RUDIMENTS, pt. 1,154
(rocket's red glare, takeover's slow dawning)
Most often I've been alone,
though I've never been lonely;
in the same way as saying most
of the times I'd always been at
work, but never working; it's
all been a funny conundrum.
Employment was always a
bane. I disliked the idleness
of forced camaraderie, the
chitchat, people going on
about their weekends and
cruises and barbecues. Ball
games and movies, the whole
bit. If any of that was the
mainstay of people's lives,
they could have it. If none
of it, however, was, then why
bother the nervous talk about
it. 'Filling spaces.' That's what
I always thought about it; like
going to a gas station that they
called 'filling stations' and having
to stand around while some local
teen or yokum pumps your gas
and you find yourself taking
about Jimmy Reid instead of
Adam Bede. ('Adam Bede
got beheaded, take heed' - that's
not true at all, but it's the way my
mind ran. Who cared about Cal
Ripkin's stats, when this whole
world of language and mental
attire beckoned? I guessed I was
just different...or 'they' were
indifferent). One of the things
about NJ, too, is that you can't
pump your own gas. I don't know
much about a whole lot of other
states, but when I lived in Jersey
it meant a sort of forced attention
to some nitwit at your window
demanding to know your attentions
and doing it for you. Usually, the
small-talk ensued. Fortunately, to
date, no one has sought tips for
this ludicrous service. Glad I
left it behind - that 'service',
not the tip.
-
Oftentimes enough, people have
asked me what it is I dislike so much
about this country; about the sot of
colloquial and formalized living that
has now overtaken so much nearly
all of what we live - or are led to
live anyway. Being up here now, so
afar and isolated from any previous
clatter, I admit to being able to see
it more clearly; what it is that has
always irked me. So, let me start
with a simple few - things most
people, frankly, in their modicum
of bestial, latter-day distractions,
won't even know about readily:
The Townshend Acts, the Quartering
Acts, the Stamp Acts (once, repealed
too), the Sugar Act, the Currency Act.
To name, and start with, a few.
-
Yes, sure, scoff and cast them off.
In a buffalo-herd like sweep, most
Americans today have lost that name
long ago, and don't deserve it anyway
- because America is over. Dead, in
fact, and buried. Like the vast graveyard
that holds those old cadavers of the Sons
of Liberty, there is no light nor lantern'
casting any illumination on the subject.
The subject of old America is now
verboten! Unspoken, broken, tried and
cast away. The current results are a
junkyard of TV drivel, lies and miscast
news and opinions about nothing at all.
-
This probably all sounds disconnected
and useless to you. But, it connects. My
1967 landing in NYC was amidst turmoil;
an almost nascent revolution of anger and
violence that, by a few years later, had
taken down a building on 11th street,
and killed a few people too. Resistance?
Popular uprising? Stupidity? Or just,
perhaps, the rising anew of a form of
Sons of Liberty resistance to crap and
murder and organized death - promulgated
by the highest powers in Washington and
in that case called 'Vietnam,' for want of
a better name. Problem is, 'Vietnam' is
singular, and the name is not adequate
at all to refer to the multi-level and very
plural layers of murder, destruction,
ecological devastation, slaughter, lying,
fabricating of needs and reasons, and
excuses, for 57,000 plus young men
gone. Woefully inadequate, and we are
still ruled by the same moronics.
-
In 1774, the British Parliament passed a
series of laws, regarding the colonies and
their varied insurrections, called The Coercive
Acts. (Would that we had the same ideas
of truth-telling and truth-in-labelling now).
Lord North, in Britain, said, obnoxiously,
in his response to the affront of colonists
resisting and uprising: "We are now to
establish our authority, or give it up
entirely. The first act closed the port
of Boston until the destroyed tea (from
the Boston tea Party), was paid for. The
second altered the Massachusetts charter
and reorganized the government. Members
of the upper house, rather than being
elected, would now be appointed by the
Royal Governor, posted from England.
(I like to look at all this now as with
Washington DC being our present-day
England, and all those nasty 'deplorables'
and such, out here in the hinterlands,
being - or soon to be - the rebellious
outragers of pattern and meaning. Except
that, in today's stupid world, the same
fluffernutters would instead probably
be called the 'Scones of Liberty,' and
would meet, dutifully masked, at a
local Starbucks. (Oh, go ahead, you
can laugh).
-
Another of the laws changed trial and
punishment, and still another gave the
governor the power to take over private
buildings for the quartering of troops
instead of using barracks. (Today, of
course, all this would probably be
applauded, any semblance of Liberty
having long ago been heaved to the
wayside and any 'controls' applauded
by the new welfare state instead of
resisted. No wonder a generation of
pathetics, or two, have now been allowed
to grow up addicted - games, films,
video, computers, all the while transferring
schematic informations with so little
basis in reality that it may as well be
claimed the Adam was made from a
solid rock in the parking lot of some
mall somewhere.
-
'The Coercive Acts of 1774 provoked
open rebellion in America. The abuses
from England had aroused the Americans'
principles, but repeated expressions of
English arrogance had finally worn out
their tempers. (I guess that too no longer
happens). Whatever royal authority was
left in the colonies now dissolved (the
rabble was armed, recall!), and many local
communities, with a freedom they'd not
had since the seventeenth century, attempted
to put together new popular governments
from the bottom up. Mass meetings that
sometimes attracted thousands of aroused
colonists endorsed resolutions and called
for new political organizations. Royal
governments were suddenly ignored, and
'Committees' of everything, in different
sizes and names, arose to take local
matters direct, into their hands. No more
the tiered and ranked homage to the elite
and 'empowered. Regular people, artisans
and merchants, took over - committees
of safety, of inspection, of merchants, of
mechanics vied with one another for
control. '
-
As Thomas Paine put it, in 'Common
Sense,' (1776), a revolutionary pamphlet
that went through 25 printings in 1776
alone, and enflamed peoples' hearts and
attitudes, calling for American Independence
immediately, 'For God's sake, let us come
to a final separation. The birthday of a
new world is at hand.' (Would that this
were so today...and this is how I felt in
1967, and it's how I feel now, as well).
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