LESLIE'S GHOST: Imagine no possessions.

Some reflections on self and other, life and death, discovery and lostness, simplification and complexity, the Congo and the United States, in the age of superfluous junk and meaningless suffering.

keith harmon snow
13 March 2013 consciousbeingalliance



Leslie's dead.  It's fifteen below zero.  Ghost is on the porch, shivering in the excitement of stalking the squirrels under the bird feeder. Still a young cat at six months, Ghost is the only thing at Leslie's old house that does not reek of decay or entropy. His being is still unfolding, a little white joy on four legs. He freezes, one leg in mid-air, when the squirrels look up, and then he advances, in inches. Dad and I watch him from the kitchen as he plots a massacre.

In the whiteness of the blizzard, and in the sunshine after, the white Ghost is invisible. It's only when he looks at you that you see him - and then you see that he has one blue eye and one green, and in these eyes a look of innocent wonder. The squirrels are alert, they clutch their seeds and split them on hind legs, and one day Ghost will fly off the porch and sink his teeth into a squirrel and the blood will spurt out and freeze bright red on the white snow and on the snow white face of Ghost. The world stops for Ghost when he sees a squirrel; raw instinct overpowers his consciousness, kind of like truth and justice blinded by a flag.

Dad calls him Mouser Cats and when he hollers: "Where's the mouser of the houser?" Ghost comes running. To me he has always been the Ghost. Equally inquisitive as frightened by my arrival -- a stranger coming into the heated refuge of Leslie's haunted house - he now climbs into my lap and drapes his body over my arm while I write. Maybe he remembers me.

"Everyone wants that cat when I leave," dad tells me. (I had instantly decided Ghost would be mine.) Leslie died two weeks before I came and so Dad will have to leave this house in a few months. "But I don't know what I'm going to do," he says. "I won't take the cat with me."

Ghost came from me. Last summer I let a homeless man I know pitch a tent in the field where I run an organic garden. Tim was a 24 year-old nomad, and he reminded me of me at 19. He was living on the streets of Northampton, two kittens in a brown paper bag, and one day I picked him and a girl up hitchhiking, two kittens in a brown paper bag. He showed up in our field and pitched a tent, ready to change the world. The kittens adopted me while Tim was at work each day, sleeping in my teepee and hanging out with the summer interns and pooping in the ashes of the fire pit. I told Tim to take some responsibility; that coyotes will eat the kittens, that they need a home and my teepee isn't it. He disappeared after that, on the bicycle I gave him, abandoning kittens and tent and rotting food and pornography -- and the other refuse of his alcoholism. When I left for Congo I gave the kittens to dad, and he brought them here to Leslie.

16 Years of U.S. Genocide in Congo

Glen Ford
http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/16-years-us-genocide-congo

A growing number of voices now charge that the Obama administration, like the Bush and Clinton administrations before it, has “protected” Rwanda and Uganda in their de facto annexation of eastern Congo and its mineral riches. But the actual relationship is more like that between a Mafia Godfather and his murderous henchmen. For 16 years, Uganda and Rwanda have done the bidding of their paymasters and arms suppliers, the American and British governments. If the Nuremburg rules of international justice were in force today, the highest officials in London and Washington would face death by hanging for their monstrous crimes – and only later would Presidents Kagame of Rwanda and Museveni of Uganda take their walk with the executioner.

When Congolese women and children screamed in agony,

Paul Kagame: “Our Kind of Guy”

Edward S. Herman and David Peterson
http://www.zcommunications.org/paul-kagame-our-kind-of-guy-by-edward-herman-1

Back in 1995, a senior Clinton administration official, commenting on Indonesian President Suharto, then on a state visit to Washington, referred to him as “our kind of guy.”[

1] He was speaking about a brutal and thieving dictator and double-genocidist (first in Indonesia itself, then East Timor), but one whose genocide in Indonesia terminated any left threat in that country, aligned Indonesia militarily as a Western ally and client state, and opened the door to foreign investment, even if with a heavy bribery charge. The first segment of the double-genocide (1965-1966) was therefore serviceable to U.S. interests and was so recognized by the political and media establishment. Indeed, following the mass murders in Indonesia proper, Robert McNamara referred to the transformation as a “dividend” paid by the U.S. military investment there,[2] and in the New York Times, James Reston called Suharto's rise a “gleam of light in Asia.”[3]

Rwanda's President Paul Kagame clearly is another “our kind of guy”: Like Suharto, Kagame is a double-genocidist, and one who ended any social democratic threat in Rwanda, firmly aligned Rwanda with the West as a U.S. client, and opened the door to foreign investment. Later, and far more lucratively, Kagame helped carve out resource-extraction and investment opportunities for his own associates and the U.S. and other Western investors in neighboring Zaire, the massive, resource-rich Central African country renamed the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in 1997 during the First Congo War (ca. July 1996 - July 1998).