Posts
since Wed, 26 Dec 2007 20:04:17.
Jim Kirwan - kirwanstudios@sbcglobal.net
"I saw an interesting program on PBS a while back - it was about the Depression and how farmers lined up at auctions, where their neighbors' farms were auctioned off. They wouldn't let outsiders in to the auction and instead forced the price down to a few dollars, which they then got together among themselves and bought the farm being auctioned off. That done, they gave the farm right back to the original owner.
Wonder if that kind of community spirit would rise today?" Hanna
That the question has to be asked is proof enough that this could NEVER happen now. The 'Oakies' of that day had almost nothing physical, but they did have a sense of real community (that is they equally subscribed to fighting both the Fascist-Capitalists and the twisted-Communists), along almost every "ism" of the time. Basically they did not "JOIN" anything because they did not need to, it was one of those freakish moments in history when some common people intuitively understood what was right and what was not. The only garbage they seemed to buy into was that other curse of slavery - formalized religion - and that's what did them in, because they never saw it coming. If they had decoded the Elmer Gantry's as easily as they understood the greed of the bankers and the fascism of the local politicians - they would have survived: but that was not to be.
What killed almost all the 'Oakies' (then) was their failure to gauge the inhumanity of their supposedly fellow human beings. They were given flyers that promised jobs at a decent rate of pay out in 'Cullyfornya' - and as they had plowed their impoverished lands too deep (and consequently lost all the top-soil) to the Dust Bowl: They packed it in: from Missouri , Kansas , Arkansas , Texas and Oklahoma , and headed West, for the paper promise of a whole "new life."
The Oakies took everything they had and piled on to whatever vehicle they could find, along with all their family members (the old included), and began what appeared to be 'a migration' but was in reality just another right-wing reshuffle of the wealth: in which the Oakies became the new immigrants in California - more slave-wage meat to be used and discarded in the fascist machinery of the day. [Immortalized in another early film called Metropolis - that was remade in 1984 - with a fantastic new soundtrack of that year].
The really interesting anomaly about the Oakies is that they were all armed, because side arms and or shotguns were just part of being farmers; so they packed the weapons in with their shovels and hoes and other "tools" when they left for the promised-land. The California Guard saw only the huge numbers of ragged dirty people, and their guns. They could barely understand the hardscrabble language and the determination to survive on the kind of slop what they would not have fed their dogs - but when the cops saw those weapons, the chances of the Oakies to be able to survive completely disappeared. The 1950's film of the Grapes of Wrath was typically another Hollywood re-writing of the actual history - and it was not just a lie but a series of lies to cover-up the true history (yet again), of still another part of their mega-creation called "Manifest Destiny." This was not just crap, it was fetid garbage interlaced with that ever-present razor-wire of self-serving idioms that have worked so well since the Disunited States began this hostile-takeover of a place that was never theirs: This was and is the American-version of Palestine: As it existed several hundred years ago ~ and they were greatly assisted in this theft by the Robber-Baron's own very special-creation ~ the Railroad Barons that "United the Nation" through slave-labor, brutality and raw greed.
The migrations surrounding the Dust Bowl happened shortly after the Slaughter at Wounded-Knee which this "government" has labeled as the end of the 400 year old war against the native population in (north) ' America .' So you see Hanna we have set the example for what the fascist Zionists are doing in Palestine , because they're simply following our example, of what we did to those that owned this land before our forefathers knew this continent even existed. Maybe that's why so many simply chose not to see, not to know the full extent of the Zionists slaughter of the Palestinians in Gaza and throughout the last sixty years?
The point I'm making here is that "we" have not even known what that spirit of individuality, that fire in the mind, of the willingness to work to achieve a better tomorrow is even remotely about. Because long, long ago we sold our souls along with whatever was left of our reputations for even less than a song. . . and now we have no idea of what to do or how to escape this human-tiger-cage that we've made for ourselves.
San Francisco found itself in a similar situation way back when - and their answer to this problem was to get some rope and go down to City Hall where they dragged the mayor and another political thug out of their offices and into the streets where they used the rope and the city's light poles to hang them in broad daylight. Thus was born the political idea (here) of rough and swift political justice, for major corruptions that cheated the public in the name of private profits. Since that time the government and its thugs have done much to discredit this idea as being 'completely beyond the pale' - Because if Vigilantism had caught on; it might have been a lot harder to screw us all with such frequency, and so thoroughly today.
A more recent film has updated this idea: it's called "V is for Vendetta" and while it's a future-illusion based upon a historical set of facts, what it's really about is taking back what actually has supposedly always belonged to all of us.
I wish things were otherwise Hanna, but Americans have lost the mythic idea of living together with anyone but themselves alone. This ' Reaganistic State ' of "ME, MY, & MINE" needs to be totally destroyed, and it looks like it soon shall be: To be replaced, of course, with something much, much worse; the idealized and totally barbaric fascism of the Illuminati and all their blood-sucking friends. It's really kind of fitting that these self-absorbed assholes will be getting the kind of end that they will suffer, of course the SILENT and COWARDLY will also die, along those that tried to stop this shit from taking over everything in sight.
This is what we get for allowing the theft of virtually everything we claimed to call our own, to go unpunished. This is also what happens when all that any society does too AVOID the past like the embrace of death itself - (just as we're doing now) is exactly like what we're allowing the Obamanation to do when they say "look ONLY toward the future" because the past must never be repeated. That's a total oxymoron and should be inscribed upon the tomb of this Republic. It would be except that there will never be a formal burial: because all that there will be, will be buried under miles of rubble. That's what we shall have because we did nothing about the graveyard LBJ created above, way back in 1966.
Many times of course; good people tried to build, to create, some even sought to get beyond compensation, to actually try and live according to some basic set of principles (beyond greed and lust). Some actually thought they could bring those long dead PROMISES, to life ~ but like Barack all most of them did was TALK. Hell some even believed that those ideas on the aging-parchments could be lived amid the stench of this corruption, but these wounds go too deep. They began as paper-cuts by the thousand: but they have remained untreated and for two-hundred years so that the entire body-politic has been covered in the gangrenous stench of its own rotting life.
To answer your question Hanna; "Community Spirit" is something that has clearly been hijacked by the mob that believes that it, and it alone, is entitled to everything that the rest of us have had to earn - ergo - allowing something as idealistic as an actual "Community Spirit" to take root would be anathema to those very SPECIAL*PEOPLE that still run this dump!
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