It’s a game. Could catch on, like the old Trivial Pursuit. Ron Paul is to civil rights as Alvin and the Chipmunks are to battlefield triage. Or Dick Butkis is to the ballet.
Of course there’s nothing funny about the subject. Ron Paul to civil rights is about as funny as Franco’s tomb.
Oh the myriad ways we cheer ourselves…
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Pictured here: Steve Kuusisto and Guiding Eyes “Nira” with Michael Meteyer, one of the great friends of the blind, west coast representative of GEB and a great Zen lunatic! Photo from Big Sur, taken by poet Ken Weisner. What great friends I have! How lucky!
“One should not be too severe on English novels; they are the only relaxation of the intellectually unemployed.”
–Oscar Wilde
“A poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.”
–Salman Rushdie
“I hear the singing of the lives of women. They clear mystery, the offering, and pride.”
–Muriel Rukeyser
“You don’t have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.”
–John Ciardi
“We must use time as a tool, not as a couch.”
–John F. Kennedy
“There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there’s only narrative.”
–E.L. Doctorow
“Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.”
–Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Your theory is crazy, but it’s not crazy enough to be true.”
–Niels Bohr
“All knowledge, the totality of all questions
and answers, is contained in the dog.”
–Franz Kafka – Investigations of the dog
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I lay awake all night, worried. I tried thinking of the stars overhead, tried thinking of oceans I've swum in. I remembered people I've wronged. Thought of old enemies. Wrestled with the goat of imagination. At 4 AM I thought about getting up and making a cup of tea but then fell into a deep sleep. It's the end of a dark year. Here are some lines by Kenneth Rexroth. Happy New Year.
Bostonian of the Year: Carmen Ortiz
Sent from my iPhone
On the left, Bebe Rebozo, reputed now to have been Nixon's secret paramour, and certainly his money launderer. In the middle, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Tricky Dick is seated behind the derrière of a poodle.
Nixon: "Really? You just shake the dog and it shits nickels?"
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My sister in law Karen passed away last night after a long fight with virulent breast cancer. She died at home, in her husband’s arms. Dave took care of her with the devotion of real love and I’m grieving for him and his son Michael, who is a college freshman. I always aim my spiritual hopes in the manner of Walt Whitman — the universe is taking Karen back now and it’s filled with life giving energy. And love.
Here is Ron Paul in 1992:
“An ex-cop I know advises that if you have to use a gun on a youth, you should leave the scene immediately, disposing of the wiped off gun as soon as possible. Such a gun cannot, of course, be registered to you, but one bought privately (through the classifieds, for example).”
Notice that Paul cannot by definition be talking about the use of a handgun for self-defense as he’s advocating for the premeditated purchase of an unregistered firearm solely for the purpose of murdering a young person. One understands that this is Texas blarney: for “youth” you can read “colored youth” and for the conditional future perfect tense “if you have to use a gun on a youth” you can see one of Paul’s John Birch Society fixations, eg, the inevitable race war that he would love to see unleashed.
In ordinary times, or what passes for them, I’m not inclined to give a misanthropist like Paul much more than a shrug, but his recent surge in Iowa serves as a reminder that Americans will often overlook the most specious and reprehensible ideas if they can be convinced that a candidate stands for liberty. In Ron Paul’s case freedom means freedom from civil rights– which is to say that he’s for rolling back the clock on everything from the voting rights act to the ADA. Civil liberties are not abstractions, nor are they regionally conditional unless of course you’re not concerned with them at all. Both Ron Paul and his son Rand are hostile to civil rights but quick on their feet to declare they’re for getting the government off the average citizen’s back. Libertarian rhetoric sounds so good to Americans, especially to those who carry loads of class fed resentments. Remember the Willie Horton ads? Ron Paul plays vengeance fantasies with a multi-cultural society and people ought not to forget it.
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Scuffles have broken out between rival groups of Greek Orthodox and Armenian clerics in a turf war at Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity.
Bemused tourists looked on as about 100 priests fought with brooms while cleaning the church in preparation for Orthodox Christmas, on 7 January.
Palestinian police armed with batons and shields broke up the clashes.
See full story:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-16347418
As Christopher Hitchens said so well:
“Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.”
Planet of the Blind 