Friday, October 1, 2010

Friday evening diaspora

When I see stories like this, this evening in The Times and at The Southern Poverty Law Center in the Context column every month, I think of the terms of praise this blog has adventitiously elicited - pretty, hot - and of the blogs I admire, myself, where discipline plainly reigns as if Nancy Cunard were about to flick a finger upward, to restore society's yo-yo to the crêpe of her many-clustered hand. We show each other pretty things, and observe a gracious code of silence, competing to incur our own contempt.


So it seems we need a splurge in green and blue, to bathe the mind of cognition of our failed self-government, of our endlessly flouted doctrine of consent. If we are governed by consent, after all, we are responsible. Sifting through a pile of slides I took years ago from a window at the Drake, overlooking the commute home up Lake Shore Drive after dark, I think, Put on a pretty picture, cher, as we mix ourselves a cocktail of Onwentsia's own invention. Show us a boytummy glistening, as the meniscus of our drink, vermouth in swirls like fuzz of suave infusions, rises to the lips of our consensual forgetfulness.


I don't think so, tonight. I have another Friday evening diaspora. Behind, bellygrossened sheriffs fart, insensate in the cycle of a State-supported crime, evidenced before their eyes in a railway depot in Jacksonville, Florida in 1921. To this day, voluminously, the young flee this region in one's and two's, to get somewhere a State will take them without malice toward their kind. And for every one of them, and for families fractured by discovery of their unintended colour, we glide past their exemplar to the club car in our silence.





9 comments:

  1. "however, whether anyone was then cured, is not clear..."

    remains the most vile comment of all...

    B

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  2. I heard the researcher who uncovered this interviewed on CBC Radio (in Canada) this evening. She indicated that up to a third of the people experimented upon were not cured by the treatment.

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  3. A nation which can create a School of the Americas (1946-present) in the bosom of its Defense Department, to train, seduce, network with and co-opt thugs from every corner of Latin America, and invade Guatemala (the host nation for this pharmaceutical trial) officially and otherwise at a wave of its hand - always on the side of securing repression in situ - is to be regarded as unaccountably inefficient in medically dooming the incarcerated and infirm to torments, dissipation, ruin and rotting death, when it has its own stooges at the highest levels of local military, police, and bureaucracy, to infect them for nothing. But if this is just Tuskeegee's degenerate epidemiologist, freelancing on holiday, it's not surprising that he brought his penis carver, his hookers, and his spiked hors d'oeuvres to this pathetic satrapy of the American hydra, with impunity.

    "Cured?" What could be more beside the point? No, I think the signature element is the observation that a test to determine the effectiveness of penicillin had to be abandoned because the darn stuff just costs so much. He knew that before he packed his bags. What's the expression? "Mission Accomplished" - we reaped the whirlwind, our work is done.

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  4. my point exactly...the most vile comment, as if it could possibly be something worth considering .

    laurent for president.

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  5. I'd vastly rather see 5 bright kids throwing out their wikipedia.

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  6. Laurent, one of your most moving posts. In this case Wikipedia supplied me with the translation of the text carved onto the Homomonument in Amsterdam, a memorial I saw being built. This text translates as "Such an endless desire for friendship" - a quotation from a poem by a Dutch Jewish gay poet, Israel de Haan.

    Judging by what one hears of the situation in of a self-appointed bishop and his anti-homosexual sermons in Atlanta your photograph in the railway station underlines the saying "he does not learn from history is doomed to repeat it."

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  7. B, just as a man who'll act has his own lawyer has a fool for a client, a bishop in his own case has his crook for a flock. Dean Swift took his measure for us well, supra. But to master friendliness in "an endless desire for friendship" is the harder course to take. By remarks such as yours, we see it can be done.

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  8. following along with this conversation- though I add nothing a great import- I can not help notice the photograph in detail- All beautifully dressed-suits, hats awaiting fate-as if going to sunday services.

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  9. Thank you for coming by, LA; and of course this aspect of the document is very striking. After shuddering to contemplate they may be wearing the vaster part of their net worth, what strikes us is the unnerving dignity of our deportees, whatever they may be wearing. They chronically degrade us to the end.

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