The Days of the Dead

Horror as the background music, or Muzak, of life:

http://www.counterpunch.org/jw10262010.html

A few months after that night drinking beers at Fort Hood, I was again in Killeen, Texas. A taxi driver bringing me in from the bus station told me he had planned to be career military, but things changed when he did his time in Iraq. Now his wife was a few months from getting out of the army herself, he said, and then they would leave this bleached, desiccated town, this awful swathe of beige and neon and yellow ribbons in the middle of nowhere, and do something else. Other than that, he didn’t want to talk about Iraq. We rode through the nighttime streets in a thick silence. Outside the motel he turned toward me as he made change. It was a cheap place with brash lighting that cut slantwise through the taxi window and gave one side of his brown, angular face an intense clarity. He looked at me. “I killed a family,” he said. “At a checkpoint. I killed them all.” That was it. I took the change, and he drove off. 

JoAnn Wypijewski is on the road in a ’63 Valiant, sending stories to CounterPunch as she goes. She can be reached at jwyp@earthlink.com

Spinning Wild*

Work kills, the spirit, too:

http://counterpunch.org/wypijewski04292009.html

55% of What? Shotwell, where are you?:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/transport/5234537/Unions-could-own-55pc-of-Chrysler.html

Perfect example of how confused we are:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/chi-talk-colbertapr29,0,1905472.column

**************************************

WooWee BigDaddy...

Living surrounded by opinionated spin is hell. It's easy to grab on a passing lie and go for a long ride far away from your grounded beliefs. Making your way back to what you know as right is called responsibility and standing strong while mental trains of thought want to take you to sweet and promising places, is called integrity.

There is an entire industry in this country called Public Relations populated by "spinmeisters". Their job is to influence us to accept the most unappealing, least cost effective and most tragic human conditions imaginable. They are quite successful at what they do. They are paid to lie and get paid top dollar (at least the firms do, you can always get a wage slave to do the dirty work. It's just their day job.) Getting an individual to decide against his/her best interest must be easy, how else do you explain the current economic crisis founded on massive debt? Convincing someone to sign a note. payable for the next 30 years without missing a payment doesn't seem logical to me, but it's the foundation of this so-called American Dream. How many people have 72 months of car payments? Nonsensical as it is, there must be plenty.

As long as the television is on in your home, you are being spun. Your values are being questioned, your kindness is being ridiculed, you are being misled by PR firm sponsored talking heads. They have an agenda for us and it ain't good, but the truly sick part of this is we will make it happen, not them. We will call for our own demise. We will rationalize the most atrocious behavior, as we do on foreign wars, but this time it will be in your neighborhood. We will act like we know what's best for us, simple, it will be what is worst for us. Handing over decision making power to an appointed agency, recognizing the person with the gun is right. Distrusting our neighbors, friends who speak out against it will be suspect and disappeared without comment.

This culture is one of deception and delusion. It has become a fine art and profitable, respectable endeavor to trick the population and cover for those power hungry and corrupt, defending the people haters. The ones well grounded and clear of thought, free of cognitive dissonance, and with the ability to live in an unvarnished, unperfumed world find each other. They hold on tight knowing the masses are going to suffer and the overseeing forces will come and gather the deprogrammed and no more allow them to teach truth, beauty and kindness.