The White Rose

I will not go into the deeper aspects of the symbol chosen, but I will focus on one thing that is indisputably true ABOUT that symbol.

The symbol of the mystical path in the West has always been the White Rose. In the East, it is the Lotus Blossom, which are, in their construction, remarkably similar.

Among the many meanings is the only one I’ll use as our metaphor: as you peel back the flower, petal by petal, you reveal an inner layer, which is a new “world” — but IT IS STILL THE SAME WORLD.

Before you learned how to read, the world was filled with alphabetic mysteries. After you learned to read, most of those mysteries were tedious or mundane or seemingly useless, although the nearly obsolete “RESTROOMS” could be, according to your circumstances, a REALLY incredibly important piece of writing to read. But the world didn’t change. It was still the same world, but deeper and richer.

What I do here is to peel back the petals of the White Rose and find the same world, based on the “learning to read”  moments I’ve had, over the years.

I know media. I learned writing from typesetting and printing to editing, writing, rewriting, copywriting, résumé writing, but also from printing, cutting, binding, shrink-wrapping on pallets, and watching the trucks delivering those pallets to the army of vehicles going out to fill the news-stands with that week’s or month’s papers. Or, the pallets on the truck from the rack-jobbers.

Film and video pretty much the same. I was in the audience at the old Johnny Carson Tonight Show on the night that George Carlin came out and did five minutes of hilarious stuff on Death. Before that, Peter Finch had been interviewed as part of his “Best Actor” campaign for his role in “Network” as crazy Howard Beale telling America to yell, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” The next day, at noon, Peter Finch dropped stone dead in his Beverly Hills hotel, and I always wanted to ask Carlin what he’d felt at that moment.

A couple of months earlier, I’d seen Network screened at the Writers Guild Theater (alas, no more) at West Hollywood/Beverly Hills boundary, just across the street and another small street from the Troubador on Santa Monica Boulevard.

This isn’t about me, however, and that’s all you need to know. I’ve consciously tried (and succeeded) at following the three processes through from beginning to end: printing (books, magazines, newspapers), Film/Video, and, before vinyl vanished, the record industry. Wrote artist bios for press kits for A&M Records, for instance. Used to typset the labels for Kaycee Kasem’s “American Top Forty” and other radio shows usually heard on Sunday morning, “Soundtrack of the Sixties” and “The Beatles at the BEEB” — which had a level of security like unto a visit from the Pope, so that no extra copies made their way onto the collector’s market, and that radio stations destroyed their vinyl after playing the show.

And politics. From door hangers to senatorial hangers-on. The late Senator William Proxmire once told me at TCU that he felt I had a great future in politics. Dick Cheney yelled at me and my brother when we were kids. I was the unique convergence of Venn diagrams at the 2000 Democratic National Convention — a delegate and an accredited member of the Independent Media Center three blocks down  the street.

The point of the White Rose is that the world hasn’t changed, but that many mysteries of media become commonplace and mundane when one has learned to “read” them. And, no matter what the lies, obfuscations, dodges and flim-flam tricks that politicians have played since Day Zero in D.C., the world is still the world.

I don’t have any special access to politicians, insider documents, and all the rest of the cult of secrets that journalism has devolved into.

The thing I always hated about journalism was secrets that you’re constantly being forced to keep. And the culture of telephonic gossip that it engenders. I remember taking over the publishing/editorial reins at a proposed magazine that had already been through every other editor/writer in a fairly small pool. I had accepted the task in a coffee shop in Van Nuys, California, in the San Fernando Valley. By the time I could take Laurel Canyon over the hill to where it changes into Crescent Heights, and park my car just off Fountain and Crescent Heights, and check my mailbox, walk up the stairs and open the door, half of those writers ALREADY knew about it. My telephone machine confirmed that.

And, there is at least one story that I still can’t tell publicly or privately, until one person dies, lest someone be physically harmed in a particularly brutal manner in all likelihood.

The problem with “journalism” is that you have to constantly live the dual life of what you know and what you can print. Worse, most journalists live in the triple schizophrenia of what you know, what you THINK you know (which is often false), and what you can print. And, to be a successful journalist, you’ve got to have “insiders” who will give you the scoop, knowing that you won’t spill the beans. Trusting you not to “out” them, not constantly worried that you’re going to be like a Rolling Stone reporter, embed, and then print the thing that forces their resignation when the magazine hits the digital stands. I never felt comfortable with having to keep all those secrets. I am a big believer in the truth, and living the dual life of  ”I’ve got the REAL story” and “but I can’t tell you” (Worthless prole!) has always been a distasteful and dirtying pursuit, at least to my desire to have clean hands in all of this.

The dilemma is much like the constant fetish for secrecy and the guileless arrogance of the spookocracy — the notion that because people in the intelligence community know the “real scoop” they and they alone are competent to adjudge events. If you’ve ever known a retired member of that alphabet soup that I call the spookocracy, you know what I’m talking about.

I say “guileless,” because it SEEMS to go without saying. And it is wrong.

I remember the great debates (and literal debates) of the 1970s, when there was an argument as to whether it was a better expenditure of money to rely on “passive” intelligence (what is picked up via listening posts, satellite surveillance, etc.) or boots on the ground intelligence. And I tended to gravitate towards the latter. Of COURSE it’s better to have a spy inside.

But I have this peculiarity: I always want to put such propositions to the test.

So, this blog has always been about simply processing the flood of passive intelligence that sluices through the endless maw of the internet. To immerse myself in the data stream and see if I can see what’s going on without the filter of some “insider” telling me what’s REALLY going on.

I learned this working at a Kinko’s in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Just seeing the endless raw data of photocopying gave me a window into the political, legal and business happenings of the town that the newspaper would only (sometimes) later catch up to. I have always had a gift for pattern recognition, and the sheer volume of stuff that people xerox creates patterns that reinforce themselves as the data increases. I knew when Roger Zelazny sent his latest Amber novel to his publisher in New York. I knew when an attorney at the Highway Department left government service to go to work for a lobbying law firm. I knew when the oil & gas convention was happening in town, and when the big Greenpeace hoi polloi were coming for an environmental conference. That Jack Nicklaus was going to design the golf courses for a new high-end development south of town. And so forth.

Passive intelligence gathering works well, because the world remains the world. You don’t peel back a layer of petals on a white rose and suddenly get a layer that’s plaid or polka dotted. The world remains the world, and, as I say, the invisible hand always leaves a footprint.

If you’ve learned to read the tracks, stalking the wild beasts that stalk the periphery of civilization isn’t such a convoluted or byzantine endeavor.

Thus far, it’s been remarkably successful. The web of “charitable” policy shops that are currently “IN THE NEWS” was something I have been watching since 1996, when I noticed that the Heritage Foundation put out little “two minute” policy statements every day on their website and that invariably those speeches would show up, verbatim, on CSPAN when they do the “special order” speeches, that happen to run two minutes per congresscritter.

I’ve tracked the machinery ofr the Koch/Libertarian machine that menaces Wisconsin from their mistake of sending me a term limits petition via bulk mail. I’ve tracked the neo-Confederates and the hidden dominionist genesis of the home-schooling — and later the “school choice” — movement. And quite successfully.

I tracked the internet skullduggery of William Kristol’s Weekly Standard and its entry (along with Koch Industries spokespersons) into the McCain campaign.

And lots more.

But most importantly, I haven’t had to keep anybody’s secrets, or play the “Ben Smith” game of doing favors by repeating palpable lies and slurs in my column, so that I can maintain my “access” to a nest of vipers.

And I can “republish” larger chunks of writings and statements for context than you can in the for-profit world of publishing and journalism. If you see an ad on this site, it isn’t me, and the money goes to someone else. I don’t make a penny off this blog, nor will I monetize it. Taking cash for writing puts you under the thumb of the check-writer, whether you like it or not, and this blog has not been, nor ever will be Politically Acceptable, Orthodox or Keereckt. This is about transparency.

Because, as with the White Rose, the world remains the world, and as we peer closely at the world, we see it at ever-deepening levels, but it remains the world.

Peace

Now, with both the White Rose and the Lotus of a Thousand Petals that changes when you reach the center, of course.

But you’ll have to consult your local mystic floral representative on that one.

That bit’s above my pay grade for this blog.

And, oh yeah, I used to sack her groceries when I was in high school. (click photo)

Courage.