the Pakistanis laughed

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The Pakistanis laughed. So did “The Bangladeshis. The women with head scarves. The blondes. The Indians. The Palestinians. The Jews.”

It was that kind of night, actually, when for a moment you can believe that all the world’s problems could be solved if everyone would just lighten up a little bit (or a lot) and laugh together, at themselves and at each other. The lineup was packed. It was like there’d been an uprising at The Daily Show and Jon Stewart was stashed in a closet somewhere backstage bound in duct tape.

Go to Meera Subramanian‘s piece at Killing the Buddha and read about the night

Comedian Aasif Mandvi, correspondent for Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, began ….. “Stand Up for Religious Freedom” at Comix on W. 14th Street in New York …… reflecting on things he missed as a kid growing up Muslim. “Santa Claus. Bacon Bits.” (Pause, the critical tool of the comic.) “Seeing my mother’s face.”

Laughter. The best medicine.

The Kochtopus: one more reason to revolt

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The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests. In a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States. And Greenpeace issued a report identifying the company as a “kingpin of climate science denial.” The report showed that, from 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups. Indeed, the brothers have funded opposition campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies—from health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program—that, in political circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus.

Read more in the New Yorker.

Like the robber barons of old, David H. Koch is a billionaire and very generous philanthropist, as though doing some good with some of his money makes up for all the bad he does with the rest of it — including the founding and support of supposed “grass roots movements” such as Americans for Prosperity Foundation. Charles Lewis, the founder of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan watchdog group, said, “The Kochs are on a whole different level….. They have a pattern of lawbreaking, political manipulation, and obfuscation. I’ve been in Washington since Watergate, and I’ve never seen anything like it. They are the Standard Oil of our times.”

The revolutionaries who held the original Boston Tea Party would never have stood for the machinations of the Kochtopus. These new Tea Partiers, manipulated by libertarians like Koch who spread disinformation and and stir up the disatisfactions of the people who will most suffer if their policies come about, are going to dismantle what is most good about this country. What these misguided citizens don’t realize is that they will ultimately suffer most, as the Kochs of this nation grind their lives to ash.

I like these comments left on a post of the blog of the Investigative Fund.

QUOTE OF THE DAY:
“I’m wondering if those who support that so-called Tea Party Movement really know where Republicans are leading them? It seems like the Tea Party rank & file are being USED by a bunch of vain, self-serving, evil, power mad, greed stricken, K-Street Con Artists. Paid for by wealthy silver spoon trust fund babies who want to turn the American PEOPLE into peasants. The scum of the earth who hide their hideous faces by using Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin as spokespersons. SUCKERS!

Just look at their agenda items. It‘s like wet dream for Ken Lay or Jack Abramoff:
1) Repeal Health Insurance Reform
2) Privatize Social Security or abolish it.
3) End Medicare
4) Extend Bush Tax Cuts for wealthy and Big Oil
5) Repeal Wall Street reform
6) Protect all those responsible for Gulf oil disaster and future environmental catastrophes
7) Abolish or cut funding to Department of Education
..) Abolish Dept. of Energy
9) Abolish Environmental Protection Agency
10) Repeal 17th Amendment
11) Rewrite Bible and school textbooks,
12) Replace JESUS with Glenn Beck, Frank Church with Joe McCarthy…
13) After USA is destroyed by Republican Party low grade thought processes, BLAME Democrats/Liberals
14) be flunkies, soldiers and slaves for silver spoon trust fund babies like George W. Bush, Saudi Prince Bandar and the Koch Bros.

Why aren’t the mainstream media falling all over themselves to unveil the Koch behind the curtain. Sell-outs. All of them.

artifact

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This is my response to the MagpieTales #34 visual writing prompt. Go to the link to get to the responses of other writers.

Artifact

There once was a point
to this old lantern
that now only reflects
what light slips through
somber drawn drapes

Once it had a purpose in
repelling night’s dark hand.
Its flickerings lit dim stairwells,
dispelled the haunts of nightmares,
revealed vague truths hidden
within shadowy eyes.

Useless in lonely oblivion,
it waits for storms
that devour the sky
and send the world
into frightful corners
of unexpected night.

a sense of scent

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I almost missed this Magpie Tales #33 visual writing prompt, but better late than never.
(As usual, you can read other submissions at the link above.)

A Sense of Scent

She thought she was done with him,
but one night the moon rose
clear and full-faced,
and an early autumn wind
swept the scent of lavender
through her open window.

Some times are harder than others
to sit silent,
hands clenched against
the lure of the pen,
mouth set against
the call of the phone,
thinking to oneself
that some things are better
left to silence,
to the slow decay of time,
the turning of moons
and lavender seasons.

But even in the darkest of corners
some things refuse to die –
some small husk still
riddled with seeds,
some insistent root
defying the dust,
some dormant dream
of a riotous clash of hearts,
clutch of minds,
dance of hands that
hope and hold and, too soon,
let go.

She thought she was done with him,
except his voice
still pulls at her belly
like the insistent tides of the moon.
So when he calls
from places lush
with a thousand thriving things,
she sends him dewy lavender
wrapped in familiar black lace,
because, they say,
The sense of smell
is the most visceral,
holding even the darkening
memory of the dying.

c’mon Congress, give us a needed New Deal

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I have plagiarized from Ronni Bennett’s post and have sent the following message to my Congressional legislators. You can do the same, easily, by starting here, a site through which you can identify and email your legislators.

Please support Ohio Democratic Representative Marcy Kaptur’s bill, HR 4318, which would authorize the president to re-establish the CCC, a program that put millions of young men to work during the Great Depression. Those young men were doing mostly physical labor. Kaptur’s bill eliminates the age and gender limits, and keep in mind that for every project involving manual labor, there are related support jobs that older people can do.

To me, this a no brainer. We are in desperate times. Young kids just out school can delay their career dreams a few years (as they did in the Depression) to earn some money while helping rebuild the nation’s infrastructure, and it would be a lifeline for older workers who otherwise have few options.

I can’t think of a better way to spend the next “stimulus” now that the federal government has so munificently helped out Wall Street workers.

I’m with Michael on this

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On September 11, in memory of a co-worker he lost on that day, he wrote:

I believe in an America that protects those who are the victims of hate and prejudice. I believe in an America that says you have the right to worship whatever God you have, wherever you want to worship. And I believe in an America that says to the world that we are a loving and generous people and if a bunch of murderers steal your religion from you and use it as their excuse to kill 3,000 souls, then I want to help you get your religion back. And I want to put it at the spot where it was stolen from you.

I’m quoting Michael Moore, of course, that guy who has (and shows) the courage of his convictions.

He makes a great suggestion at the end of his piece quoted above, in which he argues that the mosque community center intended to be built near Ground Zero should be built AT Ground Zero:

I say right now. Let’s each of us make a statement by donating to the building of this community center! It’s a nonprofit, tax-exempt organization and you can donate a dollar or ten dollars (or more) right now through a secure pay pal account by clicking here. I will personally match the first $10,000 raised (forward your PayPal receipt to webguy@michaelmoore.com This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ). If each one of you reading this blog/email donated just a couple of dollars, that would give the center over $6 million, more than what Donald Trump has offered to buy the Imam out. C’mon everyone, let’s pitch in and help those who are being debased for simply wanting to do something good. We could all make a huge statement of love on this solemn day.

I never contribute money to any cause. This time I made an exception.

my poem, in print

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It’s been a long while since I’ve published any of my poetry. It’s been a long time since I’ve written any poetry.

Early last spring I ran across a request for submissions from the Ballard Street Poetry Journal, and I took a chance and submitted one, which was published in the current Summer 2010 issue.

I find the poetry in many journals rather inaccessible, either for reasons of language or subject. But I loved all of the poems in the Ballard Street Poetry Journal. Here’s mine, which appears on Page 21:

The Gravity of Gardens

They gave me a garden the size of a grave,
so I filled it with raucous reminders of sense:
riots of marigold, lavender, sage
rosemary, basil dianthus, rue.
And waving madly above them all
spears of brazen Jerusalem artichoke
that perplexing garden gypsy
that blossoms and burrows,
grows up to nine feet tall, and
in the harsh summer storm
dances her defiance
to the grim arrogance
of gravity.

I need to plant that garden again.

the end of summer

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My daughter grew several different tomato plants from seeds, and they all came up — pear tomatoes, German striped, persimmon, purple, and others I can’t remember the names of. I have been in tomato heaven. I eat them like fruit.

It’s the end of summer now, and the last batch is ripening on the vine despite attacks from tomato horn worms.

I didn’t do the kind of gardening this year that I used to love to do. Too tired, I guess. It’s getting harder and harder to get down on and up from my knees. And, for some reason, a lot of the herbs and flowers I planted in the spring didn’t make it.

In my early married years, before I cultivated a green thumb, my husband used to joke that I killed even plastic plants. Maybe I’ve come full circle.

I am looking forward to autumn. It’s my favorite season. The weather suits me, as do the colors.

It is the end of summer, and I will miss sitting on the canopied swing in our front yard. It has become my favorite place to hang out.

It is the end of summer, and I wonder just how much longer my mother can go on.

stasis

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This is my response to Mag 30 visual prompt at Magpie Tales.

will it rot or not

That’s how I’m feeling about my life right now. I took my bite. So what. I wait for my mother to let go of a life no longer worth living and my son to find a life worth living with passion. And I wonder if my life has been worth living. Will the apple rot or finished being consumed with relish. And does the larger menu matter any more. These are questions that I ask as statements. Maybe the core of this metaphor is that I just don’t know anymore. As Eve found out, sometimes one bite is all you get before being tossed out of Eden.