Packing for a Transatlantic Box, or Paper for Essays on Schadenfreude, or Timber for Dollhouse Dressers, or a Twenty Baht Note for the Thai Rubber Trade

What, reaction? I am small, it still pleases me too much that 70% of motherfuckng Oklahomans are pissed this morning, I'm so small I'm still going to enjoy too much the schadenfreude over Rush Limbaugh's listeners' anguish, the anger of the asshole cracker four doors down from me who's a dick to my ferals and steals Obama signs from front lawns and is stupid and/or arrogant enough to leave them uncovered in the back of his pick-up. I'm small, it pleases me someone - either - won and won clear cut, that a concession speech was made by one of the fuckers, that this isn't going to recounts and courts. I'm small, it pleases me that loved ones are pleased even if I still maintain that for advancing oligarchy's interest Obama is the best salesman, that the country will be farther right in 2016 for Obama's election than had Romney won on matters economic and imperialistic and police state. I'm small, this was my first election cycle in which I didn't vote my tribal heritage, it gives me no joy they won except for the disappointment of the arch-rivals they beat. I like my side less than once; I still hate the other side the same as always.

• UPDATE! Schadenfreude?
• America lost the election: The United States Army is developing a weapon that can reach -- and destroy -- any location on Earth within an hour. At the same time, power lines held up by wooden poles dangle over the streets of Brooklyn, Queens and New Jersey. Hurricane Sandy ripped them apart there and in communities across the East Coast last week, and many places remain without electricity. That's America, where high-tech options are available only to the elite, and the rest live under conditions comparable to a those of a developing nation. No country has produced more Nobel Prize winners, yet in New York City hospitals had to be evacuated during the storm because their emergency generators didn't work properly. Anyone who sees this as a contradiction has failed to grasp the fact that America is a country of total capitalism. Its functionaries have no need of public hospitals or of a reliable power supply to private homes. The elite have their own infrastructure. Total capitalism, however, has left American society in ruins and crippled the government. America's fate is not just an accident produced by the system. It is a consequence of that system.
• On the election.
• UPDATE! Karl on Earth.
• A Liberal fantasy.
• E.J. Dionne's silly snoopy dance.
• Things will be different this time.
• He wuz right.
• Over/under Marco Rubio is 2016 GOP VPOTUS nominee? Ted Cruz?
• UPDATE! On the above.
• Geoffrey was an idiot.
• YAY! FOR MY STATE!
• On the above, a dead hibernating bleeger reappears.
• Question Seven passed.
• HEY! United plays second leg v Metros tonight in a nor'easter!
• Simplistic and inaccurate.
• Satie!
• More Elliott Carter tomorrow, including requests that have been Kindly submitted.

HANDS ARE WOOD

Seth Abramson

Come see the woodpile behind the cannery.

Come through the wall

            to where the wood was chopped

and the difficult wood was hewed.

There is a short history of commotion here,

where a sudden bonfire spat its surprise

            at the sky—

a hundred feet or more the shavings swept

through disturbed air, and made their own

music, the music hands make, such a yellow

crackle and such a thrashing

in the morning.

Come wait for the heavy trucks to arrive,

            the men in dusters cutting the twine,

loading the long ghostly planks like ballast

            into iron barges.

This will be packing for a transatlantic box,

or paper for essays on schadenfreude, or timber

for dollhouse dressers, or a twenty baht note

for the Thai rubber trade. These matchsticks

will burn whenever you strike them, and this,

hack at it however you like, is nothing more

than deadwood for the fire. Come see—now

even the men are doing only

                        what they were made to do.