Two Joe Wilsons. Which has done more for his country?
September 10, 2009
August 10, 2009
Labels.
Too many labels for too many people, too many men and their ill accrued fables.
So, a segment of a poem pertinent for an eternity:
Yes, I abhor thee and thy throne,
Oh, miscreant in despot's clothing!
Thy doom, they children's dying groan,
I witness them with mirthful loathing.
Upon thy brow one reads the sign
of subject peoples' degradation,
World's horror, blemish of creation,
Reproach on earth the Divine.
December 02, 2008
The Return of Weasel Words?
Lo , those many years ago when all of psychodrama came to the fore in the Clinton years. Lying, word parsing, 'the meaning of is is' etc. No truth was beyond a twist, an embellishment, a modification...
I see that Eliot Spitzer's prosti-tot got the big inteverview with Sawyer. Lawdy, what they won't do for the ratings. But ratings were not the big story,it was the lead that nowhere used the words 'prostitute' or 'sex worker' or private 'madam.' No, lots of psychological terms to skirt the nasty little word 'whore,' which is both accurate and perjorative. All about the psychological victim, the big emo story.
Can it be time so soon for the return of the weasel words?
August 12, 2008
June 10, 2008
A Conversation
We went out for a date. Her choice of where to go. The smoke in the place was a second atmosphere. She seemed, 'nice.
"Where do you live?" She started with that one.
I live between the high notes and the low notes, between the big and little slinky strings, between the worn frets and the ones rubbed flat.
"On the west side." I answered, somewhat disinterested in this topic.
"Oh, I like the west side. Its cooler, more laid back. Our side of the lake is more uptight."
I took a pull on my Turkish smoke. She really was good looking, in a burned out sort of way. Her hair was put up well but had the dry look of over 50. She was trying really hard.
"The east side is ok. Uptight makes more money you know." Feeling her out. Burned out on money or burned by some other guy. Hard to tell. But money was in the mix for sure.
"Money." she ventured, tapping her drink glass with her fingernail. The question must have hit home. Or apartment, now, in her case. "Want some cliches to go with that?"
"Nope." I had seen money and I had seen none. Been at both ends, been to both places. Some of the places were clean, none of the women were. Dirt was relative. The music was absolute, the high and low notes. E flat was forever blue. I doubt she cared about that. I doubt she had a radio. Music was background to this one.
"I've heard lots of cliches. Some good, some bad. Most of them useful at times. How bout you?"
She smiled. "What kind of work do you do?' she asked, staring at my hands. I put down the cigarette and slid them under the table. I didn't want her to know.
"I work in the sewers. Our crew runs a machine down the trunk lines for inspection. It's horrid. The smell is not so bad, but the darkness is horrid. It pays so damn well for the shitty work. We get our time off and good pay. I never have to think off the job. It never follows me home." It was my standard. She knew I was lying. I could hear the high notes crying in my head, the howl of the feedback. My hands were too soft. She could tell it was a scam.
"You don't have to lie. Lots of guys lie. I'm used to it though."
"Pretty lies trump ugly truths. My truths are boring and safe. My lies are much more fun. Pretty lies never hurt no one." It was as close as I would let her get.
She sat there and stared coldly. The math was being done. Balance sheets. The guitars were howling now, the feedback, the shrieking, the groaning. It was a blur of notes running down the neck of the Strat.
"So, not a one trick pony?" she asked.
"We usually aren't. I won't disabuse you however."
She stared some more, leaned over and put out her cigarette, dropping it into the ashtray without grinding the butt down. "Lets leave." she said.
June 07, 2008
Checkmate
The black king or the white queen? The Black King it is. Ah, but he must still deal with the other white one, the knight. The queen was difficult. She could move as she wished, this way and that, from frontal assaults to oblique maneuvers, racing headlong for the length of the board and striking deadly poses. The black king stood and waited, drawing her in.
She took on the mantle of a knight, a Joan of Arc, rushing forward, dodging left and right. Neither left nor right seemed to suit her, each too limited at the magical shape changing she really needed. Her pawns had fallen away to the black pawns. The ramparts of the black rooks were too high, their steadfast immovability fixed her with a knowing gaze. Even her loyal bishops deserted her in the end. Even the black king's treasonous bishop could not undo him, and so he fell to the white. But his blood was now on the king's clothes, a stain so dark as perhaps never to be removed.
The magnanimous black king did not savage the remainders of the white queen's army. He offered them grace, an open hand, a chance to be redeemed as fair. His offer was brushed aside. The white queen, bitter in her defeat, had no desire to share a crown. She spat on the Black King. Fealty was her reward.
May 10, 2008
Of Floods.
Mrs. Clinton said yesterday that she could win. That "Hard working people. White people." would vote for her in the fall. Gee, thanks senator, for being a uniter, not a divider. I was appalled, but should not be, at this blatant use of race made justifiable with its endgame politics used as the justification. Just how low will she go? Bring out the bathyspheres.
Again, an oblique start to a separate question. When I was a student at Cal from 84-88, I lived in Bump City. Oakland, CA for the less streetwise. Oakland is as close as I can get to the ills of urban places. East LA gets the press, but Oakland lives it every day, decade after decade. No wonder one of the foils in Tom Wolfe's "A Man in Full" is from the Bay Area, a book that very humorously addresses the race mess we live in. Oakland can be pretty rough and in the day, the days of the crack cocaine epidemic, it was a place where you watched your back. Cocaine, the club drug of the glitterati, had come home to the streets as crack, and it did a crackerjack job on the black population of Oakland. Al Capone would blush I'm sure.
A classmate living near Lake Merritt heard a particularly nasty argument being consummated in the apartment next to hers, followed by gunshots and holes appearing in her walls. A quick trip into her large cast iron bathtub saved her hide. A few weeks after I left, an incensed relative of a woman hit by a bus got on that bus and opened fire. July Fourth and New Year's Eve were peppered with the local Chinese and Mexican fireworks, but also with Mac-10's firing blindly into the night, their leaden rain falling where it may.
And the color was black. No bones about it, crack tore the black community into pieces, pieces that now are suffering from crystal meth and yet more crack, not to mention Oxycontin and other legal stuff gone to the street. Go visit a big city and see for yourself. Don't take my word for it.
So I, like many of the day, understand the inception of the drug wars. Rudy Guliani would know best. But then so would Harold Washington. The idea that fear of public spaces is OK would return us to the streets of Dickens's London, the English being at the lower levels as mean as we are. Society can't function when fear rules. Note that our president uses both sides of the fear coin. Heads, you fear terrorists, tails, I keep you safe but stoke your fears. Zero Sum.
Fast forward to 2008 and you have more people in jail here than most places in the world, right up there with China. This jail-fervor was the step-child of fear. And in the ensuing dragnet, drooling stoners who should be shuffling to the mini-mart for another beer to whet the cotton-mouth are instead behind bars. Yes, so are some folks who could outshine the characters of "No Country For Old Men." In the last days of May, I think about this, for this is a building flood that no one wants to think will happen: Someday, the prison doors will swing open. When they do, out will come drug lords and gang-bangers made even more hard by the pen, not to mention the life skills the stoners will have acquired just to survive. This flood will be large, mean, and black. No mincing of words here. Stats tell the story.
So, back to Senator Clinton. How on earth could she use her words in such a manner, a manner meant to stoke more fear and more race? There is only one reason you can logically accept; personal ambition at all costs. Everyone under the bus until there is only the bus driver left, and no one else. A bus empty of humans but full of hate and fear and ambition.
I am for Senator Obama as he has not gone down the path to finding gasoline for all fires, building tinder fires of fear and race. He has held the line quite well despite the controversies that have hit him. When the flood comes, I want this man to address its problems and find a path that is not driven with fear and hatred and race. Those three horsemen will surely try to unnerve and pull under any man or woman they can find. The horsemen have already found Senator Clinton.
May 04, 2008
Hey Ladies. Hey Fellas.
So, after a week of lounging about, I now have a semi-functional foot. You see, there is this horrendous condition caused by too much salt intake called 'Morton's Neuroma.'. Just fibbin. But, for the ladies tiptoeing about in skinny high heels, this is the result of all your late PM hijinks with Claude from the Sorbonne. Not due to Claude, who will give you worse bodily problems, but because of the shoes. Tight, pointy toed, 6" of butt in the air high heels. Not how I got this problem mind you, nor would I say so if I did. But somewhere out there, between your 3rd and 4th metatarsal lies a nice, unassuming, pleasant little nerve. It likes to tell you when you kick the bedpost and scream in pain or when you stomp a little honeymaker in the clover and end up with a huge painful toe. But, years of abuse also take their toll, and mashing a nerve twixt two bones leads to less than happy synapses. The little bugger gets all hot and bothered, then swells up like a pea. End result: Constant pain in the foot akin to standing on a stone every time you walk. Ow-wee.
So the doctor cuts this guy out, you hobble about for weeks, wishing you were not a slave to fashion or closet gay person who lives for ill fitting trendy shoes. Or, a person with a history of running or other foot abuse. As I sit here in an oxycontin fog I just wish to mimick some of my patients: If I had known I would live this long, I would have taken better care of myself. Man those old folks are smart.
April 24, 2008
March 31, 2008
A Numerology of Verses
A birthday like any other, at eighteen he couldn't drink a drop of moonshine in his home state. He didn't care. He didn't drink anyway. His girlfriend did, but she was not the type to go on a bender and strip down in a bar. She was a regular gal.
Most of his friends graduated this year from high school, some going on to college, pledging fraternities and sororities, others going the townie route. All 17 of them had plans, even though the plans diverged that summer for each of them.
It was August 16, 2006 when he joined up. He still was not sure why he joined. He had been accepted at university and a good one at that. Even a small scholarship was there for track and field. He was good at the Olympic sports, the odd ones that no one cared about. The discus, the javelin, the hammer. His nickname was 'The Hammer,' more for his ability to come down on his friends than to toss a too large weight down the field. Always the self righteous one. Always the nag. The army suited him well.
Fifteen of the guys in his basic training didn't make it. Some went nuts, or were nuts, before they arrived, barely functioning nutbirds before the recruiter got them for his quota. The others collapsed in the heat of the swamps or the gun ranges. Some just disappeared without warning. It turned out to be prescient.
Fourteen flights were leaving the day he left, all of them heading east, all of them full of ripe human cargo. Strapped into his seat he dozed into worlds and places that didn't exist or that he had nurtured into existence in his head. Real or not, they raced along in his head, a movie with no coherent sound track, no coherent dialog, no credits. It was all action with no reason.
They arrived in the desert on Friday the 13th, and he laughed about this with his buddies as they crouched into the back of an armored car. Black humor was indistinguishable from the lighter kind, but humor it was none the less. They were young, and so was the day. They were young and life was forever, like the sand.
Twelve hours into the ride the base glowed on the horizon, a small encampment blurring out the stars withs its mercury-vapor green glow. This was his home, his new home, his home until otherwise. This was a small piece of Mayberry in the sand. But no Main Street here.
His tent mates were good fellows. Eleven of them shared the large tent, laying beneath its cool shade in the day, playing cards in its glow in the night, gas lamps roaring like blow torches. They felt safe here, even as the occasional mortar came out of the dark and landed nearby, its loud thump more entertainment that emergency. It was just sound effects to a war.
The next morning blew in hot, hotter than he had ever known. By the time the wake up call sounded, it was 85 degrees. By ten, it was 100 degrees. This was the new life. Hot, or hotter, but never cool. Never free of sand and heat. Never free of the sounds of war in the distance.
Nine of the guys in the tent were from near his town. This was odd. There were no more regiments all from a town. The army didn't want whole towns to lose all their men at once. It was all mix and match and keep things impersonal and anonymous. Don't go to war with a buddy, go with a stranger. Its easier that way. To lose a stranger.
The next morning was the first for the patrol and the bugle blew at eight in the morning to get them going. No one could play the bugle of course, but it was tape recorded, CD recorded and pressed into vinyl. No one was going to sleep in. The army said so.
The trucks headed down the road. The nearest village was only about seven miles away, but the jostling of the trucks and the hardness of helmet and gun was uncomfortable and no one dozed or slept. In the hundred degree heat, the misery was universal. They coughed sand and moaned.
At the edge of the walled village, six of them jumped out, happy to be away from the heat of the truck and blowing sand, better to be on foot and the master of one's own self. No more victim-hood of the truck driver. It was all on their own shoulders now.
Five houses down the street and no one was to be seen, either the heat or the fear of their infidel faces kept the streets empty, the windows shuttered. Alone in a town full of people.
As they crept along for four blocks, the village was silent. Not even the sound of a goat or desert bird. Only the soft crunching of sand and gravel under foot. Only the wind.
Of the whole group, three had done this before. They knew what to expect. They knew what could happen. Each had his own story. But none of the three had shared the stories. The math was all subtractive.
Two of the lead sergeants rounded a corner. He followed them, trusting their experience. They knew better. They held the key to live.
As they crouch-walked along a wall, one shot rang out. It found its target, but he didn't really understand. He didn't really comprehend the red in his hand, the pain in his neck, the blackness of his vision. He didn't have to.
At zero hour, in the cover of darkness, they put his body on the truck, and they left.
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