cheese it, the cops!

The River and the Thread

Rosanne Cash's newest release, The River and the Thread approaches masterpiece status. I know I included it on my latest list of albums I'd like to take to the other side...one of the troubling things for a lot of us is that we realize the South in a lot of ways represents the American Id and as such is part of all of us. We have to find out how to deal with it before the Id slaughters us all -- is it the food, water, reliance on religion, in-breeding or what the hell is going on there? Who wants iced tea so sweet and treacly it rots your teeth as you chew it? Who has NASCAR drivers tatooed on their private parts? Who would elect Ted Cruz, Mitch McConnell and the newest dingbat who things homosexuals should be purged from the Republican party? 

 

Well Rosanne doesn't really try to answer those questions, but she might have some insights. 

45 years later, I see that this matches the brilliance of "Ode to Billy Joe..." The album cover was a picture taken by Rosanne's husband and music director John Leventhal standing behind her looking down at the Tallahatchee River from the Tallahatchee bridge. 

 

 

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eu and secession

provisionally, i admire david cameron's go-it-alone approach with regard to europe. i wouldn't frame this in terms of sovereignty myself, but rather just say that, other things being equal, i'm in favor of balkanization, fragmentation. it's hard not to realize that though the euro had some good effects there for awhile, when the thing starts to go bad, you are at the mercy of forces completely beyond your control. surely merkel is having that sensation, but so is the government of greece. the problem with centralization of huge swathes of geography and economy is the extreme distance it imposes between individual and community will and action and the actual decisions that affect them. the more distant power is from all the sites over which it operates, the less accountable to any it can possibly be. one loses all control at the level of multi-national bodies over one's own fate, and one loses all responsibility.

'sovereignty' in this case is an alternative way of saying that. but you could make the same case for scottish or welsch independence, or really, breaking political and economic power down into local communities. you might be able to achieve greater prosperity for some bit of time by consolidation, but then you are at the mercy of the powers constituted, and when things go wrong you are unable to do anything to shape your own destiny. that's why i'm a proud splittist. it's easy to picture the further consolidation of europe at this point as something that many people in many countries come deeply to regret in the long run: merely a way of generalizing the meltdown.

it's not only a political position; it's a crime

tibetan writer jailed for splittism

splittism contd

the chinese authorities respond to splittists.

splittism

from the inspiring pages of the people's daily.

Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi met in Almaty Friday with his Kyrgyz counterpart Ruslan Kazakbayev to discuss regional peace and security.

During their talks on the sidelines of the meeting of Foreign Ministers' Council of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), Yang said that China is ready to work with Kyrgyzstan within the SCO and other multilateral frameworks to jointly combat the "three evil forces" of terrorism, splittism and extremism in a bid to safeguard regional peace, security and stability.

a lot of times it's hard to tell whether there's a translation problem, or whether china is ruled by lobotomy patients, or whether chinese culture really is grotesque because, as people often assert, it denies or actually successfully expunges the human individual. chinese people are naturally all merged with each other; they are non-individuals, as though god dropped them into a blender and hit frappe. that's why westerners often yearn toward the china they imagine, or that the chinese state portrays. the fantasy of politics, in rousseau, hegel, marx, hitler, in left right and center, etc is self-annihilation: becoming one with others, as the fantasy of religion is becoming one with god etc.

at any rate, i love the coinage 'splittist,' which the chinese always throw at the dalai lama. so in this sentence, the idea is that he is equivalent in his evil to osama bin laden or something: self-evidently a refusal to merge entirely with the chinese state is the essence of evil. but i am a proud splittist. i wonder whether anyone owns 'splittist.com'? who will join me in splittism? we can all be one in our resolution to split and keep splitting, both to fragment the society and to take our leave. we can split with each other as an expression of our solidarity. and then we can each permit ourselves to fragment within.

thesaurus.com gives nice guidelines for splittist action: bifurcate, branch, break, burst, cleave, come apart, come undone, crack, dichotomize, disband, disjoin, dissever, disunite, diverge, divide, divorce, fork, gape, give way, go separate ways, hack, isolate, open,part, part company, put asunder, rend, rip, rive, separate, sever, slash, slit, snap, splinter, sunder, tear, whack.

a rich plan of action.

see ya!