Don't Shoot

I appreciate in this order:

Breathing good air, drinking clean water, eating healthy foods, maintaining comfortable body temperature, my beloved family, language, art and technology. Affordable energy's awfully nice, too.

"Nature is a language- can't you read?" Morrissey and The Smiths

e.e. cummings has been a favorite ever since my junior highschool English teacher Mr. Dreyer sketched out one of cummings' more disjunct works on the blackboard and helped us through the maze, after which the path seemed all too clear.

73 Poems, 26

if seventy were young
and death uncommon
(forgiving not divine,
to err inhuman)
or any thine a mine
--dingdong:dongding--
to say would be to sing

if broken hearts were whole
and cowards heroes
(the popular the wise,
a weed a tearose)
and every minus plus
--fare ill:fare well--
a frown would be a smile

if sorrowful were gay
(today tomorrow,
doubting believing and
to lend to borrow)
or any foe a friend
--cry nay:cry yea--
november would be may

that you and i'd be quite
-come such perfection-
another i and you,
is a deduction
which(be it false or true)
disposes me to shoot
dogooding folk on sight



It's well-established that Bush, like Reagan and his father before him, isn't much of a reader. Brother Neil is dyslexic, as is Bush Sr. Our president is not contrite about this condition. He maintains arrogance and cold disinterest instead.

That's why we have a mountain of government debt and in the decades to come even our grandchildren will still be digging out from under it. It's why the wars are going so poorly. It's why the 9/11 attacks, though predicted in a presidential daily briefing, proceeded unmet. It's why the economy has only been good to a very small handful of already obscenely rich people.

Everything is a language, and Bush can't read.