Sorry: Can't Go With (Busy Getting Things Done)

So where were we? Oh yes, "beliefs", in a world that's here for the living.

Going through life like a gullible child, returning again and again to the trickster who snatches a coin from your ear, until you start bringing him (or her, he's increasingly a she) your own cash to see how it's done, only to find they don't return it. "Nuh uh", they say when you ask for it back, looking smug at having got you again - surprise! - so your dumb ass trundles off to find more, maybe bringing a friend along next time to go "Ooh".

Suckers. Rubes. Really, that's what you are. There's no honor amongst thieves - that's what you ought to be texting.

But, unfortunately, the practical things can't make a deep enough impression in your head - at least, not enough to make it down to your thumbs anyway.

(I'm a two-finger typist myself. Duh.)

Today's great "artists" are pretty much all propagandists - how's that for a kick in the head? They promised us Burning Men and all we got is a bunch of old embers, smoldering with the extinguished flames of the '60s.

These fools can't provide beauty for all the money in the world, determined as they are to parade their ancient "ideas" - if you can call them that - cribbed from Lenin and Marx (or "marks"). It's gotten so bad, pretty soon, we'll be signing I.O.U.s with an "X" - which will stand for Malcolm, not you.

And I don't mean Malcolm Little either, but some other, scary black not-your-brother, who's still very-much alive - and living in run-down splendor right down the street - and who'll kick your ass, while laughing at you, for having the temerity to think getting what's yours back is the point. Shit, getting what's he can is the point, and now he's got yours, too. Fool. Your stupid ass wanted to "help".

He'll have his whores - Nancy, Shirley, Oprah - and what you got? Nothin' - because you were stupid enough to listen to the stupid bitches and think they were your friends in the first place - but they could give a fuck about you.

Ain't they sweeet? No, loser: ain't you sweet? Piece of candy for the baby? I don't think so.

Sleight of hand, bait-and-switch - that's all that's presented now - and badly. That's all you get. Maybe all you deserve.

Like I said, you're children, so you can't see the moves, because experienced hands are always a blur - usually headed in the direction of your pocket - while clinging tightly to what they've got and, much more, determined to keep it. If you're one of us, I think you'd better have a gun handy: you're gonna need it now. Sorry.

A lot of damage can be done in four years. Hell, it's been only 8 months since the knock-knocks danced in the street, celebrating their new (greatest? latest?) "messiah", and, already, the pillars of society are shaking like it's 9/11 all over again.

Sure, we got Van "Basketball" Jones but he ain't "The One", and who knows if you losers will tire of the game before the score becomes too lopsided? Shit, you already gave the "players" too many unearned free throws (but, thankfully, not a home court advantage) and anyone dumb enough to let that happen is bound to be a little demoralized.

Maybe even a lot.

Whatever.

Despite the cigarettes (or maybe because of 'em) I don't tire and part of my job as head cheer leader is to provide a beacon for new recruits whether anyone can see me or not.

I wonder if they can sometimes.

Don't you worry: y'all rotate for now, I'll find more back-up.



I'm not looking for people mesmerized by flashing lights, but those who feel most comfortable in the dark, standing watch, waiting for the sunshine. And I mean real sunshine, not the promise of (Ah, see? Gotcha).

People who still remember The Greatest Generation's advice and realize, if this is the shit they had to get through, then most of them couldn't have been too stupid after all.

(We'll talk about all that "God" shit later,...I mean, really.)

Our ancestors, too, risked losing the whole thing, but never who they were as Americans in the bargain.

Somehow, that didn't get passed down too well (your wannabe hippie parents were good to you but not good for you) so who got lost, stupidly trying to "find yourself", listening to charlatans leading you astray by pointing away from what works and telling you to "Be Here Now". And you did it! (Yes, that act of idiocy still startles me.) You big dummies, this ain't India, and you don't need to go to know. Crazy that is. I've already dropped acid: unless it don't (which is tragic) it lasts eight hours and you're back. Big deal.

And, having always preferred Stars and Stripes, I could never be a huge fan of paisley anyway - and, especially, not in my mind.

So what are you gonna do now, Woodstock Nation?

You convinced one black guy to wrap a rag around his head and destroy the Star Spangled Banner, and now you've got another one going for the meat.

I swear, you idiots did seem happiest when partying in mud of your own making.

"It's a free show!" you cry, when, truth be told, the (community) organizers merely get all the money they could carry and leave your silly asses there with the musicians who keep playing because A) it's a(nother) distraction and B) they feel sorry for you.

But don't you remember: they always arrive and leave by helicopter. Woodstock, anyone?

Y'all will never learn. Not even after Altamont.

So where were we? Oh yes, "beliefs", in a world that's here for the living. You know, the folks who are so smart they'd never accept an invitation to a seminar about escaping society or being taught how to breathe.

Of course, you can't count yourselves amongst that group, my friends.

Nobody's fooled by you anymore:

It's almost 2010 and you've been chasing The Grateful Dead.

The Lyin' Of The Boomers, The Lyin' Of The Senate (And What They Were All Lyin' About)

"[Ang Lee] turns something that previously looked sloppy and drug-induced into something joyous.

Throughout, Lee aims for a feeling - that specific sense that sometimes comes over us when we're young, of moving through a golden moment and knowing it. And so the scene in which our hero, Elliot (Demetri Martin), takes LSD in a van with a hippie couple, seems neither squalid nor dangerous, but rather like some warm and cozy rite of passage."

-- Mick LaSalle, enjoying another telling, and reselling, of the story of Woodstock - a lie our nation can do without hearing again - in a movie review for The San Francisco Chronicle.

"Phillip Craig Garrido was already known as an oddball who said he could channel the voice of God through a makeshift box, but on Thursday, the eccentricity took on an aura of horror.

Eighteen years ago, authorities said, he kidnapped 11-year-old Jaycee Lee Dugard on her way to catch a school bus in South Lake Tahoe. Ever since then, they said, he kept her prisoner in a squalid backyard compound near Antioch, raping her and fathering two daughters by her - the elder of whom is now 15.

Phillip Garrido is a registered sex offender, and authorities inspected his house several times over the years but never discovered the backyard compound.

The neighbors and other acquaintances said Garrido conducted religious revivals in a tent, claimed to hear the voices of angels and God, and said he had developed a device through which he could control sound with his mind. He propounded this all in a business he called 'God's Desire.'

In a telephone interview from jail with Sacramento TV station KCRA, Garrido said, 'In the end, this is going to be a powerful, heartwarming story.'

In recent years, he said, 'my life has been straightened out. Wait till you hear the story of what took place at this house. You're going to be absolutely impressed. It's a disgusting thing that took place with me at the beginning, but I turned my life completely around.'"

-- Demian Bulwa, Jaxon Van Derbeken, Henry K. Lee, and Kevin Fagan, who seriously ought to check if Phillip Garrido knows Ang Lee or Mick LaSalle - or attended Woodstock - since they're all telling the exact same story, in The San Francisco Chronicle.

"Ron Garrido said he always knew his younger brother was deeply troubled.

There was, he recalled Thursday, Phillip Garrido's damaging use of LSD as a teenager in Brentwood and his talk of sexual compulsion. There was the escape from fellow drug dealers after high school, the federal conviction for rape and kidnapping and his prison marriage.

Still, the latest news - accusations that his 58-year-old brother had snatched a child off a street, held her in his backyard for 18 years and fathered two of her children - was a shock for Ron Garrido.

He said in an interview with The Chronicle that he was surprised at his only sibling's alleged crimes - but he didn't doubt the story.

'It just seems so bizarre, but I can believe it,' said the 65-year-old Brentwood resident. 'I know my brother, and I can believe he did that. ... He's a fruitcake.

'My thoughts are with the poor little girl,' Ron Garrido said of Jaycee Lee Dugard, 29, who was abducted in 1991 near her family's South Lake Tahoe home. 'She was held prisoner there. She had two children with this idiot. Now she's got to start a life.'"

-- Demian Bulwa, on the real post-Woodstock backwash the rest of us have been made to endure - probably until the last Baby Boomer is dead - glad only that we made it out alive, with our country still here, but without Mary Jo Kopechne (be sure to click the link and read that spin) while still trying to make sense of what we can glean, from reading The San Francisco Chronicle.

Oops - Looks Like The Train Just Left The Track!

"Woodstock resident Marta Szabo's memoir, 'The Guru Looked Good,' tells the real-life story of a young woman pulled out of her hip New York City life to join an internationally known yoga movement headed by a glamorously beautiful female guru. The memoir follows its narrator as she moves up the hierarchy to become secretary to the guru herself, privy to a dark and secret world the public never sees. Readers get an inside look at a cult-like world in which hundreds of thousands seek solace, including the rich and famous."

-- The Poughkeepsie Journal

Um, this is a memoir - not a fictional story,....so shouldn't somebody (like Marta Szabo AND those "rich and famous" - but especially the famous) have some 'splainin' to do about "a dark and secret" but "internationally known" cult "the public never sees"?

Hmmm.

Here - let me help to get the ball rolling:

HEY TEA PARTIERS - HAVE I GOT SOMETHING TO SHOW YOU!!!

Nirvana

"At my local bookstore on the eve of the 40th anniversary of Woodstock, 1960s nostalgia is in high gear. A display table is stacked high with pricey coffee table books, each with its own variation on psychedelic rainbow lettering, each claiming to reveal the untold story of the 'peace and music' festival. I understand the lucrative business of selling those hazy memories — the Woodstock museum, Cherry Garcia ice cream, even the new movie 'Taking Woodstock.' I just can't buy into it.

It's not because, as a Gen-Xer, I feel slighted that I missed out on all the fun. It's because for me and many other children of the flower children, our rose-colored glasses are not just slightly tinted, but darkly tainted.

Along with the iconic music and fashion came myriad new religions and a foolish rush to embrace peddlers of spiritual snake oil. A flood of swamis, yogis and self-proclaimed enlightened beings preyed on hippies who were disillusioned by mainstream religion and in search of an alternative path.

By the time the mud had dried at Woodstock, Swami Prabhupada had created the Hare Krishnas and the Rev. Sun Myung Moon had founded the Unification Church — the Moonies. Communes and ashrams sprouted across America. In the 1960s, the decade now mythic for its anti-conformity, flocks of people conformed to the dictates of self-proclaimed prophets.

In 1968, the Beatles sat at the feet of the Maharishi. Consciousness-raising went mainstream. Reciting Sanskrit chants, wearing japa beads and finding a guru became chic. Everyone who was anyone read 'I Am That' and 'Autobiography of a Yogi.' Many free spirits obediently changed their names, dropped out of college and abandoned their families. Ironically, their wild-child rebellion landed them in rigidly structured cults that controlled their lives — and those of their children."

-- Jayanti Tamm, author of "Cartwheels in a Sari: A Memoir of Growing Up Cult", saying what the rest of you can't admit - you are the indoctrinated children of cultish madmen - as part of her Daily Tidings.

LSD: Let The Sixties Die

"…like many teenagers tragically lost in the Reagan ‘80s, I had Woodstock dreams, imagining some perfect purple haze of love. By the time I got to college, the cult of latter-day hippies had become a marketing phenomenon: Urban Outfitters was selling tie-dye T-shirts and groups of us made daytrips to Walden Pond to drop acid on Thoreau’s acreage. Undergraduates lived in shanties, built in front of the university president’s office at Harvard Yard, to protest investment in apartheid South Africa; all around the campus, reprints of posters advocating the 1969 student strike were thumb-tacked on kiosks and telephone poles. I was there, one of many, in love with a dream I’d had as a kid.

Today, of course, I know what LSD really stands for: let the Sixties die."

-- Elizabeth Wurtzel, in a piece called "Obama's Other Radical Friends", in the Wall Street Journal

Caught In A Hippie Cult Of Liars

"It wasn't true,...we just decided to make it a bit more romantic."

-- Janis Raven, public relations person for the, recently deceased, English entrepreneur, Anita Roddick (above) who deceived everyone - including people in Third World countries - after she stole her concept for The Body Shop.

"Among the major corporations which have enlisted these firms are AT&T, GM, Ford, IBM, Calvin Klein, Westinghouse, Dupont, Scott Paper, Campbell Soup, Lockheed, RCA, Procter and Gamble, All State Insurance, NEC, Boeing Aerospace, General Foods, GE, and McDonald's in-short, approximately 20% of the Fortune 500 corporations, plus innumerable smaller companies,...

...The IRS, CIA, the Army, Navy, and Air Force have all engaged these training companies. Many of the trainers, however, use techniques and promote philosophies at variance with the moral and religious convictions of employees,...Most often, these techniques and philosophies arise from the broad and variegated matrix of the so- called New Age Movement (NAM). And this fact has caused a great deal of controversy,...The core of the controversy is highlighted by Arthur Johnson's statement that 'There's a fine line between corporate culture and corporate cults.'"

-- Lawrence A. Pile giving a breakdown of some of the many companies that hired Werner Erhard (above) est, and/or The Landmark Forum, and other '70s cult-inspired groups, to "motivate" their employees. These teachings, which have now saturated Western culture and are now accepted as fact by some, were found to be deceptive and dangerous, resulting in massive lawsuits.

"I am still doing the same thing as in 1968."

-- Joel Rosenman (above) one creator of the Woodstock festival, who is now caught in Norman Hsu's pyramid scheme of Democratic fundraising.

"Dolphins, penguins, who gives a shit,...?"

-- Sting (above) the supposedly-socially conscious Sting (above) whose chef testified he is married to a woman with a "grandiose ego"; from an article called Superstar Hypocrite, which details his many deceptions, "green" pronouncements, and various ethical issues.

"Fads like astrology and be-ins, free love, newfangled drugs, the Hare Krishna movement,...dropping out,...generally thumbing the nose at the Man".

-- Charles Isherwood, describing the themes behind Hair - "one of the last Broadway musicals to saturate the culture" - which is returning to the stage for another run at ruining it, in The New York Times.

"At the heart of [Carlos Castanada's] movement was a group of intensely devoted women, all of whom were or had been his lovers. They were known as the witches, and two of them,...vanished the day after Castaneda's death,...A few weeks later, Patricia Partin, Castaneda's adopted daughter as well as his lover, also disappeared. In February 2006, a skeleton found in Death Valley, Calif., was identified through DNA analysis as Partin's."

-- Robert Marshall, in an article on "The Godfather of the New Age" for Salon.com.

"One afternoon, a young Malaysian woman had a psychotic breakdown, attacked ashram workers and was dragged away by police. I later found her at the police station, half-catatonic, mumbling 'darshan, darshan, darshan' over and over again. At dinner another evening, [my friend] pointed out a wan Austrian woman tugging around a listless little boy. She was frenzied because she'd had a dream in which Sai Baba instructed her to abandon her 7-year-old son and live on the streets as a beggar, and she didn't know whether she had the 'strength' to do it."

-- Michelle Goldberg, with an article on Sai Baba (above) the pedophile Indian guru who sells incense all over the San Francisco Bay Area, also in Salon.com.

"If he sidles up to someone who loves Tito Puente, he’ll be quick to say, 'Oh, I’ve been listening to him for years!' If he meets someone who hates Tito Puente, he’ll shed a single tear and bite his lip that he just couldn’t get Puente’s albums banned, because of that awful Republican-controlled Congress,...you can sometimes catch the duplicity.

With Hillary it’s much harder. She plans everything. Her notion of spontaneity is changing her brand of day planner without having a meeting about it first.

Bill could speak with a forked tongue on the fly. Off the cuff he said he agreed with the minority but would have voted with majority when it came to the first Gulf War. He tried pot but didn’t inhale. Monica Lewinsky had sexual contact with him, but he never had sexual contact with her.

What Bill says with rakish bluster, Hillary pulls off with schoolmarmish fog."

-- Jonah Goldberg, on Bill and Hillary Clinton (above) the '60s generation's first White House couple.