Threescore and ten plus years on this planet, watching with dismay of the man’s plunging like Lemmings over the cliff, I have some thoughts to share.

Man is a silly, random, childish, beautiful brute. He is a pure, spiritual being, burdened by baggage of pain and misdirection accumulated over his existence which is eternity, making him reactive and stupid. He does stupid things constantly. Witness the worn stones and dreams of past civilizations, tilted askew in the sands and mud now long abandoned.

Having once attempted a run at politics I learned that politicians must please everyone which is impossible. Attempting this makes him a liar. Then lies become commonplace, and attempting the tricky balance of staying afloat in a sea of pleasing all leads to not really knowing or caring what it true. You have to have a phenomenal memory to be a politician. You have to say one thing in the morning to one group something different to another group in the evening. You learn to talk slick and really never commit, sounding like you are committing while saying with heart what you think they want to hear.

We are witnessing, in January 2012, the pre-selection of a Republican candidate that can beat the democratic president Obama this year. The candidates, in trying to each be positioned for nomination by crushing each other, are providing fodder for Obama in the big final race to come. In my life I have watched this happen several times, but never has so much depended on what happens in 2012.

Perhaps it doesn’t really matter who is elected, for I feel they are all puppets, with strings pulled by the same banker puppeteers. Their masters have pulled down each country under their control until finally they have the big one, the United States, postured to crumble in a few years, having taken over the money, the media, food, energy, shelter and transportation. Their objective is unthinkable. The existing puppets in congress and the high seat have closed their eyes and are diving over the cliff toward oblivion in every policy embraced---bankrupting this great experiment with unimagined velocity. Whether a Republican president can or will do different is questionable. Each will blame the preceding contingent. The previous boy president followed his daddy’s will who was following in turn his orders.

Do you think any of the viable lying candidates will make a difference? Only Ron Paul could. But he would have to get Congress to act to implement his plan, and each of them has sold his or her soul to get and stay in office. I love Ron Paul. He is incredibly honest and my dream president. But “they” will not let this happen. Only a miracle can keep Obama, the most arrogant and flagrantly incompetent president ever, from being re-elected because he has the blacks, Hispanics, democrats, and the media, and many just who love the way he reads a monitor. They do not wish to lose their something for nothing life. Who can blame them? Please, whoever is listening, tell me I am wrong.

hitchhiking

Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac of today, January 13, 2012, had the following little poem that made me remember my hitchhiking days. When I was growing up in the country in Northwest Louisiana, about 50 miles south of Shreveport (close to Texas border) we either caught a Trailways bus or “caught a ride,” (hitchhiked.). The bus only came through once a day and went to Shreveport or somewhere southeast, so if you wanted to go somewhere you hitchhiked.

There was no danger. There were many on the road with their thumbs hiked in the air wanting a ride. I had many experiences, some great, some terrifying. Like the time my buddy Kenneth Brumley and I caught a ride with a couple of drunks. It was a two door car, and we were sitting in the back and couldn’t get out. He was all over the road and in the ditches driving 100 mph, sometimes sailing in the air, leaving the highway on the crest of a hill like you see in the movies, to crash down with a great bounce after a brief flight. Finally he stopped for gas, and both he and his passenger went into the station. Kenneth and I crawled out of the window and hid until they left. We had been taken many miles out of our way and were relieved just to be alive.

There were queers who reached out and touched my leg and I demanded to be let out then and there---wherever I was, even on a lonely stretch of road. Once a guy showed me a huge roll of hundred dollar bills while driving, then showed me a pistol to prove he was loaded but would blow anybody away that wanted his money. Most of the time it was a nice guy or couple. Caught rides on the back of pickups, or cattle trucks with plenty residue from their erstwhile bovine passengers on the bed of the truck and you took your chances on trying to find a place to sit, and more often than not, black people would be willing to help, needing help themselves most of the time.

We never thought much about hitchhiking. I would catch rides from my little town to Highway 80, which ran north and south from Shreveport all the way to New Orleans, through Baton Rouge, a distance of nearly 300 miles. I did this many times, without a single problem in the fifties.

I was a kid, still a teenager, and until I got a car this was my way of going places by myself. By the way, there were no speed limits on those two lane roads, and driving eighty and ninety was not unusual. No seat belts either or air conditioning. Probably no higher accident rate then than now. Mellow memories. I had a sense of freedom that I had forgotten. Of course, the couple hitchhiking in the poem that follows didn’t involve much freedom for them—it was a different kind of freedom. Then was Janis Joplin’s Me’n Bobby Magee a kind of freedom?. That kind of freedom feels quite wonderful as a memory.LDS



HITCHHIKERS
by Charles Simic
After a Walker Evans photograph from the thirties

Hard times brought them out early
On this dreary stretch of road
Carrying a suitcase and a bedroll
With a frying pan tied to it,
The kind you use over a campfire
When a moss-covered log is your pillow.

He's hopeful and she's ashamed
To be asking a stranger to take them
Away from here in a cloud of flying
Gravel and dust, past leafless trees
With their snarled and pointy little twigs.
A man and a woman catching a ride
To where water tastes like cherry wine.

She'll work as a maid or a waitress,
He'll pump gas or rob banks.
They'll buy a car as big as a hearse
To make their fast getaway,
Not forgetting to stop for you, mister,
If you are down on your luck yourself.