(This post actually written on 11 August 22.)

Out on a quick gas and grocery run–the only time I listen to NPR anymore–they had a story about how the Hoovervilles, Bidenvilles, homeless encampments, continue to grow their populations, and continue to be busted up by police in some places, ‘forcing people deeper into the woods’.

American people. Your fellow citizens of this Greatest Nation.

Somehow they have millions to send Pelosi to Taiwan to wreak her damage. Somehow they have plenty for the FBI as they press their vendetta against Trump, knowing full well that ‘Voting’ and ‘Democracy’ will fail them catastrophically if they have to compete fairly against the Donald with nothing but a Biden or a Bootygig in two years.

There is always endless money too for passing wheelbarrows of it to their defense contractor cronies through puppet sinkholes like Ukraine and Afghanistan and Iraq that have nothing to do with the People or actual ‘American Interests’.

Yet never enough cash to house and feed the poor people here. Mothers? Children? Fuck ’em. Wire another billion to Zelensky.

This is the true American way, that I’m supposed to be so proud and grateful to benefit from. I continue to refuse.

There are two reasons no one ever moves to fix this.

At the level of the PMC underlings, the professional-managerial class, the individual fifty states (who, by the way, are mostly sitting on giant piles of ‘stimulus’ and Covid money and doing nothing with it besides sending out more fucking cops to harass the encampments)–a lot of people really believe that providing for the poor would only encourage ‘laziness’. Housing the poor is immoral in this view. ‘I got mine; I had to work so hard for it; why should I have to pay their way’.

At the level of real power, the people in the encampments serve as a warning to everyone else: step out of line, buck the system, refuse your vaccine, lose your job, and encampments are where you end up, bitches’.

This is our carefully designed ugly modern Empire world.

***

Before the ‘news’ came on, I listened briefly to some preacher, and he was telling the same story that Dylan’s lyrics tell:

God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son”
Abe says, “Man, you must be puttin’ me on”
God say, “No.”
Abe say, “What?”
God say, “You can do what you want Abe, but
The next time you see me comin’ you better run”
Abe says, “Where do you want this killin’ done?”
God says, “Out on Highway 61”

The preacher said correctly that the point of the episode was that God needed proof that his worshiper loved Him more than he loved his own son. If you ask me this is one shitty insecure pile of a divinity, but even that’s not the worst part of Christianity.

The problem is that no one with two brain cells to rub together believes anymore in The Resurrection in any form, much less in the promise of becoming a harp player on some heavenly cloudbase. There’s just no evidence of any kind for it, and as for taking it on “Faith”, that doesn’t even work when you’re trying to pick up an old F250 for the advertised lowball price–much less when we’re talking about prescriptions for morality and what is promised to happen to you after you die.

So instead we collectively hold on to all the worst parts of the ‘christian’ ethos, the innocent-killing old-testament parts, not because of the fake reward at the end, but because the worst parts serve the interests of our own inner worst parts. We forget all about ‘the kingdom of heaven is within you’, because we’re too busy as a culture making sure that the kingdom of Hell within us is manifested all around us Now, in every subtle greedy way imaginable.

***

The buddhistic alternative that is keeping my mind together at the moment has a number of advantages.

Buddhism only makes one tentative promise. It’s about personal liberation in this world and not about the end of all suffering in some future theoretical one.

In pure form it’s not really even a religion at all. It’s just a description of the human condition and a suggested set of prescriptions for the problems our own natures cause us. It’s like Marxism that way, but without the dogma.

Might be that the Four Noble Truths are the only spiritual practice that is actually consonant with real anarchism.

Part of me feels like going on and on, but right now I want to duck my own thoughts and live in the present moment for a bit, ‘kay?