TROPHY STATE

TROPHY STATE is the working title of my fourth novel. Again, an artist is the protagonist. This time the artist is Rembrandt Giovanni Bugatti, who is known as Bugster, or Bugsy, and sometimes Lily calls him just plain Bug. Bug is investigating brutal private army activities in Africa to authenticate his next suite of political paintings. The proxy wars that Bug is investigating, as well as a company that has become a country, and a major religion soon stand in the way of his art, his life and his new love. Bug’s African investigation sheds light, peppered with ridicule, on the great catastrophe that the world’s nation states are engaged in. America is the biggest culprit: it is jobbing out to private armies illegal war-making missions  in countries for which Congress has given no war approval and thus escaping oversight by Congress and backlash among voters. The private armies, essentially licensed to kill by the US State Department and Defense Department, are using weapons and munitions outlawed by the United Nations, assassinating scores of third world leaders, and engaging in rampant torture. No one, not even the United Nations, seems to have the authority or the will to stop private armies like Blackwater Global. It’s a dangerous mess, and Bug is caught in the middle of it all.

Chapter 1

 

A chunk of Daniel Greenberg’s entrails still attached to a yellow and gray spinal segment, four ribs spinning like chopper blades, landed in the sand near my feet. Daniel’s severed head zoomed past, spraying a veil of pink mist on a desert sky already the color of burning coals.

The fly-by of Daniel’s head created backwash, which suctioned to its wake an airborne swarm of assorted war trash. Plastic bags, do-rags, cotton bandages, ripped-apart flags, shredded ponchos, bloodied desert camo, mangled photographs, disintegrated T-shirts, and empty candy wrappers instantly came under the centrifugal control of a ghoulish vortex. The collected litter then spiraled outward coalescing into a kaleidoscopic circular form, the pattern momentarily resembling a cutaway exhibit of some giant flower at a horticulture convention. And then—tchew-tchew-tchew—terrorist bullets ripped the bloom apart.

The gloating, grandstanding cackle of battle noise overwhelmed my senses, but I had heard the faint zzickuh-zzickuh-zzickuh sound of poor Daniel’s head as it flew by. It actually fizzed and chattered, his eyelids and lips fluttering from G-force, his beard on fire. Daniel’s cheeks distended backwards so that his teeth were completely exposed, as if he were having the time of his life at a drunken frat party.

I didn’t know Daniel well and had presumed I would not like him, because he reminded me of an irreverent John Belushi. And that may have influenced the impression I had just formed, but another memory, now awful, stabbed my consciousness. Daniel, just a few days ago, and only to make conversation, was telling me about the last time he saw his eight children. I could see him in my mind’s eye making nonsense sounds to amuse his kids on a Tel Aviv playground. I saw Daniel running, only his head visible above a wall of sandbags. I heard his children laughing. Mostly to show him that I was listening, I had said his kids probably thought he was some weird migrating bird, making all those sounds, gone from home ten months out of twelve. Daniel had laughed and then fell silent. A minute later, he burst into a riff of sounds, as bizarre, splendid, happy, and as sad as Robin Williams.

I dry-heaved and shook my skull brutally, as if self-inflicted violence could tear the talons of insanity loose from my mind. The ghastly sight of Daniel Greenberg’s fizzing head had impacted my consciousness like a stray cannonball from the Battle of Bunker Hill—this terrorist attack felt that unreal, a freaky, ghoulish distortion of place and time and purpose.

And that was it for me.

I knelt over Daniel’s entrails, a steady whine of bullets overhead. A small blister of sand caused the overshoot, but the bullets were chewing the top off the blister, and in a moment, the bullets would reach my head. I dropped into fetal position, curling my body around Daniel’s entrails. Remnants of his kidneys were still attached, two ureter tubes hanging loose, a ten-inch segment of an artery lying next to the spinal segment. I dug into a pocket for my multi-tool and used the scissor to clip off two tubes about eight inches long. I put the end of one tube in my mouth and blew hard. Orange bubbles came out the other end. I stuck that one in my shirt pocket and tossed the other tube in the direction of Captain Jubal, as far as I could tell the only other survivor.

Then, I dove to my left and commenced clawing my grave, my polyandrium, my ossuary, my sepulcher, into the simmering, smoking sand of the Sahara. I burrowed beneath the sand like a dung beetle digging for camel droppings. Realistically, I had no more hope of survival than a slow-roasting mbuzi in a Berber barbecue pit. But oddly enough, that grave saved my life. And maybe my sanity. Such as it is.

In kinetic battle, you can close your eyes but not your ears; escape the visual but not the aural. That’s the rule. But there beneath the sand, I not only beat death—O grave, where is thy sting—I beat the rule.

The kabooms of rockets and mortars and grenades, the pops and pings and whines of small arms fire, the screams and curses and strangles of our wounded, all the aural proctors and prompts of battlefield psychosis reached me in my sandy grave only as blunted percussion. No decibel, no amplitude of sound, was distinct from the other. The carnage raged; the Sahara shook, and each sand fragment passed the death-vibes on to its neighbor. From one silicone particle to the next, the death message relayed forward a little less complete, rounded off—its sharp sting dulled. In effect, when it reached my buried ears, the Battle of the Sahara was little more than a phantom of acoustic physics.  At most, it was no more than a quantum epithet. But even the epithet said:

“Congratulations, infidel! You’ve been massacred.”

We had not been ready. The terrorists wiped us out. It should not have happened. Captain Jubal, “commander” of our reinforced, mostly criminal, company of French Legionnaires when the attack began, was adamant that we must stop for a freaking re-up sales pitch a mere 900 meters from the only decent cover within a 500-mile radius.

Nine-hundred meters!

Translated, we were but seven football fields away from safety: thick walls to shield us, water, food, ammunition, shiny white teeth of the smiling instead of the dead. We were little more than half-a-mile to tactical cover, consolidation, resupply, ammunition, med-evac, and a well-earned celebration of victory. After all, we had liberated over 100 captive Timbuktu schoolgirls.

We? We were the 200 Legionnaires from twenty-four different countries. We were the attachment of twenty hired Mali Special Forces wannabes and a Spanish team of three contracted artillery forward observers. We were a lone steroid-stuffed, Whitewash, Inc., geardo-wierdo Major Flynn, who pretended to be CIA, and we were the squad of ten Kenyan mercenaries and the two Bulgarian drone pilots, whose drones had out-flown their electronic leash a week ago. We were our civilian getaway pilot, plus a gorgeous and courageous NGO[1] lady, and I, an embedded political artist from Anderson, Indiana. And, though they had not shown up yet, we were supposed to be supported by a mystery sniper team on contract[2] from Bulgaria. The snipers purportedly were outfitted with an M2010 Enhanced Sniper Rifle (ESR) modified to disable engine blocks in terrorist pickup trucks. Altogether, we were a total of at least 239 . . . targets.

Plus, trailing along behind us when this started were nearly a hundred villagers. Some carried with them stale beignets, Tiger Head batteries, woven hats, homemade lotions, and anything else they hoped to sell to the mundele. Some were tentative but curious children hoping for enough excitement to carry their weary boredom through another monotonous day. A few were old women trying to convince grandkids to come home, some hoping to be of use if the soldiers decided to bivouac in the desert. One woman kept up a steady shouting at Captain Jubal, thanking him over and over for saving her daughter from the terrorists. These camp followers turned into camp forerunners the moment the terrorists began their counteroffensive and quickly disappeared back to Timbuktu, a wise decision Captain Jubal should have adopted.

***

Jubal had enlisted in the Legion five years previously during its changeover from Opération Serval to Operation Barkhane, in 2014. Serval was a French military operation in Mali to oust Islamic militants who had turned terrorist and begun a brutal push south toward the center of Mali. United Nations Security Council Resolution 2085 of December 20, 2012 set Operation Serval into motion, which lasted until July 15, 2014. Operation Barkhane then launched forty-five days later. It would be credited with killing three of the five Islamic leaders in the Sahel region, Abdelhamid Abou Zeid, Abdel Krim and Omar Ould Hamaha.  Mokhtar Belmokhtar fled to Libya and Iyad ag Ghali fled to Algeria.

Before any of Operation Barkane’s successes, Captain Jubal fled to hospital to recover from meningitis. Just as he was to return to his unit, malaria sent him back to hospital again. By the time Jube was finally healthy, Operation Barkhane had ended.

Jubal spent the next three-and-a-half years back in France as a training officer, posturing as if he had single-handedly kicked Al-Qaeda out of the Sahel. Between 2014 and 2018, Al-Qaeda made occasional raids into the first line of sub-Saharan cities, like Timbuktu, in the Sahel region. Late in 2018, France re-committed the French Foreign Legion to the Sahel, and Captain Jubal was sent back to Mali. His mission was to organize and lead a small local militia and a number of hired private army assets into a quick-striking force to intercept Al-Qaeda raiders before they got up a head of steam in another push south.

***

And now, here we were—Captain Jubal’s Legion and all its freelance posse add-ons—at horizontal alert on the down side of a pillow-shaped, sleepy-looking sand dune.

This, Jube’s brilliant dally in the desert, suffered from dimwit-private-army-kill-for-profit reasoning. It seemed to him an excellent time for the troops to hear Whitewash, Inc.’s chief salesman, Major Freddie Flynn, enlighten them on the greatness of our little army’s just completed and, as it would turn out, premature rout of the terrorists. Ye old Mission Accomplished gloat. And attendant bullshit.

God forbid we do this dog and pony show within the cover of Timbuktu’s stone buildings. Some enterprising townie might overhear Flynn’s spiel and sell his B.S. to a competitor, like Blackwater Global and its Jesus-freak CEO, Erik Prince. In Africa, private army spies and counter spies are thick as sand flies, a plague that Antonio Prohías could have created in Spy vs Spy, if he had wanted to go Biblical in scope.

But from Flynn’s myopic point of view, and if you discount the terrorist’s practical mastery of tactical withdrawal, we had driven the terrorist brigands out of Timbuktu and scattered them in the desert, had we not? Why not sing a little praise? Proselytize while the mind is right? Major Flynn’s God, if you again discount the devilish counterattack of the terrorists, had just delivered us into a landform resembling an amphitheater.

That had to be a sign.

The only question remaining was whether Flynn should speak from the upper level, like Jesus at The Sermon on the Mount, or lecture from the bottom, like Professor Charles Kingsfield from the well in The Paper Chase. Major Flynn, showing a little humility or a lot of stupidity, chose the well. He could pose and preen and bluster down on the floor of the well while the men, their backs to every possible enemy approach, pretended to listen while lounging around the inside slope of a gigantic shell-shaped dune. Acoustics would be marvelous.

Never mind the shell-shaped dune was also a terrorist’s wet dream of a perfect killing field.

Major Flynn offered a seven-word prayer—”Praise Jesus, and God save Emmanuel King”[3]—and leaped into his sales pitch to convince soldiers in each unit to rollover their contracts for another tour of duty in South Sahara. He never got to the part where he would tout the $25,000 bonus and $300-a day wages for soldiers who jumped ship from the Legion to sign on with his Whitewash, Inc. private army. The terrorists, fully locked and loaded and reorganized from our earlier assault, rolled over the top of our miracle amphitheater and immediately had Major Flynn speechless and the rest of us at bloody checkmate.

By the time I had quelled the panic among the command group and organized our defense, the terrorist’s advantage had already wiped out half our company. Flynn had been right about the acoustics—the screams of the dying were just beautiful . . . if you happened to be a terrorist.

Hoping to reach the cover of the buildings at the edge of town, a few of us managed a frenetic retro-movement behind billowy cover from our last three smoke grenades. We made it several meters out of the amphitheater and up the side of another dune, but a terrorist flanking tactic stopped the command group short of town. The first line of stone-walled, mud-plastered buildings of Timbuktu were a mere 100 meters away, and we were stopped. Without looking, I could feel the presence of those stone buildings. But that’s as close as 126 of us, then 80 of us, then 20 of us, then 4 of us, would get to salvation. Brilliant!

In Captain Jubal’s mind, there had been nothing dangerous about his lollygag order, because no self-respecting leader of soldiers—our side or their side—would launch his men on an attack under the scalding heat lamp of pyretic noon in the scorpion-boiling Sahara Desert. But ISIS, al-Shabaab and Ansar Dine—something like 3,600 of them still operational—proved to have gone black on respect…self or otherwise.  So, they threw the mother of all bullshit flags on Flynn’s dissertation in the desert.

I’m recognizing an unaccustomed emotional attachment to my sarcasm and wonder if the brutal weirdness of these terrorist battles has gnawed away a bit of my sanity. Oh, well; it is what it is. Something of me has survived, so far. I will just have to get to know what there is left and remember I still have a job to do. There has always been a place in my hardest hitting political paintings for crazed sarcasm, but only on the condition it makes a necessary point, not that it become a compulsive tic.

Speaking of compulsive tics, the terrorists’ Dushka machineguns stopped firing. Finally. Then the finishers, the aljalaad, the goat-rodeo meninists with Chinese made Swiss Army Knives, Budapest bayonets and Baghdad butcher cleavers, completed their mission of executing our wounded.

But the aljalaad finishers left me alive in my grave, I could say in silence, except for the ringing in my ears, the sort of high-pitched silence that makes your spinal fluid quake.

It got better, though.

Maybe it was the therapeutic effect of hot sand, but after a few minutes, the screaming in my ears diminished to only a head-numbing drone. The relative quiet led me to wonder if Captain Jubal had survived. My last eyeball of him was of his flabby, apple-bottom booty plopped in the sand and his premature jowls jiggling as he commenced to dig. In the darkness of my sandy grave, before I stuck the tube in my mouth and pulled the last pile of sand over my face, I could still see Jubal’s duck-feet toeing outward like a dorky, double-jointed child squatting in a sand box. His minced-penis brain had been in total panic, and his trenching tool had flayed the desert sand. Jube had been following my lead—nothing new there—but I had pulled the sand on top of my face so quickly that I had not seen if he had had enough sense or time to cover up.

Our two graves beneath the Sahara were my idea…all mine. Though art history may only remember me as an irritating minor artist, I will go down in military annals as the humble artist who created a whole new takeoff on Genghis Khan’s concept of strategic withdrawal.

No, no, I’m aware. This vein of grandiosity is new, too, but maybe it will go away, or I will grow to deserve it. It is, though, a tragedy that Charlton Heston is forever unavailable to play me when they make the biographic. These cold, dead hands laying that gun aside and digging that grave in the sand—what a scene!

And no, I did not devise a way to cover my cold, dead arm of choice—the one I used to pull the sand over my body—but that apparent oversight was not a shortcoming in my plan. Before I buried myself, I observed there were at least three-dozen human limbs, or partial limbs, not counting fingers and toes, lying about our position. I quickly turned that unsettling agglomeration into an advantage. The ISIS, al-Shabaab and Ansar Dine barbarians assigned to finish off survivors would likely think my and Captain Jubal’s arms lying on the sand were nothing but an organic part of the aesthetics of common ordinary everyday massacres. Captain Jubal and I both were doused in enough blood and human waste that our arms lying on the sand should look no different than those arms blown off Jubal’s 200 or so Legionnaires. Except, our bones were not protruding and our ligaments and arteries were not splayed like the puke-and-wine-soaked cords of a New Orleans bar mop.

I gambled that the terrorist’s observation skills were only those of mere killers or master soldiers—lazier, more presumptive and less precise than my artist eyes. Hopefully, the dullard’s attention to detail would be insufficient to notice one critical difference in otherwise identical human fragments. For those who have never been on the receiving end of a massacre experience, that bit of observation and evaluation on my part illustrates the inner workings and cool control of a true command mind. Though technically not in command, I had taken the lead. Again. And I liked the odds in favor of my plan for saving our keisters. Fine. Unless some pathetic terrorist decided to take Jubal’s or my forearm back home as a bone-in treat for Elton, or whatever terrorists name their mongrels.


[1] NGO (Non-Governmental Organization: a nonprofit organization that operates independently of any government, typically one whose purpose is to address a social or political issue. The number of NGOs worldwide is estimated to be 10 million. The Red Cross, Care, Doctors Without Borders and Greenpeace are examples of an NGO.

[2] Remington Arms, the manufacturer of the M2010 Enhanced Sniper Rifle sponsored the sniper team just as it would sponsor a professional hunter. Remington was paying for the weapon to be tested in actual desert battlefield conditions and for the team to write glowing reports about it in international soldier of fortune publications.

[3] Emanuel King has been charismatic CEO of Whitewater, Inc. since 2016, and he has been an ordained minister of the David’s Harp sect since 1991. In 2001, Emanuel King was exonerated in the arson murder of his 13-year-old Saudi wife, Seeta bint Lassab King.

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PALM TREES AND ANDERSON, INDIANA: THINK BEVERLY HILLS AND HOLLYWOOD…AND ALL THAT MEANS.

Today, I spoke with an Anderson resident and was inspired by a whole new idea to improve curb appeal in the city.

I stopped a moment on my morning walk, because a woman spoke to me from her yard. She was bent over a potted plant and appeared to be re-potting it. I don’t mind a conversation about gardening.

“Nobody walks on the sidewalk anymore,” she said. “Everybody, except you, walks out there in the middle of the street.”

I maneuvered away from the aroma of a garbage bin tilted precariously next to the sidewalk, and stopped to answer her. Maybe people walk in the street to get a little distance from the five-mile-long row of trash bins by the sidewalk, I thought. Anyway, she seemed friendly, and if there were to be a conversation, I didn’t want to be smelling the garbage while we talked. It could have been worse, though; it could have been trash day, when the bins are full and waiting for the trucks to come. This bin on trash day could be full of putrid stuff at its foul-smelling zenith. Plus, lucky for me, it was parked a few feet away, right next to the curb, as if it were a small car innocently occupying a parking place. Down the street, trash bins stood in rows as far as the eye could see, and no, this was not trash pickup day. These Anderson bins spend every day out front of people’s homes, as if watching a July Fourth parade.

“Nice porch,” I decided to start with a compliment, “I like those wrap-around style porches.”

“Yeah, it gives the kids somewhere to drop their stuff,” she said. “But then, they always leave stuff lay where they finish with it. In the yard. The sidewalk. It’s me puts it up there.”

“Kids nowadays,” I remarked, “Is that a rhododendron?”

“Kids and the neighbors,” she retorted, ignoring my question. “Property values going to hell around here.” She stood up and brushed a wisp of hair away from her face. “Neighbors don’t care if their crappy houses make me get upside-down on my mortgage. Look at that one over there. That dead bush been there three years.” I looked in the direction she pointed but didn’t see a dead bush.

Three trash bins side-by-side on the other side of the street might be in the way of my view. The lady walked out to the sidewalk and said, “You can’t see it from there. Come over here, look right there; you can get the full impact of the curb appeal we got around this neighborhood. See?” Then she turned toward her house, eyed the wrap-around porch piled with broken chairs, half-rolled rugs, empty pottery, multiple bird cages, bent bikes, boots, plastic guns, and cases of empty pop bottles, and cocked one arm on her hip, like an LA decorator. “Curb appeal, nobody gives a damn! Have a nice day, mister.”

“You, too.” I resumed my walk, the dead bush already forgotten. But the LA decorator notion started me thinking maybe trash bins could be redesigned to resemble palm trees, then lining them up at the curb would make a neighborhood look like Beverly Hills.

Fake palm trees up and down every street. Next thing you know, we’d have weirdos on skateboards.

Bunch of fake palm trees and you’d soon have hookers working a parade of Rolls Royces.

And tourists taking photos. Japanese dudes with five or six cameras.

Tour buses with guides pointing out famous criminal’s homes. “Look to your right. The house with the jungle growing out of the gutter, the boarded-over front door, and an old television antenna on the roof. That one. June 27th, exactly one year ago, that’s where the Anderson swat team thought they killed Jack the Stripper, but Jack turned out to be a retired librarian. Now, coming up on the left…”

Fake palm trees. Next we’d block the streets off; Disney’s filming a remake of Paradise Found this week. Already changed the name of the city from Anderson to Anderwood.

Fake palm trees. Door on the side of the tree. Vacuum mounted up inside. Hold your trash bag by the door, push a button, and WHOOSH! the whole bag is sucked up inside the tree; high up. Winds clear the stench, move it on to Muncie or Noblesville; they wouldn’t know the difference.

Fake palm trees in Anderson. Watch property values soar. The first step to gentrification of Anderson is redesigning those garbage bins. It’s an entrepreneurial opportunity waiting on just the right person with a little imagination.

 

Atlas Shamed, or What is Wrong with Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged?

My novel Joseph’s Easel, the Rise of an American Picasso makes a case that Capitalism is classic mob mania, is more ominous than insanity, and that unregulated Capitalism is fixated on legitimizing all the characteristics of sociopathic behavior.

I intend that the primary antagonist of my novel to be the literary symbol of raw Capitalism, and as such, he, Clap Kruegerrand, will be indistinguishable from the classic sociopath, not because I twist words to equate the capitalist with the sociopath, but because no accurate description of either, or both, can distinguish between a capitalist and a sociopath.

Kruegerrand is religious. He is a very successful farmer, who owns dozens of other businesses. He is a force in central Indiana. He likely will remind readers of individuals they know in their communities–big shots, whose sociopathic personalities are devilishly designed for success in a capitalist society.

Krugerrand personifies the capitalist heroes of Ayn Rand’s books, heroes she mistakenly, if not maliciously, created to convince the world that sociopathic characteristics in tall, wealthy men are noble and admirable.

Clap Kruegerrand, in Joseph’s Easel, demonstrates what is wrong with unguided, unregulated Capitalism. His character flaws clothed in success and acting out in hilariously ridiculous behavior teaches that systematizing and institutionalizing sociopathic behavior and naming it Capitalism does not make it ethical, moral, right or desirable, even if a famous author says it does.

Systematizing and institutionalizing sociopathic behavior and naming it Capitalism does not make it ethical, moral, right or desirable, even if a famous author says it does.

I am serious. Listen up, Ms. Rand: Simply systematizing and structuring sociopathic behavior and worshiping it as an all-powerful God named Capitalism gives it no honor, nobility, virtue or effective use in a just society.

Simply systematizing and structuring sociopathic behavior and worshiping it as an all-powerful God named Capitalism gives it no honor, nobility, virtue or effective use in a just society.

Consider:

Social scientists and psychologists describe the depraved sociopath using the exact same words that Economists and Ayn Rand followers use to coach and advise and motivate the aspiring Capitalist entrepreneur.

  • The sociopath as well as the capitalist is glib and uses superficial charm to sell his selfishness as being important to your life and your business’s life. In addition to thousands of other authors of business advice, Pratik Dholakiya, in 5 Habits of Relentless Entrepreneurs, coaches the capitalist practitioner “to learn to hustle, even if hustle does not come naturally”. 
  • The sociopath as well as the capitalist is manipulative and cunning in order to get you to do that which benefits her or her business. Capitalist gurus on university staffs and through How-To Books for sixty years have taught that “…there are no true friends in a capitalist economy or in a free society. Excellent capitalists are all sharks. They circle and wait for traces of blood to appear in the water. It is a mistake for the entrepreneur to forsake the shark persona and merely emulate the King of Beasts, because a lion works only when it is hungry. Once it is satisfied, predator and prehy then live peacefully together. The true capitalist is never at peace with the public” 
  • The sociopath as well as the capitalist never recognizes the rights of others and sees her self-serving behavior as not only permissible but preferable, even virtuous. In The Culture of Terrorism, Noam Chomsky warns America about the danger of a sociopathic society that accepts and worships self-serving behavior under the presumed constitution of Capitalism. “There are few genuine conservatives within the U.S. political system, and it is a sign of the intellectual corruption of the age that the honorable term ‘conservatism’ can be appropriated to disguise the advocacy of a powerful, lawless, aggressive and violent state, a welfare state for the rich dedicated to a lunatic form of Keynesian economic intervention that enhances state and private power while mortgaging the country’s future.”
  • The sociopath as well as the capitalist appears to be charming, yet is covertly hostile and domineering, seeing other people as merely an instrument to be used. They feel they have permission to dominate and humiliate other people in order to gain advantage for themselves or their business. 
  • The sociopath as well as the capitalist has a grandiose sense of self and feels entitled to a killing field that favors his needs and his business.
  • The sociopath as well as the capitalist has no problem lying through the teeth, coolly and easily, and it is almost impossible for them to be truthful on a functional basis, because the truth often stands in the path of getting their way and/or making their business richer.
  • The sociopath as well as the capitalist can create, and get caught up in, a complex belief about their own, or their company’s powers and abilities, because they are captured by the first belief of importance to them–the belief that they or their business is the most important thing in the world. Entrepreneur.com insists that the businessperson “become a shameless self-promoter.
  • The sociopath as well as the capitalist has a lack of remorse, shame or guilt, because since he is at the top of the needs ladder, all things are virtuous that help move up the ladder all those solutions for his or his company’s needs. In fact, there at his throne at the top of the needs ladder, only the degree to which something serves the capitalist or the sociopath will define the functional measure of value and virtue.
  • The sociopath as well as the capitalist does not see others around them as people, but only as targets and opportunities to benefit him or his business.
  • The sociopath as well as the capitalist believes the end always justifies the means and they let nothing stand in the way of their self-interest and the bottom line of their business. Steve Jobs recognized the problem when he criticized John Sculley’s business principles. 



“John Sculley ruined Apple and he ruined it by bringing a set of values to the top of Apple which were corrupt and corrupted some of the top people who were there, drove out some of the ones who were not corruptible, and brought in more corrupt ones and paid themselves collectively tens of millions of dollars and cared more about their own glory and wealth than they did about what built Apple in the first place.” –Steve Jobs



  • The sociopath as well as the capitalist has a refined ability to fake warmth, joy, love and compassion, because those emotions serve as ruthless tools to get what he wants or what his business needs.
  • The sociopath as well as the capitalist gets outraged by insignificant matters, yet remains unmoved and cold by what would upset a normal person, because his sense of proportion always distorts value systems in order to justify his god-like all-important self-interest.
  • The sociopath as well as the capitalist is unable to empathize with the pain of other people, because to do so would impair his ability to serve his own or his business’s needs. Bill Boulding, Dean of Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, preaches, “There is no growth in comfort.”
  • The sociopath as well as the capitalist believes he is all-powerful, all-knowing, entitled to every wish, is limited by no sense of personal boundaries, and has no concern for their impact on others, because such qualms would limit the “good” they can do themselves and their business. Steli Efti, Co-founder/CEO Elastic, Inc. advises the businessman to be relentless in the face of refusal. Apparently, the only time a successful businessperson should ignore a client or customer is after they have paid their money. And the most crucial time to bully the potential customer is when the customer indicates he or she wants to be left alone.
  • The sociopath as well as the capitalist is not concerned about wrecking others’ lives and dreams and are oblivious or indifferent to the devastation they cause, because such sensitivities inhibit the brutal drive to get what they or their business wants.
  • The sociopath as well as the capitalist does not accept blame themselves, but blames others, even for acts the sociopath/capitalist obviously committed, because such insight blinds them to the shortcuts that they need to use to serve their desires and their business interests.
  • The sociopath as well as the capitalist prefers a parasitic lifestyle to a realistic life plan, because realism stands in the way of the easy road to success for him or his business.

And so it goes, in real life as well as in my novel, Joseph’s Easel, the Rise of an American Picasso.

Alien brain matter?

ET WAS HERE

I photographed these GREENISH BRAIN FRAGMENTS from extraterrestrial beings in an empty field next to a street ironically called International Way just 510 yards north of East 32nd Street in Anderson, Indiana, June 21, 2019 at exactly 10:21 AM. Needless to say, my discovery has been blown into proportions of Trumpian legend.

Image may contain: plant, outdoor and nature

Yes, this is brain matter from a couple hundred giant extraterrestrial beings who blew their own brains out when allegedly they realized they had mistakenly landed in #AndersonIndiana.

Apparently, the alien navigator became confused by weather and the immense oceans of water presently standing in Indiana fields. I guess the aliens had done enough homework to know that Washington, DC was originally built on swampland near the Atlantic Ocean and made some sloppy piloting decisions.

Anyway, they drifted into the Anderson area totally hidden by thick cloud cover and landed ten spacecraft in this field and on the roof of the new Purdue building nearby on East 27th Street. The alien visitors immediately began their search for our leader. Which led to the tragedy and the remains of some 200 ET brains being scattered across this field. You can visit the area and see for yourself. This brain matter covers much of the field, and as yet, Defense Department officials have neither cleaned it up nor cordoned the area off as being off limits to ordinary citizens.

In the above photo, you can almost make out the outline of the extraterrestrial leader’s head and torso. Defense Department investigators are trying hard to blame this incident on the city of Anderson. Anderson is a convenient scapegoat, because with its dilapidated buildings, crumbling streets, and boarded up stores, it is so easy for observers to believe the worst. Again, Anderson’s reputation for repulsive blight (left over from departing manufacturing companies like General Motors) precedes it.

But one wild-eyed, loose-lipped official, furiously gulping down Long Island Ice Teas in Buffalo Wild Wings last night, let slip that the mass suicide was NOT caused by the sight of Anderson’s depressing curb-appeal. The mass suicide–by Rexim-Favor laser pistols–occurred right after the aliens asked a policeman to take them to our leader. The policeman promptly-summoned city officials, who, cognizant of the ethics of fair warning, even to aliens, showed the aliens a video compilation of just who our national leader is.

A member of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), who asked to be kept anonymous, described the aliens response to the video as “…crazy, even for aliens. They squeaked and ticked among themselves in their own language. And then they seemed to have gotten an order to assemble in that abandoned field. Suddenly, they all pulled a pistol of some kind, put it in their mouths and pulled the trigger. People in Anderson thought the loud noise and bright light was a massive lightening strike. No lightening strike I ever heard of could debrain 200 people in half-a-second, but that’s just me. It’s a hell of a mess.”

(Below) This particular large spill of alien remains contains the cell bodies, dendrites and axon terminals of neurons from the largest brain among all the beings so far accounted for in this particular task force of alien explorers. This, according to a spokesperson for AATIP, is the largest brain ever examined on earth, and it belongs to the creature believed to have been a celebrated alien artist tasked by his planet’s leader to sketch impressions of so-called life on Earth.

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ALL POINTS BULLETIN: All ten alien spaceships have disappeared and have been reported stolen, allegedly by the same persons who five years ago frustrated Anderson police for months by stealing tires almost every night off of new cars parked in dealer lots in the city.

SOON GONE, ANDERSON

three houses

June 25, 2019: Just off busy Scatterfield Road on the east side of Anderson, Indiana, across from Office Depot, these three houses–now overgrown eyesores–are scheduled for demolition. Dave Cravens, Anderson Fire Chief and business owner, has purchased all three and intends to clear the entire lot to make room for a commercial building and parking lot. Cravens says demolition awaits only the removal of gas meters, which is underway already. Two entry drives will be added, and one tenant for space in the new building has already committed.

According to Cravens, demolition should begin in less than 20 days.

For more about Dave Cravens, visit https://www.facebook.com/Cravens2018/

 

60,000,000 INVASIVE THISTLE SEEDS IN A SINGLE ANDERSON, INDIANA FIELD, BUT THEY’RE EDIBLE

thistles

How Many of These Thistle Seeds Will Sprout in Anderson Yards and Gardens Next Spring?

This field is east of Office Depot just off Scatterfield Road and 38th Street. Its thistle blooms are a flashy violet right now, and pretty to view from a distance. These thistle blooms attract butterflies and bees, but thistles are an invasive weed. Some states have laws requiring property owners to remove certain thistles before they go to seed.

Untitled-1

There are a few dozen species of thistles. Some thistles grow to less than a foot in height, but thistles, like these in this field (either bull thistle or Canada thistle is my guess), grow to six feet.

Kings County, Washington published an article recently listing some of the characteristics of some thistles.

  • Originally from parts of Europe and Asia, this Class A noxious weed is now invasive in North America, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, among other places…
  • But once thistle shows up, it’s persistent. Seeds survive in soil an average of 16 years. One King County landowner eradicated a few plants from his pasture more than a decade ago. Last summer, he cleared a blackberry patch on the land. Earlier this spring, Weed Specialist Dan Sorensen found over 50 new plants growing in the cleared area!
  • One thistle can produce over 6,000 large seeds.
  • Milk thistle, another invasive species, is widely known as a medicinal plant, especially for liver problems.

Chris Hope in Permaculture Magazine, a British publication, expounds on the more positive uses of thistle.

  • One of the great things about thistles is that every single species is edible, so this is great news for foraging beginners! Even the closest lookalikes…are edible – (which includes the sow thistles and sea holly…
  • (As to eating thistle weeds, Hope says) …plants that have spines to offer protection against predators, have no real need for bitterness.
  • (Compared to our other vegetables commonly grown for the table) Weight for weight, thistles come out higher in fiber, protein, phosphorus, magnesium, calcium, copper, zinc, and other nutrients.

Yes, Indiana does have laws that order destruction of (one specific species of) thistle–Canadian thistle. Purdue Extension Publication FNR-436-W explains.

  • In the state of Indiana it is unlawful [IC 15-16-8, “Destruction of Detrimental Plants” law] to let Canada thistle reach maturity or bloom. This law was written in order to reduce the spread of Canada thistle in Indiana. At the very least any method that inhibits or stops flowering complies with the law. This can be achieved by mowing, tillage or herbicides. Mowing or the use of herbicides to control noxious weeds is allowed for CRP acreage at any time within the first three years of establishment, or prior to a Final Status Review, whichever comes first. Because Canada thistle is covered by Indiana law, CRP policy mandates that Canada thistle must be controlled.

MY QUESTION IS: Why are retailers in Indiana permitted to sell thistle seed as bird feed?

Re-examining the Platitudes of Art

“Visual Art is the Universal Language”

Maybe not…

 

If you were stranded on a tiny, remote island and had one empty bottle and one piece of paper, what sort of message would be most useful to you to put afloat in the bottle? 

Would you paint a picture that would communicate the seriousness of your predicament AND establish your general location?  Or could you use words alone–in your language–to get your point across?  Or would it be better to combine words with an image?

Wouldn’t you hope that anyone who found the note, say, in Fiji, or Sumatra, or Chile, or Japan, or Mongolia, no matter what language they speak, would be able to read it well enough to discern your predicament in enough detail to initiate effective help?

Maybe we artists should admit that as yet There Is No Universal Language, not even art.  Or at least examine the assumption with a great deal more curiosity than we so far have. Bear with me.

DIEGO RIVERA

Although he was not the first to make the assertion, over half-a-century ago, in the 1950’s, Diego Rivera said that “:…art is the universal language and belongs to all mankind.”

Diego María de la Concepción Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez is considered to be one of the great painter iconoclasts of the 20th century.  He was thoughtful and opinionated about art, politics and the plight of working people.  But Diego saying something clever does not a maxim make.

LANGUAGE IS FAR MORE COMPLEX THAN IT IS UNIVERSAL

Today, after nearly twenty years of learning to use the worldwide web, diverse cultures of “all mankind” congregate around the clock in the immensely crowded public square of cyberspace. And there we express our cultural uniqueness in words, video, audio, photography, music, dance, hype, jest, scam, lies…as well as the visual arts.

Above is a computer detected worldwide web activity map (cropped)

 Some forward thinking individuals predict that through the Internet, in time, we will answer whether or not anything at all can become a universal language.

Scientifically, linguistics makes the most thorough study of the question.

Quantitative linguistics formula (cropped)

I suggest that if the scholars of linguistics thought that art was the universal language, surely they would be applying their sensitive examination tools to visual art with headline-making exuberance.  Their probability distribution and quantitative methods might find interesting results by quantifying the incidence rate in which all the various symbols of visual art occur in different cultures and how often those symbols express the same thing.

In their study of language, linguists use tools like phonetics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, historical linguistics and syntax to predict, with high degrees of accuracy what a newly-found symbol is apt to mean, playing the odds like a card counter in Vegas.  And then the linguists double-down on those symbols they have decoded to determine the meaning of the next symbol, and the next, until at last they decode the entire language.

With those tools, linguists have deciphered most of the languages of the world, even those that have been hidden with small tribes deep in jungles and mountains and deserts for millenniums.  Keeping in mind the capabilities of linguistics, one could argue that spoken and written languages are indeed universal, because it is possible that the linguistics discipline, devoted to understanding them, actually finds a way to read the most subtle detail of any language, but “universal” would only be universal if everyone except linguists were dead.

Linguistics Largely Ignores Visual Art.

Perhaps, if we artists knew more about linguistics and the amazing results it achieves, we might not be so certain that visual art is the universal language.  And we might not emphasize the article “the” in order to assert the implication that nothing else under the sun is a universal language —not humming, not whistling, not music, not body language, not dance, not mathematics, not pheromones, and not even movies.

 “Christina’s World” by Andrew Wyeth.

Sadness, Devotion, Glee

It is true that perceptive people all over the world, without the slightest need to resort to scientific tools, can read the singular sadness or devotion of an art work, no matter if it was created on the opposite side of the world by a culture utterly foreign.

Test your perception here.  Which of these paintings are voicing sadness, which are expressing devotion, and which are trying to express glee?

    

  

   

Is sadness or glee or devotion all that these artists were trying to convey?  And if any one of them was trying to say something more than, or trying to express a finely-tuned modification of, one of those three emotional conditions,  such as sad devotion, and if art is the universal language, then why don’t we read exactly what the artist is expressing?

READ THESE

 

 

 

 

Are you able to read all of these visual symbols, all of which appear in many art works in various parts of the world?  They have been designed to represent certain emotions, behaviors and devotions, and within special groups they are clearly understood.  But if you or I cannot read them when they are included in an art work, is that art work speaking a universal language?

But to be judicial about the question, there are a few visual expressions which artists make that can be read almost anywhere by almost anyone.  A few.  And they are simple, more simple than the vocabulary of a baby.

 

Little did I know while raising my son that little babies use their hands to communicate, as the woman below illustrates.

Well, if those few expressions and hand signals are our arguments for art being the universal language, please consider that “language”, as expressed by other disciplines, such as poetry, literature, science, mathematics, movies, theater, opera, nursery rhymes, country songs, and even a baby’s elementary hand signals is immensely more specific and complex than merely expressing (and accurately reading) sadness or devotion.

Other disciplines use language to express complex emotion, needs, understandings and concepts.  Just the ability to verbally express with exact precision the simplest complex emotions surpasses the language of visual arts.  Simple complex emotions like:

Sweet sadness.  Bitter sadness.  Unjustified sadness.  Sweet unjustified sadness.  Bittersweet unjustified sadness. 

And verbal language can express those complexities in a way that the reader and viewer understands more or less explicitly what subtlety is being expressed.

Visual artists may try to express those subtleties, but few people, not even the very rare critic of genius class, can decipher the subtle complex message the artist might be expressing with any degree of accuracy or consistency.  That is why the visual artist’s act of language is often incomplete, expressed but not understood, like the early sentences of a toddler.

I doubt that apologists for art are willing to limit language to grunts, tears, giggles, “Mine”, “Me want”, “No”, “Me go” in order to make valid their claim that art is the universal language.

That said, I offer one new argument for the contention that…

“Art—if studied in a certain way—might someday be a universal language”.

Here is a development to think about in that regard. An acquaintance of mine in Indianapolis, by way of a professorship in the philosophy department of the University of Illinois, has invented software that can listen to conversations in ANY language and discern what is being talked about. His program achieves a basic translation not by the usual means of how the words are formed with vowels and consonants and diphthongs and syntax,or any of the techniques linguists formerly used…

but by means of measurable and quantifiable digital sound qualities as observed in microscopic variations within sound waves, something like a polygraph without all the wires.

My friend sold that software to the United States Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA now use it to plug into phone conversations all over the world for the purpose of extracting a generalized idea of what the conversation is about—such as causing trouble, planning a terrorist attack, conducting an illegal sale, hiding people, and so on.  That enables them to discern which conversations warrant a closer listen and translation with trained human ears.

The thing I find interesting is that it turns out that there IS something fairly complex—the psychologically induced sound variation—that is contained in all spoken languages of the world, which is universal and can be detected fairly accurately, as my friend’s new software invention proves.

Perhaps that suggests another look at the possibility of art actually having qualities of a universal language, something like psychologically induced variations that exist in spoken language.

And maybe my friend in Indianapolis might be able to create software that can view any piece of art and read in it the artist’s most complex message, even if the artist had been overwhelmed by his subconscious and did not even know himself or herself what exact message the Id was expressing.

When that software is perfected, and we are able to proxy it to do the job of comprehending, then we might be able to say with a bit more certainty that “art is a universal language”.

But don’t hold your breath.