And Another Thing, Too,

In a silly press conference in the sixties, Bob Dylan, when asked to define Folk Music replied, “a constitutional replay of mass production”. I refer to this moment as an entry into a very important fact of modern life concerning humanity all over Earth. Mister Dylan was playing and he was making a serious point that if made directly then would have been ignored. It sticks out to this day as an unanswered dilemma, and a growing cancer.

What have we become?

We will hurt ourselves again today. We sponsor our injections in pain-numbing doses and blame “them”.

It is not to say that there are no true art expressions. It is that there are so many fakes so readily made available they drown the real thing. The rela thing requires a serious, diligent, unstoppable search, and it always will. Art used by a system of mass production to further its interests is bound to be a “replay of mass production”. The question on all the minds of all the artists used this way is “what sells?”.

Book publishers, theatre production companies, film production companies, from the largest right on down to the single artist acting alone on his laptop attempting with the best of intentions to make dough from his art are asking it.

As an example, a sizable commitment in time and money and professional collaborators was made just prior to the almost certain entry of the United States into World War II in the form of a film entitled How Green Was My Valley. That award winning film, emotionally stirring, brings tears to all our eyes to this day. The performances were of the highest quality. It is called a masterpiece. It portrays real hardships in a low-income mining village of proud hard working miners and their families. Wages were being cut for these men solely because the owners could hire unemployed workers from nearby towns at lower even starvation wages. The patriarch of one of the families who has spent his whole life in the local mine dies as the result a cave-in at the end of the film. The whole story has been told as seen through the eyes of an innocent child of that unfortunate man. All who watch suffer his grief. But, the film ends in hope. It is the replay ending of all such works. We hurt ourselves with the pain of the miserable state of

our true situation as much as we think watchers will tolerate and then entertain the hope that we can keep up the same way of life that has led us time and again to horror and one day all will be as it should be.

I have known, sadly, a lot of alcoholics who have followed this tired, old saw right into the jaws of death. One more. But for grace, one of them would have been me. We have met the Illuminati and it are us.

“Illuminati” is a word for an unknown who is, or one day may be, the real ruler of the world. It is us, our greed, our fear, our anger, our intolerance, our ignorance. Each is brought to the point of realization in his own life, and it happens this way, I am the one I hate. What have I become? Maybe the Dark is from my eyes? The evil I see in another is in me.

In this manner is the solution a most personal thing. I must end the process for myself, begun in childhood, of following another's formula for my life. It turns out “The Jedi Knight” or the One I have been wishing for and praying to, is me, and has been all along. I know I truly joined the entire human race when I ceased looking outside for my answers. We are in the same boat.