Wine Cork

Another of my recent poems. Hope you enjoy it.

Wine Cork

Even with that hole in your head

you still catch my eye, lying supinely

on your side, feet glowing red

kissed by your claret companion.

I don’t envy your future, though,

headed to the heap, some distant

landfill, where gulls will raise a row

over lesser treasures than you.

Can’t help but wonder from where you came

—likely Portugal or Spain—and who

else but me feels the same

about your family’s tomorrow?

You’re on the way out: that’s a given.

Screw tops are screwing you out

of your honorable living.

Lighter, easy, and most of all, cheaper.

No heft required, no special tool,

no grunting, straining, or contraptions

that make you feel like a fool

puzzling out how to work them. 

Yet to uncork a bottle to get at the wine

seems natural as breathing, the way

God intended from the dawn of time,

long ere the Market became divine.

A Luther Footnote

Remember I told you the other day about Luther and the amazing lost and found story that revolved around him? Well, here's a footnote. I finally remembered about going back to where he turned up to see what else I could find. Specifically, I was looking for the carrying strap. So I drive there this morning, put on the emergency flashers and hoof back along the side of Chatauqua Avenue and, I'll be damned, there it was, just a smidgen the worse for wear. It's back where it belongs now, attached to the bag, as God intended. Good things do happen--just not often enough for enough people.

Our Defunct Fourth Amendment, Part 2

Have you noticed where all the lamestream media attention is going on this NSA snooping story? The inevitable villain, Edward Snowden, the spook contractor with a conscience, has become half the story. Boehner called him a "traitor." Mitch McConnell is calling for his blood. The Justice Department is after him, and the majority of the country thinks he's a criminal. The other half is a large discussion about the merits of the policy. Is it really in our best interest as a nation to have the National Security Agency recording and keeping terabytes of metadata on every American using one of the major telephone companies to make calls? I submit that both of these issues are bogus. Completely. The real issue is secrecy. All the things that the security apparatus of this country is doing in the dark, out of sight and purview of the American people.

What's really the problem the NSA and the rest of the federal government has with Snowden? You don't think it's that these two NSA programs--the phone listening and PRISM--that are the issue, do you? As if the terrorists aren't aware of what the U.S. is doing to combat them? You think anybody with half a brain can't figure out that the U.S. is engaged in electronic snooping to some degree? You think Snowden let some kind of really gigantic cat out of the bag when he went public? Are you kidding me? No, brothers and sisters, the real sin is that Snowden told the whole population of America what was going on. He told the people who are being snooped on, who are paying for all of it, and who were not consulted about this program that wasn't even debated in their hearing. That's the problem. NSA got caught treating every American citizen as a potential enemy. If these programs are so good for the country, if they're protecting everybody, then why the hell are they secret? Why are they locked away under layers of classification.

So don't let all this smoke screen jabber about Snowden and all the other peripheral issues distract you. The issue is SECRECY and how it makes a mockery of Obama's promises of transparency. Things are more Orwellian under him than George W. Bush. The issue is the creeping massive power accruing to the police and security agencies of the government.

I heard today on NPR that George Orwell's 1984 is and has been the best selling book on Amazon since this spying on Americans story broke. Don't doubt it. 

This CNet story explains all about PRISM. Wikipedia already has a pretty expansive article on Snowden here.

Related articles

• Edward Snowden: Saving Us from the United Stasi of America (commondreams.org)
• Protesters Worldwide Rally to Support Whistleblower Edward Snowden (commondreams.org)
• Our Defunct Fourth Amendment, Part 1 (whatpowderfingersaid.blogspot.com)

How Cool is This?

This would definitely make you forget what you were paying for the groceries. Bravo!

A Tale of Luther

I think I might've mentioned that my daughter went off to Morocco with her husband about 10 days ago. Anyway, she did. And they came back on Thursday night. It was a hell of a trip to the airport and a hell of a wait when I got there – but that's another whole story. Suffice it to say that they were unable to pick up their luggage for about 30 minutes because some luggage handler had an accident, and we had a hold-up while an ambulance negotiated three lanes of vehicles parked there to pick up passengers. Waiting around and wasting time was the last thing I want to do at this point. Here's why.

A little background: when I lived in Germany, 20 years ago now, it was not at all unusual to see guys carrying what is properly described as a male handbag. Very handy and useful devices. I bought my first one when I was still living in Europe, and it immediately became just plain essential. I always say, "I keep my life in there." Almost literally. Credit cards, insurance cards, pocket knife, membership cards, business cards, writing implement, notepad, money clip, etc. But since I knew I was coming back to Oklahoma, a state well-known for its broad mindedness, I made the decision before I even left that I would never talk about my "male handbag" or (even worse) "male purse." So then and there my handbag was named "Luther," and he would always be referred to by anyone who knew about him--family and close friends--as "Luther." Which is really a great name for a purse when you think about it, kindest, suggesting "leather" and "Protestant" which fairly well describes somebody male who would carry a purse in Oklahoma. (And we're not talking about Protestant in the religious sense here, obviously.)

This is not Luther, but kinda like, so you can get the idea.  For one thing, Luther is leather, and another, he's bigger with a carrying strap.

 Plainly, the historian in me is taking over with all of this background. Long story short: I'm helping my granddaughter get her stuff packed up into the car on my way to the airport to pick up Tanya and Mitch--I'm going to drop her at her house on the way--and I put Luther on top of the automobile while I'm fiddling with stuff for the trunk and backseat. And I drive off with Luther still on the top of the car. I did not discover that he was gone until I got to the airport and went to get my reading glasses out so I could discern the words and symbols on my iPhone. Panic pretty well describes what ensued when I couldn't find him. Naturally, I freaked out – and then had to wait for all of the airport delay until I could get home and retrace my route on what I was sure was going to be a fruitless search for Luther. I was not a happy camper.

I will shorten what could certainly be a much longer story by my adding details about how my heart sunk with the futility of of this, and how Susan prayed and prayed (I have to admit I did too, but I can guarantee not as hard.). Lo and behold, I find Luther laying in the middle of the street right past Highway 9, which is where I would've accelerated since it was out of the neighborhood. He was none the worse for wear. It appears the car rolled over it because one handle for a zipper – I guess that's a handle, what you call those things? – was gone; one side had a couple of small nicks; the leather strap has disappeared (I'm not sure I wouldn't be able find it in the same place or in the vicinity even right now.); and some contents inside were destroyed: three ballpoint pens none of them expensive, and my reading glasses, of course, but not the glasses case. Everything else survived: money clip, credit cards and cash intact; pocketknife; and all the other stuff. No harm done. Amazing!

Susan says it was prayer, and I'm cannot argue with that. All I can say is that there was a purse of some sort laying right in the middle of a public, well-traveled street for about an hour and a half and nobody touched it. You had better believe that I have implemented corrective action on Luther's departure from home procedures to go with his already rigorous departure-from-other-places procedures.

Our Defunct Fourth Amendment, Part 1

I cannot say I'm really surprised by the bombshell revelation that the National Security Agency has a gargantuan (and growing daily) database containing the phone and electronic records of every person in the country. I worked for the Fed in the military long enough to know how these people who are purportedly concerned with "protecting our freedoms"--that of course would include the entire "security" establishment, law enforcement, and the Dept of Justice--don't really care about constitutional protections of those same freedoms, not when they get in the way of what they want to do, which in the context of the paroxysms of paranoia launched and nurtured by the Bush and Obama administrations is by definition intrusive, drastic, and dangerous to civil liberties. Moreover, the attitude is to use the latest technology can offer (and remember, always at a handsome, if not obscene, profit to the government contractor) to the greatest extent possible. Believe me when I tell you that monolithic focus on the "bad guys" simple blots out concern for our basic constitutional liberties. And of course, this is all cloaked from the American people by classifying the programs, the technology, the locations, everything, under blankets of secrecy. 

Related articles

• Why NSA's defense is so weak (salon.com)
• Fourth Amendment Restoration Act - Rand Paul Introduces Anti-Snooping Bill (patdollard.com)
• An Orwellian Paradise (theburningplatform.com)
• Everything is terrible. (jwz.org)

Sweet Virtue

Latest installment in the ongoing series of theraputic poetic efforts. Old Catholics will definitely get it. The rest of you probably also.

If you are completely unfamiliar with the Baltimore Catechism, there's an online edition at: http://www.catholicity.com/baltimore-catechism/ For the purposes of the poem, you'll find the stuff about virtues at #10. A real blast from the past. 

Far from virtuous, Whitman's candy was (and is) sinfully good

 

Sweet Virtue

From here, on the cusp of the globe’s

final capitulation to the whirlpool of ignorance,

arrogance, and lassitude swirling us all

to kingdom come—the final drain—remembering

a world that demarked good from evil

as starkly as digital Wall Street from analog

Any Other Street—I say remembering, not imagining.

It’s a tad embarrassing; scary, too,

to grasp the gulf I’ve crossed to stand

at the present precipice.

All the way from Baltimore Catechism,

that compendium of answers

to every vital question about the sole

vital matter of existence: that is,

the eternal fate of your eternal soul—

all, all that mattered. All the way, I say,

from celestial certitude to beyond

WTF, here, peering over the precipice.

Everything Catholic dissolved in Mystery.

But the Catechism brooked no doubt,

condemned all query, banished logic

to the Kingdom of Tautological Truth.

The meaning of life? Death? Answers galore!

Virtue? Questions #122-135 dispatch thorny

questions about that, laying virtues out

as neatly as Whitman’s Sampler bon bons.

Hierarchical, of course. Theological virtues  

(God their “proper object”) on top row:

Glistening foil-wrapped faith; dark chocolate

hope, swathed in silver; and cherry-creamed charity,

wrapped in red, the one you save till last.

Strewn beneath and layered below

a veritable host of gifts and fruits

of the Holy Ghost. Virtues in glorious,

oft perplexing profusion. Virtues moral and

cardinal: hard-shelled fortitude, jelly-filled justice.

Continency, that unknown nougat. Long-suffering,

which nobody chose on purpose. Modesty,

curled in the corner of the box. And those

nutty ones: benignity and sugary filial piety.

And chastity: the one everybody tasted

and put back in the box.

The Abbysinians - 1995

Love that roots reggae music. And these guys are masters of it. Enjoy.

Gods of Olympus Taste a Little Bit of Earth

So there they were all arrayed in their tin soldier finest regalia. Beribboned like Christmas presents, or rather I should say, like M&M and Ju Jubes graffiti, stapled to their manly chests, their dutiful, worshipful minions arrayed behind them in the first row at the Senate armed services committee hearing on sexual assault in the military. The committee in general was not buying the united front from the service bosses that they were going to make this issue priority one, etc., etc. What a treat to see women senators McCaskell of Missouri and Gillibrand of New York give these guys the ass-chewing they so richly deserve. (I could not help but think how our "heroes" in uniform will privately vilify in the vilest way possible these two women. I remember real well what they had to say--and probably still do--about Hillary.) All you have to do is imagine them in the same shoes as the service women who have the courage to report sexual assault and what happens to them. We know what happens. They get persecuted by the chain of command and other members of their unit. I suppose the prevailing ethos is that if you get raped, just "suck it up." Only it will be worse for the ladies of the Senate who have the temerity to dress down the uniformed gods of Olympus and who are attempting to get commanders out of the business of shielding sexual predators in the ranks.

And how I hope they succeed. I'm not really expecting that they will, though. The military is going to get its way, it always does.

Related articles

• Military leaders defend commanders' role in sexual abuse cases (guardian.co.uk)
• More women in the Senate equals more pressure on the military to fix its sexual assault problem (dailykos.com)

Aches and Pains

So I get ready to go back to room to read last night after the Ranger game– which they won 3 to 1 over the Royals – and the toe on my left foot is just killing me. And I know what this is: it's a flareup of my gout, for which I take a pill every day so I don't get flareup of my gout. I keep thinking about all those famous kings and queens hundreds of years ago to use to get this and often for long periods of time, and I always thought well, that's really too bad. But I'll tell you, I've got a lot more sympathy for them now. It hurts. We are waiting right now to get a prescription refilled for some pills that I used to have to take when one of these attacks came.

And I've got these various aches and pains in my back, ribs, sometimes upper left of my chest. They just come and go as they please. I'm just resigned to it. All of this crap comes with the territory of a deteriorating bodily constitution. As I approach what has to be jocularly referred to as "the Golden years," I become ever more aware of how important your health, and especially as we know now, your gene pool, has to do with all this. Susan keeps telling me I'm real lucky because I've got "good genes". But I don't give a hoot about my genes or whatever pool they came out of when my toe is throbbing.

Our granddaughter Libby has been staying with us while her parents are enjoying the 20th anniversary trip to Morocco, of all places. And I'm sure she's got have all kinds of tales to tell them about living with a couple of old people for two weeks. It has sure been a delight having her, especially because we get to know her better and vice versa. I assume, perhaps without a good reason, that that is a fairly even trade.