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And So it Goes

Speaker 1
You.

Speaker 1
Hello, aloha and mahalo. It is Monday, September 11, day of remembrance for all of us.

Speaker 1
My name is Thomas Farley, F-A-R-L-E-Y-I have a friend who is is dying and he has been dying for many years, but it is certainly the end of the line.

Speaker 1
It will be the end of the line very soon for him, it seems, unless there’s some miraculous intervention from beyond science.

Speaker 1
I and he’s a good man. He doesn’t deserve to die, die poorly like this. I would not trade places with him. I envy him, though, in a way, with the enormous amount of resources that he’s been able to get to apply to his condition. He has a physical disease.

Speaker 1
He has a number of things wrong with them, but they are in the end, all physical.

Speaker 1
He’s had good insurance with Kaiser and I’m sure some of his own money. Similarly, I’ve had good insurance plans and money and I’m actually paid out of pocket for nearly all of my mental health treatment because compared with physical diseases, you cannot get seen by a doctor routinely enough to do any good in mental health. For a psychiatrist. Well, he has Kaiser. I think under Kaiser, probably you wouldn’t be able to see a doctor psychiatrist more than once every couple of months.

Speaker 1
Instead, you’re kicked down to therapists and technicians. So I’ve always paid out of pocket for regular psychiatric treatment.

Speaker 1
So that’s one big difference between mental health and physical health. Another is that routinely, for years now, most of the major insurance companies have provided a 24 hours nurse talk line so that you can talk to a nurse at any time of day except that. And I’ve talked to these nurses on these health lines before. They say they’ve never, ever had a psych nurse assigned to one of these 24 hours help lines. They could have a psych nurse, a telephone line in addition to the physical, the regular RNS.

Speaker 1
They could have that. These groups, Intermountain, Southwest, Kaiser, multibillion dollar corporations, they could pay for a 24 hours psych nurse telephone line so he wouldn’t wind up at the emergency room or some other place victim of suicide. But they don’t because mental health does not exist for these people. They talk about these institutions, talk about the rising rate of suicide, and isn’t that awful? But they won’t fund for it.

Speaker 1
They will not fund for it. They will instead give out some pity, some false pity and give some money to other groups, other agencies that are working on the problem, but they themselves don’t participate. And in the last few years, we’ve all seen how they want to really focus. They really want to throw everybody into two categories that of depression or anxiety. And if you’re not in that category, then good luck to you.

Speaker 1
I don’t want to dwell on my particular problem, although I’ll just say that it’s severe insomnia and nightmares and yeah, you hear about research, say, into PTSD and related, but it’s not really in my opinion. And I’ve been almost become a professional consultant on this subject since I so much want to get better. And I’ve tried everything. So I’ve become sort of an expert on what’s current, and I’ve done everything, including electroshock, or ECT as it’s politely called. Electroconvulsive therapy didn’t work for me, paid for all that out of pocket.

Speaker 1
Physical diseases, especially the physical diseases that happen to a lot of people, that Big Pharma has a market for. Those seem hopeful. As far as research getting spent, I know there’s some incurable, seemingly incurable problems like autism, and so there’s just major diseases, although autism goes to great deal of mental health fields, so it’s inherently not going to see the amount of research or funding to begin with. My friend has got all of these resources now available to him as far as end of life treatments and hospice, just like my parents had hospice and people willing to help stepping in. And there’s nothing for end of life, for mental health problems.

Speaker 1
My condition is not livable, and all I get in a response as far as end of life is that it can’t be that bad.

Speaker 1
And I sometimes say, yeah, you’re right, it’s not that bad. It’s a hell of a lot worse. You live with this, you live with this. But it’s a mental health problem that they can’t capture with a microscope or a thermometer going up or down, or blood pressure they can measure or blood they can sample. They just have to take the word of the patient, and our word doesn’t mean a damn thing.

Speaker 1
And I feel for people with mental health problems that are not as articulate or verbal as I am, that can’t express themselves or they express the hell they’re going through. They really have. That just I can’t imagine the misery funding needs to be addressed for my friend. There’s all sorts of patient advocates available for him. He’s actually had genetic engineering things done for him at Stanford Hospital.

Speaker 1
There’s been housing available for family and relatives nearby, just on and on and on. And I am glad that he’s had that care. It’s extended his life for many, many years. It’s just there is no equivalent in mental health for this. And it just devalue you.

Speaker 1
It devalues a person over and over and over again. You’re not worth it. And if you want something done, you got to pay for it yourself, because we can’t see it, so we don’t think it’s a problem. I’ll give you a simple example of how much I often have needed a patient advocate to deal with people just on the phone, for example. One of the things that really induces my nightmares is being a mean person and having to argue endlessly.

Speaker 1
And if anybody’s dealt with any customer support, any healthcare organization over the last many years, you’ll know that it is impossible sometimes to get across what you’re trying to say to a person that keeps falling back on a script will not transfer you to a supervisor about the websites and email addresses that they hand out that don’t work, telephone numbers they never call to make sure that they actually work. It just goes on and on. Well, that all forces me to get service, forces me to be a mean person with these people. And I don’t want to be a mean person. It’s toxic.

Speaker 1
It’s toxic to everybody, but especially in my condition. And I can’t tell them that that just engendering more and more nightmares. And it would be great if I had a patient advocate that would be able to speak for me and would be able to sit for hours and hours on a phone trying to get something arranged and it’s just not possible, not even with paying for it out of pocket. These people don’t exist. And it is very frustrating every step of the way you’re told that your condition doesn’t mean anything and it is indescribable as I try to make myself, as I try to make other people comfortable with me.

Speaker 1
You can’t mention, for example, that you have violent nightmares anymore. They’ll call the cops on you.

Speaker 1
People today are so scared by corporate media that they associate mental health with violence when in fact the mental health are far more likely to be victims of crimes than actually committing the crime. But corporate media doesn’t want to hear that. And it is the more and more I try to make other people comfortable around me, the less credibility I have, the more well spoken I am, the less people think there’s anything wrong. If I keep up appearances, then just what’s the problem? And I’ll try to say, well, how many times do you have to watch your mother or your best friend get chainsawed to death?

Speaker 1
Well, it’s not real. No, it actually feels real. And shock after shock and this has been going on since 1988 with me and it just breaks you down. I probably have less than 4 hours of sleep every night and tell you this is how these professionals, they just want a measurement. How many hours of sleep are you getting?

Speaker 1
And their limited thinking is insane. Well, four or 5 hours, it doesn’t matter. It’s the quality of sleep. It’s all broken up. I’m pacing around at 233 30 in the morning, waking up every other half hour.

Speaker 1
It’s the quality of sleep. But they can’t measure that. They have to rely on your word. And your word doesn’t count. Your word doesn’t mean a damn thing.

Speaker 1
Well, we’re sorry for you, but there’s no at this point I’ve tried literally everything, including, like I said, ECT. And that program when it first came out, using the Apple Watch, which is a dedicated Apple Watch and a dedicated iPhone that goes with it called nightwear. I’ve written a multi part review on YouTube about it that also failed.

Speaker 1
But in the end in the end, my friend has a ton of services he’s going to have measured, respectful, end of life experience, I guess you would call it. But no, I’m going to have to take care of things myself. And it’s tragic, but it’s consistent with the disregard that mental health gets in this country. I’m not sure it’s that much better anywhere else, and I don’t have any suggestions other than fund, but it’s all about money, and so I just don’t especially Intermountain. They’re an incredibly toxic group, incredibly damaging to mental health people.

Speaker 1
And you can read on my website, Thomasfarleyblot.com, what they did to me, how they treated me. I think a real fundamental problem in healthcare is how the line personnel, or the people responding to their Twitter and social accounts have no idea what duty of care means. We are patients first and then customers. This is not a typical industry where you have a customer. No, we’re patients first.

Speaker 1
When you extend the duty of care, if you have to explain what duty of care means to somebody picking up the phone, they need some real training or they need some days in the hospital tending to patients. Once you accept the duty of care, again, it’s just not my dad was a brilliant physician, brilliant doctor, and his colleagues were all well mannered, neat, professional, all of them caring. And they accepted the responsibility for a patient once they took them on. And once a system takes them on, like Inner Mountain or Kaiser or what have you, that duty of care is extended. That umbrella applies to everybody under their name.

Speaker 1
Well, that’s enough for now. I wish I could give you some hope, but there really isn’t any. Not at least for people with my condition. And I think that they would actually prefer a lot of us just to die off so they don’t have to deal with them. I think that’s what’s going on with a lot of the homeless, with mental health problems.

Speaker 1
It’s just get these people off the books and we can go back to treating people for just anxiety and depression and everybody else is on their own.

Speaker 1
But if you know more about the subject, let me know. But there’s no dignity in this, not for people with mental health.

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These Are the People I Deal With

I don’t expect anyone to read this except for search. And I don’t expect anyone to sympathize with my complaints, either, because this is the way the world is arranged. I’ve was raised to be a nice person but there are too many mean people to overcome. This is not something I can win. And, given my constant nightmares since 1988, not something I can cope with.

 

[00:00:03.650]
This weekend at a community picnic, I was introduced to an old cowboy who asked me what I did for work. I told him that I work part time online, at which point the conversation quickly drifted south because of him. He told me that the greatest computer was between our two ears, the human brain. And I said, I agree with that.

[00:00:39.770]
He then went on with a whole series of statements and questions that were aggressively going after. I think I think when I start talking about computers and what I do online, it’s so far out of reach of most people that they think that I’m trying to be smarter than them, or somehow they feel inferior. I think that’s a great deal of it. They have an inferiority complex to anybody that’s working with computers. They act as if I’m trying to prove that I’m smarter than them, when in fact, I usually don’t start the conversation at all because I’m so far out of reach with what I’m doing, with what most other people do that it’s not even worth bothering to talk about.

[00:01:31.860]
Like all of the work that I’m doing with AI and Chat right now. And it’s very discouraging because I had a friend say to me recently that it was possibly economic, because not everybody can afford a computer or the resources that I have, and that’s not really the case at all. I should probably stop at this point and refresh everyone’s memory that early on, before the Internet went commercial, back in about 94, 95, with the advent of Mosaic. Mosaic was the first graphical based Internet browser that you could see images with that became relatable to people. Images provided a boost to advertising, but librarians had been on computerizing, their catalog, card catalogs, for years before.

[00:02:42.790]
And so when personal computers came out, they started populating libraries with them. Especially, really around 84, when IBM came out with its own personal computer for the masses. There was this Charlie Chaplin advertising campaign that was hugely successful. But years before, Apple had been trying really, really hard to place computers in the school to get these lucrative contracts, and they did a good job. They started about 1980 with the Apple II.

[00:03:18.270]
So by the end of the 80s, computers were basically in every library and school. And so everyone’s had an opportunity since then to use computers in one way or another. Night school classes, adult education classes since really the late 80s, early ninety s. And I’ve actually been on computers since 1978. Over 40 years.

[00:03:46.230]
Everybody’s had a chance. But an idiot like this that I was talking to, he doesn’t want to go to the library. I’m sure he hasn’t been to the library in decades. He probably can’t remember when he checked out a library book last. I have many computers.

[00:04:02.350]
I think I have two desktops, two laptops, two tablets. I also have a library card from Pahrump. A library card from Goldfield and a library card from Tonopah. And I am in those libraries, actively. I’m checking out books.

[00:04:22.130]
All of those libraries have a computer. I think it’s just laziness on most people’s part and not having an interest. It’s easier to put down somebody for what they do than to ask about it or just say simply nothing at all. These are the people that drive me crazy. There’s so much amazing stuff going on and I don’t mind if they’re not interested, but it’s the librarians that I’m infuriated with.

[00:04:53.090]
They’re the gatekeepers in education and they don’t want to know about Chat or AI. So it’s not really economic. It is a deliberate decision on many people’s part not to engage, not to learn, to let the things go by. And people that are actually interested, that are burning to create, that are trying new things, that are experimenting with new things, those are people that are something to be put down on because I think it might remind them of how little they want to know, how content they are with their own little world. And that’s fine as long as you don’t go out and bully people or put people down.

[00:05:38.570]
This is the way I can make some money. I can make this money part time. I’m doing a good service and yet I have people people commenting who don’t even know the basics of writing and business writing.

[00:05:55.970]
Self-sustaining freelance writers are maybe four or 5% of the population. That’s it. Everybody else is doing a second 3rd, 4th job to enable their hobby or their passion the and as far as nonfiction writing goes, nobody understands that. As far as business SEO, there’s nobody that I know, haven’t known for a couple of decades that has any idea of what I’m doing. But if they ask, if I try to explain, it’s just an immediate putting down of what I do.

[00:06:40.750]
It’s just this prejudice against the unknown, which is really the root cause. If you don’t know something, if somebody knows something you don’t, you don’t want to hear it. Instead of asking questions about it or letting it go, they want to put it down because they’re bullies. That’s all they can do. They’re trolls.

[00:06:59.990]
And maybe it reminds them of the fact that they’re dead to the world, that they have no interest in inquiry.

[00:07:10.170]
Anyway, I just wanted to put down what I have to deal with almost every day in my effort to be creative. I really have to keep it hidden. Can’t discuss it because it’s like we’re going back to the Dark Ages. One idiot, in fact, who’s in charge of something historical, he was talking about computer literacy, computer literacy in such a way that I asked him this:

[00:07:43.400]
You’re not holding out computer illiteracy as a point of pride, are you? And this guy’s a former engineer and he thought about it and said, that’s a good question, actually. I am. This is a living, breathing, talking luddite. He doesn’t want to learn.

[00:08:02.380]
He wants to put down people for learning. We’re going to go back 300 years into the Dark Ages when people were prosecuted and killed for trying to learn things, for trying to advance science. We’re going to try to discredit them. Or Mao’s Cultural Revolution, in which anybody with higher learning or higher ambition was killed. That’s what we’re going to get.

[00:08:29.090]
We’re going to go back to the Dark Ages and then we’re going to take 300 years to come back again. At the end of the Dark Ages, they had to reinvent all the math that the Greeks had done, what, 1500 or  2000 years before, because people were criticized and killed for trying to learn new things. And now we have people writing about chat and AI who don’t actually use it, haven’t experimented with it, but don’t want to learn. They just want to put it down. So it’s frustrating, but that’s the world we live in.

 

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Goldfield, Nevada — A Balance of Desires

The product originally being displayed here was a powdered milk product called Anlene. The ad ran in Crown Magazine from Taiwan back in 2001. Mandarin publication. It seems their milk board can have as much fun as our American milk board.

A balance of desires refers to the many things to do in Goldfield, Nevada? What next? When? I’ve symbolized some of those things by using my Goldfield posters as elements. This poster is 17 inches wide and 60 inches tall. Yes, five feet high.

My Etsy Store is here: https://www.etsy.com/shop/ThomasFarleyDesigns

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Are Writers Made or Born? by Jack Kerouac (transcribed for the first time!)

I transcribed this article from two image files at the Writer’s Digest website. I have introduced line breaks of my own to make the text more readable online.

This is a six minute read. Kerouac reserves the word “genius” (and his attendant praise) to those who originate a writing style, those “born” to write. As he puts it, anyone can write but not everybody can invent a new way of writing.

This is a well planned piece by Kerouac. Notice how he echoes or repeats the use of ‘five thousand’: “five thousand writing class students, “five thousand university trained writers,” and “five thousand ‘trained’ writers plus Joyce.” These echoes are all made at distinct, different points in his work.

Notice, too, the depth of Kerouac’s study and reading of the Great Books. You might think a Beat writer would have laughed off the classics when developing a new way of writing but Kerouac didn’t. This man _studied_. Only the Great Books provide a wellspring deep enough to inspire new thoughts. Although Tom Clancy is an excellent writer, no one will ever pen a Great American Novel by reading how Jack Ryan breaks into a locked file cabinet.

[Thomas Farley, thomasfarleyblog.com (link to this post) September 18, 2022]

The text of this article and post is available here in .pdf format (internal link)

ARE WRITERS MADE OR BORN?

BY Jack Kerouac

Writer’s Digest, January 1962.

Paragraph 1

Writers are made, for anybody who isn’t illiterate can write. But geniuses of the writing art like Melville, Whitman or Thoreau are born. Let’s examine the word “genius.”

It doesn’t mean screwiness or eccentricity or excessive talent. It is derived from the word gignere, (to beget.) And a genius is simply a person who originates something never known before. Nobody but Melville could have written Moby Dick. Not even Whitman or Shakespeare.

Nobody but Whitman could have conceived, originated and written Leaves of Grass. Whitman was born to write a Leaves of Grass and Melville was born to write a Moby Dick. “It ain’t what you do,” Sy Oliver and James Young said. “It’s the way atcha do it.”

Five thousand writing class students who study “required reading” can put their hand to the legend of Faustus but only one, Marlowe, was born to do it the way he did.

Paragraph 2

I always get a laugh to hear Broadway wise guys talk about “talent and genius.” Some perfect virtuoso also who can interpret Brahams on the violin is called a “genius,” but the genius, the originating force, really belongs to Brahams; the violin virtuoso is simply a talented interpreter – in other words, a “Talent.”

Or you’ll hear people say that so and so is a major writer because of his “large talent.” There can be no major writer without original genius. Artists of genius like Jackson Pollock, have painted things that have never been seen before.

Anybody who’s seen his immense Samapattis of color has no right to criticize his “crazy method” of splashing and throwing and dancing around.

Take the case of James Joyce. People said he wasted his talent on the stream of consciousness style when in fact, he was simply born to originate it. How would you like to spend your old age reading books about contemporary life written in the pre-Joycean style of, say, Ruskin or William Dean Howells, or Taine?

Some geniuses come with heavy feet and march solemnly forward like Dreiser. Yet no one ever wrote about that America of his as well as he. Geniuses can be scintillating and geniuses can be somber, but it’s that inescapable sorrowful depth that shines through – originality.

Paragraph 3

Joyce was insulted all his life by practically all of Ireland and the world for being a genius. Some Celtic Twilight idiots even conceded he had some talent. What else could they say, since they were all going to start imitating him? But five thousand university trained writers could put their hand to a day in June in Dublin in 1904 or one night’s dreams, and never do with it what Joyce did with it: he was simply born to do it.

On the other hand, if the five thousand “trained writers” plus Joyce, all put their hands to a READER’S DIGEST-type article about “Vacation Hints” or “Homemaker’s Tips” even then I think Joyce would stand out because of his inborn originality of language insight.

Bear well in mind what Sinclair Lewis told Thomas Wolfe: “If Thomas Hardy had been given a contract to write stories for the SATURDAY EVENING POST, do you think he would have written like Zane Gray or like Thomas Hardy? I can tell you the answer to that one.

He would have written like Thomas Hardy. He couldn’t have written like anyone else but Thomas Hardy. He would have kept on writing like Thomas Hardy. Whether he wrote for the SATURDAY EVENING POST or CAPTAIN BILLY’S WHIZBANG.”

Paragraph 4

When the question is therefore asked, “Are writers made or born?” one should first ask, “Do you mean writers with talent or writers with originality?

Because anybody can write, but not everybody invents new forms of writing. Gertrude Stein invented a new form of writing, and her imitators are just talents. Hemingway later invented his own form also.

The criterion for judging talent or genius is ephemeral, [ed. note – added the comma] speaking rationally in this world of graphs, but one gets the feeling definitely, when a writer of geniuses amazes him by strokes of force never seen before and yet hauntingly familiar (Wilson’s famous “shock of recognition”).

I got that feeling from Swan’s Way as well as from Sons and Lovers. I do not get it from Colette, but I do get it from Dickinson. I get it from Celine, but I do not get it from Camus. I get it from Hemingway, but not from Raymond Chandler, except when he’s dead serious. I get it from the (sic) Balzac or Cousin Bette, but not from Pierre Loti. And so on.

Paragraph 5

The main thing to remember is that talent imitates genius, because there’s nothing else to imitate. Since talent can’t originate it has to imitate or interpret. The poetry on page 22 of the New York Times, with all its “silent wings of urgency in a dark and seldom wood” and other lapidary trillings, is but a poor imitation of previous poets of genius like Yeats, Dickinson, Apollinaire, Donne, Suckling . . . .

Genius gives birth. Talent delivers. What Rambrandt, Brandt or Van Gogh saw in the night can never be seen again. No frog can jump in a pond like Basho’s frog. Born writers of the future are amazed already at what they’re seeing now, what we’ll all see in time for the first time, and then see imitated many times by made writers.

Paragraph 6

So in the case of a born writer, genius involves the original formation of a new style. Though the language of Kyd is Elizabethan as far as period goes, the language of Shakespeare can truly be called only Shakespearean. Oftentimes an originator of a new language forms (sic?) is called “pretentious” by jealous talents. But it ain’t whatcha write. It’s the way atcha write it.

–30–

Writer’s Digest’s image files.

External Link (s)

Interesting discussion of this essay: https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/10/17/are-writers-born-or-made-jack-kerouac/

Notes:

Wilson’s “famous shock of recognition”? More fully, Melville, “Genius all over the world stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round”.

Samapattis: The Britanica offers this on Buddhist meditation, “[F]our further spiritual exercises, the samapattis (‘attainments’): (1) consciousness of infinity of space, (2) consciousness of the infinity of cognition, (3) concern with the unreality of things (nihility), and (4) consciousness of unreality as the object of thought.”

Celtic Twilight idiots: Followers of the material Keats and his like penned regarding Irish folklore.

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Remembering Michael Duffet. (Again.)

Some bot at Legacy.com is asking people to go back to guest books they have signed in the past. Perhaps add a little more. So I did.

Michael was a challenging man; he did let you escape back into the bliss of ignorance once telling you the truth. “You haven’t read that book, Thomas? Oh, dear. You must, you absolutely must.” “That haiku is is pleasant but you don’t have a reference to a season. It’s not just a matter of getting the right syllable count, you must have a seasonal reference. Read the great masters of Haiku.”

Today’s Writing at Legacy

Michael is still dearly missed by everyone who know him; I’ve written below on how much he impressed me, by extension, everyone else must have been. Michael would have pointed out that fallacy in logic (post hoc ergo propter hoc) but I stand by it. You’d never forget your house burning down, your wedding, the birth of a child, the loss of same. So, too, with Michael. You could never forget him and there is no recovery with time. A loss great and felt continually.

Past Writing at Legacy

I was living in Isleton while Michael was the editor of the Rio Vista Herald and Isleton Journal, a cut and paste weekly newspaper. I reached out to Michael when I moved to Isleton because it seemed there were no other writers in the area.

I was totally overwhelmed by his education, Cambridge, and by the depth of his reading. He was kind and warm and explained things well. His newspaper office desk was littered with texts in Japanese and Arabic.

He said he had spent five years with the Bedouins in what I will call Arabia, before heading east through India and on to Japan. The stories all seemed legendary and at all times thoroughly believable. He said he once met the Beatles and I am sure he did.

My condolences to his family, students, and friends. He was a good man.

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Got Milk?

—

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And This is How You Get a Nobel Prize

Idiot Wind by Bob Dylan

Selected lyrics:

Someone’s got it in for me
They’re planting stories in the press
Whoever it is I wish they’d cut it out quick
But when they will I can only guess
They say I shot a man named Gray
And took his wife to Italy
She inherited a million bucks
And when she died it came to me
I can’t help it if I’m lucky

Idiot wind
Blowing every time you move your mouth
Blowing down the back roads headin’ south
Idiot wind
Blowing every time you move your teeth
You’re an idiot, babe
It’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe

In the final end he won the wars
After losin’ every battle

I woke up on the roadside
Daydreamin’ ’bout the way things sometimes are
Visions of your chestnut mare
Shoot through my head and are makin’ me see stars

Blood on your saddle

It was gravity which pulled us down
And destiny which broke us apart

The priest wore black on the seventh day
And sat stone-faced while the building burned

I waited for you on the running boards
Near the cypress trees, while the springtime turned
Slowly into autumn

Down the highway, down the tracks
Down the road to ecstasy
I followed you beneath the stars
Hounded by your memory
And all your ragin’ glory

You’ll never know the hurt I suffered
Nor the pain I rise above
And I’ll never know the same about you
Your holiness or your kind of love
And it makes me feel so sorry

Idiot wind
Blowing through the buttons of our coats
Blowing through the letters that we wrote
Idiot wind
Blowing through the dust upon our shelves
We’re idiots, babe
It’s a wonder we can even feed ourselves

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Rhodesia Repost from Last Year

This needs to be said again. And again. Before free speech and accurate histories are regarded as only important to white racists.

Updated September 22, 2021

As Long As a Free Man Breathes There Will Always Be a Rhodesia

When I was growing up I admired plucky little Rhodesia from afar. It is now called Zimbabwe. Like the Weimar Republic or perhaps Camelot, it lives only in memory and myth.

Rhodesia was a colony of the United Kingdom in the 1960s until it broke away to form an independent nation. It became a pariah state like Chile under Allende or Israel under Golda Meir or Ariel Sharon or anyone else.

Everybody hated Rhodesia. Why?

It had white supremacists. Racial injustice. Continuation of colonial rule. Blah, blah, blah.

Rhodesia’s origins go back as far as the 1650s with the establishment of Cape Town to the south by the Dutch. And the subsequent settling of southeast Africa by these people and other Europeans.

The native people of this thinly populated land were nomadic and for the most part hunters and gatherers. They built little in keeping with their constant hunt for food. All sub-Saharan Africa was this way, with no buildings of note in pre-Colonial times until you reached north to Giza and the Pyramids.

Rhodesians turned tractless scrub and veldt into a modern civilization which superpowers and future despots coveted for their own.

In the 1970’s two thugs named Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo led armies against Ian Smith’s government. Mugabe had money and munitions supplied by China and Nkomo was financed by the Soviet Union.

Everyone knew that both men would fight each other to control Rhodesia once whites were thrown out of power.

This racial injustice stuff was all nonsense and fraud.

The fighting was a power grab, a money grab. It was all about winning a nation possessing valuable natural resources and a vibrant, profitable economy. Mugabe and Nkomo claimed to be freedom fighters. Hardly.

Africa consistently produces oppressive and brutal strongmen who destroy any built up economy through corruption and in so doing plunge that country back into poverty. A nation’s treasury winds up in a Swiss bank account and the dictator goes to live abroad in a foreign country that he pays to protect him.

Critics charged that the black man did not fairly share in the wealth of Rhodesia that they helped create. Rhodesia was indeed largely built on the labor of the black man because they were the local work force. Would critics have preferred a Philippine or Malaysian workforce like the Saudis employ?

Besides enjoying regular employment, blacks were paid better than any other Africans except those in the R.S.A. Another country run by white folk.

But it’s not just labor. A country must be expertly managed and led. The administrators of all British Empire colonies, for example, had a low tolerance for bribes and corruption and an innate skill for running things. The Rhodesians also had these qualities which are essential to building up a country and going forward.

After the Roman Empire fell, villagers in every part of the former holdings tore down Roman walls and and buildings for stones to make their houses. They didn’t construct aqueducts or hot spring heated swimming pools or infrastructure to bring in water or take out sewage. No vision and no discipline existed to carry out the future and Europe plunged into the Dark Ages. But I digress.

The world agreed regime change was fine as long as blacks came into power. This was reverse racism endorsed and agreed upon by the entire world and the United Nations. Black man good, white man bad. All based on skin color.

China and Russia acted for their own strategic reasons. Rhodesia was just another piece in a giant cold-war game of chess. China still has their eyes on Africa. They may eventually control the continent with blacks in government just for show.

The Rhodesian Army gallantly fought against the world in a bush war of legend but the outcome was always certain.

Many foreigners enlisted in the Rhodesian army. Like the pilots who volunteered to help Great Britain before the United States entered World War II. Or like Orwell and others who fought with Spaniards against Franco in the Spanish Civil War.

End of Days found civilians taking automatic weapons with them before going to play golf or tennis. It was that bad.

And so The Great Experiment failed and another despot was installed. Another dictator who ruined everything positive that the former colonial power had brought about. Rhodesia is now a basket case and another welfare child nation of too many in Africa. Worse, it enslaves people and subjects its own countrymen to conditions never seen under white man rule.

This is from from the widely respected World Factbook I understand that it is a long quote:

“Current situation: Zimbabwe is a source, transit, and destination country for men, women, and children subjected to forced labor and sex trafficking; Zimbabwean women and girls from towns bordering South Africa, Mozambique, and Zambia are subjected to forced labor, including domestic servitude, and prostitution catering to long-distance truck drivers; Zimbabwean men, women, and children experience forced labor in agriculture and domestic servitude in rural areas; family members may recruit children and other relatives from rural areas with promises of work or education in cities and towns where they end up in domestic servitude and sex trafficking; Zimbabwean women and men are lured into exploitative labor situations in South Africa and other neighboring countries.”

It didn’t have to be this way.

Europeans were criticized for carving Africa into colonies whose country boundaries did not reflect tribal boundaries, thus causing chaos and inciting misery. Well, white governance is long gone and the murderous thugs who control many parts of Africa don’t care about boundaries.

The World Factbook quotation above shows how freely human trafficking goes on between Zimbabwe, South Africa, Mozambique, and Zambia. These slave traders go anywhere they want to loot and pillage and war. Against other blacks.

Black on black violence has dramatically increased in all forms since white governance ended on the African continent. Blacks enslaving blacks, blacks killing blacks, blacks warring against other blacks. This isn’t racist invective, these are just the plain facts.

Rhodesia was making progress toward a more equal society but that is not discussed today. History is always written by the victors. (And their politically correct sympathizers.)

Gandhi’s nonviolence movement achieved independence for India because, ultimately, the British were a civilized people and would listen to reason. It wasn’t the power of Gandhi’s convictions. Forget that. After too many stupid and tragic mistakes to keep India within the Empire, Britain listened. Mountbatten could be talked to. Negotiations could happen because the British allowed them to happen.

Not so the Taliban, the Chinese communists or the illiterate and ultra-violent butchers that now control Rhodesia. Working toward equality could have been possible under Smith’s government but that was all thrown away in favor of people who would kill you for your wrist watch. After they force you to watch your wife being raped.

Is the black community in America and around the world happy now?

Cecil Rhodes was scurrilous and a white supremacist but he was also an empire builder. Note the word ‘build.” He left behind cities and roads and power plants and telephones in the wake of his never ending greed.

Nothing is getting built anew or maintained in Africa anymore. Leaders instead prey on their own people and existing resources. Burn down the Amazon rain forest for easy money. With no revegetation except a few pitiful replanting schemes financed by kind hearted people outside of Africa.

White rule was unacceptable to the world but it’s always good with the bad. Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) once asked how many Central and South Americans would renounce Roman Catholicism in favor of going back to the religions practiced before the Spanish introduced them to Christ and the Pope. I’m not seeing many hands going up.

Soldier of Fortune Magazine presented the only accurate reporting at the time and most of that writing is still available on eBay. Colonel Brown’s Paladin Press produced SOF and without it the memories of a gallant people fighting for their homeland would be completely lost.

As a final note, I had to look up how to spell Zimbabwe for this post. I don’t use it.

As long as a free man breathes there will always be a Rhodesia.

—

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Categories
fiction Poetry Uncategorized

The Most Famous Chinese Poem

Introduction

I read that this is the most famous Chinese Poem. Four lines. That’s it. That’s economy.

I don’t know Chinese so I must rely on translations. Do any of these translations appeal to you more than another? I like all of them taken together.

Quiet Night Thoughts / Thoughts on a Still Night / Thinking on a Quiet Night

by Li Bai (701-762)

1st unknown translator – external link)

Before my bed, the moon is shining bright,
I think that it is frost upon the ground.
I raise my head and look at the bright moon,
I lower my head and think of home.

2d unknown translator – external link)

Bright moonlight before my bed;
I suppose it is frost on the ground.
I raise my head to view the bight moo,
then lower it, thinking of my home village.

Wikipedia (First reference – external link)

Before my bed there’s a pool of light
I wonder if it’s frost on the ground
Looking up, I find the moon bright
Then bowing my head, I drown in homesickness

Wikipedia (Second reference – external link)

Moonlight before my bed
Perhaps frost on the ground.
Lift my head and see the moon
Lower my head and pine for home.

Categories
COVID-19 editing writing fiction non-fiction writing Poetry politically correct

A. E. Housman Noting the Difference

Everybody thinks they are smarter than they are. You, me, everybody. Everybody thinks they are smarter than they are.

Politicians also think they are smarter than they are.

The difference between us and them is that they constantly seek to control our lives with their overestimated intelligence.

The continuing botched evacuation in Kabul shows how little intelligence politicians posses.

This isn’t about Democrats or Republicans. Maybe Trump could have pulled this off, who know?

But what is known is that all of these politicians with all of their advanced degrees couldn’t think out this problem.

Yet they want you to believe that what they say on climate change, Covid, education, or monetary policy is is the right point of view. The smart point of view.

Maybe not.

Our politicians learned nothing from Vietnam or the Russian experience in Afghanistan. The same mistakes over and over. Just like we might make. But we don’t try to control a politician’s life.

It’s all about power and domination over people not in power. (internal link) We want to be left alone to live our life by our own lights.

But most politicians don’t want to leave you alone. You have to agree with them. They are smarter than you and they want to prove it.

Yet they are just as smart or stupid as we are.

The Laws of God, The Laws of Man

by A. E. Housman (1859-1936) (internal link)

The laws of God, the laws of man,
He may keep that will and can;
Not I: let God and man decree
Laws for themselves and not for me;
And if my ways are not as theirs
Let them mind their own affairs.
Their deeds I judge and much condemn,
Yet when did I make laws for them?
Please yourselves, say I, and they
Need only look the other way.
But no, they will not; they must still
Wrest their neighbor to their will,
And make me dance as they desire
With jail and gallows and hell-fire.
And how am I to face the odds
Of man’s bedevilment and God’s?
I, a stranger and afraid
In a world I never made.
They will be master, right or wrong;
Though both are foolish, both are strong.
And since, my soul, we cannot fly
To Saturn nor to Mercury,
Keep we must, if keep we can,
These foreign laws of God and man.

[emphasis added,.ed]