Apolitical America: Nightmares of the Preventive Paradigm

"In the past, politicians promised to create a better world. They had different ways of achieving this, but their power and authority came from the optimistic visions they offered their people. Those dreams failed, and today people have lost faith in ideologies...But now, they have discovered a new role that restores their power and authority. Instead of delivering dreams, politicians promise to protect us from nightmares...But much of this threat is a fantasy, which has been exaggerated and distorted by politicians. It's a dark illusion that has spread unquestioned through governments around the world, security services and the international media." BBC Documentary Power of Nightmares

As George Carlin said, "You have no choice, you have owners." Yet, before I heard the words of this comic genius, I had an inkling that America was having its way with me, and I desperately needed to get out. When the twin towers came crashing down, I was a teenage male, bent up in a corner, with only one response, the one I thought my American family wanted to hear, "I would kill to get revenge." As I watched the growing stores of books on international post-Cold war espionage supporting the drama of "war on terror" dialectic, I became more and more sickened and disillusioned. Bush's maddeningly insane propaganda machine of backwards language and foolish bad humour turned my stomach. I fled America, to live in the Middle East. I needed to hear the breathing from "the other side". I found human hearts, not enemy minds. I found a camaraderie so naturally human, and so deeply universal, that I was fulfilled from my need to be "American" at all. With Obama's "war on terror" claim to fame at finally finding success in hunting down Osama, I remain ever firm in my convictions. American "terror" propaganda is so deep-seated that it is truly beyond politics, it is the very lifeblood and backbone of American society. 

See my post: Flightless Dreams and Dark Humour of a Post-W.orld...

__________

A gargantuan supply of Spanish rice, washed in a tantalizing array of chiles and spices galore, wades in a fine cream sauce. A team of cooks work with exceptional efficiency in an open kitchen. The dining area is of a posh nightlife design. Smoke wafts among whisky inhalation in the metropolitan air. 

New York Restaurant by Edward Hopper

As I stare into the blaring kitchen lights from the dim seating area, I notice a cook saunter over to a telephone on the wall. His white frock is stained with stout culinary effort. Taking another sip from my snifter, eyeing a fantastic belle at the table across from me, the dining lights suddenly dim uncomfortably. The kitchen light glares out over the tables with the stillness of an all too noticeable silence. Everyone is motionless. 

At the Moulin Rouge by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

My eyes survey the room with blundering anxiety. The white frock of the cook at the phone reflects a brutal white light over fearing eyes. His mouth opens, and out emits a breath so hot I can feel it nearly twenty feet distant. His eyes become two open holes. The man falls, and I can see his frock begins to stain red. Crawling along the open floor, he is steaming hot. As he unbuttons his cook's clothing, his chest pours with ashen blood, a red so crimson it floods my eyes with a blinding hue. In my mind, I kneel to help him. I sit, frozen. 

Triumph of Death (detail) by Peter Bruegel the Elder 

All realize the man will soon die. One cook slowly meanders over to a phone, shakily dialling to quell the emergency at hand. In a last gruesome attempt to breathe, the man on the floor has almost completely undressed himself. Swelling with heat, blood pours from his chest and mouth. Staring at me with empty, soulless eyes. I faint. 

_________

"Fires beneath the throat, hand and breast of a reflected sky
Inside the single-eyed, whose perfect clock chimed roughly over the groundless

Patience, dusting off wine bottles
Into Californian eternity
...

The idealistic round elegized by madmen before indulgent crowds,
A folklore, pained to vulgarity in the thick mire

Soaked with herbal grime,
That dream-forsaken wine of the ancient, pours

Sending women to mind thankless law
In the first civil war before nationhood or tragic mores

The fallacy in and out of sight,
Instantaneous with thoroughly flushed wives, fanning themselves awake

As the flies descend and drink their salivating gore-fest tirades,
The Queendom, saved by the ranting duration of a minor apocalypse

When all the rest of the world lies in tears
Shaken only by worldwide fame"

excerpts from "Co-creative Wondering"

Climate Changes Civil Society To Support Dreamers

"This morning Munira Sibai, a Syrian-American student with SustainUs, delivered this speech on behalf of young people (YOUNGO). Although many governments could not be bothered to listen to their citizens, civil society was present in force: supporting Munira and each other in a way that governments can only dream of. Onwards." Earth in Brackets BLOG (Dec. 7 2012)

Tonight, as I drifted away, I read the latest Democracy Now! headlines on climate change. Civil society and democracy are shifting gears for full speed ahead as the human race confronts the most pressing issue yet known to humankind: A Warming Earth. 

Read the latest World Bank Research analysis on the devastating impacts of unheeded climate change warnings. At 4 degrees warmer, the science begins to frighten. 

Earlier tonight, as I cycled home, I met a bewildered fox. Scared and nervous, we approached each other. My fear suddenly transformed as I saw fear in the fox's eyes. I glided past carefully. I witnessed this incredible animal confusedly find an exit from the paved city pathways to the nearby riverbanks. I think of Native proverbs that ask, "who will speak for our beloved animals?" 

________

The candles are now all reconstituted wax. The rain boils and steams before it reaches its earthen ground. The sky is on fire and I need a new name.

In Peril by John Atkinson Grimshaw

Through my window of impoverishment, a sanded frame of dirt, I see tanks spewing the ire of mankind. Fire is the breath of unreason. Violence spreads across the land.

Miniature diorama in the Herat Military Museum by Marius Arnesen

Bombs and machine tracks seed great pocks of holes in the earth. The clouds are dark with soot and anger. Lightning cracks through the smiles of silenced memories. Families are swept away like dust.

Lunshunku battle during the Sino-Japanese war (1895) by Unknown

Fending off the soul-puncturing thunder of war, I flee through the bureaucratic maze of a police state. Warmongers drive their piercing insanity into my eyes, as I feel my way through back entrances and obsolete hallways. The border embassy shakes at the foundation. Our earth will be interminably scarred. We are equally victims and perpetrators of widespread ecological domestic abuse.

The Immaculate Conception, detail: Dragon's Eye by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo

In a vile trench of near-death urgency, I climb out, and into the sun of borderlands. Having escaped the eruptive core of my country’s open, bleeding veins of disintegration, I wade in scintillating wetlands. Vibrant green pasture, lily pads and low-lying bogs hydrate my contemplative sight.

Sunset over wetlands by Julian Falat

I can almost see beyond the untimely closure of history. Birds and insects sleep with day, at peace, like me, in restful respite.

_________

"Escalations nerve-wracking, lonely murmurs murmuring

Crescent peaks dangling under bums grateful with uprooted membranous petrified and calcified flesh

Journey to roust the kneeling mind, with the desiring missed find, to be missed by nations feigning the patient behind swollen gum-brain awry, with skull-ache

“kinj moduls vrent speen og”

Desiring missiles
Desired missing
Failing nations

Patient fang"

excerpt from "Cajoled Spine-Tap"

Do Not Confuse Transparency With Justice, Interview With Julian Assange

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange lays the groundwork for sanity and clarity, two moral imperatives which become severely deluded in our modern economic infrastructure of global monetary exchange and corrupted international hierarchies with regard to law and policy. The transparency is won through the exposure of new facts, and the justice is had in their due measure via civil application on the ground. This is a bottom-up frequency of people intelligence. This is our one and only power in an age where the word, and its unforgivable silence, is one of the most powerfully dominating forces, painting such instances of carnage as the war in Iraq with the "nice" of workaday mindlessness, aloof and yet proverbial. 

Watch, and wonder why human experience has become the greatest challenge to corrupted power. 

"Politically significant leaks will be 'collaboratively analyzed by hundreds of [Wikileaks] editors in a way mainstream media-leaked documents could never dream of...'" Hanna De Jong, Wikileaks spokesperson, "Media/Web site aims to post government secrets"

________

I know this man. The narrowing, shifty corners of his immaculate apartment reek with the anticipated horrors of bachelordom. A homosexual no less, I slither through the tiny, dimly lit space, eyeing the specialty fabrics and delicate cabinetry with suspicion. This man is no frugal spender. He begins to prepare a fish salad. The salmon are now extinct. “Right and fished out all the way down to Caribbean,” he says, as I open a can of tuna.

Adaptation (2004) by César Leal Jiménez

The lights dim to near darkness as I put the last finishing touches on the salad. Lying across from one another on the carpet floor, he asks me how I deal with my oncoming death. I get nervous, as I notice him procuring a crack pipe from the folds of his clothing. I escape into the corridor halls of the apartment complex. Finding a washroom, I clamber downstairs into a basement. A mass of elderly people sits and washes in undivided toilet and shower stalls. Flabbergasted, I am at all odds. “Should I return upstairs?” Blankly, I go anywhere except back.     

________

full with brutish lies
that carefully whispers a song of superiority, stigmatized,
and the random tear, breaking at the seam of the color line
brackets, the argumentative congress
in sparked ruthless struggle

...

in our head and eye
who self-formed, began as a creative laboring
in the strong brush with a peculiar kind of will
that worshipped a diverse issuing of the ten-thousand tongued iris
performing for the blessed worldly guest

...

growing up in the solitary profundity of man, alone with nature,
wherein lies our humane passage
through social obstacles
in desire and the restrictive curse

- excerpts from "None Superior Than No One"

The Genocidal Unconscious of America

“The U.S. is a strange society because I think consciously the country wants to believe that it does good and that it has, you know, good intentions around the world and it’s not very in touch with its subconscious self that is a lot meaner and a lot more homicidal than the self that it would like to acknowledge.”

- Charles Abourezk, Supreme Court Justice for the Rosebud Sioux Tribe

___________

With an unusual collection of friends who have never before met in person, including my childhood neighbor and my best friend in Calgary, we all set out on bikes through a nearby forest path to the ocean. We are excitable, older and more aware of our environment than ever. There is a confident appreciation for the anticipated wilderness charm ahead. As we exit the neighborhood onto the main street, still lacking any signage dedicated to non-motored travel, there is a foreboding stimulus from afar as an interrupted vacuity of law overtakes the street-laden, forested horizon. We all stretch our necks backward, blithe with eager enthusiasm to find our way to the secluded ocean vista. As we comfortably engage on our briefly paved portion of the path, a paddy wagon stops in front of us. Lights blazing with ingenious madness; the government insinuation is of madness and futility. Officers exit their vehicle, pursuing our humiliated, fading glory with a clown-faced repertoire of deception and misinformation. One cop hands me a crinkled dollar bill. Hesitant, I grab its frayed edge. As soon as the act of derogation ensues, another cop hands one of my friends, visiting from Canada, a ticket of over one hundred dollars. Sitting down, exasperated with inner frustration, my friend refuses the ticket. I take it for him as to not cause a stir.

The cops press on with deliberation, attempting to get a rise out of us through any and every means at their wicked disposal. Soon, our bikes are in the back of the van. “What have we done?” I ask myself with intensive speculation. The air smells of fish and pig, putrid. Their glares are fuel to the fire. Letting us out at my neighborhood friend’s home only a few paces away by car, as to pour salt on our bleary, wounded minds. One cop asks my friend, “What’s your family background?” He smiles patiently and responds, “Well, I’m English, and ummm…” the silence is emphasized by the piercing stare of the officer denouncing his Asian eyes with an understated slur. “And Dutch!” I say, in support of my friend before the awful reception of the savage, unannounced feigning of America’s pitiful counterterrorism. Defeated, the rest of my friends join my neighbor into his house for drinks and an indoor evening, while I angrily bike down the hill to my mother’s house with the ticket in my pocket. “I’ve got to tell them about the insipid brink of justice coagulating around our neighborhood with such asinine hubris.” I consider introspectively.

Red flashing lights drown the usual calm haze around my mother’s suburban home with inconceivable villainy. As I ride smoothly around the back of the house to peer out into the driveway stealthily, I can’t believe my eyes. “Another police raid, we are innocent! The police are the guilty ones these days.” I curse their heavy hog-head presence on our property. They have torn apart the entire garage. My stepfather stands on his smooth driveway pavement dumbfounded, entrenched in the unwelcome malevolence. Domestic counterterrorism laws have been enacted. To the local police, now in full operation as a military state, no heed is recognized for the delicate peace and earnest honesty attributed to the very population whose lives have been dedicated to their government services. Through force, the government takes full advantage of the interlocking mutuality behind the dual inception of insurmountable trickery. “When will America’s children realize they have only cheated themselves?” I clamber on, to ride myself through the neglected wilderness path. There is an ocean beyond.  

_________

Police

"If the police are trying to arrest you for some crime of which you are innocent, it foretells that you will successfully outstrip rivalry...A dream involving the police means you feel guilty for not honouring a promise or obligation...The police could be addressing Karmic Law as well as the laws in our physical world...Old dream interpretation books say that dreaming about police is an indication that you will obtain unexpected assistance with a current problem." (iDream)

________

Preconception, the snowball effect, and the end of humanity.

Thematic Abuse.
Two Versions (one for public, one unmodified).

Lost familiarity.
Generations.

“What blue fire has been found hidden these last few days?”

“It is the tax of the many on the few”

And the brandished awareness of our single life
followed into the brazen evening with full vigour.

The young woman revealed her teeth
and wore a short vision on her ring
that lacked the ability to forget.

Her rhythmic movements lied agape
to preserve our entrenched faculty
to be remorseful and sick.

We lie in the unbounded grease
of a pandemic conspiracy,
a mass confusion,
ringing clear as the empty sky
before each face, it sings wryly
behind a mask of enraged pain.

“It is a race to the beginning!”

“The thieves of fire are out to lunch today and we have no one left to hear…to see…to be…”

The groundless mire of slick urbanized gore
lets a finishing cackle into the murderous air
as we slink in our beds engrossed
in the contemplative gold of our own breath
…softly giving way to the perfected sleep
that buys dreamless jewelry from the rocks of visceral stress.

“Illiterate, unreliable, lazy mediocrity, feigning humanity"

"Who is that
who cherishes the meaningless fog?

It covers our sanity…”

Animals quiver with stagnant pleas
whimpering in their cages
and blinking tears into the loveless dust
of the meat they will sacrifice
to a mouth blocked with a family honor
so loud it tears to fuck
all the beauty of being one species.

Feb. 20, 2010

Busking, Gambling and Escape from the Assured Life

Peasants Playing Cards in a Tavern by Adriaen Brouwer

A dream of two days ago will not escape me. It is ever pertinent, because it lingers still in my memory, and its narrative, symbology and emotional meanings are carried through into my dreams today:

Dream 1

I am running, as a fugitive would run, I run with everything that I am. I seem to be escaping the watch of some unknown authoritative holding. The police, FBI, it could be any of these, or it could be something more abstract. I am unsure, yet I am running.

Next, I find myself busking with a guitar beside a Fire Station in the town of Mattapoisett, Massachusetts. This is an odd place to find one's self busking, however I am in the eye of governmental authority. My change bowl clinks with a Canadian loonie and a few pennies. I am enjoying playing the guitar, then I feel as if I am being chased again, the firefighters seem to all glare and approach as if from above, and my whole environment around me seems to do the same.

Dream 2

I at New York University. My step-father is guiding me to sign up for a set of classes with a Master's program as he had always wished for me. I comply with passive-aggressive remarks and actions, thinking in my head one thing while doing another. I sign up for some classes in his presence. Next, he buys me a cheap guitar out on the street. I see him speed off with an unforgivably strange partner, however he is happy, and so I am content.

I visit a friend, we are in a small space, inside what seems to be a bedroom of a trailer. I show the people there the guitar and it seems to be entirely unplayable. It is a cheap piece of trash. We sit awkwardly around the television, wasting time.

I then go down an alleyway which appears similar to the alleyways in and around Cairo, Egypt's downtown midan or squares. In the alleway, I see people busking. They are bringing such authentic vibrations of strength, persistence and genuine enjoyment to an otherwise dull and dreary atmosphere of biological decay and mental stagnance. The street performers are still not well-recognized nor respected well by passerby onlookers. I cheerfully greet these buskers and enjoy their drumming.

Next, I am in what seems to be the inside of a warehouse, it is a filled with the stereotypical busker of the public mind. A recurring dream-character, tall, stout, blonde-haired, bearded with bad complexion. Within the warehouse there is homelessness, deprivation, madness, poverty. I walk through unaffected yet witnessing, somehow removed by unique experience. I have returned to a world filled with inequalities and cheap resolve for a way of life which transforms peoples minds into that of a fugitive.

                                                                    ____________

One day, while reflecting on the act of street performing/busking, I was taken with the notion that busking is in many respects like gambling. And from a crude perspective, the art of pure improvisation is in a way a form of gambling, wherein you anticipate, based on one's knowledge of the variables at hand, the outcome of a certain action. The fact that my experience as a street performer/busker has been through performing completely improvised music further emphasizes my notion that improvised street performing is a kind of gambling, however with the due sophistication of musicianship and the wealth of experiential confidence in playing one's instrument. For further understanding seek: myspace.com/vian and youtube.com/nivsha

Discolored Urban Landscape Sexualized in Youth

Ciudad by Ulpiano Carrasco

The landscape is a discolored, underdeveloped urban setting rising high up, similar to urban sprawl of Cairo, favelas of Brazil and the outskirts of D.F., Mexico, I can see out from a high rise, immediately outside the underdeveloped core are more riche developments that look more like suburban residences in Boston, upstate NY or Washington DC, then after that ring which has a certain brilliance and illuminates in the harsh sunlight much clearer than my immediate surroundings in a somewhat dim vantage point, the most outlying division is a pentagon-looking, round-shaped government-type building similar to the famous MIT hall in Cambridge, yet the building is surrounded, as are all outlying developments, with dense low-lying jungle similar to southern Mexican traditional Maya lands, I seem to have checked into the dilapidated high-rise I'm in, as it is a hotel. I'm with four others, 2 guys and 2 women my age, one of the ladies looks Provencal French with a Roma nose, the group becomes quite sexually aroused and active, altogether, I'm observing with care how they treat the French-looking lady as her naked body is mounted revealing a pointed mass of moving genitals, the group soon disperses with an air of slight dissatisfaction, I seem extremely anxious and leave the building

Sept. 29 2011

Seizure of the Father from the Western Family

Fighting Forms by Franz Marc

Taking place on the property of my Father’s house, there is great tension in the air as the house is stormed by government police, I hide somewhere near the trailer with my sister as I exit in similar fashion to the end of the movie “The Professional” I am caught, however, by officials after a standoff where my sentencing is escalated by the moment due to my non-cooperative actions as they assault me with shotguns and take me into custody, some of my family members there seem to have been killed as there was an incident involving drugs or an unclear criminal derivative of that sort. I am in the back of a police car, and exclaiming, “I am someone” in multifarious expressions as my life sentencing is foreseen by the accompanying police officer and in my mind, life takes a turn for the exceptionally terminal. Call it a nightmare, if you will.

September 11, 2011