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HERE IN THIS SUN

In this sunlight
Hot one street wooden town

With one store on the corner

Under a big unpainted porch, the screened door (its heavily scuffed bottom covered with different shaped stickers for motor oil and other products) bangs closed behind us

There’s a little bell that tinkles, but the banging’s louder although the bell keeps tinkling for a few more seconds.

They sell fishing poles and ice and bullets and pop-cycles
The lady who sells us the pop-cycles, she’s nice

Her English ain’t so good

Her husband’s isn’t neither

He talks to some hunter or fisherman near the tackle and bullets

He said hi to dad when we came in, but not to me or my brother, only dad and my sister:

“You’re a little cutie, are-en’t you?”

Now he just talks to the hunter or fisherman

It was cool in there on the clean but worn linoleum floor with wood showing through here and there

And it smells clean, like the sun hitting hot dust and pine trees and the tar in the roof, and of tidy old human places and the tangy odor of candy mixed with wood and ice cream and gun oil.

The screened door bangs again behind the hunter or fisherman and the lady says, “Bye now”

The little bell tinkles too, but the banging’s still louder

In this sunlight
Somewhere is a good ways away

In the car, hot vinyl smell and tobacco

No seat belts yet

California before the rush

All those years ago

© 2014 by Douglas C. Ferrin

SEX ON AMERICAN TELEVISION

If aliens came to Earth and watched only US network and commercial cable television, they would believe Humans had sex exclusively in bras and panties, pants, sometimes men's briefs.  

In high school in the mid 70's, when I went to any R rated movie, I was almost certain to see exposed breasts, often full female frontal nudity.  Today, one must turn to pornography, or to see any nudity in a more or less mainstream production, to pay cable series such as Spartacus or Game of Thrones. 

Also when I was in high school, a lot of teenaged girls were getting pregnant because information about sex was unavailable to them. Free and open talk about sex over the internet has made that phenomenon almost non-existent.  Plenty of teenaged girls still get pregnant, but it isn't because they don't know better.

I personally dislike pornography, and I tremble to think about 12 year olds learning about sex from the faceless acrobatics they are likely to see on the internet.  However, it seems the more proliferation of pornography that there is, the more acceptable that it becomes, and the more that young people seem to know about sex,  the more conservative the CARA team, that is, the folks at the Organization of Classification and Rating Administration (part of the Motion Picture Association of America, inc.) becomes.  We are left with a media that shows almost no beautiful nudity or tender, realistic sex (aside, perhaps, from the brutal realism of many rape scenes).

But CARA is conservative only about nudity.  Not about violence.  Bar none, the most gruesome bit of violence I've ever seen in any movie or TV show was on FX, a commercial cable network that adheres to network standards of nudity and violence, on the prime-time program Nip/Tuck. In the episode I saw (the last episode of the series I ever watched) a woman wanted an elective mastectomy.  It seemed a reasonable request, because every woman in her family's history had gotten breast cancer and many of them had died from it.  The plastic surgeons on the show unequivocally told her they would not do the operation.  The day after receiving this news the woman came into the waiting room of the surgeons' office and sawed off her breast with an electric carving knife.  One could see the viscera inside the breast; flesh and blood flew everywhere.  But I suspect many Americans were gratified that neither they, nor their impressionable children, once saw a nipple.

I recently came across this photo on the internet.  It's of a wall in a little courtyard that I know in Barcelona. I remember the first time I wandered into the courtyard (I've been back a couple of times since), in 1984, looking for a quiet place to eat my lunch. It was sunny and peaceful and birds chirped. As I munched away, I noticed all the pock marks on the walls - some holes (not shown in this photo) were maybe six inches deep and a foot and a half wide, mostly about chest height. I went up to look at the holes: the big holes had lots of little holes in them. I suddenly realized each little hole was made by a bullet and that hundreds, maybe thousands of people had been executed there.

I’m not anti-union*.  But people have been trying for decades to untangle the corrupt, steaming dung-heap of Philadelphia’s One Party political system with little success.  Philadelphia's Unions are deeply entrenched in that system, run entirely by Democrats, and of that dung-heap system they (Philadelphia's leading Democrats) should be ashamed because this is the kind of shit we have come only to expect of Republicans: graft, skimming, promises not even remotely meant to be kept in the first place, not even in the politicians’ murkiest dreams.

I’d like to give a deep and completely disingenuous thanks to a few of Phillys’ Unions for their apparent and utterly undeniable lack of interest in ethical work and in their responsibility as public servants.  The garbage people have twice failed to collect garbage or recycling, supposedly because of the snow (at least in the poorer neighborhoods, like where I live, in Germantown) – mine has been sitting out since Monday night and it is Saturday today (the temperature has been in the 50s now for two days and there is little snow left) - and have not once plowed the streets here except on Germantown Avenue and Broad Street.  I have received mail 6 times in three weeks (that’s out of 18 delivery days), when normally I get something or another every day.  The paths and sidewalks through and around Germantown's public parks remain untouched, un-shoveled, and for several weeks have been sheeted with ice, terrifying to navigate.   And have you noticed the new No Parking signs that actually make it look as if you can park there, downtown?  That’s another discussion.

All I can say, in the end, is $%#&*!!!!! You.

*I am pro-union and would like to see them re-established in places where they no longer exist.  Except for in a few cities like NYC and Philly, and in a few industries like the film industry, they have all but vanished in the United States. However corruption in any system will hurt it and turn people against it.  I am unquestionably anti-corruption.

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BE SURE TO VISIT THE ALL NEW DOUG'S DAILY MEDITATION PAGE

Facebook censored my old Meditation Page, due to the following Meditation about Ben Franklin; it was  more or less a bash against excessive government control, our legal system, the way Republicans tend to say one thing and do entirely another and so on.  Not only did they censor it, but I can post nothing new, even single words like "testing".  As soon as I refresh the page, the new post is gone.

I guess it's OK: there should probably be one site without a bunch of crazy political trolls plying their wares.  Here's what caused them to Censor me:

Franklin takes his son William to a park where they fly a kite with a key attached to it in a mild storm. A policeman sees Ben as Ben encourages his son to get the kite higher into the clouds so that they might see if electricity will run down the string and shock them. The policeman is shocked by Ben’s cavalier disregard for his son’s well-being, and Franklin is arrested on charges of culpable negligence and the reckless endangerment of his son. He is convicted and sentenced to six years hard time with a chance of parole after three.

William is sent to Boston to live with his Grandparents who eek out a living making candles from sheep fat. Just a month after William’s arrival, the shop is raided and his grandparents are charged with using animal products to make consumer items without a USDA permit. Their property is seized, their bank accounts frozen, they are fined $250,000.00 and, after 72 hours in separate holding cells in a nearby jail, they are let onto the street. Most of the cash they entered jail with is gone because they have been charged $40.00 per night each for their stay in their holding cells. After several nights in a shelter for the homeless, they begin to receive welfare and food stamps and are housed in a crack hotel in Jamaica Plains. Also discovered is the fact that the elder Franklins kept Billy out of school to help make candles. And although they schooled him very well themselves, they are found in Violation of Guardian Responsibilities, the news tells stories of them as suspected terrorists, and William is put into foster care. They are fined an additional $125,000.00 for their negligence as Guardians.. They attempt, month after month, to file suit for wrongful seizure, but since no charge has been officially filed against them, their public defender tells them that it is very difficult to file suit against any government agency when, in fact, that agency has not broken the law; it is also, says the public defender, impossible to file a counter-suit when they themselves have not been charged, nor had a suit filed against them. However, the public defender says, attempting to cheer them up, it may be possible to have some of the fines defrayed by the value of their seized property.

William’s foster parents, it is discovered too late, are scam artists. After being arrested a year later in Las Vegas, they confess to having left Billy asleep at the bottom of a highway embankment somewhere in Utah. In prison, Ben sees his son’s face, for the last time, in a picture on the side of a milk carton.

Finally paroled after four years, Franklin starts a magazine for farmers giving advice on weather conditions for the planting of crops and so forth. He is embraced by the Coalition of Organic Farmers and goes to Washington to lobby for the ban of all vegetables genetically engineered for profit and an end to inhumane veal farming. He is taken under the wing of Thomas Jefferson and soon signs the constitution.

Back in Philadelphia, where a neighbor has tipped off the FBI to the comings and goings of what appear to be suspicious Muslims, Franklin’s printing office is raided and searched under warrant. Ben’s assistant Abdul is an American born Muslim, and there appears a small advertisement in the back of his magazine for exotic spices that may have a connection with a Muslim terrorist organization in Ocala, Florida. Ben and Abdul are both taken for questioning by Homeland Security. His house, land, and the printing shop are seized by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms due to suspicion of illegal possession of firearms. Franklin, it is found, owned a blunderbuss and a half-pound of black powder, both of his own, illegal, manufacture.

During his questioning, torture, and the investigation into his suspicious activities, Franklin is asked his stance on racial issues. Why, for example, if he were against slavery, did he not emphatically state this in the Constitution that he himself had approved and signed? He explains over and over again that his influence was minimal on the majority of the Founding Fathers, and that he and Jefferson were proud to at least have gotten into it the theory of equality if not its immediate practice. “And why,” he asks, “do I get the feeling I am here exactly because of my association with a man of color and his non-Christian beliefs?” Yet he has the sinking feeling that his intellect and answers are useless in his current situation.

It is also discovered by the investigation committee that Franklin spent some time in France shortly after he founded the University of Pennsylvania; it is supposed that while in France he had sexual relations with an Algerian woman. Franklin is deemed by Homeland Security to be an enemy of American Business and of the American People by endorsing non-standard agricultural practices through his magazine and in his person as a lobbyist; this and his apparent allegiance to a France that appears indifferent to America’s military doings, and his undeniable Algerian-Muslim connections leave Franklin to be detained indefinitely. He is convicted of Terrorism and the potential manufacture of Weapons of Mass Destruction, sentenced to prison for life, without parole, said sentence to begin after indefinite Homeland Security detention (he thinks, but is never certain, he is somehow in Cuba); he is also charged for the use, sale and purchase of slaves.

Although Franklin neither owned, sold nor bought slaves, it is found during a Congressional hearing that endorsing by merely writing against, but doing no action to inhibit others’ use, purchase and sale of slaves, is tantamount to using, owning and/or buying slaves one’s self.

Franklin never hears what became of Abdul.
Two years later in prison, he sees on a television news program that his beloved Constitution is under attack. How, the pretty but daffy looking anchorwoman asks, can we live by a creed written by criminals, criminals who sanction the discrimination of people on the basis of skin color and faith? The picture cuts to a man at a podium near the Washington Monument talking to a cheering crowd of thousands. “Who are we,” the man, the spokesman for the Return to Patriotism movement asks, “To judge anyone, be they Christian, Muslim or Jew, be they Black or White?” During a close-up of the man, Franklin suddenly recognizes him as the director of the investigation committee at Homeland Security that had questioned and tortured him. “We are right,” continues the spokesman/director, “not merely because of our legacy as Keepers of the Truth, but because we are the people who love Freedom, we, and those like us, are True Patriots, and those who love America the most.”

All material at Doug's Daily Meditation ©2014 Douglas C. Ferrin

A song I recorded and performed a few years ago.

HOW TO AVOID NSA DETECTION OF COMMUNICATION

Scientists, hackers and coders have all been pouring over the problem of NSA wire and computer tapping.  Finally they have the answer:

Yes, paper mail.  After all, it's still a felony to open your paper mail, no matter who does it, unless it smells like drugs or looks like a letter bomb.  Make sure you don't blow dope smoke on your letter, or put a weird zipper thing on your letter.

Everyone's rushing back to vinal records, and everyone's bitching about losing their privacy.  The privacy is only lost with digital and electronic media.  Paper, or Analog Mail, is still legally inviolate.

Granted in most states cursive writing is no longer taught - if I were a conspiracy theorist, I would surmise the "government" is forcing our young people to communicate digitally.  I don't think that: I believe the thinking machine that dictates what goes on in public (and private) schools is more of a thought sucking machine, like a vacuum cleaner, hot air blowing out the other side.  Perhaps a better analogy is that of a computer algorithm trying to run with inadequate input.  Not to put too fine a point on the matter, school administrators are often stupid and appropriate the money they do have in all the wrong places.

I send letters to my kids, and they love it.  People still love getting hand written letter; opening the mail box and seeing the familiar handwriting of someone they like and / or love.  And face it, trying to do business with email has become difficult because email has become so low-impact.

Nothing says "Read Me" like a real piece of paper.  Which shouldn't still be made out of trees, but I'll talk about that another time.

At last, an answer on how to communicate quickly and without being spied on.  This method of communication mandates a felony charge for anyone inspecting the contents of the communication.  Full story tomorrow!