This Mechanism Kills Fascists

This is Woody Guthrie's saying, of course. Kept it posted right thar on his git-fiddle. I keep it posted on my laptop so that every time I open and close it, I'm reminded that there's a war on, but it ain't the one we think is going on. It's the attempted decimation of the subjective voice. Or, as Lawrence Ferlinghetti puts it, "Freedom of speech is always under attack by Fascist mentality, which exists in all parts of the world, unfortunately." He's right. It even exists inside each of us...which is where it came from to begin with, of course.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti is my dizzawg. Pretty much everything he says is true and right, like "there is an ecstatic mechanism in birds that makes them fly upwards in spite of worms” and “the world is a beautiful place to be born into - if you don't mind some people dying all the time - or maybe only starving - some of the time which isn't half so bad - if it isn't you.” I don't know how he came to possess such a strong ability to accurately describe the state of affairs. Hard work, maybe. Or hard luck...because it must be painful to see it all so clearly but all you can do about it is write about it and run your bookstore.

Maybe some day I'll own and operate an indie bookstore. Or a farm. Or maybe I'll raise goats. I would consider opening up a junk store, where all I sell is useless junk, but the competition for that couldn't get any stiffer than it already is. Jesus, man. That one about the birds and the worms is haunting me right now.