AD.

foto by smith

blog doubts from a 25 year long friend:

I’m beginning to truly question some of your postings.

We who are still over here – I’d say even fighting in the trenches, maybe some of us as double agents, maybe some of us by presenting alternative views to folks for the first time in their lives (think about that) – we’re subjected constantly to religious diatribe. I’ve gotta say, the blog is starting to sound just like more of the same.  You’re beginning to sound as rigid and self-righteous as any hard-line fundamentalist christian.

So, I have questions:

What do you suggest we all do?  Sell everything we own, and follow your example?

i’ve never ever suggested anyone follow my path – i doubt they could, or would even want to (why would anyone EVER want to be me – being me is hell). in fact i’ve always espoused dylan’s, “don’t follow leaders, watch the parking meters, you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” my message since 1968 has been to look within for the truth, your own truth – never trust anything anyone outside you says. we all know what is good and bad from our OWN inner voice. if something is bad, your quiet voice inside says so. so you should say so. point your finger. say unclean. do everything in your power to get cheney and bush indicted for war crimes for mass murdering 200,000 to 800,000 iraqi civilians – 43% of them children (ergo, genocide). write your congresspersons. vote. in your case, inculcate your students. cheney and bush need to be driven from power and indicted.  my leaving america could be seen as taking the coward’s way out – i didn’t stay and fight. but then, i haven’t stopped fighting just because i left either.

What, exactly, does that do to change the political and financial makeup of America?

punish current evil and it will deter future evil, or at least slow it down, make it more cautious.  remain silent, encourage worse in the future.

What about people who have no possessions to sell, or the worth of whose possessions wouldn’t buy them a ticket to Ashtabula, let alone London? 

what does that have to do with anything?  i have created art against the bad guys and written poetry against the bad guys and spoken out against the bad guys and demonstrated against the bad guys for 42 years now. my possessions or what i was worth had nothing to do with what i did to expose these people.  in fact, my actions actually cost me money, possessions, friends, advancement and probably fame and fortune along the way. that i finally sold everything and left is because i became so disgusted with america’s lack of morality i couldn’t stomach the country’s lack of outrage anymore.

Who did you work for to get the possessions you sold, to get the money to be on this journey?  Did you check into backgrounds, refuse to work for any corporation that had ties to the government, stay steadfast to your ideals then – or did you bite the bullet and earn because you needed to take care of your mom and yourself? 

as i said above, this has nothing to do with my actions these past 42 years. i find this argument disingenuous. i spoke out when i had nothing. i spoke out when i had something. and i never attempted to acquire anything along the way. i’m not asking anyone to stop working, or to sell everything – not once have i ever suggested that.  all i say is speak out. silence is cheney and bush’s best defense. i don’t understand where this possession thing is coming from.

Would you have refused an Ohio Arts Council grant, an NEA grant, or any other government-funded chunk of change? Or a corporate collector (like, say, Metro hospitals)?

not if they offered me fair value for my product with no strings attached. and i DID pay $200 to buy back an art piece i sold for $100 once because i found out the collector thot cheney & bush’s bombing of iraqi civilians was ok… so i put twice my money where my mouth was and bought my piece back from an immoral asshole for reasons of principle.  i don’t know of anyone else who has done that. and my metro commission was for the children’s wing of the hospital, and it has brightened their days and lightened their load. so i did moral good.

What about people like Wilcox, who have young children to support?

i think the primary duty is to raise our children with a healthy attitude, as my parents did me. healthy children will lead to a healthier future.  we each have our own path to walk. it may be raising a child, it may be helping your mother, it may be teaching young students there are other moral roads to walk, it may be sacrificing your life to stop a mass murderer. as i said above, all i’ve asked of folk is to speak out. you seem to be protesting stuff i’ve not said.

Are you refusing to stay in countries that support the US?  Are you refusing to travel to countries that support torture, allow other countries’ prisons to be built within their borders? Are you refusing to fly on airlines dependent on mega-corporate fossil fuel?

no – but i have given up my own vehicles, my own electric appliances, my own mass consumption, my access to medicines, my local fame and reputation, even my marijuana use – and i am risking my life and freedom by speaking out. i think it prudent i left america, because eventually i’d be on one of their secret lists, somewhere in one of their brain camps. but again, i’ve not called on others to do any of these things you’re saying. i’ve called for folk to speak up, to vote, to think, to do what little or large thing they’re able to do. that’s all i’ve asked.

I understand you’re in free-fall, you’re taking perhaps the most major risk you’ve ever taken in your life.  I understand you need to attach huge meaning to this.  I’m not saying enormous meaning isn’t there to be found. But what I am suggesting to you is that the meaning you are searching for is yours, yours and Kathy’s alone.  You made a choice to pursue your life and art in this manner, and it will, I am certain, make you both better, richer artists, but it is a PERSONAL journey.  I respect the considerable personal integrity in your search, but I am losing respect for the fact that you appear to not to return that respect. Bush is a classic megalomaniac. Are you becoming one?

i’m sorry, but it IS also a MORAL ETHICAL journey. this is important. we’re talking mass murder here. we’re talking gutting the american constitution here. a german who was in germany before the war said that every day it became just a little worse than it was the day before. if it had gone from a to z in one week, everyone would have been up arms to stop it – but, it was just a little worse each day over a long time. each day he’d look around and see no one else seemed bothered, only him. so he kept quiet too. well, i cannot keep quiet. i’ve seen the concentration camps here. the torture techniques the nazis used are the same torture techniques cheney and bush are using, the same ones the american government is actually discussing legalizing. the fact that you know this and are silent astounds me. the fact that there’s not one mention of 1 dead iraqi baby in your questions astounds me. how can this not be important? what can possibly be more important?

I’ve been one of your lifelong friends and fans, through thin and exceedingly thick, and I need to say that the diatribes accusing all your readers – who are largely poets and artists, thinking humans perfectly capable of drawing their own conclusions and taking their own steps counter to the hell America is in now, whether subversive or overt – these sermons are actually beginning to alienate me.  At the very least, you are preaching to the converted.  I don’t think you have ANY republican, tv-addicted, torture-supporting readers.  So: you might think about who you’re casting stones at.

i naively assumed all my poet and artist readers agreed with me 100%. i thot we were all on the side of the angels here.

End of my own diatribe…  love, believe it or not, MadM

i believe you, madder me – as i said earlier. i’ve always been a morally hard person to be around… thot you all were used to this by now.  also had hoped the humorous blogs in between (like my 1st climax etc) would soften the edges of my preaching. but i am a preacher man.  no way around it.

When you sermonize with a big sweeping “you” – as in, “this is being done in your name” – no – you are not being clear at all regarding who it is you’re talking to.  “You” means everybody who’s reading.

“You” to me means anyone who remains silent.

But I guess the biggest thing for me is that you offer no solutions.  When you wrote about the man at the bus stop in Leeds who said, “America bad”, you called him uneducated. So: what else are you saying BUT “America bad?”  We KNOW that. I’m asking: how would you fix it?

actually, he was a mentally handicapped person … i felt it would be rude to say so, so changed it to uneducated. my thot at the time was even the mentally handicapped knew right from wrong, so where did that put cheney and bushy boy in the brain chain. and i have offered a path, a solution – several: DO AS YOU WOULD BE DONE. speak up. speak out. vote. teach the young the moral path. do what little or large thing you can. but DO NOT REMAIN SILENT. silence is acquiescence. silence is sin.

As a thinking, fully capable human, I have the right to question anyone who’s preaching: Bush, republicans, fundamentalists or friends. As you are preacher, I am teacher.  That’s what we do; we ask questions. You’re wanting to meet intellectuals on your travels; I think they will question you as well. cheers, MadM (you can use whatever I write in the blog…but put in the questions, too. ) (I do this to hard-line christians, too, when I have the inclination: I tend not to bother much with those I don’t care much about in the first place. It’s a big component in the fact that me own mother hasn’t spoken to me since 1991 – I asked her questions ).

i welcome questions. especially when the answers are so clear. do you welcome answers?

5 Responses

  1. Yes, I welcome answers.
    Clarification re/ questions about possessions
    (and, in fact, all questions that followed the first): those were questions asked IF you DID expect us all to sell ours and leave as well. Sometimes it’s good to ask more questions before answering. Then you might not see argument, disingenuous or not, where there are only questions.
    I have another: I don’t at all understand why you think I would be asking you questions about dead Iraqi babies…?
    Unless I’m REALLY mis-reading, your point is to be asking Bush about them.
    MadM

  2. comment from poet-ick jack:

    Your question-answer with MadM should not be a source of distress for you. She (I assume she’s a she) has a right to ask, you have a right to answer. If YOU think you are doing the right thing then you are. Criticism from friends OR enemies should not cloud your vision. Whether or not someone wants to support you isn’t a factor. I take what you say and use what is valuable to me and pass the rest without comment. I don’t need you to tell me what I WANT to hear, I need you to tell me what you think, feel, do. Whatever is good for me is good for me. Whatever isn’t I already forgot. Follow your vision, say what you say, answer the questions that come up but don’t turn aside because anyone has some problem. You are the only one who knows what you’re doing.

  3. by the way – we do have at least 4 republican tv watching blog readers that i know about… or we did. haven’t heard from them in awhile, so maybe i chased them away. and i suspect there’s a few more than that.

  4. K added this comment to Kath’s PRODUCT blog above. i’m copying it here because it is germane to this discussion. i asked folk to speak out, and lo –

    Hello Lady,

    Your pictures are great. I was excited to see that you are in Krakow – my dad and I traveled to a little town in the Carpathian mountains not far from where you are. I am a friend of Smith’s and met you once (you are great) at the opening where he had his own work for sale.

    First: It seems like Smith is getting cross examined in the “comments” for what he said about America – the torturing, the killing and all of that. As for me, I am surprised anyone that knows him would question his integrity of purpose. Actually, it would not matter whether Smith passed all of his critic’s criteria for sincerity or not – Jeez!

    Why be prompted to turn on Smith? Why not grill the government that stepped outside of the society of civilised countries? Why not look beneath the government’s publicly stated motives?

    The fact that you are in Krakow, in the general area of the world that saw wave upon wave of horror during and after the 2nd world war, makes me think of a tragedy similar to the Holocaust. When the Soviets took control of Western Ukraine, part of the area formerly known as Austria-Hungary, Stalin set out to break the peasant class. 100,000 people were killed, reduced to skeletons in the streets, because he took their stored food and ultimately the seed for future crops.

    Then, to ensure control, all of the “Intelligentsia” were systematically rounded up, tortured and killed. My grandma’s second husband was a small town mayor. He and others stood within a barbed wire enclosure, facing a firing squad. They decided to break and run, knowing, this way, some would survive. He found a stormwater pipe and crawled his escape. He was paranoid that the kgb would find him, even in the US, until the day he died.

    This was after the Germans were defeated and the US considered the Soviets to be an ally. Nobody in the US knew what was happening. Just as when the Jews were being imprisoned and killed, the world was not fully aware of what was happening. Perhaps people wondered, and felt uneasy, but they did not have complete awareness of the horrors that were happening.

    So let’s shout about it, write about it, paint about it, what ever it takes for the nicey nice complacent people in America to understand that terrible things are going on – that optimistic patriotism doesn’t make everything all better.

    Keep up the blogging, I’m hooked.

    K

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