Monday, November 8, 2010

Unlike a Man It Rose Again Rolling with the Wind Over and Over to Be as It Was Before

An ad I keep hearing on the radio for Head and Shoulders shampoo guarantees cleaner and fuller hair after a week of daily washing versus not washing your hair for a week. When you're a bald man, that's doubly nonsensical.

Well sure, and Obama claims he's an admirer of Gandhi, I snort derisively. When you're a fully-vested poodle, snorting at irony is triply nonsensical.

Anyway, finished a moleskin, started a new one along with a new noxzema bottle blue virtual one. When you both want attention and the pleasure of being ignored it's quadruply nonsensical to call attention to both.
  • Aesthetics.
  • Self-absorption.
  • Tear jerk.
  • Growth industry.
  • Corrupter v corruptee.
  • Krugman still doesn't get it
  • Electoral dissonance: The result is a kind of political cognitive dissonance. Frightened by joblessness, “the American people” rewarded the party that not only opposed the stimulus but also blocked the extension of unemployment benefits. Alarmed by a ballooning national debt, they rewarded the party that not only transformed budget surpluses into budget deficits but also proposes to inflate the debt by hundreds of billions with a permanent tax cut for the least needy two per cent. Frustrated by what they see as inaction, they rewarded the party that not only fought every effort to mitigate the crisis but also forced the watering down of whatever it couldn’t block.
  • Recipe for fascism: American politics, as the midterm elections demonstrated, have descended into the irrational. On one side stands a corrupt liberal class, bereft of ideas and unable to respond coherently to the collapse of the global economy, the dismantling of our manufacturing sector and the deadly assault on the ecosystem. On the other side stands a mass of increasingly bitter people whose alienation, desperation and rage fuel emotionally driven and incoherent political agendas. It is a recipe for fascism. 
  • Outrage, misguided: The U.S. midterm elections register a level of anger, fear and disillusionment in the country like nothing I can recall in my lifetime. Since the Democrats are in power, they bear the brunt of the revulsion over our current socioeconomic and political situation
  • Mush
  • Brooks and Balzac?
  • Straight problem.
  • O'Malley's next four years.
  • NaNoWrMo. I tried three years ago, long after I knew I wasn't a novelist, see no reason to reconfirm. I have one friend trying this year, she says she thinks she might make it. Go Jill.
  • Impossible music.
  • GbV.
  • Husker Du.
  • Enter to win new re-release of All Things Must Pass.
  • Darkblack's Sunday Overnight.
  • Spin Yo La Tengo's wheel! Anyone want to go to the 930 show in January?
  • Shade and honey.

THE TERM

W.C. Williams

A rumpled sheet
of brown paper
about the length

and apparent bulk
of a man was
rolling with the

wind slowly over
and over in
the street as

a car drove down
upon it and
crushed it to

the ground. Unlike
a man it rose
again rolling

with the wind over
and over to be as
it was before.

5 comments:

  1. Hertzberg is doing a bang-up job of congratulating his readers on being Not Republicans.

    As if that really matters. Good one Hank! The Crippled Grey Hag loves her sycophants!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yes, but he's not wrong in that above paragraph on how the not not-Republicans were worked.

    Mind, it took the complicit spinelessness of Democrats to make it work - and Hertzberg elides that aspect - but that doesn't deny how the not not-Republicans were worked.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Everyone who votes partisan is worked, but Hendrik wants the Not Republicans to think their being worked as mindless partisan robots is the preferred vehicle to The American Dream (as yet precisely undefined in practical terms, but... who cares?). 234 years in, and we're kicking royal ass!

    Never mind that pesky "economy," it's a house of cards anyway!

    ReplyDelete
  4. I hate to be the spelling police but I had to read the sentence three times. Moleskin is flannel-like stuff with a sticky back that you put on to avoid blisters; Moleskine is a notebook.

    Thank you.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Heh.

    I've only got a freaking trunk full of filled ones.

    ReplyDelete