Saturday commute cix: Catching up with policy

It was a slow day

And the sun was beating

On the soldiers by the side of the road

There was a bright light

A shattering of shop windows

The bomb in the baby carriage

Was wired to the radio

These are the days of miracle and wonder

This is the long distance call

The way the camera follows us in slo-mo

The way we look to us all

The way we look to a distant constellation

That's dying in a corner of the sky

These are the days of miracle and wonder

And don't cry baby, don't cry

Don't cry

It was a dry wind

And it swept across the desert

And it curled into the circle of birth

And the dead sand

Falling on the children

The mothers and the fathers

And the automatic earth

These are the days of miracle and wonder

This is the long distance call

The way the camera follows us in slo-mo

The way we look to us all

The way we look to a distant constellation

That's dying in a corner of the sky

These are the days of miracle and wonder

And don't cry baby, don't cry

Don't cry

     It's a turn-around jump shot

     It's everybody jump start

     It's every generation throws a hero up the pop charts

     Medicine is magical and magical is art

     The Boy in the Bubble

     And the baby with the baboon heart

And I believe

These are the days of lasers in the jungle

Lasers in the jungle somewhere

Staccato signals of constant information

A loose affiliation of millionaires

And billionaires and baby

These are the days of miracle and wonder

This is the long distance call

The way the camera follows us in slo-mo

The way we look to us all

The way we look to a distant constellation

That's dying in a corner of the sky

     These are the days of miracle and wonder

     And don't cry baby, don't cry

     Don't cry

Paul Simon

Graceland

  The Boy in the Bubble

1986©

How is our darling Dick like yesterday's fashion prince?

 D'you have a mode of
 covering up that's ty-
 ing you in knots? To
 precipitate a frock
 you can't escape, re-
 sembles making a war
 you can't pretend is
 someone else's. People
 wouldn't know you with-
 out it. We saw our Dick
 in Murdoch media again,
 impersonating a garrote.

iii  dove, crow, wall

Cornstarch, milk, and London's Springtime moment

 Our paper of record sent a man

 to London's lightly covered in-

 troduction of menswear sugges-

 tions, and took the precaution

 of illustrating his excitement

 with enough liberality to read

 through it. It would call for a

 harder heart than ours to doubt

 his report, of many reduced to

 tears. Deconstructions do this. 

Houdon ate the heart out of his own blancmange, so uncontrolled was the voracious jubilation for its crumbs. But there he was, the gender blessed at last to breathe within the milkened cornstarch of idolatry in motion. Who would not have wept to share the day? 

 At home, then, later - possibly much 

 later - the usual sordid questions 

 tend to lay the celebrant low. Where 

 can one wear the thing; how can one 

 know if it isn't a knock-off, or even 

 if fits? What if it shows up on Amazon?

 But, oh, is it not just chickening out

 in art's defense, even to ask the price?

Origins of Wednesday iv

        Eventually, however, a day 

        arrives when conditions be-

        come more fortunate and the 

        tremendous tension decreases; 

        perhaps there are no longer 

        any enemies among one's neigh-

        bors, and the means of life, 

        even for the enjoyment of life, 

        are superabundant. At one stroke

        the bond and constraint of the 

        old discipline are torn: it no

        longer seems necessary, a condi-

        tion of existence - if it per-

        sisted it would only be a form

        of luxury, an archaizing taste.

        

        I always figured, the con-

        ditions of greater fortune

        this philosopher was talk-

        ing about, were social and

        cultural, not material. He
        expects social change, not
        social mobility. Still, e-
        ven the fortunate can hope
        to be released. 

       
      

Friedrich Nietzsche

Beyond Good & Evil

  Prelude to a Philosophy

  of the Future

  What is noble cclxii

Walter Kaufman

  editor & translator

Basic Writings

op. cit.

1879 Hall

The Diemming of Nouri al Maliki

We come again to that phase
we always appreciate in the
pursuit of our serial wars,
when the retirement of their
pretexts focuses on the Diem-
ming of our puppets. In Iraq
we observe the disintegration
foretold quite neutrally, to
all who were undeceived, as
long ago as 2006, although if
anyone had felt like it, he
could have read the wartime
letters of Lawrence in Car-
chemish, where he dined with
the country's compiler, Ger-
trude Bell. But I was remind-
ed of the more recent volume
in an exchange of notes with
an expatriate of here, and the
reason we never hear of it now, 
is that it was hostile to our
preposterous pretexts, and the
work of a friend of the Kurds:
Peter Galbraith has been shun-
ned but his analysis has matur-
ed in the rise of ISIS. The End
of Iraq is worth a read today;
The New York Times drew his map
for us again last weekend, and
very prettily, too.

If no one can ever be in synch
with today's American policies,
who learned of the world before
the dawn of Fox News, we'll still
always have Casablanca, in which 
the default text of authority's 
hypocrisy immortalised Claude 
Rains, shocked, shocked to dis-
cover gambling at Rick's.

But I stray. The beat beat beat
of the tom-toms of propaganda,
which wafted so musically to our
upright ears as John F. Kennedy
prepared us for abandonment of
the sectarian, the corrupt, the
exclusionary, the arrogant head
of our visibly failed state in 
Saigon, echo loudly now, to Nouri
al Maliki, you you you must go.
Ngo Dinh Diem was surely those
things, which we now so sagely
discern to be incompatible with
a viable state, but which are
exactly what we specified and
engineered in boosting Maliki, 
made him available, and made him
expediently dependent and culpable.
All he lacks is a Crawford twang,
to articulate his lineage. 

What was to be expected of a war
to celebrate the death of history?

Now, a rug can be pulled out from
under embarrassing satraps, more
than one way, as Mr Noriega can
attest. No one can suppose we in-
tend the Diemming of Iraq's head
of state to imitate previous art.
But our honor now perfumes the air,
to edify the senses of the latest
generation to mature in this land.

I do not like to reflect on such
things in this setting. I like the
way my lawns are being groomed this
season, by some earnest and learned
youngsters, in whom caring to do a
good job translates into a brighter
glow than ever in the quiet acres I
enjoy with my dog. I'd be uneasy a-
bout paying them money for their la-
bor, without repaying their care. 










Peter W. Galbraith
The End of Iraq
  How American Incom-
  petence Created a War
  without End
Simon & Schuster, 2006©

Ellen J. Hammer
A Death in November
  America in Vietnam, 1963
Oxford University Press, 1987©

Jacques Fath had a splash called Green Water

   something I agreed 

   on with my father.

So was the Governor of Texas doing his Mayor of Toronto thing?

  

 You know Rick Perry,

 you love Rick Perry:

 a walking consola-

 tion for the death

 of Liebling (and we

 have another summer

 coming on). So was

 this a trial balloon

 out in San Francisco

 on being on his game

 only as an addict, 

 like Toronto's pop-

 ular Mayor, or was

 he simply confiding

 that he can't under-

 stand his personality

 without reference to

 fear of where it draws

 him? He needn't worry.

 That requires consent.