Post-Earth Day Musings

New Yorkers were blessed yesterday -- "Earth Day" -- with unseasonably warm weather and not a cloud in the sky. I took advantage of the hot sun and cool breeze by running a few miles in the park and soaking up some of that rich ultra-violet radiation. But I really had to struggle to escape persistent thoughts about how miserable we have made the world over the past couple of centuries -- how we took the gifts of the earth for granted. Actually so-called "civilized man" has, for the past 200 years or so, treated the earth with nothing less than contempt. The earth has been for civilized man a kind of enemy or, at best, an obstacle to be overcome and mastered through man's superior ingenuity. And, of course, man's hatred of the earth has ultimately resulted in his own suffering -- suffering for some more than others thanks to the elegant machine of his civilization. This cycle of pain is not so wondrous when one considers that humans are, after all, of the earth and that hidden in man's contempt is necessarily his own self-loathing and shame. Thus human suffering and, very possibly, extinction is the inevitable result of man's poisoning of the environment. How short-sighted is modern civilization that it cannot find the motivation to cherish and protect the earth in the most basic instinct of self-preservation?

Virginia Tech

For nineteen years I have been put in your man's world and was forbidden to touch anything and you made me think that all was going very well and that I did not have to worry about anything but putting flowers in vases. Why did you lie to me? Why did you keep me ignorant, if it was to admit to me one day that this world is cracking and that you are all powerless and to make me choose between a suicide and a murder?

-- Jean-Paul Sartre

Bill O'Reilly: El Gringo Rumbero, do you hate America?
El Gringo Rumbero: Hell yeah!

Why is it such a big deal that the shooter was Asian? Conversely -- why wasn't it such a big deal that the shooters at Columbine were White? How does his being Asian have so much explanatory power? Could it be that the U.S. is still a nauseatingly racist country?

Here's my hypothesis about the shootings:

This guy killed all of those people because a lot people in this country are fucking annoying and anyone who has never fantasized about just going all out and fucking buck wild and putting gaping holes in his fellow Americans is either extremely Buddha-like and Saintly or just plain stupid and insensitive to the world. In fact the guy said he was sick and tired of the students at Virginia Tech whom he viewed as rich and debauched. In other words -- it aint that deep, people! Stop hiding your racism behind pseudo-anthropology and look at the world around you!

This guy killed all of those people because it's so fucking easy to get a firearm in this country! You can get one at Wal-Mart. The kid had two nine-millimeter pistols that he obtained legally! Had he stayed in Korea -- where it is virtually impossible for civilians to procure firearms (legally or illegally) -- he probably would just have gotten wasted and, in the worst case, gotten his ass beat in a drunken brawl. Instead he was in Blacksburg (VA) where -- unlike in Korea -- any demented psychopath or his retarded cousin can easily and legally procure lethal firearms.

And where's the memorial address for the 650,000 dead Iraqis Mr. President?! Why are the lives of 650,000 dead Iraqis worth exponentially less than the lives of 32 Americans?!

The Gringo You Love to Hate

It is good if we are attacked by the enemy, since it proves that we have drawn a clear line of demarcation between the enemy and ourselves. It is still better if the enemy attacks us wildly and paints us as utterly black and without a single virtue; it demonstrates that we have not only drawn a clear line of demarcation between the enemy and ourselves but achieved a great deal in our work.

Mao Zedong, 1939

People hate El Gringo Rumbero? Believe it! Every now and again I run a Google search on my square moniker to make sure no one is surfing the Web using my government name to cruise for jail-bait or solicit assault weapons or narcotics (since, obviously, i never do that shit). This morning I ran my regular search and, lo and behold, my birth-name comes up on the "Pro-raghead terrorist and communist filth list" posted by some responsible U.S. citizen doing his part to protect the precious homeland. Okay so maybe some drunk adolescent Internet user from Indiana enjoying his first pickup truck with a gun rack blasting Christian Rock is not exactly what Mao had in mind when he wrote about "the Enemy" but hey -- I'm an Armchair Revolutionary!

Spread Love

Ladies say: "El Gringo Rumbero is all about the love." It's true. But most people in this town don't have time for love. We are so caught up in the rat race, the seemingly endless cycle of production and consumption, that we have forgotten about the big picture -- the broader cycle of life, death and rebirth. Love may not conquer all but it is the life experience par excellence -- through love you truly experience being in the world and you have knowledge of that which makes us all live. In love both of the fundamental ontological elements come together -- ecstasy and agony. Also in love you feel intense, strong and powerful while at the same time utterly insignificant, banal and subject to the whims of that which makes us all live. In love you bravely submit to your fate.

The other day I was riding the subway downtown when a man boarded the train with a guitar. He raised the guitar to his chest, threw his head back and began to play. And as his eyes rolled back into his head he began to sing. His songs were devotional hymns that he himself had written (I checked later and couldn't find them on the Internet) and they were love songs. They expressed the joy and suffering that is the fundamental intuition of life -- existence at its core -- the truth one finds in love. Suddenly I understood why love songs are rooted in spiritual hymns and chants. That strength that is realized only in unconditional submission that comes through in hymns is identical to love. His songs were those of the human being in its crudest most raw form, the human being at ground zero, the human being in all its wretchedness but also in all its glory since it's only then that the human is indistinguishable from the rest of the universe and closest to the sublime -- in love. When the man finished his last song he dropped his guitar, opened his eyes and looked at all of the passengers who were all holding forth crisp green bills in their hands for the musician. Looking at each one in turn he said in a slight Jamaican accent, "thank you ladies and gentlemen... I hope that my music has brought peace and love into your hearts." And, as the train came to a stop and the doors opened, he turned without taking any of the money and left the train.

Pessimism

Pessimism easily seduces even the most minimally perspicacious observer of the world. The most beautiful creatures among us die too soon and in mass while ugliness flourishes across the surface of the planet. Wickedness is rewarded and righteousness is punished such that we now live in a world ruled tyrannically by the most wicked people imaginable. Genocidal murderers, dope traffickers, money launderers, child murderers, war mongers are words that come to mind when seeking to characterize the personalities that now rule the world. And our leaders are not content to destroy the best of their own species either. The most beautiful, most elegant, wise and graceful animals are quickly being cleansed from the face of the earth due to the policies of our leaders. The luscious diversity of plants, insects and all forms of life with which Creator lavished us is rapidly disappearing. The air is polluted and most people in the world no longer have access to potable water. Our leaders lie to us, they use us, abuse us, trick us, rob us of our children and generally add to the endless trail of corpses that essentially represents the past five centuries of history. Perhaps it is as Leslie Silko says, that we are living under the reign of the Death-Eyed Dog where blood-sucking sorcerers hold sway and bleed the people and destroy the land to satisfy their vile appetites. Perhaps these are the seven generations that Lakota medicine men spoke of, during which the Wasichus rule as tyrants over the land destroying the Buffalo Nation and massacring the people. And perhaps one day the White Buffalo Calf Woman will return and restore peace, harmony, justice, equality and freedom to the land. I pray that she does come or that something happens; that a change comes and soon, because this is not the way to live! It can't be that Creator put us here to endlessly circulate capital, to persuade others that "Brand X" doesn't suit their lifestyle, to live our lives as ideological automatons, to poison our brothers and sisters or even to murder them in mass! We obviously live in HELL and it's ruled by blood-sucking DEMONS! We must GET OUT! This imperative is the sole response I have been able to articulate to the pessimism that threatens to consume me.

Entertain The Notion

"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."

Aristotle

Rest in peace to all of those who have lost their lives since the U.S. launched its war for global domination on September 11, 2001, the hundreds of thousands who needlessly lost their lives in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine and New York City. Pour out some liquor.

What happened on September 11, 2001 was the Reichstag Fire of the present era. The pivotal event that signaled both the end of the last economic expansion of U.S. capitalism and the beginning of the present phase of U.S. imperialism -- the quest for domination of the entire planet. And, like the Reichstag Fire, it was an inside job. People with many more, and more impressive, credentials than I share this view. Robert M. Bowman (former Director of the U.S. "Star Wars" Space Defense Program in both Republican and Democratic administrations, and a former Air Force Lieutenant Colonel with 101 combat missions), Andreas von Buelow (former assistant German defense minister, director of the German Secret Service, minister for research and technology, and member of Parliament for 25 years) and Michael Hugh Meacher (senior Labour member of the U.K. Parliament and former environment minister) are among the long list of distinguished individuals that question the official story.

While you pay your respects to the dead, entertain the notion, do the research and examine all the angles. If I am wrong then you've lost nothing. But if I'm right then wouldn't you want to know?

Gangland and Philosophy, Brooklyn-Style

Everyone from Brooklyn has a mob story. I have a few but I 'm not going to tell them today. Today I want to talk about the real crooks -- the ones whose racket is so bad that they are playing all of us for suckers. These hoodlums are so hip that they have all us all thinking that their racket is legitimate and, even worse, they have us all carrying on about small time hustlers and how they should be locked up. Every year each and every one of us kicks up about three tenths of his or her income to the U.S. Treasury Department. Why? Ostensibly that money goes to maintenance of the government, infrastructure, the military and social programs. But if you look at the Federal budget for Fiscal 2007, you'll see that about 49 percent of the budget is going to the military. And if you include spending on Homeland Security and NASA (basically a military program), the portion of the budget devoted to military operations swells to well over 50 percent. You don't have to be the hippest wise guy on the block to see that the U.S. government is essentially a protection racket. Hence, our politicians are always telling us that we need to spend more on military because of this or that very frightening enemy. Today it's the crazy Arab terrorists tomorrow, who knows what it'll be, or whether there'll be a tomorrow... But it's a little more sophisticated than your typical protection racket because the government really is spending the money on weapons and so forth. They're not just shaking us down to line their pockets like your typical street hustler. We know because they've got hundreds of thousands of our young men overseas and they're tapping our telephones. So whoever's behind this racket is putting the squeeze on us, taxing us in sweat and blood, to fight turf wars to control valuable foreign markets (mainly dope and petroleum) while making sure none of us squares at home gets wise to the lovely set-up. If you think about it, this is much worse than your typical mobster. Your typical gangster may shake you down for "protection" every week but he doesn't make you send your son to fight for him two blocks down. Also your typical lowlife doesn't tell you that Arab terrorists or some such bullshit are trying to burn down your store. And if you don't pay, they don't fly fucking airplanes into your store and demolish the joint and then blame it on some Arab guys with ceramic box cutters who the local newspaper reports were one thousand miles away when it all went down. Sure they may beat you up and send you to the emergency room, but you know damn well who it was. Usually it's the same guy who asked you to pay up the first time. The point is that we are all the big-time suckers in a really gruesome mob story and it's time we got wise.

Is Pluto a Planet?

Whether or not Pluto is labeled a planet (the big debate this week at the annual meeting of the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union ) has more to do with politics than astronomy. Pluto is a cold spherical rock that has been orbiting the sun for billions of years and what the blood-sucking devils who rule this planet call it is insignificant. However, Pluto is the only planet to have been "discovered" and named by a U.S. scientist (Clyde Tombaugh in 1930). What's at stake is the position of the U.S. as a global power, not only militarily, but culturally. Science has little to do with it. Labeling Pluto as a planet will force the inclusion of potentially hundreds of solar system objects into the planet category and unnecessarily complicate the taxonomy of astronomy. But, considering that the U.S. is willing to murder hundreds of thousands of Iraqi women and children to exert its military might, it makes sense that it would fuck up astronomy to exert its cultural hegemony.

Interestingly enough, like the "discovery" of the Americas, the "discovery" of Pluto was an accident that resulted from a faulty hypothesis. Tombaugh believed that only the existence of a ninth planet could explain the anomalies he was observing in the orbits of Neptune and Uranus. However, in fact, Pluto has no role in the anomalies he observed.