Folks,
Ridgecrest, CA, where I stayed last night is adjacent to China Lake - an airborne weapons testing and training range. From Wikipedia and I quote,
'Inventions tested and refined at China Lake include the AIM-9 Sidewinder missile, the AGM-62 Walleye TV-guided glide bomb, the AGM-45 Shrikeantiradar missile, the AIM-95 Agile missile, the AGM-122 Sidearm antiradar missile, the AGM-123 Skipper laser-guided missile, the lightstick, and the continuous-rod warhead'.
So I am in the valley, at sea level, tripod set-up, minding my own business when I notice a jet fighter packing heat - see the picture I have included - it is blurry but you can clearly see it is definitely outfitted for serious game hunting. It takes one low pass far removed from me and then disappears straight up and is gone - or so I thought.
I continue taking more photos of the desert and snow capped mountains and then I begin to hear the jet again - I turn and the goddamn thing is right there - it goes right over me so low that the sound that finally follows it is absolutely enveloping, all encompassing and deafening. I drop the camera but catch it before it hits the ground and I try to take as many pictures as I can before the crazy sob disappears, accelerating straight up. You talk about one gigantic rush!!
Yea, though I drive through the shadows of Death Valley, I fear no evil, because that guy or gal is armed to teeth. Hallelujah, amen - pass the ammunition!! After I changed my underwear ...
I stopped at Zabriskie Point - which to some folks out here is a movie not a place in Death Valley. I always tell younger folks asking about the late 60s to have a look at this film as it just about sums it up nicely - similar to how Apocalypse Now manages to capture what the Viet Nam must have been like - at least to my mind. The movie also featured a stellar soundtrack - which people forget when they talk about Top Gun and Flashdance being the first two movies that featured best selling soundtrack collections. The Zabriskie Point soundtrack featured CSNY, Pink Floyd, The Youngbloods, Grateful Dead, and others.
When I get thinking about the 60's and all the movements to establish alternative life styles, communes, etc. - none of them ever worked and none of them ever will, in my opinion. They all fall apart because at some point, somebody has to do the real work of providing shelter, heat, food and clothing. And somebody has to clean out the shitter. They all fell apart over these issues because while the enigmatic figurehead is sleeping with all the women (that was called free love unless anyone else but the enigmatic figurehead was trying to get some - witness the animal kingdom and see what happens when you try do that) the less favored women and the men had to support them - smacks of the feudal system doesn't it - been there, done that, know how the story goes (insert sound of guillotine blade being raised - or falling -here).
And basically here in the US we have something similar going on. Everywhere I go Mexicans are doing the real work - tilling and fertilizing the soil, planting the seeds, watering the crops, harvesting the food, packaging & distributing the food, processing the food, serving the processed and prepared food, taking out the garbage, cleaning up and emptying the shitter.
In Toynbee's, 'A Study of History', he examined the rise and fall of several civilizations. One of the conclusions he drew is that a prelude to their collapse ( and they all did) was an increasingly wealthy and lazy middle class that was supported by an underclass that had no way themselves to rise to middle class status - i.e., no reward for their back breaking labor.
The underclass eventually revolts, withdraw their services, the economic system collapses, anarchy ensues, the civilization breaks down into several smaller contiguous units and re-combines in a manner that results in new borders and a new constitution.
The US is definitely at a cross roads - it is no longer White, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant/Catholic. It is everything but and this country's elite and powerful have to recognize that and embrace it - if they don't, they'll soon be cleaning out the shitters themselves.
Roy Harper wrote a great song in the early 70's called, 'I Hate The White Man', I quote from it,
Far across the ocean
In the land of look and see
There once was a time
For you and me
Where the winds blow sweetly
And the easy seas flow still
And where the barefoot dream of life
Can laugh and cry its fill
Where slot machine confusions
And the plastic universe
Are objects of amusement
In the fiction of their curse
And where the crazy white man
And his teargas happiness
Lies dead and long since buried
By his own fantastic mess
For I hate the white man
And his plastic excuse
For I hate the white man
And the man who turned him loose...
In the land of look and see
There once was a time
For you and me
Where the winds blow sweetly
And the easy seas flow still
And where the barefoot dream of life
Can laugh and cry its fill
Where slot machine confusions
And the plastic universe
Are objects of amusement
In the fiction of their curse
And where the crazy white man
And his teargas happiness
Lies dead and long since buried
By his own fantastic mess
For I hate the white man
And his plastic excuse
For I hate the white man
And the man who turned him loose...
As I sit here in Las Vegas, the playground of the middle class, their successors wait on them hand and foot .... let's hope it's a peaceful takeover.
Phil
PS - appearing tomorrow night at the Flamingo, 7:30 PM, Marie Osmond ....
No comments:
Post a Comment