In Memory: Oscar Wilde

Today is Thursday, 30 November 2006.

With profound sorrow, The Museum of the Bourgeois memorializes the anniversary, in 1900, of the death of Oscar Wilde, poet and martyr.

Imprisoned and murdered for “queerness”.

From his poem, The Ballad of Reading Gaol:

I never saw a man who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
Which prisoners call the sky,
And at every wandering cloud that trailed
Its raveled fleeces by.

May humanity rise up, and deliver humanity from every imprisonment by ignorance, bigotry, avarice, and ambition.

A Whale of a Slave

Today is Wednesday, 29 November 2006.

So, “Kasatka”, an orca at SeaWorld San Diego "attacks" her “trainer”.

Sometimes, slaves revolt.

“Kasatka” = Spartacus.

Whales are very intelligent beings.

Would you care to be kidnapped from your natural habitat, and threatened if you didn’t perform tricks for the amusement of homo allegedly sapiens?

Didn’t think so.

“Trainer”, or, “torturer”?

“Oh, they love performing and being stars”.

Yeah. “So long, and thanks for all the fish”.

“Kasatka” isn’t even her name. Her torturers aren’t even smart enough to know her real whale name.

But they’re vicious enough to torture her for cold cash.

WHALE Superior to homo allegedly sapiens in that whales did not invent nuclear weapons, the automobile, bigotry, nerve gas, extermination camps, etc. etc. etc.

All torture camps for animals should be closed immediately, their inmates guaranteed a dignified life until they die, and further torture outlawed.
___________________________________________

IMPEACH, CONVICT, IMPRISON.
___________________________________________

Definition of WHALE owes debt to John Brunner, author of one of the greatest 20th century novels, Stand on Zanzibar. Read it. And weep.

No Decency

Today is Tuesday, 28 November 2006.

Although I have a reputation for rubbing people’s noses in the truth of this world, I cannot advise my readers to look up “videos of beheadings” on the Internet.

I saw today on CNN all but the final moments of a video shot in a town in Iraq. Sunni militia are preparing to behead, in a public street, a male they believe is Shia militia. Passersby are making videos.

Car bombs. Mortar shellings from one neighborhood to another. People pulled out of homes, cars, off buses, and shot to death. A hundred a day, or an hour? Mass graves created one by one.

This is the Iraq accomplished by the mission of the Bush regime. Apparently, the Coward of Crawford believes such are the birth pangs of democracy.

Last month, I forced myself to watch a video of a beheading. It was probably more horrible than you imagine. I felt I owed it, as a citizen of this country, as one who failed to stop the misleaders who created the conditions which gave birth to such atrocities, I felt I owed it to the victims, to watch them die, at least once, at such comfortable remove.

I believe a recent study in the British magazine, The Lancet, the most distinguished medical journal in the world, is correct, having used scientific sampling methods, that at least 100,000 surplus civilian deaths have occurred, 84% of them by USA/United States Empire air strikes and artillery. Probably far more: we have very efficient delivery methods for death.

I’m sorry; I cannot be over-concerned at the harm the Bush mad adventurism is doing to this country, not while so many are being butchered in Iraq, only because wicked rulers in DC chose to “Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war!”

The words of Joseph N. Welch to Sen. Joseph McCarthy, in the 1954 Army-McCarthy Inquisition, are fitting, to be addressed to Bush and his minions:

“You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

And, it’s odd for me to quote Oliver Cromwell, but the shoe fits:

Bush: “In the name of God, go!”

IMPEACH, CONVICT, IMPRISON!

Massacre at the Washita

Today is Monday, 27 November 2006.

On this date in 1868, gunmen from the 7th Cavalry, commanded by George A. Custer, murdered nearly 200 Cheyenne, led by Black Kettle, on the banks of the Washita River in Oklahoma.

It is instructive to note that the current George is as brutal and incompetent a military leader as George Custer.

Impeach, Convict, Imprison.

Impeach, Convict, Imprison

Today is Sunday, 26 November 2006.

As of today, the uncompleted conquest of Iraq has lasted longer than USA/USE involvement in World War II.

The conquest of Afghanistan passed that mark long ago.

As to the Bush Junta, one can only say: Impeach, Convict, Imprison.

In Memory of Edith Cavell

Today is Saturday, 25 November 2006.

In a rush, elsewhere to be, but just saw this on a Lebanese website.

The Wikipedia article on Edith Cavell is OK. Check it out.

This is what i saw:

"Patriotism is not enough, i must have no hatred or bitterness for anyone" Edith Cavell

Well, when I go before a firing squad, and that day will come, i hope i have the grace to say something so ... full of goodness.

In Memory of Betty Comden

Today is Friday, 24 November 2006.

With great sorrow, the Museum of the Bourgeois memorializes the death of Betty (Cohen) Comden, Broadway lyricist extraordinaire, half of Comden-Green.

Just google the dame, and you’ll realize a dozen tunes ringin’ in your head … well, that’s Betty.

“The Bronx is up and the Battery’s down,
The people ride in a hole in the ground,
New York, New York,
It’s a helluva town.”

Well, here’s a sign off for the lady:

“Now you must wake up
All dreams must end
Take off your makeup
The party’s over
It’s all over, my friend.”

Happy Thanksgiving/We're Living With War Everyday

Today is Thursday, 23 November 2006.

Dear Readers.

I suspect you expect from me, on Puritanical Turkey Day, a stern sermon, about how, in 1492, there were an estimated 40 million Native Americans, and how the European invasion reduced that number to less than 10 million by 1650.

But no.

And I won’t mention Nunna daul Isunyi — "the Trail Where We Cried”, the Trail of Tears, where proto-Nazi President Andy Jackson did the extermination-camp thing on 4,000+ Cherokee…

Well, I did sneak that in, but … how about some Neil Young?

LIVING WITH WAR

I'm living with war everyday
I'm living with war in my heart everyday
I'm living with war right now

And when the dawn breaks I see my fellow man
And on the flat-screen we kill and we're killed again
And when the night falls,

I pray for peace
Try to remember peace
I join the multitudes

I raise my hand in peace
I never bow to the laws of the thought police

I take a holy vow
To never kill again
To never kill again

I'm living with war in my heart

I'm living with war in my heart and my mind
I'm living with war right now

Don't take no tidal wave
Don't take no mass grave
Don't take no smokin' gun
To show how the west was won

But when the curtain falls, I pray for peace

Try to remember peace

In the crowded streets
In the big hotels
In the mosques and the doors of the old museum

I take a holy vow
To never kill again

Try to remember peace

The rocket's red glare
Bombs bursting in air
Give proof through the night,
That our flag is still there

I'm living with war everyday

I'm living with war in my heart everyday

I'm living with war right now.

Eat and weep.

All [White] Aboard

Today remains Wednesday, 22 November 2006.

“In another example of the fear and prejudice surrounding Muslims in the US since the attacks of September 11, 2001, six imams were handcuffed and forcibly removed from a domestic flight [US Airways] because passengers and crew feared the clerics were a threat."

"Three of the imams said their evening prayers just before boarding a flight from Minneapolis to Phoenix two days ago, causing alarm among passengers who heard them.”

[Robert Lusetich,The Australian, November 23, 2006]

Timothy James McVeigh would, of course, pass muster.

Or, for that matter, Lee Harvey Oswald, who whacked JFK, this date, 1963.

C'mon, US Airways, get with the program: Lynch 'em all.

Happy Birthday, Princess!

Today is Wednesday, 22 November 2006.

The Museum of the Bourgeois celebrates the birthday of the Princess of the Far and Farm Realms.

a poem by Sara Teasdale:

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pool singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

Perhaps, an odd choice for a birthday ode, but the Princess understands.

Happy Birthday, Princess!

In Memory of Robert Altman

Today is Tuesday, 21 November 2006.

It is with great sorrow The Museum of the Bourgeois memorializes the death of a cinema director of the first water, Robert Altman.

Any further words of mine would be superfluous.

He has become his films; let their names speak for him: Nashville, The Player, Secret Honor, A Wedding, 3 Women, Quintet, Tanner ’88, Gosford Park, The Gingerbread Man, A Prairie Home Companion, and, of course, M*A*S*H.

Bush & McCain Assault Women

Today is Monday, 20 November 2006.

Yes, George Bush is a “uniter, not a divider”.

Trouble is: he unites reactionaries and bigots.

George United has appointed, as deputy assistant secretary for population affairs, Eric Keroack, an anti-choice, anti-contraception extremist, to head the Office of Population Affairs.

Keroack is medical director of a Massachusetts organization, A Woman’s Concern, which offers free pregnancy testing, ultrasounds, and counseling. Check out the group’s website: it doesn’t bother to mention its purpose is to “help women escape the temptation and violence of abortion”.

Also doesn’t bother to mention its stance on birth control: “A Woman's Concern is persuaded that the crass commercialization and distribution of birth control is demeaning to women, degrading of human sexuality and adverse to human health and happiness.”

(In other words, people who engage in extramarital sex shouldn’t use condoms, and hopefully then “God” will smite them with well-deserved STDs, or better yet, AIDS.)

Also doesn’t mention that it’s not a medical nonprofit, but a “Christian” ministry offering free services to lure women in for propaganda and pressure.

Up next: George Uniter appoints the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan to head affirmative action programs.
________________________________________

In a related story, pretend moderate and maverick John McCain has reversed himself, and is sucking up to the fundamentalist far right.

In 1999, speaking to the San Francisco Chronicle, McCain said: “I’d love to see a point where it [Roe v. Wade] is irrelevant, and could be repealed because abortion is no longer necessary. But certainly in the short term, or even the long term, I would not support repeal of Roe v. Wade, which would then force X number of women in America to [undergo] illegal and dangerous operations.”

Yesterday, McCain told George Stephanopoulos: “… I do believe that it’s very likely or possible that the Supreme Court should — could overturn Roe v. Wade, which would then return these decisions to the states, which I support.”

So, Big John: you support subjecting women’s bodies to ownership by the government, and to dangerous back-alley abortions, if that will make you king.

And by the way, Johnny Boy: when you were terror bombing Vietnamese civilians, did you check to make certain none of them were pregnant?

The Peron of Nicaragua

Today is Sunday, 19 November 2006.

How the mighty have fallen.

Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua was once a Sandinista.

No more.

I remain a great supporter of the Augusto Sandino National Liberation Front.

After leading revolutionary Nicaragua, and going into opposition, Ortega changed. He became rich. He lusted to become president again. So, he sucked up to female-hating, anti-choice “religious” elements, both Roman Catholic and Protestant fundamentalist.

The result: with president-elect Ortega’s support, Nicaragua has now criminalized all abortions, even to save the life of the mother.

Hail, Caudillo Daniel!

What a pleasure it must be, Don Ortega, to own the bodies of all the women of Nicaragua.

Formerly Ortega, now the Peron of Nicaragua.

In Memory of Carrie Dickerson

Today is Saturday, 18 November 2006.

It is with great sorrow that The Museum of the Bourgeois memorializes the death yesterday of Carrie Dickerson.

Carrie was born in a log cabin in Oklahoma in 1917. She earned a B.A. and M.A. in home economics, and taught in several schools. In the 1960s, she and her husband opened a nursing home in Oklahoma, and she attended nursing school and became a registered nurse.

In 1973, she learned the local utility planned to build a nuclear power plant near her family farm. After several months of intensive study on the issue, she began organizing opposition. In the course of her struggle, she sold her nursing home, mortgaged the farm, contributed her savings, and made and sold quilts to support the group she had founded, Citizens Action for Safe Energy. Lawsuits were filed. Thousands rallied round. Carrie gave some $200,000 to the cause.

In 1982, the utility announced cancellation of the Black Fox Nuclear Power Plant. Since then, no American nuclear power plant has been approved for construction.

The struggle left her nearly broke, and she taught quilting classes to make ends meet.

A few years ago, she told the Tulsa World, “Sometimes we’re expected to do something with our lives other than what we had planned. I think this was my purpose in life. That’s the reason I can accept my condition today.”

She also said, “People always told me that I couldn’t win, that I was too small to make a difference. I’ve always said that you can’t win if you don’t try.”

It was my honour to be Carrie’s comrade in the struggle. Her latter words are a fitting epitaph for her. Carrie was petite in stature, but mighty in conviction and deeds.

Fare thee well, Carrie. We shall keep the faith, we continue the struggle.

CNN: Fire Glenn Beck!

Today is Friday, 17 November 2006.


On 7 November, Representative Keith Ellison (D-MN) became the first Muslim to be elected to Congress.

On 14 November, CNN Headline News anchor Glenn Beck interviewed him, and said, “And I have to tell you, I have been nervous about this interview with you, because what I feel like saying is, "Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies." And I know you're not. I'm not accusing you of being an enemy, but that's the way I feel, and I think a lot of Americans will feel that way".

If Beck knows he’s not an enemy, why bring it up? To prove Beck is privately overflowing with bigotry, or simply to smear Ellison, and appeal to the bigotry of his viewers?

Now, it seems obvious that, under the guise of “objectivity”, CNN hired Beck (a homophobe with a yearning for a lily-white nation) to compete for the audience that adores the hatefest of Fox News. But the false notion that “there’s two sides to every story” equals objectivity won’t wash.

The lie that “Jews are vermin and must be exterminated” has no claim for automatic representation; Mr. Hitler has no right to equal time. This is of a piece with the treatment of Irish immigrants when they first began to arrive in America in significant numbers. “Everyone knew” the Irish were lazy, shiftless, alcoholic, and promiscuous, as well as loyal only to the Antichrist heading the Church at Rome, for whom they were preparing to conquer the country.

There are two sides to every story only in the sense that sometimes one side is truth and one side is lie. To present lies as if they had equal claim to automatic dissemination with the truth is irresponsible.

CNN should immediately fire Beck.

Beck has the right to say what he wishes, but it is highly reprehensible for any journalistic outlet to pay him to spew hate.

MoB Welcomes Al Jazeera English!

Today is Thursday, 16 November 2006.

The Museum of the Bourgeois is delighted to welcome Al Jazeera English Language Television to the journalistic community.

Not that any cable or satellite network in the USA/USE carries it, but you can find it at http://english.aljazeera.net/News.

(Sorry this isn’t set up as a direct link; I’ve temporarily misplaced the code to insert that, and I’m not a NetWizard.).

Yes, the same Al Jazeera that War George and Disgraced Rummy damn as a tool of Satan.

And yes, it’s funded by an A-rab potentate, but then Fox is funded by an Australian-American potentate, etc.

People rightly question the objectivity of “state-run” television networks. But, they should demand the same standards of state-regulated and –ruled television networks, such as we have in the good ol’ USA/USE. Recall, the F.C.C. can put CBS, etc. out of business with a simple regulatory vote.

The MoB recommends absorbing the perspectives of a large number of new outlets, then applying reason and history to try to distill the truth. Harder than simply swallowing the pre-digested and distorted crap of Fox, but far more rewarding and enlightening.

Oh, I almost forgot: Fry in hell, Rupert Murdoch.

Trent Lott's Big Tent

Today is Wednesday, 15 November 2006.

So Trent Lott, Republican senator from my birth state of Mississippi, has today been voted back into the Senate Republican leadership.

This is of course the same Trent Lott who four years ago praised the segregationist values of white supremacist politician Strom Thurmond.

“I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either," Lott said.

Thurmond of course ran for president in 1948, on a program of strengthening the Second Slavery, or segregation.

During the campaign, he said, "All the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes, our schools, our churches."

The Thurmond platform included: "We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race."

Now, Lott wasn’t some loud-mouthed, ignorant 12-year-old white boy from Gulfport, parroting the racist trash he heard at home. He was a mature politician who knew what he was saying, and meant to say it.

Many Republican leaders talk of “The Big Tent” of the Republican Party, which supposedly welcomes persons of colour for reasons other than exploitation.

When it comes to Trent Lott, The Big Tent is just the same old white sheet.

Rise Up!

Today is Tuesday, 14 November 2006.

I awoke to this:

Up to 150 people kidnapped in Baghdad By CHRISTOPHER BODEEN, Associated Press Writer
46 minutes ago

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Gunmen wearing Iraqi police commando uniforms kidnapped up to 150 staff and visitors in a lightning raid on a government research institute in downtown Baghdad on Tuesday, the largest mass abduction since the start of the U.S. occupation.

Iraq's higher education minister instantly ordered all universities closed until security improvements are made, saying he was "not ready to see more professors get killed."
________________________________________________

The Warlord George Regime created the setting for such tragedies. These people will most likely be found on a rubbish heap, holes drilled in their bodies, bullets in their brains.

There's a part of me that hopes Donald Rumsfeld is kidnapped, stripped naked, and dumped on a street in Sadr City at high noon.

Wouldn't help anything or anyone, of course.

I saw a photo in The New York Times, on the first anniversary of the massacre at Tianamen Square in Beijing.

An elderly man was arrested, he was the only protestor, he was shouting, "Rise up! Rise up!" Had his child been murdered there?

I've always wondered what happened to him, in the conclusion, other than the obvious.
_______________________________________________

When will we rise up?
_______________________________________________

As always, have a nice day. :) LOL

Neil Young is 61!

Today is Sunday, 12 November 2006.

“Sailin’ hardships through broken harbours,
Out on the waves in the night …”

Can’t imagine surviving the 60s without the voice of Real Neal.

“Four dead in O-hi-o,
Four dead in O-hi-o…”

Neil Young is 61.

Today.

Thanks, dude.

Armistice Day, Constant Sorrow

Today is Saturday, 11 November 2006, Armistice Day.

I.

By Christmas Eve, 1914, the trench line disfigured Western Europe from Switzerland to the English Channel. Millions of infantry lived amidst mud, rats, and their own excrement, to the greater glory of their rulers, or perhaps their homelands, or perhaps glory, or perhaps virtue, or perhaps survival.

Then, on Christmas Eve, as night fell, at various points along the line, heart-sick, home-sick soldiers began to sing Christmas carols. Soon, they began calling Christmas greetings across No Man’s Land. Now, in those early days of the war, No Man’s Land was not the hell of multiple barbed-wire fences and fields of land mines that it would soon become.

Braver individuals or perhaps foolhardy, or perhaps just human, soldiers began to venture out into No Man’s Land: “I got some good British whiskey here; anybody over there got some schnapps?” “Komarade: I haff some good Deutsche zigaratten; anyone over there got Export A?” And, at many points along the line, to the horror of their officers, enlisted men, and even NCOs, rose from the trenches, met in No Man’s Land, and began to talk, exchange gifts, even play soccer by the light of the moon.

In some places, they helped each other recover and bury their dead.

The Christmas Truce extended through the next day, and, in some places, through New Year’s.

Then all returned to the work at hand, of butchery.

II.

“The master class has always declared the war; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose --- especially their lives.”
--- Eugene Victor Debs (1918)

III.

I can offer sympathy, empathy, pity, and sorrow for those who fight, but I cannot offer honour, even for those who fight in necessary defense, for I believe that all killing is sin. (I mean sin in a philosophical, ethical sense, not theological.)

Armistice Day is a day for remembrance.

Armistice Day is every day, for throughout human history there has been ceaseless warfare.

And so I offer constant sorrow.

IV.

What if all of us, humans everywhere, declared a Christmas Truce, a whatever truce, and said, we will not kill for any reason?

"You may say that I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one ..."

In Memory of Ellen Willis

Today is Friday, 10 November 2006.

With great sorrow, The Museum of the Bourgeois memorializes the death yesterday of comrade Ellen Willis, journalist, radical, feminist, gone too early at the age of 64.

In an essay in her book, Beginning to See the Light: Pieces of a Decade, she wrote: “My education was dominated by modernist thinkers and artists who taught me that the supreme imperative was courage to face the awful truth, to scorn the soft-minded optimism of religious and secular romantics as well as the corrupt optimist of governments, advertisers, and mechanistic or manipulative revolutionaries. Yet the modernists’ once-subversive refusal to be gulled or lulled has long since degenerated into a ritual despair at least as corrupt, soft-minded, and cowardly – not to say smug – as the false cheer it replaced."

"The terms of the dialectic have reversed: now the subversive task is to affirm an authentic post-modernist optimism that gives full weight to existent horror and possible (or probable) apocalyptic disaster, yet insists – credibly – that we can, well, overcome …"

"My deepest impulses are optimistic, an attitude that seems to me as spiritually necessary and proper as it is intellectually suspect.”

The struggle continues.

In Memory of Ed Bradley

Today is Thursday, 9 November 2006.

With great sorrow, The Museum of the Bourgeois memorializes the life of Ed Bradley.

A great journalist, and a great human being.

Your author had the honour of meeting him.

It would have been ca. 1988, when HH was co-producing the annual New York Folk Festival. Mr. Bradley had consented to introduce a rising young jazz guitarist, and make some general remarks about jazz, of which he was a great fan.

A few days before the event, Mr. Bradley called me. Class: not an assistant, but The Man himself, to tell me that he had been called away on assignment, and that he greatly regretted he couldn’t be there. I asked if it would be too great an imposition to ask if he would record his introduction on video, and he immediately agreed.

The next day, I sat in the control room of a CBS studio, watching him flawlessly record. I will always recall how gracious and gentlemanly he was.

The Museum of the Bourgeois extends sympathy to his family and friends.

Such a loss, at such an early age.

“Flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”

Comic Rummy Interlude

Today remains Wednesday, 8 November 2006. Herewith, a bonus track.

Following is, of course, a bad poem from World War One, terribly jingoistic, but at first I thought it was about War George, Hunter Cheney, and the dear, departed Rummy.

62. The Kaiser and God

By Barry Pain

[“I rejoice with you in Wilhelm’s first victory. How magnificently God supported him!”—Telegram from the Kaiser to the Crown Princess.]


LED by Wilhelm, as you tell,
God has done extremely well;
You with patronizing nod
Show that you approve of God.
Kaiser, face a question new— 5
This—does God approve of you?

Broken pledges, treaties torn,
Your first page of war adorn;
We on fouler things must look
Who read further in that book, 10
Where you did in time of war
All that you in peace forswore,
Where you, barbarously wise,
Bade your soldiers terrorize,

Where you made—the deed was fine— 15
Women screen your firing line.
Villages burned down to dust,
Torture, murder, bestial lust,
Filth too foul for printer’s ink,
Crime from which the apes would shrink— 20
Strange the offerings that you press
On the God of Righteousness!

Kaiser, when you’d decorate
Sons or friends who serve your State,
Not that Iron Cross bestow, 25
But a cross of wood, and so—
So remind the world that you
Have made Calvary anew.

Kaiser, when you’d kneel in prayer
Look upon your hands, and there 30
Let that deep and awful stain
From the blood of children slain
Burn your very soul with shame,
Till you dare not breathe that Name
That now you glibly advertise— 35
God as one of your allies.

Impious braggart, you forget;
God is not your conscript yet;
You shall learn in dumb amaze
That His ways are not your ways, 40
That the mire through which you trod
Is not the high white road of God.

To Whom, whichever way the combat rolls,
We, fighting to the end, commend our souls.

Don't Cheer Just Yet, Part 1

Today is Tuesday, 8 November 2006.

As I’ve written before, the Conquest of Iraq and the Vietnam War have at least one very crucial difference: the degree of geopolitical significance.

The Vietnam War, more properly the Indochina Wars, lasted 30 years: 1945 to 1954, when France, financed by the USA/United States Empire, vainly attempted to re-conquer its former colonies, and 1954 to 1975, when the USA/USE vainly attempted to retain its colony of South Vietnam. Between 5 and 6 million human beings, mostly civilians were murdered, and tens of millions more wounded, permanently maimed, or terrorized.

But, Indochina had minimal to no geopolitical value to the USA/USE in its greater struggle with the USSR.

Iraq is far different. It sits on an ocean of oil, amidst more oceans of oil.

Consider. The civil war is now at the small-unit, guerilla warfare stage. Most likely, were USA/USE troops to withdraw, it would swiftly accelerate into the large-unit stage. The militias would form into companies, battalions, brigades, divisions. The army would probably fragment along sectarian and ethnic lines, taking heavy weaponry with them. Formal pitched battles, aimed at occupation of territory, would ensue, along the lines of the former Yugoslavia.

Iran would be greatly attempted to intervene on the side of the Shiites, as would Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States on the side of the Sunnis. Turkey might decide it was time to liquidate the Kurdish problem. Israel would go on high alert, and might be tempted to bomb Iranian nuclear sites. Short- and medium-range conventional missiles would undoubtedly be fired against oil fields and facilities. Russia might see an opportunity to curry favor with one side or another.

Oil production would be disrupted and greatly diminished. Global recession would most likely result, perhaps even depression.

A fine mess you’ve got us into, George.

As a civilian military and geopolitical genius, Supreme Warlord George is right up there with Stalin and Saddam Hussein.

He invades and conquers a nation pasted together by British imperialism, stands by with inadequate troops to prevent major looting which destroys much of the nation’s infrastructure (“Stuff happens”), is so ignorant of the country he doesn’t know it has a long history of bitter and violent religious and ethnic strife just waiting to re-ignite, then, like a Texas Nero, clears brush on the ranch while Baghdad burns …

TO BE CONTINUED.
_______________________________________________

On this day in history:

1932 – Franklin D. Roosevelt elected in a landslide (Bush makes Herbert Hoover look like a genius)

1966 – Edward Brooke elected first African-American senator

1989 – Douglas Wilder elected first African-American governor

Emma Day

Today is Sunday 5, November 2006.

On this date in 2000, HH rescued the cocker spaniel, found bedraggled, and running, pathetic, on the street, Emma Goldman, who resides to this day, in great happiness, with Mrs. HH and Mr. MH.

Day of the Dead

Today is Wednesday, 1 November 2006.

Herewith, Version 2.

In many cultures, today is "The Day of the Dead".

A day to remember and honour all the dearly departed.

Check back; I'm working on an essay.

A poem by Robert Lowell

For the Union Dead

"Relinquunt Omnia Servare Rem Publicam."

The old South Boston Aquarium stands
in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.

Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;
my hand tingled
to burst the bubbles
drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.

My hand draws back. I often sigh still
for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom
of the fish and reptile. One morning last March,
I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized

fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,
yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage.

Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpiles in the heart of Boston.
A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders
braces the tingling Statehouse,

shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake.

Two months after marching through Boston,
half the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.

Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city's throat.
Its Colonel is as lean
as a compass-needle.

He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,
a greyhound's gentle tautness;
he seems to wince at pleasure,
and suffocate for privacy.

He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely,
peculiar power to choose life and die -
when he leads his black soldiers to death,
he cannot bend his back.

On a thousand small town New England greens,
the old white churches hold their air
of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags
quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.

The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year -
wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets
and muse through their sideburns...

Shaw's father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son's body was thrown
and lost with his "niggers."

The ditch is nearer.
There are no statues for the last war here;
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling

over a Mosler Safe, the "Rock of Ages"
that survived the blast. Space is nearer.
When I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.

Colonel Shaw
is riding on his bubble,
he waits
for the blessèd break.

The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.