Itinerantdaughter's Blog

“I don’t care.  As long as it gets me out of the restaurant business, I don’t care.”

“It’s like this.  I have been appointed judge in the penal colony.  In spite of my youth.  Because I assisted former commandant in all punishment-related issues, and also I have the best understanding of the machine.  My basis for deciding is this: guilt is always beyond doubt.”  ~guess

Pablo Neruda’s body is being exhumed in Chile, and based on a picture of the scene in the Times, it appears there is a group of musicians playing.  How did they get there?  Were they hired?  And what did they play?  These are very important questions.

I received a free promotional book here at my office titled as above, and it turns out it’s a seminal text of the Seventh Day Adventist Church, though that’s not indicated on the cover.  Perhaps they thought a reader would be turned off by such proselytizing, but they weren’t prepared for the likes of me!  The back matter makes it all sound so consequential!

“Unparalleled changes taking place around us forecast rapid and distressing events of the greatest magnitude.

“Already, in many hearts, there are sorrows and ills that no human balm seem able to heal.  In many places, there are restless and unsettled state of affairs, causing political and religious forces to forge unprecedented alliances.  And, wholly beyond the control of humanity, there are unregulated forces of nature which unleash calamities one after another in quick succession: earthquakes and tornadoes, destruction by fire and flood, often with great loss of life and property.

“Solemn and important, indeed, are the events taking place in our times.  But what do all these really mean?  Could these be warning signs, arousing us to some imminent danger?  What should be our role in the fast-approaching events soon to break upon the earth?

“The book in your hands provides definitive answers.  [ed note: eeeeee!] Drawing upon lessons from history as well as Bible prophecy, The Great Controversy reveals that the world is a theater of conflict.  The actors –– you and me –– are preparing to act our part in the last great drama.  And our choices and actions have a part to play in the outcome of this agelong struggle.

“You owe it to yourself to read this book.  For, ‘those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.'”

You had me at “ills that no human balm seem able to heal.”  Poetry!

In other news, I had an elaborate dream about the Counting the Omar Tumblr last night.

Last September, about 60 Vermonters met in the chambers of the house of representatives in Montpelier to celebrate the state’s “independence spirit” and to discuss the goals of “environmental sustainability, economic justice, and Vermont self–determination.” The speaker of the house had given up the space free of charge for the one-day conference. First at the podium was a  Princeton-educated yak farmer and professor of journalism named Rob Williams, one of the organizers of the event, who at 9 A.M. opened the proceedings by acknowledging what he called “some unpleasant and hard truths.” Amid the twin global crises of peak oil and climate change, the United States was “an out-of-control empire.” It was “unresponsive to the needs, concerns, and desires of ordinary citizens.”

Williams, who wore a T-shirt that said “U.S. Out of Vermont,” did not advocate revolution. He was looking for a divorce. He wanted Vermont to secede. “Nonviolent secession,” he said, “the detaching from empire and exercising our rights to independence, a deeply American right first expressed in the Declaration of Independence, is a right that demands re-exploration today.” Williams noted that Vermont is one of only three states, along with Texas and Hawaii, that ever existed as an independent republic—in Vermont’s case, from 1777 to 1791—and that as “a national leader on progressive political issues,” the state was “uniquely poised to lead this national conversation on self-determination.”

The murmuring response from the crowd suggested they’d heard it before. Williams and his fellow travelers—who constituted not quite a movement, he said, but more “a network of critical observers”—had been calling for separation from the U.S. since 2003. They had gathered in the ornate rooms of the state house to spread the word in 2005 and again in 2008 and now in 2012. Vermont had not yet separated, but the secessionists who were calling for a “Second Vermont Republic” had gained notoriety, and some small influence, across the state.

The conference’s attendees included an ecofeminist named Lierre Keith, co-author of Deep Green Resistance, who reported that “capitalism is literally insane” and urged the collapse of industrial civilization; a man in a kaffiyeh who enthused over a recent story about a rural Vermonter who, faced with police harassment over his use of marijuana, mounted his tractor, drove into town, and crushed seven sheriff’s cruisers under the treads of the behemoth machine; a musician who sang a tune called “Totalitarian Democracy”; a thespian garbed in 18th-century blouse and boots and cravat who re-enacted Ethan Allen, the farmer-soldier who led Vermont’s war of secession against New York in 1777; and a troupe of female dancers from the radical Bread and Puppet Theater, dressed all in white, who chanted a series of poems about “upriser calisthenics.”

–– From an article in American Prospect entitled “U.S. Out of Vermont!”