BooMan wrote a post Friday night called called What are We Doing? in which he complained that he has “been having trouble writing this week” and questions the real function of the left blogosphere in today’s world. At the end, he says “Just some Friday night thoughts to try to blow through the writer’s block.”
I started a comment that grew into something more.
Much more.
Here it is.
Read on if you are interested.
BooMan…
To understand “what we are doing”, we have to truly understand what we have done.
You write:
A perfectly accurate statement.
And BY that opposition, we have literally changed the world and quite possibly saved this country from extinction. Where we were…a tiny minority…2 and 3 and 4 years ago? It’s where the majority is today, in a broad sense.
Aware of BushCo’s criminality and incompetence, aware of the futility of a massive Middle East War.
So?
CONTINUE to oppose.
If “oppose” is exactly the right word.
Listen…as careful readers of my writing already know, I am not only a politically involved person and a musician, but I have also studied a number of physical and meditational/awareness systems in an attempt to…apply any word you wish to the indescribable. Awaken is as good a word as any.
The greatest teacher I found…someone who did not much like having his name strewn about when he was alive, so I maintain his anonymity after his death…taught me many things. He “changed” me. No doubt.
Here is one of the many exercises he gave me.
Attempt, for as long as you can manage it, to pay attention to what is happening in the so-called present as if it was the immediate past. As if you were living a split second IN FRONT of the wave of the present.
Sound simple?
Try it.
I will say no more about this exercise except to point out that if done correctly, interesting things can happen.
Another thing that I learned is the concept of “As above, so below.” That the laws of the universe pertain equally in the microcosm and the macrocosm.
Now take the left blogosphere’s overall position. It is and has been “living in the future.”
The left blogosphere is nothing less than a prophet. A system that functions as prophecy. All the large and small inputs of literally thousands of sincere and intelligent people…people who are doing real work for largely non-monetary, moral reasons…adds up to a sort of political and social prophecy.
THAT WHICH WILL BE.
So…what you are feeling?
It is simply the present catching up to you.
As any real artist will tell you, in order to produce real art you must stay on the front of the wave.
In the future.
The fix is now in…Clinton/Obama/maybe Edwards. As God is reputed to have said after He created the Universe “And it is good.”
They done caught up with us.
Isn’t that why we all got involved here in the first place?
To get a majority of the people of the United States to wake the fuck up?
Well…this is about as good as it’s going to get, podna. If EVERYBODY was supposed to be on the real front of the wave…as Lenny Bruce so presciently asked 50+ years ago…”Who will clean the shithouse?”
So…just get on your mental/emotional surfboards, y’all, and paddle on out to where the waves are REALLY breaking.
Do what Real History Lisa is doing. Chronicle the news of what has happened. We need to expose the HISTORY of the PermaGov. The covert ops that have run this country almost into the ground in the name of Realpolitik.
Do what Jeff Wells has been doing over at Rigorous Intuition. Catalogue the unbelievable until it starts to make sense.
Do what Joe Bageant has been doing. What Jimmy Breslin did for 50+ years. Write about the lives of the underclass as a POLITICAL statement.
The great composer and musician Charles Mingus wrote a (highly fictional) so-called autobiography called “Beneath The Underdog.” The fine writer Walter Mosley (who chronicles the struggles of the black population of Omertica in the ’50s through the ’70s in his equally so-called “detective fiction” better than anyone else on the planet) wrote a book called “Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned”. There are ALWAYS people who are living beneath the underdog, people who are always and forever both outnumbered and outgunned. And as that other prophet Whatsisname is reported to have said “The meek shall inherit the earth.”
Translation? (Because I believe that many things were lost in the translation that we generally accept as New Testament “truth”.)
The fire that sustains the flame of civilization is ALWAYS the hottest at the bottom of the pile.
Gandhi understood this as well.
As did Mao Tse Tung and Fidel Castro, Malcolm X and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and any number of others, large and small.
With varying degrees of success.
And now it’s our turn.
Technology has…quite by accident, if the word “accident” has any real meaning in a universe that on all available evidence appears to be endlessly dedicated to evolution…created a mass mind where all of us minor prophets have the possibility of creating a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.
So…carry on BooMan.
Blow your writer’s block right out of the water.
You live in a changing neighborhood of Philadelphia, correct? Right on your own block…I got yer “writer’s block”, right THERE …I will guarantee that there are enough stories to keep you profitably occupied as an observer/writer for the rest of your life if you are so inclined.
Just go out your door, incline left and start writing.
One step ahead of the wave.
You be bettah off.
And so will we.
Gotta run. Trying to teach some kids in Newark how to play jazz today.
There is good work to be done everywhere.
Bet on it.
Later…
AG
