SUPREME COURT BETRAYAL: DEMOCRACY LOST

A JAZZMAN CHRONICLE: DISSEMINATE FREELY.

By Jack Random


“The court’s primary function will be to strike back government regulation of private business at every turn. Anti-trust law is dead. Environmental law is rendered toothless. Regulation of essential industries -- energy, water and food -- is barely breathing. Security reigns supreme over individual liberties and the only rights that count are corporate.”

“Blame the Democrats and Move On: The Federalist Court.” Jazzman Chronicles, July 20, 2005.

“It would be impossible to understate the dangers that corporate dominance poses to democracy. Corporate democracy is an oxymoron. It cannot exist. It is an unconscionable perversion of democracy.”

“As the World Turns: America Left Behind.” Jazzman Chronicles, September 6, 2009.

........

As a progressive libertarian independent the events of the week were enough to send me into a tailspin of despair. No, it was not the Massachusetts senatorial race, which I found rich in irony and something of a mixed blessing. No, it was not the precipitous decline in the stock market, which served to remind us that that brokers and bankers are far more afraid of populist rage than they are of any mainstream political party.

No, it was rather the boldest assertion to date that the Supreme Court of Chief Justice John Roberts has one and only one defining characteristic: Corporate bias.

History informs us that there is perhaps no form of government more vulnerable to corporate takeover than a democracy in which there are no controls on the funding of political campaigns. Knowing this, there is no democracy in the western world that allows unlimited corporate funding. Knowing this, our Supreme Court delivered a ruling that allows just that with one caveat: corporations cannot contribute directly to political parties or candidates. It is a curious exception in that it seems to confess that the court’s reasoning is flawed. If corporations are in effect citizens, entitled to the rights of individuals, on what grounds should they be denied direct engagement?

It is however an exception that has no teeth. Corporations do not need to contribute directly to parties or candidates. They are fully capable of running their own political operations. They can operate their own focus groups. They can use their resources, even those gained from public bailouts, to tip the balance of power and control the policies of government.

We’ve grown accustomed to hyperbole from pundits and politicians but this time it is real. Democracy can be compromised only so far before it ceases to be democracy. In this case the alternative our Supreme Court has thrust us toward is corporate fascism not unlike Mussolini’s Italy, a government that found nothing objectionable in Hitler’s Third Reich. It was only business.

In the bold new world the court has laid out for us the electoral process will become a mere formality as it is in Russia or Iran. It will become a ritual to commemorate the democracy we once treasured. In this new world neither the people, the mom and pop corporations nor the unions will hold any sway, though this ruling applies to them as well, for they cannot compete with the power of the almighty dollar that corporate monoliths bring to bear.

Leaders of the Republican Party have embraced this decision and never fail to include the unions in their analysis. Yet the labor unions are a red herring. After half a century of decline, there is no union in the land that can compete with any major corporation. By this ruling union influence is rendered negligible and corporate power reigns supreme.

Among the many questions that remain unanswered are the international implications. The modern corporation is an international leviathan with tentacles extending across borders in every direction. It has no loyalties, no patriotism, no ideology, no principles and no virtue. It is governed by the profit margin, plain and simple. If selling out the workers of America (by exporting jobs and banishing the rights of labor) will boost the profit margin, it is not a decision that will be contested.

The corporate behemoths may allow Barack Obama to continue as president, they may allow the major parties to exist, but with this ruling the nation just got a charter for a new board of directors that will replace all branches of government as the ultimate arbiter of decisions. If any member of congress, Senator or President violates the dictums of the corporate masters, they will be targeted for extinction. In that sense the parties themselves will become irrelevant. All parties will become agents of corporate interest.

For as long as this decision is allowed to stand we are no longer a democracy.

It must not be allowed to stand and yet overturning a Supreme Court decision is a daunting task. Among the courses of action suggested thus far, none shows any real promise of success. Amending the constitution requires two thirds of congress and three quarters of the states. Removing the majority members of the court for treason, however justified, would require an overwhelming push by congress. As long as Republicans remain convinced that corporate dominance is to their advantage it cannot happen.

Perhaps Congressman Barney Frank, who noted that corporations are creations of law, offered the most interesting approach. Corporations are granted corporate status by the government and the government retains the right to enforce standards and regulations. It is therefore possible that congress can control the power of corporations through corporate law rather than campaign finance law.

There are at least two major obstacles to this approach. First, congress has not been able to pass re-regulation of the financial institutions even after the lack of regulation played a primary role in a near catastrophic collapse. How are we to believe that congress will act in this case even as the minority party throws up a roadblock of united opposition?

The dismal truth is congress is paralyzed. While some may give lip service to the necessity of systemic change, there is no real movement toward striking down the filibuster rule in the United States Senate. As long as the filibuster remains there can be no real change.

Even if we could get beyond systemic paralysis, any effective legislative attempt to undo what the Supreme Court has done would surely be struck down by the same court.

Those of us who believe in democracy must continue to fight but it seems to me we must also recognize reality. In all likelihood we are stuck with this decision until the balance of the court is altered. The way things are going it could be decades and by that time the nature of congress and the White House could be so altered that change may be impossible.

Once lost, the road back to democracy is paved with hardship.

That is the problem with Supreme Court decisions. They have the power to alter the very heart and soul of a nation.

So welcome to the corporate world: We are up against the wall, rifles pointed at our chests, and our only remaining choice is whether to be blindfolded or to confront our destiny with open eyes.

Jazz.

JACK RANDOM IS THE AUTHOR OF THE JAZZMAN CHRONICLES (CROW DOG PRESS) AND GHOST DANCE INSURRECTION (DRY BONES PRESS). A COLUMNIST FOR THE NATIONAL FREE PRESS, WORLD EDITION, HIS CHRONICLES HAVE BEEN POSTED ON NUMEROUS CITES OF THE WORLDWIDE WEB. SEE WWW.JAZZMANCHRONICLES.BLOGSPOT.COM.

Beatlick Travel Report 2010: Survival Camp

Date: Jan 16, 2010 3:11 PM

Fort Stockton:

The Beatlicks are in a small holding pattern in Fort Stockton before we can set up our winter camp in Study Butte, out where the coyotes howl and the wind blows free. We are in Neil’s trailer, heading to Neil’s 40 acres, but first I’m going to have to attend to a dental problem and get a passport photo and application off.

We anticipate at least six weeks in the wild so to speak and I am stocking up. My Mama is laughing so hard at me right now, up in heaven. I just bought a 20-pound bag of pinto beans. I used to turn my nose up at my mother’s beans and now I’m going to live on beans and oatmeal. I am ashamed of myself now for the snooty way I would criticize her beans, called them “peasant food.” I guess now I am a peasant.

The trailer in Fort Stockton doesn’t offer many creature comforts so it makes a good transition for outdoor camping. There’s no running water so we have to haul buckets of water in from a spigot outdoors, we have to fill the toilet up every time we flush. We are also cooking on the camp stove. We are in a small bedroom with a bed, the cook stove, two chairs, DVD, computer, MP3 player, and plenty of books and movies from the Fort Stockton Library.

We have seen the property in Study Butte and it is great, we can’t wait to get out there. But I will have to find some dental assistance first, I can’t imagine sticking myself out there for six weeks with no access to help if I should need it.

One friend has asked me why in the world we are doing this. One reason is to save money. We are trying to save money for plane fare to Ouxaca. A friend in Las Cruces has told us where he stays for $250 a month. That is a serious goal for us this year if we can keep down expenses and save.

Plus I think it’s a fun experiment to blog about being out in the wilderness camping. I am spending more time with survivalists and this is a group of people who genuinely believe something catastrophic is going to happen to our country and we will have to fend for ourselves. That peaks my imagination.

Neil’s brother Henry lives out in Study Butte already and works in a Bentonite mine. That is what some Kitty Litter is made of mostly. It clumps up around moisture. Neil’s whole property is just about Bentonite. So if it rains there is a real problem, as it did a few days ago we heard. Henry has to park two miles out by the road and walk to his camp if it rains. So we will make sure it is all dried out back there before we head out.

So our Survival Camp is all about getting in a situation where we don’t need to spend much money and testing ourselves against the elements. We have this wonderful friend who can offer us such a unique opportunity. Why not go for it?


Happy Trails

Beatlick Pamela (publishingpamela@yahoo.com)

2010 Beatlick Travel Report: Survival Camp

Date: Jan 12, 2010 10:21 AM

We hit the road for Fort Stockton and our good friend Neil Astor's house last week. We will be moving onto his forty acres in Study Butte as soon as this polar front moves out of town. We got to go see the property on Sunday and it is pretty spectacular in its starkness. Windswept, open land amidst the Chisos Mountain range and many more I don't know by name yet. The sunsets are absolutely spectacular. The goal is to go in and survive for six weeks off the grid.

It's an experiment just to test our mettle and save a few bucks. Imagine, if you got off work one day and someone told you you can't go home. Imagine everything you knew and understood was taken from you - electricity, gas, water. What would you do?

Well we're about to find out. I was comforted to know that Neil's brother is already living on the property. He works in a mine 30 miles away and has a campsite with a travel trailer. I think I would be a little more intimidated if he weren't there. At least he knows the ropes.

Once I get my van in there, if I get my van in there, for there is one really step hill and more than a few intimidating ravines to cross, then it will stay parked till we come out. One time in, one time out, is the plan. The store three miles away has wi-fi so we can stay in touch but the prices on food are prohibitive. The best grocery store is five miles away, but hopefully Neil's brother Henry will give us a ride from time to time.

Now on this imaginary doomsday scenario that I am modeling after I do have a few obvious advantages. I have the luxury of preparing and tomorrow, the 13th of Jan., we will be stocking up on dry goods. I have a shopping list and more survival tips coming to the third page of my website. It's not up yet but will be soon. I'm having fun thinking about what to buy and how to make it all last. The basics are coffee, oatmeal, powdered milk, pinto beans, rice, trail mix, crackers, raisins, boullion, brown suger, and peanut butter all in bulk. So much for the low-carb diet that helped me lose 40 pounds. But I guess if the store is five miles away that might prove itself to not be a problem!

Happy Trails
Beatlick Pamela

David Alfaro Siqueiros in America

....

the same building, different days, like a photograph
compressed in the retna waiting to be born
a montage in a dream where all else disappears
but the building itself
always half-light, red structured brick
double-doors closed

when I was approached by madness at a young
age, I saw my breath before me as a great stone
wall to write upon
an agitation so obscure
perishable only for the throat
holding back the darker blood
to capture the dusk


Chris Mansel

No Background To The Sun

....

a body stretched over a broken window
not through but over, the frame of the window
and the pane is on the ground, the blood
of the victim has been stepped on, the memory
of the event wasn't captured in a photograph
until eyes blinked on the first approach

dust is blown up in the air and slowly, slowly
settles and mixes with the blood and glass
under a microscope, unless its a good
microscope will not show the design or how it
changed the DNA, the glass will eventually
be collected and thrown away, it won't be
analyzed, its just a body

a body scarred with glass, deep cuts,
not incisions, once rigor mortis sets in the dialogue
is lost, Don't believe.


Chris Mansel

Shame and Pride in America

JAZZMAN CHRONICLES. DISSEMINATE FREELY.


By Jack Random


It is a great shame that in America we cannot criticize our nation without being painted in the colors of betrayal and treason by the self-righteous and self-proclaimed defenders of American pride. Yes, even those who only yesterday led the nation to the edge of economic collapse and left our reputation torn and tattered before the eyes of the world retain their hold on power by defining patriotism with unwavering praise and effectively denouncing anyone who does not adhere.

So it is that our president on the occasion of his acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize assumed the role of head cheerleader – a role better suited to his predecessor than to the candidate who succeeded on the promise of change.

It is a role that seemingly every president must assume yet to have embraced it so soon and on such an ironic occasion is deeply disappointing.

I cannot and would not deny that America historically has accomplished much for which we can be rightfully proud. Aside from very limited experiments in democratic rule, America gave birth to the modern republic. In our short history we have moved closer to the democratic ideal by expanding the electorate to include the landless, minorities and women. We have made advances in civil rights and civil liberties. We have fought for the rights of labor and against corporate monopolies when their powers grew so pervasive that they threatened the very heart of the republic. We have spilled American blood to defeat the imperialist-fascist dictatorships of Japan, Italy and Nazi Germany. We have fought back that peculiar form of elitist oligarchy that was known by the name of communist socialism. At times in our history we have stood strong in the cause of human rights and advanced the cause of science. We have eased the burden on the elderly with Social Security and Medicare. Against a backdrop of racial discrimination, we have elected an American of African heritage president. As in the recent $3.4 billion settlement with the indigenous tribes of North America, we have upheld the rule of law even at great cost.

For all this and more we can rightly be proud but there is a darker side to our history that we can neither ignore nor rationalize if we wish to realize the promise of our founding. It was that darker side that was oddly missing in our president’s skewed rendering of history before the Nobel audience in Oslo, Norway.

In compensation for our president’s omissions, in the interests of humility, honesty and justice, I offer the following sources of American shame. I offer them not to build a case against our nation but to direct us toward a better nation and one that will contribute to a better world.

First and foremost, all honest Americans know, despite centuries of misinformation and indoctrination, that our nation was born in something resembling original sin. When our European ancestors arrived on American shores they did not find a continent free of inhabitants. Some tribes were warlike and some were not but they were as proud of their cultural heritage and social order as we are today. They had not developed industry but rather formed a covenant with the land. They lived in harmony with their surroundings, respected the animals that shared it, and survived in relative peace. When the Europeans arrived with their industry and modern weapons, they claimed the land and methodically cleared it of its former inhabitants. When they could not eradicate all of the people, they killed the buffalo and cut off all means of survival, effectively accomplishing the same goal. The Euro-Americans called it Manifest Destiny. History calls it Genocide.

We have never made just reparations for this crime against humanity or for the crime of slavery and the recent settlement (compensation for cheating the tribes out of their allotments for stolen resources) is but one small step in that direction. That the surviving American Indians and descendants of African slaves have lived in dire poverty all these years is the enduring shame of our nation.

The magnitude of these crimes is so enormous they can never be set right but they must be acknowledged as a part of our heritage. They must serve to remind us what horrors can be committed when a people are incapable of admitting fault. We must constantly strive to ease the burden of those who suffered for our wrongs. For the Native American community, freeing Leonard Peltier before his death would be a meaningful symbol of contrition. For the African American community, Obama is the symbol and rebuilding our crumbling cities and the infrastructure that serves them would help.

In the critical area of foreign policy our president proclaimed our nation the defender of liberty for the last six decades. Well, at least he is not defending the Spanish-American War and the subsequent occupation of the Philippines. For the record, the peoples of Indochina, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa might take issue with that characterization. Certainly, the president has admitted in the past that Vietnam was a mistake. I would go further: It was an unnecessary, immoral and unwise war that cost as many as three million Southeast Asian as well as 58,000 American lives. Were we defending liberty in Vietnam or were we standing up a corrupt government in an ideological war? Were we defending liberty in Chile when we deposed Salvador Allende in favor of military strongman Augusto Pinochet? Were we defending liberty in Iran when we overthrew the most democratic government that region had ever known and elevated the ruthless Shah? As for Iraq, does this president really believe that the first Gulf War was justified on moral grounds? Or is he rather yielding to that historical analysis that proclaims the righteousness of the victor?

The truth is we have often fought on the wrong side for the wrong reasons. The truth is we have used other nations as the battlefield in a mission to impose our will and to expand our influence to the realm of empire.

For a nation that holds its esteem in the principles of justice and democracy, much of our history is a source of shame and one that we have only begun to address. But our shame (or rather that for which we should be ashamed) does not end with history. It lives on in a myriad of ways.

When all of Europe, a diverse group of nations if ever there was one, agrees on a moral imperative, it is highly probable that they are right. All of Europe agrees that affordable healthcare is a fundamental right. That America has not achieved that fundamental understanding of human rights is a source of shame. That we continue to debate the virtues of government involvement in healthcare while our private, profit motivated healthcare industry deprives coverage and charges excessive fees is less an indication of our independence than it is a sign of the failure of our democracy. It is the basic role of government to provide for the needs of its people. If we cannot provide healthcare then we have failed and we should be ashamed.

All of Europe agrees that the death penalty is an abomination and an abuse of the power of the state. That we stand alone among civilized nations in imposing capitol punishment, even as evidence emerges that our system of justice is fraught with error and literally thousands have wrongly been put to death, is another source of shame.

That our current administration has continued the policies of secrecy, mass surveillance, and detention without just cause or adjudication is shameful.

That our president has failed to explicitly repudiate the Bush Doctrine of aggressive, unilateral war is shameful. The president’s unwavering supporters may rightfully argue that his Afghanistan policy has not changed but his remarks in Oslo defending unilateral war without deference to diplomacy was a departure from the candidate so many of us chose to support.

If I were a member of the committee that chose to bestow the Nobel Peace Prize on this president, I would be shaken to the core.

America is a proud nation. That is what makes us a great nation when we are on the side of justice, when we are fighting for the good and the oppressed. It is also what makes us horrific when we take the wrong path. We are a nation that can never admit mistakes. We are a nation that to this day adheres to the maxim: might makes right.

Until we are prepared to accept our flaws and the errors of our way we will never achieve the greatness we desire. As the wise have always attested: True greatness lies in humility.

Jazz.

JACK RANDOM IS THE AUTHOR OF THE JAZZMAN CHRONICLES (CROW DOG PRESS) AND GHOST DANCE INSURRECTION (DRY BONES PRESS). THE CHRONICLES HAVE BEEN POSTED ON NUMEROUS CITES OF THE WORLDWIDE WEB, INCLUDING THE ALBION MONITOR, BELLACIAO, BUZZLE, COUNTERPUNCH, DISSIDENT VOICE, THE NATIONAL FREE PRESS AND PACIFIC FREE PRESS. SEE WWW.JAZZMANCHRONICLES.BLOGSPOT.COM.

OBAMA’S WATERLOO: THE AFGHAN LIE

JAZZMAN CHRONICLES. DISSEMINATE FREELY.


By Jack Random


“As Commander-in-Chief, I have determined that it is in our vital national interest to send an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan. After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home.”

“Under the banner of … domestic unity and international legitimacy - and only after the Taliban refused to turn over Osama bin Laden - we sent our troops into Afghanistan. Within a matter of months, al Qaeda was scattered and many of its operatives were killed.”

President Barack Obama, West Point, December 1, 2009.



In August 1964 President Lyndon Johnson reported to congress that the North Vietnamese had attacked an American war ship in the Gulf of Tonkin. It was the lie that gave Johnson legal authority to escalate the Vietnam War.

In August 1990 President George Herbert Walker Bush pointedly and repeatedly refused to inform Saddam Hussein that an invasion into neighboring Kuwait would be considered an act of aggression that would result in an American military response. It was the lie that launched the first Gulf War that would inevitably lead to the second.

On October 7, 2001, the ruling government of Afghanistan offered to try Osama bin Laden in an Islamic Court. The offer was summarily rejected and the bombing of Afghanistan commenced. On October 14, 2001, the Taliban offered to surrender bin Laden and Al Qaeda operatives to a third country upon submitted evidence of their involvement in the September 11, 2001 attack on the United States. The government of the United States refused and the war proceeded as planned.

In March 2003, President George W. Bush ordered the massive bombing of Iraq on the basis of fabricated evidence of weapons of mass destruction and nefarious connections to Al Qaeda and the September 11 attack, after the United Nations Security refused to sanction the cause of war. These were the lies that initiated the Iraq War.

When a war begins with a lie or a perversion of the truth, it is doomed to an end that will punish the aggressor nation and tarnish its reputation in world affairs for generations to come.

On December 1, 2009, President Barack Obama, after eight years of a failed occupation, initiated the second phase of the American Afghan War with a creative perversion of the truth. For while it may in some sense be true that we did not invade Afghanistan until after the Taliban offered to turn over Osama bin Laden, the greater truth is that we ignored all offers to negotiate the trial of bin Laden and Al Qaeda for a cause of war that was predetermined.

We now know that the administration of George W. Bush planned the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq before the September 11 attack. For the Obama administration to pretend now that we had no choice but to bomb them back to the Stone Age is to ignore history and to continue a disgraceful legacy of dishonesty and deception.

The truth is that the Taliban, as despicable and primitive as it may be, was not responsible for the September 11 attack. The truth is that the Taliban inherited Al Qaeda and the Mujahideen from the CIA in the aftermath of the failed Soviet occupation. The truth is Afghanistan was never a righteous or necessary war. It was a war of choice or if you prefer a war mandated by the nation’s profound grief in the aftermath of September 11.

The truth is that we had a choice but we had the wrong man as president.

Imagine for a moment that we had engaged the government of Afghanistan. Imagine that those negotiations resulted in the arrest and trial of Osama bin Laden and the perpetrators of the September 11 attack before an international tribunal. Bin Laden and his co-conspirators would likely not be free today and the remnants of Al Qaeda would have dissolved as the international pariahs they were and are.

Our aggressive wars, killing innocent civilians and punishing whole nations for the crimes of a few, gave these criminals legitimacy and reduced America to a criminal nation.

Tragically, we cannot turn back the pages but neither can we ignore historical truths and hope to change the course of events.

Our president now claims that the war in Afghanistan is in our “vital national interest.” He is wrong. For while we have interests in that war torn nation, the threat of Al Qaeda has already been reduced to a manageable minimum and the Taliban can reach no further than the tribal regions of the Afghan-Pakistan border. Neither poses a direct threat to the United States or its allies.

It is naïve to think that the Taliban or its radical Islamic allies can capture by aggressive action the nuclear arsenal of Pakistan. The most powerful force in the region is Pakistani intelligence and its military partners. Owing in no small part to our mindless and irresponsible actions, the government of Pakistan is weak but the military remains strong. The only real threat to the Pakistani weapons is that which arises from within. We cannot reduce that threat by our military actions. Indeed, we can only exacerbate the situation.

What was missing from our president’s address was any real and tangible mention of a diplomatic initiative engaging the regional powers. Absent that initiative there is little we can do to improve the security of the region.

Some choose to embrace the 18-month timeline for American withdrawal but it seems to me a misguided hope for the president has premised withdrawal to conditions on the ground. We have heard this language before. We heard it in Iraq and we heard it in Vietnam. Indeed, we heard it from the Soviets in Afghanistan.

In eighteen months we will confront more or less the same circumstance we face today. If it is in the “vital” interest of the nation, as our president has already determined, then we will have no choice but to continue and escalate as the military commanders request.

Consider the motivation of our sponsored Afghan leader, Hamid Karzai, the warlord of Kabul: He owes his position of leadership to our money and power. Since he knows we will withdraw if all goes well, it serves his purpose to see to it that it does not go well. For Karzai’s hopelessly corrupt government, it becomes a game of showing some signs of progress while maintaining a precarious balance of vulnerability. For his rivals and the tribal leaders, they will play it to their own advantage.

It will go on for years and years until we finally decide it is no longer in our “vital” interest. In fact, it never was.

The world is full of danger. We do not possess the power to eliminate all threats or to invade all nations that do not share our view of the world. We can only hope to protect our own people to the extent possible and to move the world in a better direction. Aggressive war and occupation can never accomplish these goals. Only reasoned diplomacy can. War and military action must always be reserved to the most essential circumstances.

The war in Afghanistan (like the war in Iraq) is neither essential nor vital to our national interests. We should not be surprised by our president’s policy. He gave fair warning in his presidential campaign. But he is wrong and we must persuade him that the best way out of this bottomless pit is an orderly and conditioned withdrawal.

Jazz.

JACK RANDOM IS THE AUTHOR OF THE JAZZMAN CHRONICLES (CROW DOG PRESS) AND GHOST DANCE INSURRECTION (DRY BONES PRESS). A COLUMNIST FOR THE NATIONAL FREE PRESS, WORLD EDITION, HIS CHRONICLES HAVE BEEN POSTED ON NUMEROUS CITES OF THE WORLDWIDE WEB. SEE WWW.JAZZMANCHRONICLES.BLOGSPOT.COM.

[Random Note: My latest novel "Hard Times" is being posted on Slush Pile reader -- an experiment in publishing.]

CHRIS MANSEL & JAKE BERRY: A DIALOGUE

A Dialogue with Jake Berry by Chris Mansel (2008).

[Editor's Note: This exchange features two of the most creative contemporary minds I’ve encountered. No one rejects convention more thoroughly than Mansel and no one of the unconventional creative bent is better read or more informed than Berry. Both are writers and artists of singular character – in the uniqueness of their pluralities. If there is a better source on the creative process, I am not aware of it. Jazz.]

[Chris Mansel: Any conversation for me with my friend Jake Berry is a learning experience and a gift I do not take lightly. I was again fortunate to ask Jake questions for the third time and the answers speak for themselves.]


Chris Mansel: If the Buddha were standing out in the rain would you invite him in, or go outside and stand with him?

Jake Berry: I'd invite him in to help me tear the roof off my house.

Chris Mansel: If your creativity is the medicine you are prescribed, then is the diagnosis running parallel or controlling the ship on troubled seas?

Jake Berry: You know how to load a question. I think of how they found Nietzsche mumbling to himself over his papers. He never said much after that though he lived many years in silence. Or Holderlin pacing in circles all night, jotting down notes, some of them brilliant fragments, and playing violin, or was it flute, that according to some who heard it was quite beautiful. Yet it is obvious from people who spent long periods in his company that he was suffering greatly, quite mad, relative to the times anyway. He lived another 40 years deteriorating.

I know that working more or less every day at one creative pursuit or another keeps me from going to Wal-Mart, buying a shotgun and shells and having a go at the place with both barrels until the cops and media arrive and spoil my fun. Some of us are afflicted with this thing. The nerves are calmed for a moment after you write or speak/sing a poem, write a song, play a musical instrument, paint, draw. It has been this way since I was a child. Artaud said no one ever did any of these things except to get out of hell. He would know. He spent enough time there.

At the same time it can be extremely hard work - grueling, obsessive day after day. Insomnia from dwelling on a piece so intensely it won't leave you rest. Knowing that even your most inspired effort is probably doomed to failure, even by, perhaps especially by, your own standards. I know you suffer from migraines, seizures and so forth that seem connected to your work. But then once you really commit to this thing everything is connected to it.

What I try to do, with actually a small degree of success, is keep my ego out of it. Out of my feelings about the work, out of how others react to it, and out of dominating the work as the central voice.

Most creation tales begin in chaos, the void, or some similar unknown. So it is. We stumble around in the dark. Those who practice any of the arts and believe they know what they are doing are utter fools. If I have learned anything, it's how to recognize a fool. I have a great deal of experience in the art of foolishness, where practice does not make perfect, but only makes one more foolish.

Chris Mansel: If destructiveness is in the chemical makeup, does it come from the same component as creativity, or do they operate individually off of one another further down the line?

Jake Berry: I don't see how they cannot be interwoven. Creation and destruction seem to be part of the same process of change. Since nothing is permanent we can see the change as either the destruction of what has disappeared or the creation of something new. When we bring intent into consideration we can discuss whether creation is the result of intention to make something new or destroy something previously present. Further than this we can discuss particular instances of creation and destruction.

Let me answer then with a question to you. Are your films a destruction of the images from which they originally drive or are [they] pure creations in which the original image is merely the ore, the raw substance to be shaped in a particular way? To what extent is the end result predetermined or left to chance?

Chris Mansel: The images are deconstructed in such a way as to bring out the image beneath the surface. What you refer to as pure creations is left to modifying or using the software in such a way as to bring about a new surface of the canvas, a painting over if you will. Everything was left to chance until I saw the image and I would then go back and correct it or take the muddy approach and let the muck fly where it lay. When I started working with your Brambu recording I began a whole new process of working towards the text and an evolution began that as you often say, “Developed delightfully stranger and newer life forms.” In other words I did things that I didn’t know I could do until I did them. My latest film The Dead Illume is a perfect example of this.

Your blog Notes, Quotes, Ideas, Speculations hasn’t been posted on in three years and this is a fascinating piece of work. I wonder if you have any plans to expand it into a book length project in the future.

Jake Berry: There was a train of thought I was working with there and I still want to develop it, but I have been distracted by other projects. I intended the site as a place to post more or less random philosophical bits and pieces. So perhaps I will return to it that way then pursue the longer piece by weaving it in and out of the rest.

You say above, "I did things I didn't know I could do until I did them." That seems to be the most appropriate way to work. In my experience if I understand where a piece of whatever kind is going before I start it doesn't remain interesting for very long. The whole point of this kind of practice is discovery. The thing that surprised me the most was the quality of the work you were doing with a computer camera and free software. There are directors working with budgets of millions of dollars who devour hours of our time and do not give us anything. You on the other hand open entire worlds of imagination with no budget and asking only two-five minutes of our time. Do you intend to continue working with this approach or would you like to eventually use professional cameras and software?

Chris Mansel: Of course I would like to use more sophisticated equipment and turn it on its side in the same manner. But I don’t foresee it happening. One reason is funding. I just don’t see any way I would have access to the kind of equipment you are talking about. Another reason I don’t think it will happen is because it would be the natural progression of things and that just hasn’t been the way my life has worked out.

In Arthur Janov's book, Primal Scream, he writes, "E. H. Hess, investigating pupillary contraction and dilation in response to certain stimuli, found that the pupil dilates when the stimulus is pleasant and contracts when it is unpleasant." If this is true would not a nation be so seized in its view to generally accept any thing that was thrown at them?

Jake Berry: I suppose that's true if what was thrown at them was pleasant. At least that portion that was paying attention. I think the manipulation of a populace has to go further than the autonomic response. It has to strike at that level, but it also must engage the intellect in some way. And of course pleasure is only one response that can be manipulated. We have seen how populations respond to fear, and how fear can be used to coerce populations into believing things that would otherwise seem unreasonable. It's part of the way those in power convince the majority to conform. The real power always lies with the majority. If the great majority of a population truly does not wish to do something, then it does not have to, but this requires a kind of solidarity we rarely see in large populations. Usually the struggle for resources and other divisions like ethnicity, religion, race, and so forth prevent solidarity, and that is exactly the way the most powerful individuals in any society would like to keep it. Only a few can be rich, otherwise having wealth would be pointless. In a capitalist society, wealth is power and those in power do not wish to lose it. So the manipulation begins.

Where does art fall in all of this? We know that it can be used as a tool for manipulation, but we also see that people with no power at all the world over make art. If the populace in general becomes more concerned with aesthetics than with consumption, the facsimile of wealth, will that populace become less subject to manipulation?

What I mean is concerned with making art, not just passively observing or consuming art products.

Chris Mansel: Art becomes the transparency that can be lifted up and placed anywhere at will. Commercial art has taken upon itself to balance out the scales of madness to borrow a song title from you. Having no power you can still make commercial art, anything feeds the eye, it’s the pineal blues these days. The false Buddha is everywhere. It is more important now to be the bug than the botanist, to be the moth than the flame; to be seen is the new orgasm, the new sexual technique. Cesare Lombroso wrote in 1899, “The atavism of the criminal when he lacks absolutely every trace of shame and pity, may go back beyond the savage even to the brutes themselves.”

I would like to ask you about a song entitled “So Many Birds.” This is a very dramatic recording. Could you talk about the song and the writing and why you placed it as the last track on your new album Liminal Blue?

Jake Berry: "So Many Birds" was I think the last song I wrote for the set. I think I wrote 15 songs during the period, 11 ended up on the album. I was about to change the tuning on the guitar when I hit a chord that felt like a door opening - one of those moments when you hear a whole song unfolding out of a single chord. The tuning is one I use often because it has so many possibilities. I never seem to fall into a rut with it. The low E string is tuned down to B and it goes on from there to F sharp, B, E, A, E. I found it a few years ago fooling around, looking for new tunings, then discovered later that Joni Mitchell had used it on several albums, including Turbulent Indigo, one of my favorites.

That's probably why it made sense to me. It's easy to get 13th and 11th chords in this tuning, so the harmonics are fairly broad. The first part of the song works out of an F sharp minor 13, so the melody is a minor modality, a darker, more dramatic feel. The second section of the song moves to A major, and F sharp minor is the relative minor to A, so you get what Leonard Cohen calls, in "Hallelujah", the "major lift." But it eventually resolves back to the minor. This was a case where the words flowed out of the music. They came to me as I was working out the chords and melody.

It happened fairly quickly. When I went to record it, all the parts seemed to come quickly as well. There is one idea that I got from listening to the first Portishead album. I noticed in one of the songs the way they used vibrato on a guitar strumming the chord at the beginning of each measure. I liked the atmosphere that created, so I tried it with "So Many Birds" and it was very effective. The song doesn't sound anything like Portishead, but that's another reason to listen to all kinds of music, you get ideas you can bring into your own work to create something new. Duke Ellington and Miles Davis were influenced by Ravel and Debussy, and Ravel was influenced by early blues. The reason it's the last song on the album is because it feels like a good way to finish it. It often happens that the album sequence is very close to the order in which the songs were written. There's also the last line - "ride on, until you disappear, even from yourself."

After that it felt like the story had been told.

As your film/video style develops I see how you move from very recognizable images of nature to pure abstraction, which is just as organic since it is derived from the original images. This movement takes me in two directions. It seems to make the film more spiritual, intuitive, more open to the imagination. It also makes me think of the films of Stan Brakhage. This is not because it looks like Brakhage but because you seem to allow the work to take its own course and move into those open areas. How does this work from the inside as you are working on the piece?

Are you trying various techniques or experiments then going with what seems to work best or is it even more organic than that, does it seem to guide itself completely?

Chris Mansel: The difference in Brakhage and me is his images would rush by you and constantly you found yourself inside a community reflecting off one another. In my defense I am alone without the benefit of community and working in a limited medium and without editable film. The software I use is limited to its creation. Film is strength in a society of weakened eyes searching for anything. Brakhage was a genius but then again so was Greg Toland and he never directed one picture but you can’t mention Citizen Kane without discussing his work.

As I am working on each piece the image, the initial image suggests everything and until I add any abstraction, for lack of a better term, it says nothing at all unless you count the surface or what light has down to it in the original photograph. Nietzsche’s last words were, “More light.” He also suggested we listen to music with our muscles. If that is true then perhaps we look at film with our brain, each individual eye developing or editing the image separate from one another. Burroughs was right; life is a cut-up. The process is organic. Short of literally showing you how I make a film I can explain that separate filters in the software capture and distort light in different ways. It is back dated software to the year 2000 so there are more advanced processes out there on the market but I have been successful with what I have at hand. It is organic and it is a process of selecting the recipe per each individual image. There is no way to fully explore the depths of it because there are innumerable ways to take photographs and countless recipes.

Aaron Copland wrote, “When I speak of the gifted listener I am thinking of the non-musician primarily, of the listener who intends to retain his amateur status. It is the thought of just such a listener that excites the composer in me.”

Do you happen to agree with Copland or do you compose for whoever listens?

Jake Berry: My definition of a listener might be different from Copland. I probably don't draw as clear a distinction between amateur and professional. We live in very different times. In Copland's day professional musicians played classical music, with club or cabaret musicians considered a distant cousin, even though Copland based much of his music on very unprofessional American folk music. I do think that a trained musician or a musician who makes a living by performing and recording music will hear very differently from the music fan who does not play, or the casual listener who enjoys whatever is on the radio. However, I wouldn't say I have a particular type of listener in mind.

Writing a song is more intuitive than intellectual. I am following the feel of the music, contributing to it, toward something that seems real, something that connects with my experience of the world, and something that remains interesting as I develop the progression and melodies and so forth. I hope that if a song is true to my experience, has an authentic feel, and remains interesting over the process of writing and recording, it will also connect with other people, though on their own terms. Most of the time when someone responds to me about one song or another they discover things I never imagined. That's an affirmation as far as I'm concerned because it means that person found something of their own in the song. As a fan, my favorite music always has that quality, so that's a measure of success for me.

Wayne Sides pointed out the obvious to me one day when he said photography is light writing, writing with light. The great photographers, from Steiglietz to Weston to Minor White or Robert Frank all seem to have that in common. Just as drawing is a moving point, so photography is moving light. This is even more so with moving images with people like Toland or Sven Nykvist. You are a poet, novelist, songwriter, painter and sculptor/assemblage artist as well as a film maker. Do you see all these things as part of a whole, points along a continuum or do the demands of each discipline make them completely distinct from one another? If they are part of a whole how does each of the mediums in which you work inform your film and video work?

Chris Mansel: It's a continuum of course but then again it's not. To make a mistake in a film is like making a mistake in any of the other fields you named. You simply have to start over or have to rethink the process. I can't reedit because the software is unable to do so. If I had to pick a discipline I would pick assemblage to mirror film making. I walk along the shore or though the woods or anywhere really and stop and look at a piece and wonder if I could make it work with something else. That takes a lot of thought. But as The Marquis De Sade wrote, "Any enjoyment is weakened when shared."

But the Marquis was insane.

Your writing has always been visual, now that I have given video to the audio recordings of your text, where do you go now with your written word? Is there a way to transcend the traditional form of delivering to the reader or listener?

Jake Berry: Doing Brambu Drezi Book 4 with a moving image component has been my intention for two years or so and the opening section of Brambu Book 4 was finished and posted at You Tube and the IFC Media Lab last fall.

Since then I've done the video and some of the audio for the second section of Book 4, but I'm still working on the words and the visuals on the page. There is a tendency to want to put the words in the video, and I will do some of that (you've done that beautifully with some of your own poetry in video by the way), but the ideal situation is to have the book in hand at the same time the DVD will be playing. The book itself is both a score for performance and visual art. The video as you have added to excerpts from Books 1-3, and as I will continue with Book 4 is just another element. I don't think there is any need to transcend the traditional forms of poetry, just add to them. There are many films that I think are poetry based purely on the visual alone. We spoke about Brakhage before, and I think your work does this. Also, a little closer to the feature film, directors like Godard, Antonioni, Terrence Malick, et. al. create a kind of visual poetry. Godard also drops words into his films sometimes, right in the middle of scenes, at first inexplicably, but gradually you recognize it as a kind of cut-up poetry.

Most of your film/video work so far has drawn from landscape, do you envision a time where you'll want to work with the human form?

Chris Mansel: Yes I have thought of this but I would have to have a model who wouldn't mind the painful prostrations I would put her through. The shots I have in mind would also be in nature and in a studio setting. They would be called Essays in the Passing Sciences. It would be a film about an hour long. I have already conceived some of it in my mind but I don't know if it will take place or not.

Jake Berry: I do what I can to support the work of others, but I never feel like I have done nearly enough. It would be nice to have the resources to start a publishing and recording company so that I could promote and distribute the work of all the artists of whatever kind who are now often ignored. I don't think it's a continuation of my art necessarily, but one wants to give something back, and give something to the world beyond your self. When you love the arts and you see great work not getting the recognition it deserves you want to do something about it. At the same time, whenever I get a few extra dollars I spend it getting my own work out there or buying instruments or equipment that will help me create and promote my own art as well as others. So I feel selfish as well.

Essays in [the] Passing Sciences sounds like a wonderful project. You might be surprised. There might be people willing to do the work because they are interested in being a part of a project beyond the ordinary film. Could you go into a little more detail about what you have in mind?

Chris Mansel: Specifically in nature, there would be those parts of the body I find interesting that would either coalesce with the environment or protrude. In a studio it would be more close-up. There are many things I find interesting about the human body. The idea is to photograph in both settings the form in a new and interesting way.

Say for instance the arm from the shoulder to the elbow against a broken limb both hanging from a tree and a broken limb on the ground. In a studio setting the arm would take on a different meaning when it was up against a light bulb that was turned off to signify the idea is there but it is nothing new.

Another idea is have the body submerged in leaves with only the hair emerging. These are essays and who is to say if is it science or not?

One thing your writing is known for, particularly your Brambu writings is the art. A book of your art, drawings, sculpture would be a monumental task but well worth the under taking. Do you think such a book would free you to create more art and distance you from what you have already created?

Jake Berry: I'm not sure what the result would be. But if there is a publisher willing to give me the opportunity I'd leap at it.

In the past when I've been confronted with similar situations I tended to add it to the things I did rather than subtract it from the activities in which I was already engaged. So I would probably assemble a collection of work that had not been associated with any previous project and spend a period of time obsessed with creating new work.

Your written work, whether prose fiction, non-fiction political writing, or poetry is so diverse that it is almost impossible to imagine it as the product of a single mind. Do you have as many selves, as many souls, as you have approaches to work? Are we by nature singular or plural or both?

Chris Mansel: I have often wondered this myself. When I write, from start to finish, unless it is a long piece I usually finish it in just a few minutes. A poem will sometimes take two minutes or more. The words come out so quick I am lucky to get it down in a cohesive piece. Since I have seizures I can hardly write legible any more creatively. So like most these days I write at the computer.

As far as approaches to work I have a select library I pull from. I won’t try and list them but Dante plays a major role.

Non-fiction mostly, personal experience is where I glean. Pete Townshend quoted Elvis Costello once and said, “Each writer must be a thief and a magpie.” I adhere to that philosophy a great deal.

We are by nature singular though most might disagree. I have said many times your creativity is the medicine you are prescribed. You are prescribed not anyone else. You are the one writing even if someone else is editing. You are the one faced with the blank screen or piece of paper, you and you alone. I can’t think of a better place to be, though I have felt different many times. This evening alone I had a seizure and spent five hours in the emergency room. It was my seizure and it was my pain. I had my wife and daughter with me but it was my instance that brought me there. We are a singular being adrift in a tidal pool. Back and forth we go through life but you can never get away from the fact that we are alone.

Do you foresee a day when the writing of Charles Olson will be taught alongside Mark Twain and Washington Irving in our education system?

Jake Berry: The thought of Charles Olson being taught in our education system troubles my sleep.

I can foresee a time when Olson will be taught at various levels of secondary education and that time is now. He just isn't being taught very widely. There's also a backlash in some quarters against modernism right now. Part of this is justified because in some places modernism and post-modernism (whatever the fuck that is) eclipsed everything else for a while. It makes sense that we keep modernism in perspective. It's only a small part of the story. On the other hand there are those that want to toss it completely in favor of a return to some imagined period when poetry was held in high esteem and was relatively easy to understand. That was before audio recordings, certainly before audio recordings and films became so popular. Even without new formalism or other poetries that shun the apparent difficulties of modernism there are still forms of poetry that are easy to understand and are extremely popular. It just hides under the name 'popular music.' While much in that area is pure product, candy - there is still great poetry sneaking out as pop music because that's the medium in which it is performed. It's a long list and everyone that really loves popular music and devotes time to listening to it will know immediately what I'm talking about. When I use the term popular music, I mean all the music that has been popular in terms of a large audience (compared to other forms like classical, avant-garde, art song and so forth) over the last century as recording technology has made music available to everyone. There's no small amount of modernism in pop music either. But you rarely hear people complain about the difficulty of a Radiohead lyric for instance, or the obscurity of Beck's references. People talk about the words. They recognize them as being more abstract, but that isn't a problem. There are millions of people walking around singing lyrics that are open to as many interpretations as there are listeners and few have a problem with this.

Does the fact that you can sing an obscure bit of poetry make it better somehow than reading it in a book? Maybe it does. Maybe someone should set The Maximus Poems to a nice backbeat, mix in a heavy bass line and some nice guitar licks. I bet if a successful artist did that and didn't call any attention to the fact, beyond the essential permission notice buried in the credits, we'd have people all over the world singing Olson.

The troubled sleep was a paraphrasing of Ezra Pound who said the same thing about the classics being taught.

I have certainly had my share of troubled sleep, but I am as likely to have it troubled by something I am working on as anything else. I'll be so intensely focused on a poem or song that some part of me can't let it go long enough to rest. I wish I was romanticizing this, and I never used to have this problem, but it definitely happens now. Also, I have often found sleep to be a source of creativity. I was trying to catch up on missed sleep from last night with a nap this afternoon and woke up with the phrase along the lines of "the devil is going to get his." I don't know what this means, but for some reason I attached it to the current conflict between Russia and Georgia. Sleep can indeed be an escape.

In times of most intense stress from the world at large I seem to be able to sleep. I think perhaps my mind is trying to escape the stress.

I hope you don't mind if I keep hammering away at this idea of the singular. My experience is that we are in a state of constant change. My self, what "I" am seems to change to adapt constantly to circumstances. So, I find it difficult it locate a singular self. I have an ego of course, an inflated one too much of the time, but I think of that as something like a device for asserting one's presence in the world, and a very crude one at that. It's necessary, but temporal and shouldn't be taken too seriously. I think that one of the origins of our idea of self lies in monotheism.

When Moses asks who is speaking form the burning bush the voice comes back "I am." There's that singular I. As western culture developed around monotheism we also see popes, kings, and so on represent themselves as the presence of God on earth. The presence of the God. Your work seems so varied - you write poetry and songs of all kinds, you do all manner of visual art. Even your recent series of films seems the product of many selves, not a single individual. So I'm puzzled. Can you help me to understand how all of this happens from a singular identity?

Chris Mansel: I keep going back to Georges Bataille, he wrote, "Me, I exist." It is pounded into us that we are all good and evil, but we are all singular, just one man or woman. My story, The Savage Tale of Walter Seems tells the tale of a journalist who has multiple personalities. One is a journalist, one is a killer, and yet another is a holy man.

Perhaps that role of monotheism is in all of us and that is where it comes from. Perhaps the burning bush was talking back to Moses in his mind. Maybe we hear what we want to hear. It would account for the many readings of the same text and the many different versions of worship. We understand more about the chemicals in the brain now than we did then.

How this happens from a singular identity is in my opinion like The Neophyte by Durer. Maybe we are like the fresh young scholar surrounded by the more experienced and as we get older we learn to how to utilize them. But again we are all one mind. As I get older my writing and my films will become better and other artistic endeavors will become apparent.

I'd like to ask you a question I asked Neeli Cherkovski in my interview with him. I wonder if you have a favorite artist or painter and what brought about this opinion?

Jake Berry: It would be impossible to single out anything like a favorite artist. I'm reading, listening, learning all the time from new artists. There's a list at: http://www.myspace.com/jakeberry16.

If you mean painters only the list is just as long. The earliest art yet unearthed is every bit the equal to the "great masters," though I love DaVinci, all the Renaissance north and south, art from all the ancients, everything that isn't just pure commercial crap. I can't get enough of art of whatever kind. I feel the same way about philosophy, history and science. There's so much to see, hear and learn that it's frustrating knowing there will not be enough time to see it all.

Recent developments in the cognitive sciences reveal that our behavior, our emotions and thoughts, are associated with electrochemical activity in the brain. This leads back into the old debates about self-determination. To what extent are we able to make individual decisions? Or is everything we can feel or know or do the result of chemicals in the brain, their transmitters and receptors, responding to external stimulus and biological predispositions?

Chris Mansel: Any mapping of the human mind surely would include a descent into hell. As for individual decisions we must prey upon ourselves like rabid dogs and weigh the consequences but finally whether we receive council from others or not we are the Emperor in his new clothes draped in the blood of the designer and his minions. We are the final word unless we are someone without honor or purpose. A dog will follow a bone only as long as the scent or the desire allows unless you beat him to do so. As someone who suffers unimaginable headaches I can hereby say that the chemical imbalance is that descent into hell with no poet's way out, no guide to soften the rough waters. The transmitters click off and on I believe but in a situation of intense pain I believe that like a damaged nerve they simply shut down. I can only speak for myself and truthfully in the ways of science, just my belief but I tend towards the belief that hell and its torments are in the mind and its pain I feel on an occasional basis.

[Editor’s Note: Many thanks for this incredible journey through the creative mind, from the depths of Dante’s Inferno to the skies of liminal splendor. These artists are creating bridges to new worlds and new contexts that redefine the human experience and every journey they take reveals new portals, new roads or new ways of seeing and believing. Those of us who value the creative process envy and thank them, along with the adventurers who came before and will inevitably follow. Many returns. Jazz.]
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Jake's Word Re: AFGHAN TRAP REVISITED

[In response to a Jazzman Chronicle reprinted below.]

Well said. Delivered with the intelligence, scope and precision of the finest political writing. Much closer in that regard to the founders than anything you're likely to ready anywhere in the major presses. Thank you for your perseverance. We need that now and always.

I keep thinking of something Robert McNamara said when he returned with some of his American counterparts to meet with his former enemies in Vietnam decades later. One of them asked him, "Did you not know the history of Vietnam? Every country around us and many countries from all over the world have invaded and all of them have left defeated. We are still here."

It's obvious that the Bush administration never bothered to study history, any history, let alone Afghanistan. They ignored the fact the English pieced the country together out of warring tribes, just as they did in Iraq. They ignored the fact the British could not control Afghanistan and after a long struggle, they abandoned it. The British empire was crumbling as they left. They even ignored history so recent that even their children and grandchildren knew it. The Soviets invaded with the same results. They left as the Soviet empire crumbled.

We knew this going into Afghanistan. But we went anyway. Al Queda finally found the trigger and pulled it when they could be certain of a massive, unrelenting response. An unified multinational force is the only possible answer in the short run. Troops from all over the world, relatively small numbers from each nation, adapting to each shift of position, applying pressure, making it clear that they will not be there permanently. Eventually U.S. troops and those of other nations beyond the region will have to leave, just as we will eventually have to develop domestic energy resources and leave the entire region to settle its own problems or fight one another forever.

Civilization as we define it began in the middle east (and probably China and other places as well). We will never control the region. Not Alexander, not even the Persians themselves, could hold the region for more than a few years.

We are in deep now, but we don't have to be. The world should be put on notice that our time there is limited and that we have the skill, innovative drive, and resources to free ourselves of economic and cultural ties to the region (including Israel). We should have never been there to begin with. We simply cannot stay there forever if we wish to survive.

Jake Berry



THE AFGHAN TRAP REVISITED: COMPOUNDING OUR MISTAKES

By Jack Random



Let’s assume that the group of people who planned and executed the September 2001 attack on America’s institutions of finance, the military and an unknown third target (I would have thought the CIA in Langley, Virginia) were something more capable than idiots. Let us assume they had at least a notion of a plan that went beyond hitting us where it hurts.

The American response to such an attack was not difficult to predict: We would identify a likely enemy and strike with the awesome might of the world’s most powerful military.

Our response may have gone beyond what the enemy predicted. If they had knowledge of the then residents of the halls of power, they could have predicted a war in Iraq. Though unrelated to the attack and the attackers, Iraq was a war the White House wanted for reasons as obvious as a solar eclipse.

They may have known that we would attack Iraq but they were certain that we would attack the nation that unwittingly hosted them: Afghanistan. They would have predicted that our zeal to display our awesome powers of destruction would cut short any discussion with the ruling Taliban. They would have predicted that our pride and stubborn determination would lead us further and further into the Afghan trap where we would awaken years later to find that we can neither go forward nor get out.

As any foreign power might have told us: there is no winning a war in Afghanistan. There is only a slow, painful death.

Our military commanders tell us what they are supposed to tell us. It is not in their vocabulary to lose a war once it has begun. They tell us what they need to win tempered by what the public will accept. Instead of saying we need to exterminate half the Afghan population and annihilate the northern provinces of Pakistan, the commander requests another 30 to 40 thousand troops. If he gets them have no doubt there will be another request six months down the road and another and another until at length we are in so far we can neither go forward nor get out.

We are in the process of doing precisely what our attackers wanted us to do.

But the commanders and their defenders in Washington protest: The surge will work just as it did in Iraq. Never in the annals of military history has the truth been so deviously distorted. When true history is written, it will record that the American occupation forces in Iraq, trapped and cornered in a spiral descent, made a deal with the enemy. We would give them arms and money (just as we did the Mujahideen in Soviet occupied Afghanistan) to fight against a common foe. They took our money, our weapons and our ammunition on the condition that we would agree to withdraw our forces from the battlefield.

So what have we won in Iraq? Have we won control of the oilfields we so coveted? Have we won a more loyal ally in the region than our former ally in Saddam Hussein? Have we weakened our regional adversary in Iran? Have we secured the democratic form of government?

We have in fact accomplished none of these. We have in fact strengthened Iran, lost our influence over the oil, and the only thing less certain than Iraqi democracy is the prospect of Iraqi unity and peace. As the Hollywood oil man famously opined: There will be blood. There will be a fight for control of Iraq that will likely tear that creation of the British mandate apart. It will be a battle that will stretch on for years and decades and perhaps even centuries and in the end we will have little say over who wins and loses.

As it is in Iraq so it is in Afghanistan but more so. We find ourselves in the same dilemma that confronted the Soviets in the fateful year of 1987. Before the occupation Soviet military commanders warned that Afghanistan was a trap. It was a nation of disparate tribes that could only be united by a foreign occupier. It was a war the Soviets could not win but it would suck the life out of the Soviet treasury like the unquenchable thirst of a vampire. Soviet political leaders would hear none of it. They were the mighty Soviets. They would prevail where no one had before. Once it became clear they could not prevail they were afraid to fail, afraid to be embarrassed as the Americans had been in Vietnam. They were caught in the Afghan trap.

Flash forward to today. The situation in Iraq is unstable even as we prepare the withdrawal of the vast majority of our troops. The situation in Afghanistan is a spiral descent. The Karzai government has revealed itself as hopelessly corrupt. The Afghan model of democracy was clearly Florida 2000 in which votes can be manipulated to the desired outcome at the command of the government in office. (To Obama’s credit, it was not acceptable to the new White House.) We are sponsoring murderers, thieves and drug dealers even as we condemn the enemy for doing the same.

We are losing the war not because we have the wrong strategy and not because we lack the soldiers. We are losing the war for the same reason the Soviets lost: It is not our land to win or lose. The Afghanis may play with us for some time. They may take our weapons. Some may take our money. Whatever they promise or bargain away, in the end we will leave and they will decide for themselves who rules their land.

Our legitimate objectives in Afghanistan are (a) eliminating terrorist cells and training centers intent on attacking our people or assets and (b) ensuring that nuclear weapons in Pakistan are not transferred to irresponsible hands.

Despite the bravado of our former president, we have always known that the mission in this part of the world is one of intelligence gathering and precise covert military action backed up by prosecutions in international courts of law.

It is time we stopped playing by the script of our enemy and started standing for the cause of justice. We are not engaged in a battle of civilizations. We are upholding the rule of law.

From any rational perspective the Afghan president by embracing the illegitimacy of his government has enabled the American president to find the most direct path out of this hopeless quagmire. Clearly, the kind of democracy Karzai envisioned is the kind illustrated by Karl Rove, Dick Cheney and Dick Nixon in a former era. It is the kind of democracy practiced in Russia, Iran and countless African states. It is the kind that does not leave the important questions government in the hands of a mindless rabble.

That kind of blatantly undemocratic reasoning might have brought no more than a chuckle from our previous administration as they blindly pressed on with their predetermined agenda of empire building but it should not be acceptable to our current president.

In the beginning many of us were willing to give Karzai the benefit of the doubt. So what if he was a lackey for the oil industry? So what if he had a history of corruption? Anyone who takes the stage in international politics has danced with the devil once or twice. This was his chance to come clean. Instead, by embracing the dark side of electoral politics and rejecting the very concept of democracy, Karzai has become our worst Afghan nightmare. He gives the lie to the benevolence of the American occupation.

It is not in our national interest to uphold a corrupt and unlawful government. It is not in our interest to maintain an occupation indefinitely. Our only interests are fighting the violent extremists who threaten us and maintaining a stable government in nuclear Pakistan. Both objectives would be better achieved by maintaining a small footprint in the region and by withdrawing the bulk of our military presence.

However we may despise the Taliban for their archaic beliefs it was a mistake to declare them the enemy alongside Al Qaeda. The Taliban had no part in the planning or execution of the terror attacks on America. When we declared war on the Taliban we compelled them to join ranks with Al Qaeda. We simultaneously committed ourselves to an unwinnable war. With eyes wide open and led by arrogant folly we marched into the world’s deepest muck hole.

When we made our mission not a surgical strike by Special Forces to eradicate Al Qaeda but a full-scale invasion and occupation, it was a mistake of epic proportions. When we announced to the world that our goal was not to subjugate the Afghan people but to establish a working democracy, we ought to have kept our word.

A democracy is not a packaged good. It is a process and a very messy process under the best of conditions. The most basic premise of a democracy is that all segments of the population must be represented. You do not disenfranchise those with whom you do not agree. No matter how repugnant we may find a group’s beliefs, in a democracy we provide equal access to the electoral process. To exclude a segment of the electorate (as we did the Sunnis in Iraq) is to guarantee a civil war.

We must remember that in the broad scope of history, our own nation disenfranchised women and minorities until only yesterday. Imagine that a foreign power took control of our government and excluded Mormons or Jews or evangelical Christians for their archaic beliefs. The most secular of Americans would never accept that kind of manipulation in betrayal of the democratic ideal.

The way forward in Afghanistan is clear. We must correct the errors of the past. If it is still possible we must invite the Taliban to join the electoral process and we must make sure that the process is fair and equitable to all Afghanis.

The Taliban is not our rightful enemy on the field of battle. They are our adversaries in the universe of ideas. That is a battle we can and will win for we carry the forces of justice and destiny on our side.

What has happened in Afghanistan is shameful. There is no redemption for the kind of corruption the Karzai government has shown. We cannot defend them. We must therefore ensure that a fair and open electoral process sweeps them away into the dustbin of history.

The only agreement we should and can require of the Afghan government is one the Taliban would surely have agreed to nine years ago: a modest presence across the landscape from which to operate a continued assault on those who attacked us and those who intend to attack us and those who similarly threaten the nuclear stability of neighboring Pakistan.

That is our legitimate interest in the region and it is the best scenario we could possibly hope for at this stage of the game.

Jazz.

JACK RANDOM IS THE AUTHOR OF THE JAZZMAN CHRONICLES (CROW DOG PRESS) AND GHOST DANCE INSURRECTION (DRY BONES PRESS). THE CHRONICLES HAVE BEEN POSTED ON NUMEROUS CITES OF THE WORLDWIDE WEB, INCLUDING THE ALBION MONITOR, BELLACIAO, BUZZLE, COUNTERPUNCH, DISSIDENT VOICE, THE NATIONAL FREE PRESS AND PACIFIC FREE PRESS. SEE WWW.JAZZMANCHRONICLES.BLOGSPOT.COM.

Mind of Mansel: Cessation Blues

...

american history sweeps a street that won't get clean
I'm carrying a gun carved from snakes and beans
the past tells me the battlefield is not always green
liberty is the highest peak that I have seen

wrapped myself in the flag and went out on the ledge
it took two steps forward to get out over the edge
lovers held out their hands but watched me fall
once I hit purgatory it turned into a serious brawl

I came back to life in the fields of war you see
and I cried to see that others were following me
so I walked off the line and lay my gun to the side
and in the name of peace you know I again died


chorus:

Cessation Blues, let it be one with you
even Gulliver knew, the Cessation Blues


- Chris Mansel

JAKE BERRY'S RESPONSE TO KEITH OLBERMANN’S SPECIAL COMMENTARY ON HEALTHCARE

Olbermann is eloquent as always. And he utilizes a tool that most journalists either do not have or fear to use – a vocabulary. Maybe the words are written by someone else, but regardless, this is proof that intelligent use of the language can of itself be persuasive.

I agree with Olbermann, but that's no surprise. I have always felt that we should seek to collectively try to create a society that is compassionate before all else.

But in a free and open society, we are also free to be subjected to manipulation by those who are greedy to acquire and maintain their hold on power even if it means many others will die, even if it means that they themselves will die sooner than necessary. Power has its own directive. It seeks to consume, to control and drive the whole world to a massive, bloody conclusion merely for the ability to say "I had," "I have," and "I am above all others." It is ego written as large as the universe and once you have tasted even a small portion of it you cannot let it go without personal sacrifice because anything or anyone you believe you have conquered is now a part of you and to lose it means losing something more precious than life in the future, it means losing that part of your self right now. It means a small, immediate death. Once this contagion grips you you will do anything to protect it. That is the contagion, the real disease at the heart of the problem.* Many people – probably a majority now – believe that healthcare reform means that they will lose a part of themselves. This despite the fact that they do not actually possess what it is they are afraid of losing.

Once again we will fail because we prefer to react before we think. The leadership in and out of government, those who will ultimately make the decision about healthcare, has been horrible on all sides and from all corners. No one has spoken directly and clearly about the issue. Olbermann comes as close to it as anyone I have read or heard when he says that the issue comes down to the simple fact - "I want to live." We can make the apparently complex issue much clearer by asking a few questions. Here they are:

Does everyone in this country have the same right to live as everyone else?

If you are rich do you have a greater right to live than if you are poor?

If you are poor is it your obligation to become wealthy enough to pay for health insurance and all other health costs no matter how rapidly those costs continue to rise?

Should we cut healthcare costs by simply eliminating those who cannot afford it from the system? More directly, should we allow the poor to die because they are too poor to afford healthcare?

And how much will the cost of healthcare have to rise before you become one of those who can no longer afford to pay for it and be condemned to death?

Life is precious. The life we have is all we know. But as Olbermann states so eloquently, and as we all know, we all must die. How long do you want to live? Do you want to live as long as you are able to speak and hear and know the world around you? If so, you will need to live healthy and need a reliable system of healthcare to help you return to health when you inevitably fall ill. Do you have that right? If you do, does everyone else as well? Where do you draw the line? In the U.S. it appears that the line will be drawn with dollars. Life will be equated with wealth. The richer you are the longer you live. If that is the choice we make. So be it. We have always had a talent for ignoring the suffering of others with the exception of short term emergencies. Oh, there are those few who will give to the poor or help out in other ways. A few will even dedicate their entire lives to alleviating the suffering of others. But most of us are better at ignoring pain and suffering until it touches us. Then we want it to go away. In short, we want to live.

Do I matter more than you? I don't think that I do. And it doesn't bother me that I have less money in my pocket because someone else who is suffering tonight draws on medicaid or medicare or some other publicly funded program. But those programs are in fact underfunded and medicaid in particular is one reason that healthcare costs continue to rise. Another reason might be that pharmaceutical companies, as a group, spend half their budgets on advertising drugs (most of which cannot be acquired without a prescription). But I am obviously a socialist, right? If you believe that you believe a lie. And I am one of many millions.

Consider the questions and consider how you will feel if you fall on the bad side of the equation.

This is the way I speak to myself when it comes to the issue of healthcare. I am not sure that there is a solution. But can't we at least try to find a way for everyone to live as long as they can or as long as they chose? Maybe the answer is simply to leave things alone and let the system collapse. Maybe a better system will replace it based on supply and demand alone. I doubt it, but I'm beginning to think we're going to find out.

INFNITIES
jk

* Editor's Note: Despite the best efforts of the healthcare industry, the public continues to strongly support healthcare reform in general and the public option in particular. Another way to look at the debate is this: If healthcare is a right and not a privilege then it is immoral to profit by it. The health insurance industry serves no useful purpose to the general public. It should eliminated by the most direct means possible. Further, profit making corporations should not be allowed to own and operate hospitals and healthcare clinics any more than such corporations should be allowed to run schools, fire stations, police forces and the military. We are told to be afraid of government (i.e., socialism) but we ought to be afraid of the corporate takeover that is unfolding before our weary eyes.

Beatlick Travel: Final Report 2009

Date: Oct 15, 2009 5:59 AM
Beatlick Travel Report #12

It has taken a full year to really become comfortable with our new van. I felt so connected to my old 71 VW and transferring emotionally to my newer 77 has been like taking on a new lover. When in Albuquerque last month the transmission hung up on me twice in one day in downtown traffic. I panicked at first then thought this van is officially blessed by the Ukranian Orhtodox Church, me too and Joe. This can’t be happening. The painful learning curve. All this time I have been shifting in a lazy X pattern when I should have been using an H pattern. So now I know and that is last bit of trouble I have had with the van. Coming back from Taos was one of the most pleasant experiences I have had, stress free driving now.

We are also in a new era with Beatlick News. We’ve changed over to a new publishing program, more compatible than our old Quark documents. I also took the front page picture with my Tracphone and emailed it to my new laptop computer, which is Wifi compatible. Publication is becoming much more streamlined and less stressful, too. And the house-sitting gigs are really starting to stack up so no new trips planned until January.

Here are some final thoughts which will be my Live For Art column in our upcoming issue. Check out beatlick.com in about a week or look for a hard copy in the mail if you are a subscriber.

The Red River and Rio Grande come together at the Wild Rivers Recreational Area in New Mexico. Far above at The Junta Point you stand between the two gorges that hold the rivers between their enormous canyon walls. Having trekked down the canyon paths to the confluence and looking up to Junta Point you can barely intellectually grasp how long it took for the rivers to eat through the flat earth further and further down to the canyon floor. Millions and millions of years. There in the midst of all that space and depth I can’t help but ponder how insignificant I am in the context of all the time ensued to create this natural wonder. How little do we matter in the entire scheme of things except to our own selves and those who share this time and space with us. It’s marvelous and frightening.

I marvel at the friends I am still allowed to have. The longer we are on this earth the more we lose: family, friends, neighborhoods, entire worlds and levels of consciousness.

The universe is still expanding, making us even more significant and small. How we treat each other now is the most important thing—in our homes and in the world. Happy Trails

Keep in touch and stay on the Happy Trails...
Beatlick Pamela Hirst

AMERICA’S BROKEN PROMISE: THE UNFULFILLED RIGHTS OF HUMANKIND

JAZZMAN CHRONICLES. DISSEMINATE FREELY.


By Jack Random


In what Thomas Paine christened The Age of Reason, democracy supplanted the royal monarchy as the government of choice for enlightened nations. There was much discussion in those pivotal times of human advancement concerning the inherent Rights of Man. Borrowing from England’s Magna Carta, the British philosopher John Locke and the French philosophers Jean-Jacque Rousseau and Francois-Marie Arouet (aka Voltaire), Thomas Jefferson immortalized the universal human rights in the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.

Many attempts have been made to identify and innumerate the universal Rights of Man but none yet has succeeded in finding a general consensus across the divergent cultures of our planet. Some nations, held back by centuries of tradition and religious belief, have not yet accepted the basic tenets of individual liberty. Others like our own have failed to move beyond the most basic of rights and liberties. Some would say we have done a poor job of ensuring and protecting even those fundamental rights and I would count myself among them.

There is something to be said for the conservative approach to enlightenment. We cannot expect primitive societies governed by witchdoctors and tribal warlords to be transformed into functioning democracies overnight. We cannot expect nations carved in the earth by foreign occupying powers to embrace ideals of governance they have neither discovered nor devised for themselves. All societies must be allowed to evolve according to their own levels of consciousness by their own methods.

But we in America pride ourselves as a bastion of civil liberty. We never tire of proclaiming ourselves leaders of the free world, a shining city on a hill illuminating the way forward for all of humankind. It hardly matters that we have so often failed the test by sponsoring military dictatorships and coups or allowing the disenfranchisement of minority voters to overturn elections, we have an obligation by our own proclamation and self-aggrandizement to forward the cause. We have a responsibility to lead the world because we believe ourselves to be the world’s leader.

Despite our flaws and failures we have often found our way to push forward in critical times not by summoning the lost voices of our founders but by recognizing their substantial shortcomings. Our founders did not acknowledge the rights of women but the nation found a way. Our founders did not recognize the rights of minorities or the poor but succeeding generations righted those wrongs.

It is time we moved forward. It is time we understood once and for always that for every right our founders committed to law they got something wrong. They were profoundly flawed men even if enlightened for their time and we have no obligation to be bound in perpetuity to their shortcomings.

The recent national debate (if it may be called that) has brought to light several of our shortcomings in the fulfillment of human rights. When angry white men bring semi-automatic weapons to political protests it should not escape anyone’s attention that the right to free expression is compromised by anyone who does not agree with the armed protesters. It is not by happenstance that the founders placed the right to bear arms in the context of “a well regulated militia.” They had no intention of validating the spectacle of an armed mob intimidating their fellow citizens.

What are we afraid of: that a subversive element will take over the government? I would suggest that the subversive element is the angry mob itself and that recent history has already recorded the takeover of our government through electoral fraud. But the remedy was and is in the ballot box, not in armed mobs issuing thinly veiled threats before the television screens.

It will take time but we must curtail the right to arm in order to protect the greater right to freedom of expression and freedom from the inevitable violence that will ensue if this trend continues. We must elect officials who are sworn to take no money from the gun lobby that zealously blocks gun control legislation to prevent unstable individuals from purchasing automatic weapons and wielding them in public. We must eventually change the political equation that will not allow anyone to become a Supreme Court justice unless they agree to ignore the language of the second amendment in favor of an unfettered individual right to bear arms. Barring that we must amend the constitution.

The national debate on healthcare reform has brought to the fore the unfulfilled right to decent and affordable medical care for all our citizens. Indeed, all human beings, even those here illegally or as guests, should have the right to medical treatment without fear of penalty or deportation.

America is so far behind the curve on this issue that it alone places us in the second class of nations on the fulfillment of human rights and respect for human dignity. Every American should be ashamed that we alone among industrialized nations fail to ensure universal healthcare to our people. We are so blind to our own interests that we allow an industry that is motivated by profit and profit alone to dictate the terms of so-called “healthcare reform.” The corporate monoliths that provide millions in political contributions and millions more in a public relations offensive summon the uninsured and unhealthy masses to decry real reform as socialism and (unbelievably) fascism and the masses fall in line. It seems not to matter that fully 65% of the people do not buy the corporate propaganda and remain steadfast in supporting the public option as critical to the reform effort, it only matters that the angry mob on the television screen opposes it.

The fault here goes to the heart of our democracy. Quite simply, our elected officials are on the take. Until we succeed in banning corporate contributions from dominating our electoral system, our officials will represent the wealthiest corporations first and spend most of their time trying to deceive the people into believing it is in their interest.

Perhaps they can explain how it is in our interest that international corporations have been granted all the rights of individuals and more while individuals have been denied the most basic right of democracy: the right to vote. If you don’t believe that is possible you should spend a little time reading the landmark Supreme Court decision Bush v. Gore 2000. If the courts were forced to recognize the right to vote they would find it difficult to ignore the massive voter disenfranchisement that allowed George W. Bush to steal two presidential elections.

How can we possibly believe that our president went to war to secure other nation's rights to democracy when we have done so little to protect our own? The election of 2000 should have been the death knell of the Electoral College. Instead it fortified our standing as a second-class democracy. In any other nation the defense of archaic rules to justify the nullification of popular will would have been condemned for what it is: hypocrisy.

Compounding our shame, we have leaders who advance the notion that voting is not a right at all; it is rather a privilege. As a wise man once said: That is not only a lie but a damnable lie. If voting is a privilege then we live in an aristocracy and democracy be damned.

We cannot summon the founders on this one – not unless we want to go back to the days when the right to vote was conditioned on property ownership and neither women nor minorities were in the club. When the Declaration proclaimed, “all men are created equal,” it was a literal exclusion. The founders set up the United States Senate as a surrogate House of Lords to guard against the dangers of democracy. We can no longer defend such notions any more than we can defend slavery or the disenfranchisement of women.

The U.S. Senate has become the obstructionist body that thwarts the will of the people. It not only stands in the way of meaningful healthcare reform; it stands in the way of the advancement of human rights.

It is time we ended the archaic Senate rules that allow forty senators to defeat any major legislation. If they cannot do it or will not then we must elect senators who will. But we cannot find viable candidates for such a regal position who will represent our interests because the cost of a senate seat requires big money – the kind of money that only corporate monoliths can provide.

Here lies the linchpin of this thesis. It is the reason our government is incapable of advancing the rights of humankind. It is the reason we have not secured our right to vote. It is the reason we have not fulfilled the right to healthcare, the right to employment or the right to decent shelter. All our interests as citizens of the nation fall secondary to corporate interests because the largest and most powerful international corporations have a stranglehold on our political process.

They have the money and money rules – even when it has been provided on the public dole from our own pockets.

What we need now is a peaceful revolution, a mass movement, and a cause that supercedes all others. It is a cause that unifies disparate groups because it is simple and appeals to common sense. It would not prevent the election of fools and charlatans to office but it would end corporate dominance of our government overnight.

It is simply this: Only individuals (subject to the limitations set by our legislative bodies) shall be allowed to contribute to political campaigns.

Jazz.

JACK RANDOM IS THE AUTHOR OF THE JAZZMAN CHRONICLES (CROW DOG PRESS) AND GHOST DANCE INSURRECTION (DRY BONES PRESS). THE CHRONICLES HAVE BEEN POSTED ON NUMEROUS CITES OF THE WORLDWIDE WEB, INCLUDING THE ALBION MONITOR, BELLACIAO, BUZZLE, COUNTERPUNCH, DISSIDENT VOICE, THE NATIONAL FREE PRESS AND PACIFIC FREE PRESS. SEE WWW.JAZZMANCHRONICLES.BLOGSPOT.COM.

Beatlick Travel: Wild Rivers

Date: Sep 26, 2009 11:23 AM

The confluence of the Rio Grande and Red River is at the Wild Rivers Recreation Area where this report originates. The confluence I mentioned earlier on the Low Road to Taos report was actually the Rio Grande and Rio Pueblo confluence.

I also meant to tell you in my last report about all the small black tarantulas that kept crossing the dirt road we took out to Manby Springs. We passed seven in one mile. That was before the weather changed. These little guys knew all about it and were on their way to make new burrows for themselves as they prepared to settle down for the winter.

We are already hunkered down in full winter mode now as we head out for the Wild Rivers Recreation Area on BLM land. We are sleeping on the bottom bunk and lining the interior with the Indian blankets to keep in the warmth from two big candles, an oil lamp, the occasional Coleman heater, and my favorite – a hot water bottle. I carry it around like a baby, call it the “baby” and just am amazed how warm and cozy it makes me feel. I love it.

We have driven about thirty miles from Taos, off the main road, through lots of small communities that seem to be living a much more hard-scrabble life than their counterparts in glamorous downtown Taos. The clouds get bigger, grayer, and more daunting as we head further and further away.

The Montoso campsite is along the rim of the Rio Grande Gorge. The mountains are dark and vast in the background. There is a second gorge beyond our horizon where the Red River is making its way through its own steep canyon walls, heading toward the Rio Grande. It rains on us that night and a subdued atmosphere greets us as we set out on our hike.

We had to walk to the Junta Trail from the van through a path of decimated pines. By the time we got to the gorge overlook there was some sun peeking out of the clouds. We were well suited up, complete with gloves, sweaters, neck scarves, and sporting two walking sticks.

Here two ecological worlds collide at the Junta. High above on the rim where we camp we see grasslands below the big mountain peaks, along with sagebrush, juniper and pinyon trees. Far down below in the shadows at the bottom of the gorge there are towering ponderosa pine, small springs, and lush riparian vegetation. All lay there in shadow most of the day because the canyon walls are so high.

I can't imagine how far it is from the bottom of that gorge where the river runs to the top of those snow capped mountain peaks that greeted us this morning. It is a 1.2 mile hike down to the confluence. The trail is rated “difficult” and it is. We set out on a rocky switch back trail, had to climb down one ladder, take a long series of metal steps clinging to the rock face, then follow the continuous switch back rocky path down to a flatland. The BLM has made a valiant effort to hold back the relentless law of gravity that erodes the steep rock walls, taking out old trails, and necessitating new ones. At the bottom four trails converged into a cross, where we picked up the Junta trail, .4 miles further down an easy dirt path.

Unlike so many other places we have constantly encountered other hikers here, mostly fishermen with their rods in hand. Two couples came by us with ski poles, or I guess hiking poles. I took our two wooden walking sticks and made myself a hiking stick outfit and was amazed how much easier it was to maneauver and traverse across the rocks.

Despite how intimidating the trail looked and how distant the confluence, we made it there in 30 minutes or less. The hiking sticks I think added to the speed. Joe is a billy goat and scampers over rocks. I was definitely going slower than he was before I started using the two sticks.

There were only big boulders where the two rivers came together, no shoreline. The Rio Grande is the larger of the two rivers, neither one of them really daunting, yet the slope of the land and the big rocks created a friction and conflict so strong that a marvelous roar fills your ears and the water is smashing and gushing over stones, with the light dancing through the droplets of water. I found a relatively flat rock, took up a comfortable yoga position and just willed all that raw energy into my own body.

Later with great dexterity we made two sandwiches on our knees; there was no surface to maneuver with. We munched avocado, pepperoni, and cheese sandwiches while we watched the nearby man fishing for trout. Two women sat on rocks keeping him company. The sun went in and out and long logs of gray clouds still dominated the sky.

When Joe pointed out to me the ridge we had to hike back to I was shocked by how far away it looked and figured it would take all afternoon to get there. However surprisingly enough we were back withing an hour and fifteen minutes.

The most devastating shock of this hike is the destruction created by the pine bark beetles. We camped in the bone yard of pine tree skeletons. In my estimation in places a third of the trees are destroyed. Their carcasses so massive in number that it would be impossible to remove them, or burn them, and they devastate the landscape with their blackened limbs like burnt fingers scratching towards deliverance. But there is none.

Happy Trails
Beatlick Pamela