1968 — a year to remember. The doctors had given me massive doses of antibiotics. More than to kill or cure a horse. I had to go back to Europe. Should I stayed in Africa, I would have died.

 

This was the year of many other events. Like most years, there is always stuff happening to our human historical condition, but we pay more attention to some items of “significance”, such as the death of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, while 3,124,976 other people keeled-over for various reasons — from wars to malaria. I had malaria as well. 

1968 was the year of yet another French “revolution”, this time inspired we are told by students and workers. After years of farting around since, the French are still in the same canoe, as the rest of the Western world, conned by the US empire in charge of paddling in circles.

Apparently, in 1968, a small item to mention here was an off-the-cuff accidental interview of Wilfred Burchett by an ABC crew in Vietnam. As a fired up David Hill, former CEO and former chairman of the ABC, reminded the Friends thereof, at their AGM meeting the other day, the tapes of the Burchett interviews, sent back to Australia, never passed customs and disappeared into the biggest black hole of forgotten journalism. Was it 1968? I don’t really know, but the hearsay that came back to Gus via the ABC news-pigeons, was interpreted as a form of “censorship”… 
The ABC is in for a battle. The defeat of the government in Wentworth would have been delivered due not in a small part to what this CONservative — under Abbott, Turnbull and Scummo — government has tried, is trying and will try to destroy the ABC. People love their ABC — as flawed as it could appear be. 

1968 was also the year of the death of Thomas Merton. We have mentioned him before in a forgotten job lot:  "I would like to mention four of these Americans: Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Dorothy [Doris] Day and Thomas Merton. This year marks the one hundred and …"   etc… Merton died in unclear circumstances. But his writings still live on and provide a many people some comfort against their misfortune — often brought on by others — but the poor bastards get blamed for not having been sociopathic enough in their own self-defenced survival. On top of this, your social security cheque has been cancelled, because you’ve not been a hard working boy/girl. Crummy.

Here comes a hopeful study of Thomas Merton on OffGuardian:

 

Then he taught me this, as if he were Socrates asking questions. I paraphrase:

If you were Merton’s “they,” those who rule the American Empire and your oppressed subjects were restless and awakening to their plight, what message would you want to convey to keep the peons from rebelling? What strategies, short of direct violence, would be most effective in rendering even the relatively well-off middle class passive and docile? What, in other words, is the most effective form of social control, outside economic exploitation and fear of penury, in a putative democracy when all the controlling institutions have lost the trust of most of the population?

Then, without skipping a beat, he answered his own questions. You would, he said, tell them that the sky is falling, the empire is collapsing, that the rich rulers are going to get theirs when the system collapses on itself and that this is in the process of happening right now. So sit back and watch the show as it closes down. The end is near.

Then he said he had to go. Lunch was being served at the nearby soup kitchen and if you didn’t get there early, they sometimes ran out of food.

Read more:https://off-guardian.org/2018/10/28/the-apocalypse-not-now/

—————————————————

Thomas Merton was a Catholic monk. Yet he ecumenically embraced many religious paths. Thomas was born in France. His father was a New Zealand painter and his mother was a Quaker from the USA. Merton's messages of peace are still some that should be heard despite being filtered through strong religious beliefs, which he first espoused in Rome, on his second visit to this city. 
But the main error in the discourse above about the collapse of the “system”, is that in reality, the "Rich won’t get theirs” when (if) the system collapses. And the system won’t collapse in the way we could think. And we, oldies, those who mucked up the planet for the benefit of our twittering dumb progeny, might die before that. There’s a good chance of that. The system has strong kidneys and survives only in booms and busts for good reason. Sustainability and balance are dirty words if you’re a capitalist. Yet we, the slaves at the bottom of the cage, still hope for proper adjustments in the system, with peace and equality, rather than self-destruction. We can dream.
Here, we need to make a leap of faith away from faith, into the difficult establishment of ethics, by using our natural strengths of aggressiveness and submissiveness, to weave our relativity of purpose. This purpose is to manage our ecological subsistence (survival) without making godly fools of ourselves, while enjoying the moment, not destroy the planet and inventing better comforts... Life as such is complicated yakka, but enjoyably so. We need to monitor our impacts, personally and globally, on the equations of the natural system which could go arse up way before our own social system fizzles.
Little is said about Merton the monk falling “platonically” in love with his nurse when he was sick somewhere. But this is not a place to tarnish the memory of this man, probably under the spell of morphine, who helped many people towards their own mystical journey of positive survival. The delusion of god is an attractive escape from the grind, though god’s stuff is waning somewhat, under the more rigorous scientific — and dare I say exciting — understanding of our little place in the universe added to our goofy artistic interpretations of this irrelevance. The more we learn, the less we know. Isn’t this goodo? I love it.
In any “system collapse”, it’s mostly the poor and the second class citizens of the middle bourgeois range who suffer. The rich won’t get hurt. They have their escape pods. They have their fortresses and private armies, including lawyers and reserves of supplies. The poor people, us, have been dedicated to work for them-the-rich, under the delusion that our work has an intrinsic value, sometimes given to us as “contributing to society” with many golden valves plugging dark holes on a clarinet. We’re screwed.
Our social contribution is not in relationship with the benefits. 
We work far too hard for peanuts. 
At some stage in the capitalist system, we are encouraged to become sociopaths in order to survive: we’re told to “compete”. Competition is natural, but the way humans take it, from the sports fields to the office, it is a degrading form of grubby prostitution in which we get hurt and punched, unless we punch back necessarily. Thus, delusion in our values under “god”, is a neat trick to soften the blows. 
We should be angry. Really angry. But we are not, because we will get our cheese and our due recognition (possibly our subconscious “revenge”) in the after-life… hum... 
This ain’t going to happen. When we’re dead, we’re dead. Gone, dusted. Kaput. Vanished. Including our lovely delusions that do not go beyond our last breath. 
I know. It’s a harsh reality and most of the rich people have understood this. They decorate their own self-indulgent illusions and abodes with gold leaf and pricey works of art, but they know the limited value of their cash. They will bid against each others for sociopathic fun, while we toil with our bare knuckles, or get arranged on the slave boat of unemployment, awaiting our turn to toil. 
The social systems are built around the value of cash — both at the political and religious levels. Religions are businesses. Should we care that our social connecting networks can spy on us? To be able to sell us something? Or stop us from becoming revolutionaries?
Should we let a nice day be spoilt by our rumblings?… Is hope the best we can do? Should not we be tearing the place down and replace it with “better”? Should not we organise ourselves in phalanges in street revolutions? The only problem is there is no way we can threaten the system from a virtual soapbox. The internet lets off a lot of unusable wasted steam.
The rich are laughing their head off…
We’re screwed. Unless we wait our long-coming turn… In one of his drawings "One-Shot Dept: Vengeance” (Mad magazine #66, October 1961, p. 13), Antonio Prohías  the artists famous for Spy vs Spy cartoons (see at top), introduced an interesting concept:

A caveman kills another caveman with an arrow to the head. The dead body nourishes the living arrow, which grows into a tree. In the modern day, a motorist who resembles the first caveman crashes into the tree.

Lovely sentiment, but this tends to leave us all dead. 
Funny, though we can do better than revenge. We could stop working for the rich and the warmongers.
Gus Leonisky
Mad as Mad...