Sunday, December 23, 2018

The Most Generous Contribution I Can Afford

  • I do need to move Zappa from top of blog, I haven't posted enough Fleabus here lately.
  • This, the ultimate in futile weekend blogging, two days before giftmas, there are more bleggalgazes this time of year whether actual bleggalgazes or year end lists, bleggalgazing for people who insist they don't bleggalgaze.
  • Bleggalgaze: posting when I want rather than when I need has increased the pace of dwindling pings, and I'm pleased this distresses me barely at all as compared to once (thank
  • you if you are still here, that means as much to me as always).
  • Fleabus isn't fading quite but her elderly decline into frailty has started, best cat ever.




  • She and Rosie the only two of five indoor who don't mind Napoleon conversion into indoor cat
  • (Napoleon's second home, the trailer classrooms of the elementary school across the street removed last month (in the middle of the night, two weeks of night, two to five in the morning, weird) he comes inside as soon as temp drops below forty).
  • It seems I don't know enough English history to fully understand what Eliot's sometimes on about in Daniel Deronda, though her sentences alone will keep me reading
  • (I have no plans to do research). 
  • Lush as Raffles is old already, as is Grandcourt as Causabon, chord-wise.
  • MomCat comes in side porch door three feet, stays until Olive comes to greet, bye!!


  


   



THE TRAGIC CONDITION OF THE STATUE OF LIBERTY

BERNADETTE MAYER

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
Give me your gentrificatees of the Lower East Side including all the well-heeled young Europeans who’ll take apartments without leases
Give me your landlords, give me your cooperators
Give me the guys who sell the food and the computers to the public schools in District One
Give me the IRS-FBI-CIA men who don’t take election day off
Give me the certain members of the school board & give me the district superintendent
Give me all the greedy members of both american & foreign capitalist religious sects
Give me the parents of the punk people
Give me the guy who puts those stickers in the Rice Krispies
Give me the doctor who thinks his time is more valuable than mine and my daughter’s & the time of all the other non-doctors in this world
Give me the mayor, his mansion, and the president & his white house
Give me the cops who laugh and sneer at meetings where they demonstrate the new uses of mace and robots instead of the old murder against people who are being evicted
Give me the landlord’s sleazy lawyers and the deal-making judges in housing court & give me the landlord’s arsonist
Give me the known & unknown big important rich guys who now bank on our quaint neighborhood
Give me, forgive me, the writers who have already or want to write bestsellers in this country
Together we will go to restore Ellis Island, ravaged for years by wind, weather and vandals
I was surprised and saddened when I heard that the Statue of Liberty was in such a serious state of disrepair & I want to help
This is the most generous contribution I can afford.

3 comments:

  1. We do not encourage outdoor cats here. I live within the perimeter ("ITP") ATL, yet beside a large, major creek tributary of the Chatahoochie River. I've spotted no less than a half-dozen coyotes in the neighborhood in the last five years or so. Two weeks ago I spotted a large, healthy fox a couple blocks away. We often see signs for "Have you seen my cat?" complete with adorbs pics. Ill-advised. Sasha stays in.

    Also, best wishes for the Holiday Season!—what is that, Halloween through Presidents' Day or something?

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  2. Best of the season to you, and yours. Wish I could insert something sage and full of wisdom here, but will leave that to others. Be well in all senses.

    The holiday cats here on the Left Coast are Mr. Jingles (Jingles to his fans), who allows The Best Friend to feed him and be involved in his life where appropriate for humans, and Merv, fixture in the life of the Last of the Old Unit. We'll tell them about Fleabus; long may he wave.

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  3. Uncle Sam as Zombie
    a metaphor for the Republic's state of health

    Dead? Catatonic? Just resting?
    Pining for the fjords, like the parrot in the Monty Python sketch?

    I suggest the American Republic is zombified,
    in a metaphorical sense of the literal truth of the horror movie cliche.
    The superstition about zombies is that they are dead,
    and returned to a kind of life in death by magic.

    The truth (and I am relying on the accounts of Canadian ethnobotanist Wade Davis for this)
    is that they have been intentionally poisoned in such a way that they appear dead,
    and after the "corpse" is buried the folk psychopharmacologist (a.k.a. "witch doctor")
    revives and enslaves them.

    Their state of mind after zombification no doubt depends
    not only on the drug regimen they have received,
    but on their pre-existing beliefs about what has happened to them.

    "The Republic", of course, is not a biopsychosocial system
    that can literally be given mind-altering drugs.
    It is a kind of abstraction for collective social behavior,
    and the art, science, and business of the manipulation of collective beliefs
    has many ardent practitioners these days (even, in a sense, those of us who blog).

    I ask you to join me in a thought experiment.
    Let's imagine that there might be some way for Uncle Sam,
    now lying in his grave, to return to life -
    not just a half-life of working for his (and our) oppressors,
    the military-industrial-congressional-financial-corporate media complex.

    How could that be done?
    What would it take for the Republic to become unzombified?
    What are the "antidotes" for the "brain poison"?
    If "ideas" and "feelings" are what have poisoned us,
    are there other "ideas" and "feelings" that can restore us to health?

    Some say there is hope -
    structures of oppression built by people can be dismantled by other people.

    Or maybe Kurt Vonnegut was right in the pessimism he expressed in his last years -
    there is no way in hell that the U.S. will EVER become a humane and reasonable nation.

    May the Creative Forces of the Universe have mercy on our souls, if any.


    written 2007

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