Listics

… three of the more dramatic domestic events…

Yesterday I listened to (and blogged) Leslie Winer’s “5″ from Witch. She’s uploaded the whole album to YouTube. Toward the end of “5″ we hear a dramatic harmonic, dramatic to my generation, the simple progression from a high E up to the B above it. At least I think those are the notes I heard. It doesn’t matter really. What mattered to me at that moment was the brief echo, repeated, of the opening of the Buffalo Springfield tune, “For What It’s Worth.” Allusive.

Today I heard “John Says.” I loved it. Cinematic. Reggaelistic.

Blair Millen wrote about this album three or four years ago.

Technorati Tags: leslie winer, madame levy

Time and the airbrush removed
reality from the photo I carry
in my wallet, a portrait rescued
from a box of family memorabilia,
a picture to remind me of you.

Andrea Gibson via Normand ICH

Declaration of Peace

Today marks the fifth year since the decider accomplished his mission. The table was tilted and all the wealth rolled into his side’s pockets. All of the benefits accrued to the rich, all the rewards. All of the costs have been borne by the poor, all the risks. As of today I have no enemies on this globe and my peace has come with a price unpaid. What is the cost of justice? How shall we value truth? What pain will we feel as we excise the shrapnel of deceit from the body politic? What stains will permanently discolor our social fabric? The cold war is long over — Churchill and Stalin and Truman and Khrushchev long dead. There never was a war on terror. We defeated Iraq and have lost ourselves in its occupation. We ousted the Afghan Taliban and wandered aimlessly in the mountains seeking bin Laden, the golem we built. The rich and the powerful are weighing the odds that thermonuclear horror in Tehran will distract us, the drums of constant war drive us mad, erode our faculties, assure continuity of the oligarchic rule that has brought us to the brink of extinction.

But I am at peace. I have no enemies on this globe. I have only my duty to the people and the truth. It’s my job to speak up and dissect the myth of Adam Smith, to remind people of the insanity that informed their economists and game theorists, the ones who provided the scaffolding of rationalization for the politics of greed.

I am not at war. I am simply a citizen looking for justice.

Class Struggle
Not warfare,
struggle
LISTEN to Jeremiah
(Jeremiah was stoned in Egypt by those he reproached for their evil deeds)

We have no right to take a life
George Bush has no right to take a life

May Day in Moscow…

“There had been a war fought and won and the great city of the conquering people was crossed with triumphal arches and vivid with thrown flowers of white, red, and rose. All through the long spring days the returning soldiers marched up the chief highway behind the strump of drums and the joyous, resonant wind of the brasses, while merchants and clerks left their bickerings and figurings and, crowding to the windows, turned their white-bunched faces gravely upon the passing battalions.”

Old Winnie Churchill pulled a fast one on the people of the USA.
Chomping down on that Stogey and wiggling his eyebrows like Groucho Marx

We can say the name of Marx now, acknowledge his existence
Harpo, Zeppo, Chico, Gummo
Adolph Marx, Herbert Marx, Leonard Marx, Milton Marx, and the inimitable Julius Henry
Marx
Winnie was a pale imitation, a cheap fraud, catch his act at the Rivoli
But he fooled old Harry S. Truman with his jive talk about metallic window treatments in eastern Europe.

Paranoid Harry the Haberdasher,
to this day the only world leader
the only world leader ever to order the melting of 100,000 eyeballs
in their sockets, the blistering, the boiling away of the blood of two cities

20,000,000 Soviets died to defeat Hitler
Harry and Winnie liked to say we won the war

Harry and Winnie took their act on the road
Sold the world on the Iron Curtain
Sold the world on the Cold War
Divided the world between the organized economies and the rapacious economies
Gordon Gekko Marx
Disinformed us all, commie in every closet,
Machinery and the profit motive,

Land, labor, capital
Power, politics, and greed

On May Day workers around the world celebrate…

The first of May:
When the flowers break through the earth,
When the sap rises in the trees,
When the birds come back from the South.
Workers:
Be like the flowers,
Bloom in the strength of your unknown power…

So sang Langston Hughes, an uncommon man, rare.

May First, Loyalty Day… it took an act of congress in 1958
to set aside
a special day
for the reaffirmation
of loyalty
to the United States
and for the recognition of the heritage of American freedom.

Mission accomplished?
Not yet.
Now it is time to lay bare the class struggle
the American class struggle with roots in blood
the deaths inflicted by a private army of Pinkertons in the 19th century
the deaths inflicted by the Colorado National Guard up at Cripple Creek
the deaths inflicted by the US Army in the Chicago Pullman Strike

the American class struggle finessed by the fear of the might of the Soviet army
undermined by McCarthyism
redefined by the Nobel Prize in Economics year after year
rightist perspectives projected with the clarity of revealed truths

all of the victories from 1880 to 1968 have been reversed
bread, circuses, NASCAR, and tits
what happened to the 40 hour week
what happened to collective bargaining
what happened to the regulation of businesses driven by greed
what happened to progressive tax models
what happened to the wealth of America, the wealth of the world
who has it
how shall we redistribute it

LISTEN to Jeremiah
do not reproach him

I see a red banner against a deep blue dawn, a Maxfield Parrish sunrise –
Happy May Day, Happy Labor Day, Celebrate the unity of working people around the world

Cousin Betty Jo writes,

It must be coincidence that only 9 days before the Indiana Primary, the Supreme Court ruled yesterday that Indiana’s photo ID voting law may be applied to the May 6 election.

What’s the problem with that? Suppose you don’t drive, so don’t have a government ID? Well, of course, you can go wait in line at the DMV to get an id.

Wait! you need a birth certificate. No, you don’t have a computer. Heck, you can barely afford to buy nonfat dry milk for your kids. So, you panhandle some spare change to buy a phone card, make some long distance calls to your state of birth. Get the right office, and they’ll be happy to send your their form. Once it arrives in 5 - 7 business days, just fill it out, include a two sided copy of a photo id, and mail it back with a check.

Wait! No checking account? you can go to the post office, wait in line and get a money order, then mail it back. Once they receive it, they will process in 2-3 days (unless they are busy), and then mail it back in 5-7 business days.

Wait! You don’t have a photo id. Well, you can contact a direct relative (like a parent or natural sibling (no step parents or step siblings allowed), and get a signed affidavit from them and a copy of both sides of their photo id, have them send you that and use it to apply for a copy of your birth certificate, after which in a while, you will have the certificate and can then go down to the DMV and wait in line for a photo id. They’ll take your pic and send you the id in 5-7 business days.

Woops. The election is over. You are TOO LATE.

hmmm. Guess all those poor Dems won’t be able to vote in Indiana after all. I can hear the news reporting on May 7 that all the hoopla over high democratic voter turnout was clearly an aberration for it seems the Indiana turnout was low…. must be because the Democrats have turned off their voters with their inappropriate (non white male) candidates….

[Johnny Cash, June Carter Cash, things get better and better[/tags]