Friday, September 30, 2011

A Well-Moistened, Adenoidal Sound, Part Sigh and Part Growl

Halfway through a piece on - get this - my complicity, this time about Occupy Wall Street and how easy and lazy it is for me to simultaneously envy the naivete of the protesters while justifying my own inaction because I presume all action to be naive, but instead of finishing it I decided to watch a soccer game, so fresh links before they go stale, two-songs, poem.




  • Dissent, not protest
  • On Occupy Wall Street (and Jim provided the songs below Fleabus)
  • Fucker: Obama may have flown by the fail-safe line, especially when it comes to waterboarding. For many civil libertarians, it will be virtually impossible to vote for someone who has flagrantly ignored the Convention Against Torture or its underlying Nuremberg Principles. As Obama and Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. have admitted, waterboarding is clearly torture and has been long defined as such by both international and U.S. courts. It is not only a crime but a war crime. By blocking the investigation and prosecution of those responsible for torture, Obama violated international law and reinforced other countries in refusing investigation of their own alleged war crimes. The administration magnified the damage by blocking efforts of other countries like Spain from investigating our alleged war crimes. In this process, his administration shredded principles on the accountability of government officials and lawyers facilitating war crimes and further destroyed the credibility of the U.S. in objecting to civil liberties abuses abroad.
  • On the above.
  • Fucker: It was first reported in January of last year that the Obama administration had compiled a hit list of American citizens whom the President had ordered assassinated without any due process, and one of those Americans was Anwar al-Awlaki.  No effort was made to indict him for any crimes (despite a report last October that the Obama administration was "considering" indicting him).  Despite substantial doubt among Yemen experts about whether he even has any operational role in Al Qaeda, no evidence (as opposed to unverified government accusations) was presented of his guilt.  When Awlaki's father sought a court order barring Obama from killing his son, the DOJ argued, among other things, that such decisions were "state secrets" and thus beyond the scrutiny of the courts.  He was simply ordered killed by the President: his judge, jury and executioner.
  • On the above. Motherfucking pwoggles.
  • End of loser liberalism.
  • A beautiful anarchy.
  • Cornucopia
  • Rhetorical question.
  • The Hayek/Rand Hypocrisy Club.
  • Questions for POTUS candidates that will never be asked.
  • Motherfucking crackers.












THE DOG STOLTZ

August Kleinzahler

The dog Stoltz pushed his paw pads into my neck,
the warm, beaten leather deep under my chin,
and let slip the one paw to up near my mouth
with all the filth of the many blocks we trod,
together trod, a well-moistened, adenoidal sound,
part sigh and part growl, coming out of him,
transported, he seemed, in a slow-motion delirium
as I tickled his chest and behind his ear
when he just then told me he’d tear out my throat,
looked in my eye and smiled, best as a dog can,
then turned ruminative and spoke once more:
—I simply have to knock off that essay on Sassoon.
This would have been Sassoon the war poet, understand.
Dogs cannot write. My mother told me this.
As for his talk, well, I took no special notice.
His love of the war poets was well known.
Stoltz would have been part bull and something else.
Two friends walked by just then, handily as these things go,
and inquired of us sitting down there on the stoop,
not even, a doorway merely, along a busy street,
how went the day and what pursuits was I attending;
but what interested the two of them most
were the tergiversations of the dog Stoltz,
first beast, then scholar, then abject and adored.
(Say, who among us does not care to be undressed?)
He was not really my dog, you see, and of this made note,
but were glad as well at my having a new dog in my life.
It was a busy stretch of pavement, Amsterdam maybe,
or Broadway, or farther down just south of Chelsea.
I can tell you it was the West Side, of that I’m certain,
and it was mild, spring-like, a few drops in the air.
The friends passed along and the dog Stoltz slept.
He was not my dog, you know. He simply followed me out
of what can only have been a very fine home,
such were his graces, his recondite tastes.
But he was a killer too, and rather smelled.
I cannot accommodate another animal now, please understand.
I am between places. I will yearn for Stoltz, but no.



7 comments:

  1. I wait with bated breath the teabagger outrage over the killing of al-Awlaki.

    After all, this clearly is something the Constitution was written to prevent.
    ~

    ReplyDelete
  2. Oh boy, can't wait until post-Xmas when the fecal cavalcade of not supporting Obama means one's in favor of SuperHitler raping your children then gnawing on their innards while filming it to show you the film as your eyelids are stapled open hits the nitrous.

    Of course, by then, everyone will still be celebrating DCU's RSL-style sub-500 magical run to the title, right? Right.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks for the link kindness.

    *

    I think this paragraph from Stoller is problematic:

    There are a lot of police, but unlike the portrayal in the press the relationship between the protesters and the police is fairly good. The arrests and macing you saw happened because protesters decided to march to Union Square without a permit, and many joined the march on the way. Police began arresting people to keep control of the streets, and that’s when the macings happened. I’m not downplaying what happened, but context is important for understanding why the camping in the park isn’t really problematic while the marching has seen conflict.

    This reads like fault finding of the protestors (yes, protestors; they're not a "church of dissent," a clumsy phrase which attempts to spiritualize the very, very material) for the actions taken by the police to keep them from expanding into fuller (and less corralled) public view.

    Blaming the victim, and whatnot.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Always welcome.

    I agree with you about Stoller though give him a slight pass in that I think he's reflective of what I was getting at in the opening: Occupy not only challenges the fuckers drinking champagne and laughing at them, it challenges (and I'll only speak to me) my complacency and my finding the language not only to think about it but act upon it.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Thanks for the Stoller link. I think we're watching something nascent; don't know what it might grow into. If anything. Yes, that video challenges us all.

    Thanks, too, for the linkage.

    Your under 2:30 challenge was the most fun I've had on the inner Toobs since discovering free porn. Speaking of which, two music links are broken. Here's the corrections:

    The Mantles, Cascades: http://youtu.be/F_kvZRGTSuA As it is now, it goes to The Chesterfield Kings.

    Dog Day, Lydia http://youtu.be/p7Etk31V-Ks Not sure what's wrong with it as it is.

    ReplyDelete
  6. "Profound guys like me often seem naive. Perhaps I'ma fool of the gods. That remains to be seen. But answers are mostly simple, wisdom is."

    Your thesis subject author uses the words naive and naivete early and often.

    I don't think the group I'm joining in St. Louis necessarily qualifies as naive. After all, we're meeting before we walk together to the site of occupation--the Federal Reserve Building--tomorrow at a local nightclub called The Crack Fox.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Self-accusatory only. And the first George Mills let his horse lead him to the salt mine.

    Cynically, it's a nice surprise to have my complicity challenged. More cynically, new material.

    ReplyDelete