17 October 2023
I recently read a very funny comment online about what, in America, has become the continuing crisis.
“Break to commercial:
This crisis brought to you by Pfizer.
Wrong Crisis.
This crisis brought to you by Raytheon and Lockheed.”
Such a sad, cynical, and truthful commentary doubtless can be stated in other parts of the world, where free speech has been squelched for decades. I posit the possibility that free speech, which is, in and of itself, an ideal — was never truly free in many of those parts of the world.
There’s a farcical illusion of a First Amendment in Great Britain, a pitiful contrivance of one in France, with organized stabs (woops, wrong word choice) — organized public spectacles of group-speak to supposedly translate into A Voice.
The rest of Europe strikes back against the repressive EU through elections that ping-pong from one side of the political spectrum to the other, at fairly regular intervals. I try not to observe the goings-on. I’m more than prone to motion sickness. Bringing (and making use of) the big brown paper shopping bag with me on the Bus for Class Trips in grammar school is one my more vivid memories of School Daze.
Many, if not most, of the citizens in the Old World nonetheless instinctively know those truths of natural rights, and God-given liberty, to be self-evident. Those citizens, however, don’t count in those lands that gave birth to the New World. That’s why there’s a New World.
During the archaic days of Thomas Paine and The Crisis — which started its immortal life as The American Crisis — his words were not welcomed by the majority of colonists. That reality is why the firebrand Mr. Paine wrote those words!
He also penned Common Sense, and, brother, do we need some of that stuff today.
Perhaps it’s the rebel in me that understands that a gag order on any American citizen will only help that gagged mouth (and throat) to speak even more effectively about what he can’t say. I personally had a gag order placed on me, starting in childhood. The formation of a writer was definitively underway, especially during my adolescence.
I started off that strengthening phase of my moral backbone with mouthing off. I consequently received quick retribution from the adults-in-charge whom I was confronting regarding their arrogant stupidity, their haughty hypocrisy, their vile sense of authority over whoever it was they thought they could control, for their own nefarious purposes.
The squeaky wheel gets the grease.
Here, in the USA, the squeaky wheels are so abundantly greased with corporate payola that the grease has caused those wheels to fall off the runaway train, a lecherous locomotive that keeps train-wrecking across the Fruited Plain. I shudder to think where that train will careen before it inevitably flies off of the cliff awaiting it.
During the past few years, the costs of building a custom house in my region have sky-rocketed. The logical and subsequent market effect, even in Commie-fornia, is the sale of vacant lots has become extremely difficult.
There will always be the shoddy, fast construction of tract-homes, filling up even more of the Sacramento-San Joaquin valley, as well as lining the land along I-80 for that quick freeway access. That acreage used to be farmland; but the continuing crisis of achieving a NO FARMS-NO FOOD goal is being brought to the Golden State, courtesy of Headless-Horseman Guvmint and the corporations that comprise California, Inc.
It looks as if the scavenger-quick-investment model of flipping hovels is returning to my region.
The subprime collapse of 2008 put an end to that monstrous cacophony of speculative house-construction throughout the world. Only then did I learn that I was not the only legitimate homeowner, with a legitimate mortgage, who had put up with the din and the dingy re-construction and re-modeling of 1200-square foot shacks into 2-story wannabe McMansions — right next door!
The writing of THE DAWN started in September 2008, immediately following the economic gag orders placed on The Banks about their decades of reckless deeds of greed and stupidity. The Bank of Beijing sleazily financed the plywood-do-over of the dump behind my house on Peach Lane.
I am wondering today how the Bank of Beijing figures into another go at the wheel of misfortune in America.
Thus it is that I am thankful today, and every day, for having listened to many, many incoming signals, during those 2000s — to situate myself here, where I am in the here and now, typing this essay in my Dream Home, Larkhaven. Some of those intuitive messages arrived in my head in stereo, especially as I listened to classical music to help me weather those weird years.
Working toward the writing of my 2-volume opus helped me even more. As weirdness descended upon my nation in the year of our Lord 2020, I worked furiously, but steadily, to complete composing L’AUBE, the translation of THE DAWN.
I’m working steadily, though not furiously, to return to L’AUBE for the final review of that translation.
We’re always living in a world of uncertainty. There are, forevermore, vultures, vultures everywhere. To soar like an eagle, one must spot those vultures before they spot you. It’s not an easy task, but, with enough experience, that work becomes reflexive. During a manufactured crisis, you can see the vultures a mile away.
And there’s solace in that certainty.
One thing is quite certain for me upon this day:
The continuing crisis is les Autres — the Others.