Gimme Shelter Two!

This is becoming, well, shall we say... woo-woo?


The preceding post jokingly talked about becoming a "refugee" in Argentina: this morning, we have this from Voltaire Network: "You explained that your request for refugee status within the terms of the Geneva 1951 Convention is still being considered by the Argentinean Senate, while in 2005 you were granted political asylum, albeit, on a provisional basis. That probably makes you the first U.S. citizen in that situation!"

The article deals with the strange case of FEMA cameraman Kurt Sonnenfeld and should be read in its entirety. My interest in it here is that it represents one more psycho-linguistic "coincidence" among the many that have begun to occur since I began this blog and the "resettlement in Argentina" meme. Momentum has begun to be trackable. The language barrier will break down as one English-speaker after another decides to effect Paradigm Change on a new continent and in those countries which prove themselves hospitable and not easily intimidated by the giant to the north, as has Argentina in the Sonnenfeld case.

The Southern Cone, with its vast, nearly empty stretches of virgin, arable land, provides freedom from the nearly ubiquitous sense of confinement settling like a cafard over life in the "developed" countries of the north.

"With its hard hope, the South exists as well," goes a (translated) verse in the 1985 anthem El Sur También Existe, with lyrics by the late Uruguyan poet Mario Beneddeti and sung by the Catalan Joan Manuel Serrat. Yes, the South exists, and nothing here is easy. Nevertheless, for the intrepid and daring, leaving "the North that gives the orders" for the challenge of creating something here that can no longer be created or perhaps even maintained there, for these, the rewards will be great, particularly for the young, who will leave a living legacy for their children, the legacy of a New Paradigm and land upon which to create it.

"Oh, a storm is threatening
My very life today
If I don't get some shelter
Oh yeah, I'm gonna fade away"

Thanks, Mick. Gimme Shelter

Now if the Rolling Stones roll into Argentina, or Jagger joins Jacko on the big stage in the sky, we'll know for certain that psycho-linguistic vortices are gathering with the storm.

Ratso Rizzo Republic

Another terribly dated pop cultural reference, but becoming terribly dated myself...

Ratso Rizzo--a character in the movie Midnight Cowboy
--made his name in America in 1969, forty years ago now. Forty years before that, the year was 1929, the year of the stock market crash that ended the "Roaring Twenties" and initiated the Great Depression; all that seemed unimaginably shrouded in the mists of time to the twenty three year old I was then, so the Sixties to a young person today... And as for the Great Depression, well, its place in time for today's twenty three year old equates to 1889 for me at that age, and 1889 was for all practical purposes akin to the Pleistocene for me. Puts things in perspective, doesn't it?

But Ratso is an archetype of sorts, one who may be about to make a reappearance on a wider stage than that upon which he limped back in 1969. Ratso was what in the New York of that era was known as a skell: dirty, smelly, a butt-sniper (as in pick-up-cigarette-butt-from gutter), pickpocket... got it? And, of course, he lived in a squat, and it is there that he pops through the time tunnel to appear on city streets not just in New York, but soon on a coast-to-coast simultaneous appearance tour, leaving the unemployment lines when the checks run out to revert to the hunter-gatherer culture of yore.

Ratso is far more likely to be the avatar of the New and Greater Depression than the Okie or the freight-train-hopping hobo, basically benign figures who appeared at the back door to split firewood in exchange for some three-day-old apple pie and a steamin' cup of java. Ratso don't want no handouts, and those surviving suburbanites who hang their clothes to dry in the back yard now that carbon tax and all has made it impossible to use that big electric dryer for anything other than a giant hamster treadmill, well they'd better hook the clothesline up to the refrigerator circuit if they plan on wearing them again. And they'd better pull up those croquet stakes, and the wickets too, and keep the pets indoors, because otherwise Ratso will set up his own little equivalent of Sonny Bryan's Texas Bar-B-Q pit, and they'll be lucky if he doesn't take Lassie's fur to line his overcoat, or maybe his busted-sole, blown out shoes.

The movie's theme song was perhaps more memorable than the film itself, and fits in with with the psycho-linguistic mind set of the street person:Everybody's Talkin' At Me. Many times, "everybody" consists of any number of voices inside the boom box of the brain, but, for once, no matter how high the thing is turned up, you can't hear it, even though the distortion is present.

How long will it be before the wandering Ratsos begin linking up in groups of three or four, at first lurking in the shadows of shop-windowed streets, then amalgamating into larger groups like the body-snatched out in San Francisco? How long before refugee Ratsos begin turning up in tiny towns, their remaining teeth filed into fangs, the better to tear your flesh with, my dear?

A whole catalog of horror films begins flickering before one's eyes: Night of the Living Dead;I Am Legend; 30 Days of Night... you get the picture, I'm sure.

The Ratso Republic: Nightmare on Main Street.

Synchronicity and Resettlement

Fans of C.J. Jung take note: I just had downloads of Miracle on 34th Street (Special Edition),Robocop 2
and Last Man Standing
entering simultaneously, while 134 others remained idle. Is that trippy, or what?



Space does not permit a detailed explanation of the synchronicity at work here regarding the titles and themes of these very different films; suffice it to say that those readers with cultural depth and highly evolved psycho-linguistic intuitions will understand almost at once the implications of this apparent "coincidence." The three titles have been placed in random order in homage to chaos theory, but it should be readily apparent that even a reshuffle of the order inevitably leads to the same general conclusion about the direction in which humanity is headed: South of No North: Stories of the Buried Life
to use a phrase coined by the always-sensitive seer Charles Bukowski.

Well, that aside, I find that I am getting more inquiries about what it might really imply to emigrate To the Catacombs here in Traslasierra, inquiries sufficient to have led me to decide to offer a full-fledged resettlement service should demand warrant it. There are a number of organizations out there that have been doing this sort of thing for a long time, but it is my understanding that they overcharge, that they are touts for properties in which their principals have invested at a much lower cost, that the people involved neither speak the language well nor even live all-year-round in the places they promote. If you believe it could be in your interest to consider emigration to the Southern Cone countries, and particularly to this area, contact me and we'll see what we can work out. I am not running a resettlement business, a real estate business, a newsletter business... This is a community-building effort with flexible financial norms. Think of it as a refugee relocation project. Think of just who the refugees might be.

Then act!