Saturday, April 16, 2011

Moss, Beggar, Weed, Tick, Pine, Self.

Duncan said it first so credit where due, though who didn't think the same thing:

Both stories make it sound as though that live microphone picked up Obama telling off the Republicans themselves. But then you realize that he's boasting to a "private event," a fundraiser, about how he gave them mugs what for. The ninety-five pound-weakling is standing up to the worst bully on the beach at last! Barack Obama has stopped playing eleven-dimensional chess and is going to show the Republicans what he's made of!

Well, not really. I don't believe that the microphone feed was accidental, and I don't believe that Obama really said such things to the Republicans.

Oh look, today Krugman calls for calling pigs pigs:

The easy, and perfectly fair, shot is to talk about the hypocrisy here; where were all the demands for civility when Republicans were denouncing Obama as a socialist, accusing him of creating death panels, etc..? Why is it OK for Republicans to accuse Obama of stealing from Medicare, but not OK for Obama to declare, with complete truthfulness, that those same Republicans are trying to dismantle the whole program?

Oh look, here's somebody named Sally Kohn in Friday's YFWP:

The real problem isn’t a liberal weakness. It’s something liberals have proudly seen as a strength — our deep-seated dedication to tolerance. In any given fight, tolerance is benevolent, while intolerance gets in the good punches. Tolerance plays by the rules, while intolerance fights dirty. The result is round after round of knockouts against liberals who think they’re high and mighty for being open-minded but who, politically and ideologically, are simply suckers....

It would be one thing if Republicans were negotiating in good faith, recognizing that reasonable minds can disagree on the matters at hand and that each will have to bend. But the GOP has become so extremist that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) made clear after the 2010 elections that his party’s agenda for the next two years was not governing but ensuring Obama’s defeat in 2012. Meanwhile, as they have for years, Republicans have openly shared their desire to shrink government so much that they can, as anti-tax activist Grover Norquist once promised, “drown it in a bathtub.” Democrats’ tolerance of such destructive positions is a sign not of nobility but of pathetic self-loathing.

Yesterday morning I got a call from Planned Parenthood asking for $$$, yesterday afternoon a call from the DNC asking for $$$, a call twenty minutes ago from the Maryland Democratic Party asking for $$$, all calling pigs pigs. Interesting coincidence, if not deliberate confluence, of circumstances, yes?







STILL

A.R. Ammons


I said I will find what is lowly
and put the roots of my identity
down there:
each day I'll wake up
and find the lowly nearby,
a handy focus and reminder,
a ready measure of my significance,
the voice by which I would be heard,
the wills, the kinds of selfishness
I could
freely adopt as my own:

but though I have looked everywhere,
I can find nothing
to give myself to:
everything is

magnificent with existence, is in 
surfeit of glory:
nothing is diminished,
nothing has been diminished for me:

I said what is more lowly than the grass:
ah, underneath,
a ground-crust of dry-burnt moss:
I looked at it closely
and said this can be my habitat: but
nestling in I
found
below the brown exterior
green mechanisms beyond the intellect
awaiting resurrection in rain: so I got up

and ran saying there is nothing lowly in the universe:
I found a beggar:
he had stumps for legs: nobody was paying
him any attention: everybody went on by:
I nestled in and found his life:
there, love shook his body like a devastation:
I said
though I have looked everywhere
I can find nothing lowly
in the universe:

I whirled though transfigurations up and down,
transfigurations of size and shape and place:

at one sudden point came still,
stood in wonder:
moss, beggar, weed, tick, pine, self, magnificent
with being!


3 comments:

  1. Wow, two posts in less than 4 hours?

    You're trying to make Randal and meself look bad, aren't you!
    ~

    ReplyDelete
  2. I blame Peggy from the Maryland Democratic Party. She changed the ring of coincidences that could have waited until Monday into an angry confluence I wanted to rid myself of today.

    ReplyDelete