THE RICH GET RICHER AND…

The following, below, is from the London Telegraph. All I can see is that this proposed exclusive golf camp for millionaires just goes to demonstrate how, as they used to say, “filthy rich” the filthy rich are getting. This would be a place only the very very very, yes, very, rich could afford to go as they trot about the world, living high off the labor of the laboring folk. The laboring people of the world create all this wealth for these people whose only contribution is the capital. All the real creative work is done by the hourly wage earners. These displays of wealth are disgusting in a time when much of the world’s population lives in poverty, without potable water, in conditions unfitting for a pig. Read it and gnash your teeth!

[SNIP]
Donald Trump's Controversial $2.1B Scottish Golf Resort Proposal Is Rejected

London Telegraph | Auslan Cramb | November 29, 2007 11:17 PM

Donald Trump's controversial plans to build a £1billion golf resort along a stretch of unspoilt coastline have been dealt a fatal blow.

Councillors have rejected the proposals for two links courses, a five-star hotel, a golf academy, nearly 1,000 holiday homes and 500 private houses in one of the biggest single property developments seen in Scotland.
[PASTIE]

CURRENT READING

Nine Stories by Salinger, The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil, and some Marvin Bell poetry. It occurred to me recently that all I want to do in the near future is read popular science and the world's best literature while working algebra problems to exercise my logical brain. Keep my nose out of politics and pop culture. I'll bet my resolve lasts until, maybe, a minute from now.

SMIRKY AND SON


Doesn't that smirk just say it all. It says, I'm a rich, connected SOB, and you fools that support me as I grow rich at your expense are truly fools and idiots, and don't I know it. All the way to the bank, I laugh.
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ART AS RELIGION

Hello readers! After a long silence, here I am again.

The following is what I thought art and literature were during most of my adult life, even though I was not always clear about their power in my life. Unfortunately, artists and creative persons who are ahead of their culture find that they are not drawn into the circle of society nor are others drawn into the creator’s circle. So what does Ms. Dissanayake make of the avant garde? I think she has confused popular dance, which is more universal in its appeal, with art and literature that challenges conventions.

“Art, she [Ms. Dissanayake] and others have proposed, did not arise to spotlight the few, but rather to summon the many to come join the parade—a proposal not surprisingly shared by our hora teacher, Steven Brown of Simon Fraser University. Through singing, dancing, painting, telling fables of neurotic mobsters who visit psychiatrists, and otherwise engaging in what calls ‘artifying,’ people can be quickly and ebulliently drawn together, and even strangers persuaded to treat one another as kin. Through the harmonic magic of art, the relative weakness of the individual can be traded up for the strength of the hive, cohered into a social unit ready to take on the world.

“As David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary theorist at Binghamton University, said, the only social elixir of comparable strength is religion, another impulse that spans cultures and time.”

FALLING DOWN FALL


It’s Fall definitely now in November, and, finally, the cottonwoods are changing (see photo), but my buddy in Erie PA tells me it’s in the 60s there while in Vancouver it is in the 50s today. What’s up wid dat? So, today, I was much depressed thinking of how many ways health insurers from private to Medicare try to shift as much expense onto the client as they can and do so in very sneaky ways so that you don’t see it coming until it’s halfway up your butt. It’s stealth insurance for sure. Then, also, today, I hear that my PSA jumped a little bit more than one point and that scares me since it’s that old black prostate cancer that killed my dad, a very aggressive form of it. And he died at age 77, and, as anyone who reads this blog knows, I turned 70 in October. So I’m more scared than I let myself in on until one minute I’m talking to a buddy about our lives and, suddenly, it hits me that any plans we make for too far in the future to see each other again, might be too late. Then I got a tingling sense of fear all the way from my funny bones in my elbows, all around the chest cavity into my heart.


One good thing about my walk today is that the old blue heron is back. I thought that when the city poisoned the blackberry bushes on the little isthmus where he spends a lot of time and cut down all the vegetation there that, perhaps, they scared the old bird away or, maybe, killed him with poison. But there he was today sitting atop one of his favorite pilings. Picture included.
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PALIMPSEST/GORE VIDAL

Just finished reading Palimpsest, Gore Vidal’s memoir of his life in the late 40s, the 50s and into the 1960s. Gay and atheist, he’s an inspiration to me, a decidedly heterosexual American male and atheist, myself. I don’t know if he knows it, but all his own frailties show through in Palimpsest. I can see him being from time to time as petty and as vain as those he castigates and reveals in his memoir, but, then, so often, reading him, I also see myself, being the same thing. In fact all humanity is present in his memoir. None of us is free of the vanities Gore writes about. It’s been a long time since I laughed aloud reading a book, but Gore made me laugh, aloud and freely. Interesting—when laughing aloud in an espresso joint, where many tender sensibilities abound, one catches nearby talkers wince as they wonder if one is laughing at them. I noticed that more than once.

“When Orwell writes, ‘Spain,’ or Hazlitt, ‘Napoleon,’ one's eyelids droop, Surely this does not happen when I write ‘Ron and Nancy’.... At least my characters are inherently comic, or so I find them. Today, I wonder why I am so content, inhabiting as I do a body so keen to disassemble. Then I realize why, perfect day to one side: I do not want anything, I am past all serious desire for anything—at the moment, anyway. The Buddha was right: To want is to suffer.” —Vidal, p.174

Today has also been a perfect day for me after a troubled Sunday when everything in my life seemed empty and purposeless. How odd that those days still come at my age of 70, and they always come when I am still taking myself to task for not having succeeded at that or this, when I still think I want something more than a sunny, coolish walk beside the Columbia River in the glittering light. This morning, I was also a Buddhist. Like my wife.

“I recall now, something that Jack [Kennedy] had observed about the great of this world. ‘In this… uh… job you get to meet just about everybody. You get to know all the big movers and shakers, and the thing that most strikes me about them is how second-rate they really are.’ He said this with some wonder, even wistfulness—as if he had really wanted to be impressed and wasn’t.” —Vidal, p. 378

“During my ten years in the wilderness, a good deal had happened in literature. The Beats had for a time flourished, and many of us were alarmed. Was this what writing was destined to be—an endless report on what one had done the night before while listing the names of the all-alike towns that one sped through on the ever-same road? Although, as writers, Kerouac and Burroughs were not much different from such conventional writers as Philip Roth and John Updike, I feared that their imitators would, like the executors of some inexorable Gresham's law, drive literature itself out the window. All this proved to be a false alarm. Their imitators were few, while the originals either died or did not continue, and literature went out the window anyway.” —Vidal, p. 410

The ten years Gore speaks of as “wilderness” are the years during which he vowed to make himself financially independent so that he could write whatever he chose to write and live as he wanted to live. He set himself five years but it took ten, still he accomplished it. And the novel continues to die a slow death. Though opera and classical music are further along in their decline, so the novel, a Johnny-come-lately compared to those two, is following slowly behind, leaving the stage. I would mourn their passing, but, if the hope of life is that someday true peace and prosperity could reign here on Earth, I can see no evidence that the arts have contributed to that peace or prosperity. No more than has religion. Could Plato have been right when he wished to ban poets from his Republic?