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Salvaging America, the Valkenheiser Way (Vote For Judge Alvin)

CEE

“God is in His Heaven
The Pope is at the Vatican
The King is in Madrid
The Viceroy is in Mexico City,
And to Hell with you, I’m in San Antonio.”
—a social expression of the Tejanos, in the years prior to the Texas Revolution

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    What This Country Needs...is 50 little ones. This one with Greek Democracy and that one with Corporatocracy and another with Dan Aykroyd, gunked in freakish makeup, its Shire Reeve. “Perfect freedom, has no existence”. These, in Ben Hur, were the words of Pilate. Wisdom of the Roman World State, which took as she liked, and did not yield...but, wisdom.
    If you believe the professorial twaddle, re: No Absolutes, you understand our nation is a work in progress. Such a work, works only until those who will not be told, begin to rival those who salute, or who sling the tool and sing, or who can repeat doctrine as being necessary for survival. Yet as I’ve said, you cannot have IDIC and dialog. If you make a world of individuality to be realized, if ubermensch as understood is raw potential as Self’s weaponry, the Other becomes almost tertiary by consideration—however, assuming that’s wrong, that you would give or help, or not let anOther starve, I doubt you’d let the same Other dictate your behavior. Or belief system. Or stomp on your convictions. Or curtail your freedom. And if they did, and if they stood behind you in line at Target, it could get ugly, right? Except they have family and you have family, and association spreads to jobs, hobbies, churches—in my Dad’s era, The Lodge. Gathered even up to those low millions in your home state, what issues grappled at, things idealized or despised, angry voices or internicine warfare, all is limited. Rare comes Hatfields and McCoys in mortal struggle.
    Some will always bellyache, and some draw the booby prize of sad lives, but there exists understood, binary accord from horizon to personal horizon, Where You Live. There exists, via roads crisscrossed, a prevailing viewpoint and its chief rival. Sociopolitically, chicken soup for the citizen, is Zoroastrianism in the form of states rights. Ahura Mazda (as human statehouse), is the main and majority-accepted thinking, Where You Live; Angra Mainyu, likewise lives as the local/regional voice of dissent. Destined never to control, this voice must too be accepted—at least partially, in that it will never control. A stranger, an outsider, an interloper, a revenuer, a distant court or suited monarch or an American Reichstag bought by riches and flesh, may in theory, decide for us all...but humans, and nowhere more than Main Street, decide at last, for ourSelves. And we aren’t usually the Dalai Lama, in terms of concession.
    Foreign thinking, may be just a four-hour drive away, its foreign laws you despise, its foreign gulag, too. This universal shield acting as dragnet is finally, untenable. Persons are flying off society like heat tiles on reentry, because a Giant Presence, purports to speak for All. Once again, our founding, tricorn credo, is “Fuck You”. As for Marshal Gilligan, he can’t put everyone in jail. We are thus, as a nation, doomed to implosion, unless we gerrymander ourselves according to boundaries set by history as the cartographers drew it.
    The argument against states rights, aside from Stars, Bars and J.B. Stoner’s face never seeming to rub off in spite of every detergent, is the more general damning of “loss of rights”, i.e. each state, in deciding for itself, will result in gradations of liberties, which in turn will result in a bell curve of freedom, all the way from Woodstock to Nuremberg. Some states, will be restrictive. Even cruel.
    Uh. Yes. That’s the whole idea. Like the Internet can be summed up with the words, “It takes all kinds to make a world”. Yes, I’ll verify, there will be states you will not wish to travel through or near, lest you have to police your own behavior, which would appear an immense sticking point with Americans young enough to not recall Iwo Jima, duck and cover or Francis Gary Powers. American citizens are 60 proof-bombed on the divine right of “Get your fuckin’ hands off me!” when it comes to arrest over belief versus what’s on the books. And states deciding in folksy statehouses who can do what and what gets you thrown into a dungeon with a goofy, bearded cellmate, with no appeal to Candy Crowley, Bill-O or a 5-4 vote not legally allowed the court which makes them, is not only terrifying, it’s surreal. It’s sweaty, greasy barking mad Dan Aykroyd, removing part of his face. A funhouse madhouse grinned at all-friendly, by a sea of blue and badges. Some members of this Union, don’t like, want, nor will tolerate what passes for 21^th Century rights. Your rights within these retentive places, are therefore effected. Because the Law of Georgia or Utah or Oklahoma, beats You like a royal flush beats Joe Shilabotnik.
    I personally live in a state which has prosecuted 6 governors and sent 4 of them to prison, a place where they managed to “lose” the ballot box in the first election after statehood, declaring later over mulled cider, which man had won “unanimously”. So, this has nothing to do with purity or paragons of virtue. As the father of a friend told me in 1982, “you can have a town with six people in it, and one might be a murderer!” But in a nation of over 325,000,000 souls, each to their spin and with individual scissors going Boo Radley on “diversity” of even thought, decisions of a regional nature—those social, those personal, chief among them—most wish, in almost every instance, to decide within our clan, among our tartan, by that which our manic-depressive hamlets and their populi, say do. But for the densest concentrations hugging waters rising to their back steps even now, the rest of America, unforgiving as the villagers in Christy, aren’t going to accept any yolk of “outsiders”. I’m not saying we long for Sleepy Hollow, rather, if we know where everyone lives and can find them, our control issues are satisfied. Not everyone will agree, though in statehouse, county seat or automobile campground, but by way of simple subtraction, your state as passive isolationist, becomes both healthy diet and Tony Robbins seminar.
    Man, though reduced in mob size with local affiliates as the only tell all, of course remains (pardon me) nothing but trouble. My vaunted anarchist-friends of yore, fair swelled with pride affirming “the death of nationalism”, by way of “people becoming individuals and not ‘parts’ of things, anymore” (this, ca. 1986). The non sequitur which trips up everyone, forcing shibboleth out of everyone’s wellintentioned mouth, is that If All Are Individuals and If Nobody’s Perfect, you have no reason, outside of each person’s own, contrived finger food of The Golden Rule, to support any group thinking. Certainly not better your area or community or region. “Do unto others”, often means “as you personally understand ‘doing’”. This can mean lots of personal vendetta, false social causes sporting Groucho glasses, but it’s like capital punishment hailed as deterrent: you’re never gonna weed out specific, localized cancers within the human soul. It’s a given, no matter how big or small the model of peoples agreeing on sets of rules, you’re always going to have Tank Man, hokey-pokeying himself in Smallville’s Tiananmen Square...and, you’re always going to have dim rooms filled with smoking men, who make Tank Man disappear.
    Does it therefore matter a little bit, if half a nation, from election to election, gnashes teeth in a raging squeal, like the demonic image MTV once created to symbolize Mike Tyson? Sure, this one and that one will drive a car into an official, wrought iron fence, or dash, Olympian, across the White House lawn, or fly underneath radar into a building filled with powerful liars, or even pop a cap into a minor politico no one would give a damn about, otherwise...but, even given 50 states bristling with armaments and a formerly self-sustaining nation named Texas more and more flipping off The Beltway...what chance is there, really, for actual mass riots and cities in flames? What are the odds on martial law and the National Guard gunning down rebels? If it can’t be 50 fiefdoms of binary accord, it can’t be one, big blob of one, either. We therefore need only establish The End as not coming by way of the 4^th Planet of the Apes movie, no Jonathan Chance of Styx rock lore, no Kevin Costner for good nor postmodern Alexander for bad. No shooting and shooting and shooting, until POV demographics become HD. Americans, appear too unorganized to begin this bad scifi, but for scattered convoys of the terbacky-chawin’, and bad as US Intelligence is, like Homer Simpson knocking out every hobo, they at conclusion slam good old boys, bad old boys and ugly ones, too, inside. If indeed Man is by definition inept, a rude ass or a howling schizophrenic, what’s the point of a paradigm shift? Why alter a thing?
    A: Diversity—yes, even in thought—and given diversity itself means 97 things to 100 people...it, diversity, but for template of Self, is too great a cross for too many, to bear. It is, taken to its conclusion, chaos. And a stranger from a strange place telling you “NO”, then sending you to a supermax is, in a society modeling Universal Freedom, a dirty lie. America, reduces in judicial practice, to “freedom for everyone else”. This is how the interp plays, in simple logic. Simple logic, in nearly every dealing or home, reigns.
    From the unsold CEE poetry mms, A Forlornbook for Goths:
    “Human” as united, cannot grasp, let alone accept, such a calling up of Self, that this one sees darkness as light, another sees darkness as darkness but yet this is a fine thing, another says there is no difference between the two, another calling them Indian Red and Lincoln Green. Such individuals, to Human, must, if they are serious in such unfettered nonconforming, be incurably sick...and the spectrum is so broad, so diverse in the truest sense, as to allow for each to be a Self, each actualized as its IT seeks and develops, IT being ITs core root. Human finds this very, very troubling; Human wants that separate, to go away. Behind a wall. Behind barbed wire. To be instated, sedated, jailed or confined. Shot down in the streets, without the right God gave a ragweed. Human, demands this. It howls for it. It stamps its foot like a child. But, to say to “No” to Who One Is, is in the West, no longer permitted. Not openly. Not officially. Human is often, now, thwarted by Laws safeguarding Selves. Human responds, by rising up. Like Cain.
    That is the reason Ein Amerika is guaranteed to end badly. We aren’t talking about apocalyptic events or dominoes falling, as something beyond humans themselves. Like the old chicken vs. egg about “guns don’t kill people; people, kill people”. Does anyone give a goddam the peripherals, if the scenario majors in Mutually Assured Destruction? I admit, winning the argument has always been a gigantic priority, for Me...then again, I don’t care, not a jot, if everything we know turns overnight into the last 10 minutes of Miracle Mile. As Nero in concert, it concerns me not at all, and that in itself means You should be on it, nonfriend, and with the intensity of a “Double Naught Spy”.
    Man, Is Not Good. He Will Never Become So. And He Doesn’t Give A Crap, That You Don’t Like Absolutes. This means you can take all the red and blue dye in the world and pour it over Tim Russert’s grave, as it isn’t a question of “sides”. There is no “good” team, and no home but where we hang our hat. And it’s quite out of the Q, to spread the societal blanket nice for each, individual situation...but you’d be amazed, how much easier and fast under control any trouble will be, when Montgomery and Sacramento and Bismarck and Montpelier, Topeka and Salem and Boise and Dover, know exactly who and how many to subdue...because the force of any prevailing attitude, is what makes dissent go away, and the truth is, not one American wants anything other than their movie as they write it. Those half-cocked philosophical sorts with glaring smiles burned into their faces, those who swear they wish the raw feed, find even they do not, in practice. We, each identity, wish Utopia as Self desires...but if you think about it, Utopia as a general conception, we see as a matte painting. It’s peaceful, as there’s no movement, except for the robot servants some insist into theirs’. You aren’t going to get that matte painting, without a playing field leveled as by a Giant Hand. Via size reduction and by way of an incorporated state-level system, this (I grant, somewhat ominous) peace and “Come for the Festival, ay-yuh?” may not be a lock, but the near-beer of it, can be had in a six.
    For purposes of a planet filled with armies, a national Union is required. For purposes of home and hearth, something rather smaller, less dramatic, suffices. You’re welcome to live wherever you like, providing that in any, particular Rome, you do as those particular Romans do. And do your ‘do’, convincingly, please, because no one is more particular than a regional group with its particulars lined up and in order. It boils down to the assertion one cannot have everything, that choices must be made, priorities established. For a fair percentage of us, There Will Be Negatives. Mere geography, what view gets you off, is another trade. I’m elementary school enough to believe in strict majority rule, with no hand-patting rider attached to that line. Might making right, is the living rule of human beings. The idea of 50 fiefdoms run by 50 Reeves may not sound as fun as if they were going to St. Ives, but the odds are better than Vegas or Atlantic City you could, in The Information Age, find your home of “rightful thinking”. Of accord and belonging, acceptance and unity. Of rest. As with the disfigured mutant youth in Night Gallery, somewhere there is a place, a state, a community, a group, where You are the norm and the template. Where Order itself is as you like, or would love or breathe, whole, within.
    A tired, grimy concept of a luvluvluv melting pot which in reality never grows anything but colder, more separatist, a bullshit image playing out as High School Cafeteria America, is a place none can find peace. 50 states, each to their own but rendering unto Caesar, offers 50 chances. It may not be anyone’s dreamt ideal, but ideals are by their nature, goals as carrots on sticks. At some point, all but zealots quit striving and ship oars. This I recommend, as it’s coming up on kill or be killed. If in peace we would live, then understand, each of us in our daily walk, is separate but equal. He who would prefer a battle royale then thump chest as representing Jeffersonian dances of sugar plum fairies, is disconnected to the point he needs be a person of interest, or some “C”-student playing it Honor Society and never breaking character. Community in conflict on a national level is not a game, and just because media’s talking torsos can safely grimace or sneer, chide or mug hatred without worry, doesn’t alleviate. It does not give vent. It inflames.
    We have legislated ourselves into a corner, into a plumber’s prison worthy of Curly Howard. We can almost not move a muscle. It’s 50 neutral corners, or that is the end of the silly experiment of “freedom beyond kings”. If your pursuit of happiness, gets its peanut butter in my chocolate, then by me, push the button, Frank, show’s over. Balls to the wall, gone to the mattresses, the denouement of WATCHMEN, is infantile. You know damned well, Man is made of zero sum and Christopher Lloyd trying to be a Klingon. Man, is vainglorious. And, it’s not like other nations, a few with great might, aren’t paying attention. If America spider-cracked, it wouldn’t have to crumble inward. So, give up your rainbow hug of a postcard, and retreat where others nod at you like it’s church. I’ll do the same. It’s the only way any of us will get a wink of sleep, so to be ready if a global five-alarm sounds. Likemindedness, admittedly not for think tanks, is in the personal, what makes “safe”. Maybe less for the sad folks in Maryland. Annapolis may be their heart and mind, but that state will always have a poisonous cyst on its rear. One which used to be a pretty fair swamp.

CEE

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