Friday, October 16, 2015

Someone Interferes Everywhere with Me



Had a pint with two friends last night - HEY! did you know that the Republican committee on Benghazi exists solely to damage Hillary Clinton's political prospects! It's true! Two Republicans even admitted it! Who knew?

Fucking shoot me. As I type this there are 389 days, 9336 hours, 560160 minutes, 33609600 seconds until POTUS DAY 2016. I almost watched the Democratic debate. Fuck me.

I write this in part so I don't write about work - as in not even in tablet - though work is what compels me to write something these days.

Fleabus photo by Planet last weekend. Woke up with Dog Faced Hermans in my head.

















THE SONG OF THE DEMENTED PRIEST

John Berryman

I put those things there.—See them burn.
The emerald the azure and the gold
Hiss and crack, the blues & greens of the world
As if I were tired. Someone interferes
Everywhere with me. The clouds, the clouds are torn
In ways I do not understand or love.

Licking my long lips, I looked upon God
And he flamed and he was friendlier
Than you were, and he was small. Showing me
Serpents and thin flowers; these were cold.
Dominion waved & glittered like the flare
From ice under a small sun. I wonder.

Afterward the violent and formal dancers
Came out, shaking their pithless heads.
I would instruct them but I cannot now,—
Because of the elements. They rise and move,
I nod a dance and they dance in the rain
In my red coat. I am the king of the dead.




4 comments:

  1. Set against the backdrop of our current Political Shadow Play: that Berryman? Good choice.

    ReplyDelete
  2. AN ANALYSIS OF THE AFFECTIVE DIMENSIONS OF THE FIRST DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATES DEBATE 13 OCT 2015

    Yves Smith, author of ECONned: How Unenlightened Self Interest Undermined Democracy and Corrupted Capitalism (2011) , writing at
    http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/10/sanders-debate-results-as-case-study-of-the-modern-versailles-hall-of-mirrors.html:

    I found her grating, and I don’t mean just her voice. She was overly confident and told too many obvious lies. I swear I can now even hear her tick when she knows she’s pulling a fast one: her voice becomes tighter, more strident. Her sound formation shifts a bit forward in her palate and her volume goes up a smidge. Her voice goes harder, a twinge more nasal, and flatter.

    So as much as I came away thinking Sanders had a very uneven evening, in that he was very effective and crisp at some points, took his “let’s take the high ground” too far, and let Clinton and his other debaters off the hook (you can assail bad policy choices and lousy or flip flop track records without descending to personal attacks), and like all of them, was worrisome on foreign policy.

    But even with those warts, I still found him to be more compelling than the well packaged Clinton fraud, the candidate of the oligarchs now pretending to be the progressive booster of the decimated middle class. I was thus surprised by the virtual unanimity of the punditocracy in declaring Clinton to have been the winner.

    But this Alternet article by Adam Johnson, on the yawning chasm between focus group and various online poll reactions, versus the take of the chattering classes,

    http://www.alternet.org/media/bernie-won-all-focus-groups-online-polls-so-why-media-saying-hillary-won-debate

    yet again proves how isolated our elites and their media mouthpieces have become. Many of these people ride the Acela yet seem incapable of looking out the window and taking in the poor condition of many of the communities on the route. Or consider Janet Yellen, who had to have her staff locate three actual unemployed people for her to speak with before her first speech as Fed chair so she could feign having some direct knowledge. It appears that the struggling are so far removed from her sphere that they might as well be housed in zoo cages, as we did to pygmy Ota Benga.

    Similarly, you’ll see that one of the reasons for “expert” antipathy to Sanders is that they deem him to be too angry. The well-enforced cultural norm, that one has to be well-domesticated and adhere to the requirement that discourse be “polite” as in bloodless, is a very effective device for stifling debate and marginalizing dissenters. One of the reasons that young people are so keen about Sanders may not simply be that he is voicing their grievances. It is also that he is validating anger as a legitimate reaction.

    Anger is particularly demonized in America, no doubt because anger is a hard-wired reaction to injustice in social species. Intelligent social animals both collaborate and cheat. Altruistic punishment, meaning the impulse to discipline cheaters even when the party inflicting the punishment incurs cost without getting any personal benefit, is a pro-long-term survival behavior, since too much cheating means that social structures start to erode.

    [end of quote from Yves Smith]

    ReplyDelete