Saturday, August 19, 2006

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.

3 comments:

Eli Blake said...

I actually think he is a little smarter than you are giving him credit for.

There was one time when I interviewed for a job with a large company (many, many years ago) and they asked me a question that could only be interpreted as 'will you be our S.O.B.?' I answered the question truthfully that I would consider doing what they asked in the hypothetical scenario to be unethical. I didn't get the job.

Now, I believe that Reagan really was that ignorant, as you describe. The reason he was so good at getting his point across was because he actually believed what he was saying. Bush, on the other hand, if you have seen him asked a tough question at a press conference, shifts his eyes for a moment, as if he is thinking, 'Well I can't tell the truth about that, so how can I obfuscate the question so that I avoid answering it, or if I have to answer it then I know that I will lie, so how do I phrase the lie so it will sound plausible and fit together with what truth is known and any other lies I've already told on the subject.'

In other words, someone asked him somewhere along the way the 'Will you be our S.O.B.' question, and he said, 'Yes.'

Eli Blake said...

You sure your family is only number 5 on the list? I mean, those other things are nice too, but for example, if one of my kids starts smoking as a teenager I will be very disappointed by it, but I won't kick her (I've only got girls) out of the house because it's interfering with my clean air (though I might ask her to not smoke in the same room I'm in).

shrimplate said...

After airway, breathing, and circulation, sometimes it gets a little dicey for me.

But I do love my (immediate) family and I would do anything for them, and suffer any discomfort if it would give them benefit.