Quentin and I are good friends, in a way. I have watched every single one of his films; some twice, some three times, and some more than that. The Kill Bills, for instance. What beautiful works of art they are. I truly respect the fellow, as an artist. He grows.

I’ve just been very, very busy. I wanted to see Django Unchained in the theater; alas, I rented it from a Redbox.

Quentin’s been studying my psyche, you see. This time, he found all my buttons, evey one of them, and pushed them over and over. I learned a great deal about myself tonight, thank you, Quentin.

Two bits o’ background:

Me, ten years old, sticking my head into an oven at Dachau, and seeing the black human soot coating its steel sides.

Me, thirteen years old, watching a slide show about the history of slavery in Mrs. Klimko’s class. She shows us a modern photo of a black man who had been chained to a tree and blowtorched to death, somewhere in the South during the fifties.

Now, these experiences, others to be sure yes, but these two experiences — they are me. They shaped my intellect, my emotional being, and most importantly, my Primate.

I’ve got a reasonably large Primate. Oh, certainly, there’s German involved, and Welsh, but there’s also a great deal of paternal abuse and unresolved Buzzy Holzer/Mike Sullivan insecurity issues carving out enormous channels through my impoverished spirit. My Primate tends to tremble a lot; I have anger problems. Eh. So do we all, so do we all.

Ah, Quentin. I discovered, through his work on this wonderful fucking movie, that there is almost nothing in the world I love more than watching slave-owners and slave-whippers and slave-haters get shot. Shot and blown up, and their bits scattered to the breeze. My Primate immediately began to shake his heavy chains, and roar with glee, and call for more, always more.

My Primate also loves George Patton, you know. Oh, he slapped a soldier, and that was incorrect behavior for any officer of the United States Army, an institution I love. But the Nazis feared him more than any other general, honestly and truly feared facing this man down in their very programming, and my Primate deeply, deeply loves George Patton for that very reason. My Primate hates Nazis, and therefore truly enjoyed Inglorious Basterds each of the many times I watched it. A lovely, lovely film for my Primate.

But now. Holy cow. I was set up and knocked down, over and over, and my Primate giddily squealed with delight every time one of those Southern bastards exploded into a misty human spray of copper-scented revenge. Quentin reached down inside my RageBoy and tickled him, played with him, and fed him the most delicious Primal chocolate ever. Damn, did Quentin peg me. So much so, that at very end of the film, I found myself sending out a crackling message throughout human reality, an actual Bolt Of Will that flew out from me to reach around the world and strike fear into every single last oppressive soul with a warriorific shout: ‘The Meek Shall Inherit The Earth’.

By which I mean, all cages open, all creatures free, all violence met with destruction, all dominance met with extinction. It was a moment of pure Primal expression, brought about by the careful machinations of the Storyteller and his Minions. Oh, certainly not logical, or even perhaps real outside the confines of my DNA-designed German/Welsh skull. Nonetheless, I was changed, and brought to understand myself better, and that means one thing and one thing only: Good Art.

Thanks, Quentin. Goddamn. I am a Primal Violin, sir, and you are the fucking Maestro, stoking the Meek, clarifying the Path Of Inheritance. My Primate loves you for it, and is tonight barely unable to be contained within his heavy tungsten links. Shaking those chains. Shaking those Primate chains.

I wonder how many times I’ll watch this one. Rattle, rattle.

…Lunatic Monster Circus. The place where people can say the things that would get them ostracized from any gathering of reasonable human beings, right out loud, sick, wrong, and proud.

The Republican Party is ruled by these Cruel, Murderous Torture-Monkeys, and that’s not going to change.

The GOP is our very own North Korea, right here, inside our own borders.

This is just freakin’ weird…

This is my new favorite lip dub video . . .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehYoIKTsiV0

I hope it is uplifting.  Think about it, ’cause I do.

The rich getting richer, the poor poorer, global warming, overpopulation, resource scarcity… what’s the world coming too?

Violence Vanquished

What I find really striking in the linked article is the trend starting long before the era shown in the chart, findings that belie the myth of the pacific life when man was close to nature.

The first was a process of pacification: the transition from the anarchy of the hunting, gathering and horticultural societies in which our species spent most of its evolutionary history to the first agricultural civilizations, with cities and governments, starting about 5,000 years ago.

For centuries, social theorists like Hobbes and Rousseau speculated from their armchairs about what life was like in a “state of nature.” Nowadays we can do better. Forensic archeology—a kind of “CSI: Paleolithic”—can estimate rates of violence from the proportion of skeletons in ancient sites with bashed-in skulls, decapitations or arrowheads embedded in bones. And ethnographers can tally the causes of death in tribal peoples that have recently lived outside of state control.

These investigations show that, on average, about 15% of people in prestate eras died violently, compared to about 3% of the citizens of the earliest states. Tribal violence commonly subsides when a state or empire imposes control over a territory, leading to the various “paxes” (Romana, Islamica, Brittanica and so on) that are familiar to readers of history.

Of course, now that I’ve posted this, some madman is probably pressing the button as I speak. Duck and cover!

I really like this article. Now all I need is one this good for cannabis. Byronius?

Thanks to Harlan Ellison for the post heading and for expressing my feeling so well!
Funny, I couldn’t find a category for ‘confession’!

To all New Worlders: Please forgive my occasionally incoherent moments… Sometimes, under stress, I just have too many thoughts running around in my head at the same time… and what can come out of my fingers is (too often) just plain scrambled eggs!

Now that we’ve put the Nation’s suicide watch on the back burner (for now anyway), I can go back and reread some of my comments and observe that some of it looks like shattered glass… thought fragments that are incomplete or sometimes just STOP in mid-flight…

So I humbly beg your pardon, and I’ll try to do better in future!
But I shall remain “Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs”

silence and time
white dust to blue water
deep down we know nothing
hot that sun the one the only one
cool the cave
sweet the water
to float
early running mid roaring late release
spring away from the shelter
take trees and bring all us that are this
and that true lovers true servants
to equi and pach leaf and moss
because nothing is so perfect
nothing was so perfect
the sky needs nectarines
the outstretched arms need cool water poems
the hot giants need stone shapes
singers of their souls
benches beneath summer night breezes
passionate hands.

Andrew Sullivan, despite running a great blog with plenty of thoughtful commentary, often holds positions I disagree with vehemently. What I love, though, is that he publishes dissenting positions sent in by his readers that are often articulate and quite prescient. Here’s one disagreeing with Sullivan’s position on state lotteries:

You wrote, “No one is forced to play the lottery.” True. Nor is anyone ever forced to take that first hit of heroin. Direct narcotics sales by the government could go a long way toward resolving our state and federal budgetary issues – hell, you yourself support decriminalization of at least some drugs – so why not get the government involved in those businesses too?

As a former professional card counter (I’ve been turfed from over 100 casinos in 16 states and wrote a recent book on the subject), I know more than I wish I knew about the psyche of gamblers and the spirit in which gambling revenues are generated. The business is dirty almost beyond conception.

Yes, blackjack professionals get a tad bitter because we’re treated like criminals for the simple act of playing, with an objectionably high skill level, the sole beatable game. But when you find yourself surrounded by armed guards for the non-crime of gambling in a gambling hall, you begin to see that casino management has not even the least of shred of interest in a fair and balanced gaming environment. Their job is to beat fish out of the money, period.

And then you start looking around to the fish. You see the midnight zombies with their waning stores of cash and the anguish in their postures and faces. One way to get in trouble as a card counter is to inadvertently exchange one of these “ah-ha” smirks with the bosses when a compulsive sits down at the table. The bosses all know something about their little industry. They laugh about it – perhaps because to consider it seriously and with compassion would make them either crazy or out of a job. But spend the time in casinos that I’ve spent, observe the amazing frequency of clearly unhinged people steaming on, desperately toward ruin, with no one to help them – in fact with all their supposed buddies on the casino staff conspiring to assure their continued destructive behavior – and you won’t be able to help yourself. You’ll loathe this fucking industry.

Not to say that it ought to be outlawed. But when the Oregon state lottery is shown to derive over half its profits from a troubled minority of citizens spending $500 or more each month, when the government-run casinos in Ontario are shown to depend on gambling-related mental illness for fully a third of their revenues, I find it difficult to ignore that predation is essential to the industry.

And that’s why as a citizen I refuse to have any part of it. I don’t want my government turning fellow Americans into fish. Keep the industry private. Let the scum deal in scum.

This reminds me of a guy that I used to work with about 20 years ago when we were both ‘vacuum operators’ depositing thin films on glass used for laser manufacture. He was extremely high-strung, often manic and irritable. These were bad traits for our task because it required steady hands and intense focus for up to an entire 8 hour shift. The operator had to peer into the chamber manipulating a heat beam to essentially cook the material that was being evaporated in a steady and even pattern. One slip and the run was destroyed and you had to start over.

My co-worker was usually manic over his latest gambling exploits, or else extremely depressed and wanted to tear your head off. Once he told me, when I took over his shift, that he was heading off to Reno to hit it big. There was a gleam of confidence in his eye. I never saw him again. He failed to show up for work the next day and we later found out he’d driven his motorcycle off the road into a ravine on the way home from a presumably less than successful evening.

I’ve told my own, likely somewhat apocryphal story of my gambling history many times; how I invested a nickle in a gas station slot machine, got two nickles back, and immediately retired a winner, never to gamble again. This happened long before I met my unfortunate friend. I’ve also never bought a lottery ticket. I have the seed of many vices in my genes but fortunately not that one. Obviously, a huge percentage of the population does bear this affliction, and I pity them for it. I, like the dissenter above, loathe the pitiless pushers who expand this human misery for profit and agree government should have nothing to do with it.

Mitt Romney Haunted By Past Of Trying To Help Uninsured Sick People

BELMONT, MA—Though Mitt Romney is considered to be a frontrunner for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, the national spotlight has forced him to repeatedly confront a major skeleton in his political closet: that as governor of Massachusetts he once tried to help poor, uninsured sick people.

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Will he recover from this unspeakable crime?