It Was Only A Dream…Eddie Cleanhead Vinson

Arthur Gilroy

19 years ago

I had a dream last night.

Martin Luther King Jr. had dreams too.

So did Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson, a great blues singer and alto saxophonist who had a strong influence on the young Charlie Parker. (His “It Was Only A Dream” is the most agonizingly truthful song about the interface between reality and aspiration that I have ever heard. All sung with the astounding good humor and optimism in the face of perverse cruelty that marked the black culture of this country right on through the official apartheid years. HIS head was clean. For SURE.)

My dream was that “something” had happened that ended this nightmare inside of which we are living today in America. People were partying up a storm. Bush and BushCo had surrendered; the smoking gun of conspiracy and creeping, media-enforced covert fascism had been discovered, and the sleeping people of America had finally awakened from their decades-long trance. This dream was so strong, so immediate and so real that it propelled me up and out of bed to log onto the web and see if indeed something HAD happened. I have never done this before. It was that strong.

But, as I found when I checked the news sites…it was only a dream.

I immediately thought of Cleanhead.

However, I could not go back to sleep. Something HAD happened, something important to me was out there somewhere, and I wanted to find out what it was.

Well…I found it.

Read on to get the REAL dream.

Nightmare America.
From an essay by the wonderful Joe Bageant, “Carpooling with Adolph Eichmann”.

A series of quotations from a book written over 50 years ago by Milton Mayer about the rise of Naziism in Germany called “They Thought They Were Free, The Germans, 1938-45” (University of Chicago Press,1955)

Read it and weep for your country.

“What no one seemed to notice. . . was the ever widening gap. . .between the government and the people. . . And it became always wider. . . the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting, it provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway . . . Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about . . .and kept us so busy with continuous changes and `crises’ and so fascinated . . . by the machinations of the `national enemies,’ without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. . . Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, `regretted,’ that unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these `little measures’. . . must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. . . .Each act. . . is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone. . . you don’t want to `go out of your way to make trouble.’ . . .But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves, when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. . . .You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things your father. . . could never have imagined.”

Sound familiar?

“…one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. . . “

And…

“You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow.”

How long are we going to wait?

How long are we going to accede to the non-opposition of our so called “opposition” party?

“You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things your father. . . could never have imagined.”

MY father died two years ago.

He flew Spitfires in the Battle of Britain. He and my mother…both Americans… volunteered to join the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1938 to go and fight Hitler.

They were ahead of their time.

Visionaries.

THEY had a dream, too.

They were brave young Americans who believed in the American dream of democracy and freedom and were willing to put their corporeal asses on the line to defend that dream.

But when he died…and for decades BEFORE that…he too had “accepted” what he could not even BEGIN to imagine or understand. Turned his face away from the awful reality of what this country was becoming.

Why?

How?

Because…”The forms [were] all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays.”

Only the SPIRIT had changed.

“…the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves, when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed.”

Which is where we have come to today.

We accept SO much.

We “accept” domestic spying on an unprecedented scale…and believe me, we have not even seen the TIP of that particular digital iceberg, and probably never will.

We “accept” stolen elections, elections that are so BLATANTLY stolen that even the population of a classic banana republic would be outraged, elections where both the official opposition party AND EVEN THE SO-CALLED OUTLAW “PRESS” (Major left wing blogs…and you know JUST who I mean) turn their heads and make believe that nothing is happening.

In their own shallow self-interest.

We “accept” the undeniable fact that this administration lied to the American public about what was going on in Iraq so that they could prosecute their Blood For Oil War.

We have “accepted” domestic and international assassinations, a phony War Against Drugs, a progressive dumbing down of the educational and cultural systems, the destruction of the family system by a two wage-slave workforce…Mommy and Daddy BOTH got to work seven days a week plus overtime just to pay for the necessities…a totally dishonest media and SO much more.

Our passivity, our acceptance of the progressively more and more odious set of “new realities” presented to us by those in power is running us down a long and bumpy road that leads straight to hell.

And what is the key to ALL of this “acceptance”?

Once again, I quote Joe Bageant. This time from another essay, “The Simulacran Republic”.

Americans, rich or poor, now live in a culture entirely perceived through, simulacra-media images and illusions. We live inside a self-referential media hologram of a nation that has not existed for quite some time now, especially in America’s heartland. Our national reality is held together by a pale, carbon imprint of the original. The well-off with their upscale consumer aesthetic, live inside gated Disneyesque communities with gleaming uninhabited front porches representing some bucolic notion of the Great American home and family. The working class, true to its sports culture aesthetic, is a spectator to politics … politics which are so entirely imagistic as to be holograms of a process, not a process. Social realism is a television commercial for America, a simulacran republic of eagles, church spires, brave young soldiers and heroic firefighters and “freedom of choice” within the hologram. America’s citizens have been reduced to Balkanized consumer units by the corporate state’s culture producing machinery.

—snip—

Meanwhile the culture-generating industry spins our mythology like cotton candy. We all need it to survive, Hollywood myths, Imperial myths, melting pot myths, the saluting dick male myths. They keep the machine running. And when the machine is running correctly, it smoothes its own way by terrifying uncooperative people into submission in prisons and torture rooms, where we do not have to look at the corpses on ice and the naked hooded bodies handcuffed to the bars. We are innocent as long as we keep our eyes taped shut. And only with our eyes shut can we keep seeing the hologram. And with duct tape over our mouths, we can recite its slogans with one hand over our heart with the other one resting on the trigger.

The average American spends about one third of his or her waking life watching television. The neurological implications of this are so profound that they cannot even be comprehended in words, much less described by them. Television creates our reality, regulates our national perceptions and our interior hallucinations of who we Americans are (the best and only important tribe on the planet.) It schedules our cultural illusions of choice, displays pre-selected candidates in our elections, or types of consumer goods. It regulates holiday marketing opportunities and the national neurological seasons, which are now governed by the electrons of the illusion. We live within a media-generated belief system that functions as the operating instructions for society. Anything outside of its parameters represents fear and psychological freefall to the faceless legions of within it.

—snip—

This is by no means a free country and given the intense luminosity of the hologram, we cannot even see freedom from here, and probably would not recognize it if we could. Moreover though, we cannot tear our eyes away from the great flickering glow of the hologram.

And people wonder why I advocate newstrikes and new parties?

The Democratic Party is now a hologram of itself. You could put your hand right through Joe Lieberman, Joe Biden, Joe kerry…ALL the digital Joes and Josephines…AND their so-called “positions” if you could get close enough to them to do so.

They literally DO NOT EXIST!!!

Certainly not in the form in which they are presented to us.

Do you not find it a little…questionable that Mary Matalin and James Carville…those two “competing” purveyors of bits and bites in the form of opposing politicians…presumably SLEEP TOGETHER every night? Eat breakfast in the morning and then sally forth into the lists of the political wars ON OPPOSITE SIDES?

Please, people.

Wake the fuck up.

It is getting VERY late in the game.

Turn off your TVs.

Turn off the hologram.

And start dealing with what IS.

We are a one party system now. DemocRatpublicans all.

We don’t need a third party.

We just need a SECOND one.

Give me reality or give me death.

Turn off the TV and wake the fuck up.

Before we all end up sleeping with the fishes.

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