havel and a derelict

"thanks to the apparent disadvantage of coming form a bourgeois background and growing up in a communist state i had the opportunity, right from the start, of seeing the world form below."
vacalv havel. open letters

"i would tend to favor an economic system based on the maximum possible plurality of many decentralized, structurally varied, and preferably small enterprises that respect the specific nature of different localities and different traditions and that resist the pressures of uniformity by maintaining a plurality of forms of ownership and economic decision-making."
vaclav havel. disturbing the peace.


"my co-workers should probably learn multitasking: they should be interchangeable, they should take turns; and those that have already been somewhere should provide exhaustive written information to all the others so that the sum of acquired experience becomes the property of all."
vaclav havel. to the castle and back.

i was never a big fan of vaclav's...largo desolato reads like a reworked version of kafka's book "the trial" and his quotes sound like a small-time ceo and bureaucrat...anointed a "dissident" by the cold warriors he was really a frustrated capitalist longing for the life of his father and grandfather...he might not have torn the castle down but he would have parked euro-disney next to it if he could have...lionized by the sodding mouthpiece of armed reaction ronald reagan...and friend of the miserable clintons and goddamned maddie albrecht i won't be missing him much...his books and plays go into the bottom file box.

i was sitting in the truck in the wiseway parking lot waiting for mom today when a derelict guy who looked to be in his twenties somewhere walked across ridge road and into the parking lot wearing worn jeans, sneakers that flopped on his feet like flip-flops because the shanks were broken out, and holding his coat closed because the zipper had failed...he inopportuned no-one for anything and didn't speak...just walked across the lot with his head down to the ashtrays located outside the doors...he scavenged some likely looking butts...lit one up...and exited the way he entered...one of the 13 million "officially unemployed"? ( or the more like 20 odd million if you discount the politically expedient government figures and count those who have flat given up) humans may have started out as egalitarian bands of foragers but the neolithic revolution and its attendant social stratification burned that right out of us...the industrial revolution and the unfortunate rise of capitalism with its resultant consumerist utopia has isolated us in mounds of stuff to the extent that those with very little become invisible behind the heaps...merry christmas...a "false and commercial festival" if ever there was one...organized religion is never up to any good but their rites have been hijacked by something even more foul.