Fablespinners: Literature's Online Open Mic!

by Victor Om Shanti

In response to favorable comment concerning my recent publication here, August 12, 2005, of "Yo Grito De Lloras (Me recuerda el PSJ)", I wrote the following:

Thanks for your comments and your offer to ride your pony to Crawford to read it to the fringe elements encamped there. Make sure the pony (a la , my short-story, 'Las Zanahorias') gets real carrots as a reward.

Cindy Sheehan is a national tragedy underscoring, in part, what happens when socialism, via Medicare and HMO's, undermines mental health programs. She is a poster girl for the exploitation of those with mental disorders by those with demogogic motivations who are trying to reclaim the glory they lost after the anti-Vietnam War era past by reacting in knee-jerk fashion to oppose whatever President Bush says, even if he were to ask for consensus that the sun rises in the East. Sheehan and her type are a further demonstration that the opinions of those who arrive at decisions based on their feelings are inextricably woven into their very being, no matter the overwhelming evidence against their opinions. To challenge them with logic based on evidence is to challenge their sense of their right to exist.

I can only feel pity for a woman who has lost her son, is disowned by her family for dishonoring the purpose of the life of her son, and is being divorced by her husband, most likely, for all the years that her current public manifestation of mental illness, manifested itself in their private life.

Nonetheless, I think that she should be given the benefit of hospitalization to deal with her illness and her genuine grief. I would hope, at some point, the exploiters surrounding her would be jailed for sedition.

Flashback, thirty, to forty, to fifty, years ago. I am most dumbfounded (and this is my own flaw) at the vast dichotomy between the aspirations of idealistic teens, scores of whom voluntarily gave their lives for an intellectual, albeit incorrect, social aspiration and the current real behaviors of their former leaders who survived the civil war of the seventies.

There is something particularly distasteful about 'Burn, Baby, Burn Barbeque Sauce' in it's in your face contempt for the conditions which led to the Watts Riots forty years ago. Although, it is in keeping with the evaluative criteria of Karl Marx that capitalism has showed itself a superior economic system towards a just distribution of wealth, in the crucible of history, psuedo-Marxist have failed to accept that fact. In contrast, I think it is beyond the bounds of decency for those who have realized the error to exploit within capitalism their own misguided actions which led to the deaths of hundreds and the ruin of millions who had sincerely believed in them and their flawed philosophy.

I was not so surprised, and I know it wouldn't at the time have made any difference but to elevate his stature, that in the period of the Second Civil War, Eldredge Cleaver was a paid employee of the government of North Vietnam, as well as, an autobiographically admitted serial rapist, murderer, thief and adamant Biblically based supporter of wife beating. At some other point, maybe, you could explain to me the common, enraging, phenomenon of Kathleen Cleaver, who, the scion of a U.S. diplomat, educated at the finest Ivy League schools, Doctorate in Law from Yale, internationally traveled, not to mention, extraordinarily beautiful, was drawn to Eldredge like a moth to a flame.

There still exists implementation of the same error by those who champion capitalism and the original interpretation of the U.S. constitution's federal democracy. That is an absence of teaching the fundamentals of the Constitution and the benefits of capitalism. Back in the day, when J. Edgar Hoover waged covert war on the Rainbow Coalition (not the usurpation of Jesse Jackson, but an amalgam of the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords Party, The Young Patriot Party, The Red Guard (I Wor Kuen), The American Indian Movement, and MECHA) and as is the condition now, with nauseating political correctness, there is little implementation of educational policy which would instruct just why socialism/communism is more emotionally satisfying, in the short term, but is vastly more evil, in insidious and overt ways, than "evil capitalism" in the long run.

Had such instruction been taught by the survivors of the Great Anti-Fascist War, many of the children of the successful would not have been driven toward socialism by feelings of guilt, and, the Civil Rights Movement, perhaps, would not have fatally detoured from a road which demanded participation in the American system of politics and economics to a side trail of Marxist/Maoist Communism, and by extention, the anarchy which, today, is the Demi-Commie Party of Howard Dean,M.D.

If the survivors of the debacle of the Vietnam War/Second Civil War era would instruct the current generation, then perhaps, the motivation of the Islamo-fascists can be understood in proper context and defeated; the death headedness of gangsta culture might better be transformed into energy of civic upliftment rather than an effective agent maintaining slavery by other means.

It is in that spirit of reforming education that I wrote and published "Yo Grito De Lloras". It is an unabashed penance and plea for absolution for the authoring and publications I did during that period.

However, given the lingering influence Socialist/Communist philosophy has within mass media, there is still considerable work to do in order to repair the damage caused by us in the past.

I find it disturbing, or perhaps, it is grief over the loss of an opinion, that who I believed was the greatest intellectual I ever personally met, Angela Y. Davis, Ph.D., based on her easy access to an encyclopedic range of knowledge, is in reality a "feeler", not an intellectual, despite graduating magna cum laude, and a member of Phi Beta Kappa. I have reached that conclusion because of the preponderance of the evidence. She insists upon still championing communism, despite the facts of history.

"I still consider myself a socialist. What we learned from the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European socialist countries has made me more insistent on democratic forms of socialism." Time Magazine, Sept.22, 1998

Typically, her rebuttal to history is that the right persons have yet to implement the theory. That has been the excuse for pogroms which have liquidated millions and a source of my poem, "Revolution To You Is Romance".

While there exists within me an impulse to try to see good within everyone, until they demonstrate I should not have trust in them, Angela Davis goes too far in trying to wed the idealistic theory with practice when she promotes a campaign to abolish all prisons, at least in the United States, which she calls the prison industrial complex.

"Certainly there are people in prison who have committed horrendous crimes, but that should not justify treating [them]...as people who have no future -- treated to the penal repression that one finds in so many institutions."

and,

"We have a great deal of work to do to counteract the stereotypes and to recognize the humanity of so many people who are behind bars."

My thought:

Educate Our Children.
Protect and Serve The People.
Books and Bars
By Any Means Necessary!