No Exit—from the Not-So-Great Depression
by Charles Potts

No Exit is the title of one book by Jean Paul Sartre, a French writer, communist and co-father of Existentialism that I’ve never been able to read, even though I have always admired the fact that he thumbed his nose at the Nobel Prize for Literature saying something like, “I don’t accept prizes, whether the Nobel or a sack of potatoes.” The Nobel Prize for Literature, as you’ve probably heard, is passed out by a pack of gunpowder academics from the net proceeds of the fortune of Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, by confusing politics with literature. Each year they make some kind of difficult-to-decipher gesture toward one or another enclave in the Third World. They haven’t given one to an American for a long time—trying to snub the Empire, I suppose. Who knows what all they read on their way to spurious decisions.

To give you an example of how far into the mire language has fallen, I’m under the impression the Swedes delegated the awarding of the Peace Prize to the Norwegians, and as an old Swedish girlfriend of mine used to say, “He ain’t Norwegian” when she wanted to insult somebody, the way dweebs from Eastern Montana make fun of the hapless denizens of North Dakota. I mean, they gave the Peace Prize to the Boy Scout from Chicago and he had to pick it up the very week he announced he was sending an additional 30,000 troops to win the war in Afghanistan at a cost of $30,000,000,000, i.e. thirty billion dollars. I hope the unemployed are sitting down for this but my honorary degree in rocket science suggests that it is impossible to win a colonial war when it costs the Empire A MILLION dollars per soldier to put a pair of boots, as the talking heads put it, on the ground. Even if they were taking gold out of Afghanistan by the trainload, colonial war is a losing proposition. And there is nothing else there to “win” either. The last time I can remember that the Peace Prize went to such a warmonger was when the great war criminal Henry Kissinger accepted it, on behalf of the scut work he did for the scoundrel Richard Nixon in the Empire’s war on Vietnam. Americans have forgotten their own colonial history, if they ever knew it. Back in the day, early 1600s, with the importation of some good tobacco from the Orinoco River in South America, Virginia became the drug producing capital of the new world. Fortunes were made. Now the Empire has the effrontery to try to wipe out the opium producers in Afghanistan.

Colonial War in all its many disguises is one of the primary reasons why there is No Exit from the not-so-great depression. To give the Tea Party sympathizers among the audience an example they can get their red meat teeth into, the Cheney-Bush Administration started and lost three unnecessary wars simultaneously while bankrupting the Treasury and blowing a hole in the world economy that likely won’t get re-filled in the length of an ordinary lifetime. And Republicans wonder why they are out of office.

To take their undeclared wars one at a time… (By the way, this civilization declared war in 1941, two years before your author was born, and has never declared peace. We have war as a way of life, described in the political literature as “Peace and Prosperity,” going down in history as a violent parody of standards even double-talk can’t reach.) In their post 9-11 mind set in concrete, they launched the aforementioned War on Afghanistan, allegedly because the perpetrators of 9-11, mostly Saudi Arabians and Egyptians, once trained there. It was described by that half-an-asshole semi-Colon Powell as asymmetrical warfare, overlooking the fact that the asymmetry was provided by the Empire, when a handful of special ops could have taken out the survivors of the plot for chump change. At least that’s the way Eisenhower’s CIA used to do it during the “Peace and Prosperity”-driven 1950s. Discontent with starting a war they couldn’t finish much less win led them on to the War on Iraq, a regime changer if there ever was one, to depose a war criminal satrap the Empire had set up years before, one Saddam Hussein by name, who never made the slightest dent in his long war against Iran, even with the Rumsfeld-provided poison gas.

Lying their way into war is the modus operandi of the Empire, now in need of a theme. Voila! A War on Terrorism. A war on abstract nouns is the perfect setup for the Empire. The enemy can’t be found, so Osama bin Laden is still at large, generating funds for both sides. The siege mentality of the Paranoid Christian Fascists has them fighting Islamo-Fascists and the Fascists are winning. For every terrorist killed three new ones are created, an endless supply for an endless war, in an Empire presided over by endless fruitcakes. The Empire has 16 separate spy agencies, all gathering information and hoarding it from one another, much less the people on whose behalf it is purportedly gathered. If you have a secret and somebody else wants to discover it, that somebody else becomes pro forma an enemy. The interlocution of paranoia; the structure of political madness.

The algorithm for the end of empires has three integrals and derivatives. How fast the leaders burn through their assets, chief of which is the support of their populations; the size of the asset base; and the quality and focus of the opposition. Costs of empire are borne by the entire population while the benefits accrue to the very few with inside jobs: no-bid contractors who milk the sacred American cow. In other words, the calculus of empire and colonial war is an exercise in socializing the costs—socialized war, anyone?—while privatizing the benefits. This best of both worlds is a dream scheme for plutocrats and a nightmare for everybody else. An Alice in Wonderland foreign policy presided over by the presidency, no matter who holds the office, presages an epic disaster.

If you haven’t dropped out yet, it’s probably time.

Charles Potts: wikipedia

Previous work by Charles Potts in Arthur…

“The Recession and How to Live Through It” (Jan 2009)

“The Dope From Muskogee”

Shoethrower Muntader al-Zaidi named Arthur Magazine “Man of the Year” 2008; Charles Potts salutes al-Zaidi with new poem, “Balls Out.”

“A Case of Cheney Paranoia”

Poem in Arthur No. 5 (special “Arthur Against Empire” issue)

“Spasm Empire”

Charles Potts & SUNN 0))) at ArthurFest 2005 – video footage

Reposted from January 2009—because it still applies… —Ed.

January 28, 2009

THE RECESSION AND HOW TO LIVE THROUGH IT
by Charles Potts

[Arthur editor] Jay Babcock has tempted me with the phrase, “It would be great if you wrote something on this subject,” referring to the subject line of his email, “The recession and how to live through it.”

I’ll take the bait. This is more than a recession. This is going to be a huge depression, with the “recovery” way off in the distance.

A recession, per Christopher Wood, desk chair person for The Economist in Tokyo circa 1995, is “a superabundance of inventory, and can be melted off the shelf; a depression is a superabundance of capacity” and takes much longer to get out of. Remember that it took the bean counters in Wash DC a full year to confirm the economy was in recession, and there’s a lot of over-the-counter chatter about how this recession is already longer than the one in, take your pick: 1976-1980-1991-etc. However, look around you and notice the superabundance of capacity. The industrial hind end of Europe, Japan, the US and China plus all else, can easily produce multiple times more automobiles, cell phones, TVs, computers, refrigerators, et al. than anybody with funds can buy.

This is the fourth major deflationary price collapse in the past 600 years. In the three previous price collapses, there was a long period afterward when prices did not recover their pre-fall levels for decades. Prices last collapsed hard in 1815 after Wellington’s victory over Napoleon at Waterloo; the period from 1815-1896 has been called by economists The Victorian Equilibrium. Many things contributed to this low-level stability, but it is sobering to realize there was scant inflation in the United States during the 19th century. (Inflation, by the by, is not necessarily a bad thing. Inflation simply moves assets around the game board from creditors to debtors; it doesn’t actually destroy anything except purchasing power if all you have is cash. In deflation, which we’re going through now, cash will buy a lot. During inflation it is better to have hard assets that increase in value at least at the same rate as cash.)

Will it take eight decades before the world economy is go-go again?

My reference to 1815 isn’t casual. I just re-read David Hackett Fischer’s The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History. His book is about the three previous big price collapses: in the early 14th century when the Black Death ended the so called “Middle” ages; then, circa 1492, when prices collapsed during the Renaissance, and we encircled ourselves globally; and the aforementioned 1815. What’s so crucial about 1815 is it is also the date and the event that Oswald Spengler (The Decline of the West) identifies as the moment Western culture went sideways and into “civilization,” cf. Napoleon at Waterloo. Fischer’s graphs of how the prices rose and fell, can be superimposed one over another. This collapse we’re in, the big one for the rest of our lives, started 20 years ago in Japan in 1989, has hit Argentina and most of Latin America, Russia twice now, and finally the big fish, the rest of Europe and the US. Even Doha is scaling back!

The powers that be with their printing presses will print money and throw it at the wall until enough of it sticks. Some activities will appear to return to normalcy. But you shouldn’t wait for the influx of money to turn deflation into inflation, just as you shouldn’t wait for the bailout to trickle down to you. Unemployment is going to increase and stay high for some time. Challenging moments are upon us.

My advice in hard times would be the same in good times: find something you love to do and master it, become as good as or better at it than anyone has any reason to be. Look up the people who do it really well right now. Study the masters. A musical instrument, a physical activity, painting, movies, art of all kinds, the writing of poetry or other books, whatever makes you feel better about yourself and contributes to our well being. Try enough things until you are satisfied that your fascination with the subject will lead to mastery. Six or eight hours of focused effort a day should suffice. I think this is reasonable advice, coming from an old man who has squandered most of his life by being interested in too many things to master any of them.

We don’t exist as individuals; we exist as the sum total of our relationships. You’ll need all the friends you can get, so be honest, fair and generous in your dealings with other people. Don’t be afraid to ask for help or take unseemly risks. The future does not belong to the risk aversive.

It will be difficult to get rich in the onrushing hard times, but it will be easy to get poor or poorer. Watch where your money goes. Make sure you get good value for it. Avoid buying things you don’t really need. Add value to your activities by putting forth effort. Expect others to do the same.

Spend time with children and if you have children of your own, take the time to understand the world from their point of view.

Assets are things that have to be used up creating additional assets. Almost without exception, your biggest asset is your time. I could have gotten rich teaching a seminar I created called “Seize the Day,” essentially a series of sensory exercises to stimulate your imagination to take over and live your own life. But I preferred life in a small town and didn’t want to see the inside of every airport and convention center in the country.

Maybe it’s time to skip the addictions, look up old friends, or visit long-lost relatives. Life is a gift of such presurpassing value that we sometimes hardly notice. Learn to appreciate simple things, the taste of water, the odor of flowers, the great way gravity contributes to your ability to walk and run.

Some of the things people love to do and do well don’t pay that much: poetry for example. Nobody really gives much of a fuck anymore if you can understand the world and set it to music. You have to feed yourself, and if a family, contribute to their well-being. You may find yourself bearing an overload of dissonance, earning your daily bread and wishing, as the Colorado poet and painter Joe Lothamer said, “I dream of being a janitor.”

Every changed circumstance contains opportunities, which accrue to the first people to recognize them. Since circumstances are in constant flux, there is a steady stream of opportunities. Learn to spot them and make them your own.

Keep the basics in mind. People will still be buying food even if the rest of the consumer economy blows completely up, as it so richly deserves to. Heal the sick, wake the dead, feed the hungry. Food shelter and clothing. Eat slowly and chew your cud well.

Biographical info on Charles Potts.

Previously in Arthur:

“The Dope From Muskogee” by Charles Potts

Muntader al-Zaidi named Arthur Magazine “Man of the Year” 2008; Charles Potts salutes al-Zaidi with new poem, “Balls Out.”

“A Case of Cheney Paranoia” by Charles Potts

Poem in Arthur No. 5

“Spasm Empire” by Charles Potts

CHARLES POTTS & SUNN 0))) AT ARTHURFEST 2005 – video footage

Chapter Time
poem by Klyd Watkins

Because the living room did not lie down a super highway,
Spike had to put up signs to have the big trucks detour through.

ZZZZWOOOOOMMMMM
said the red
sign Phospher’s wife
blew into
the air. It took off down the road after
the red truck.

Klyd Watkins’ first chapbook of poetry, pete’s improvizations [sic], was published by Owl’s Breath Press in 1969. During the seventies he produced ten lps of Poetry Out Loud with his wife Linda and with Peter and Patricia Harleman. These records are still collected. He has alternated between writing poetry and creating poetry by direct audio recording of improvisation. Since the ’90s he has sometimes combined the two, using text as well as improvisation in his recordings and publishing written poetry. His CDs include Listen The Night, as part of the band What Are We? with Mike Panasuk, and “Harp All Made of Gold,” which presents chapter one of his long poem Jack spoken over world class rock and roll. Books include Ghost Trees from Sugar Mountain Press and 5 Speed from The Temple.
His own poetry and that of friends, both well know and never heard of, appears on his website: http://www.thetimegarden.com/
http://thundershack.net/ is devoted to his backyard recording studio.

poem by T.M. Göttl

St. John’s Fire

Next time you stand at the foot of a spiral stair,
look straight up,
into the dome, owned by
the gold and green brothers, Polaris and Sirius.
And there, you’ll see
the dove and the raven,
the flood birds, entwined,
in the pupil of a god’s eye, and the
god’s double tongues—one of leather, one of steel—
carving silver peacocks
into the backs of liars and other faithless.
They fill the streets
with their gunpowder cries, but
intrepid, you kick past their glittering,
bottled hollers, approaching
the mossy queen with
tiny lions climbing
from her open collar.
Your fresh supplications, awkward and
skinless, hover near the queen’s feet,
until the twin cubs devour them
and run. You must chase them,
without wheels or engines or bullets this time;
only your untried calves and thighs and lungs, only
your untested heart.
And you chase them, every midnight and midmorning,
past the tribes of the hopeful
tending St. John’s fires,
and camping at the ocean’s fingertips.

T.M. Göttl, a member of the Buffalo ZEF Creative Arts Community, has won a Wayne College Regional Writing Award and a Franklin-Christoph Poetry Prize. She won first place on the first time she ever competed in a poetry performance competition. She travels throughout the state of Ohio, writing and performing her poetry, and her work has appeared online and in print, in places such as Deep Cleveland, The Poet’s Haven, The Mill, The Hessler Street Fair Anthology, and a bilingual poetry collection to benefit victims of the Sichuan Earthquake in China in 2008. Her first collection, Stretching the Window, was published in February 2008.

untitled poem by Angela Jaeger

write with the tv on
building the houses
finance the education
save the nation
fraud the credit
use my number
file a claim
get a new card
find a new password
keep it a secret
forget about it
fall in the house of still
the tall frame no blame
listening to a voice within
the secret number
the subway train
the snow is god
and the snow is falling

ritual for wild dogs

by Jeremy Gaulke

we found whiskey in bottles
without labels
in charred ruins and secret places
draped in rust and toadstools

we knew they were there but could never see them
but we prayed for them
and left the whiskey
in the ruins off the road
adorned in rust and natures squalor
to make them mad
to make them strong
to make new gods of slaughter

poem by Valerie Webber

My Neighbour Has a New Girlfriend

every first time that I’ve done them.

Valerie Webber
In her own write: Valerie is a reluctant academic and proud smut peddler. She has lived in Montreal since abandoning her maritime home 7 years ago. When not writing she alphabetizes her cd collection, chews the skin around her fingernails, and shamelessly indulges in legal drama television. She generally shares too much information concerning genitals, her own or otherwise. Previous work includes thin little arms build castles (big baby books) and lignin diadem with Genevieve Dellinger (big baby books, rain ridge press & glasseye books co-publication ).

Dust off Your Lips, a poem by Travis Catsull

we pray
for bigger mouths

Travis Catsull, from Year of the Girl

Other books by Catsull include Open Spirit and Isle of Asphalt from Effing Press in Austin. Catsull is the editor/founder of Haggard and Halloo and co-founder of The Charles Potts Magic Windmill Band Which won the Austin Chronicle’s choral CD of the year award in 2008 for The Golden Calves.

Think fondly of Eachother
This is what we are

Eachother

Also know we are alone together
And will die the same

Alone

Madness:
in the cooler
          of the mind,
the elevators
       corridors and yes the
                             sole stairwalker
               even now he whistles
                             thinking fondly of eachother

A leaf drags along the ground for miles

(eachother)

A cricket intermittently makes an
                announcement

Eachother

What it is we share
    When we mow each our own

When we type for one

                 When we meet the mailman
At the door it is in unison

Turn madness into roars
            Of joking with eachother
                         Tears paper thin the walls of
                                    Anger at eachother like
                             Birthday cakes and chicken
                       With butter for eachother
               For this is all we are

—Bree

This poem is from Bree’s “Was Chicken Trax Amid Sparrows Tread,” available at abebooks.com, or send check/cash/MO for $10 per book plus $2 shipping & handling, to
Green Panda Press
3174 Berkshire Road
Cleveland Heights, OH 44118