stand on this?"
List people, organizations & sites to relate & reach out to. (& those to avoid).
People with radio & other communication equipment, horses, jeeps, electric cars,.
Electric car club.
Who to notify in the event of an emergency (or potluck or party). Be always aware the emergency is HERE and NOW , pre and post Trump and post Truth.
Other suggestions for outreach.
Lists (kept with someone you trust) people willing to help now & in emergencies.
(Especislly for Southern AZ) How to build shades, ramadas, verandas, and who might help with the building.
Handy mechanical strategies and handy household hints (for getting high on getting by).
FOURTH
ANOTHER "PLATE"
(For the whiners who say they got nothin to say (me)):
LISNPL8
PUT OUT THE WELCOME TABLE.
Any old way you can, say,
"COME ON IN! SIT DOWN! HAVE SOMETHIN TO EAT!
In a broken time in a broken world, with broken hearts, breaking bread together is key, especially with those who are hungry. It contradicts the tyranny of abstraction and restores real community, produces Ocytosin, the community hormone, essential to the birth process(es) in more ways than one. So? Reach out, talk to neighbors, have potlucks, eat our way back to the beginning. It's easy and simple, here, let me show you...I too will work for food.
FIFTH PL8 (a 2FER):
LOCO L and/or 2KRAZ4U
(Can't never have 2 much on OURPL8S cuz 2MCHAINTENUFF. OK so what if that's too many letters. There's three kinds of people, those who can count and those who can't.)
STRENGTHEN LOCAL ECONOMY (COMMUNITY)
" DON'T MESS WITH MISTER IN BETWEEN! "
(Cut out the middlemen.)
Communities broken from the top down must be rebuilt from the GROUND UP. Join a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) buy from a local farmer at farmer's market or wherever. CUT OUT the middleman, transportation, refrigeration all shipping and handling and Big $$$ big interest loans where you can.
THINK GLOBAL BUY LOCAL
You're ALWAYS voting with your money.
Buy an electric vehicle from your local dealer. Charge it with your own solar panels from your local solar dealer. Don't let them tell you. YOU tell THEM what's valuable. If they're dumb enough to argue, don't talk back just show them the money.
CALL FOR DISCUSSION:
Key words fellow labrats we will need as we navigate this maze in search of? CHEESE!: community, communion, communication. Can local dialogue solve the age old dilemma of coming to any agreement on how to raise our children? Can we even agree on giving them the tools of analysis and verification and turning them loose from our warring prejudices? To accomplish that we gotta stop waving our hands (& abstractions) in the air (Don't fight guys that big.) and limit the discussion to the barest most particular FACTS we know. Even so, this will fail but it's the same damdum best chance we always had. And then how do we communicate to the Mayors and governors who say,
"We will NOT stop and frisk in black and brown and low-income neighborhoods. Hell no, we won't do ICE's job, the Border Patrol's Job, the BATF's job. No you CAN'T come into our churches and hospitals to do your immoral legal business. Hell yes, we WILL go to Paris for the climate change talks."
Who told them? Who can tell us there is no duty to obey insane, immoral or illegal orders? How can we stand up with them? By standing alone ourselves, on principle, and by reaching out to them and recording, as publicly as possible, what they and we are doing and by reaching out to others in our community who share these values. Make lists of people you want to be with when the thing go down. Tell them.
An architect friend and I were discussing the question of what actions would make sense in the event of a huge solar flare, a heatwave or E bomb, either of which would wipe out most electronic technology either by frying electronic equipment or just by wiping out the electric grid. Wouldn't it be great, he said, if 100 people then showed up at the nearest civil defense shelter, if we have any anymore, or to someplace like the Tucson Community Center with diesel or pre electronic ignition vehicles (or better yet HORSES! YEEEEE HAAA!) (Or The Clown Squad, HAAA! HAAA!) and were willing to take people and supplies wherever they needed to go to be of assistance?
Yes, I said, and wouldn't it be great if all those people had handheld two way radios and could communicate to hams and low power FM stations and even taxi and Pirate Radio? Because who cares if you have a license when the national government isn't there for anybody who isn't rich? (MIGHT EVEN be sending Federal troops in, in violation of POSSE COMMITATUS). And, just for laughs, try to connect with even our regular TV and Radio stations. When the electric grid went down in Puerto Rico, The Virgin Islands, & St. Croix, cell phones didn't work. Ham radio was pretty much all there was. The police were useless or crooked and citizens directed traffic and helped as many people as they could. That's where we all are now. If we use their example maybe we can do better. EVEN IF extreme disasters don't strike we still have a dysfunctional government to rebuild one baby step at a time.
Expect Puerto Rico. Expect this disaster is already here in the absence (emptiness equals "evil") of national governance. Expect loss of communication. Expect Ham Radio or municipal internet or two tin cans tied together with a string or smoke signals or something. ) serving as the nervous tissue of community, rebuilding, locating problems, solutions and family members thousands of miles away. Expect chaos still prevailing under cover of the administration's DISTRACTIONS. EVEN IF no other disaster happens expect perfect SHITSTORMS and TRUMPSTORMS and comics hopefully not getting sad but just doing their job. They got one job, tell jokes in the face of an angry god. (In the UK Trump is slang for fart, so announcements of TRUMPSTORMS are greeted with peals of laughter. IMAGINE the roar of thousands of whoopie cushions, the universe laughing at life on earth being destroyed by a gasbag! What cosmic fun fellow Superheros!) But maybe that's just me, again, you know me, always lookin on the bright side.....
Obviously it would have been way easier and more effective if Puerto Rico had a rehearsal, but who among us (much less the poor) has time or money to prepare? Some people just naturally band together in emergencies, but others kill and rob each other. That's where a little planning and community building aforethought might come in handy. But I/you can't build community, it just happens, BUT "you" CAN set the stage. I'm hoping little ol "I" can help.
As your personal psychiatrist du jour, M'seur, dont you think disasters and death itself might just be nature's way of telling you to slow down? Even when the fix is in & it's the fix we're in? The deck is rigged, but I have no right to get depressed just because it never mattered what I said in performance or in person about global warming or anything else. Who do I think I am? What do I think I know? You can't talk back to bureaucracy, you can't talk back to the radio, you can't talk to the traffic. The traffic dunno where it's going, it just know it's gotta go, let us ALL RISE and sing:
grumbling and growling and howling into the land of the dead
you gotta lag behind if you wanna get ahead
showers this way, ignore those howls, here's your soap and towels,
you ain't got
one damn thang t' say
Even the salesman knows EVERYTHING MUST GO! THESE BARGAINS WON'T LAST! You can't speak truth to stupid but sometimes Stupid speaks truth to you. And I'M STOOPIT! The Clown Squad at Casa Goofy International don't call me SUBCOMMANDANTE SUPERDUMMY f'r NOTHIN!
BUT acts of kindness shine even brighter in the film noir darkness. Snuff those candles out they do not die, but burn forever in memory. This is where community begins.
THE FIRST DISASTER
is isolation whether by feral little bullies in the sandbox or on the playground or with the divide and conquer tactics of the demented sociopath in chief, dividing self from self, the fragmented ego too lonely to cry for help. The second almost automatically follows: giving up hope. So?
So don't let your hard drive get fragmented inside some self annointed DICK TATER's mobile, screensaver fulla crowd teasers (DISTRACTIONS), especially on Facebook and Twitter because their formats break up all possibility of conversation into isolated bits (i.e. incoherence, the word itself says it all). And sexual politics are GREAT bread and circuses (DISTRACTIONS) material for those media, insurmountable DISTRACTIONS because Americans, being descended from Puritan and criminal stock, have never been able to handle sex. Repression and punishment make things worse.
Gossipy accusations given credence without a trial or investigation, invite political hit jobs and extortion.
The ignorant savages we killed on our march to the sea had more effective child raising methods and social rituals which we could discuss if we controlled our media instead of vice versa (if there wasn't so much vice in the versa). We break up over its rootless abstraction, and can't get back to earth to find common ground. Does media chatter interfere with our conversation with the natural community or is it just me? The naturalist E. O. Wilson and Henry David Thoreau agree, but what do they know, they're just ecologists, (you know, that special interest group).
The times are incredibly evil. The word evil is so incredibly empty ,(doesn't describe anything, it's just name calling. Fitz are you listening?) seems to me it should be replaced with the word "empty". A century ago H. L Mencken wrote about that dead certain emptiness in mind and media that enables and puts idiots in power, allows justice to be polluted with motive, while an abstract value system destroys our only habitat, all that was good to touch and feel and so, made any "sense" at all. All the news that ISN'T filled with useful men brought down by mere accusation while the most powerful of useless idiots storms around the White House flinging DISTRACTIONS while arranging the last dance parties on the Titanic and the Feast of Armageddon to know you?
So... what's the good news?
If it all gotta go down stupid, I still go back to little acts of kindness and sharing (as caring) as the beginning of community, and the necessity of evil creating the necessity of starting with,
"A Global conversation using LOCAL examples."
Our mission statement at Casa Goofy International. See our blogs and founding documents at MEDIA FIRE and
Can we DO SOMETHING? Or, as Joan Rivers used to say,
"CAN WE TALK!?"
.... in my post performance-performance art career or (or careen) I've taken cues from the Society of Friends, one of them, an encampment in the African bush in the early 20th century: a new volunteer comes in, asks eagerly:
"What can I do to help?" The old hands say,
" Don't do anything, just OBSERVE for six weeks and then forget about all your ideas and just help the village do what it's trying to do."
(Usually if they say they GET IT they don't.)
Heisenberg said you can change a lot just by observing, Yogi Berra said you can observe a lot just by watching. So just WATCH it, OK? because to GET IT you gotta GET that (esthetic) DISTANCE of tragedy or comedy....
And the other image:
A little room, a group of people sit quietly, one of them begins to speak, says what's on his mind, sits down. Silence. After a while another person begins speaking. (Quaker meeting house).
And then? Then so many times we go out into the world all fired up with the spirit and hit the wall of idiots. Same thing happened to me as a Street Club Worker in Brooklyn working with Black, Puerto Rican and Irish gangs, and then as the heating and cooling guy for the International Arts Center, again trying to span the gap between rich and poor, or, in performance, measure the sprawl of the city, again with my body. Always saying negative won't win, good will out. Wrong! Same shit different day.
Pause and then begin again, with hope and virtue as their own reward.
At the end of that day and looking back, I THINK I would be more suspicious of abstractions and ideals and have more trust in rebuilding community from the GROUND up as in our mission statement at Casa Goofy International,
"A global conversation using LOCAL examples."
But in all of this what was lacking was a sense of the Absurd being interwoven in the fabric of space-time, and my version of the Society of Friends would therefore be our Facebook group page:
"FRIENDS OF Casa Goofy International"
And my superhero identity vaguely modelled after Subcomandante Marcos....
....IS....
(drumroll cymbal crash)
SUBCOMMANDANTE SUPERDUMMY!
SO I, SUBCOMMANDANTE SUPERDUMMY, HERE from the government and HERE to save you from yourself(S) (and HERE cause I got no other place to go....anymore) would like to present my humble PIE! (INCOMING!) (Headsup!) offering of our "Friends Of Casa Goofy International" Facebook page as A QUIET ROOM, a forum for continued DISCUSSION, a haven safe from the usual dislocated individual quips & quarrels of Facebook & Twitter, (DISTRACTIONS), a little room for quietly sharing on point, related news items, jokes, toons, factoids, free stuff, parties and gardening tips. Please join and visit us there frequently (and often too, and also etc. a note from the Department Of Redundancy Department.) YES AND ALSO...
....coupons and recipes, and, last but not least, like Peggy Lee sang,
"JUST KEEP ON DANCING!."
(or else, the terrorists will win.)
(PICTURE: My old fart yard art sculpture, "The President's Chair Is Empty" homage to performance by Imo Baird.)
