Saturday, May 7, 2011

Deconstruction Found the Moving Circle



Thursday Night Pints turned quickly from Garyland to Osama's assassination and reassessing Obama. Would you have bounced as much if Osama had been killed by these awesome Navy Seals by order of George Bush in 2007, I asked, because I've no doubt I would have been suspicious of the official timing and timeline and narrative as it shifted, I would have screamed how Republicans would shamelessly politicize the killing, but mostly I would have bitched and bewailed the further assertion of claims of omnipotence for both American power and the imperial presidency. Snuff, anybody, anywhere, anytime, awesome.

Well, the celebrations were sickening, said L, on the yahooing prior to Thursday Night Pints. L, I love you, but look at that photo above, taken Friday. The question isn't whether Osama deserved to be killed, the question is whether the people who decided to kill him deserved that right. D said, Osama and Obama were playing the same game under the same rules. That didn't exactly win though it happens to be true, and about us too, but it was D's turn for a ridiculously priced scotch.

Hey! Did you know Washington DC has a professional soccer team?





It's true, and they're gonna try to win back-to-back MLS games for the first time in two years tonight at RFK! Weather is going to be beautiful. See you there!










THE EIGHTIES

Brenda Hillman

An Essay

A friend asks, "What was at stake for you in the Eighties?" She's trying to figure out Bay Area Poetry. There was Reagan's New Morning for America. Garfield dolls stuck to the backs of windshields with suction cups. At the beginning of the Eighties I was married & at the end i was not. The Civil Rights Movement became kind of quiet. Feminism became kind of quiet. An editor told a woman he couldn't read her poems because it said she was a mother in her bio. Many thought about word materials. Environmentalism got kind of quiet. The earth spirits were not quiet. Buildup of arms. Iran-Contra. Savings & Loan scandal. Tax cuts gave way to library closings. The Challenger went down with the first woman astronaut aboard. People read letters to her on TV. Mini-golf places with purple castles opened on Highway 80 in the Eighties. Chernobyl exploded & the media announced it as a setback for nuclear energy. People ate out more because of tax cuts. i fell in love with a poet. Earth dropped its dark clock. A few wrote outside the margins. Mergers & Acquisitions. The Bay continued to shrink. Many got child-support checks. Many came out. Deconstruction found the moving circle. A few read Lacan. Guns 'n Roses Sweet Child o' Mine. Our daughter drew pictures of trucks with colored fur. She had 24 ear infections in one year so why were you not supposed to write mother in your bio. Many wrote the lyric with word materials. The Soviet Union began to free prisoners. America freed fewer prisoners. Superconductivity. Gorbachev became president instead of something else. One son went to college. We cried. There was no e-mail. Art pierced the image. Blue-rimmed clouds hurried past outside & in. Some wrote about childhood; some wrote about states of mind; some wrote word materials instead of about. Symbolist poetry, by then 120 years old, pushed the dream nature of the world. Hypnotherapy. i began the trance method. In the Eighties, Mr. Tam stayed the same. Mt. Diablo stayed almost the same. Many species died & would not return. At stake. One son started a punk band; he had a one-foot-high purple Mohawk. i listened to the tape with another mother trying to make out the words. Oliver North held up his right hand. Reagan turned off his hearing aid. Sentences fell apart but they had always been a part. Yeltsin. Walesa. Wall comes down. Romania. El Salvador. Noriega. Some elderly folk lived on dog-food when their pensions collapsed. People worried about children, lovers, ex-husbands, jobs. Consciousness stayed alive. Interest rates leapt through the vault of the sky. We cried & cried. We made food & quit smoking. We learned the names of wildflowers & forgot them & relearned them. This was only the beginning. There's so much more to be said in answer to your question.


5 comments:

  1. What the gospels meant: shoot, motherfucker, shoot.

    Being completely unversed in musical theory/training, all I've got to say about Dmitri's strings are a vocal thumbs up. I'd say desert island, but what a jarring anti-sun they are.

    Even if DC doesn't win, maybe you'll get lucky and the triggerman will show up.

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  2. Mr Oxtrot thanks you for the link.

    "North Bethesda", "South Potomac", "West Chevy Chase", "East Georgetown" -- these are the signs of a highly insecure people seeking status in lieu of meaning or understanding, as if status were tantamount to either. Sad, foolish paupers longing to be in the King's Court. They all want a Compound on Bradley Boulevard like Tommy Friedman.

    Definitely something I don't miss by being away. Condolences to those who remain and suffer under the pretentiousness of it all.

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  3. your post reminded me of this, from the other day:

    To me, Mr bin Laden's long overdue demise simply punctuates America's embarrassingly foolhardy, self-undermining and inept response to the 9/11 attacks. After failing to find an elderly man on dialysis for almost a decade, yesterday's hit feels more than a bit belated. It's as if Team America missed the woulda-been game-winning three-pointer but stayed on the court long after the buzzer tenaciously chucking clunkers for hours until finally they nailed it in a dim, empty, echoing arena. We don't cut down the nets for that. But maybe now we can let ourselves go home.

    http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/05/killing_bin_laden

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  4. I've mentioned this here before but it's been a while - the dividing line between Bethesda and Kensington is literally the road I live on. The houses on the south side are Bethesda, the house on the north Kensington. My house is worth $50K less than if it had been on the other side of the road.

    My disgust at the celebrations (by all colors across the political spectrum) touched off by bin Laden's assassination were viscerally intense, but what's left is the certainty that Corporate's marketing was reminded anew of the possibilities of jingoistic bloodlust.

    I also told L and D there will be more assassinations soon, even of U.S. citizens et viola.

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