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[04 Apr 2008|12:02am] |
And, you know, talk about the terrorists as these heartless people, who would set off explosions in the midst of men, women, and children. Well that's our foreign policy is that's what our submarines are prepared to do is to set off enormous explosions in the midst of civilians. And so far in the history of the world only one country has been crazy enough to set off nuclear explosions in the middle of civilians. That's us. We did it twice.
Well, I don't care, because I expect to be dead soon, but well I do care, because I have grandchildren and I am ashamed of the country they are trying to make a living in. It's heartless...
Well the greatest gift America has given the world was a treatment for depression. Which is jazz, the blues. The African-American community, which made this great gift to the world. And it has been so beneficial to me, because I am often depressed. And I have said, you know I'm nominally an atheist or an agnostic, but that the only proof of the existence of God that I ever needed was music. How it works, why it works, I don't know, but thank goodness it does. What a gift to the world, jazz is.
Well of course we have this thing called the Patriot Act, which enables the government to look out for people who are disloyal, supposedly helping the terrorists. And this Act entitles our government agents or whatever, to go find out what books people are taking out of the library. And librarians in this country are notoriously unpowerful- Not well connected at all and not well paid at all. In spite that, they have resisted this and so the America I love might have disappeared from a lot of places, but it's damn well at the front desks of our public libraries.
Still, it proves that dissent doesn't matter, you think there was a time when it did. And they have discovered, the neo-conservatives, the representatives of the rich, have found that dissent doesn't amount to a hill of beans anymore. Yes I've protested and a lot of other people. You know, middle class people wearing neck ties and respectable suits, you know, have protested this war and the Vietnam war too, and it made not a damn bit of difference. So sure they could easily afford for people to say whatever they damn please.
And while I think it's entertaining to be dissenting, one reason to write is to say to other people that you are not alone, others feel as you do.
At Auschwitz there must've been some horrible jokes told just to take care of a few minutes ... but it isn't- a joke isn't a sign of happiness, it's a sign of unhappiness and it's a short term relief. Freud talked about 'gallows humor', he called it, what we call 'black humor' now too, and this is people about to be executed. One man they marched off to the gallows as saying "This day is certainly beginning to look up." And of course none of this is funny. And there was a man- used to be in Chicago, that they would execute people in Cooke County jail, because the electric chair was there- and one man was strapped into the electric chair, before they put the hood over his head he said "This will certainly teach me a lesson." Doesn't that make you proud of being human beings? That we can say that.
After the Roman games and the Spanish Inquisition and the World War One and World War Two and the Holocaust and Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I think it's time we packed it in. I think we are perfectly awful animals, even destroying the planet as a life support system. And so I think it's time we packed it in, because there was a time when the dinosaurs packed it in and I think they were taking a better care of the place than we are.
I myself have said about life "It's no way to treat an animal". It hurts too much. The mood of the planet now in so many places- the suicide bombers for instance, human beings are in revolt against life itself. They don't like it. And in my great book A Man Without a Country I have a poem, which says "The crucified planet Earth / should it find a voice and a sense of irony / Might now well say of our abuse of it / 'Forgive them, Father. They know not what they do' / The irony would be that we know what we're doing / And when the last living thing has died on account of us / How poetical it woud be if Earth could say, in a voice floating up, perhaps from the floor of the Grand Canyon 'It is done. People did not like it here / And they don't."
Apologize. Apologize. All love one another with that.
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