The Bush Administration Is...

Today we have a post from Peace Tree Contributing author, W. Christopher Epler.

The Bush Administration is a fragile mobile of Political/financial/religious forces; not a unified political juggernaut.

It's like an animal that shouldn't even exist, since the probability that the Christian Right would unite with Israel's lunatic fringe at precisely the same moment Mussolini-style American fascists would attempt a corporate coup d'etat is effectively zero.

But this is exactly what happened, even though any historian would be laughed out of his/her tenure ship had they predicted such a fantastic collage of seemingly disparate interests could last for more than five minutes.

However, mobiles go out of balance very easily and rag tag coalitions of virtually different life forms never last, and the signs are everywhere that the Bush/Republican/Evangelical/lunatic-fringe-Israeli army of insanity is beginning to implode.

The reason is simple. Each of these Hydra Heads has its own agenda and "compromise" is not the name of the game with profoundly irrational and selfish people. In short, thieves fall out.

Probably never in American history has there ever been such a concantation of evil -- and such an IMPROBABLE concantation of evil. Creatures like Tom Delay, for example, are simply off the chart. Consider a man who will almost certainly end up in prison for several
years who repeatedly justified his political/financial atrocities with Biblical scripture.

And who would EVER have thought that Baptist lunatic fringers (which certainly doesn't include moral heroes like President Jimmy Carter) would march arm in arm with the political/religious Israeli lunatic fringe (which certainly doesn't speak for the complex State of Israel, e.g., the labor party).

Lunatic fringers all, but lunatic fringers with profoundly different agendas. It's a miracle they even speak to each other.

The hopeful moral in all this, of course, is that coalitions of diverse fanatics NEVER LAST. People in the psychotic grip of their designer ideologies may eat at the same table, but they never worship the same gods. Behind the public charade of unity the cult leaders sneer at each other and bide their time. Each Hydra Head secretly thinks it will outlast all the others.

Lastly, in the context of these delicately interlocked evils, people like Dick Cheney and Karl Rove are given far too much credit (or discredit!) for current events. As Tolstoy said of Napoleon, these scum are merely surfing vast national/international currents and as move the currents, so moves history. Rove, Cheney, Bush, etc. are simply the bubbles of the day, and high probability always wins over low probability so this fantastically improbable network of mutually reinforcing corruption is disintegrating before our eyes as we speak.

W. Christopher Epler (Bill)

Y'all visit Bill at his home blog The Liberation of Realism

_______________________________

Peace y'all

Tags: Bush Administration

How far will the political pendulum swing back to the left after Bush?

Greetings All,

I really don't know why it irks me so terribly to re-install an operating system but it does.
I know.
It is not hard to wipe your drive and just start over...but it irks me...lol.

But I did it anyway.
Just let go of the past along with all my bookmarks I lost previously and assorted other things that I probably have forgotten about.

Bye Bye.
One of those things that is just so final.
So far so good though : )

Today...we have a guest post from Peace Tree contributing author, W. Christopher Epler.
Hope y'all enjoy it.

How far will the political pendulum swing back to the left after Bush?

There's a consistency in American politics which virtually guarantees that an extreme swing in a political direction is predictably followed by a similarly extreme swing back to the opposite direction. Let's call this the "pendulum principle".

So, since the neocon lobby has moved Washington to the neo Nazi right, does this mean the swing back will be a dynamic rebirth of American Socialism?

However, the word "socialism" tends to make some Americans uncomfortable, so probably the "swing back" will be called progressivism, liberalism, or perhaps even populism (a la Harry Truman)
-- but the name is moot, since the political world view of all these "isms" is basically identical.

The one thing you can take to the back is that in spite of the Judas media, "liberalism" is BACK. The pugs did a good job for a time turning liberalism into a political dirty word, but they should have saved their money since liberal values and policies will almost certainly dominate American politics at least through 2008 and possibly for several elections to come.

The swing back first appeared in 2006, in spite of stolen local elections and a Republican media which concealed the fact that the elections were a dramatic mandate for progressive change.

Indeed, the fact that progressivism won the day in 2006 IN SPITE OF media propaganda, samo, samo, Republican stolen elections, and diaper dem centrists (e.g., Happy Hillary, Judas Joe Lieberman, and the DLC), is a measure of the outrage and focus of millions and millions of American liberals.

In poll after poll, it is increasingly clear that the majority of Americans have contempt for BOTH Nazi pugs and diaper dems.

Interestingly, similar polls are also appearing in Israel, showing that both countries are filled with people who are sick to death of fascist lunatic fringers and the thumb sucking enablers of fascist lunatic fringers.

So IF the great majority of each of these countries manages to coalesce into a representative political party, perhaps the historically inevitable choice will be some form of Democratic Socialism.

Sure would be nice to take control of our country again, wouldn’t it?

W. Christopher Epler (Bill)

_______________________________________

Peace Y'all

Tags: The World After Bush

Fascism Is The Acting Out Of Delusion

Today we have a post from Peace Tree contributing author, W. Christopher Epler.

Fascism Is The Acting Out Of Delusion

Behind all this chaos and hate is delusion. We human beings just refuse to grow up and the essence of fascism is merely institutionalized fear.

But fear of what?

Fear of truth -- fear of "reality".

Let's take a fun/serious philosophical example. How many of us really take it in that when a tree falls in the forest, and there's no one around, there isn't any sound?

Of course, we have to rephrase it a bit and say that when a tree falls in a forest and there's no "auditory nervous systems" around (human or otherwise), there isn't any sound. However, this self evident answer utterly redefines the human condition! It opens us to realities beyond the consensus scheme of things (i.e., "consensus reality").

Consensus reality is our living our life from place. The only problem is that it's a form of intelligence suicide.

Take the falling tree business. An axiom of consensus reality is that there's a duality between separate selves and the external world.

Basically, the alleged external world is what separate selves are separate from (and also from each other).

Sound is supposed to be in the external world and sometimes we hear it and sometimes we don't, but the duality between hearing and sound is absolute.

But this, of course, is total nonsense. Sound IS hearing, just as hearing IS sound. We don't view the view; the view IS the view. All that perceiver, perceiving, and perceived foolishness is a game of the mind. It's projecting language into reality.

The truth of the matter is that there simply AREN'T any "separate selves", any more than there is an abstract "external world". What's real is infinitely (?) more mysterious than this running amok of language.

It would take a book to make all the connections between the above example and the cancer of fascism (implicit or explicit), but the connections are there. If the human mind set is in profound reality denial (and always has been), then it's relatively obvious that this defective take on what's real will manifest accordingly. Hence, fascism is a symptom of reality ignorance.

The tragedy is that none of this is hard to realize and there's countless other ways reality keeps tapping us on the shoulder.

Let's look at one more example. How rarely do we confront the truth that we never think about what we think about before we think about it.

Thinking is what you're doing right now -- bang, bang, bang! You never stop and think before any mental activity. Hence, no "thinker" -- any more than there's a "writer" or "reader" of these words.

Which means what? It means we never "one up" ANYTHING. Immediacy ongoingness is reality process and it's the self activity of that which is already the case. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. The ancient Chinese word for nature is tzu-jan, which means (roughly) that which is so of itself. So nowing is the of-itself-soing of that which is so of itself. Only hubris thinks this spontaneous ongoingness is in any way "one upped" or caused by a meaningless separate self.

That name and face on "our" driver's license has no denotative meaning. It's not referring to a kind of entity/thing. It's just a face and a name. So all those "me's" and "we's" and "you's", and "they's", etc., are just white noise in the flow of that which forever transcends language and theory (including scientific and religious theory).

These observations could go on and on, but the relevant intuition is that all this Bush/Republican evil and hatred is DIRECTLY (albeit convolutedly) connected to the consensus delusions of our species.

An encouraging thought is that evolution works in mysterious ways and conceivably Mother Nature is already "dissolving" the chaos and suffering which we will never be able to "solve" with politicalvsolutions. And surely it's obvious by now that politics is part of the problem, not the solution.

One thing is certain. Mother Nature always has more tricks up her sleeve than can ever be imagined by delusional separate selves.

Or said differently, however uncomfortable the possibility, the probability is that "we" are not the problem solvers, but the very problem itself.

Thinking otherwise is the soul of fascism.

W. Christopher Epler (Bill)

_____________________________

Peace y'all

Tags: Fascism Hitler Bush Regime

Sunday Poetry Series: Opus 61

The Peace Tree is proud to present a piece by our newest Peace Tree Poets Society member, Bill Epler. Bill is currently in the process of creating his own blog and we will be making the announcement of his Grand Opening with attendant links in the very near future. Until then we are very pleased to present his work here for your enjoyment.

and now....

Opus 61
By W. Christopher Epler

the morning emerges from yesterday's resignations

and struggles to meet the day vertically and combed.

snowflakes of the night,

now melted into irrelevance,

no longer blind us with revelations

and the day awaits bipedal outpourings

onto the atmosphere floor.

a black comb in the boy's pocket

bulges slightly

and catches on drawers when he walks too close,

inconveniencing parent policed,

rushing to school trajectories,

but not defining his life into grandparent non futures

since relatives for him drop off the edge of the world

with no particular fanfare.

but grandparents remember still, occasionally,

snowstorms and kitchens of long ago schoolings:

scolding teachers, homework dungeons, and Christmas holidays

now lost beyond lostness,

lost beyond anticipation, commitment, or someone else's prayers

and exquisitely unimaginable to their own children's grudging paybacks.

these sighing epiphanies are flavored with tutored acceptance,

but never with smiles.

the boy’s school is a warehouse of cross talking pandemonium

in which taller and heavier life forms

perform pedagogical rituals which they never took seriously either

and the boy learns far more about what the grownups don't know

than what they, never convincingly,

claim to know with such absolute certainty.

this lesson requires no homework and is never forgotten.

the boy starts to breathe again

the moment he leaves these peculiar factories

and surrenders while walking home to a calling ancientness

which encourages him to bite off small branches overhanging the sidewalk

just for the animal hell of it.

he does so

and spits

and much prefers this jaw living

to the escaped again chalkboard comas.

in jungle summers he sometimes visits dry creek beds

slightly out of town,

memory innocent, adult less, and usually alone

exploring alternative realities

unimaginable to philosophers and businessmen.

breathing and eyes only remain

when merging into these insect glorias and heat saturated weeds,

antidote dimensions to the clutchings of language drunk adults

-- the dead eyed ones who think they're alive

but feed on the earth magic of children.

in early teens he bicycles to small rivers of privacy

into which he abandonly walks

otter nude and sun alive

and drifts beyond the consensus insanities of the world.

the mud moves between his toes

while currents embracing his utter body

propel him through adventures with logs, leaves,

even turtles, and pell mell turnings.

the sky is plane less, the sounds aren't man made.

he has come home.

in due course the booming advice guns

of head livers

penetrate his very castle,

there to echo unceasingly,

contemptuously ignored only by his loins

which remain invincibly memory proof.

the open winged,

sky eyed living of boyhood

shrinks to a bubble of jabber

claiming to be a soul,

an ache of lost wildness

which breaks the hearts of angels.

oh, young boy, young man,

how right you were about everything,

everything,

and everything.

______________________________

Peace y'all

Technorati Tags: Sunday Poetry