Thursday, November 27, 2014

What It Must Be Like to Be an Angel or a Squirrel We Can Imagine Sooner





  • MST3K: Thanksgiving tradition from when Comedy Central didn't suck.
  • Three hours of music in the wake of Ferguson.
  • Offered for your consideration: Barack Obama, Ferguson, and Evidence of Things Unsaid: In the case of Michael Brown, this is more disappointing than enraging. The genre of Obama race speeches has always been bounded by the job he was hired to do. Specifically, Barack Obama is the president of the United States of America. More specifically, Barack Obama is the president of a congenitally racist country, erected upon the plunder of life, liberty, labor, and land. This plunder has not been exclusive to black people. But black people, the community to which both Michael Brown and Barack Obama belong, have the distinct fortune of having survived in significant numbers. For a creedal country like America, this poses a problem—in nearly every major American city one can find a population of people whose very existence, whose very history, whose very traditions, are an assault upon this country's nationalist instincts. Black people are the chastener of their own country. Their experience says to America, "You wear the mask."
  • Here, an abridged version of a conversation I had with a friend Tuesday - Friend: I still think Obama is an honest broker. Me: Isn't that the worse-case scenario?
  • The Strangling of Nonsense.
  • A Thieves' Thanksgiving: It’s never been such a good time to be a crook. In what other country of laws does one enjoy so much freedom to defraud one’s government and fellow citizens without having to worry about cops showing at the door? Small-time crooks sooner or later end up in the slammer, but our big-time con artists, as we’ve come to learn, are now regarded as the untouchables, too well-heeled and powerful to lock up. Not only that, the most famous among them are widely admired, not just by their peers and politicians on the take, but even by our president, who, six years after the worst financial crisis since the Depression, calls them good businessmen (he said it at least once). No wonder the graduates of our most prestigious schools speak openly of emulating their ways, discarding those antiquated altruistic values university students in previous generations aspired to. Besides, where else in our weak economy are there so many good job opportunities as in racketeering?
  • Dark Age of America: The Suicide of Science.
  • Riots and Reason.
  • Reminder.
  • I applaud Hillary for visiting Ferguson and meeting with Al Sharpton. Oh wait, that was Rand Paul.
  • US GDP divided in half: a map. Yes, I live in the orange. I have always said that I don't live in America.
  • Removing the brown M&M's: Hillary-style. What a despicable asshole.
  • Learning from the billionaire journalism model.
  • How cats became domesticated.
  • Cinerama reuniting!
  • Yes, it's the slowest day of the year in Blegsylvania, I was collecting these links and watching MST3K anyway, thank you for reading.
  • On the Meredith poem below.







PARENTS

William Meredith

What it must be like to be an angel
or a squirrel, we can imagine sooner.
 
The last time we go to bed good,
they are there, lying about darkness.
 
They dandle us once too often,
these friends who become our enemies.
 
Suddenly one day, their juniors
are as old as we yearn to be.
 
They get wrinkles where it is better
smooth, odd coughs, and smells.
 
It is grotesque how they go on
loving us, we go on loving them
 
The effrontery, barely imaginable,
of having caused us. And of how.
 
Their lives: surely
we can do better than that.
 
This goes on for a long time. Everything
they do is wrong, and the worst thing,
 
they all do it, is to die,
taking with them the last explanation,
 
how we came out of the wet sea
or wherever they got us from,
 
taking the last link
of that chain with them.
 
Father, mother, we cry, wrinkling,
to our uncomprehending children and grandchildren.



2 comments:

  1. I applaud Hillary for visiting Ferguson and meeting with Al Sharpton.

    Bleh.
    ~

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  2. i enjoyed reading meredith's "parents" and his account of the experience it came from

    yesterday i had a satisfying experience of filial piety - i went to thanksgiving dinner at the retirement community with my father's widow, who is a shadow of her former self - her daughter, a year younger than myself, has lived in germany since she graduated from college, and comes to visit once a year, so i am the closest approximation of a relative she has on this continent (she was a french war bride who came to america soon after world war ii - and her daughter now speaks english with a german accent - sometimes one thinks the universe has a sense of humor)

    and speaking of poetry, regular readers of this comments column will recall some of james tate's poems, with my analysis, which i posted here quite recently - i also put them at another forum - one person (a self-described poet-philosopher) wrote in response

    "frankly this is the sort of jibberish one would expect (both the poetry and the analysis) in a college English class with all who are assembled thinking that they have wandered into a location where new experiments in style are being developed and adding a new leading edge of 'hip cultural slick' to the tired and worn out old form"

    chacun a son gout

    ReplyDelete