The House - Richard Wilbur

THE HOUSE
by Richard Wilbur

Sometimes, on waking, she would close her eyes
For a last look at that white house she knew
In sleep alone, and held no title to,
And had not entered yet, for all her sighs.
What did she tell me of that house of hers?
White gatepost; terrace; fanlight of the door;
A widow’s walk above the bouldered shore;
Salt winds that ruffle the surrounding firs.
Is she now there, wherever there may be?
Only a foolish man would hope to find
That haven fashioned by her dreaming mind.
Night after night, my love, I put to sea.

(The New Yorker AUGUST 31, 2009)

At least Mom got out alive!

I know what you might be thinking. Mom is dead, some year and a half. So that's just ignorant. I say no, no it's not! Mom got out somewhat unscathed. She died in her sleep on her favorite couch, in her most favorite abode. The couch of all transgression, god forbid! When mom broke her hip and was finally released to her home, she had a visiting nurse whom she loved - Anne - St Anne who loved mom reciprocally. She listened to all Mom's political ravings (Anne-sorry to say I always egged her on).
Well, after her hospital rehab for a hip joint replacement, mom was assigned a youngish- ornery physical therapist who came every other day to bark at her. He told her and she then told me that her furniture, (especially her couch) was unacceptable for her to relax on. I said ok what did he suggest we get?
Mom: Who knows? Oh yeah? What did he know? Brat! He was just a young very unhappy man. Well apparently he did himself in (and her consequentially) when he showed up at a random time in the summer. Mom kept her screen door and windows open. He saw her 'sitting on the dreaded couch' and threatened her that if he ever caught her sitting on THAT couch again, he'd personally throw the damn thing on the lawn.
Mom wasn't easily threatened- in fact she took it as a challenge, and she practically started to live on the couch, in utter defiance of the stocky little man who seemed to her to arrive just in time to torture her in some way. Mom and I decided he was just a dick-and he was.
His last visit to her before he imploded was another unannounced visit. Knowing mom she may have been washing dishes and saw him coming and got her butt right over to 'The Couch' and snuggled right in there just to irk him. "Hello? Someone there?"
According to her report to me, he finally imploded and did a Rumpelstiltskin hissey fit and ran out the door yelling back to her, " You will never see me again!"
Mom was gleeful, but guilty, when I showed up. "I finally got rid of that nasty little man!"
What? I thought, another carcass on the superhighway of mom's intolerance?
I was really proud of her, even though I was put into a position to rescue her from the status quo. I wasn't prepared for that, as in why don't they give manuals when you have a new baby? I called Anne. Anne, saint Anne took this all in and also considered when she met up with me, that I was the antagonist, which she accepted without scorn, saint that she was. She came right over and brought a new, unconventional caretaker for Mom, some lovey- dovey- tiny- Korean woman, who babied mom and was very touchy-touchy. Mom was appalled. She hated touchy-feely-gushy people. At the end of this mortal coil for mom, she tried to give up that belief, with caveats. Like forgetting her appointment with the nice woman by mistake on purpose.
Anne was eventually recommissioned and moved on to her new assignment, but never forgot about mom and kept up on all the goings on. Mom continued to believe that Anne was her Guardian Angel- who else could she be? I was inclined to agree.
On Dec 22, 2007, Mom died on her beloved couch. She won in the final inning. She used all of her great talents to unseat the nasties, and for someone who always took the "Golden Rule' very seriously, in the end realized the golden rule applied to her being as well. God love and good deserved rest Mom!

Wendy's Baconator Sandwich

What has the food industry done? They've taken the fat, sugar, and salt; they've put it on every corner. They've made it available 24/7. They've made it socially acceptable to eat at any time. They've added the emotional gloss of advertising. Look at an ad: you'll love it; you'll want it. They've made food into entertainment. We're living, in fact, in a food carnival. - Former FDA Commissioner David Kessler


http://www.democracynow.org/2009/8/3/former_fda_commissioner_david_kessler_the

Till We Get There

I am on your side.

The Lumpen

Black Panther Party band

All power to the people!

Whistleblowers

We can be heroes just for one day.

Full Spectrum Dominance

It is impossible to achieve the aim without suffering.

Fripp: Exposure (dir. Chris Stein). Again - http://tinyurl.com/lmu597

The Troublemaker

Separate were heaven and earth, good and bad, birth and death. Day and Night never mixed. Woman was woman and man was man.

But Exu, the errant bandit of Africa, liked to entertain himself by provoking outlandish minglings. And he is still at it.

His devilish tricks erase borders, join what the gods divided. Thanks to his clever deeds the sun turns black and the night burns bright. From the pores of men sprout women and women sweat men. The dying are born, the born are dying. For everything created or yet to be created, backward and forward get so confused you can never tell boss from bossed or up from down.

Later rather than sooner, divine order reestablishes its hierarchies and geographies, and everything and everyone gets put in place. But sooner rather than later, madness reappears.

Then the gods lament that the world is such a difficult place

--Eduardo Galleano, "The Troublemaker." Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone. Tr. Mark Fried. (New York: Nation Books, 2009) p.2.

"So What?"

Masters of blues:

The American Empire is Bankrupt

Chris Hedges:

"This week marks the end of the dollar's reign as the world's reserve currency. It marks the beginning of a terrible period of economic and political decline in the United States. And it signifies the last gasp of the American imperium. That's over. It's not coming back. And what is to come will be very, very painful."

Did they get you to talk or did you hold out?

Thanks a lot -  RMN, LBJ, Milton Friedman's Chicago Boys, RR, (& GRF) and, yes, even JEC and WGC:  http://tinyurl.com/m8h5dy

War is Sin

Chris Hedges:

The crisis faced by combat veterans returning from war is not simply a profound struggle with trauma and alienation.  It is often, for those who can slice through the suffering to self-awareness, an existential crisis.  War exposes the lies we tell ourselves about about ourselves.  It rips open the hypocrisy of our religions and secular institutions.  Those who return from war have learned something which is often incomprehensible to those who have stayed home.  We are not a virtuous nation.  God and fate have not blessed us above others.  Victory is not assured.  War is neither glorious nor noble.  And we carry within us the capacity for evil we ascribe to those we fight.

Those who return to speak this truth, such as members of Iraq Veterans Against the War, are our contemporary prophets.  But like all prophets they are condemned and ignored for their courage.  They struggle, in  a culture awash in lies, to tell what few have the fortitude to digest. . . . 

Marx's Relevance Right Now

Also:

http://tinyurl.com/lb7kur

Remember when WalMart lobbied in favor of upping the minimum wage?

Williiam Carlos Williams "The Dance"

 . . . . Kicking and rolling about  / the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those / shanks must be sound to bear up under such / rollicking measures, prance as they dance / in Breughel's great picture, the Kermess

Night

Back when she was a child, Helena pretended to be sleeping and then slipped out of bed.
She dressed all in white, as if it were Sunday, and without a sound snuck out on the patio to discover the mysteries of the Tuscuman night.
Her parents slept, her sisters as well.
She wanted to see how the night changed and how the moon and stars moved. Someone had told her that the heavenly bodies shifted and sometimes fell, and that as the night advanced they changed color.
That night of nights, Helena watched without blinking. Her neck ached, her eyes hurt. She rubbed her eyes and looked again. She looked and kept on looking, but the sky did not change and the moon and stars remained firmly in their places.
Dawn awakened her. Helena shed a tear.
Later, she consoled herself with the thought that night doesn't like anyone spying on its secrets.

- Eduardo Galeano, "Night." Voices of Time: A Life in Stories. Trans. Mark Fried (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006) 40.

Torture

The debate about whether "human rights" can ever truly be separated from politics and economics is not unique to Latin America; these are questions that surface whenever states use torture as a weapon of policy. Despite the mystique that surrounds it, and the understandable impulse to treat it as aberrant behavior beyond politics, torture is not particularly complicated or mysterious. A tool of the crudest kind of coercion, it crops up with great predictability whenever a local despot or a foreign occupier lacks consent to rule: Marcos in the Philippines, the shah in Iran, Saddam in Iraq, the French in Algeria, the Israelis in the occupied territories, the US in Iraq and Afghanistan. The list could stretch on and on. The widespread abuse of prisoners is a virtually foolproof indication that politicians are trying to impose a system--whether political, religious or economic--that is rejected by large numbers of the people they are ruling. Just as ecologists define ecosystems by the presence of certain "indicator species" of plants and birds, torture is an indicator species of a regime that is engaged in a deeply anti-democratic project, even if that regime happens to have come to power through elections

As a means of extracting information during interrogations, torture is notoriously unreliable, but as a means of terrorizing and controlling populations, nothing is quite as effective. It was for this reason that, in the fifties and sixties, many Algerians grew impatient with French liberals who expressed their moral outrage over news that their soldiers were electrocuting and water-boarding liberation fighters--and yet did nothing to end the occupation that was the reason for these abuses.

-- Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine (New York: Picador, 2007), 155-156.

Harold and Maude

HAROLD: You sure have a way with people.

MAUDE: Well, they're my species!

Lumpenproletariat

lum-pen-pro-le-tar-i-at
noun
(esp. in Marxist terminology) the unorganized and unpolitical lower orders of society who are not interested in revolutionary advancement.

ORIGIN early 20th cent.: from German (a term originally used by Karl Marx), from Lumpen "rag, rogue" + PROLETARIAT.

Oxford American Dictionaries

Desiree & Medea's Great Act at the Correspondents' Dinner

The best act didn't make the main stage.