Music Monday ~ A Choice

Peace or Armageddon: Take Your Pick
by Paul Atwood
Snip

...The drumbeat is incessant and appears to have won most of the public to the faith that Russia is our mortal enemy again and a dire threat to our security. The lesson all should have learned in the wake of the missile crisis has been deep-sixed so long that few citizens today understand how our deliberately overwrought relations with the Soviets during the Cold War brought us within an eyelash width of nuclear holocaust. As many who were embedded in the national security state during those fraught years, like Daniel Ellsberg and former Defense Secretary William Perry and many others, have admonished us lately we are now in circumstances every bit as perilous as the darkest days of the Cold War. We have utterly forgotten the fact that the intense and growing extreme nationalism that is overtaking the planet is precisely the social virus that promoted two global wars in the last century.

Final paragraphs:

I personally hold Donald trump in contempt for many of the obvious reasons. Given everything he has supported since appearing on the political scene he seems the least-likely president to seek genuine rapprochement either with North Korea or Russia. Yet he is also ramping up conflict with Iran and supports the criminal war by Saudi Arabia against Yemen, the poorest and perhaps most ravaged nation on the planet. Still I cannot but support his attempt to find some way to reduce and stop the growing tensions with Russia and so should every sane American and demand key actions for a more peaceful world before events run out of control. Trump’s emphasis on reducing the threat of nuclear war and of shrinking the military spending that is bankrupting the U.S. by seeking some solid non-hostile relationship with Russia is astonishingly the sanest argument to come out of Washington, perhaps ever. Sanity exists in Russia too. I would fervently hope too that we can perceive that a growing antagonism toward China bodes ill as well.

But we must beware! The Hawks and the vultures are circling.

On Music Monday, what else is there to say but.....

"...a funny ol' world that's a-comin' along".

The State Department's Collective Madness

by Robert Parry begins:

Over the past several decades, the U.S. State Department has deteriorated from a reasonably professional home for diplomacy and realism into a den of armchair warriors possessed of imperial delusions, a dangerous phenomenon underscored by the recent mass “dissent” in favor of blowing up more people in Syria.

And ends with:

Yet, the neocons and liberal hawks who control the State Department – and are eagerly looking forward to a Hillary Clinton presidency – will never stop coming up with these crazy notions until a concerted effort is made to assess accountability for all the failures that that they have inflicted on U.S. foreign policy.

As long as there is no accountability – as long as the U.S. president won’t rein in these warmongers – the madness will continue and only grow more dangerous.

The piece led me to re-post something from my first 12 months of blogging, it was posted originally in May 2007.

I was moved by an article written by one of my favourite journalists, Christopher Cooper, for The Wiscasset Newspaper [Sorry, link now defunct]. The piece was titled "As Some Warn Victory, Some Downfall" - a line from Bob Dylan's song "It's Alright Ma (I'm only bleeding)".

A short extract:

"Anybody who likes this [Me: or any] war should sign on to it. Send his or her son and daughter. Send the Pentagon a generous check toward the cost. Support the troops? Go die in the desert so they don’t have to. Yellow ribbons tied to a power pole or a string of made in China toy flags along a bridge rail don’t do the job five long years into the butchery.

I wish I thought electing Democrats these days made much difference. I wish I thought the anguish ninety or a hundred families feel every month when they see a brace of officers coming up their front walks bearing that unspeakably terrible salutation could somehow seep into each of our hearts and make us turn off the ball game or the car race or walk out of the Spiderman sequel and demand that somebody, anybody, either party, do the right thing. Right now."

Christopher Cooper's article led me, via its title, to read again some Bob Dylan lyrics of the 1960s. Many remain relevant today, they were written when Uranus conjoined, or lay very close to, Pluto.

In a 2002 review of Mike Marqusee's book, "Chimes of Freedom: The Politics of Bob Dylan's Art", Stefan Schindler of La Salle University wrote:

"What is especially fresh about Marqusee's book is its astonishing relevance. It's a journey into the smoldering fissures that still inform our collective psyche: globalized, militarized, terror-edged, led by lunatics. Marqusee makes exactly the right point when he suggests that "the sixties might someday come to seem merely an early skirmish in a conflict whose real dimensions we have yet to grasp." As William Faulkner said: "The past is not dead. It's not even past."

Bob Dylan's lyrics are in stark contrast to the mawkish sentimentality of some country music offerings. Dylan's own politics have been the subject of argument among his fans. It may well be that he is not quite as "lefty", nor totally anti-war, as these lyrics suggest. It doesn't matter. We each see in them what we want to see. Good poetry and lyrics can be chameleon-like, capable of appreciation in many ways, on different levels.

From MASTERS OF WAR
Come you masters of war
You that build all the guns
You that build the death planes
You that build the big bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks

You that never done nothin'
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it's your little toy
You put a gun in my hand
And you hide from my eyes
And you turn and run farther
When the fast bullets fly

From IT'S ALRIGHT MA (I'm only bleeding)
As some warn victory, some downfall
Private reasons great or small
Can be seen in the eyes of those that call
To make all that should be killed to crawl
While others say don't hate nothing at all
Except hatred.

Disillusioned words like bullets bark
As human gods aim for their mark
Made everything from toy guns that spark
To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark
It's easy to see without looking too far
That not much
Is really sacred.

While preachers preach of evil fates
Teachers teach that knowledge waits
Can lead to hundred-dollar plates
Goodness hides behind its gates
But even the president of the United States
Sometimes must have
To stand naked.

From SONG TO WOODY
I'm out here a thousand miles from my home,
Walkin' a road other men have gone down.
I'm seein' your world of people and things,
Your paupers and peasants and princes and kings.

Hey, hey Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song
'Bout a funny ol' world that's a-comin' along.
Seems sick an' it's hungry, it's tired an' it's torn,
It looks like it's a-dyin' an' it's hardly been born.

Track-back Tuesday ~ "some day, mother f......s"

I've been shuffling the January archives again....here's one from January 2010:

In the Right Direction

Reading around various websites and forums recently, I got the feeling that people, in some perverse way, seem to be at best concentrating on negativity, and at worst almost willing on catastrophe and World War III. Heading towards yet more war, especially of the World War variety is not the direction in which the world is supposed to be moving. Later, I read an article by Stephen Gyllenhaal: Peace On Earth, the last paragraph struck a chord, then led me back to something else.

The last para:

I'll take it all and keep right on moving -- one little ant doing his little bit among six billion other ants, because one day, you sons of bitches who talk peace and deliver war, who talk health and deliver illness, who talk good and do bad -- some day, mother f--ckers there will be peace on this planet -- real peace -- because time, real time, is on the side of evolution.

That thought of evolution catapulted me back to a 2007 article which I have mentioned before on this blog, but do not apologise for re-airing: "A History of Violence" by Steven Pinker is interesting and a little uplifiting, though not without its own warning. As a prelude it states:

"In the decade of Darfur and Iraq, and shortly after the century of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, the claim that violence has been diminishing may seem somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene. Yet recent studies that seek to quantify the historical ebb and flow of violence point to exactly that conclusion."

Steven Pinker goes on to present his theory that, in spite of current world events, in his opinion man has become less violent over the millennia, centuries and decades. The article is well worth reading in full. He finishes with this paragraph:

"But the phenomenon does force us to rethink our understanding of violence. Man's inhumanity to man has long been a subject for moralization. With the knowledge that something has driven it dramatically down, we can also treat it as a matter of cause and effect. Instead of asking, "Why is there war?" we might ask, "Why is there peace?" From the likelihood that states will commit genocide to the way that people treat cats, we must have been doing something right. And it would be nice to know what, exactly, it is."

I want to shout out "Astrological Ages, sir?"

Age of Taurus, Age of Aries - two previous Ages when, in spite of progress in many other areas, violence and inhumanity to man flourished. The Bull and The Ram - neither signifies peace and fellowship, and the history of those Ages broadly matches the symbolism. It wasn't until The Age of Pisces dawned, that there was any sign of a very, very slow movement away from violence - but SO very slow that unless someone like Steven Pinker outlines the stages, and spells it all out, it's impossible to see. If we could have a magical video of the history of man on Earth, fast-forwarded at lightning speed, then it might become clear that we are indeed heading in the right direction, strange as it seems.

Astrologers cannot agree whether we are still in the Age of Pisces or on the cusp of the Age of Aquarius, or have entered it already. Whichever way one prefers to think, neither Pisces nor Aquarius symbolises violence. We must still be working through the dregs of what was left of the Age of Aries, I guess. Perhaps we are nowhere near as far along the astrological age trail as some suspect. But we are moving in a good direction.

Steven Pinker adds

"It is not a license for complacency: We enjoy the peace we find today because people in past generations were appalled by the violence in their time and worked to end it, and so we should work to end the appalling violence in our time. Nor is it necessarily grounds for optimism about the immediate future, since the world has never before had national leaders who combine pre-modern sensibilities with modern weapons."

We do have to accept that we live in risky times, of course. To continually focus on that fact, as so many tend to do these days, is not going to make things any less risky. All it does is to spread doom and gloom and take the joy from the life we have.

A STAND FOR PEACE & HOPE

On 16 December military veterans, along with some high-profile activists: Chris Hedges, Daniel Ellsberg, Medea Benjamin, Ray McGovern and Robert Shetterly and others will Take a Stand for Peace at the White House Fence.

Thank goodness for men of integrity and principle. They shine out among the dross!

Last week Chris Hedges wrote that they will "protest the futile and endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many of us will, after our rally in Lafayette Park, attempt to chain ourselves to the fence outside the White House. It is a pretty good bet we will all spend a night in jail. Hope, from now on, will look like this."

Chris Hedges' full essay is HERE. He went on:

Hope is not trusting in the ultimate goodness of Barack Obama, who, like Herod of old, sold out his people. It is not having a positive attitude or pretending that happy thoughts and false optimism will make the world better. Hope is not about chanting packaged campaign slogans or trusting in the better nature of the Democratic Party. Hope does not mean that our protests will suddenly awaken the dead consciences, the atrophied souls, of the plutocrats running Halliburton, Goldman Sachs, ExxonMobil or the government.

Hope does not mean we will halt the firing in Afghanistan of the next Hellfire missile, whose explosive blast sucks the oxygen out of the air and leaves the dead, including children, scattered like limp rag dolls on the ground. Hope does not mean we will reform Wall Street swindlers and speculators, or halt the pillaging of our economy as we print $600 billion in new money with the desperation of all collapsing states. Hope does not mean that the nation’s ministers and rabbis, who know the words of the great Hebrew prophets, will leave their houses of worship to practice the religious beliefs they preach. Most clerics like fine, abstract words about justice and full collection plates, but know little of real hope.

Hope knows that unless we physically defy government control we are complicit in the violence of the state. All who resist keep hope alive. All who succumb to fear, despair and apathy become enemies of hope. They become, in their passivity, agents of injustice. If the enemies of hope are finally victorious, the poison of violence will become not only the language of power but the language of opposition. And those who resist with nonviolence are in times like these the thin line of defense between a civil society and its disintegration.

"As above, so below" - as the people conjoin to protest, the astrological chart for tomorrow in Washington shows some appropriate planetary conjunctions:



Uranus/Jupiter in Pisces ~ here's the peaceful but rebellious demonstration.

Chiron/Neptune in Aquarius ~ here's the socially conscious and creative attempt to heal the wound of endless war.

Pluto/Mars/Mercury/North node in Capricorn ~ here's anger being communicated via very down to earth means.

Sun in Sagittarius in harmonious trine to Moon in Aries at 10:00 am as the demonstration begins.




UPDATE 16 December

MARS, for good & ill.

Astrologers have various eloquent ways of describing how the position of Mars in a natal chart reflects back in the personality. Stripped down to its bare bones, I see Mars as pure energy, a driving force that can be used for good or ill. The "ill" half of that, in its worst form is, of course, violence and war. As Mars is with us always, war and other forms of violence are with us always. The seed is within us all. Romans celebrated Mars and all it stood for, including war. We (or some of us) have moved on since then.

As it happens today, 19 October, was a day set aside in Rome to honor Mars:

The Armilustrium was a festival in honor of Mars, the god of war, celebrated on October 19. On this day the weapons of the soldiers were ritually purified and stored for winter. The army would be assembled and reviewed in the Circus Maximus, garlanded with flowers and the trumpets (tubae) would be played as part of the purification rites. The Romans gathered with their arms and armour on the Aventine Hill, and held a procession with torches and sacrificial animals. The dancing priests of Mars known as the Salii may also have taken part in the ceremony.

I guess we could all spare a thought today to honor the positive energy and drive that life bestows on us (aka Mars energy), while at the same time reminding ourselves that it has a dark, very dark, side which needs always to be kept in check.

Coincidentally, Michelle of the "Crows Feet" blog has just produced a lovely video which fits in well with my last point. With her permission, here it is. Thank you, Michelle for a beautiful piece of work:

Willie and Billy

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