What works, what doesn't, as a voice in the wilderness of social media and the blogosphere

William Blake never got a break ... until he was near death.

The problem isn't the poetry, it's the medium. Most of the greatest poets who are internationally recognized pre-date color TV. Dylan, Lennon, Springsteen and later Leonard Cohen took poetry and carried it across the airwaves on a musical vehicle a book of poetry could never attain. In terms of popularity, who cares? Sure, poets are minimized in comparison. If there was an Incredible Hulk of poetry, how bad would that be? A small press poet is something to be. Their art is no less meaningful despite a competitive environment that has relegated the poetry book medium into the arcane shadows of the dispossessed. As Blake wrote, "It is not my job to reason or compare. My job is to create." If I can move a room full of 20 people, then I have made a wave in the turning of the world ... In other words, a pin-prick fraction of eight billion souls is still a shitload.

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Using social media as a news gathering source has its drawbacks. It's hard to get people to write. They just hit "like" and move on. This after I posted the following on Facebook: I'm doing an article on the National Park Service centennial and I'm looking from people about their recent experiences at National Parks, as well as related issues, such as encroaching development. Looking for quotes, so please give me a hand ..." The only response I got was a like from a new friend in Timor, Indonesia.

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It happened: The Mythville blog finally surpassed 100,000 visits. My story and interview with Gordon Lightfoot finally pushed it over the edge. Thank you, whoever you are, 100,000th visitor ... You've made a lone voice in the wilderness of the web a happy man today ... http://mythville.blogspot.com

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Just looked at some of the reports on Trump's rally in North Carolina, and Jared Yates Sexton, who has turned tweeting crowd commentary into an art form, has noticed a new form of behavior. After the GOP candidate blames the media for his sinking in the polls, people like to stalk the area cordoned off for reporters covering his campaign to shout insults and take photos of journalists, as if they were trying to intimidate them. As Sexton tweeted tonight, "I heard several people talking about wanting to hurt the press, several mentioning a civil war if Trump loses. This is building in a hurry."

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Trump got his first intelligence briefing this week. On page one on the list of threats was a warning about a madman in the U.S. stirring up hatred in large gatherings, threatening political assassinations and nuclear war. Trump ran out of the room, in terror, retreating to his tower.

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Who owns America's film companies? Up to a few years ago, 20th Century Fox was owned by Rupert Murdoch, but now is apparently still under that empire's wing, owned by Fox Entertainment Group. Columbia Pictures is owned by Sony. Paramount Pictures is owned by Viacom, owned by the family of Sumner Redstone, a long-time Democrat who nonetheless endorsed George W. Bush for president because he said it would be better for his business. That industry, in turn, has turned into a forum for supposedly "serious" films with a heavy post-9/11 heroism vibe, comic book blow outs, yuppie training films posing as comedies, and, getting back to the topic, buddies with guns. Anyhow, these major corporations have very little interest in artistic undertakings. They are casting out their nets for the blockbuster bucks. Clearly, a key engine for the dumbing down of America. P.S. Paramount's blockbuster attempt, a remake of "Ben Hur," is tanking this weekend. It's as if Hollywood has completely run out of ideas and now they are paying for it.

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By far the biggest response I got this week, other than a good number of hits for my archived article about Gordon Lightfoot at Mythville, was a kind of honest assessment of how I managed to tame my Facebook feeds: "A lot of people are posting about how they get nasty comments on Facebook, mostly due to their political views. But I weeded these people out years ago by unfriending anyone writing angry words in caps. My friends are mostly poets and humanists, teachers, professors and publishing people. Back in those days of political flaming on Facebook it was like shooting ducks in a barrel. Now, I kind of miss the action. Of course, there are members of my family who refuse to friend me. I'm the crazy poor liberal living in the woods." The bottom line:  You want the love? Then be unabashedly personal.

Mythville: Thievery Corporation: Two Decades of Downtempo ...

Mythville:

Thievery Corporation: Two Decades of Downtempo  ...: Thievery Corporation:  Two Decades of Downtempo    A t the nadir of the alternative scene of the 1990s, Rob Garza and Eric Hilton w...

Mythville: Time and Sound

Mythville: Time and Sound

Militarized police tactics incite fear, then anger, then violence in terrorized U.S. communities

     The government may think twice about arming radical militias in the Middle East, but when it comes to distributing weapons within our own shores, we seeming to be willing to arm the forces of terror to the teeth. According to the Defense Logistics Agency, a federal program called 1033 delivers surplus military equipment to civilian police forces across the Unite States: pistols, automatic rifles, armored vehicles, some capable of surviving blasts from land mines. While MRAPs may have utility in Afghanistan and Iraq, if land mines become a problem in the U.S., it's unlikely, in the social disorder, that civilian police departments will do much to protect anyone. But hey, they are great toys, right? What can be more "peace officer" than an urban assault vehicle crashing through your porch and into your living room? That is certainly the cumulative effect for Americans, on either the right or the left, when such images march into your home on the television screen.
     This is what it can be like in certain segments of America. In the poor neighborhoods, in those places where the communities aren't gated, the power dogs rage. The police are running hot. Their violence is unrestrained. There will be a knock on your door. Maybe. More likely they will burst in. With more force and menace than any street gang might dare. What the hell, after all, Team Swat in America is above the law. They will shout something at you, the precursor for what's to come. They will drag you out of your car. You might say, "What? Why?"
     By that point you are the criminal. Ask one question and you are resisting arrest. Next thing you know eight soldier looking dudes in Desert Storm gear are slamming your face into the sidewalk, the door, hood of your car. They are in bullet-proof vests. Wearing khaki. Not much use in an urban landscape, but certainly intimidating. They point a Taser gun at your chest. They want to know, where's so and so, who you have never heard of. They want your identification. If you refuse in any way, their aggression only gets worse. You stutter, stumble with your thoughts, wondering how this could be. A citizen, on the street? No. No. No. The guns are pointed at you, potentially, any moment of the day, as the overwhelming force overcomes you.
     Now, if we break this behavior down, we have to get back to the dogs again. Anyone who has been around them much knows that if you get three or more swirling around in a group, their mood switches into something more aggressive. Doesn't take much to get them barking and nipping at each other. This is the problem with overwhelming force. Maybe they are in a line, dressed in riot gear for a peaceful protest: The more you get, the more likely something bad is going to happen. Call it pack behavior.
      And now they are armed like the military, all dressed up in hand me downs from various Gulf wars, Middle-Eastern interventions, and the overall look is that of an occupying force. This has been the kick-ass first, ask questions later policy of law enforcement since 9/11.

      But, in the social media environment, with tactics and agent overkill exposed before a national audience of people outraged by the war zone presentation in Ferguson, Missouri, maybe something good can come of it? Maybe in the shrill mechanical noise of the First Amendment being cancelled by the St. Louis County army bullhorn telling protestors to go home, maybe in the pyrotechnics of anti-crowd devices, in the ghostly images of shadows running through smoke, of television camera crews running from tear gas canisters, maybe in all of that dystopian detail, maybe out of all that the media-military-industrial complex might start asking more questions. Maybe, after many dozens of them are spread around in a viral revelation of what's really going on, these videoed instances of police brutality and anti-protest overreach will get the attention of the silent majorities of citizens tired of watching the U.S. Constitution going down the drain. Maybe someone will try to restrict the hand-me-down policy. This is being called for by U.S. Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.), who is seeking to restrict the Pentagon's "1033 program"
    Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. Well, actually, it's pretty unlikely. As long as the culture of violence is the unchecked feature of law enforcement, riots in the wake of police shootings will continue to be a symptom.
    There certainly were some firsts in the Ferguson case. After the worst night this week, Aug. 13, 2014, President Barack Obama spoke out, the governor of Missouri decried this vision of a "war scene," the state police took over the situation, and the next thing you know, white-shirted officers are walking in front of the daylight marchers as if they are protecting them, and the Missouri statie in charge, Ron Johnson, is giving streams of people in the street hugs. It was quite a reversal. Until the next night. After police had released a video of the slain teen, Michael Brown, robbing a local market, the community reaction seemed to indicate the police was trying to send out signals to assassinate the memory of someone they had killed, that the punishment did not fit the crime. More than anything else, since small markets and convenience stores have been targeted by looters; it all seems to say that the citizenry's sentiment over the daunting power structures of police and property, in an age of increasing economic disparity, has reached the tipping point.
     How the repositioning of force across the country might occur over the long term is anybody's guess. But a paradigm shift is needed. Perhaps state and local politicians might heed the call to resist accepting armaments more suitable for World War III into their arsenals. Might good a good place to start. The heavily armed lines of police-soldiers in the streets may be an organic outgrowth of life during wartime, but it certainly gives the appearance of an a yet another reactionary elitist put down. Perhaps if the powers-that-be put more thought in the kinds of images they are projecting, seeking alternatives to violence. After all, the best way to invite an attack is to build a fort. Open your fist, and extend your hand in peace.

Rand Paul: Mr. Macro Insensitivity

One has to really admire U.S. House of Representative Rand Paul for telling anyone willing to listen that anyone receiving unemployment benefits past 26 weeks is some kind of malingerer, because living that way is so much fun. Shows real gumption, what some might call gall, yes, but inspired.

He's a real little Lord Fauntleroy. Truly profound, academically speaking. He's the Tea Party's appointed "intellectual," as he speaks from the mighty heights and tipsy perspective of a Kentucky bourbon-sucking state, the security of having a politician dad. He's as streetwise as a college professor might expected to be as he comes from the embryonic magic bubble of the elite, asking the suddenly impoverished to avoid the disservice of having the too-big-to fail economies of a global catastrophe, a world, basically, gone cash-free, to pull themselves with their own bootstraps and ignore the facts of life, just as he has.

As an politician, which now means infotainer, he's a natural. He goes up on the stage of one-thousand points of light; and when he speaks, no doubt seeking donations for the cause of the now-launched 2014 political season, he has become one of the first great voices for the Tea Party, ah, Libertarian, bellweather: a kind of gift that keeps on giving.

That polls fails fail to reflect this gift, this talent for saying completely insensitive things bound to ignite a far greater opposing public outcry ... that this gift isn't reflected in the current polling, which lives only in the moment (happily, there is nothing to vote on today) should come as no surprise.

Glitch in "Obamacare"? No worries, folks. Concerns on that score eleven months from now depend upon the rolling storm of the moon, the sun, the stars. Want to overload the judicial system with a giant class action lawsuit over surveillance society, good luck! Both ex-presidents Bush, Clinton, Reagan and Richard Nixon will need to be listed as defendants for a whole world hell-bent on listening in for any signatures of terror and fear. Surely, cutting the unemployment checks for millions of Americans will get the radical right plenty more votes. Nobody ever remembers cold treatment like that over the Holidays. Sure. Sure. Sure.

Like I say: The gift that keeps on giving.

Because it's so much fun having your livelihood jerked around by a bunch of sycophants of corporate-nation state privilege. It's so nice to be among the floating decoys amid the big bad karmanomic sea of the unfortunate, trying to keep your sanity intact while these walking historic aberrations with full medical and economic armor, silvery, gold and intact with their boquets of red, white and blue, arguing "No, we don't need to change, you do." And if the luckless earth kidnapped by a cold-blooded band of lawless lawyers in Congress won't inspire you, the urgency of impending homelessness, maybe even a wish to die, will certainly calm you down and make you a prime candidate for that job that doesn't exist.

It's so nice to look forward to that once-a-week call to your state's make-sure-your-not-a-deadbeat zombie unemployment hotline. Which says it's a federal prison waiting for you if you do not answer honestly that you sucked, again, this week at life, that you applied for at least three paying tasks which your are, quite obviously, being such a loser, bad at.Your personal responsibility for the global war on terror, the international bank bailout, and yes, the Kennedy assassinations, Reaganomics (I and II) being so visibly acute. You, as children, should have known better. It's so fun hoping that, since you can't afford a land line anymore, you have to stand for three hours at the last pay phone in America in some dirt-poor apartment complex, your ear burning red from the Depression era jazz on hold, to speak to an actual human being about WTF!

With any luck, a distant dog bark won't create the incorrect signal when you are on that telephone line, because that might either create a sonic bump causing a sound that is the exact opposite answer of your sad situation, or, perhaps, with an even stronger sound, perhaps a passing jet noise, the need to start over, your jittery self an emotional wreck as you stand there, alone, by the phone.

It's so nice to go month after month to the internet to see if some kind job creator can lift you out of your disgrace, Mr. Big Bootstraps, since for a long time you had been wondering if your e-mail account had been locked inside some kind of cyber-bubble, your hundreds and hundreds of job apps for strange (probably illegitimate Craigslist "employers") to answer. It's so much fun listening to the latest lecture from professor Rand Paul about this.

Oh yeah, it's a hee-haw good old time.

Among other things, Douglas McDaniel is the author the book, "Human Search Engine."

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 Last Water

What would you do if you were the Pope? Dunno? Well, I've been thinking about it. If only because while I live lost in the great desert of the West right now, I once lived near a far off imaginary town by the sea ... let's call it "Salem, Massachusetts" ... and while I was there I was convinced by a friend to seek the counsel of a fortune teller in a big city, let's call that big blob of civilization "Boston," and this sage crystal ball and Tarot card reader told me that in a previous life, I was the Pope. 

Sure, I said back, you say that to all of the guys. It appeals to our patriarichal natures, our paternal peccadilloes, our massive insecurities that tell us, if we know anything at all about the world, we are incredibly small, and that due to these flaws, we like the idea of having the power to burn evil doers at the stake, thus, saving them. We like to launch overseas wars, calling them crusades. We like to pray about just about anything that comes off the top of our heads to large numbers of amazed, receptive people. We like the good business practice that comes from being the middleman.

Kinda like Rush Limbaugh, but with something covering our bald heads. Because we like big hats, too, we older guys do. The bigger the better is what we think. Keeps the head warm. Older guys granted the power to say any silly thing that comes off the top of our heads also like to write big important books as thick as a brick. Limbaugh himself, just the other day, told his massive, terrified audience, that he had just written a book about pilgrims, who had some strange ideas. Strange enough to feel the need to cross the great imaginary ocean -- let's call it the "Atlantic" -- in order to practice a dour, somewhat paranoid thing called puritanism.

I found Mr. Limbaugh's little puritanical book pitch for the kiddies far more interesting than what another similar radio-ready fat cat, Glenn Beck, had: a radio show advertising "Biblical Money Code," whatever that is.

Mr. Limbaugh describes himself as "Talent on loan from God." Pretty Popey, eh?

What Rush was selling on his show, besides his children's book about pilgrims, which turns out, is not that thick, was home security and internet identity theft stuff from "SimplySafe.com" and "Lifelock.com." That latter product, apparently, protects people from online identity thieves. However, it fails to mention what happens when this electronic life locking operative gets sucked up for apparently random reasons by the National Security Agency's out-of-control zombie-technology sucker. Big fish do eat bigger fish. It's just what big fish do. Even in online life, where we are all naked as sin, fish food for the mighty search engines of progress, and suckers for fools given permission to pray about anything they want on radio shows, such as riots before the conventions of political opponents, failures for health care programs for the poor, chaos to reign in the streets, so on and so forth.

When Limbaugh comes back on the air, also broadcast from a far off imaginary place by the sea -- let's call it "Florida" -- what comes off the top of his big head are fear-based baits pitting social security recipients against food-stamp recipients, kinda like the Hatfields and McCoys of the welfare state. And then, everybody gets mad and scared and keeps on listening to Limbaugh.

Yep, Limbaugh is a pretty entertaining guy. He talks of education and uses words like "commentate" in the same breath. Funny voice in the head is Rush, who decries the "low information voter" and then promotes, over and over, his skinny book about pilgrims. He also says a book store that placed his children's book display out front was "leftist leaning." What I never heard on his radio show, which promoted, between this fear-bait, as well as his message to the kiddies about pilgrims, of course, was some rational explanation for the Salem witch trials. "I wrote this book for kids," says Rush. "To try to counter the crap these kids encounter in school." Education "crap" wasn't very well explained, either. Yep, there was low information about that.

Nothing about the witch trials, surely. Such gaps, such gaps, between the here and the there.

I didn't even want to write anything about Mr. Limbaugh, witch trials or locks on life when I started this. Sorry. Especially if there are any kids reading. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Witch trials are even scarier than witches themselves. I just wanted to say something about people who like to pontificate about great issues to folks who can barely conceive of fantasies heard from the remote, desert lands of the West.

What would I do if I were Pope? I would turn off Rush, first, then try to figure out what "Biblical Money Code" is, and explain that in a really thick-as-a-brick children's book. Amen.

Another 72 Hours of Anarchy in the USA: Too Pig to Flail

Preexisting conditions are dead. It was born as a Reagan Era thing. But the national insurance model, instituted in Massachusetts, in 2006,  is all online and glitchy as a roll out. A lot of people who couldn't get insurance between then and now also are dead. They are speaking. One word: nevermore. The winds of change are blowing in many directions. Anarchy is howling in those winds. A brave new world is born.

However, we still are in the midst of the government shutdown, and one result has been Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer and the radical Republican legislature withholding unemployment checks for thousands of residents. So while the Coconino County Ranger District's parking lot is stately and quiet with their law enforcement wing parked in front, with a lot of people parked in the lot but nobody to be seen, all kinds of trails and sites for the district are closed.

By the ninth day of the Republican-led government shut down, the situation with the regular guys and gals on the street more than just jittery. It's just absurd. Unreal. Terrifying at the very moment you open your eyes each morning to wake. Civility, shaky at best after a near decade of incapacitating paralysis for a zombified nation walking around in a state of shock as it was, now is facing a gut level overload challenging the very concept of what is sane, what is civilization and what is total anarchy. Behavior in public places is tentative and unreal. For example, the situation as your friendly neighborhood corporate grocery store is as panicky as the hen house sensing a fox circling the yard, with people stocking up on as much food as they can pack up, overloading store electronic systems creating long lines and angst reflective of the same psychological disorders and divisions played out in Washington thousands of miles away.

Meanwhile, back at ground zero, within the Washington D.C. beltway, the atmosphere is described by one resident this way: "A bubble of delusion surrounds the Capitol. There are a lot of furloughed government workers walking around with signs." All Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) could say  is he's "ashamed, embarrassed." He has urged the powers that be to re-open Grand Canyon National Park, where 2,200 residents live, high and dry, on the Kaibab Plateau, on a spot of civilization called Grand Canyon Village, where St. Mary's food bank has gathered enough force to drive up supplies for a short term from its base in Phoenix. Let's not even go into what the situation might be for government researchers in Antarctica, or how one northern Arizona wing-nut politician is comparing Obama to Hitler because over such issues as gun control (Didn't he arm his entire population with guns and point it toward the four corners of all Europe?), or China and Japan officials telling the U.S. to get its act together (Isn't Japan still reeling from a devastating tsunami and nuclear meltdown).

"Act" is the key word. As in actor. As in the passion play, the artifice of performance. All Americans only able to see themselves on the mirrors of their own imaginary movie screens.

"A pretty dangerous path," Boehner says, having paved the little yellow brick it party paved for itself.

There are reports from Salon.com some congressmen are drinking on the job, and one is left to wonder if these folks, drunk on power and desensitized with bottles and bottles of bourbon (and we thought it was a Tea Party), should be pulled over by some United Nations cop driving a reasonably sized squadron on tanks and fully loaded armor personnel carriers.

Rush Limbaugh, "coming with urgency," where "every day is hurry, hurry," is amazed the Daily Show is deemed more newsworthy than FOX News.

"Prisoners of the inside the Beltway narrative," he says. "The government totally incapable and incompetent."

Kathleen Sebelius, "totally incompetent," playing a Daily Show sound byte, playing to what he calls the "low information crowd." Even the crazy people, speaking profound truths from time to time, points out Steward saying, out of context, "maybe she's just lying to me." Limbaugh notes it as the start of some kind of paradigm shift in the way Tea Party types and conservatives are viewed during the shutdown.

Of course, whichever side is winning is the important thing. Limbaugh was once the public relations man for the Kansas City Royals. He made sure everyone realized Stewart's actual last name is Liebowitz: as in, Jewish.

"I'm not trying the start anything here," he says. Seductive. The snake. He called Stewart a "liberal flunkie." Young people, he says, are "low information people." Limbaugh sounds plugged up, well fed. As the guffaws and bellows blow, he says young people are all about "fairness" while apparently they don't like corporations and don't watch FOX News, the "fair and balanced" voice of the right. A station that gave America Glenn Beck, who deified the deists of the American Revolution as patriots sanctified by God, like prophets. Limbaugh, decrying the "low information" audience he apparently doesn't reach as well as the Daily Show, apparently can't remember the web site for the national health care plan he's railing about, the relatively simple, www.healthcare.gov.

National Public Radio also is featuring how, in the cult of personality debate, Obama can come out the winner. Everything is a game, something to do with a red line, and who is going to stand up, previews a statement from the President over the "conversation." White House "calculation." Gridlocked congress and the White House impervious to polling about the "the pressures" and how "Republicans are taking the biggest hits." National brands. Campaigns. The president's approval rating "ticking up."

The president is about going on but NPR suddenly goes out just as Obama is about to speak, and music comes on, with a robotic, soothing announcer saying occasionally in the spring and fall, sunspots interrupt satellite communications. It is 11:15 a.m., October 8, 2013, and weird less-is-more instrumentals continue to play. "We are rendered deaf by the sun as it passes by," the recorded announcement from KNAU-FM repeats. The music is worse than what you hear when you call government hotlines for unemployment and get put on hold for hours and hours to call.

Now Obama is back. "Let's stop the excuses and end the shutdown now ... as soon as Congress votes to re-open the government." He goes on about how the "Republicans flirted with default" a couple of years ago. He talks about it being like dropping an "nuclear bomb" on the economy. He paints an apocalyptic scenario perpetrated by a "handful of radicals in Congress."

The mind drifts as Obama goes on about moving forward with the national health care plan, the whole thing now sounding like a campaign speech. New jobs. Deficits. "I don't believe any party has a monopoly on good ideas." Monopoly also is a game. "Ransom," Congress damaging "our credibility."

"Let's pass a budget. Let's end a government shutdown."

Associated Press reporter gets the first question. "I will talk about anything," Obama answers. "The only thing Democracy cannot afford is for someone to say ... I will not pay my bills ... We are not going to pay a ransom for America paying its bills."

Big gusts are hitting Flagstaff and the entire Coconino Plateau, further carving the region's rock and blowing leaves off trees. Dust swirls in the street with gusts anywhere from 25 to 45 miles per hour. The weather is wet as hell on the East Coast. A few days before, six inches of rain flooded Louisville, Kentucky, while many feet of snow resulted from an early blizzard in South Dakota. Syria is on fire with war and bloodshed and millions of refugees are on the run. Egypt is falling apart. Obama has passed up an important meeting with leaders in Southeast Asia. The Grand Canyon is shutdown, but Kaibab Plateau continues to push up the canyon as it gets deeper, and the high winds are presumably blowing the coal fire smoke on co2 from the Navajo Generating Station in Page very much more rapidly to the east.

"It makes me nervous," Obama says. "The American people are nervous."

Obama gets another questions about politics. And he goes on about "millionaires and billionaires" and the "American people being shut out of the process ... idealogical extremists can entirely skew the process."

The press conference has gone on for some time now, almost a full hour, and nothing, well, very little, has been asked about serious issues facing the globe, short of the meeting the president cancelled in Southeast Asia. The press is all about the politics, the drama.

"Americans expect civility, common sense," Obama says as you can hear the sound of cameras click over the radio. At noon, the news announcement is "The president will not negotiate with Republicans," the broadcast actually interrupting the press conference. Then, Obama is back ... "democrats give in on negotiations and the Republicans don't give in on anything."

Now the news is back on again. The medium isn't the message, it's a clusterfuck caught on fire.
 On another station, the Democratic big-necked blowhard, big Ed Schultz, is yelling into the mic, also interrupting the press conference, about subsidies to "Big Oil."

"Tell me how the Republicans are your friend, Mr. Trucker," Schultz says. "My lord you people are freaking stupid!"

Workers. Regulations. Ways to identify right wingers, something about a march on Washington.

"The vote ... The vote!," he says.

While Schultz rolled on about the truckers like a thunderstorm into a commercial, it's unknown how long the president's press conference went on, the falcon being unable to hear the falconer. Meanwile, FOXnews now features two dark condors of grim conservativism as commentators, both Brit Hume and George Will, completing the set. On the radio, Will sounds like a stodgy old heartless buzzard indeed. Once during the era of George W. Bush, in 2006, Will made an appearance at a swanky luncheon for business writers in Phoenix. The private-home location was very close to the top of Moon Mountain in Paradise Valley, a flint-rock covered edifice, the entire event put together by one of the town mavens of the well-we've-got-ours-why-should-we-have-to-pay-for-that elite. What Will said that day is hard to remember. If you needed to sit still, take notes and write a story about what he said that day that made any cohesive sense, it would be a lie. It went something like hum, hum, hum ... hum, hum, hummer ... but on the radio on this particular week he was just a perfect cold slice of pizza, offering up the chestnut of wisdom, spoken from the deep piggy of the soul, that government is supposed to work like a glacier preventing change.

O, sure, it's supposed to work each day like it's about to crash from the weight of its own density and crash the whole world into the pit of economic hell because of its power, arrogance and extravagent pride.

In the nutty bubble of Washington D.C. there is a lot of talk, but no action. By the weekend the government remains, a default on the feds paying their debts looms. The whole world watches as the good ship lolly pop Americana heads toward of the edge of the known economic world. The stock market was rising on Friday, Oct. 11, but the GNP (gone nuts planet) is the only thing you can trust. All of the experts on the world money god can do is find different way to say "insanity."

Politicians only play the blame storm game of Whose Default Is It? The polling numbers blame the gridlock on political polarization and paralysis begun by the radical wing of the GOP, the Tea Party, year-round-tan-man Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio), who is the speaker of the house, but gridlocked within his own party, and is caught in the eddy of the cosmic whirlpool of the unbelievable. Says Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), "He needs to be more concerned about his country than losing his job." However, if he loses his speaker post, he still would be a congressman. What would cause Boehner to be toppled from the position? Short of some kind of revelation due to some personal life misstep due to a NSA surveillance revelation made public, it's hard to imagine just what, exactly, is required to be dethroned if five years of national gridlock and do-nothingness in Congress has done the job already.

But setting all cult-of-personality issues aside, everyone seems to be in trouble. The world watches as the U.S. government is too big to fail. But by the morning of Oct. 12, 2013, the South Rim of the Grand Canyon is opened to tourists, with doubtlessly the same kind of make-it-happen niceties of civic like that tend to keep the tourism industries spinning, the world in motion, and the band playing on ... Arizona paying the federal government $650,000 to keep the park open for seven days ... Meanwhile, the Democrats and Republicans exchange blocks of overtures and bids to make it all better, unable to come up with that baseball-style exchange known as the trade that helps both teams.