This Day, For Thers

My favorite blog is Whiskey Fire, and my favorite blogger is Thers, who's mother just died. In his post about her passing, he links to Donne, Death Be Not Proud, an understandable sentiment from a man who just lost his mother. Since it's my son's birthday ("Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow..."), I'm going to be celebrating today, but I really want to take this little time for Thers who certainly deserves a taste of the beautiful for a moment, if only as a reward for his tireless raking of muck.

I like the Donne, especially after some Bushmills, but I'm more of a modern poetry lover, and I always think of what might just be My Favorite Poem (although that is certainly an even more elusive classification than Favorite Blog or Blogger) on such occasions, which is by Lawrence Raab. Since I couldn't find it on the internets anywhere, I'll put it here, for Thers.

This Day

Watching the beautiful
sticks of trees as they click and sway,
the first green unraveling,

it's easy to imagine I might
remember this day forever.
I say it to myself,

never to others, while the poem
made hoping to preserve it
is changed, then changed again

to fit another order
it happens to discover.
At the end I find myself

in a room by a window, or at the edge
of a field, with the same clear
sky above me wherein later

I will imagine clouds, as if
some movement were required. That,
or a different kind of stillness.

So there must also be
a family circled round
the bedside of someone

who is dying. I place
myself among them.
All of us are waiting

for the little we believe we need
to hold on to and repeat.
But this is not my family

although it is you
who are dying, your words
I am again unable to imagine

as everything continues
sliding together in the light,
that day so easily

changed to this one,
the sky that is so blue, and the clouds
that cross my gaze with such terrible speed.

--Lawrence Raab

Another Reason Why I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Reading Whisky Fire

Or: when only creative cursing can possibly explain the outrage over the idiots on the political right...

This bit of outrageous outrage from my neighbor Thers today:

Here is why I dislike the American Political Insider Press, and by "dislike," I mean, "want to toss into a vat of shark-infested sulfuric acid." It is because of this class of thing from The Politico.

When Al Franken ran for the Senate last year, the former “Saturday Night Live” star had to reassure skeptics that the fierce partisan attacks he lobbed at Republicans as an author and radio host wouldn’t define his style as a legislator.

But because of one of his first pieces of legislation, Democrats now have their most brazen attack line of the emerging 2010 campaign season: that Republicans are insensitive to rape victims.

The charge stems from a Franken-sponsored amendment that would prohibit the Department of Defense from contracting with companies that require employees to resolve workplace complaints — including complaints of sexual assault — through private arbitration rather than the courts.

Only in the god-blighted shitworld of the horrible fuckassed American Political Insider Press is it possible to even fucking think for a motherfucking minute that it's Playing with Partisan Dynamite to argue that the American government should not negotiate expensive contracts with companies that shield rapists. What the fuck? What the motherfucking fuck?

See, I live a little further out in the woods than Thers. No one can hear me scream except my wife and kid, and they're used to it (Bush was president for more than half of Spencer's life).  I have this little blog, where I occasionally tee up on some particular brand of lunatic peanut butter that sticks to the top of your brain and tastes like shit (and I also have this other blog--to which, unfortunately, I have to keep posting as long as certain war mongering junta members walk around free--in which I usually go off on some particularly nasty revelation about, for example, torturing people  in order to get "confessions" about the exact bullshit you just made up and told some idiot reporter) but... I don't have that many readers.

What the hell was I just saying? Oh, yeah, how I envy Thers for being heard when yelling FUCK (a Jon Stewartification: the effectiveness of yelling fuck is directly proportional to the number of people who actually hear you). So, I settle for a little surrogate satisfaction by subscribing to Whiskey Fire.

Reading this catharsis not only purges me of the need to take a picture of KKKarl Rove outside and target practice on it (with a BB Gun, you sillies, since I'm too physically fucked up to use the Bush punching bag anymore), but it also serves the purpose of (and how much does it suck that we need such a thing serving such a purpose?) reminding us that rape is a crime for which no arbitration need apply. In the real, just, and moral world of how-to-deal-with-a-crime, all we need is investigation, testimony, and evidence, and the sick fucks who think it's some kind of fun to gang rape someone because they figure, "Hey, we work for Halliburton and Dick Cheney's got our backs," those sick fucks go to jail after their fair trial.

And I thought you fucking Republicans were all about locking up criminals... Oh, were these white guys that did this rape?

As for Manu Raju, the concern troll at Politico who shook this disturbing cling-on ball of political reasoning off his ass hairs yesterday, well, I'm just glad Thers reads between the lines of your turds so I don't have to.

Or, as we said up here at our house after all those Repugs voted to protect rapists: "Holy Fucking Shitballs! Senator Al Franken just got those fuckers but good!"

 

Whiskey Fire In Binghamton

I've been reading the Whiskey Fire blog for quite a while now. Great snark. Plenty of insight. Always good wing-nut fun making. When a shooter killed 14 people in Binghamton last week, I was surprised to hear that this fun little blog I'd been reading is being written by folks just down the road from me. I felt a little tinge of memory from past tragedies that make us all feel closer together. In this case, we were pretty close already.

I was anxious this morning to see what they had to say about the tragedy, now that it's had some time to really sink in. The post is from Jake T. Snake: Why is the mine still open when the canaries keep expiring? It's a powerful post, and I recommend reading the whole thing, now, because I'm going to quote the end, which is where Robin and I wound up when we talked about this yesterday. Why, if this guy was pissed at people who fired him, or the rednecks (Binghamton is a city of 43,000, of which 80% are white) who made fun of his bad English, did he go shoot other immigrants like himself?

Finally, I think it is instructive that the shooter picked as his victims, not someone powerful like the people who had laid him off, but a group of the powerless like himself. This is the other dynamic that repeats itself over and over, don't attack those in power that are the root of the problem, but rather find someone weaker to victimize and perpetuate the cycle. This also explains the disdain people have for social workers. We help the weak and disenfranchised and in the united states that is a sign of weakness the unforgivable sin.

All the pitchforks and torches talk is a bunch of hot air fueled by psuedo-populists who will pat the back of the next CEO to donate to their election campaign. When the really angry people lash out with their firearms and satchels of ammo hanging around their necks, they don't go after the powerful. They go after the weak, the easy targets, those least able to protect themselves or fight back. Their self-loathing is exposed through their choice of targets.

Take the case of the Pittsburgh cop killer who was so certain that we were going to take his guns that he, whipped into a frenzy by the riot inciters in the GOP and Fox news, decided to take it out on some middle class, under paid cops who were just doing their job trying to keep their community safe from the likes of Wing Nuts like him. Maybe those cops were conservative 2nd amendment types too. He didn't know. He just started shooting at the first easy target to walk up to his house. He used an assault rifle. The cops were sitting ducks. Easy targets.

We're going to see a lot more of this. As Bushvilles sprout up all over the country, as the welfare roles and the unemployment lines get longer, as wages continue to fall, real income collapses, health care is lost, mental illness goes undiagnosed, we're going to see some very angry, heavily armed people lose it. And they won't lash out at Phil Gramm, George Bush, or Dick Cheney. In one of the final, ironic twists of the Bush era, they will take it out on the people who least deserve it.