Musings On Debt & Money: Some Few Slight Inconsequent Thoughts On Economics, Hereby Proffered Humbly for Your Delectation & Critique [spellchecked]

I've been thinking about the video I posted last. I decided that for my own sake I needed to type out what I think is happening in the world economy, so as to organize my own mind a bit.

I post it here hoping for your criticism and thoughts, my public. Any constructive feedback will be gratefully received.

This is the product of only a couple hours thought. It meanders and rambles and is anything but authoritative. Take it as merely the half baked thought of an ill educated layman, no more..

Ici-bas, mes pauvres pensées:

 

First truism: government debt is a necessary shelter for major capital. The debt exists solely for the purpose of sheltering massive (and usually essentially fraudulent, in that profits are nearly always privatized and losses socialized) investment returns with a guaranteed continuing return from the taxpayer.

The public debt is therefore the creature of capital.

Government investment in infrastructure (which includes investment in human infrastructure by way of things like education and health care) and subsidies of private business that is not financed directly by taxation must be financed by the creation of privately held debt.

We can either make rich people pay for the public expenditure directly by way of taxation, or else borrow the money from them.

The rich of course much prefer the second option, since the creation of public debt becomes a cash stream allowing them ever greater - by the mystical power of compound interest - control over the economy.

For capital is not "normal money." It cannot just sit there as cash on the counter. This is the first meta principle that "normal people" who think of their money as paper that they can carry around in their pocket must realize:

Money is not *real*. It is not even symbolic, not even a platonic actuality, not even meaningful in the sense that words are significantly real. Money is rather merely a number, an utterly arbitrary unit of measurement that we assign to wealth. When we say that Carlos Slim or Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerburg has 63 (or whathaveyou) billion dollars, we mean that that person has **contractual control** over certain aspects of our economy that we "value" at that amount.

It is interesting that the very most essential things in our economy often cannot be so easily controlled, and hence "valued" by monetary contracts. Sunlight, the air we breathe, our thoughts and feelings, the energy and blood coursing our synapses and sinews; very often the water (rainfall) we drink, our "casual" and familial (which is to say the most essential aspects of our) social interaction, our leisure time when we refuse to sell it; all of these things are generally free from contract.

Ownership is the most atavistic of contracts. It is a social construct, a metaphysical system, by which things (largely the fruit of other people's labor) are associated with a person. Money is thus a type of implicit non-specific contract. When we exchange our time, effort and expertise for money we are accepting the reality of that money as a contract.

When Facebook is said to be worth a trillion dollars, we mean that the information and participation of people in that system is held by advertisers and people who value access to that information and such influence upon people that Facebook has, to be worth that much. Facebook is in investment terms merely a metaphysical construct, a contractual system. A source of information and influence over people.

Money is an utter abstraction, in other words. Apart from its very real blunt contractual power, it is unreal and so substantially meaningless. As a unit of measurement it is insubstantial, unlike most units of measure in that it is utterly arbitrary. This is especially true on the level of capital, where the contract has been substantially abstracted from the physical and human reality that the number represents.

This is even more true of contemporary speculators, who trade on stock, insurance and futures markets in an utterly abstract manner. There is no sense of proprietorship in a modern hedge fund.

So, in order to have money in the sense that a capitalist has money (which is as different from the way "normal people" have money as prosaic Newtonian physics is from Einstein's quantum physics) you **must be investing it** .. Because that money represents contractual power over men and property, and nothing else. It cannot be completely abstracted and unused. It must be somehow allocated, its power exercised.

Investment is merely the substantially abstract allocation of wealth and property, then.

And again, you can see how the public debt insulates the major capitalist from risk. The debt is backed by the "full faith and credit" of the U.S. taxpayer, which means that any economic activity financed by way of that debt is insulated from utter failure by the taxpayer. Barring the collapse of the government, the bond holder will get his return. The public exchequer is also simultaneously the perfect customer: it always pays its debts, and is a perpetual source of new business.

 

Second truism: the recent housing bubble and resulting banking crisis were (on the highest levels of banking and government) deliberately created.

Fraudulent profits created during the bubble have been guaranteed by the taxpayer.

TARP therefore essentially represents a massive transfer of wealth from the American taxpayer to the banking sector.

Moral hazard has been substantially removed from the system for the major capitalist insider. Institutions may be destroyed, and minor investors and pension systems ruined, while the individuals responsible for these disasters are richly rewarded.

Legal consequence, risk exposure - moral hazard - exists in the middle and the bottom, but not the very top.

This radical imbalance exists, in that the laws criminalizing such behavior (eg, Glass Steagall) and separating prosaic banking from risky investment were overturned under Clinton, allowing the banker bastards to speculate with mortgage income (the money you pay every month for the privilege of occupying your home) - which income is the backbone of the banking system, accounting for most of the money in it - allowing them to use this money (which use was strictly regulated in the past, after the last crash that caused the Great Depression) in further very risky speculative loans to people very likely unable to repay, rather than merely as a source for further securitized mortgages.

People with poor credit histories were allowed to borrow without the 20% down payments historically required under Glass Steagall. People with no collateral, and insufficient income to repay loans, were nevertheless given mortgages. Usually under usurious variable rate mortgages that had seductively low initial rates, but then inevitably increasingly higher interest rates over time, guaranteeing quickly increasing profits until the inevitable moment they failed to repay. These loans were deliberately designed to fail. The bankers providing them knew the people receiving them would eventually be unable to repay, and deliberately issued mortgages that would concurrently fail sooner than later. The bubble was meant to blow up quickly and catastrophically, causing a "shock and awe" crisis where the "fire just simply had to be put out" or else the entire economy would go off the rails, causing another Great Depression.

The American taxpayer is left holding the flaming turd filled bag, guaranteeing the profits "earned" in the bubble, not on the level of the homeowner (or, more accurately, the dumb chump paying and so owned by his mortgage), and not even usually on the level of the mortgage seller (the bank receiving the interest), but on the level of the mortgage insurer. The major insurer in this past crisis, which is to say the primary tool used by major capital to defraud the taxpayer, was AIG.

This innovation, of insuring risky mortgage loans in large groups called "tranches," was again an "accidental" "innovation" made in the 90's at the time they overturned the banking laws protecting the public. Major insurance companies were allowed to guarantee very risky mortgage debt, allowing banks buying insurance for that debt to free up more capital under the banking laws that remained. Usually banks are made to hold ten percent of their capital in reserve (read low interest but very secure government securities and such) as a sort of anchor against a massive failure of mortgage buyers to repay their debts. In such an instance, the bank needs this secure reserve to garantee it's ability to continue loaning money, and hence the integrity of the banking process, and preventing a "run on the bank" (where investors and account holders pull their funds out of the bank simultaneously at the moment of crisis) and the resulting collapse of the lending process.

Banks were allowed both to make more risky loans without backing collateral, while simultaneously being allowed to reduce their reserve capital requirements. In lieu of significant low interest reserves, they were allowed to instead insure their high risk mortgage lending, and then release the money that would otherwise have been held in secure investments to use in further high risk (and very lucrative on the sort term) lending that was feeding the housing boom.

The insurers, most infamously AIG, were not then required to have the sorts of very conservative reserves on hand to guarantee the policies they were writing. Traditional insurers of property are bound by strict laws requiring they keep sufficient conservatively invested reserves on hand to guarantee their policies in the event of a massive disaster. These common sense requirements were not made of this new market. These insurers were allowed to guarantee massive speculation without being required to hold any reserves to back their massive exposure to risk. Again, this was deliberate on the part of the architects of the new system.

So, when the fraudulent loans (made without collateral, given to people who the bankers knew were very poor risks, to people who could and would simply walk away from the loans when they could not pay them, and who would suffer relatively minor consequence of bankruptcy) went bad on a massive scale, the banks turned to AIG to pay the policies. AIG had nowhere near the capital necessary to back its exposure, and so immediately failed. As did Bear Sterns and Lehman.

The federal government was then mugged to back the bad insurance policies, thereby saving the remaining banks' bacon. AIG is now currently more or less owned (via "bankster socialism") by the Federal Reserve (which is a consortium or cabal of private banking interests allowed to print - create - and then loan money for their own profit, emphatically not a governmental agency acting in the public good) and so now simply a tool used to dispense public monies to the banksters.

The pattern is the same as that of the collapse of the tech bubble in 2001 that claimed WorldCom, Tyco and Enron. The watchdogs were again bought out by their masters: accounting firms and ratings agencies cooked the books and gave their approval (AAA ratings to bad investments, etc.), thereby participating directly in the massive fraud being committed. Then, in the aftermath, the regulators - the SEC and Justice Department and state prosecutors - did nearly nothing, when even under the existing gutted regulatory law they could have brought thousands of Wall Street cretins to prosecution.

The public is thus left paying for the bubble. Not by guaranteeing that normal people seduced into buying homes at absurd prices can keep the houses they were seduced into "buying" at hugely inflated prices, but by guaranteeing the insurance policies written on failed loans. The intact banks keep the title on the property (causing stagnation and massive destruction in many communities) and their speculative profits, too.

Normal people (non-capitalists, those subsisting on exchange of their own labor, 99% of the US populace) can rarely afford to actually buy homes - most Americans buy mortgages, which is to say the right to pay interest to a bank for thirty years, for the privilege of living in a house whose title is held by a bank- our new lords material are bankers.

Nota Bene: while certain institutions (AIG, Lehman, Sterns: that is to say the immediate competition of Goldman Sachs, whose alumni control the Fed and so Washington) were allowed to fail, the individuals running them were made rich. Or, rather, vastly richer. They destroyed their institutions, but kept their millions in bonuses.

They failed us deliberately. They cheated us massively. And they have been greatly awarded for their fraud and thievery.

The rich own the major media. This is why this story is suppressed. The American people should be able to figure this out anyway, and react; but we are far too selfish, stupid and bovine. It is in our self interest to accept the soporific line that the bankers are rich because they deserve to be rich. We gladly believe it because we know that we in relative (global) terms are also rich, and in the very same fashion.

Which is to say that wer are rich by way of massive violence, fraud and deception. Through exploitation by way of contract. The lawyer's and banker's game is our game. We are merely their house servants, their praetorians. A privileged subordinate caste of workers and soldiers.

 

Third truism: The Iraq and Afghan wars are in the tradition of the "Great Game" played between the European powers, especially Great Britain and Russia, for control of Asia and her resources. Now the stakes (rapidly declining irreplaceable essential oil wealth in Asia and the Middle East) are higher, and the players more numerous (add a previously dormant but now very serious China and India to the calculus, as well as major wild cards like Iran and Pakistan that can at any moment throw the entire game into deadly nuclear armed chaos) than before. We are being fed a propaganda line about terrorism, WMD and self defense that is essentially false. We are there for oil and other essential mineral resources, period, point final. Without them we would be a third world economy. With them, we are a continuing super power.

There are millions of Chinese, Indonesians and Latin Americans (etc.) working for us for a dollar or less an hour. We benefit from this exploitation just as the bankers do, if on a reduced scale. The irreplaceable fossil fuels and cheap human labor we consume every time we go to Walmart or order something online makes us complicit, too.

We tell ourselves that we deserve wealth because we are a great and virtuous country, blah blah blah. But that is simply bullshit.

 

This here is the bottom line: we can either stand for justice, which is to say for the rights of workers to be properly paid and treated, and for **moral hazard**, which is to say **enforced responsibility and consequences for the powerful**, or we will deserve to fail as a society and civilization.

 

Final (I pray provocative) truism: American culture, our capitalist economy, has given us every crude carnal pleasure to live for, yet nothing transcendent to die for. We now have nothing beyond radical sustenance of utilitarian desire; the spurious, libertarian "freedom" to sate our every whim.

This is anti-christ.

 

So I say. What then say you? Any and all comments are hereby gratefully solicited. Any and all critique is welcome.

 


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Further Thoughts on Humility & Knowledge

 

But let the Spirit of all lies with works of dazzling magic blind you. Then absolutely mine, I'll have and bind you.

- The Devil, Goethe's Faust

 

Gnosticism is the predominate heresy of our age. Gnosticism is belief in salvation by knowledge, belief in the (eventual) supremacy of the intellect over all. Essentially, belief in salvation through power. "Knowledge is power."

Gnosis is derived from the Greek for knowledge, just as science is derived from the Latin for the same. The conciet of the gnostic is that the spiritual (as with everything else) can be reduced to a science, that by understanding one can control things spiritual. Just as one can control the material, the physical through knowledge, one can also control the metaphysical by way of knowledge. Astrology births astronomy, alchemy births chemistry, both birth physics. Technology is as magic. We can be become like gods through knowledge. This is the Fall.

Christianity, in contrast is in this sense a practical agnosticism. We know nothing that can save us. Reality is ultimately mysterious, infinite when we are finite. We can never completely control it, which is to say never control reality's Creator, he who is the source of all that is. He is utterly ineffable, beyond all human power to control or even ultimately understand. The universe gives a hint of his transcendence, enough to inspire awe.

Thus just as we did not and cannot create ourselves, we cannot sustain or save ourselves. It is embrace of this abject need for the Other that saves. Salvation is love of him, and therefore love is the only thing we ultimately need. Again, salvation is through love and the humility and trust (faith) that love engenders. It is in our dependence, weakness, and ignorance that we are saved. It is not in pride, but humility that we are gathered in. "For God is love." Thanks be God forever.

Therefore, it is not knowledge as power that saves, but realtionship in the Divine Trinity, whose energies are grace born of love. And while love is animated by certain knowledge, understanding, it is not of the intellect. Rather, it is of the heart.

So it is then that the smallest shattered, diseased retard with a heart consumed with love is infinitely greater than the futile pride of all hell unbound.

My friend Dale is far greater than satan.

I.H.S.V.

A.M.D.G.

 

 

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Bruised Orange: O.J. Squeezed from the American Dream..

If I Have Anymore Faith in this Fu'k'd Up Country, It's Due to the Likes of John Prine..




Them Lyrics:

My heart's in the ice house, come hill or come valley,
Like a long ago Sunday when I walked through the alley,
On a cold winter's morning to a church house
Just to shovel some snow.

I heard sirens on the train track, howl naked gettin' nuder,
An altar boy's been hit by a local commuter,
Just from walking with his back turned
To the train that was coming so slow..

You can gaze out the window get mad, gettin' madder,
Throw your hands in the air, sayin' "What does it matter?"
But it don't do no good to get angry,
So help me I know..

For a heart stained in anger grows weak and grows bitter..
You become your own prisoner, as you watch yourself sit there
Wrapped up in a trap of your very own chain of sorrow..

I been brought down to zero, pulled out and put back there..
I sat on a park bench, kissed the girl with the black hair
And my head shouted down to my heart, "you'd better look out below!"
Hey, it ain't such a long drop don't stammer don't stutter,
From the diamonds in the sidewalk to the dirt in the gutter,
You'll carry those bruises to remind you wherever you go.

You can gaze out the window get mad, gettin' madder,
Throw your hands in the air, sayin' "What does it matter?"
But it don't do no good to get angry,
So help me I know..

My heart's in the ice house, come hill or come valley,
Like a long ago Sunday when I walked through the alley,
On a cold winter's morning to a church house
Just to shovel some snow.

I heard sirens on the train track, howl naked gettin' nuder,
An altar boy's been hit by a local commuter,
Just from walking with his back turned
To the train that was coming so slow..

You can gaze out the window get mad, gettin' madder,
Throw your hands in the air, sayin' "What does it matter?"
But it don't do no good to get angry,
So help me I know..

For a heart stained in anger grows weak and grows bitter..
You become your own prisoner, as you watch yourself sit there
Wrapped up in a trap of your very own chain of sorrow..



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Glossarium: Thoughts On the Humility of Truth

As I'm driving about and finishing my grand tour of the peninsula, I've been thinking about this here blog, and all the things I've created it to say.   I've said virtually none of it yet, because of the overweening aspect of it all.    


Throw my thoughts upon the void impassive..  Strew my pearls..  


It needs to be said well, if at all.   


So far I've been coy.  I've been amusing myself that way, but also unsure of how - or even whether - to begin being explicit.   I want to start gently, and give my testimony in a way that the dozen or so people that  I want to hear it (and if they are so moved, respond somehow to it) to hear it well.  


Today, I realized that I feel ready to start saying it.   No time like the present, no moment like now.  So I will say what I've been holding to my heart all these years..  The secret work of my heart all this time, that has made my live the seared blessing that it has become.


First, I need to explain a few terms.  If you notice, I've been tagging my posts here.   I want to explain what I mean by a few of them, so that if you care to follow this blog and really understand what I am trying to say, you will. 


This afternoon I was listening to NPR and Neil Conan was interviewing this fellow about "apocalyptic" movies.   They were joking that the segment had nothing to do with the previous ones in which we learnt that London is burning, world markets collapsing, tanks are rolling the streets of Damascus, and the recession deepening.   They rattled on for a while, and talked about a bunch of movies in which the human race is almost or entirely annihilated by one thing or another, usually some combination of our own hubris and stupidity or alien invasion or natural holocaust.    


As listened I realized that they weren't going to talk about the origins of the term, about what the word "apocalypse" means.   Let me do it for you here.   This the etymology my dictionary gives the word:


ORIGIN Old English, via Old French andecclesiastical Latin from Greek apokalupsis, from apokaluptein ‘uncover, reveal,’ from apo- ‘un-’+ kaluptein ‘to cover.’


This word entered our lexicon by way of the Bible, of course.  It is used as a title of the last book of the New Testament, which is (if you did not know) written in Greek.   That book is the account of a prophetic dream attributed to the Apostle (Greek for "messenger") John, the only one of the 14 apostles (I include Judas, Matthais and Paul) to die a natural death.   Judas killed himself, and all the others were all martyred (Greek "to witness") for their faith in Christ.  


John, not incidentally, is the only one of the twelve who did not run away from the Crucifixion, and remained at the foot of the Cross.  


Wikipedia says that the name John derives via Latin Iōhannēs and Greek Ἰωάννης from the Hebrew name יוחנן (Yôḥanan, also transliterated Yochanan), a short form of the long name יְהוֹחָנָן Yehochanan, meaning "Yaweh is merciful".  


Now, why am I telling you all this?   If you notice, I've tagged a lot of the posts here with that word, apocalypse.   And when I do it, I am usually not (usually most often emphatically not) referring you to the end of the world, or to tribulations like those that Neil Conan and his guest were calling "apocalyptic" in those films.   Like I say, not normally..  


Instead, what I mean is that I think that whatever I am writing about is revelation of the hidden truth, the true nature of things, of veiled unappreciated goodness, veiled (often widely accepted) evil.  The way we, and things, truly are.  The beauty deep down things, or else the tricks that wicked bastards are doing in the shadows..  Things that people aren't noticing or being honest about, the subtle things that admit transcendence, the wickedness that we do to benefit ourselves and that harms others.


You know, all that which is "occult"  (from Latin occultare ‘secrete,’ frequentative of occulere‘conceal,’ based on celare ‘to hide’; the adjective and noun from occult- ‘covered over,’ from the verb occulere ).


Those things "seen through the glass darkly.."


These things are not usually "occult" in the sensational sense.  But evil things are always in the end diabolical, and the most evil people ultimately become satanic, in that they consciously revolt against the good and begin to worship their own wills which are evil.  And that is inevitably demonic and then spiritually uncouth in all the ways that people normally think "occult."


When I use "occult" as a tag on this here blog, I mean that I'm usually talking about something malevolent or diseased that is disguised, subtle or hidden.   Or, something beautiful that is gentle and unappreciated.


Which brings me to the issue of knowledge.  Gnosis, science, wisdom.   Love.   


Knowledge of good and evil.


Which is of course tantamount with knowing the truth.  The truth that shall set us free.


My ultimate message here, the thing that I want finally  to tell you, is that that truth exists.


Because what is is true, and that is inescapable.


We can either accept truth, witness and worship it, or else reject it and lie.  We either see that we serve the truth, and are subject to it, or else seek to escape it and deny it.


If we acknowledge our dependence upon the truth, our need for it.. If we see that we cannot control the truth or destroy it..


And that the truth will necessarily humiliate us, make us see ourselves and others as we really are..


That the truth is not in the end of the intellect, but rather of the heart..


That the truth, like everything good and real, is personal..  is indeed, a person.


This is my faith.  My testimony.   My heart knows it is so.




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Further Thoughts Forth

Since I just let tear that last post, and the void remains impassive, let me kick it up another notch:

Otto von Hapsburg died at the age of 96, today. July 4th. A distinction he shares with both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. That's amusing.

Why? Because this is the birthday of the Great Masonic Republic, the Whore of the Enlightenment, the anti-thesis of nearly everything that the Hapsburg dynasty represents in historical, theological and political terms. The only thing less "American" in this sense would be the papacy itself.

Now, I never met his highness, who one time pretender to the now extinct throne of the Empire of Austria Hungary, and so also a hypothetical candidate for the post of Holy Roman Emperor if it were still extant. I do have the great honor and pleasure of knowing many of his relatives, personally, though. Indeed, I consider a few of them that I spent some time with to be friends, in that slight but distinct sense that you often develop with people whom you like and share many things in common with.

In common with. Funny. But it's true. I've shared meals and drinks with them, gone to mass and prayed the rosary with them, been to parties and dinners with them, all on a first name basis. Once in a while I would kid one of them, address them as archduke and then tell them with mock sorrow that it was a shame, but that I am a republican and revolutionary..

In a tone of mock sorrow, but not in complete jest. For it's emphatically true: I am a republican and revolutionary.

Because for as much as I like them..

Like them? Yeah. Because they are not at all like the vulgar "noble" house of Monaco, or the tawdry jet- setting Windsors. They're more like the family Von Trapp: very friendly, haute bourgeois in their manner, not at all ostentatious. If you didn't know who they were, you'd never guess.

Still, as much as I like them, I am not about to join the Black Yellow Alliance.

In fact, if we aren't going to bring back the Roman (note, Roman, not Spanish) Inquisition, and support the full triumph of the Gregorian Reform and strive for the fullblown global triumph of the Papal Imperium (see how I've gone Orthodox, and now have come full circle round: accept the authority of the See of Rome all ye schismatics, and repent), then I am with Jefferson, and for the freedoms articulated in the Bill of Rights.

What I'm trying to say is that I am a Guelph and no Ghibelline, then a republican and no monarchist.

Like any of that makes any sense in reality. These last few years I've been thinking about all of this, wondering if I have any politics left anymore.

If it is not time for me to turn inward, for good.


How come? Because in reality, we live in a world where the gnostics have triumphed, in which the nominalists have won full sway. It's all extrapolated numerology and elaborated alchemy, now. The faustians have made their bargain and seized their mess of pottage, in the moment victorious.

Personhood - human dignity - is now held to be synonymous with will and consciousness. The mind is held to be independent of the body, which is to be transcended in the algorithmic triumph of the mind over matter.

The software can be extracted from the hardware, and set loose as a type of "angelic" intelligence to live eternally. The end of the human race, the master stroke of our evolution: transcendence through trans-humanism.

As has always been the case with them, gnostics never tell the truth. They are always hiding their intent, allowing the great mass to wallow, rut and forage, while they seek their transcendence through gnosis.


In terms of this scheme to be a Christian is to be agnostic. For faith is an embrace of powerlessness, a profound humility that recognizes the face of the Lord in that of the retarded, the ignorant, the sinful, the poor. Oneself, and every other human being no matter who they be. It is to renounce any pretension to salvific power over creation, it is to admit our own utter dependance upon and ignorance before God.

For we know nothing about Him that he does not reveal to us Himself. That is to say that all such knowledge is only had by grace.


And grace is not to be had by force, either of intellect or will: It is never coerced but always gratuitously given; like friendship, like love.


Which is to say that a human social order informed by grace would be like a great family in which the weak are borne by the strong.


Not some sort of bizarre hermetic hieratic order in which the masters of numerology lord over everyone else, enslave and force them to do their bidding in return for some contrived unreal abstraction like money.


You know how Orthodox Jews wrap the words of God around their head and right forearm? The will of the One they worship is always before them.


Today, in this culture most of us would put our portfolio and paycheck in the phylacteries if we were to wear tefillin.


That's what you could call a prophecy partially fulfilled. Can I get an amen?


Again, Happy Independence Day Y'all.



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On Key West

Key West, 4th July Weekend, 2011.

I have no idea how this place was before they put the oversea highway in. Or how much that amazing highway cost. It reminds me of Monterey, California crossed with Vegas. This used to be a working harbor and naval base. Now, it's overrun by fratboys, sorority girls and their families. Middle America, come to pahtay.

That miraculous highway across the sea exists merely to bear these tourists here.

This is what I've spent my entire adult life fleeing. These people, the stench of their middling ambition for wealth, their secure pleasures and sporadic weekend and then once yearly weeklong binge drinking. They may have kids in tow now, but they're still acting like they're on spring break.

Hemingway I think hung out in both Key West and Monterey back in the day. Definitely Key West.. Maybe it was just Steinbeck in Monterey..

Whicheverway, I doubt either one of them would want to hang here (or in Monterey for that matter) today. All the old working fishermen are disappeared. Now we have the besotted technicians of stockbrokers taking their place, NASCAR hats on backwards, Coors light cans in hand.. It's like becoming trapped one giant Kenny Chesney video.




The unscripted, the rough and raw, the unusual, the dissonant, the foreign, almost everything that could complicate and zest the place has been stripped away. It's basically been made like one great Carnival cruise, but without the boat, and no free parking. Cue the Jimmy Buffet, and get yerself a fake tattoo and an overpriced weakly blended margarita.

All of which is merely to say that they've gone made this place in their image: very lame. American wealth always standardizes and plasticizes, pasteurizes and makes things cute, routine and sentimental. That's what this place is: where the CPAs and Rotarians can come and play at being a celebrity sport fisherman for a long weekend.

It's like when they read the cliff's notes to pass that sophomore English quiz on For Whom the Bell Tolls. They're still faking it after all these years.

All of which is merely to note that Key West pretty much sucks.



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A Lone Post Modern Striker: Musings on Love & Ideology

I've been meditating lately on how people talk and think about politics, which is to say economics (creation, distribution and use of wealth) and religion (what binds us together, sacred narrative, myth, ritual, culture, history, the etiology of desire) and how silly our discourse and thought often is.

These last ten - no scratch that - last twenty years have been educational.

There's a stupid trope that's been making the rounds in the so called conservative circle-jerk for at least that long, usually attributed to Winston Churchill that keeps getting recycled, that goes something like this: "If you're not Liberal when you're 25, you have no heart. If you're not Conservative when you're 35, you have no brain."

People of a certain age like to repeat that like a mantra, as a means of soothing themselves for have gone on that drug and sex binge from 1967 through 1975, and then having "grown up" and "seen the light." Seeing the light usually means having "accepted Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior" in an encounter with God while smoking that last jibber in 1977, finally getting that CPA and real estate license, moving back to the suburbs and having two kids, then registering Republican and voting for Reagan in 1984.


That's been a common American life trajectory these last 60 years, and somehow even teaparty trogs seem to sense in their undulating rotund weightwatched guts that it's not a pretty one.

"I mean the commune, we were young, idealistic, you know? Then I woke up and realized I needed to get a job."

"Liberals suck! Keep your hands off my Social Security!"


Whatevah hoss. We all gotta do what we yabba dabba doo.


Being that I used to call myself a conservative, and almost joined Pat Buchanan's campaign for president back in the mid- nineties, but now find myself watching Democracy NOW and reading the likes of Hunter S. Thompson, Naomi Klein, Michel Foucault and Marx with immense pleasure and suppressing the urge to get a baseball bat and plant it in the set every time someone turns on FOX news or anyone from rags like the Weekly Standard or National Review starts flapping their gums on any channel, I find that quote immensely amusing.


It's not as if my essential loyalties have changed, mind you: I'm still both anti-abortion and anti-war, because I still believe in mercy as an ecstatic and immanent actuality. I still am a practicing Catholic who takes his faith seriously (perhaps still too seriously..) I still love my Country. Love my family, my friends, my tribe, my people, my language, my home.


It's just that my ways of thinking about all of these things, the prism through which I understand them, are changed.


I still believe in a supple and lyrical (even elagaic) orthodoxy, in truth, but I no longer feel like I can utterly control it with my mind. I feel like I can express and defend it poetically, somewhat, not with the rank certitude I used to.


I know longer really know what to think, I only know what I believe, want, hope..


What I love.


It seems to me that love is a species of humility. I wrote a brief post a couple days ago, where I wrote that desire is its own consummation and parody. I wrote that without thinking too much, out of my heart, as a sort of metaphoric impressionistic aphorism..

What I meant is that love and desire are in and of themselves satisfactions, yet also crucifixions.

It's in the tension of desire, not in pleasure, that I find my meaning.

Why do I want what I want? What am I wanting? Who do I want?


Dante wrote in detail about hell and purgatory. He could describe it all.


In heaven though, he was silent. There was nothing that could be said.


Some people mock heaven as boring, imagine eternal love as tedious.


The same way they find seem to find masturbation ecstatic and the cubicle secure.


I know only enough to pity them.


I'm not wise, smart or holy enough to teach anyone anything, probably. I can only dissent.


I'm on strike.


Me, you'll find contemplative in these woods mulling a rainy day mantle of mist wrapping smudgy ethereal swathes about the trees from my study, a fire in the pellet stove, my dog on my feet, earl grey in the mug, my books in stacks on every table and in cases on every wall, home of glad ferment (especially in the basement) and with a heart of quizzical gratitude and ever less frazzled bemusement.


I mean, if anyone cares to come look.



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Dancing with the Mountain.. Skiing as Life Metaphor.

Skiing is an inherently un-American sport. That's because most of our sports stories and metaphors revolve around the idea of trying harder.. "Okay boys, go out there and really hit 'em!" Go drive harder, tackle harder, run harder, play harder.

Well, in skiing it's just the opposite. The trick is to try softer.

Work with the mountain, rather than attacking it. Adapt your movements to meet the terrain.. Ski calm and collected, with the least amount of energy possible.. Let turns happen and forces build progressively, rather than forcing them all at once. Skiing is about borrowed forces. Gravity, mediated by our own grace, propels us far faster than we could ever go under our own sole power. The role of a good skier is to dance with, and coordinate these exterior forces, to meet the mountain in her curves and move with her.

The more you are in tune and sync with your skis, the snow, winter, with your own body and the mountain, the less there is to feel aggressive about.

The French have a term for this: la glisse. Glisser avec delicatesse, is to eloquently slide. You can't force it, don't even try. Let the piste rise to meet you, then flow into her..


Adapted from Breakthrough on the New Skis, Lito Tejada Flores, pp. 274-5.



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On Desiring Christ's Possession

A few rudimentary thoughts:


First, to pray intentionally and intimately is the most beautiful thing you can do.

Second, praying like that is a grace. You must ask God for it.

Third, the goal of a Christian is to pray like that, and thereby seek to be possessed by God.

Just like the devil possesses, so too can Christ "possess." Christ's possession heals, beatifies, transfigures and frees, while the devil's counterfeit wounds, distorts, warps and enslaves.

A soul seeking to pray should beg Christ and the Holy Spirit to possess her.

This type of prayer is a hint of heaven, an intimation of paradise.

Paradise is entering into complete intimacy, becoming completely united with the Triune God, in a state of eternal rapture in which one is completely taken and possessed of the Trinity. In this the soul "is" worship, "is" prayer. The soul is mystically unified with and becomes like unto God himself.

You can taste an intimation of this by praying now, while God is still veiled in time.

There is no created thing that *we possess* that can do this, no other person. This means no created thing should be allowed to distract you from prayer. This is the point and meaning of ascesis and destroying the carnal passions which distract us from God, and too often become "idols," which to say ends sought in themselves for merely our own pleasure and exaltation.

If you think anything other than God will make you utterly happy in the way you want to be, you're confused and being tempted to idolatry.

Seek ye first the Kingdom of God - union with him - with thy entire mind, soul and body.

All other merely physical needs and desires must be made subsequent, always subservient to your friendship and love of God.

Such necessary detachment is also a grace, also the fruit of prayer.

Ask, and ye shall receive.

Pray for love and in love, for humility and in humility, and you'll get it..


Try (taste) and see..



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Let us love one another and laugh..

Time passes, and we shall soon laugh no longer. And meanwhile, common living is a burden, and earnest men are at siege upon us all around..

Let us suffer absurdities with gladness, for that is only to suffer each other.


Hilaire Belloc.



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