Catherine wrote:
Thanks for all of these photos, GR...
That was a wonderful trip that I wish I could've made....maybe someday!
Don't let that dream die! Keep it on the back burner and next year might be even better. I have a dream on my own backburner to organize another trip up there next year, a well-planned trip, with a hand-picked group of people who I respect, and really photograph and document the crap out of everything we see. Whether that dream happens or not, if you and your husband are interested, you should really consider going up there. It will change you.
Catherine wrote:
I think that says it all, and having been there . . .
I've got to tell you, sloth and I, our attitudes have really changed in a way we could never have predicted before the trip. It's sort of a "fuck this" attitude that, for me, is sick yet liberating, liberating in a heightened, morbid way, like a sharp-edged maturing of the inner spirit that I'm experiencing personally. Those "wide angle" photos of the wreath laying in the link you provided reveal
exactly what I now know -- and will never forget -- from having walked the ground up there, and from having observed the media barrage upon returning home. It can probably best be summed up in the following statement I wrote for my team over at the American Town Hall:
GR wrote:
The funny thing about that trip is the further I got from it, the more it changed me, and I can see more and more how the media class and the political class are distinct groups of people from the ruling class and the working class. It's charades, and the whole of history has been, as best as possible, has been staged (Prouty would say "planned") for the public to consider, staged by conspiring siblings, or conspiring parents, figuring out how to best "break the news" to the other family members, whose tacit permission they need to complete their plans.
I can't emphasize enough the
feeling behind those words. It's almost as though I'm finally in enough spiritual pain as a human being that I'm for the first time in my life really starting to think clearly, really starting to feel the first indications of "the fog of the middle class" lifting its sleepy weight off my eyelids. People who shake Bush's hand at those staged memorial events are still sleeping, and it's sad to know they will probably
die sleeping.
I don't know if anyone reading this can relate to that. We have so much to fear in the future, in the next few weeks even -- a human being can't feel that and not be profoundly sobered. It's a terrible feeling, but it's also liberating. I'm truly cut off from ever being able to go backwards, psychologically.
As a direct result of this feeling, and of certain news items since the trip, such as the bizarre comments by Bush at the 9/15 Rose Garden news conference, I don't know that I'll be able to mentally return to the frenzy of that day in New York to the point where I can really write for you some decent, detailed notes of the many different vibes of that day; I can tell you in this moment, however, that it's surreal in a life-changing way to be on the streets of New York protesting 9/11 one moment and then in a New York Burger King the next moment, where former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer is on CNN HDTV talking with the tranparently evil mannerisms of a fascist CEO about the dangers of small "detonating devices" being carried on airplanes. One can't physically step between those two distinct pockets of air in real life and not instantly and forever realize that our contemporary politics of 9/11 are utterly staged to look a certain way, by interlocked, interchangeable classes of society who feel the fantasy concept of their own assured survival must be the only class of reality that ever existed, their sad ignorance of our universe, of MLK's "ultimate reality," its own baseless support for the insane self-destruction of nazi fashionability.
Some of you might enjoy this YouTube clip of Barrie Zwicker talking about his new book. Nine minutes. Might be worth starting a new thread. But this is an example, one of the few, where I see cause for optimism with 9/11. And in the meantime, pray for the people in Chicago, man.
Zwicker on YouTube
