… is a symbolic assertion of consensus by millions of Americans on how their country can be fixed… especially in light of the federal government’s attacks on NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and Army Wikileaker Bradley/Chelsea Manning.
The plan is to develop a Website and facilities for blanketing the country in ‘signage’—bumper stickers, t-shirts, coffee cups, lapel pins, banners, brochures, etc.—that will be suggestive of a Snowden-Manning 2016 presidential campaign. Continue reading
Time for some ‘sloppy sentimentality,’ a story I had not been aware of… but in the latter part of the 20th century came to be a symbol of hope for humanity worldwide. “Dewey Readmore Books,” showed up one minus-15° January 1988 morning in the book deposit box of the public library of the small town of Spencer, Iowa. The author discovered the kitten, just a few weeks old barely clinging to life under the returns. [The narrative of how the staff managed to save the poor cat’s life is a thoroughly amazing achievement in itself, putting flesh and blood (or fur and blood) into the observation that where there’s life there’s hope. Honestly, it borders on the miraculous.] Continue reading
Ma Joad: You’re not aimin’ to kill nobody.
Tom Joad: No, Ma, not that. That ain’t it. It’s just, well as long as I’m an outlaw anyways… maybe I can do somethin’… maybe I can just find out somethin’, just scrounge around and maybe find out what it is that’s wrong and see if they ain’t somethin’ that can be done about it. I ain’t thought it out all clear, Ma. I can’t. I don’t know enough.
Ma Joad: How am I gonna know about ya, Tommy? Why they could kill ya and I’d never know.
Tom Joad: Well, maybe it’s like Casy says. A fellow ain’t got a soul of his own, just little piece of a big soul, the one big soul that belongs to everybody, then…
Ma Joad: Then what, Tom?
Tom Joad: Then it don’t matter. I’ll be all around in the dark—I’ll be everywhere. Wherever you can look—wherever there’s a fight, so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad. I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know supper’s ready, and when the people are eatin’ the stuff they raise and livin’ in the houses they build—I’ll be there, too. Continue reading
“Psychiatry does more than define mental disorders. It purports to describe actual states of mind, and it coalesces and freezes those descriptions in such a way that people believe these states of mind exist. They don’t. They’re fictions. Fantasies. This is an enormous landscape of consciousness-programming. It’s actually reduction. Like many systems before it, psychiatry tries to reduce the possibilities of wide-ranging free consciousness. Throughout history, people have always been afraid of mind freedom. ‘What will people with free minds do?’ ‘What will society become if people’s minds are free?’ I can tell you: society would change radically, right down to its foundations.” (The Underground, Jon Rappoport)
Over the past 30 years, my work has always returned to freedom of the individual.
Not only Constitutional freedom and Bill-of-Rights freedom, but liberation of the power of individual thought and imagination and invention. Because those qualities are unpredictable, open-ended, and limitless. This is where long-term revolution begins. Continue reading
Roughly a year ago someone or something raised the notion to me of a symbolic Ed Snowden and Bradley/Chelsea Manning presidential ticket. And I thought to myself, “Wow, such a campaign would be like giving the finger to the powers that be for their multiple high-crime assaults on the people… while they always get off scot-free. The gesture being a milder, more thoughtful version of Howard Beale’s passionate appeal in the movie Network, ‘We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore!'”
So I promptly went to my BuildASign.com account and designed the bumper sticker you see above right. [If you click on the image—and then on the ‘Check out This Design…’ link on the page that comes up—you can order them directly.] I had in mind a trial balloon for an actual write-in campaign for the two persons… though a real write-in campaign would need to find two legally qualified individuals to be the bona fide candidates manifesting for the expelled Snowden and incarcerated Manning. Continue reading
Delysia: [during an air-raid drill] Guinevere, I’m scared!
Guinevere Pettigrew: It’s just a drill, I’m sure it’s just a drill.
Delysia: But it won’t always be, will it? We’re going to war, aren’t we?
Guinevere Pettigrew: Yes we are. And that is why you must not waste a second of this precious life. Listen to me. Once I too had ambitions. Not your grand ones, simple ambitions. Marriage, children and a house of our own. He died, in the mud in France. A good, solid man. You would call him dull, no doubt, but he smiled whenever he saw me and we could’ve built a life on that. Your heart knows the truth, Delysia. Trust it.
What a phrase, “… but he smiled whenever he saw me and we could have built a life on that.” Uttered by Guinevere Pettigrew (Frances McDormand) to her strangely acquired mistress for a day, Delysia (Amy Adams), it comes toward the end of the movie in the context of an adoring piano player Michael (Lee Pace) proposing to Delysia that she accompany him to New York for song and marriage. Continue reading
“The media have substituted themselves for the older world… The new media are not bridges between man and nature —they are nature… The new media are not ways of relating us to the old world; they are the real world and they reshape what remains of the old world at will… In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point… The whole tendency of modern communication… is towards participation in a process, rather than apprehension of concepts.” (Marshall McLuhan)
The best film ever made about television’s war on the population is Paddy Chayefsky’s scorching masterpiece, Network (1976). Yet it stages only a few minutes of on-air television. Continue reading