Many states are dealing with their exploding deficits by borrowing record amounts of cash, rather than either cutting services or hiking taxes. Last year, state and local governments borrowed $127 billion, or nearly 10 percent of their total revenue. That's the highest percentage since the 1950s. More evidence of a possible impending break-up. I believe that when it happens, the US of A will split up and go regional. I know it sounds idotic now, especially given the homogeneity created by the media, cemented in place with fear (people tend to huddle together when terrified), and over two hundred years of tradition, but if the state leaders do not come up with the brilliant idea of withdrawal from the Union on their own, finances (or the lack of them) may create the situation for them.

Imagine six or seven American regions, each with its own character and traditons and its own militia (all those defense trillions would be unnecessary -- who would want to go to war with New England or the Pacific Northwest?) -- instead of the monolith USA. The Empire is a huge target. What we truly need right now is not another foreign adventure, but another constitutional convention -- out of which, I trust, we would see that what we had created in the eighteenth century is now too large by far to function as a republic: we need to downsize ourselves to preserve our enlightened principles.

On another subject, the BBC reports this morning that one of France's most celebrated chefs has apparently committed suicide after his flagship restaurant was downgraded in a top restaurant guide. Bernard Loiseau was found dead at his country home yesterday, a hunting rifle by his side. I THOUGHT his cream sauce was a tad on the oily side, but I wasn't going to say anything about it.

Item, in toto, from this morning's Santa Fe New Mexican:

Underwear Stolen on South Side
One hundred pairs of panties were stolen Friday from a residence on the south side of Santa Fe.
City police reported a woman arrived home in the 2400 block of Calle Zaguan at 7 p.m., after a 90-minute absence, to discover her kitchen window smashed and her bedroom ransacked.
The panties apparently were the only property missing, police said.
The victim declined to talk more about the crime.

She was obviously trying to protect her 'south side.'

An article in tomorrow morning's New York Times Magazine says that repression may be more therapeutic than clearing out the traumas (Greek for 'wounds') of the past in talk therapy. This seems to me a rather daffy and irresponsible position. Anyone out there reading this -- and the article, of course -- who has a 'take' on the subject, please let me have it: jdispenza@aol.com.

We finished a retreat last Friday, and we begin another one tonight. The work is to uncover the wounds of the past, heal them, and move on so they can stop being an obstacle to the progress of body, mind, emotions, and spirit. If repression is a better way, maybe we should be in a different profession -- or the same one reframed to include the spiritual practice not of forgiving, but of...forgetting?

Signs. These images of nightclubs going up in flames -- last night in Rhode Island (yes, there is a little state called Rhode Island), the other day in Chicago: I had a chilly feeling that I was witnessing scenes from Dante's Inferno. There seems to be a 'dance of death' going on up there, people dancing in the face of the death of the Empire, then falling exhausted to the floor and being tampled upon or incinerating themselves. The war has begun: we are the dead and wounded.

Still another good reason to protect ourselves against illegal aliens:

A Los Angeles woman is suing the Sci-Fi Channel because she was a 'nonconsenting and unwitting victim' of a hidden camera prank that caused her to believe that she was actually being chased by a space alien on a remote desert road in California. Kara Blanc thought she was headed last March to an exclusive Hollywood industry party with two actors (who, unbeknownst to Blanc, were working on the reality show Scare Tactics) when the trio's car appeared to stall. At that point, the two male actors were set upon by an 'alien,' which caused Blanc to take off 'running for her life through a dark, desert canyon area.'

Amos Oz in this morning's New York Times: If you are envied by all, you should be careful about wielding a big stick....The big stick is necessary, but it is best used to deter or repulse aggression, not to 'impose good.'

Blizzards seem far away from here, not only in geography but also in time. They are a thing that is of another place -- and also of another time, perhaps even another age of Earth. Snow was a part of my childhood, but it is not present in my life now, nor has it been for quite some time. When I hear about huge amounts of snow accumulating in fields and in streets, stopping trains, planes, cars, closing schools, it is as if I have returned to another time somewhere in the long ago. I am a boy again there, watching the wonder of the elments, pulling on my boots.

Here we have palm trees, sun, and 75-degree afternoons. In this place I am lulled into believing that this is the way the world was meant to be: earth as a planet of mild weather.

Spam email might be valuable to gain some insight into the collective consciousness of the G.C. (Greed Culture). Reading the spam in my box over the past three days the way one might read tea leaves -- or the entrails of owls, and so on -- I am evolving some conclusions...tentative, naturally, because one never knows what next Big Concern will float by like intellectual sewage in the cultural mainstream.

Number one is money, or rather the lack of it. This surprised me, since I had thought that sex would be first on the minds of everyone in the empire: I based that assumption on the numbingly repetitious advertising of products on TV and in magazines with its more or less overt promise to deliver a quick orgasm upon sale. This month's issue of Vanity Fair has ads so titillating that they are virtually dry-fucks, as we used to say (about slow dancing) in the 1950s.

No, spam about getting credit cards in spite of bad credit, low mortgage rates, earning money at home stuffing envelopes, alternatives to declaring bankruptcy, gaining access to secret credit ratings, winning money prizes, and saving big bucks by refinancing the house outnumbered penis enlargement and herbal Viagra by almost two to one. All of this confirms my suspicions that everyone in the culture is two paychecks away from the street...you know, pushing around a shopping cart loaded down with a bedroll and lots of aluminum cans.

Number two is sex, or rather, apparently, the lack of it. Spam promises bigger sexual equipment, better sexual performance, longer sexual ecstasy, more sexual fun. If you dug up this culture a couple of thousand years from now the way we dig up the ruins of Rome, Greece, Carthage, and Troy, you would have to surmise, just from the exhumed evidence, that we are a pleasure-deprived, genitally insatiable culture on a sex-drunk...pumped up, but oddly the victims of agonizing inadequacies in every sexual department -- and permanently unsatisfied.

Number three is weight loss: we are a culture of fatties, with one in three of us declared clinically obese. Thirty years of eating fast (fat) food, delivered to us by the food industry -- note the word -- has made us all look like Humphrey Pennyworth. Diseases directly caused by overweight, like diabetes, heart disease, and cancer, are going through the roof. But no one is suggesting that people try simply eating less to benefit their health. Would you like fries with that?

Number four is about having the ability to spy on other people.

Note to myself: do not automatically delete spam; save it, count it, analyze it, search its entrails for signs. Like other garbage, it might be concealing some gems.

The numbers of people protesting US war policies over the weekend was impressive, but the Financial Times reports this morning that Washington is turning a deaf ear to the crowds. The brittle arrogance of this Administration may not bring it down -- it didn't Nixon's at first -- but continuing along this line of single-minded isolation eventually will take its toll. I am being careful in my mind and heart to separate myself from the karma accumulating around the president and his people. When the breaking up comes, I want my conscience to be clear.

Meanwhile, the citizenry seems to be bracing for war, even in the snows of one of the harshest winters on record up there: almost as if Nature was trying to put out the fires of the war cries with ice.

This beautiful afternoon. The temperature is 75 degrees. Juanito and Antonio just came in from washing our car. Mike is cleaning Madre's ears. Down the street, people are having a garage sale...we bought a beach umbrella for the patio; we almost bought a big blue couch, but when we sat on it, it was like sinking into a marshmallow.

This morning we ate nopales and eggs in the courtyard at the little place on Calle Jesus next to the bookstore. I seem to be without allergies. Mike is thinking of studying one of his naturopathy courses later. Sali Ann writes, Jennifer writes. I am listening to Mozart.

The afternoon is hanging in the sun, like sheets on the line. We hang lightly here with it, caught.

Probably three million people were out on the streets yesterday on behalf of peace and against US war policies, but the leads in the New York Times are about other (although related) subjects. And one, singing the praises of the apparently undervalued Bo Diddley, is completely unrelated. There is a photo of a rally today in Australia. I suppose there is not much to say about an event that draws 750,000 people (London) out of their homes and into one public place for one purpose except that it happened. Still, one has to wonder what it takes to get banner headlines in our curiously somnambulant print media.

Georgelle writes me early this morning with Senator Byrd's speech in the Senate the day before yesterday. 'In only the space of two short years this reckless and arrogant Administration has initiated policies which may reap disastrous consequences for years,' he says, sounding like Cicero condemning Cataline. Why hasn't this been picked up by the major media? It appears to be making the rounds on the Internet underground, but that is preaching to the choir. Twice in the speech Byrd makes reference to the fact that fully half of Iraq's population is under the age of fifteen: going to war with that nation would be going to war with a nation of children.

It comes as a huge surprise to me that there is a voice -- and an eloquent voice, at that -- of dissent out there. I had assumed from reading the US press that the nation is on a single-minded course. The opposition party in the Congress has been, as Byrd notes, 'ominously, dreadfully' silent -- perhaps because this Administration has it so confused over issues of loyalty. The culture has been mesmerized into this impending war by leaders (and I use the term loosely) bent on executing a peculiar and for the most part covert policy in the name of the electorate.

Where are our leaders on the other side, by the way? Where is a responsible media at this critical time?

But while Byrd's speech moved me on one level, it left me vacant on another. Something lethargic is setting in. I believe the reason I am losing interest in the whole war affair is because I see and feel it as further confirmation of the drift toward the breaking up of the Empire, and its movement is inexorable. When something this large is afoot, the appropriate response may be simply to witness, and try to turn to something more personally interesting and satisfying. In that way, I tell myself, the horrible, unthinkable matter of dead and maimed children will be out of my hands.

Like Mark Twain, who made 'a separate peace' with the Confederacy, I seem to be making a separate peace with my culture of origin, which I see as intent upon self-destruction because the center cannot hold.

I open the morning papers these days and I am greeted with the same headline, in various forms, wordings, and degrees of gravity: Bush Says War Inevitable, War is Certain, Iraq Given Last Chance by UN, Powell Says War Looms, Absolutely War on the Horizon. There is so much of this that I have begun to zone out. Like Rhett Butler, I am ready to say, 'Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.'

Can this be? On the subject of a conflagration in the Middle East, a conflict that will leave thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of innocent people (the children!) dead or virtually dead, I appear to have lost interest. Something in me seems to be responding to all this 'news' as if it were in a dream or a movie. The news is old news. I am bored with it, and want something else to turn my attention to. I have stopped reading idiot hawks like Andrew Sullivan -- and idiot doves also. I am wanting news about art, about love, about life. I want to hear about new and daring opera productions, breakthrough films, shocking plays, dazzling novels...imaginative vegetarian recipes.

If others are feeling this way, maybe the 'news' -- Bush, Iraq, the UN, France/Germany, North Korea, blah, blah, blah -- will just evaporate from lack of...what?...ratings?

Americans are in debt by $1.7 trillion. But go ahead and send in that application for another platinum card.

My feelings about the center not holding and the breaking up of the whole under the weight of its very heaviness (brought about by ego inflation and the resulting general drift toward cultural psychosis) are now concentrated on money, and particularly its misuses in the American scheme of things. When the World Trade Center went down, it surely was symbolic, beyond all the other geopolitical issues, of the destruction of the money culture: we appear to be living in the final days of that culture, about to witness its dismantling...with no small amount of human suffering attendant upon it.

From the interview with Camille Paglia (is she the smartest person in the country, or what?) in today's Salon:

What is your position on the increasingly likely U.S. invasion of Iraq?

Well, first of all, I'm on the record as being pro-military and in insisting that military matters and international affairs were neglected throughout the period of the Clinton administration -- which partly led to the present dilemma. The first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 should have been a wake-up call for everyone. However, I'm extremely upset about our rush to war at the present moment. If there truly were an authentic international coalition that had been carefully built, and if the administration had demonstrated sensitivity to the fragility of international relations, I'd be 100 percent in favor of an allied military expedition to go into Iraq and find and dispose of all weapons of mass destruction.

But most members of the current administration seem to have little sense that there's an enormous, complex world beyond our borders. The president himself has never traveled much in his life. They seem to think the universe consists of America and then everyone else -- small-potatoes people who can be steamrolled. And I'm absolutely appalled at the lack of acknowledgment of the cost to ordinary Iraqi citizens of any incursion by us, especially aerial bombardment. Most of the Iraqi armed forces are pathetically unprepared to respond to a military confrontation with us. These are mostly poor people who have a profession and a dignity within their country, and they're not necessarily totally behind Saddam Hussein's ambition to dominate his region. There's just no way that Saddam's threat is equal to that of Hitler leading up to World War II. Hitler had amassed an enormous military machine and was actively seeking world domination. We don't need to invade Iraq. Saddam can be bottled up with aggressive surveillance and pinpoint airstrikes on military installations.

As we speak, I have a terrible sense of foreboding, because last weekend a stunning omen occurred in this country. Anyone who thinks symbolically had to be shocked by the explosion of the Columbia shuttle, disintegrating in the air and strewing its parts and human remains over Texas -- the president's home state! So many times in antiquity, the emperors of Persia or other proud empires went to the oracles to ask for advice about going to war. Roman generals summoned soothsayers to read the entrails before a battle. If there was ever a sign for a president and his administration to rethink what they're doing, this was it. I mean, no sooner had Bush announced that the war was "weeks, not months" away and gone off for a peaceful weekend at Camp David than this catastrophe occurred in the skies over Texas.

From the point of view of the Muslim streets, surely it looks like the hand of Allah has intervened, as with the attack on the World Trade Center. No one in the Western world would have believed that those mighty towers could fall within an hour and a half -- two of the proudest constructions in American history. And neither would anyone have predicted this eerie coincidence -- that the president's own state would become the burial ground for the Columbia mission.

Including one small town where the debris fell called Palestine, Texas.

Yes, exactly! What weird irony with an Israeli astronaut onboard who had bombed Iraq 20 years ago. To me this dreadful accident is a graphic illustration of the limitations of modern technology -- of the smallest detail that can go wrong and end up thwarting the most fail-safe plan. So I think that history will look back on this as a key moment. Kings throughout history have been shaken by signals like this from beyond: Think twice about what you're doing. If a Roman general tripped on the threshold before a battle, he'd call it off.

I heard the other day that the Vatican was doing a search (I use the phrase advisedly) for a saint to be the patron of the Internet. For a couple of days I forgot about it, then, for some reason, I became quite interested in the idea. I went to the Vatican's site and found the roster of all the saint -- Lord, there are a lot of them! -- and started sifting through.

When I mentioned this to Marthe this morning, she immediately came up with St. Christopher. But Christopher has been de-sainted, remember. About thirty years ago, the Vatican said the evidence for his having lived, let alone having died and gone to heaven, was rather slim. It was around the same time that the decree came down to turn the altars around, say mass in the vernacular, and so on. In other words, the literalists took over the Church, and as a result the mythos of the Great Mystery was lost to the misguided proponents of the logos.

This actually had been in the works for the better part of a century, and picked up enormous steam with the promulgation in 1950 of the dogma of the Assumption of Our Lady into heaven. At that point, to be a Roman Catholic, one had to believe and profess that the body of the mother of Jesus was taken up to 'heaven' when she, um, 'died' (but even that was fuzzy -- did she die? did she go to heaven without dying?).

Anyway, by then everyone was quite certain that there was probably no 'heaven' up there beyond the clouds, and that even if there were, the idea that a human body would rise up, and so on -- you get the drift. There is a point at which religious mystery does not, and should not, hold up in the 'real world' of what we can see, touch, smell, and hear. When mythos is forced to cross over into logos, the mystery evaporates. Pius XII stubbornly failed to grasp that there was an apple-and-oranges situation as regarded the Blessed Virgin's demise. Speaking from the power of myth, it is no problem at all to believe that Mary sighed a deep sigh -- her last -- and immediately angels came and swooped her up, her face as ecstatic as the face of the Bernini St. Teresa, and carried her off to heaven, the home of God, the gods, and, eventually, us. But try to lay that out on the blackboard of a high school physics classroom, and you're in big trouble.

Back to Marthe and St. Christopher. At first I thought it was a bad idea -- mainly because he had been taken off the Vatican's official list of saints. But now I am coming to like the idea very much, and for the same reason. St. Christopher lives in the word of mythos -- his de-saintment lives in the world of logos. By naming St. Christopher the patron saint of the Internet, we would be inviting the mysterious into this rather dreary land of zeros and ones. So, I support St. Christopher for the position: with the understanding that he represents, Christ-bearer that he is, the possibility of imbuing this marvelous new technology with Christ (union with the Father/Mother God) consciousness.

I believe the Internet will be for Christ consciousness what the Roman roads were for early Christianity -- a vehicle for the Mysterium Magnum to reach the minds and hearts of humankind. Such a noble undertaking deserves a saint of high quality, a saint who has stood the test of time.

St. Christopher, Patron of the Internet, pray for us!

Breaking up, breaking down. Something's afoot, and I can't seem to put my finger on it. Maybe one of you astrologers out there have an explanation. The pieces are: The Empire, too big, cannot maintain the frontiers, tighter rules/less personal freedom, unmasking, harder to hold together, breaking apart, using all the energy to keep up the front, to keep the center from caving in, being uncomfortable with permanent extension and expansion -- a crack down the middle, a tear of fabric, a rip. The parts falling off. A coming apart at the middle.

My dreams are all about this.

More about the culture of fear and greed: I have this feeling about the weightiness of it all, and how the center can't hold and must break. Another friend writes and uses the word 'hubris' -- and what is hubris, after all, but the extension of the inflated ego so far out that the center breaks apart? For the ancients, hubris was madness: 'He who the gods would bring down, they first make mad.' And madness does appear to be the order of the day...psychosis in the culture. Psychosis -- the condition of being out of touch with reality. We have disconnected ourselves from nature and from each other, and that separation has brought about a loss of sanity.

And so, a comet containing humans bursts in the heavens over Texas. The news reports were about 'breaking up.' Things are breaking up. What to watch for now -- now that this potent portent in the heavens has given us notice: a breaking up.

Sabine writes to remind me that in the days of the Roman Republic, and later the Empire, an omen in the skies of the magnitude of the space shuttle Columbia would have sent the citizens to storm the doors of the Senate to demand an end to warlike policies. Of course own latter-day Senators, sans togas, but with similar girth (Teddy Kennedy is looking swollen, like Charles Laughton toward the end), have long ago left off representing the people for the necessity of representing the lobbyists...gotta get re-elected, ya know. In case you missed the ironies of the day yesterday: the omen flew over Texas, the home state of the incumbent US president; the first account I read had the shuttle, carrying an Israeli astronaut, breaking up over the little town of...Palestine, Texas; Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean, falling from the sky -- a sign, at long last, of the fall of empire?

One of the best articles I read in the past year appeared in Harper's last summer. It was written by a professor at Emory University in Atlanta. In it he put forth a remarkable thesis: things can get too big...and when they do, they begin to break down...their weight, length, and breadth get so outsized that they fall to pieces. They cannot maintain. Such, I believe, is the problem with the dominant culture at the moment, localized in the United States. Look what happened when the old Soviet Union attempted to maintain itself -- all those people, all that geography. It fell apart. Knowing how this principle works, it might be better for us now, instead of making ourselves bigger and bigger (and we are doing it on a personal, physical level, also) , to begin considering how we can downsize ourselves.

Suggestion: roll up the flags, pull in the attitude, break down the monoculture, live simply, as the bumper stickers say, so that we may simply live.