Schwarzenegger-Ken Lay Meeting Emails Now OnlineWednesday, 8 October 2003, 3:08 pm
Press Release: Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/WO0310/S00064.htmEmails Show Enron May Have Influenced FERC Probe On Calif Power Crisis, Refunds
by Jason Leopold
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1015-03.htmSchwarzenegger Met with Enron's Key Lay Before the California Recall
COMMON DREAMS, August 17, 2003
Title: “Ahnuld, Ken Lay, George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Gray Davis”
Author: Jason Leopold
THE LONDON OBSERVER, October 6, 2003
Title: “Arnold Unplugged— It’s Hasta la Vista to $9 Billion”
Author: Greg Palast
Additional Sources:
San Francisco Chronicle and CommonDreams, October 11,2003
Title: “Schwarzenegger Electricity Plan Fuels Fears of Another Debacle”
Author: Zachary Coile
San Francisco Chronicle, May 26, 2001
Title: “Enron’s Secret Bid to Save Deregulation: Private Meeting With Prominent Californians”
Authors: Christian Berthelsen, Scott Winokur, Chronicle Staff Writers
http://www.projectcensored.org/publications/2005/13.html*****
The cultural output these days tends toward the highly simplistic. Good people do good things and bad people do bad things (I hate the use of the term "bad guys"). A black and white universe of easily recognized signposts. And a George Bush is popular, I suspect, in part BECAUSE people know he's a liar and criminal. Dick Cheney is the ultimate American right now....venal, self serving, immodest, and criminal. This alienation we are speaking of seems to lead people, in the end, toward catastrophic sublimation --- and the huge reservoir of resentment and feelings of powerless are manifested by identification with figures like Bush and Cheney and
Schwarzenegger. The collective guilt of a nation built on the extermination of 600 hundred-some Native American tribes and the importation and use of slave labor isn't going to be healed by simply pretending it didn't happen. Artists have forgotten to look for the truth. The truth may be illusive and relative but there is still the sense of one's truth to be told.
Charles Olson wrote about Melville....and he said Shakespeare was about the expansion across the Atlantic and Melville about the expansion across the Pacific. That search for something just out of reach. I wonder if our society doesn't feel that (as I've said before) everything is mapped and everything is within reach -- literally, since you can take a packaged vacation to anywhere, assuming you have the money. The culture hasn't found a direction for the new search. It's about memory too, and history. Adorno has said that in even the most atonal modern classical music one should not lose the memory of the cafe fiddler. This culture doesn't search and doesn't remember.
There are lots of things your remarks bring to mind here....but one last thought for now. The Jungian comments do point up how sanitized our world is....or we pretend it is. The Western revulsion toward smell and fear of contamination has never been more acute. This is, of course, sexual as well.
John
John,
I cannot look at George W. Bush, with his pathological rigidity, nor Dick Cheney, with his sociopath's sneer, nor Condoleezza Rice, with that phony smile shellacked across her face and not think that these crazy bastards are in desperate need of Reichian treatment, of being subjected to a merciless session of deep Rolfing by a six-foot-six-inch tall drag queen while being read passages from Miller's Tropic of Cancer.
Reich's (and Miller's, no doubt) position would be: What this country needs is the return of blowjobs in the oval office -- if not in every office cubicle across this repressed and regressive land. Not this dark Eros of endless war.
Stan Goff speaks of our national cult of macho narcissism and its subjugation of the feminine, what James Hillman has termed a "hyper yang" ascendancy, the utter dismissal and degradation of Robert Grave's notion of the White Goddess. And we witness it everywhere: Mel Gibson's promulgation of a muscular Christ, who proves his manhood by his endurance of pain, like a grunting, fake blood-spitting, clichéd professional wrestler; in the fear, hatred, and stigmatization of homosexuals; in the steroid-induced psychotic taunting from the governor of California of Democratic "girlie men."
Heir Governor, what about those powdered wig-wearing Nancy boys whose portraits are found on American currency? And what about the depraved fact that their pictures are placed in the pockets of one's pants -- right there next to the godly groins and buttocks of unsuspecting Christian men? The Congress will soon be forced to take up the passage of The Sanctity of the Heterosexual Groin Amendment, so that the American male will be troubled no more by dead, white, pocket-lurking poofters from the apparently pansy-ridden 18th century.
You see, John, this is where I depart from Wilhelm Reich, for I believe that humor is the real orgone energy. Shakespeare's genius extended to comedy as well. I think he would understand our era well, for he came of age in a time of religious repression and strife. As would Molière -- who would lacerate both the pretensions and hypocrisies of a clergy who mask their lust for power by feigning piety and the latte-dribbling liberal elitists whose preening vanities have destroyed what little remained of an era of progressive tradition.
In this age -- where the executive branch of our government is not "reality-based," it's good to keep O'Neal close by, and for those losing their native tongue to rapacious empire, Joyce, and HL Mencken is an imperative. If the rubes of the red states and the great "boobery" of the general American populace at large ever needed to be upbraided for their ignorance and corruption by the irascible voice of reason-betrayed, the time is now.
America Has Left The Building...
A Conversation About Culture
Phil Rockstroh & John Steppling
Part I
http://www.swans.com/library/art11/prjs01.html We need intuitive and compassion balance from maternalistic patterns of living
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