Princess Wands Star Goddess Gnome - Las Vegas & America

A few years ago, I wrote a poem (I need to dig it up--it's somewhere) called "Las Vegas Nativity." An amazing art-work called "Hide & Seek" by Pavel Tchelitchev sparked this poem, but it also inspired the likes of T.S. Eliot and Allen Ginsberg as well. That's really more about the painting than about my poetry, but I remember the theme of the piece was really about Las Vegas and how it's come to be the emblem of America.

One of my instructors took issue with that, but then again, he was a rather idealistic sort. Now, I'm not saying I'm "realistic" by any means, and at the time I was trying on an ill-fitting armor of cynicism that wasn't doing much of a good job at anything, least of all protecting me from "the cold cruel world." But over the years, I've noticed that Las Vegas has increasingly become the one city that I would identify as the quintessential "American" city of the last 25 years.

Las Vegas and Tony Soprano in fact, are the apotheoses in city and fictional character form, not only of America, but of the "gangstarrangements" of Empire culture. Oh, to be sure, Tony Soprano is held off to be garish, crude and obnoxious--oh, it's so fascinating to look at that darkness! (As if it was over there somewhere, in yeah sure, Joizey!) But the joke's on most of the rest of us chumps, because J.P. Wall-Street Tenore is exactly the same sort of thug as T.S., and every city deprived of a sense of self today I think would love to be as delectably tawdry and glitzy, not to mention outwardly lucrative as Lost Wages is.

What this has been making me aware of however, is that this all sounds really cynical. And yet, I don't see it that way. Acceptance of reality, even a dreadfully noxious reality such as ours is, is a prerequisite to finding any sort of mental health through this process. This IS the way it is right now. It's like we're all living in that Rumi story about the man who wakes up, but he's the only one, so eventually/inevitably he succumbs to being asleep again. It's hard to stay awake while the diseases both in and outside of us are doing pushups trying to muscle their way back in, or more likely to osmose back in because inertia gets the better part of valor.

I had a conversation with a fellow, a perfectly lovely guy. But he's in that place of "you know what the problem is? It's the government"--and off he goes. He is also a fellow who reflexively takes Israel's side in stuff. Honestly, I don't think he gives it much thought, and in spite of the fact that I like the guy, I sense that having a real conversation about Israel's actions in the world would call forth all sorts of psychological drums that would drown out any sense of reality. But I said to him that accepting things the way they are is the first step to really taking the higher road, even if it is to rebel, which I'm not so sure is the way. (I'm leaning more toward just letting inertia get the better part of me, and just finding a way to stop cold however best I can--give no energy to empire one way or another.)

Of course then he went off on another fascinating tear about how the founding fathers were smugglers and that the Boston Tea Party was a smugglers' action basically. Fascinating, but he missed my point. Ah well.

Acceptance. The answer to all my problems. Turn it over to the Star Goddess source of all there is. Transmute it in the crystal green shimmering heart of that plasma pleroma stuff of which we are all made. Blessings!