Category Archives: The Burning Child .. the Education Instructional Complex

Viscera .. the Obsidian Arts

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  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

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

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Check pogblog’s Glossary for brave & nefarious words.

copyright pogblog 2005 all rights reserved

Please send pogblog’s link to your friends:

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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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Year Zero With Blood – Y3000 Sans Bullets

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Year Zero With Blood – Y3000 Sans Bullets

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The time is Y0, the Year 0. (Not really Y0, of course, as there had been fabulous human history for more before the so-called Year Zero than after.) Still to come is the Inquisition, the Crusades. The manifestly destined wrecking of the Native Americans North & South from sea to shining sea. The importation of human chattel as slaves from <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Africa. The on-going oppression of women as a subtler chattel, or cattle. A myriad of ultimately aimless named-slaughters and unnamed dismemberments and indentures. A myriad is ten thousand so 4.9875 Stupid Slaughters a year is about right. The singed shuddering stench of the electric chair. Ah the glory of mankind.

 

Of course there was real and sweet and tender glory of dappled things seen by poets and notes written, mozartian and billets doux. I talk heartbrokenly about the smoky turquoise of your eyes and that is science and jazz, worth the synapses being arranged more complexly than mollusks’.

 

But I’m trying to compare for you that things can change in a few thousand years. Not the lyric and empiric, but the stunningly stupid. So by Y3000 we have plank-alongside-of-the head finally gotten some crucial things.

 

 It is insane to spend $820,000 per minute on weapons systems and other modalities of destruction.

 

Whoops, I forgot the extra $200,000 per minute on ‘off-the-books’ Iraq. We figure that out considerably before Y3000. Education R We, Yippee and glee all around. We get it in a flash flood down the arroyo of the collective consciousness and conscience around 2033. Oh, it would serve the world, the turquoise spaceship, better if every single centavo of our resources were devotedly devoted to education and fixing tsunamis, avalanches, quakes, and furacaos and so on. It seems so screamingly obvious from the vantage of Y3000. Just as we recoil from slavery, they recoil from our malignant waste, our belligerent narcissistic aggrandizement. And if not you directly, pilgrim, nor me – yet we allowed it. We were cowed. We were buffaloed. Apathy seeped into our unwary marrow.

    Further yet though, we wake. We refuse. We refuse to be duped. We refuse to be corporate cogs. We demand equality and happiness. We tend the planet and its denizens, very much including each other. Not in some simplistic norman-rockwell, hallmark card sappy way, but with respect and good humor and some semblance of sharing.

   We take responsibility – the ability to respond. We buy out all our military obligations to veterans. We train all those military age young folk to build and repair. They extend the wifi infrastructure and teach computers to young and old. We use people skillfully. We employ people in creating a planet we can be proud of in Y3000. As if the planet were a pearl and your soul a jewel I hold in my hand.

  

appendix: There is a tricky journey between here and there because we don’t all get sane at once. We have to have ingenious substitutes for aggression and belligerence to which many are adrenally addicted. Let them design very violent video games. You don’t prefer that to one single actual amputee where the stupid sods actually blew someone up? For gods’ sakes get the porn less hidden so we can hose it down with some dark humor.

   The more you fight, the more they fight. There is no victory that way, no matter your determination. It simply doesn’t work. They don’t bunch up conveniently in armies on fronts. Those days are long long past. You have to do an alchemy and shift their murderous intentions to tending. Teach them to protect rather than to destroy. It works sooner than you think once we get the line down the rapids. Education ∞.  

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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

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

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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

12 Alligator . Imix . Turtle . East . tzol 181  11.29.05 tues

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the education-obsessed world begins today with you

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Mountain View & Google Make Knowledge History

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Mountain View & Google

Make Noos-History

 

11.15.05  

  What a sweet night. <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Tuesday, November 15, 2005. A huge full moon floated in an indigo sky. The Mountain View City Council unanimously voted to lease light poles to Google to put up their synapse-devices to knowledge-cast the world’s information, the world’s eccentric and fascinating library, into people’s houses, apartments, schools, and parks.

   History. We lucky few who were there will remember that the next quantum step into the future for humankind began tonight. Daggone – how swell. How intensely cool. It is well wrought.

    You no doubt remember Teilhard de Chardin, a French philosopher from mid-last-century. He talked about the lithosphere or the original seething rock of our Earth. The lithosphere exudes a biosphere — you, me, leopards, and lichen. He predicted that the biosphere would exude a noosphere or knowledge-sphere or a world brain. In the early '90s as a zealous convert to the brilliant intimacy of computers, I hollered, “The noosphere, the noosphere! The internet. Teilhard just never imagined that there would be a technological interface!”

   Well, tonight at 37.3932N, 122.0778W, the noosphere, the knowledge-sphere took a quantum leap into the exhilarating future. Congratulations, Google. Congratulations, Mountain View. Somersaults all around. Sweet.

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noos-history pronounced new-ohs-history;

the moon-landing & telegraph & Agincourt echos are deliberate;

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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

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

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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

11 Deer . Manik . West . tzol 167  11.15.05 tue 

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the education-obsessed world begins today with you

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Glorious Move by Google

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Google has offered to put wifi up all over Mountain View Ca (my hometown and Google's) for a no-cost hot-town. They will “attach wireless 'access point' devices to hundreds of lampposts throughout town.”

 

 I wrote the following Letter to the Editor of our local paper, the Mountain View Voice. This is intensely thrilling. Readers of pogblog know how long I’ve been on & on about this. (I had nothing to do with this step except pyschically.) Good for Google. Now the next step too.

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Editor:  

   Standing ovations to Google for the farsighted gift of wifi to <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Mountain View. This is so smart and so urgently essential to a knowledge-enhanced future that I'm elated. Hurray and thank you!

   But — in order to “make the world's information universally accessible and useful,” we must collectively let the Other Shoe drop. We must get a cheap, tough laptop to every single Mountain View child K-12 so that all that knowledge brought by wifi can be received regardless of income. We must not have a digital divide, but rather a digital multiplication starting with the poorest children and rapidly expanding to all children.

   The explosion of innovation that could and should be America's future requires both the universal ultraband wifi and the universal laptops. Google has made the fabulous big first move. I call on our City Council to instantly begin the laptop project with other equally visionary Silicon Valley companies and foundations. Mountain View is the perfect place to incubate this full-force exhilarating knowledge revolution that will become a national model.


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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
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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
11 Deer . Manik . West . tzol 167  11.15.05 tue 
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the education-obsessed world begins today with you
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All Four Quadrants of Your Brain

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All Four Quadrants of Your Brain

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    The reason I like to use the allegorical essay rather than the strictly formal and putatively rational essay is that there is a part of the mind to which you as a reader get access if there are story elements. It engages all four quadrants of your brain and the collective unconscious. It’s a way of giving philosophy its juice and its irony back.

    I read linear essays with admiration, but I always feel like I need to have better posture when I read them. As if I were having tea with the Queen.

    I happen to have always had an inclination to the sort of Celti-sci-fi version of allegory because it makes an end-run around the reason I’ve never been so much of a devotee of post-Faulkner American Literature: neurosis. Pieces set in the semi-quasi-future obviate neurosis because they aren’t worming over one’s narcissistic melancholies with as confessional or thinly veiled confessional modes. There was a kind of perpetual adolescence to so much 50s + literature.

     I like the more angular, odd, well, allegorical stuff.

     The following piece is certainly as important a piece as I could either think or write, but I like to think it has a defter touch – is less sledgehammery when it’s set in the future. It’s less directly judgmental. And though it is mind, heart, soul-bogglingly serious, it doesn’t take itself seriously. I like droll.

     Part of pogblog’s job is to make the ‘horizontal’ point both clarionally and subversively. We only fool ourselves that we aren’t still fascio-feudal with different clothes. Democracy comes eventually, but not before we grok and contain and maintain the horizontal model.

 

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Horizontal

The Horizontal Model and the art of collaboration

An introduction: equality of qualities

 

    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.blogharbor.com        

7 Night . Akbal . Hearth . West . tzol 163  11.11.05 fri

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the education-obsessed world begins today with you

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IBM vs Education

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IBM vs Education .. a melodrama

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   If you send your people to an IBM Leadership Seminar, the instructor will guide and prod, say, 25 people through a highly distilled and interactive experience. All applaud, eat expensive boxed lunches, and may heed a point or two.

   Bill Blarney is a famous well-paid instructor whose renowned programs are available in boxed sets on DVD.

    As the IBM events planner, you go up to Bill Blarney at the end of the day as the late light filters through the graceful weeping amber trees beyond the huge picture windows into the plush seminar room. “Fine job today, Mr. Blarney,” you say. “I want to talk about the terms of your next engagement with IBM.”

      Deeply at ease with his fine status, fine suit, and porsche reputation, fat-cattish, post-canary, post-saucer-brimming-with-thickest-cream, Bill Blarney beams all but beatifically at you.

     “Well, Bill, next week starting Monday at <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />8am, we want you to teach five different seminars before 3pm.”

     “What!?” Bill expostulates, snorting like a startled stallion, “That’s absurd!”

     “Additionally,” you add, “each 58 minute seminar will have between 30-40 students, a different group each hour. Between most of the seminars, you will have no break whatsoever – one group will file in as the other files out.”

    “What?!” Bill’s eyes begin to bulge. A vein on his sweat-slicked forehead visibly pulses. “That’s absurd!”

    “Moreover,” you continue, “each seminar plan involves completely different material.”

    “Well, I, well, er, I – I guess I could do that on Monday if absolutely necessary to keep the lucrative, I mean important IBM account, but well, but it’s overwhelming, it’s unprecedented,” says Bill.

     “And,” you say, “you must do the same pattern with all new materials and enthusiasms on Tuesday and then Wednesday and Thursday and Friday.”

     “What!? You mean I can’t just repeat Monday’s materials? This is preposterous. I’m a leading professional. This is not humanly possible.”

     “Well, you must also give assignments each day which you must correct and comment upon each evening – from at least 150 daily participants.”

    “Nonsense,” barked Bill. “You’ve lost your mind.”

    “Yes, and you will be paid 1/5 of your current salary and have no car allowance.”

    Bill could no longer speak.

     “And after next week’s five days, you will do five days a week thusly every month for nine & ½ months of the year.”

     Weakly, licking the froth off his lips, Bill said, “No business could possibly demand this level of performance from any imaginable instructor. The energy, the organization, it’s simply inconceivable. You couldn’t pay me enough even if I could handle it for one single marathon week, least of all 36 weeks in a row. What has American business come to?”

    “Not American business, BillBoy,” you say, “you’ve been made an American high school teacher.”

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pls send this to your dear teacher friends as a holiday confection from both of us .. if only there were a way to thank them enough.

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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 Light . Ahau . Flower . South . tzol 160  11.08.05 tues

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the education-obsessed world begins today with you

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Not One Centavo on Bullets

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Not One Centavo on Bullets

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    I saw a tv program on grisly diseases like river blindness and malaria. River blindness gets into your blood and causes constant horrific itching – to the point where you just peel pieces of your flesh from your body. And then when you are about thirty, you go blind and hold the end of a broomstick with a child holding the other end, leading you around for the rest of your life. Until that child goes blind and so on and on. It costs a buck a year or something to prevent this. You probably make 50 cents a month in this country so you brutally itch and go blind.

    Where does the list have to end for you, pilgrim, in order for you to throw up your guts and say FUCKING STOP spending money on weapons? I try to avoid swearing on pogblog because profanity is usually just a failure of imagination, and when you really need it like here, its impact is diluted. But the Military Budget madness is what swearing is for.

    As I said to chancelucky: Dwight Eisenhower pushing the massive interstate highway system was justified on national defense terms tho it actually benefited commerce. The idea was that troops could be shuttled around the <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />US better, were there a need.

     The point about universal ultraband and cheap tough cool laptops (wolfbooks I call them 'cause it's cool) is that they'll explode cheap trivial low grade crud, yes, <b>but they'll also explode invention.</b>

    It is invention which will preserve America and a decent standard of living — not more destroyers and fighters.

    Yes, it will take us time to buy out this idiot war in Iraq and all our obligations to its mutilated and their dependents, but at $820,000 per minute for the Military Budget and $200,000 per minute more for Iraq (It's 'off the books'), we can make the transition to an education-invention economy forthwith if we just change the meme or the controlling idea.

  This invention and the savings on destructive projects could be flooded into education and health.

   What BushCo & Ilk completely miss is that we win both allies and friends with spreading what you might call ‘practical love.’ Instead of multiplying vengeance, we would multiply affection. Train paramedics instead of soldiers – the same people, folks, the very same people. Train para-engineers instead of soldiers. The same recruits. The same team work, the same camaraderie. Minus the future nightmares that we bequeath to so many of them. We should use our massive strength (tho we’re owned by the Chinese banks & it’s hard to know when that bubble bursts?) to build for the downtrodden, champion the sick. The Earth is pleading for peace in broken people — they are the runes, the hieroglyphs. You just have to have another tank — and you let another sister go river blind? These things are connected.   

    Is our legacy as America all this hell and hate? I don’t believe it. I believe that we can export engineering and education and medicine — and movies and cruddy hamburgers.

 

    Take a deep breath – we are going to have to believe in actual democracy for better or worse. The Security Council has got to go. No veto. We have to educate an international multilingual police force to do actual peace-keeping. With ceaseless citizens' oversight. Not power decreed by the Old Guard, but elected. We have to stand for our beliefs. It can’t be democracy except when that doesn’t suit us and we go all Adolf Stalin. We have to put our sword in the pit of fire and strike it ourselves into a pen and a plowshare. We cannot tyrannically declare our belief in democracy. We act it or we do not. People can see. Unilateral action can’t be countenanced because all peoples are created equal and have a right to the pursuit of happiness. We are supposed to help with that. Bombs are not help, ever. 

    How can you imagine that corporations should less than tithe? I have a real question as to why a genuine and humble leader needs to make one centavo more than the janitor – what real leader would not want to raise up the janitor and share his bread & or cake with her/him? (I just don’t recall Jesus being into aggrandizement, but maybe I missed that gospel? Maybe the Gospel of Greed was left out of all 36 tapes worth of the New Testament I listened to? Can you imagine Jesus being elected to office in USofA Inc with his platform? I think someone should comb the New Testament and update the language, chapter & verse & try to run on that.)
   Our leaders are supposed to be citizen servants – not bloated have-mores. How can we empower and include more citizens in a relative abundance of education and happiness? How can a leader call themselves prosperous if there are poor, unhoused, unhealed, unhappy? How can we trust any leader who rides in a phalanx of gas guzzlers? Is where they are getting to more important than where you are getting to on the 32 bus? If the leaders rode the bus and lived on minimum wage one week a month, I could listen to one syllable they have to piously mouth. Otherwise it’s all hot air and broken wind.
     Please, some leader, dare to try it. Try it and write a blog about it. We would rally around you like the whirlwind. One week a month. Then testify. Tell the other leaders how hard in fact it is. Put your life where your mouth is, Mr.Bush. Do democracy. Do humanhood.

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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

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

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Check pogblog’s Glossary for brave & nefarious words.

copyright pogblog 2005 all rights reserved

Please send pogblog’s link to your friends:

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3 Rainstorm . Cauac . Redbird. West . tzol 159  11.07.05 mon

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the education-obsessed world begins today with you

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Chinese Green & SoKo WiFi Dust the USA

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    Friends, I hope you escape this very sudden and very harsh presumably non-avian sore-throat-from-hell Event that attacked me a few days ago & felled me for awhile. I wouldn’t mention it, other people's misery in specific being tedium times ten, except that after a few days of a throat so sore, I was wavering – (I haven’t been to an MD since 1979 except once to get an inch long splinter pulled out from under my thumbnail – yes, you would say anything if they started shoving splinters under your fingernails – an answer I could have let someone else discover) – I thought, maybe, you old fool, this is the dreaded avian flu or who knows. But a friend suggested gargling dissolved Bayer aspirin in water – which I take every day any way. Willowbark is the miracle drug for sure, but chalk this in its column too. As an aspirin junkie for 15 years, only Bayer aspirin has the magic. Sorry, something is missing from the generics in this case. Anyhow, gargle away. I am not cough or other revolting drooling symptoms free, but the scary sore throat is Gone, hallelujah, bro & sis.

<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office” /> 

But to the real subject du jour.

 

Chinese Green & SoKo WiFi Dust the USA

 

    We either pursue the Burning Child shifting of the Military Industrial Complex to the Education Instructional Complex or we end up, baffled, as a backwater in history. We are spending our $820,000 per minute on an absurdly, obscenely obsolete model of dominance. The new dominance is invention for fun and for survival.

     Thomas Friedman’s China’s Little Green Book, a Nov 2 NYT column, tells how the Chinese are putting a giga-press on getting green. Not because it’s a nice idea, but so they don’t choke to death on the effluents of modernity.

    <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />South Korea, or SoKo as I ultramodernly call it, has grokked that nationwide ultraband is the kiss the frog & turn it to a prince smartest move. The frog being stuck in the past troglodytism and the prince is the collaborative and colludenative future 

     And we are stuck with a bellicose Administration all hopped up on the drugs of weapons and war. Everyone else is looking at us with horror tinct with pity or pity tinct with horror. Ye gods, I’m ashamed for our de-evolution, and a different thing, I am skin-crawlingly embarrassed that we are so belligerently and theistically stupid. We actually, tho admittedly barely, elected Al Gore an environmentalist and futurist who grokked green and the noosphere, the internet change from the competitive model to the instant and intimately collaborative, colludenative model. It is catastrophic to America’s hopes for joining – yes joining, what a novel, almost Navaho idea! — the future that we are stuck with an entire administration with at least three fatal flaws.

    The whole BushCo mindset is a throwback to anti-ecumenicalism in its many useful varieties. First let’s take a breath, as dear Fitz would say. I am not a communialist at all. I like my little personal space without having to pretend to like people’s company more than I do. I like it sometimes, sometimes I don’t. I like have a lair to retreat to – my garret as it were I suppose. I am not a happy hive person, always rubbing and buzzing like in bars on Friday night. So don’t think I have some sloppy sentimental notion of us all hunkering down in some loving commune. Piffle. However, we could care what happens in the next hovel, I think.

 

     How, for instance, does someone get to take their second dwelling off their taxes before everyone has a first dwelling? And tax payers should subsidize mansions? Really? No one makes their f***ing fortunes in a vacuum. You wouldn’t be so damned rich, FattHoggist, if the janitor weren’t making an impoverished wage. You are not worth 431 times more than your secretary per hour.

    So Robber Baron greediness and a complete gelding of the Labor Movement are flaws which pit us in the US against the future.

   In the general BushCo backward-looking, I see no one who groks the niftiness of technology. And, be sure, it is its niftiness which is what wins you over. Anyone who does not have access to home broadband is crippled. If that sounds like a blunt statement, it is from experience that I speak it. I had an overlap of dial-up and broadband. The broadband crashed one day (a rarity) and I discovered that the dial-up was all but useless. You cannot go back without feeling like an exile. All people who do not have a decent exclusive personal  computer and at least our clunky USA broadband are parapeligic, period.

     Going from broadband (as embarrassing as our USA broadband is – more like teaspoon-band compared to SoKo’s gallon-band) back to dial-up is like going from a fine 10-speed bicycle back to a tricycle. Yes, they both have wheels, but they aren’t in fact comparable.

    Please don’t be swayed by people who are not happy computer nuts. What do they know? I have the zeal of the converted. In 1988, I was still sure computers would be depersonalizing tools of an inhumane Corporate Structure. Maybe someone meant them to be, but trippingly around the gigantic feet of the dinosaurs, the tricksy lemurs began dancing under the moon after school.            

    A greatest fear I have is that with the changes happening so rapidly, those kids without computers or broadband, those not rhapsorg, are dusted into a different social species faster than could have happened before in history. The ability to augment your thinking with access to much of the world’s greatest knowledge all-but-instantly makes you different, more concrete, more specific – not disconnected, not more abstract. Now, obviously the same kind of training that a giga-reader of poetry or of the world itself is fortunate enough to get ought be vouchsafed to all these burgeoning brains so that they don’t only get addicted to cotton candy and giddy trivia. But the wonderful possibility of the noosphere is that you can pinball around from profundity to trivia in a trice.

    The freedom I feel as a writer now that I can check up on every nuance of what I’m writing about makes me just plain better in a substantial way. The melody is a gift I’ve practiced and earned, but the ability to check that SoKo has ¾ penetration of 4 times to 64 times faster broadband from an 11.05 article is a micro-solidity I can pass along that is both bloody cool and also makes us both smarter.

    I use rhapsorg instead of cyborg because the word rhapsody means woven song at root. And this future is orgged or organized more like a woven song than the cybernetic-org – helmsman-org model. There is no helmsman. Yet it is not chaos; there is an anti-entropic tendency to melody; therefore, woven song.

   So the kids (or any of us, really) not wired into the symphony are, ipso facto, deprived.

   Please don’t waste our time listing all that’s stupid and wrong with the internet. The same things that are stupid and wrong with people’s private minds – just the old mind was less on display to the non-psychic. Us psychics don’t notice so much difference, sooth to say. The vast garbage ground of pretentious nonsense and davidletterman sophomoric proto-humor is now in every Comment column of every blog that the generic imbecile-redneck-dave can find to bray on. However, I have found more thoughtful and resonant moments than ever I might have before. It requires a rhino-hide for a writer and super-quik junk-thought filters – like surfing the tv if you’re the one used to holding the remote – at a glance you see that it’s just britneyesque or whatever ain’t your poison.

       So the Chinese are doing giga-green and SoKo is leading the probably unwired way. We have got to instantly get this nation to have universal hotspots – the whole damn nation, like the MoonShot. Why were we woken up by Sputnik and not by SoKo? This is an Emergency & it is not a Test. You should hear that noise of alarm This is an Emergency until you shout at your Representatives urgently and constantly. WiFi this Nation Now.

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collaborate = working together;

colludenate = playing together;

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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

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

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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

1 Earth . Caban . Earthquake. Heron . East . tzol 157 11.05.05 sat 

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the education-obsessed world begins today with you

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the World Government Game

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Profounder Flounder

& the World Government Game

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This piece starts fable because if you don’t playful-up your mind, you won’t grok the quantum leap-frog to a new model near the end. Lube your mind.

 

   Profounder Flounder often preferred resting in the mud to being a super-hero. She liked lying in the mud thinking, like Faberge eggs, small great thoughts. Interwoven with sophisticated fishy erotica. Piscine eros was all about brushing one another with melodies of fins.   

    Her beloved, Sir Cuss BarraCuda was also a super-hero. It was easier, frankly, to fin with someone who grokked the difficulties and addictions of tovenaar rescue. There was much promiscuity among the 27,000 poikilothermic species, but Profounder was a faithful flounder.

    “Admit it, Profounder, it gets you off that he has a title,” said Clod Cod, one of their retinue. Profounder glimmered her dappled hide, the fish-equiv of a blush.

    “Yep, it’s slick. He’s so flagrant of fin.”  She nestled deliciously into the squishy mud.

    In spite of his royal heritage, Sir Cuss BarraCuda was legendary fish-freedom-fighter. “Dolphins, dolphins,” he would say. “Howsa ‘bout the tuna?”

    Side-butting was the octessence of erotic fishy action. Reproduction had zero to do with eros in the carnival of fishes. One laid. One sprayed. It was a function. But side-butting was a conjunction of hilarity and eros that humans had never joined. Side-butting was rather like jousting under the sea. Sir Cuss would coyly present his magnificent side to her. She would swim full-speed into his side, pushing him through the water and tumbling him over. Only in a supporting yet yielding medium like water would this be so violent, so playful, and cupidesque at the same time. One took turns. Part of the leisurely pleasure was the waiting while the slow motion sleersh and tumbling bloomed arabesquely in the quicksilver water and so slowly slowed. ‘You bowled me over’ has more meaning in the sargasso depths.

    The last time Sir Cuss 'Cuda had been home, they’d had a fairly hut discussion about the lot of psychic tovenaars, a kind of wily wizard. Most of their discussions were gehry or calatrava, more baroque and cognac in force and feel, though streamlined. The architecture of their conversations was one of their gifts and treasures.

        “What I’m worried about, Profounder,” said Sir Cuss, “is this epidemic of Nero Flu on Planet Paisley. I'm not sure what us tovenaars are going to do about the Nero Flu?”

     Planet <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Paisley is what we call Planet Earth, but seen in its expanded etheric dimension.  The Nero Flu is an astonishingly contagious and debilitating condition. It got its name from an ancient character in Paisley’s exoteric history, an emperor who was said to have shrugged and plucked his lyre as his great city burned. The catchphrase was ‘Nero fiddled while Rome burned.’ Nero Flu led to chronic defeat. Keep your head down, loot what entertainment and distraction you can on the sly, and hell with heroism. Heroes have to hero; hero moles get whacked. The Nero-afflicted were pre-wounded. They’d seen the ruthless usurpers, the bloated corporate gloaters, and had learned to hide in the shadows or blend with the fog.

    “Well,” said Profounder, “the young on Paisley have watched the middle-aged and old capitulate to gigaGreed, gigaCreed, and methed theoMilitoPatriotism. Who stands up? Who hollers? Silence of the Sheep – Obedient Americans is the longest running reality show they’ve seen. Who needs the SS? Malls, mortgages, football, and petty political bickering on cable tv quell the masses just fine.

    “Everyone who squawks at all is just twiddling around the edges of change. The difference with these young and the hippos is that these ones aren’t dis-illusioned . . .”

     “Hippies,” said Sir Cuss, “I think they called them ‘hippies,'  the ones hopped up on hope. Hippies, not hippos.”

   “All this shapeshifting from planet to planet, from dis-ease to un-ease, from pretty to giddy, from eyes with lids to eyes without lids. Do I have claws this week or fangs or fins? I’ll confess that keeping the lingo pristine irks my spleen,” said Profounder.

      “So, in the next triad of months, the otromundo themes are Ignite hope in the Apathos. Join Myrth, Salma Nella, The Blue, Quetzal, and pogblog in the Militarism to Educationism/Burning Child project. Backlight the Lizards with Ridicule. And do the odd torvenaar psychic rescue gig.”

    “And plot in some delicious squish in the mud time for you,” said Sir Cuss.

    Profounder Flounder fluttered her fins. It was so thoughtful of him to say that. He was a BarraCuda, a Lord of the Ocean, so silver and sleek, the handsomest fish in the sea. Mud was for vassals. But love does stranger things than make us cherish mud-dwellers.

    “You think you got if not a cure, an ameliorative for this Nero plague?” asked Sir Cuss.

   “Yep, sweets. I duz. The Apathos I know are so smart and so ingenious. And they have no interest in wielding blood-violence – violence that actually draws blood. I say we get them to invent a World Game. Like Sim City, except they would have to deal with the actual conditions in actual regions. They would get to run the virtual World. The Rebels would be the Builders. The CreedoGreedos would run things in the beginning. The Game task would be to transform the world from Creed n Greed to Equality & Happiness.

    There would be 3 World Games running simultaneously. You would be assigned to one randomly. There would be running counters of the EHQ, Equality & Happiness Quotient of each model.

    For every certain quantum of gained E & H, you’d get to spend time Through the Looking Screen in virtual Movie Houses where you’d enter sub-games of giga-GTAesque intrigue and violence and lust. We’d get them to design ways of getting credits from actual action in a local community to give you access to Game-in-Game powers.

    “Fuck, if I may say so, nation-building. Nations should be neighborhoods. World-building is the name of the future. As our R.Bucky says, ‘You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.’”

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Frank Gehry architect .. scroll down when you get there.

Santiago Calatrava architect .. clik slide show when you get there.

piscine = fishy.

poikilothermic .. unlike mammal blood, blood temperature changes with environment.

otromundo = OtherLand; lit. other world.

tovenaar = wizard, shaman.

GTA = Grand Theft Auto, a classic video game.

 

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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

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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

8 Monkey . Chuen . Raccoon . West . tzol 151  10.30.05 sun

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the pro-peace world begins today with you

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Clone the 3 Best Schools .. The Burning Child

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Clone the 3 Best Schools ..

The Burning Child

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   The Burning Child ..  Shifting from the Military Industrial Complex ($820,000 per minute) to the Education Industrial Complex. That’s how the title began. That’s the idea. I was vexed by the second ‘industrial’ but couldn’t grok something else with the proper cadence. I asked some wordsmith friends. Nada. Time floated by. Waiting for Godot. Waiting for Indictments. Waiting for the Rapture to Lighten the Piety Load on the Beloved Planet.

    Then Dear The Blue, my second best pal after Spiteful Puffy – The Blue and me ain’t Biblical or nothing, we just hang out a lot – Dear The Blue dropped a present into the air just in front of me like a hummingbird hovering, iridescent. “Instructional.” Ah. Aha.

   The Burning Child .. Shifting from the Military Industrial Complex ($820,000 per minute) to the Education Instructional Complex. Sweet. It works.

    Child, child burning bright in the forests of delight. Every child has the civil right to a superb education. We shift the $820,000 per minute over to a Manhattan Project of funding to provide an explosion of education in our nation.

     So, let’s for a few moments leave all the objections to the side and assume as a thought experiment that the ATBs, the Aliens with Tractor Beams are saying, “You Hairless Bipeds have five earth years to provide equally superb education to every single child from the Rio Grande to the Canadian border or we will incinerate your whole lousy belligerent species.” So, we have to do it. How then?

    I imagine a team of  Smart Good Hearts flying over the country in Education Force One looking down at all the schools in the country. We find the 3 Best Schools. We clone them. We buy out the remaining military obligations like veterans health care and so 4th.  We re-write the contracts with the DDX destroyers and A22 fighters and Robust Nuclear Earth Pentrator and Star Wars people so that they re-tool to research and build cheap, mobile, indestructible laptops and the infrastructure for free nationwide wireless ultraband and the best new schools gehryesque architecture can cathedralesquely create.  They do this shift as if their hair was on fire – which it will be if the ATBs get pissed.

   This is our Moon Shot. This is our Manhattan Project. If immediate profit weren’t any object, how cheap and fabulous could these tough thin fastest nifty laptop WolfBooks become? We put the $14,000 per minute we’re spending on the fantasy Missile Nonsense System aka Star Wars into WolfBook research. We have the forbidden socialism for the Military Budget now. We just re-allocate those resources to the Education Instructional Complex. We export education systems rather than weapons systems. If we can have the darned nanopod, thin and sexy (tho not so tough apparently), we can have a cheap fabulous laptop WolfBook for every citizen, child and Granny.

    This is an emergency for our very survival as a viable species. The planet is going to buck us off until we grok it. We do destruction; it does destruction – tho lots better. We do construction and fruitfulness; it will do construction and fruitfulness.

     All this is a national effort like WW2. This is WW3 – except that we fight for the future instead of smashing the present. Bloodshed will be considered Losing.

    Always look back from Y3000. Imagine where we are as our better angels in Y3000. How do we get there? That’s what pogblog wants to challenge and cajole you to think about. Not why we can’t. Because we do. So how do we get to the constructive, fruitful world? The more you bring to the table if even just in your mind and heart & not yet the street, the sooner this more delightful, smart inventive stuff can manifest. You dream about it every night. It just isn't manifested yet. We're the midwife people for the education dream. You can be a raving nutcase militant pacifist epistemologist like me, or you can be milder, cogitating in your living room. The NaySayers do not contribute. They just slow it down. We have to live with them until they shapeshift. Don't let 'em fuss you. Press on, regardless. ///<^>/////

   

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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 Death . Cimi . Twins . North . tzol 146  10.25.05 tues

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the pro-peace world begins today with you

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