Crappy New Year, Dubya and Darth Veep

So, son of a Bush, you got your Iraqi. What decency dear leader, that you refrain from taking to the airwaves to bray about your success...uh it is decency at work here, no? Congratulations, Georgie boy! We knew you were man enough to tough it out, to bear any burden of discontented voters and unpopularity to see your mission through. You are so brave and good that you could bear to sacrifce thousands of lives, cast your predecessor's budget surpluses to the dogs, immolate the tattered vestiges of hope and good will the world held for the US and squander the mandate of fear you and your corrupt party had amassed...all that and more only you had the character to do for the sacred mission to stomp out weapons of mass destruction root out Al Qaida bring Democracy to Iraq kill one rotten oil-rich human being who's rottenness was amplified by American support when he first came to power. Whats that? You say there really is democracy in Iraq now? Glad to hear it. That must mean our job there is done and we can pull out. Its a very special kind of democracy we have given the Iraqis....it kills more innocent people per day than their old dictatorship was killing on its slow days. The record number of execution orders you signed while you governed in Texas seems to be your one genuine character trait, the one act you can actually keep up: getting people killed, letting people kill other people. You are a piker, of course: there have been leaders far more efficient at your little skill. But none of them were ever leaders of Americans.

The Iraqis got their man today. Losing a bit fewer than two American soldiers per day since we began bombing in March 2003 must seem a small price to pay for the great triumph you have led us to this week, Mr. President. Far more die rolling their SUV into a ditch every day. Whats all the fuss, huh? On average, in our country, there are more women beaten to death by their male partners each day than there are soldiers killed in Iraq...only a liberal would see anything to complain about here, wouldn't you say, Dubya?

But I doubt the president will be reading this, I might as well put a cork in it. Still, I am at my wits end trying to see how we Americans can clean up the mess we have made. Nor can I see any way in which any one except Halliburton and other defense contractors have come out ahead in this fiasco. I have not blogged much lately, thinking there was more good gotten by working to strenghten the resolve of our green congress to overturn the laws and mispent monies that have underwritten the damned fool neocon dreams of empire. The doing is more important than the denouncing but I won't let it silence me. Stupid arrogance that orders up sloppy death, look for no comfort in these posts nor even the lull of silence. None. Ever. Ford bestowed his silence on you until he died and that was no favor to anyone.

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Happy New Year to everyone else!

I turn to popping corks now. My new years resolution is to blog more. Done right, forcing yourself to think a bit every day is good for you. I was challenged to put my thoughts about the peculiar aspects of our times in verse and happened to have left the task until the hour before it was to be delivered. The practice of blogging can leave you a lot of material ready-to-use:

For a time capsule addressed to whomever is living in the year 3006:

Please do not curse me, you who find these words.
What fares well when left in the care of herds?
Who we are I'll try to say to you a millenium on, but there is a contradiction here.
For nothing so much marks the present race as fixation on goods and times quite near.
To write this draws the mind far out of stifling horizons on which our lives are focused
But we'll forget you, future and purpose of our being, and resume munching like locust.
In the first species that could have them, regret and responsibility enjoyed a long divorce
The planet had been ample to tolerate that course.

Snow fell today, this shortest darkest day, for the first time this year.

Exhausted and diseased, the last forests shade the last few brooks where you'd dare drink
Our sky still blue, the poles and peaks still wear a little ice, not for long, we think,

Until now, progress measured and celebrated, meant less hindered commerce.
We were so proud when first we talked via lightning.
Now, 2006, we are past vanity and complacently dominate time and space,
For advantages confered, we are fond of all that quickens the pace
Beat the market, beat the clock. he who knows most may get an accolade
but he who knows certain things first has got it made.
There was good and bad to living in a world that walked and was humbled by vastness
Tell me 3006, do you have deliberation?
Our seconds divided in millionth parts but to centuries we are averse.

Until now, progress measured and celebrated, meant less diseased.
We don't know what to do with our old, condemning many to socially disconnected "ease".
Most of us don't even want our own old age, a genteel plague, a prospect of fears.
Some patch and stitch and color themselves younger than their years
We let the last few years, unquestioned until unfunded, beggar us to prolong what always has ended
Far past child bearing years we prop up a kind of living nature may never have intended.
But our own will, not natures, is now supreme. There are no fates.
There was good and bad to living with natural frailties
Tell me 3006, are you at peace with mortality?
We scope the second when death occurs, then say it never happened
And all the years it punctuates collapse to a query residue: "was god pleased?"

Until now, progress measured and celebrated, meant ability to know more and yet more.
We wired ourselves together and the promise hangs from that wire
If we won't pay for the news, then news must conspire
To grip us, to concern us, yet to assure us we are good and not to challenge or disoncert.
We now watch three hours a day or more of just what we choose.
The promise was a planet where reporters swarmed
Yet ever less are we bound together by our news,
growing more fearful rather than more informed.
Tell me 3006, do you really want to know more?

The word emerging in our leading minds is modest, its root: "sustain"
The word that leads the great mass of us as if it were a simple goodness is "gain".
This year Darwin's thought was upheld in court but still not learned.
"Competative" is our favored fitness, a reputation obvious and earned .
Tell me 3006, how do you value "cooperative"?

Of all the problems we cannot collectively face,
The worst yet least addressable: the mere numbers of our race.

You see there, all thoughts I have tooled and fooled with here before.

BTW, I admit my champaigne flows a bit early....in some time zones. This is why it is so important to have friends in Australia: you simply can't let your mates drink alone.

2006: A fond farewell to the year of "we CAN DO this"

It really has been a good year in some ways. We introduced a morally dead and mentally challenged tyrant to his walking papers. Our little progress and ray of hope comes too late for all the people who died in Iraq, for the species that exist no more, for the thousands of islanders and shore dwellers whose homes and livelihoods have gone under the waves. So, for many more of us, it was also a year in hell. But I have had good guides and companions who help us rail at our sewage tides. To fellow bloggers who have enlivened my tenure on this sinking ship of humanity, my gratitude for your company. As the violinist said to his quartet when the Titanic began to tilt and slip toward the deep: "It has been an honor and a privilege to play with you." Above all, personally, it has been a year where I turned somewhat from the complaining that is the staple of my blogging toward the doing, in which I joined many though with what effect we can't yet say.

And, though the weather was far from conducive for photography or much of anything else, my son and I did make it all the way to the summit of Mt Washington. A more satisfying if less educational result than last year's attempt.


Note that rime encrusted structures are typical of Mt. Washington summit this time of year and those are NOT my eyebrows! Underneath that ice, the sign says "Mt. Washington Summit". Trust me, or check out the anemometers, just visible in the background through the ice fog, appearing just above my left glove which rests on the sign.

Darwin's Revenge

A species that becomes resistant to most of the selection pressures that the environment can apply will itself become the most drastic pressure on every other species in that environment...and enjoy a freedom to degenerate unknown to any other creature nature ever fashioned.

Theory and Practice

Ignorance is the theory that you already know enough to get by. Bigotry is the social and political practice of this theory.

What could keep me away from my blog?

Yes, I have been busy. I had spare time before I took up blogging. Lately all that time has gone elsewhere:

If you are within a short ride of Newton Massachusetts, consider joining us tomorrow evening.

You might think the recent election would get the attention of our congress. But now we want to keep their attention on our issues. Come meet the kind of people who turned the election: people like you! The Operation Democracy council serving the western suburbs of Boston is holding an open House [and open Senate is planned] meeting to kick off our "Mandate for Change" campaign to make the congress work as we voted for them to work. Come to a one hour meeting at the John M Barry Boys & Girls Club of Newton at 675 Watertown St. on Tuesday December 5th. Sign-in is at 7:pm. Come see how much fun grass roots politics is. Operation Democracy is affiliated with MoveOn.org but council members are strictly volunteers and make decisions locally. If interested and likely to attend, please let us know by registering for the event via this MoveOn page.

Novemeber 7th should not be the last time your wishes counted so come on down and help us shake things up. We have an in-your-face kind of petition drive that will let you get a lot more impact than just puting your John Henry on a plea to fix healthcare or the environement or get out of Iraq...though we will tackle all those things over the coming months.