A Gift of Love

Posted on by Laughingnomad

My unexpected Christmas “Mass” occurred last night in Las Vegas of all places: Out of the dregs of post WWII Liverpool bubbled brilliant words and revolutionary music…channeling truth and prophecy even they were probably not completely aware of. Helped along no doubt by the Maharishi and the magic mushrooms of Hautla Mexico. Listening as if for the first time to the voices of a generation looking for love.

Imagination. Beauty. Fantasy. Originality. Hope. Transformation. Multisensory and Whole Brain Inspiration. Lifting…transporting…touching peace and love. Brought to us by unbelievable modern technology and the Sufi dancers of the “infidel.” Thanks to the souls of the multicultural priests of Cirque du Soleil…and the Beatles. “Love.”

Gooey overstatement? I risk cynicism. Who is to say the experience was not as transcendent as meditation? Hadn’t I just been studying Aristotle’s metaphysics of Potency and Actuality before that 1962 Beatles Tour?  Maybe last night just evoked the feeling of Possibility…of True Revolution that was born in that 18 year old new soul.

Thanks for the gift, Greg, and for the legacy of the Beatles.

Peace and love to you all in the new year!

Waiting for Alaska Flight 624

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Had a heck of a time getting out on the plane in the worst storm in the NW in 40 years! After a two hour trip from Salem to the Portland airport over icy washboard Highway 99 because the freeway was plugged with snow plows, the HUT Shuttle driver kindly unloaded my 6 duffels and 2 carry-ons and then helped pile them all onto a cart at the airport. Then, hitting a bump, I dumped the whole load in the middle of the street in front of a block long line of cars! Thanks to the generosity of two young guys who refused a tip, (it’s for our good karma, they said) I made it into the airport! A nice gentleman helped me lift my carry-on into the compartment above on the plane! Now my 42 year old son and his girlfriend are heaping loads of love and care onto me!

May you all enjoy similar care from complete strangers as well as family!

I Picked The Worst Day Ever To Travel

Posted on by Laughingnomad

It was supposed to be a simple trip from Oaxaca to Portland Oregon on December 17th to get stuff for my apartment in Oaxaca.  In the first place the plane was an hour late out of Oaxaca.  So I missed the connection in Mexico City to Los Angeles. About a half hour into the flight we hear a message from the pilot: “This is an emergency! Take one of the oxygen maska and place it on your face!”  But no oxygen masks come down from the ceiling.  A few minutes later we get the same message.  Again nothing happens.  The stewardess is on the phone. Then an announcement in spanish from the stewardess,  that,  I gathered, was that all was a false alarm.  Tranquilo, she says.

Then in Mexico city they rerouted those of us who missed connections to LAX us through Las Vegas.  Three hours out of Mexico City (and almost to Las Vegas) the plane turned back and I ended up where I started…Mexico City.  No more planes out that night so I slept in the airport…the alternative was the Hilton Hotel at the airport for $200 a night!  Next morning finally took a plane out of Mex City to LAX where I waited for a 7:30pm flight.  A half hour wait on the tarmac because the plane door wouldn’t shut.  Finally slid into PDX about 8:30pm on the 18th.  Spent an hour filing a missing baggage report and narrowly got on the HUT for Salem after which I took a taxi to Lyn’s.  So here I am in Salem in the middle of the worst snow and ice in the last 30 years.  But the Toyota started right up and I spent the day today running errands.  Got a phone call late today that my bag turned up at PDX so they will deliver it to the house in Salem. Tomorrow I will pack some duffels full of kitchen and other stuff to take back to Oaxaca.

So for inquiring minds, this is how I got from Oaxaca, Mexico to Salem, Oregon.

On the way back to Oaxaca I’ll stop in Las Vegas to spend Christmas with Greg, my first-born son. Maybe.

Do It Yourself Law Enforcement

Posted on by Laughingnomad

In the [small] town of Santiago Lachivia the fed-up residents surrounded and put into prison the military group who had been harassing them and arbitrarily breaking into homes which they then robbed. An elderly woman was allegedly robbed of 5,000 pesos…Two soldiers were jailed and 50 others were surrounded and restrained. Nobody was injured, the townspeople had no weapons.

From The Noticias…Oaxaca newpaper

Last Speech By Founder of Pakistan

Posted on by Laughingnomad

…………..I shall watch with keenness the work of your Research Organization in evolving banking practices compatible with Islamic ideas of social and economic life. The economic system of the West has created almost insoluble problems for humanity and to many of us it appears that only a miracle can save it from disaster that is facing the world. It has failed to do justice between man and man and to eradicate friction from the international field. On the contrary, it was largely responsible for the two world wars in the last half century. The Western world, in spite of its advantages, of mechanization and industrial efficiency is today in a worse mess than ever before in history. The adoption of Western economic theory and practice will not help us in achieving our goal of creating a happy and contented people. We must work our destiny in our own way and present to the world an economic system based on true Islamic concept of equality of manhood and social justice. We will thereby be fulfilling our mission as Muslims and giving to humanity the message of peace which alone can save it and secure the welfare, happiness and prosperity of mankind.

May the Sate Bank of Pakistan prosper and fulfil the high ideals which have been set as its goal.

In the end I thank you, Mr. Governor, for the warm welcome given to me by you and your colleagues, and the distinguished guests who have graced this occasion as a mark of their good wishes and the honour your have done me in inviting me to perform this historic opening ceremony of the State Bank which I feel will develop into one of our greatest national institutions and play its part fully throughout the world.”

Quaid-i-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah
1st July, 1948

I  wonder, if he could have looked into the future, if he would have advocated for the partitioning.

Auto Bailout?

Posted on by Laughingnomad

 Sent to me by a friend:

Ford has spent the last thirty years moving its factories out of the US, claiming it can’t make money paying American wages.

TOYOTA has spent the last thirty years building more than a dozen plants inside the US. The last quarter’s results: TOYOTA made $4 billion in profits while Ford racked up 9 billion in losses.

Ford folks are still scratching their heads, collecting bonuses, and wanting a bail-out.

Feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe

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Extracted from a Washington Post article:

On Dec. 9, 1531, the Virgin of Guadalupe appeared in a vision to an Indian peasant, Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin, on a hill north of the ruined Aztec capital, where the basilica stands today. According to accounts, the apparition spoke to Juan Diego in Nahuatl, an Indian language still used in parts of Mexico. When the Spanish bishop asked for proof of the encounter, Juan Diego gathered roses on the hill. As he presented them to the bishop, the image of the Virgin miraculously appeared on his tilma, a kind of traditional cloak fastened at the shoulder with a knot.

The novelist Carlos Fuentes said, “You cannot truly be considered a Mexican unless you believe in the Virgin of Guadalupe.”

Nobel laureate Octavio Paz wrote that if the macho in Mexican society is represented by the conquistador, then the Virgin “is the consolation of the poor, the shield of the weak, the help of the oppressed.”

At a time when the tremors of global recession are spreading from the United States to Mexico, where workers in assembly plants and farm fields provide auto parts and winter tomatoes for American consumption, many of the 5 million people who stood in line for hours to enter the basilica in Mexico City said they would ask the Virgin of Guadalupe to watch over their wallets and keep them filled with pesos, even these weaker pesos.

There were not nearly as many people who lined up in Oaxaca, but Llano Park, across the street from the Virgin of Guadalupe Church was filled with revelers yesterday waiting their turn to kiss the feet of the statue of the virgin…their little children dressed up like Juan Diego begging for treats from the many stalls and rides at the carnival in the street. Nuns were selling homemade Rompopo, a kind of eggnoggy  drink made with eggs and rum that is also popular in Honduras and Guatemala at Christmas time. I am told that locally ground almonds, or almond cream is added here in Oaxaca. Rockets and fireworks have been going off continuously day and night.  The Zocalo is lit up with white Christmas lights.  This is Mexico.

On Language

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Camille Paglia, in Salon.com  today, can not be accused of political correctness in her article bashing Dick Cavett for his piece on Sarah Palin.  I love it. But what she does not mention is that it might have been the content of the Palin repetoire that everyone was objecting to.  Nonetheless, I like Camille here and her poke in the eye. I happen to like frayed syntax, bungled grammar and run on sentences too…much easier to set a tone than “veddy veddy proper English.”

Camille Paglia:

“Once the Republican ticket was defeated, the time had passed for ad feminam attacks on Palin. Hence my surprise and dismay at Dick Cavett’s Nov. 14 blog in the New York Times, “The Wild Wordsmith of Wasilla,” which made a big splash and topped the paper’s most-read list for nearly a week. I have enormous respect for Cavett: His TV interviews with major celebrities, which are now available on DVD, set a high-water mark for sheer intelligence in that medium that will surely never be surpassed.

However, Cavett’s piece on Sarah Palin was insufferably supercilious. With dripping disdain, he sniffed at her “frayed syntax, bungled grammar and run-on sentences.” He called her “the serial syntax-killer from Wasilla High,” “one who seems to have no first language.” I will pass over Cavett’s sniggering dismissal of “soccer moms” as lightweights who should stay far, far away from government.I was so outraged when I read Cavett’s column that I felt like taking to the air like a Valkyrie and dropping on him at his ocean retreat in Montauk in the chichi Hamptons.

How can it be that so many highly educated Americans have so little historical and cultural consciousness that they identify their own native patois as an eternal mark of intelligence, talent and political aptitude.  In sonorous real life, Cavett’s slow, measured, self-interrupting and clause-ridden syntax is 50 years out of date. Guess what: There has been a revolution in English — registered in the 1950s in the street slang, colloquial locutions and assertive rhythms of both Beat poetry and rock ‘n’ roll and now spread far and wide on the Web in the standard jazziness of blogspeak.

Does Cavett really mean to offer himself as a linguistic gatekeeper for political achievers in this country? Yes, that is the lordly Yale that formed Dick Cavett’s linguistic and cultural assumptions and that has alarmingly resurfaced in the contempt that he showed for the self-made Sarah Palin in “The Wild Wordsmith of Wasilla.” I am very sorry that he, and so many other members of the educational elite, cannot take pleasure as I do in the quick, sometimes jagged, but always exuberant way that Palin speaks — which is closer to street rapping than to the smug bourgeois cadences of the affluent professional class.

English has evolved, and the world has moved on. There is no necessary connection between bourgeois syntax and practical achievement. I have never had the slightest problem with understanding Sarah Palin’s meaning at any time. Since when do free Americans subscribe to a stuffy British code of veddy, veddy proper English? We don’t live in a stultified class system. In the U.K., in fact, many literary leftists make a big, obnoxious point about retaining their working-class accents. Too many American liberals claim to be defenders of the working class and then run like squealing mice from working-class manners and mores (including moose hunting and wolf control). What smirky, sheltered hypocrites. Get the broom!”

Viva Mexico; Viva America

Posted on by Laughingnomad

It is Sunday and quiet as usual except for a rally in Llano Park about a block away.  The sound of the speeches bounces off the walls of my courtyard but thankfully it has stopped.

It is dusk now and the park across the street from my apartment is nearly empty except for about a dozen well dressed people gathered for something…maybe a wedding celebration. From my veranda I listen to a band playing. A singer dressed in white and big red Mexican hat sings Viva Mexico; Viva America.  A young girl sits by herself nearby.  An old man further back.  An old lady comes and puts her bags down and listens too. The band plays some more.  A lone couple dances by themselves off by the side. Another couple dances on the sidewalk. The old woman leaves.  A young boy comes and joins the young girl.  Maybe she has been waiting for him. Venus and Jupiter are still conjunct in the clear cool sky overhead.

This is Mexico!

Las Posadas

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The days of Las Posadas commemorate Mary and Joseph’s long and difficult trek from Nazareth to Bethlehem.  Rock bands are playing, marching bands with people carrying lights, dancing calendas with a giant Joseph and Mary carried atop the shoulders of a young guy, fireworks, rockets, church bells. The markets are selling Christmas decorations and all manner of  related junk.

Last night a calenda with accompanying band, and local neighborhood people,  walked quietly  with their lights in the street under my veranda and around the park.

All signifying that Christmas is coming.