City of Legends

 Yes, inspired by Robert Oppenheimer’s personal translation of the Bhagavad Gita on the occasion of the Trinity test of the first Atom bomb.  We do not need guns and bombs and tanks and napalm and poisons and weaponized diseases to kill.  Only lies.  When we turn Words, with a capital "W" into just "words", we diminish more than a single letter.  We diminish ourselves.  This is dedicated to my friend and brother in poetry Larry Jaffe.

I am become man, the destroyer of Words.
I will bend your thoughts to my own purposes.
I will eat the soul of your dreams.
I will barter for what I want with what you need.
I will justify myself in flags and books and fire
that bleeds into the skies of poorer peoples
and their waters and their lands, that I might prosper.
I will lie to you when there is no need to.
I will fall upon you when peace is the only way.
to resolve the conflict of ideologies and theologies.
I am become man, the destroyer of Words,
who mocks the purposes of a benign God
who takes many forms and facets to teach us
to reach us with the sanity that, in our vanity,
escapes us, rapes us of the innocence of peace.
I strike from the corners and the shadows,
proud of my conceits and deceits, my heart beats
with a black and bitter rhythm fashioned of bile and guile
that I will explain away as necessary to a higher purpose
that I lack the soul to recognize as I kill it with honed irony.

William F. DeVault.  all rights reserved.

Back when I was quite young, early teens, I had a paper route.  Back when alarmist TV shows and paranoia had not yet paralyzed American culture.

My favourite customer was a man I called "The Republican".  I won’t give his real name here.  But I called him "The Republican", because that is what he was.  Deep dipped in the image and label at a time when the Republicans weren’t abusing the Consitution by getting into bed with the Evangelicals. 

We used to have long, complex talks on politics.  I was a Democrat with slight left wing tendencies (I backed Humphrey in 1968).  He felt that you should never vote a straight ticket unless it was Republican. 

He told me once about how his son was an undercover agent for the federal government, busting drug dealers and their suppliers.  He and his wife used to tell me that he was not welcome in their home, as part of his undercover work required he have long hair and look like a drug user and they wouldn’t allow that in their house.  They were proud of his accomplishments, but ashamed of his appearance.

Later on, years later, when I had my brief flirtation with the Republican Party during the Reagan Administration, I though about him.  I never knew what he did for a living, or where he was from or even what church he attended, but I could tell you his political affiliation.  He was The Republican.

My mom called this morning to tell me she saw his obituary in today’s paper.  He was 90.  I wonder if he ever reconciled with his son, ever voted for a Democrat.  I wonder how he weathered Watergate and the dismal failure of Reaganomics (a word not even coined back when we spoke).

But, he was an honorable man, an honest man.  Perhaps a bit primitivist in his motives and attitudes, perhaps looking at the world as a far simpler place than it really was and is, but he was a decent fellow.

Good night, Republican.  Sleep well and dream of a time before Carter and Clinton and Obama.  Your dreams would be my nightmares, and much the reverse.  But I can still thank for, in all the time we spoke of great national and international issues, you never treated me as a 13 year old kid.

That was important.

Here we are again, the horse latitudes of the calendar.  Tax Day!  Yay!  I love giving my money to the government.  Well, am enjoying it more now that I have some confidence the country isn’t being run by a total disaster of a leadership team.

Still trying to do too many things at once.  Better slow down and pick my targets. Ha!  Like that will happen this side of the old folks home.

The comic relief that is my alarm just went off.  I am always up before it.  Sometimes (like today) by more than an hour.  My mind has one gear, I just sometimes hit the clutch for a few hours to let it sleep.

I am putting together a list of the ten most important sites, to my use of the web.

My #10 pick is Real Clear World (www.realclearworld.com), a site that collects news and features from around the world. A sister site to RealClearPolitics, which I became hooked on during the recent Presidential Campaign, this is a superb resource for anyone as into foreign affairs (stop snickering) as I am.

Joe Klein nailed the coffin for the final days of the Bush II (the lesser) presidency in his article in the latest Time, entitled The Lamest of Ducks.

View it here.

With all the America-bashing that occurs in the world, it is nice to once in a while get credit for getting things right.

An editorial in today’s Times of London entitled "A Masterclass in Democracy" that praises the American system and her people in the way this Presidential Election played out was extremely gratifying (yes, be shocked, I regularly read news from other nations…London, Eastern Europe, China, Japan, Paris South America and occasionally even South Africa…I like to know what the unfiltered truth is, as our media does have its biases (even without softcore tabloid Australian billionaires trying to control the definition of "American conservative values" by buying up and/or creating news outlets)).

For the full text of this all-too-kind editorial, see

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/leading_article/article5093551.ece

#1:  If you are an American citizen:  On Tuesday, save yourself ad your friends and neighbors and family.  Vote.  Vote Obama.

#2:  Working hard on a couple of enhancements to my sites, but already a few hours behind.  Sigh.

#3:  Listening to Rick Derringer’s "Still Alive and Well" right now feeds my soul.

#4:  I am profoundly moved by the depth of emotions I have been been witness to in the last few years.  God is good.

#5:  Update on my Grandmother.  Still convalescing.  She has her good days, she has her bad days.

#6:  I will take my rest when it is given, to steal a line from one of my own poems.

For those of you who live in foreign countries, under a rock, or only get information from Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, here’s a quick check on the status of the current candidates for President of What’s Left After Bush Gets Through Screwing Things Permanently Up and Starting Wars with the Muslims, the Chinese and The Russians All At Once.

Barack Obama: Nice guy, Big smile. Will probably get the Democratic nomination. The question is whether the people with the real dirt on him wait until after he is nominated, elected or sworn in before they make their move. His wife is very lovely, but seems to be a little angry. Not quite She-Hulk angry, more like Martha Mitchell angry (for you old timers out there).

John McCain: Nice guy. War hero (although, to be honest, most guys become heroes by taking a hill against overwhelming odds, not getting shot down and forced to rot in North Vietnamese POW Camp that is substantially less hygenic than the restroom at the average service station). Trying hard to be a nice guy and keep the Karl Rove Mindless Zombies of the Right happy. Wouldn’t wish his job on an enemy. Would’ve been Republican nominee is 2000 if not for his own party playing the race-card against his adopted daughter. Bastards.

Hillary Clinton: Tough lady. Big smile. As usual, the more experienced woman who is in line for the job gets leapfrogged by a junior manager because he’s a guy and, in the end, we are more sexist than racist in this country. One in three minorities in this country do not get assaulted at some point in their life, just because they are minorities. One in three women do. I’m writing her name in on Election Day.

Joe Biden: May be named VP running mate to Obama so that rednecks can vote for a white guy. While I am on the topic, will someone explain to me why we allow people flying the Confederate Flag to get on airplanes? They are flying the symbol of an anti-American organization that took hundreds of thousands of lives in a treasonous action against this country. I digress. Hey, wasn’t Biden’s own campaign a decade or so ago derailed by a scandal about plagiarism?

Tom Ridge: May be named VP running mate to McCain so we have someone who doesn’t have to totally cave to the Religious Right on the ticket. Former head of Homeland Security, which still sounds to me like a department under the Politburo, not the US Government. (For the glorious Homeland…)

Evan Bayh: May be named VP running mate to Obama so that Hillary can’t gripe too much, as he was her 1st choice for dance partner. If there is a whiter man on the planet, he’s albino.

Bill Richardson: Nice guy. Hispanic, which may really confuse rednecks if Obama names him as his running mate. Amazing guy, hope he keeps the beard. Was a good friend to the Clintons. Note: Was. Endorsed Obama, may not get invited to the Clinton Christmas Party this year.

Mitt Romney: Too Mormon for the mainstream. Evangelicals who haven’t read the Constitution may throw a fit if McCain asks him to the dance.

Third Party Candidates: Laughing, insanely, here.

It looks like Ralph Nader is going to throw his rumpled, self-important hat back in the ring to run for President. The guy needs to find a nice tree, cut it down, make a center pillar and a crossbar and get someone not nail him to it. He obviously has that strain of senility that manifests itself as a Messiah complex.

His self-indulgent headline grabbing, which initially was for the common good…40 years ago when he was outing the Detroit auto industry’s safety record…now drives him to sabotage national elections because he lacks the fiber to work within the system to accomplish change. In the mean time he allows real issues to go unaddressed so he can feel he still has a voice and a purpose in this world.

Lacking any real shot at winning, he wants to make sure the game is unplayable for others. Or, at least certain others.

I am one of those people who doesn’t hesitate to point out that had he not insisted on this very conduct eight years ago, we might have been spared 9/11, the War in Iraq and an economy that went from record surpluses to record deficits while gas prices tripled. And President Gore might have gotten us a running start on Global Warming action, against a threat that even now may challenge the survival of modern society and the human species.

The two party system is lame, superficial and self-destructive? Yes. Most of the leaders are self-important boobs who either know they are sucking from the common teat rather than get a real job or have deluded themselves into thinking they are making real change and progress while being compromised agents of, at best, inertia.

That Ralphie boy may be about to dive in to a race where he can deny this country its first black or female President isn’t lost on most people. Ralph is prepared to wave his hand-drawn banners of legitimacy and self-delusion, ensuring that the line of white, male Presidents is an unbroken one.

The attitudes of his generation is one of the last real barriers to a better society, where it isn’t astonishing to find women, blacks, Hispanics, or any other historically disenfranchised group playing leadership roles and making sure that issues are addressed that need to be addressed for all Americans.

I have nothing against John McCain, I think he has served this country honorably and well and would make a decent President, certainly better than the one we are about to relegate to the pages of a groaning history. If he is the nominee of his party I will give him a listen. But to place him in office purely because he is a white male shows that the hard work of people of real historical purpose and sacrifice, like Bobby and Jack Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and Susan B. Anthony still has a long way to sink in.

Paint it any way you want. Nader running for President is not progressive. I encourage those of good conscience to not donate to his campaign, to discourage him from doing this again, and from seeking to keep women and blacks in the back of the (now made overseas) bus.

Call me crazy, but the National Rifle Association’s call to the White House to back down on supporting a bill that would allow the Attorney General to ban the sales of weapons to suspected terrorists is incredibly insane. Story

We are willing to put our men and women on the front lines in Iraq to fight and die long after there is any reasonable rationale for their presence, but we want terrorists who may have already infiltrated our shores to have free access to weapons?

Charlton Heston, have you lost your mind?

Well people, in a world where we already have so many laws in place that are never enforced and that are either so outdated or so politically manifest against common sense, we have the latest and greatest: New York City has banned the ‘N-Word’.

It’s not that I don’t find “that word” offensive. I do. That’s the point. It is offensive, but no more than a handful of other words. As a writer, it chills me when a government sees itself able to declare a word or written work as illegal. It speaks to a mindset of social engineering. Of totalitarianism that is so much more offenseive than some redneck idiots who rail against the Taliban but fly a Confederate battle-flag, the symbol of the greatest treasonous betrayal of the United States, resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths.

We live in a backwards world, where politically-correct speech is subversive and deleterious to our moral fiber. I have worked in places where you can get in more trouble for saying “There are people having sex in the hall” than for actually having sex in the hall. The words frighten people. The power of the words frighten people. But if you are afraid of a gun, creating a greater sense of uncertainty by not letting people talk about it makes it more dangerous. Empowering it is foolish.

Laws that are hastily or ignorantly made are counterproductive. I am sure the New York City Council members were all voting out of fear that they’d lose votes in the next election if they didn’t vote for this measure. No sense of right or wrong or the echoes to posterity of this vote, merely a panicked grab for voter base. We outlaw something, we add to its cachet. We need social pressure, not legislated brownshirting.

We need to take the power back from this word, and others like it. We need to judge people by their actions and their hearts, not a word. I realize a lazy person can use a verbiage test to simplify the pigeon-holing required in this overwhelmingly complex media-based society, but all you have to do is look at the political headline sof the day to see how stupid we have become: John McCain is being wrist-slapped for using the word “wasted” for the young men and women who have died protecting George Bush’s machismo-fueled lies in Iraq. It’s okay to kill our sons and daughters, not okay to say the killer is wasting lives.

We have become a nation, and perhaps a world, thanks to craven media moguls and gutless politicans, of people who run from words and waste the political will to deal with real issues of poverty, education, world hunger, war and global warming. Shame on us and shame on the New York City Council for their cowardice and ignorance in the face of real issues. No wonder the third world hates us so much, we are preening buffoons, more concerned with what words we endorse than dealing with any real issues.

Chris Rock has some pithy things to say about the vote and the measure in the article. Damn, Chris always impresses the hell out of me. Read the article. Talk about it. Don’t empower the ignorance.