Falling Leaf Review
WINTER 2018
THE FALLING LEAF REVIEW
WINTER 2018
1
Falling Leaf Review
WINTER 2018
ALL RIGHT'S RESERVED ALL LITERARY AND PHOTOGRAPHIC CONTENT © Jay V. Ruvolo 2017 fallingleafreview@hotmail.com
2
Falling Leaf Review
WINTER 2018
THE FALLING LEAF REVIEW WINTER 2018 © JAY V. RUVOLO 2017 PUBLISHING & CONTRIBUTING EDITOR
JAY V. RUVOLO 3
Falling Leaf Review
WINTER 2018
ISBN 9781939739889 4
Falling Leaf Review
WINTER 2018
CONTENTS FICTIONS TOTALITARIAN CAPITALIST AMERICA [FICTION] A NON-WHITE CAUCASIAN SPEAKS OF BLACK LIVES MATTER [FICTION] POLITICS AND THE NEW POLITIQUE [FICTION] TOTALITARIAN [FICTION] CAIN [FICTION] HOP-SCOTCH [FICTION] IN EVERY FACE I MEET [FICTION] FIGHT AGAINST INEQUALITY [FICTION] HOW BLOGGING IS WHAT ANOTHER ME DOES [FICTION]
5
Falling Leaf Review
WINTER 2018
6
Falling Leaf Review
WINTER 2018
TOTALITARIAN CAPITALIST AMERICA [FICTION] Centralized government is not a necessary requirement of a totalitarian government. Totalitarianism can manifest in a society with a government as structurally de-centralized as ours, or should I say, nominally de-centralized rather than structurally? However, centralization has been the hallmark of American governmental moves, although, policies and programs run through the federal government or with federal oversight, or with federal monetary support is not exactly what I mean by centralization; however, it has become the fixed point in most American critique of American liberal reforms, or many attempts from government policy to manage or influence or sponsor a change in social behavior; that is, turning our eye from being fixed on the role of ourselves as a People into one where we become a Public, the latter always in service to the State. American conservative critique of what they call in their multiplicity of confusion and confusing rhetoric, Big Government, is not withstanding my critique of totalitarianism in America, whereby government does want the People to become wholly and exclusively a Public. The single most frequently present denotation for Totalitarianism remains "subservience to the State," and so, in this way, the push by government in its influence and authority to transform the People into a Public has been one of the greatest designs in the move to a more firmly present Totalitarianism in America, herein a Bourgeois Capitalist one, in as much and in direct proportion to how the Soviet Union was a Pseudo Anti-Bourgeois Totalitarian Communist State. Flip the coin, my brothers and sisters. The masses are assumed to be classless in America--the classless society one of the foremost messages Nazis propaganda delivered to the German People, transforming the latter into a State serving Public in no time. One could say that a Democratic People had never formed, so the Totalitarian model was always present in pretext. The idea only has to be firmly placed, firmly believed, become a medium itself the message, for this to become virtual reality politically, even if the class structure is reordered and re-presented in a way that deflects, detracts, has your eye set somewhere else on something other . . . We are no longer a People with density enough to counter-balance the weight of State, but a Public that always remains the people minimized yet maximized in and for service of the State or the government bureaus who we have all been co-opted into membership, in a subservient role. Just go to any bureau with questions and you soon find out that no one there will anticipate your needs, or form your confusion or questions into real help. You will be given a game of hop-scotch to play until you figure out exactly what you need as if bureaucrats were only computer terminals of self service. You have to know as much as the bureaucrat, which means you should never have questions because as Kennedy said, ask not what 7
Falling Leaf Review
WINTER 2018
8
Falling Leaf Review
WINTER 2018
your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country because the State is no longer going to serve the People. Everyone running government administration is meant to keep government a government of the government, by the government and for the government, so long as the government serves Power and Money; and in this way, it shall not perish. Government is certainly not for ourselves. Totalitarian structures in a society need not only be aligned with Communism, a failure on American Political Science to grapple with this as ideas trickle and seep through the rocks of American ideology (?), American journalism (?), common parlance in America? Yes, and yes, and yes again, only without the gain I would hope understanding could receive, perceive, only now deceiving. Do not be duped by restrictive definitions of 'totalitarian' that you find formed by the dogmas of Americanism, the super-category that embraces both Democrat and Republican, now virtually traditionally; both of them, anyway, since the close of the Second World War . . . the only time in our history when both parties aligned themselves in a strictly outlined and firmly established coalition . . . but ultimately to the detriment of future party politics, especially for the People. As long as we allow the Media to become our messages, allow the Monied and Power Elite to remain the Media elite; allow the latter, as Chomsky reminded us thirty years ago, to be "effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function"; yes, as long as we allow this Media (in place of a Folk connection to more traditional and grassroots wisdom) to convince us that Black and White live in mutually exclusive worlds, that is, that we have impenetrably distinct realities apart, that there is no human commonality and that free-will is a lie, we will be subject to the determinisms of State, forming a neoliberal global order managed by Washington Consensus. People, no more; the Public supporting the State for which it stands. And yes, the Public is, the People are. But this We the People must always remain a comprehensive of individuals, each one macrocosmic in his or her relationship to all categories of social action and interaction in and with all other institutions. As long as these conditions of subservience and abandonment remain, there will be no democracy, only what is garnered as privilege by the new standing order of an American Bourgeois Capitalist Totalitarianism, whether that be through media serving a more robust propaganda function (and all good propaganda injects truth in what it says, uses truth and half-truth to form its images and make it less likely that it can be easily dismissed), or by government influence selling the idea of the People serving the State is what true Patriotism is . . . please reference both JFK and Obama: Obama's age of service, and JFK's Ask not what your country can do for you . . . both of which have come to mean: we aren't going to do anything for you anymore, the State says and 9
Falling Leaf Review
WINTER 2018
resays, again and again without gain for anyone but itself, the State having taken the place of God. The media is already fully entrenched in the Coporatocracy, cannot possibly defend the People against Power or the Monied Elite. This, I would like to say, of course, does not make me an American Conservative, but I am sure I will be adopted and vilified by some in either camp(?) . . . more metaphors from warfare? Of course--we are war-like in virtually everything we do societally, so how is it that it dos not become hostility following hostility . . . Politics a new Sporting event, a friend from work has said, and I agree with her, especially in how hostile we allow ourselves to become--only there is a virulence in party politicking today that is absent from our sporting rivalries . . . but that is only because the media has not figured out how to package the animosities into something the State can control better, not that the divisiveness does not serve the interests of Power and Money . . . voting for Trump has become just another illusionary subversion to bait subversive tendencies so as to control them in the future.
A NON WHITE CAUCASIAN SPEAKS OF BLACK LIVES MATTER [FICTION] Anyone who imagines that kneeling during the Star Spangled Banner is Un-American is grossly mistaken. He or she, however, has just as much right to be wrong and express his wrongheadedness as every one of the NFL players do to kneel during the National Anthem. I used to not stand during it at sports arenas because it had far too much in common with scenes I remembered from Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will. I know what the flag means, what it symbolizes, what respect for it is; as I do for what was once a more organically defended politicized tradition in active democracy, something we have abandoned longer ago than too many of us are willing to admit or maybe just able to recognize. I wonder how many of those who call "UnAmerican" the NFL players who kneel during the National Anthem have read the essays of Madison, Hamilton and John Jay defending ratification of the Constitution by the new State of New York (The Federalist Papers), or any of the letters in correspondence between Madison and Jefferson, or carefully, which means more than superficially skimming, the Bill of Rights or the Constitution itself, or any speech of Lincoln, particularly those of the Lincoln/Douglas debates?
10
Falling Leaf Review
WINTER 2018
Have any of these knee-jerk conservatives examined just how easily they have aligned themselves with Power and Money to the detriment of themselves, their families and their futures, that is, ours? I do wonder, but not mockingly so. Yet, I do suspect that there will be hundreds of thousands--or maybe just tens of thousands--who will find offense to take and will take it whole. But then, these are probably those who imagine that saying Blue Lives Matter as a reflex to anyone saying Black Lives Matter is appropriate--and that's just it; to say Blue Lives Matter in response to someone saying Black Lives Matter smacks more of reflex and received idea than it does organic support for police officers in the difficult job they do, as thanklessly as it often transpires. This reflex represents just that ping-pong I have been saying for decades now that we love to play in America, moreover, in any socio-political forum, ever where the discussion is rational and not overly emotional or violent. Tit-for-Tat, anyone? Saying all lives matter whenever someone says black lives matter, is beside the point, but perhaps just as much as when anyone who supports Black Lives Matter thinks the movement can be more successful in its goals by severing itself from its larger continuum, and that can be restrictive to the history of black struggle, social, political or economic. Anyone who supports BLM and in any way enacts or pronounces a policy of ethnic/racial isolationism is doomed, which does not mean that the movement in its struggle must be multiracial in its leadership. I refer to "ethnic" above because the very term African-American has been a rhetorical attempt to enter the politics of ethnicity, which is what really makes up Whiteness in America--the monolith of whiteness that some African-American counterpoints frame as a reference for White People are too overarching in their attempts to understand the politics that make up people who are often Caucasian without being White, or have been the former without having been the latter for much of our history. There are still too many Caucasians who have never shared in the benefits of, nor the preclusions from, whatever White has meant traditionally, thus what White has historically meant in America. Any attempt by anyone anywhere any-when to make a monolith of Whiteness in America is doomed to failure, that is, a failure of analysis, a failure in adequate and appropriate critique. Could this be why the media allows the marketing of the idea of Whiteness to take on this failure, so to undermine any attempt to understand race and racism by setting race in a false pretext? Thus undermining all contexts of analysis and discussion? I applaud all efforts to protest Power and Monied Elites from anyone, or any people, however the latter may choose to define themselves; and the applause extends to anyone who enacts 11
Falling Leaf Review
WINTER 2018
opposition to the influence that Power and Monied Elites have on the Media and the Government. The influence of these Elites extends to governmental authority that Power and Money back, paying back Power and Money is what subsumes most government policy. Black Lives Matter does not need me to say it is valid, that it has valence, that it needs respect, that I cannot be against it because human life/lives matter and black lives are human lives. These facts obligate me to lend support, if only in verbal ascension; how can I disagree with the statement black lives matter. To offer anything that even smacks as contrary, a 'but' put out for what reason, only neurosis can explain? Yes, I do want to say Of course, black lives matter; the "of course" is a recognition of a metaphysical veracity, not a rhetorical subtraction; it is a pronouncement of the universality of this ethical construction, but fully understanding that this is not an epistemological truth yet, although it is a Truth, the capital 'T" necessitated in capturing it as an Absolute and Transcendental evaluation: true in all places for all people for all time.
POLITICS AND THE NEW POLITIQUE [FICTION] We do moo and baa together in one or another social or public forum and call it our Ode to Freedom. Can we, though, articulate any sense of freedom other than entries by figures and calculations in the ledger books of state? Have we so relativized meaning that we can no longer say anything about anything anywhere anytime other than Who's to say? When questions we have been systematically dis-educated to ignore arise. Yes, who's to say is what everyone says when he wants his invalid assertions accepted without question. This, of course, is rooted in an idiosyncrasy of thinking, or what he confuses for thinking, usually a random passing of images or phrases in the mind. It's a great advertising ploy, this who's to say to get everyone to accept anything at any time anywhere; all opinions have become equal in weight, in value--mostly because it's been the ability to evaluate opinions that has come under the greatest assault in our acceptance of semi12
Falling Leaf Review
WINTER 2018
13
Falling Leaf Review
WINTER 2018
14
Falling Leaf Review
WINTER 2018
literacy as being good enough; everyone is a genius for fifteen-seconds, just as everyone through twelve years of school was special. If all things were relative, though, there would be nothing for anything to be relative to; so all opinions being of equal weight is absurd. Reductio ad absurdum, more literally a reduction to deafness, which is what the absurd is--a lack of sense or a sense, the sense of hearing, which is what we need to hear an argument--rhetoric being the Greek root word for the Latin oratory, all argument in classical antiquity arising in its forms in orality. Yes, of course rocks must have weight otherwise we would see them floating in the air. But what about feathers? They too must have weight, but what kind of weight in as much as we see them floating about. The steps in the process of inferring gravity can be examined--but we do not want to stay put for any revelation that what we have blurted in opinion is absurd. This is very much where we have arrived, perpetual relativity ad nauseum, ad absurdum. With this, we have reached true nihilism, a nihilism at its purest. Infinite possibility does bury as I have said before. In our mass media culture, saying anything makes it so, even if only, again, for fifteen-seconds, but that quarter of a minute is enough to sustain us in our thinking for years, or ruin us for life. There is no truth, only perpetual topicality. If we lived in Bradbury's world of Fahrenheit 451, though, all knowledge would be lost, all literature gone, burn all the books--how far from the mob that burned down the library in Alexandria do we imagine we are--not very far. Our Public Schools are reinforcing this nowness and newness as the prime and the last measure of culture, of what we need in what we read. Our Brooklyn Public Library system, where I live, has set its survival, its very existence, on circulation. All funding and distribution of money to the branches depends on circulation. Books are discarded irrespective of their intellectual worth, of their literary value or their historical significance. As I have said it's the ability to evaluate that we have undermined. This move toward gleaning the shelves of the branches of books that do not circulate is contrary to a library's chief purpose, at least traditionally. It sets the library in parallel position with bookstores. Circulation alone is as close to profit that a not-for-profit institution like the Public Library can come. But libraries are not bookstores although they are supposed to store the treasure house of our civilization, of our culture and the many cultures of the world. The reactionary response to this adopted Psychopathic Politeness has been the right wing trumpeting of rudeness. Ping pong with words and slogans, cliches and received ideas, marketing dogmas repeated and repeated and repeated while we play a game of hop-scotch with Truth or just what is true . . . the latter suffering from the pervasive and collective delusion that there is no objectivity and that any articulation of what objectivity could be or should be is a lie. 15
Falling Leaf Review
WINTER 2018
I should have seen the hand writing on the wall, as a friend of mine had said, when over the last two decades slowly, but inevitably, America shifted, en masse, to the right. Wherever you might have found yourself in the linear gradations, set horizontally in our political spectrum, that American political spectrum itself has shifted to the right, relative to a fixed and constant, albeit absolute evaluation. As I have witnessed in this America shifting to the right, whereby everyone has become a little or a lot more conservative in his or her politics . . . Black America too––yes, even African Americans . . . who had once taught us the lessons and rewards of telling it like it is--a mantra heard most specifically this way from Black America, but not entirely of Black America, as much as it was certainly a particular inevitability in American politics with respect for where the people stood in relation to power . . . yes, even African-American America has stopped telling it like it is today. What then must we say? It is not that African-Americans cannot be or have not been conservative in some or many of their political sympathies, or that African Americans could not or cannot be political conservatives as we have seen evident on the political stages of America since the days of Reagan; but the historical place of African Americans socially and economically has meant that African Americans traditionally have seen or had to see American socio-political reality refracted through a liberal prism. There has always been one or another band in the liberal spectrum of political options or policies on which an African American eye was going to focus. I have noted that many Americans might still imagine they tell it like it is--this is sadly not true. In addition to this reversal from the days of my childhood, there has been a shift within a large segment of Jewish Americans, who have also traditionally held sympathy for liberal policies or politics . . . have become more conservative as well, shifting almost en-masse to the right of wherever they were situated on the American political line. Even radicals today are less liberal and thus more conservative. To be nice or not to be nice has always skirted the acts of foolishness in one evaluation or another. Perhaps there was a time to be nice as we mean nice when we say nice in earnest about someone was to be foolish. Fools are usually nice--business men love fools and their money-flattering customers with 'nice' has always been a form of marketing. But just how nice, thus perhaps polite, fits in our pursuit of the Truth or our revelations of truths is a puzzle to me. However, polite has become the new politique, a kind of muzzle put on the people who fear being publicly impolite more than they do the loss of their freedoms and the exercise of their rights that come along with a politique from the people less than straight forward, less than direct, less than honest, less than truthful. We live in a permanent social fog of half-truths and lies; of sometimes propaganda, and always advertising, advertising, marketing.
16
Falling Leaf Review
WINTER 2018
17
Falling Leaf Review
WINTER 2018
The dogmas of contemporary finance Capitalism rule our ethics and all theories of knowledge, of what is knowable the limits of knowing. The fip-side of this are the trumpeters of haranguing and vulgarity we see from many contemporary Republicans and too many today who call themselves Conservatives.
Totalitarian [fiction] I "Totalitarian needs an expanded, more articulate definition in order for us to see how it operates in states that do not fit the conventional models of totalitarian societies," Ivan Ivanovich said to his companions sitting with him on the train. "Connotations seem to have been limited by a decrease in our historical understanding of the operations of governments, and our habit of supplanting particular examples of totalitarianism for a general and generalizable denotation over all other connotations," he said. Everyone paused, each of the others sitting with him on the facing seats aboard train number 88, the 3:00 PM, Sunday, northeast regional to Boston from New York Penn Station. They were on their way. The train left on time. He has not been noticing the stations passing. "All of us can agree that totalitarianism seeks to subordinate all aspects of individual life to the authority of the state," Nikolai Nikolaievich said, remembering perhaps his days as a Political Science student, continued through grad school when getting a Master's Degree was valued more than it is today, although he stills believes that there were many Master's candidates then who were better educated, at least more deeply read than a goodly number of PhDs today, as he would say, has said, will say again, as is his habit. "This has a certain value in our understanding except that this is a highly limiting comprehension of the complexities of totalitarian restructuring of a society;" Andrei Andreyevich added, "and that is, if we do not comprehend what the State is, how the State or how states can function and do function apart from whatever the government," he was interrupted by Ivan Ivanovich, "And how the government functions subordinately to the State, and how the state operates with, in, by and for Power," he said. 18
Falling Leaf Review
WINTER 2018
Always Power, they would have agreed. "One has to understand how Power," Andrei said, "yes, how Power, Influence and Authority operate, sometimes in unison, at other times, separately, but in what could be called coalition, cooperation--and this co-operation does not have to be grand or conspiratorial for it to achieve larger controlling effects," he added, "for it to amount to oligarchic power behind governmental authority," he insisted more emphatically, "carefully managed by a media elite in bed with or allied with Power and other Money," he said. "Yes," Nikolai interjected, "the Media elite are part of the Monied Elite." "Of course," Ivan interrupted, "America's darling liberal, Obama, was deeper in the pockets of Money than any other President, controlled, manipulated more dexterously by Money and Power than any other President beside Bill Clinton," he said. They all agree with the common analysis, have said this or that about it, one way or another, in one set of words or in another set of them, each time expressing the same or similar sentiments about an America "no longer a Democratic Republic," Ivan said. "America, a place where the People have been substituted with a more grossly state serving Public," Andrei said. Nikolai added, "This always the desire of States everywhere every-when, turn the people into a public." "Power always in alliance with Money," Andrei Andreyevich added, "these being the two sets of Elites that matter most here in America, where we have carefully excluded government officials in their authority and influence from controlling that which is usually controlled by the State in Traditional authoritarian totalitarian models," he said. "There is Power as an Elite," Ivan said, "what we might have called an Estate in a much, much older Political Science," he added. "And there is this energy, this force that is Power in this elite bloc standing monolithically in its desire to perpetuate itself," Andrei continued, "yes, to accumulate more of what it has and what it perceives it does not have, which is why Monied Elites seek to broker in Power and Power, where it is not as rich as it might want to be even in its advanced greed, seeks to exchange power for money," he said. "There can be great monied elites in a Democratic Republic, but where Money exchanges its wealth for Power and Power its power for money," Nikolai said. "Oligarchic coalition displaces democracy and seeks through the help of its allies in the media to transform the People into a State and Power and Money serving Public," Ivan said. "Yes, drones in a Capitalist Bee Hive," Andrei adds. "And they used to call the Soviet Union the Bee Hive State here in the West," Nikolai added. 19
Falling Leaf Review
WINTER 2018
"What we have in the conflict between most conservative supporters of Trump and liberal supporters of Obama is a contrast in Conservatism," their friend Pavel Pavlovich added, waking from a brief and all too shallow slumber, the shallowness of which he lamented to himself in words not even under his breath. "American Conservatism's move toward totalitarian structuring of individual life in these quite dis-United States of America is apparent to anyone who has eyes to see, except too many in America have no eyes for looking at the Truth," Pavel Pavlovich said. "We've undermined the notion of a capital 'T' Truth, along with knowledge--knowledge is no longer attainable. It has become something one can never have, like water from the moon. We have only doubt, doubt and more doubt, if you want to revise Mr. Gradgrind," Pavel Pavlovich said. [And I inquire of you if you are ready to accept these men at their word, prepared to suspend your disbelief or accept the responsibility of What if, that is, What if I were this man or that one, and not, as too many of us do, ask the most irrelevant of questions, What if Pavl were I, or what if Nikolai were I, for it is not your responsibility, which is your answerability, to wrestle the characters of any story, fictional or non fictional, allegorical or non, wrestle or wrangle or mangle or mold him or her or it into your own self image, but to understand, for example, Hamlet as Hamlet is, thus What if I were Hamlet, how would I order a hamburger at WEDNY's, or how would I board a bus to Boston? and not to say, Why does Hamlet do what he does that I would never do and so act in a way I find unbeleivable?] "You do not imagine that we have actual liberals as liberals have stood, acted, said, operated since the Age of Enlightenment--and the latter moniker is used as an historical locator in the greater continuum of time and acts, not anything that pretends to be symbolic or definitive, perhaps as character names sometimes function in fiction; however, that has been the tendency, the convention, if you will, in how the names of ages, of decades, of movements in parts of social history have functioned," he said. Pavel Pavlovich put his copy of The Trial in his shoulder bag at his feet between his legs. He looked left; he looked right; he paused with his eyes trained straight ahead at the face of Andrei Andreyevich. 20
Falling Leaf Review
WINTER 2018
21
Falling Leaf Review
WINTER 2018
II He thinks to himself, hearing himself say to himself that Donald Trump is the man in the Oval Office "who twitters away his time and mind," he mumbles over his breath, Pavel Pavlovich pauses. He looks left to the windows, right to the seat next to his, occupied by Nikolai Nikolayevich. He thinks of the book that was on his lap, spine up, spread opened. He imagines talking to his friends instead of actually talking to them at the moment. He sees them in mind, not as he would if he were looking at them, as he is looking at them, in the world, on this train, but kept in mind the way others have always been kept in his mind, one presence and another and another that he, also a presence, in mind, is among, around in a way he only hears, in mind, the voices voicing concerns there, voicing fears, articulating experiences, as everyone dos everywhere every-when . . . the talking he does do with them condensed as everything is, has been, will be, in dreams and day dreams as well, perchance to live as one does in the mind. He stands and says to his friends that he is going to walk to the dining car to get something, he does not know what, he makes clear as both friends ask him what he is going to get--"I do not know. I will see what they have," he says. No one says he will join him. Pavel walks alone to the dining car. On his way to the dining car, a full three car lengths ahead, he thinks, does not know (neither do I, although it has been said that I should, even if I do not tell). He is talking to one friend, neither Ivan, nor Nikolai, nor Andrei, but another friend he has not seen in many years, maybe a little less than many, a friend none of his travel companions (who are nonetheless good friends) ever knew. Pavel never sees himself in his dreams, nor does not he see other persons anyone speaking in his dreams dreamed at night while sleeping, or in his day dreams, waking dreams, he used to say; no. He hears only voices, disembodied voices? He asks himself as he recalls having remembered he had once considered having said. To dream or not to dream while awake you could ask, the question, no?
22
Falling Leaf Review
WINTER 2018
He asks a friend I never met, "Does anyone recall what twittering used to mean? No? Ah! The sparrows twittered under the fire-escape, and there began building their nest on top of the cable box; the swallows came to roost twittering." He has always been able to extend conversations in his head as if he were writing dialogue for a play, and ease at such that stood him well when he worked in theater here in New York, offoff Broadway, he recalls fondly, the times he assisted in directing and stage managing plays in small houses, and seeing his own one-acts and other absurdist skits performed in the same venues. He used to do a bit of theater criticism too at the time. Pavel Pavlovich pauses again. He does not wonder why he would be talking to this friend from nearly two decades ago, nor does he imagine how he would be in the position to, or if it would happen if he were to try to bridge the years by contacting him. He pauses a moment to consider the friend, whatever it was they had they called then friendship, or whatever it is that two friends think they have when they like being in each other's company, drinking companions, buddies, friends . . . this was all? No, not so--more than this or any other limiting malignant phrase put upon them by those who did not like them, those who did not understand them, those who never wanted to understand them, those who never will, those too different in temperament, in intelligence, in their level of literacy, commonly higher among them and others like them than you find in general in this here systematically under-educated semi-literate America? He asks himself many questions with mock rhetorical inflection "To twitter was to speak in a high pitched tone?" He asks himself remembering that that was something some people said in conjunction with the word long before it became what it is now to do on line. "Oh yes, to talk, perhaps rapidly, and at length, and in a trivial way . . . this explains President Trump," he says. "Does it not?" Who he is speaking to is no longer relevant; that he is speaking at all, and that you are privy to what he is saying is what is important. He usually imagines an old friend speaking to him in return, but not quite at length-sometimes it is a dialogue in the way Plato set dialogues and not as dialogue in a play would unfold. His friend from how many years ago mute as it would be if Pavel were talking to the trees, which he used to like doing when he was a boy, talking to trees in the forests he'd wander
23
Falling Leaf Review
WINTER 2018
about in, on and off the trails he'd follow, or the stream beds as they flowed in their tributary existence to the Housatonic, itself a tributary of the Connecticut River. Pavel is doing all the talking, rapidly, as if he were before a captive audience, but an audience that was listening in spite of being captive. "Twitter limits speech, does it not?" He asks. "How extended can anything on Twitter be?" He asks. "Trump does twitter away the Presidency on social media--and I do not want to hear any of this shit about the deference I am supposed to have for the being of any man as President--he is not a private citizen, and ceases to be an individual as long as he functions out of the Oval Office as the most Influential man on earth. " But there he is, the buffoon, twittering along in the old-fashioned way, all the while limiting himself in the common meaning today, yes, everyone twittering on Twitter, double entendres intended," he says. He adds, "You do know that double entendre is not French, does not exist in French, is an English language pretense of creating meaning out of literally transposed words from one language into meaning something in another." Words, words and more words spoken in-loud. III Pavel pauses in the imagined time, but not in the actual time of him speaking now in mind, sometimes the words creeping out of their imagined containment to be spoken out loud in his apartment, or among others in public, not as embarrassing for him as it might be for you, as it is sometimes for me. "More absurdity I could not find?" He asks again in mock rhetorical inflection. "This of course is not to say that all such occurrences are pretentious and erroneous. N.B. still abbreviates Nota Bene which does mean 'Note Well' in Latin. But of course this was not an abbreviation used by the Romans," he says. He says, "Nonetheless, however, moreover, Donald Trump is exactly what the Power Elite and the Monied Elite need to make you and I believe that the former Status Quo is exactly what we should want again, should have wanted all along, but were too blind? to see." He is talking to someone in his day dreamed context of giving this talk, these words, how they are formed by him in mind for speaking elsewhere, although, equally truly, now. 24
Falling Leaf Review
WINTER 2018
He pauses. "Moreover," he says, "when it returns, we will certainly be inclined to embrace it and not question it. This is either designed by, or it becomes the in-effect that is used by, Power and Monied elites to further their hegemony, a shadowy hegemony, that is. Do not forget this--Power needs the darkness, shadows, like many fungi," he says. He recalls something that Andrei Andreyevich had said one day last week, that they were to, "remember that Donald had come along just at the time when Americans were fed up with both Democrats and Republicans," yes. Pavel recalls then that Nikolai Nikolayevich had added that "both parties had just brought Government to a virtual halt," yes, "both parties had just received their lowest approval ratings in a very, very, very long time," Ivan Ivanovich had said, saying what he did in addition to what the others had said, all of them then as they are today, as they were for a few years studying together at Harvard, becoming friends there, the four of them meeting through one or another extended separations. Pavel pauses. "Yes," he says to his friends in mind, simultaneously trying to read the cryptic menu chart at the counter everyone waits at to buy the highly overpriced items on sale, "the Donald seized this discontent and turned it into a more grotesque version of Change than that which Obama had stood for, which was the change of Power and Money wearing blackface," Pavel said. "There had never been any man to occupy the Oval Office ever deeper in the pockets of the banks than Barack, and we thought Minstrel Shows were a thing of the past," Pavel Pavlovich says. "And of course there are going to be some of you wondering how a black man qualifies as Black Face," he says in address to anyone he could imagine objecting, as he has a set of fleeting faces passing him in montage. Pavel Pavlovich says. "When real fascism comes to America--and I do not mean the grotesque parade of reactionary lunatics that American Marketing strategies opportunistically use to scare you into thinking the former Status Quo was alright and perhaps better, which of course it was--no one here is going to say that White Nationalists are not scary because they are. But when we say that the former Status Quo is better than Trump, what do we mean?" He asks. 25
Falling Leaf Review
WINTER 2018
"A guy being raped in prison once a month is better than him being raped once a week, is it not?" Pavel asks. Pavel Pavlovich repeats, "So,when real fascism comes to America, it will be the Neo-liberal Globalizing Multicultural hegemony that comes to us with a renewed version of its Totalitarian Structuring as we have seen increasingly for decades now, that is, if anyone had been looking keenly enough to see. I have heard too many African American mediators and moderators on cable and off of Youtube, or on any one of any other podcast, website video or internet politicking network, say too much too many times about how we need to rethink these old laws that do not pertain to Now, of course meaning the First Amendment." He pauses. "I know Charlottesville scared the hell out of us; it was meant to scare us, but even more so to make us long for the Neo-Liberal globalizers that were Ronald Regan, Milton Friedman, Alan Greenspan, Bill Clinton, Bush I and Bush II, as well as Obama, Hilary and anyone else from among the singularly minted political coin of American Politics, heads or tails, Democrat or Republican." "Yes," Pavel Pavlovich says, "even the imbecile Trump is in this packaging because doesn't he make some of us imagine that even Regan was better than him, even preferable, and so if a Ronald Regan wore black face and tweaked his campaign to look a little bit more like what might be liberal, we would vote for that candidate--oh wait! We did," he says. "That was Barack Obama," Pavel Pavlovich adds. "All of the former mentioned persons of political interest equally and mutually supported an American Neo-Liberal Globalization intent on bringing American Totalitarian Capitalist hegemony to all quarters of the globe. The coin flip at the Fifty Yard Line every Sunday is as much a representation of our National Politics as anything we see on TV," he says. IV Pavel Pavlovich says, "Neo-liberal is not a synonym for the Politically Scientific imbecility Americans engage when they say liberal, whether they be from among the conservative boobs or those who effetely and ineffectively say, I'm a liberal. Real multicultural democratic liberty will look nothing like the Totalitarian Capitalist masquerades we enjoy--and we do enjoy them as much as we did Obama's grotesque minstrel 26
Falling Leaf Review
WINTER 2018
show in the White (emphasis on the White) House, a man in the Oval Office who had deported more people than all other Presidents in US history combined, started more armed conflicts than Bush II, spread the drone assassination campaign to all quarters of the world, violated the sovereignty of more allies and foes than any other President would have dared. Yes, Barack, the Bankers B!$%h spent one TRILLION dollars upgrading and expanding our nuclear arsenal, making fifty years of arms talks irrelevant. He tried to broker hegemony in the Ukraine creating a fiasco he has not taken responsibility for, nor has the Press imposed it on him 'and you do know that if Russia had tried to get into Mexico the way Obama had tried in the Ukraine, we would already be at war," I remember Nikolai saying Pavel Pavlovich says. Pavel Pavlovich pauses. "But Obama is a Neo-liberal Totalitarian Capitalist Globalizer par-excellent," Andrei Andreyevich said, Pavel Pavlovich recalls. "Trump is just an idiot--a dangerous one, but an idiot nonetheless; and as the KGB used to say, a useful idiot," Ivan Ivanovich said, Pavel Pavlovich recalls. . . . "Only now in the cause of Neo-Liberal Totalitarian Capitalism, not Totalitarian Communism, as the KGB's useful idiots were employed to manage," Pavel Pavlovich adds to what he remembers. "Don't think we did not learn from our former foes the Soviets, all of us increasingly less and less free the further in mind and farther in time we get from the collapse of the Soviet Union," Andrei Andreyevich said earlier in their conversations on the train begun in the waiting room of Penn Station. "Yes," Nikolai Nikolayevich added, "With the absence of the Soviet Union in geo-politics, there is less and less incentive to manage freedom in the interests of the People," he said. "Which is why the United States is looking more and more like a Third World country," Ivan Ivanovich said. "An irony too many of us fail to see because for a couple of decades now I have been hearing how I should be thankful I live in America instead of Venezuela, Viet Nam, Rwanda, Burundi, or any other place the United States being the United States should never compare itself with in order to appear better," Pavel remembers having said. "For shame," Pavel Pavlovich thinks. "But then more than 90% of all our media is owned by and controlled in their dissemination by only 6 corporations. Of course our media is not designed and meant--in its dissemination and by manipulation and framing of real news--to keep Power 27
Falling Leaf Review
WINTER 2018
and Money in the shadows, you could only believe if you were naive, stupid or systematically under-educated." "Donald is too savvy about marketing and media strategies to believe that news is fake," Pavel Pavlovich said while waiting for the train earlier. "No one savvy in marketing and the dissemination of images and text in the news is ignorant entirely of how propaganda functions," he added. "We are ruled by marketing and the strategies inherent from this, even if we do everything to curtail and control and limit markets," he said.= "How can anyone's appraisal of media in America not move too close to the press and broadcast media serving a propaganda function," Ivan Ivanovich says. "Advertising and Propaganda both serve one master when it comes to what is essential in mass dissemination," Pavel Pavlovich says to himself he said. "Mass communication, Mass Media," he concludes. "Mass society is the principle ingredient in totalitarianism," he says. Pavel pauses. Pavel continues, I recall, "I do not care if Mussolini coined the term that gives rise to ours, totalitarian; Italy did not develop a totalitarian restructuring of society in the way that Russia and later the Soviet Union did or in the way Germany under the Nazis did as well. The United States is ripe for this reordering, and not only under Trump, more effectively, and within the Orwellian Prophetic paradigm, but under the Democrats and their Wall Street Hegemony. Bandy about different terms if you will, but we are becoming entirely, as we have been developing more and more greatly into a Totalitarian Capitalist Society," Pavel Pavlovich says. "Yes, totalitarian does not have to be authoritarian in exactly the ways Nazis Germany was, or the Soviet Union was, and in all the ways Fascist Italy was not, and in every way America can be," Pavel Pavlovich says, said, will say as he has been saying and keeps on saying, words, words and more words, "it amazes me how much and how often Americans come out against free speech, hating it as much as it appears to me that they do, resenting it because it does not coincide with their love of determinism over free will, or their obsession with character assassination, as you see so often, the glee that the mob that the Public has become engages, abdicating their individual responsibility to We the People . . . monstrously grotesque in how 28
Falling Leaf Review
WINTER 2018
much closer they continue in becoming like their former foe, the Soviet Union, further and further from the core defense of freedom since the collapse of the Soviet Union–– Totalitarian Bourgeois Capitalist, for sure," he said.
Cain [a short story] "I know many people from the former Soviet Union," he said, "and the only people to have apartments in central Moscow were members of the Communist Party," he continued. "This was the word then and continues to be the word of Jewish and Non-Jewish former citizens of the Soviet Union who I am and have been friends with for years," he said, "as well as from former students in a number of ESOL programs here in NYC, in Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan; as well as four year and two year colleges in the English Departments of CUNY schools, people I talked with who had no vested interest in lying that I could determine. I mean, it seems more reasonable 29
Falling Leaf Review
WINTER 2018
to assume that former communists who had apartments in central Moscow would lie about that than those who have no position would be lying by saying those who were not Communists, were Communists, unless, as most former Communists like to say, 'these are people with the sour grapes who have to malign people who have made something of themselves here in America' . . . but then we do know how the U.S. has used former Soviets in positions of prestige or authority or influence in America, much the way the Soviets used former Nazis in East Germany and in the KGB." He paused. What more could he say? He could say plenty? He knows a guy Sergey who talks about his family suffering Anti-Semitism in all the conventionally American received ideas about Communists complete with the accepted stereotypes about the Soviet Union that he knows Americans love to hear, but that former citizens of the Soviet Union, both Jews and Non-Jews, tell you is bullshit. The speaker herein quoted will not say everything he knows--or he thinks he knows. The speaker quoted by me will, would, could, what? Who else knows more firmly what he knows about what he has been told by people from the Soviet Union . . . he will not say all? All of what? No one ever reveals all. A truth to be undenied? He certainly would reveal everything to me, is not something I should believe, but then, what could he be keeping from me that would countermand anything he has said about how former Communists are adept at manipulation of images, showing great dexterity at blending truth and lies in a confusing or confounding cocktail they love to serve to Americans in contexts they have choreographed well. No one sells the experience of Anti-Semitism better than former Communists who were also Jews, and that is a truth Americans cannot accept or believe, whether it is from denial or by cover from Ashkenazi Americans in the press who fear anything randomly expressed about Jews that cannot be framed and then marketed according to their designs or needs or however news is kept consistent with the received ideas of their consumers . . . other former Communists who might also happen to be Jews knew this, know this, milk this for every drop they can use to their own advantage, as humans everywhere will step on others to advance, taking advantage of whatever lends itself to this, I am talking about the nurture of history and nothing at all about nature. We were not friends at the time. We have not become friends in the time since. "It's interesting how many refugees to the United States I have heard say: I had to be a member of the Communist Party. Another carefully orchestrated delivery when the facts of their party membership cannot be hidden and have not hindered their entry to the United States. Former Party members have been refused entry to the US, and they had to emigrate to Israel, but let's not forget the numbers who emigrated to Israel and then used the alleged good behavior of Israeli citizenship to emigrate to the U.S. afterwards." He wanted to say that these former Communists were monstrously full of shit, but he thought again of it. 30
Falling Leaf Review
WINTER 2018
You question my omniscience? Of course you do. Omniscience is suspect, is it not? He understood what his friends from the Soviet Union were trying to tell him, and that is that no former Communist stays put, is content to be just anybody and live out his life in quiet desperation or quiet resolve that he has finAlly purged himself of his former affiliation with the Soviet Communist Party. They seek positions, worm their way into positions of influence, authority, maybe sometimes even power when their experience and knowledge is geared toward their assuming such a role. "Anyone working, let's say, in Soviet Space Agency positions, or in Russian Academia with a PhD., and had apartments in central Moscow, were members of the Communist Party. This is a fact; it is prima facia. There were academics and people in positions of research in the Soviet Union who did not become members out of integrity; others who did because it meant making more money. So, the prostitution argument of only being a member for more money is equal to a young poor Sicilian kid saying I only joined the MAFIA to make more money, so please do not consider me a criminal. Of course, there is gross even grotesque victimization in prostitution that is aligned with the power dynamics of contemporary and historical misogyny, but not so in a person choosing to become a member of the Party," he said in a mouthful. These are true irrespective of your questioning them, their possible veracity, how in conflict with one or another received ideas as dogma or not. I know how many people will call this Anti-Semitism, another trick the former Communist uses because he knows how survivalist American and Israeli Ashkenazi feel and act, ad how the specter of former Anti-Semitism(s) is used to silence anything or anyone who may only remotely be seen as a maybe possible future threat. It is one of the foremost ways the American Press serves a propaganda function for Power and Monied Elites because most Power Elites and virtually all Monied elites, if they were to have a common geopolitics, it would be Zionist. Zionists are Jewish, Zionists are Christian, they are Muslim, they are European, they are North American, they are Turkish, Israeli, Arab, whatever else they can be in a world of difference the same. "I know too many Jews from the former Republics who could tell you clearly that it was a choice one made when he or she became a member of the Communist Party," he said. "I cannot tell you how full of it too many of these claims are by former Party members," he added, "and I got this from many, many Russian Ashkenazim," he insisted, as if this in itself made it a point beyond question, something self-evident. I think it is and that it does, but then narrators, you say, have their prejudices, and no amount of omniscience takes away from the subjectivity of the narrator in the frame of his narration; thus, it could be assumed, the narration is unreliable? "Perhaps there were sour grapes for not being able to rise high enough in the Party to meet their economic aspirations," he said. This is plausible. Jewish members of the Communist Party were blocked from higher positions in the party because they were Jewish. There was certainly Anti31
Falling Leaf Review
WINTER 2018
Semitism; just not everyone you hear the claims from were its victims, nor in one to one correspondence with the stereotypical images drawn by American received ideas, prejudices and ignorance. "The Ashkenaz from Russia who cries the loudest about Anti-Semitism, I have been told by more than one Russian Jewish man and woman, was a former member of the Communist Party," he said."I had Russian Jewish friends point out the members of the Communist Party who were on a portrait photo wall of fame and honor at a Jewish Community House in Brooklyn; each of them laughing at how gullible Americans are and how much guile the old Communists still had." He paused. I paused, thinking about what he had said. I do not know what kind of thinking was required to get what he was saying. It was not very difficult. "Do not think that there were no Jews in the Communist Party because there were and had been for decades," he said he had been told. We do fear the complexities of human nature, the complexities and complications of human history. "The Party was far, far more multicultural than we are lead to believe, as multicultural, if historical analyses should help us, as any of the Czars ministries were when Russia became a multi-ethnic empire before it solidified as a nation, Rossiya," he said. But the only people American print media seem to want to listen to are the former members who have learned how to garner spotlight for their own camouflaged apologetics? I ask, not necessarily you, and not by necessity me, but you do understand the rhetoric of the question mark here. "These opinions again came to me from Russian Jews who were victims of Anti-Semitism, often at the hands of Jews in the Communist Party," he said. And I know you do not want to hear that. I know you want to malign him, disbelieve him, condemn him, accuse him, no? These are just my omniscient opinions about you who read this? Could this Institutional Jew heap upon Individual Jews his own self-fashioned Anti-Semitism? Of course he could, he had been told in one way or another, words shifting, but meaning remaining steadfast. Could this be another example of the "cruel joke" totalitarian authority has historically been so fond of? Now you have another question to consider that might fly in the face of what you have been trained to think, formed by IN-formation to believe. What then must we do? All information is just that, IN formation, putting into form is exactly what informing can do, might always do even when the intention is not in itself firstly and lastly to re-form the mind of the receiver of the information.
32
Falling Leaf Review
WINTER 2018
HOP SCOTCH A SHORT STORY PREFACE A Glad Grind A fictional essay by a fictional essayer forming a persona expositor--what could that mean? Questions beget more questions. "I assume you would ask first," he said, I say. "If you had not come to the more directly assertive question, What the hell is that supposed to mean? . . . then asking--what?" For the purposes of argument, let me say that this fictional essay is an essay as fiction, as fiction is always as it has been, a thing made. Do you understand what I am driving at? There is something about it being the result of makerly intentions, this thing an essay. This follows a similar path as poetry when poetry was always something made by poets, themselves taking what they are from the word poeta in Greek meaning maker. This idea of the poet as maker is virtually the same as how the old term playwright was understood by Shakespeare in its etymology, that is, a play-builder. The word 'wright' being used for makers and builders, as in wheelwright and shipwright; although not so much for writers, but later we can talk about that. In all Freshman Composition Writing programs and writing classes in University, we talked about mechanics. Yes, the mechanics of writing; the essay being a kind of machine? Fiction as fiction is in the ways we know, think we do anyway, or imagine it; fiction as stories are fiction when the facts of the story are not what we like to call true when they are true in the way we use trueness as opposed to falseness; but then what does that have to do with making things up; this latter having so much more to do with women and their make-up than we want to discuss sometimes. True is the opposite of fake, or pretense, or lies, or other kinds of fabrications, something I never quite understood, a fabrication being something fabricated, and fabricated being in some languages that which is factory-made, itself having a remote connection to facts being out of one kind of factory or another. Even facts are things made, the factory of the mind in its interplay with what we call reality; and thereby these things made, including facts, cannot escape their fictional-ness? Yes, Mr. Gradgrind's insistence on facts, facts, facts was nothing more than a mantra born of Victorian industrialization? Now none of anything herein made, or anywhere made, is to be imagined having been made by, nor is it to be confused with, something constructed by the mind of the actual person behind the real life author, who, as the real author, is not the fictional person in his or her entirety, as persons are multiple in the roles they play upon this stage the world everywhere for everyone all
33
Falling Leaf Review
WINTER 2018
the time for all time; no one the same person all the time everywhere with everyone; no one the same person with his wife, let's say, as he is with his mother; not with his mother the way he is with the woman cop who pulls him over for a moving violation he knows he committed; not the same person he would be with another woman cop or the same woman cop for a moving violation he was unaware he had committed; none of these former acts of wearing masks being identical, the nature of being what personality is--all personality being maskality--; of course, he would not be the same as he was in any of the former mentioned circumstances as he was with his third grade teacher, or the woman professor he had a crush on, in Freshman Composition; neither of these the same as he had with another woman Professor he did not have a crush on, which of course was different from how he was with the Freshman Composition teacher years after the crush, let's just say, as I do, herein providing examples of my theory of the Self I have developed over long years of reading, writing, thinking, rereading, rewriting, rethinking, nearly endlessly studying, professional student--who made money on being a student? What then do I say? The many selves Self is true for me so therefore must be true for any fictional Self of selves I compose. There are always layers of relationships to the writing written. I am a man who is then an author over my text who has written a story with a narrator? herein read expositor, in as much as tis is exposition and not narration; expository prose being generically distinct from narrative prose; the expositor as character who speaks what he says in exposition; but then this fictional expositor is not the real person me wearing the mask of expositor in the role of expositor that the real author me wears, actually, and not actually the real person me. There has to then be a fictional author who is wearing the mask of expositor in the story, but the latter is the fictional narrator to me?
I This has gone on too long? What then should I say except that in every piece of writing purportedly fiction, there is a set of fictional "bodies[?]," let us say personas? There is always a fictional person separate from the real person, a fictional author apart from the real author . . . an author is what a writer (as we call him or her) is always, the authority over the text, no? Even if he is not the final authority? Who is the final authority? This is getting complex or is it becoming convoluted? Real/author fictional author . . . I am not going to herein now align all the possible or potential or actual roles played by the person writing this in the real world in real time for what we could call real purposes? Herein now is the Corpus, or is that, Corpse, one connected to the other in a way etymology makes interesting to examine, even if the etymological fallacy has great validity on or in 34
Falling Leaf Review
WINTER 2018
contemporary semantics, how we are not to take the meaning of a word primarily from its etymology; a words etymology will not help you understand a word in contemporary use more so than any other means, but etymology is an interesting way to look at words. And I remember an essay by Jay Ruvolo where the author said that all former meanings are present if only as residue in a word. II Where did we expect the Republicans to go when the Democrats have been shifting ever increasingly, monolithically, to the Right--yes, ever further to right since the collapse of the Soviet Union? Even before this with Gorbachev and Regan sniffing each other's assholes like dogs forming a pack and greeting each other appropriately. Yes, my fellow American political ping pong players, the Democrats are conservatives and only maintain the moniker liberal because the Republicans have virtually en-masse jumped down the rabbit hole of conservative lunacy. You do see this, don't you? No? We have no idea what we are talking about when we bandy about terms like liberal and conservative. The confusion that has been mediated by the media--and I do love puns--yes, this serves both Power and Money Elites. With the aid of we who consume the media products controlled by Money, their hegemony has become concretized. There are only six corporations who own more than 90% of all media, print, broadcast, social, film and music. Our Press is a Free Press in direct proportion to how the State Press in the Soviet Union was PRAVDA. You do not think so? I  suspect you remain suspicious--but again, we do know too little about what we speak politically, politically in our contemporaneity and historically politically. We have allowed the President's assault on the media to soften our critique, and he has again become exactly what the Monied Elite, especially the Media-monied Elite, need to divert our attention from appropriate critique of Power and Money and how news gets disseminated. Remember, Goebbels always insisted on authentic Newsreel footage in all visual representation of news items in Nazis Germany. The Gestapo always insisted on the relativity of true facts and lies and how they could and should be combined. They insisted on the lack of utility of lying all the time. The contemporary media leaving Weinstein out to dry is only a purge necessitated by the demands of continuing to serve the Propaganda Function of Power and Money. He became un-protectable, and just like in organized crime, no one can gain too much notoriety that affects the smooth operations, or become too dangerous to the body politic of organized crime as an anti-society, less anti than mutual. Weinstein is the equivalent of a crime boss being hit. It is meant to protect the criminal organization.
35
Falling Leaf Review
WINTER 2018
We know as much about power and money as we do when we talk-talk, blah-blah-blah, about race . . . and I am almost as offended by the blanket and overly generalized lumping together of all Caucasians as White People with White Privilege, as anyone had ever been, become or is now about racist definitions of Blackness and Black People . . . as if anyone actually understood what they mean by privilege and how political privileges have worked in societies as favors and wedges between the underclasses; as those that have been used to divide the oppressed or repressed . . . as they are usually doled out by an elite as a means, once more, to divide and keep on conquering. Oh, the tangled Machiavellian webs that are woven with-out complicity. The color of the foot that wears the boot of power is irrelevant everywhere except in America, and not because it is relevant in America in ways it has never been in Africa or South America or in Asia or in the Middle east or in how color can become synonymous for differences in ethnicity or religion, but because it serves a Machiavellian end to make relevant what color the foot is that wears the boot of Power as it presses on the neck of your livelihood. You must cut off the foot that wears the boot of power irrespective of the color, the shade, the tone, the voice, the gender, the ethnic flavor of the wearer. Power is Power is Power. I am white only in the minds of African Americans who see nothing else, or can see nothing else, other than race, race, race, everywhere for everything race and racism and racist policies all to the benefit of every ethnicity irrespective of class or other social position, or history; a part of, or apart from, the dominant currents of American racism. I was only white in contrast to black, which is not how my identity was formed apart from talking to, with or about black people . . . and here we must read African American, this latter reference to black people an attempt to enter the ethnic politics that I always understood, negotiated my way in or around or through. I had assumed that blackness was one of the many other ethnic identities, which is not exactly how black people saw blackness, a point of contention and confusion and misunderstanding between let's say Italian Americans and black persons. Italo-Americans understood black as another ethnicity when they were sober, mentally or physiologically, and when they were rational, intelligent and/or educate, or compassionate. They were white when being racist, when opting for or being co-opted into a strategy of broadening Whiteness to include Caucasians that had be traditionally excluded by American Whiteness, to form alliances against the Great Society. The latter was an attempt to extend the New Deal to African Americans, as perhaps only part of the New Deal was relevant to them? Moreover, any critique of Whiteness that is over-arching in its grossest assessments, too stretched in generalizing tendencies not to become thin and fragile will not sustain itself for any meaningful change anywhere, including these (dis)United States, the People having become 36
Falling Leaf Review
WINTER 2018
more akin to a State serving Public than anything envisioned by Madison and Jefferson in the latter's We the People. If any of us had the rhetorical acumen necessary to manage Democracy and avoid becoming a State serving Public, we would be more vigorous in our strategies, socially mobile, grassroots organized, rhetorically savvy and certainly literate in a way more than merely being able to negotiate the alphabet while we superficially skim pages. But then the opposite has happened and this is exactly where Black Lives Matters has found itself stumbling where it needs to be more sure-footed--which is not to put it in diametric position with any White Suprematist/ White Nationalist Political Movement (the diametrical opposition often leading to conclusions that each op-position is heads to the other's tails, a coinflip of a singularly minted coin, which is not what this essayer is saying or intending . . .). But BLM has gotten itself tangled in the stagecraft of media-craft, often serving the needs and immediacies of the State and/or the Power Elite against the People: that is, Black People, not characters in a State Sponsored Theater; as well as We the People, not We these Other People who are going to act exactly in the manner the State needs to continue as it has all along without change. The State is creating the form-fitting space for the marketable image of subversion to emerge in order to capture it and re-present it in the media for its own State purposes. Yes, we no longer even have subversion emerging but the masquerade of subversion, the marketed advertising image of subversion. And we wonder how we have come to where we are in our political contemporaneity, how we have arrived here at point in our history where we imagine, in our dis-percveived semiliteracy that we really should be rethinking the First Amendment as something like these old laws that do not pertain to now. As if Black Lives Matters would survive the end of whatever year the First Amendment were repealed, or so semi-literately revised as to make it far too topical or situational not to undermine what it purported to support. I can't take listening to how stupid we have become. Black lives matter because human lives matter, but the facts behind the reasons and rationale for Black Lives Matter better serve Power and Money for as long they do not get addressed, thus remaining a trenchant topic of only potential discussion, all the while the media benefitting from this marketing strategy exacerbate the conditions that make dialogue virtually impossible so solutions can never be achieved. BLM is a Constitutionally supported, protected, relevant movement; it speaks to the issues of Civil Rights for all, everywhere, every-when. BLM obligates us to support it, those who fashion themselves liberal or libertarian, those of us traditional enough to call themselves Constitutionalists, those who know that I am We is true for every single simple separate person; those whose focus is the First Amendment and the four freedoms as we have said before and will continue to say whenever individuality and the Macrocosmic relationship the simple separate 37
Falling Leaf Review
WINTER 2018
38
Falling Leaf Review
WINTER 2018
39
Falling Leaf Review
WINTER 2018
person has in relationship with the State (how the People are an institution of Society, the only one with density enough to counterbalance the weight of the state. BLM speaks to the Fourth Amendment and furthers its support for this amendment, addressing how far the protections are in place for a person in his personhood; it speaks to the Eighth Amendment and allowing the 8th Amendment to cover the period of arrest and just what is cruel and unusual? However, nevertheless, moreover . . . So long as we continue to swap Affirmative or Positive Stereotypes for the Negative ones we can only imagine once offended us, or those older people we no longer listen to, as BLM as often criticized Your Grandfather's Civil Rights Movement . . . we will continue to lose our way in a myriad of media packaged images (the labyrinth awaits), lost to judging books by covers (checkerboard epistemologies to support games of hop-scotch with Truth and ping-pong with words, slogans and sound bites ever decreased in their endurance); and evaluating the content of character by the color of skin, fooled by imagining that Black People and White People have completely and mutually exclusive political realities . . . the fools they are, we are. III Of course, hop-scotch is what we should be playing with the Truth when we are not playing ping pong with received ideas packaged in slogans and cliches imitative of sound-bites, only the latter ever increasingly shortened in duration. But then this is exactly what the Media needs and uses, opportunistically where and when it has not been by design; the in-effect is just as useful for Power. Perpetual re-invention is a media mandate; flip the coin and see a separate reality. Power uses Race, as do the media, the allies of Power (the Media Elite are often part of the Monied Elite, themselves sometimes the Power Elite, other times, simply allies), to sometimes create or exacerbate social conditions of separateness in order to continue their Status Quo of ignoring poverty and the inequalities, politically and socially, that are derived from a society of fixed classes. All in-formation in America, which is disseminated through one or another medium in itself the message, shapes our thinking about how the US is a classless society, one that has arrived in this glorious Democratic/anti-Aristocratic/anti-Ecclesiastic present to fulfill the dream of Liberty for All. Now, these ignored fixed classes entrench enormous economic inequality, the direct result of a totalitarian (yes, a totalitarian) Capitalist structuring of society, the latter maintained with help from our broadcast and print media, themselves often serving a propaganda function to keep Real Power in the shadows.
40
Falling Leaf Review
WINTER 2018
Don't be fooled into thinking that the Presidency as it functions today with our help is a seat of Power designed to do anything but hold the People in suspicion. The person that is President is only at best a person of enormous influence through governmental and bureaucratic authority, something that is not in itself bad. This greatly circumscribed power is beneficial to the People, but only in so far as the People remain a skeptical We the People and not a State serving Public. This however does not mean that the President cannot do great harm--in fact, he has more ability to hurt the People than to help Them. It is We thePeople who misunderstand His role and thus our appropriate responses to his authority and his influence and his power where it is power that he has. In matters of geopolitics the President has more power to effect change and hurt a whole lot of people--it does not seem that the powers of the President reside in manners of helping people anywhere. IV Bill Clinton is probably more responsible for the mass incarceration of Black America as anyone, and yet we hail him as a great liberal leader among Americans . . . which might just be the critique of Whiteness we should continue to bear, except, I am still trying to figure out how my Northern Urban Italian-Americaness guarantees me White Privilege, unless it is through the marketing of the idea necessitated by the Elite (and in my case the NEW YORK Educational Elite establishment's clear racist-ly drawn Anti-Italianess, a manifestation of NYC's tribal political wrangling, as well as the Media Elite here in NYC as members of the Influence Elite when not exactly also part of the Power Elite or Monied Elite--the media in New York has a decided bent in who it plays as its favorites and its villains and its marketed victims). We do suffer the Nationalisms of ethnicity and race, most decidedly so here in New York City, where it's media, print and broadcast, is as full of shit, spinning shit, as any industry next to Hollywood, Academia and Congress--and yes, my fellow liberals, Congress has become an industry for millionaires and other Power Elite cronies. Yes, all of this is necessitated by the needs of an Elite to tell everyone that I am privileged, but the African-American kid in Yale who is the daughter of African American Ivy League Alumni Republican Lawyers with a gross income in the upper middle class range is not. The same people I faced racistly in NYC educationally are the same managers of the media continuing to stereotype Italo-Americans and African Americans in broadcast and film programming, delivering the message that I have nothing in common with an African-American . . . all to the benefit of other groups not mine and only partly the black bourgeoisie, while also packaging the idea that the only way young African American males can be authentically black is to be one or another form of ghetto and or gangsta, another way to keep a people down by what gets understood to be their own choosing, until such time it gets repackaged as a social condition 41
Falling Leaf Review
WINTER 2018
I am supposed to feel guilty for helping to perpetuate in a racist dynamic set against African Americans by forces we should uncover and not by the design of a media elite too savvy in marketing and packaging not to know what they are doing or what the results will be. But who controls the media controls the sets of images and identities; he who controls that, controls our sociology, particularly the sociology and social dynamics of race. Bill Clinton is more directly responsible for letting the banks off the hook in a way Democrats avoid taking responsibility for, often blaming Bush II the way idiot Trump supporters (redundancy intended) blame Obama for the slow government response to the aftermath of Katrina––KATRINA WAS 2005!!!! Obama was not even President. But you can trace 2008 back to Clinton's White House and the measures that gave us the Too Big to Fail mind-set that lead to a decade of speculation and laissez-faire wild west economics, all to the detriment of the People and more greatly benefitting the Elite who gained an ever increasing elitist restructuring of society under an ever more Powerful Power Elite and an ever greater Political Manipulation by the oligarchs of power and money. Bill Clinton attacked the New Deal in ways no Republican had, or could have, and the most ardent conservatives at the time could only dream of doing as Bill had done. The heinous, oily, charlatan, devil motherfucker that he was--and do not think that he did not cost Hilary the election. Anyone who thinks he is a liberal and likes Bill Clinton is an asshole as far as I am concerned. I had a friend who had a great deal of respect for until he told me he liked Bill Clinton. Never again the same feelings. We continue to play hopscotch with the words 'conservative' and 'liberal,' yet in the ways American Liberalism has failed, there are no traditional liberals anywhere in the world who could mistake most of the Democrats and American Liberals as coming from anywhere but the right of Eternal Political Left and Right, maybe hovering the line at best, but most of them for sure over the line on the side of the Right, which is why the Republicans and American Conservatives have fallen off a cliff of lunacy, solipsism, arrogance and mean-spiritedness. Yes, of course, in face of true Totalitarianism or Royal Absolutism, even Trump could appear left of that, but let us not fall into the trap that most Americans have, loving their games of Hop Scotch with Truth on checkered hop scotch boards. We have become as blind as Lear, responding reflexively with one knee jerk Democrat or Republican outcry or another, as when we fled Bernie Sanders when too many who knew better called him a socialist, understanding how that would read in the media. But perhaps there were too many who should have known better who did not know better, having formed their political consciousness in an America that is really only conservative and more conservative, a place where real liberals do not exist.
42
Falling Leaf Review
WINTER 2018
IN EVERY FACE I MEET short story Diatribes can be useful. The force of energy from them can be used to shake up, to startle, to put on their heels. What am I trying to say instead of just saying? I do not always prescribe to the maxim--thus using it as my mantra--that more is less. No. Sometimes more is more, sometimes right action, which includes right speech, demands that more words are required; an insistence on less can become restricting, constricting, strangling? I might ask if I were to set myself in one or another pose. I do not doubt my words, or my ability to use them. Let me say in example that Joyce showed an inordinate economy in his Ullyses, yes, he did. I would hate to imagine what a lesser writer would have accomplished . . . how verbose it really would have been. No, doubt is not the highest wisdom, nor is less always and forever more, evermore, nevermore never more. Who's counting; Americans are in love with ledger books in place of any other necessitated book. The ledger keeps accounts with our ethics, our morality (if you can get your mind around the idea that ethics and morality have distinctions) our mores. Let me stop right here--now let me say that . . . if I hear one more Post-Structuralist, anti-humanist, Heideggerean, Positivist, old neo-Franco-intellectual informed determinist critique on race or white privilege from any one of too many Orthodox Politically Correct Cultural Marxist dogmatics (ironically and contradictorily allowing Marketing and not the market-place to determine their course), I will list them on the flip-side of all Trumpeting Proto-Fascist White Suprematist Anti-humanist determinisms I also hear haranguing people on the internet from any one of the nefarious motherfuckers calling themselves The Alt-Right, as if what they are has changed with the strategic shift in title; as if Kentucky Fried Chicken ceased to be Fried the moment we started calling it KFC. And I have already said this many times, and will likely say it many more--it's a great analogy. When Neo-Jacobins Clubs form across America,  we'll know who the enemies are. I used to list myself as Non-White Caucasian in college, so as far as I am concerned, from this day forward, anyone Black or White or Other will be an enemy of humanity, so long as anything but a universal humanity is the talk-talk, right along with every other semi-literate tirade from any college educated American under forty who has developed, in the bubble he or she has grown up in, any one or more of many allergies to life, living it in a way marketplace exchange allows but marketing strategies disallow . . . just as much as any of Trump's Old White Conservatives will remain as they have been enemies to this Humanist humanity only ever human when humane . . . and when Irish and Italian Urban raised Catholics find themselves in any camp with Evangelical Protestant Conservatives, right along with other Wonder Bread Republicans, I know America is lost.
43
Falling Leaf Review
WINTER 2018
If you identify with White Nationalism, what can I say--am I supposed to say something like Nazis are people too? If you identify with any of the insipid Marxist drivel spewed out of the mouths of too many variations on what some call liberal, but remains liberal in package, not in product. Am I supposed to respond with some other form of insipid white guilt apologetics, deferring to the inanity that allows African-Americans to choose one or another steps in a grander Machiavellian dance. And Black Lives Matter is not to be set up as a straw dog here, nor is it to be linked with any forms of nationalism or "nationalist" polemics. Black lives matter because human lives matter and it is humane to support it. You cannot be against it--it makes no sense to be so. I am, though, as I imagine intelligent people everywhere are, really tired of less than intelligent people taking center stage for any political movement, all of them in one grotesque or inorganic performance in the theater of statecraft--and we do have them by the tens of millions in America, all shapes, all colors, all sizes and all identifications, many and varying forms of rhetorical ineptitude: Black Lives Matter can learn a whole lot from its grandparent's Civil Rights Movements. If you do not get what I mean by Non-white Caucasian, ask me, do not assume. I have never shared in anything that has traditionally been about Whiteness in this greatly full-of-shit America, her conservatives and her liberals flip sides of one insipidly minted political coin. We have been trading in positive and negative stereotypes for so long you would NOT know an organic human being if he actually did fuck you in the ass. White People are labeled, articulated in critique, lumped together in the same ways Racists and Racism has done to and for Black Americans; and I say Black Americans because I am not so sure the same dynamic or dynamism in quite the same ways exists for Black Africans, unless we consider how every genocide, civil war and/or famine in East Africa falls at the feet of Arab controlled East African governments in their non-black power play against black Africans in the region . . . but then, I must be mistaken, because only White European People can be racist in a pseudo-imperialist colonialist way, right? But then this is the only way Power sees fit to address racism, by indulging racist rhetorical constructs of Whiteness and White People in all, or most or simply any discussion of race and racism; that is, because it cannot actually manifest racism against White people, although it can foster bigotry, but then that only runs parallel with how we have fumbled the ball on interpersonal relationships. We are a lot more uptight than we used to be, but then there is something awfully Puritanical in some manifestations and/or assertions from those who identify with, or assert themselves in support of Political Correctness, which is not mis-taken in its motives as much as it mis-handles its attempts at correction.
44
Falling Leaf Review
WINTER 2018
But then, we would not know what we should know in the formerly framed scenarios because too much of what goes on politically is either straight out of the ass or right up our asses-=-is their a collective ass we all of us share? If Obama is our shining star liberal, then Democrat Hilary Supporters are as deluded as their flip side in the Trump Simians. I am tired of the ping pong we play, the debility we suffer when analyzing politics--we have become a very stupid people--and forgive me for suiting word to action and actions too this word . . . we are unable to defend liberty or understand it. What more is there to say? If anyone were actually to get at the roots of racism, we'd understand that African-American ghettos in American cities and Catholic ghettos in Northern Ireland share something more than superficially in common, unless African Americans resent sharing their status as America's privileged repressed group because you have to understand that Elites do not have privileges; they have only rights in the social consciousness. Now, whether that is valid or viable in a pronounced Democratic social nexus is another thing, but the fact we still have enormously wealthy Power Elites and enormously powerful Monied Elites gaining Oligarchic control, doling out privileges in small parcels to minorities and other shit-out-of-luck groups reveals how un-Democratic we are. And yes, the doling out of privileges while denying access to much of this to anyone categorized as White, as if White people have a similar identity that Back Americans do, that is, as if there were no ethnicities and only race as the marker, perpetuates the Machiavellian control. But this has been part of the power dynamics of Black Identity Politics: deny the power base of non-black groups by denying the existence of identities other than the rhetorically constructed one of Whiteness. Yes, The Neo-Liberalism of Regan, Bush I and II, Bill Clinton and Obama fed the beast of White resentment by playing Machiavellian politics with the federal bureaucracy, federal mandates, which is what gave the Idiot Trump such valency among desperate people in America--and Trump got twice the number of African American voters that Romney had gotten. The chickens have come home to roost for politicians playing divide and conquer as if they were always going to be superior, and that they were superior humans because they shared a superior position of authority and influence, aligned with Real Power and Money. Let us not assume that what we once understood for the birth, the onset, the ascension, the manifest reality of aristocracy--and never forget royalties connection, identification, synonymy with reality. Yes, royalty was always reality, but that is not because they were aristocratic, but because they were Power Real, real power has always been royal, the only reality that counts or becomes the measuring stick for the rest of us, unreal. This is why so often for so long African Americans have desperately tried to make of ghetto life a life more real. How many of us 45
Falling Leaf Review
WINTER 2018
say get real as a critique of something that is not trenchant in a more visceral or violent way. Ghetto living becomes Ghetto Reality, very royal in its condescension for anything living that is not itself. Hubris. And this smacks of class politics almost in line with how the Nazis played race politics for the purposes of class divisions in their attempt to evade class structure in order to create the illusion or enforce the dogma of a classless society, one of the chief ingredients in establishing a totalitarian structuring of society. This is also aligned, almost identically, with the way some Monied or Power Elite (read Media Elite) Ashkenazi like to place race suprematist politics in their rhetoric of Jewish exceptionalism as if there were no sociology and politics to explain what they so desperately play out in their positive stereotyping as being Jewish Nature, as if that in itself does not keep the flip side of it, Nazis rhetoric, alive (to use a paradigmatically similar [parallel] rhetoric and reasoning is to rationalize, and by sleight of epistemological hop-scotch justify, the same use by Nazis) . . . it's nausea ad naseum. Now, Power has Right--that has always been the social consciousness. Whether it is fair through a Democratic lens is another thing. By undermining the validity of metaphysics and hyper-scientizing what could never become scientific, we have helped undermine the validity of democracy except through one will to power after another. It must be noted that traditionally, historically, repressed groups are divided by some of them being given privileges, such as Affirmative Action being initially used to separate the Black Bourgeoisie from Black Poor and Working Poor, the first great bureaucratic assault against the black community, just at the time Jim Crow no longer possessed viability. Black community self-help and black ownership in black communities dwindled. What happened to African-American banks? The idea that Power does not have Right and takes privileges is born in the delusion that Democracy is the pre-textual or the preternatural condition for human beings historically. This is false. The Protestant Reformation and the Rise of the Bourgeoisie was a two-pronged affront to the traditions of Aristocracy and the Ecclesiastical Power of the Church, Protestant or Reformative Christian Missionary work at its most muscular was collateral with bourgeois colonialism, the great bourgeois reformation if imperialism, when it was not still at least pseudo aristocratic, as in the British Empire, whose aristocracy survives by themselves becoming bourgeois and entering bourgeois enterprises, thus giving us the colonialism of the Nineteenth Century, markedly as savage as anything since Columbus. This of course is not a contest. It becomes absurd to discuss more or less suffering, grotesque to use arithmetic as a barometer to measure heinousness, brutality, or simply to create a morality of death, of murder by addition and subtraction. 46
Falling Leaf Review
WINTER 2018
Even in Democracies, the Rights of Human Beings must always be asserted, articulated, defended and protected by Laws, and with constant vigilance in ther manner of our interaction with each other but most especially the State and the State's agents in the government bureaus and administrators. Constant Vigilance is not maintained by a populus less literate than Freedom demands, but that is just what the Corporate takeover of education has managed. Now the unalienable rights of Human Beings are universal even in face of Post-Structualist critique that they are fictions. But their insistence on everything being a fiction and therefore invalid only results in The Will to Power and Dogmatism. I have never subscribed to adolescent responses concerning humanity, the Self or human nature, similar to those that arise when finding out that one's parents are flawed and full of contradictions and do not meet with childhood notions of them--no, my parents did not lie to me because they did not perform emotional seppuku for me when I was boy. Of course Categories are fictions, things made, as is every thing we think, say, do, build, make--how is The Empire State Building not a fiction? It is, and if you do not understand this, you have no clue what fiction is, what fictional truth can be, has been, could be allowed to become. I have known people who have grown bitter and cynical about Christmas because they discovered once in childhood that Daddy was Santa Claus. I still believe in Santa Claus, but then I know how absurd that sounds to too many hyper resentful people: Multicultural Resentment or White Resentment are flip sides of the same coin--each of them equally useless but terribly artless. And it is not simplistic to assert or to frame this in a binary way because we have become horribly binary in our assertions and our pronouncements––because we have become very INarticulate. We do play a perpetual game of ping pong with slogans, with cliches, with media disseminated soundbites, with marketing strategies instead of dialogue produced from actually being in the marketplace of cultural exchange. When we are not engaging in these ping pong matches, socially, politically, economically--we are playing hop scotch with the Truth, confusing randomly passing images in the mind for thinking. In the 60s, Power learned that it did not need Jim Crow, it could use the bureaucracy instead. They always knew they had to keep black poor and white poor separate; they learned how to use the bureaucracy to separate black workers from white workers--but then, the foundations for this manipulation had already been set by racist ideology, which then points me in the direction of understanding the critique of race, of racism(s) and racist tropes, dialogues, dialectics, monologues, messaging and messages, propaganda--yet, these have a flip side, which is in how
47
Falling Leaf Review
WINTER 2018
much of the energy and force used one way has been adopted in the countermanding and counterpoints the other way. The oppressed learn first and fore mostly from their Oppressors; Israel's foreign policy decisions are no irony when examining immigration to Israel and who has informed much of Israeli Politics since the Second World War, or how Sephardic Jews have often found themselves having Second Class status in their native land. Not always, not unilaterally universally everywhere, but considerably and persistently over time. Where we are headed, I cannot say absolutely surely, but we are bound to lose our heads in more than one way. We are following one or another road to perdition--another cliche we bandy about without heeding what we are saying. All I know is that in this fictional sense of an essay on culture and politics, I see how firmly some are set in their aims to establish an American Jacobin Party. I hear the murmurs,. Vive! Les Jacobins. Yes, I hear them more clearly as the days pass: Vive! Mon frere, Mon Semblable Jean-Paul Marat. What then must we do? Which side are you on because being Democrat or Republican only puts you on one side, neither Jack Ass nor Elephant, that might be something?
A Fight Against Inequality? [a short story] Liberalism is dead in America. There are no liberals, only Conservatives and those who are now more conservative and even more conservative than that, all the way into down the rabbit hole of political phantasmagorical conservatism; and for those who do not jump down the rabbit hole, there is always the extremist cul du sac at the end of the right wing, heinous and fascist as it is when it is not outright Nazis and race suprematist. America--since the Second World War, first slowly and with a crawl, but certainly since Regan, more rapidly and with a spring in its step--has moved monolithically to the right. There used to be a time, not so long ago, when Republicans could find themselves left of the center dividing line between what would have been called eternal Left and Right, moderate liberals in the Republican Party. Yes, not that long ago, except by our standards of memory and recall, forty years is too long a time to remember. Today, most Democrats are right of that eternal dividing line, too many of them, almost all of them
48
Falling Leaf Review
WINTER 2018
49
Falling Leaf Review
WINTER 2018
being moderate Conservatives. So, where was it we imagined the Republicans were going to go When Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and Hilary were as conservative as they were and have been. His own party called Bernie Sanders a socialist for defending what was traditional New Deal, and even Johnsonisn Great Society policies. That should have been the death knell for everyone who was concerned for really liberal politics. But then most college student supporters of the Democratic Party that I have known and interacted with spent decades crying fascist wolf until they no longer had any credible critique to offer the move to the right by their own party. Everything became politics for Lenny Small, "Democrat, Good; Republican, Bad," irrespective of what the politics or politicking had become. So, now we have moderate conservatives to mid-wing conservatives parading around as liberals, which is what Friedman's Neo liberalism is. "I read an interesting article in The Seattle Times from May 2016, an article discussing Obama's fight against economic inequality in America, a fight Obama never got as much credit for as he deserved, at least not from those who should applaud the appearance of liberal politics being played in any arena. But the author kept talking about taxes redistributed at the top to pay for the bottom, as with Obamacare, but as with Obamacare, people making 15000 a year are helped by people making 45000 dollars a year. These same people making 45K a year, if they are Caucasian, are called today by some people of color White, thus beneficiaries of White Privilege, so yes, lets increase their payments since 2014 by nearly 75%. Of course, doing this must be fair, must be just because it affects a great number of Caucasians, as it also does a great number of African Americans. Only in a punitive and retributive society can this be called fighting inequality because you will certainly get Power to okay putting the screws to working-class caucasians to the glee of some (not all) people of color because it keeps Caucasians and people of color separated which only helps Money and Power," he said. "Perpetuating this cyclically eventually leads to a broader and ever broadening division of people in the lower economic classes to the benefits of the upper classes, and it might not be a hardship more greatly suffered by Caucasian Americans than African-Americans, except it then becomes fodder for the herds of White People who now seek to nationalize under their Whiteness, as foolishly (if not also heinously and grotesquely) as anyone seeking to divide the world into checker board squares," he said. "The writer of the Seattle Times article, 'Obama's War on Economic Inequality' is, either wittingly or unwittingly, a stooge for Totalitarian Bourgeois Capitalist ideology at play in the American Political Arena, himself a purveyor of contemporary Bourgeois Capitalist propaganda as well as totalitarian dogma in defense of a classless America, although curiously suffering great 50
Falling Leaf Review
WINTER 2018
inequalities in wealth. All of this or these on the march with and for Obama's war on inequality, a fight brilliantly performed as yet another masquerade for Power and Money, choreographed to fail, but essential to the idea that there is some of Government Authority that wants to help the People," he said. "Trump is only another socially more reactionary version of serving the Power and the Money . . . because not all Power and Money are aligned together, except when it comes to the idea of making more money or gaining more power for an ever circumscribed elite. This idea of more is where some factions end their association; there are policy differences among the Monied and Power Elites in America . . . all of them being Capitalist, which means AntiProletarian and Democratic only for a few, the elite, monied and bourgeois. However, the inequalities due to class are marketed as the product of an endemically racist society and only this, of racism, by racism and for racist suprematist ends. This scares the shit out of everyone and steers us through the funneling pens as in cattle markets right to where the Elite want us to wind up, believing former Neo-Liberal Globalizing swine in the Democrats and Republicans weren't so bad after all," he said. But just as the bourgeoisie mostly found themselves aligned with the Protestant Reformation, and equally, just as all Protestant Reformers were reactionaries, America's love-affair with conservatism is its long standing crush on Puritanism and will continue to be so," he said. "Instead of us, We the People (in another time, sans-culotte)--yes, instead of us attacking privileges based on class and economic status or residually hereditary wealth, thus privileges of the Monied and Power Elites, we attack privilege based on Whiteness, based on color, based on race, which is only the antithesis of a singularly rigid line of societal racism. It then becomes another coin flip of politics in America, ringing only partly true because it does not address or articulate a critique of the standing class order. But we are a classless society, are we not? My tongue is firmly embedded in my Left cheek, as most American tongues are stuck up one or another ass. Ironically, classless societies, or the imposition of the dogma of classlessness, is one of the prime ingredients in any push toward Totalitarianism," he said. "However, who wants to listen to me?" He asks. "How can anything about White Privilege ring true when there are tens of millions of white Americans without any privileges . . . and tens of millions of Caucasians who have never participated in or benefitted from historically what has been socially and sociologically White in America? Not unless we want to take some African-American hypotheses as Law where we sidestep the leap in reason into theory from a numb er of very emotional hypotheses," he said. "Non-White Caucasian is what I used to write on my College forms whenever they asked for race or ethnicity; yes, I checked other and wrote Non-White caucasian and said that whatever 51
Falling Leaf Review
WINTER 2018
it was, has been, is or will be in America, this Whiteness, this being White, my Northern Urban Italo-American Catholic self has not participated in. Not the way lesser educated others have shouted and chanted as if I and the George Bushes are part of one singular monolith of oppression for people of color; herein read, the only minorities that count, the only minorities of a grotesquely framed and distributed set of privileges of their own, privileges again that the Power Elite use to divide some of a group from others of the group. Affirmative Action was used initially to divide the Black Bourgeoisie from the Black Working Poor, until such time as an entire three generations of hereditary welfare recipients could be excluded from the Affirmative Action that eventually benefitted Black working classes, excluded by a carefully constructed (choreographed? Orchestrated?) ghettoization." he said. We are grotesques playing in a masquerade set by the Power and Monied Elites through their media as the messages, print and broadcast, I say, could say he said, but choose otherwise to write it down in one form suited to actions or one set of actions after another suited to a correspondent form.
HOW BLOGGING IS WHAT ANOTHER ME DOES a short story If I were another kind of man I might write an essay on blogging in my blog, or would it merely be a blog entry, and how do they differ, perhaps in the way a journal entry differs from an essay, even a personal essay––but then, aren't journal entries personal essays of a kind, a different kind of personal essay than the literary varieties we have become used to, at least those we have called literary in our tradition of essay writing; and aren't letters essays, but then, they too are different than blog entries thus themselves different from journal entries . . . what are we trying to say--it is we who are trying to say here, the reader completes the text? You, my hypocrite brothers and sisters, I am speaking to you. To be a blogger or not to be a blogger might be a question for another blogger to answer; I do not call myself a blogger, and I am now beginning to question where the essay begins and ends when up against the short story or flash fiction it finds itself, the latter sometimes entering a grey room with the prose poem. Perhaps in this way the author is the final authority or the prime authority (which is What Levi-Strauss meant in his French when he called all First Peoples, les primitifs, the English translation of which suffered from the subtractive connotations the word has in our tongue, off our tongues . . .)
52
Falling Leaf Review
WINTER 2018
Here then are the words this other me would say if I were this other self saying something I have not yet had the inclination to say, what then must I say . . . To blog or not to blog--here I go again; repetition becomes motif--that, in itself, another motif: the motif of motif. I have been blogging for how long now? Need I actually count? I started blogging with The October Revue, the sister view of this one; The October Revue was also called The October Literary Revue. Literary was something I thought I needed to highlight. It might still be something I need to do. I also think that there are too many intelligent people who might be put off with the inclusion of the word 'literary,' perhaps as pretentious. I still publish the O. R.--I might take it off line--I have not decided whether to keep it going or not. It might have run its course. Not a bad opening for what I have herein said I might do--am doing . . . I also publish other blogs, but I do not have the time to tell you about either. I cannot pay the correct attention to either even in the managing of them. I do not keep up with all of my reviews equally, and sometimes I mange to edit one more fully, thus successfully, than the others. As of late, perhaps the last six months, I have paid most of my on-line time to this review and I am now considering making the others private. That would leave only The Cafe Voltaire Review, and I am okay with that. I am also considering marketing the CVR, but I am still in the initial stages of doing that. What is more important to say? To say what a blog is or what a blog does; to be and to do, what then is the question I need to ask? Prior to this review being named The Cafe Voltaire Review, it was named The Essay Review, and this is key: the principal focus of all my reviews has always been the literary essay, with extensions into the personal and the critical essay. Moreover, the essay as a form is the heart of the review, of all my reviews. Yes, essays, essays and more essays; to essay or not to essay would then be my question. Whether the topic is politics, or culture, or language, or simply social commentary--the literary essay is the form of address. Whether the essay be 250 words or 2,500 . . . the form, the style, the diction is literary. I am not herein going to venture a discussion of what the literary is or could be or has been–– the literary is never has-been for me or this review. I am not so sure of this now, but it was said then, at least at the time it was conceived it was thought to be relevant--essay, story, prose poem, what then must I say to limit these in this explication? 53
Falling Leaf Review
WINTER 2018
I have used the blog format for publishing a variety of literary forms. So have many, many, many people. Every on-line review has a blog, and the blog entries here are of a variety, either length or purpose. Sometimes, the entry is a literary essay of varying length, whether of a page or less, but sometimes one or more could extend to several or more pages. I have often, in the past, written full essays in the blog post section. There are times when a topic broached and the intention is not to essay the topic but to say something brief; however, in the course of the intended brevity, extensions are drawn. Connections are made, development happens, articulation deepens––an essay becomes. And an essay ends where it ends how it ends whenever it ends––conclusus, a kind of wall, a damming up the stream. Yes, conclusions are merely walls to dam up the flow. These essays written in the blog section would then be transferred to the pages section where they would then be catalogued as essays belonging to one or another category as titled in the pages list. These essays? Fictional essays; essayistic fiction––persona poems we understand? Persona essays–– fictional, although philosophical, I could say––I should say more, other, else. Everything we understand to fit an essay, to be fitting for an essay, to be the content of an essay––why not this or these as fiction. The essay form as a kind of fiction––how so not understood? Letters, journal entries, essays, stories, prose poems, flash fiction, what else do we have for me to say . . . WRITING, WRITING, WRITING––I have written as much as eighteen hours a day in stretches for weeks on end. What does that mean? What could it mean to say this? What would it mean to place it as it has been herein? What more can I say about the review I have published, written for, edited? It is not this review that this here piece appears in? How many literary magazines have I been affiliated with i will not ask, nor will I count. There is nothing else to say that reading the review would not do better to reveal––
54
Falling Leaf Review
WINTER 2018
55
Falling Leaf Review
WINTER 2018
THE FALLING LEAF REVIEW WINTER 2018
56
Falling Leaf Review
WINTER 2018
fallingleafreview@gmail.com fallingleafreview@hot mail.com fallingleafreview.org
57
Falling Leaf Review
WINTER 2018
58