Sherry Chandler » 2007 » November
From Woody Harrelson’s poem “Thoughts from Within”
prisons over-populated
religion is incorporated
the profit-motive has permeated all activity
we pay our government to let us park on the street
And war is the biggest money-maker of all
we all know missile envy only comes from being small.
Hey, I’ve read worse.
From people who haven’t also starred in Natural Born Killers.
I like these lines:
is like yelling at a puppet
for the way it sings.
Reading a NYTimes profile of Harrelson, who’s long been one of my favorite actors, I discovered that he and his wife run an ecological activism web called Voice Yourself.
We believe all life on earth is sacred. VoiceYourself promotes and inspires individual action to create global momentum towards simple organic living and to restore balance and harmony to our planet.
It’s a pretty neat site.
He’s also got a not-much-publicized role in No Country for Old Men, a movie I think I’m going to have to see in spite of myself.
You can view “Thoughts from Within” as a Flash performance piece.
This post was written by sherry
Rebecca may have her black bear and Gin her healthy possum, but I am content with the small covey of quail who came to spend some time outside my bedroom window. Because it was the north side of the house (shaded) and I was shooting through the window, I only got a clear shot of this guy, looking like a slightly bigger leaf in the lower right-hand corner:
Unless they moved, you could hardly see them even when you knew they were there.
This post was written by sherry
Kentucky’s Department of Transportation Safety is offering a service that might be useful for those of you on the roads this holiday weekend. The Safe Patrol works the major highways (I-75, I-64, Hal Rogers Parkway [what used to be Daniel Boone], etc) to help stranded motorists, remove debris from the roadway, direct traffic after accidents, investigate suspicious items, tag abandoned cars, and just generally try to keep the highways safer.
Free of charge, The Safe Patrol will jump your battery, help you change a tire, or give you some gasoline or oil. They also carry water and blankets. They can do minor repairs but don’t pay for tows.
If you need assistance on the interstate in Kentucky, call 1-877-FOR-KYTC (1-877-367-5982).
This post was written by sherry
In Diane Demorney’s arctic living room, Melrose sat sunk in a shapeless white leather chair that reminded him of an ice floe. He did not like this chair and never had, but it was either this or the settee (Diane herself commanding suzerainty over the long sofa), and if he sat on the settee, he’d have to share it with the cat. Melrose despised Diane’s cat; the feeling (he knew) was mutual. It had squinty golden eyes buried in a mess of soft white fur and an enormous showy tail that it liked to flick in a warning gesture whenever Melrose looked its way.
…He looked around at the room, done so relentlessly in white—carpets, furnishing, slipcovers—that Admiral Byrd would have felt at home. Even the paintings were mysteriously white on white, form sinking into background, redundant against the white walls. Sunlight, in this room, did not bisect carpets in golden rhomboids, or stripe sideboards and walls with delicate lemony fingers. Rather, it flashed and knifed, sparred with mirrors, cut across paintings, looking for a duel. …Diane…stirred the martini jug with a long glass icicle-wand which was full of oil in which hundreds of tiny silver stars were suspended. A sudden flash of sun lit the glass stirrer and moved off in its laser search. Melrose only hoped it would rest its pinpoint beam on the cat. Zap.
…
The house on Ryland Street, only a short distance from the pub, had been their destination. …At the door they were met by a chewed-up black tomcat that looked as if it had just escaped from Borstal. Melrose at first mistook it for a piece of misplaced garden statuary, as it sat there looking scraped, chpped, and dusty.
The cat decided to bristle at the sight of the intruders, the hair along its back standing up like a Mohawk on a Piccadilly Circus punk. Actually (thought Melrose, tilting his head) the resemblance was remarkable.
“You wanna see the warrant? There.” Lasko unrolled the search warrant and held it out to the cat.
“Thank God you were first one in,” said Melrose.
The cat became very starchy, got up and turned its back and swayed out of the hallway.
—Martha Grimes, Rainbow’s End (Knopf, 1995)
This post was written by sherry
I fell to musing while cooking my oatmeal on this dark post-Thanksgiving morning with a dusting of snow on the old Camry —no doubt a dangerous time to muse — about Cheney and Rumsfeld and how they’ve been making mischief in the United States, off and on, for all of my adult lifetime. They have been like avatars of a mischief-making god, personification of the dark forces in our national psyche that can be temporarily vanquished but never destroyed.
My first thought was Coyote, but while Coyote is a trickster and sometimes evil, he is also a creator and a culture hero. One might say he’s emblematic of the Native American’s more forgiving attitude toward ambiguity. I’ve always liked Coyote and feel it’s an insult to compare these men with him. And anyway, Coyote’s tricks often backfire on him. (Hmmmm….)
Loki may be more appropriate: shape-shifter, coward, con-man, and father of monsters.
Or, to come closer to home, Satan, the dark side of the West’s neurotic singularity of a god. Reduced to a fallen angel, or worse, to a pointy-tailed caricature suitable only for potted meat cans, loser in Milton’s culture wars (or was he?), he still cannot be destroyed. Although Jehovah and Satan have become a skewed yin and yang, you can’t have one without the other.
So perhaps in some ways the dark and brooding face of Nixon is a more accurate picture of our national soul than is the bright and shining Kennedy. Perhaps in our huge democracy that is always on the verge of falling into chaos, we in some way need these mischief makers. Maybe they are, in some way, corrective as well as destructive. Or maybe they’re just part of the human condition, that for every Mother Teresa produces also a Jeffrey Dahmer.
Or perhaps we all just think we’re John Wayne when we are in fact Dan Duryea. Or to make that metaphor more feminine, Catherine Hepburn when we’re only Ava Gardner.
Possibly the problem is in our Manichean view of life. Perhaps the more we try to suppress the dark side (sorry), the more destructive it becomes.
Read Hope Mirrlees’ Lud-in-the-Mist.
This post was written by sherry
Thanksgiving Day
Over the river and through the wood,
To Grandfather’s house we go;
The horse knows the way
To carry the sleigh
Through the white and drifted snow.
Over the river and through the wood,
Oh, how the wind does blow!
It stings the toes,
And bites the nose,
As over the ground we go.
Over the river and through the wood,
Trot fast, my dapple gray!
Spring over the ground,
Like a hunting hound,
For this is Thanksgiving-Day.
Over the river and through the wood,
And straight through the barnyard gate!
We seem to go
Extremely slow,
It is so hard to wait!
Over the river and through the wood;
Now Grandmother’s cap I spy!
Hurrah for the fun!
Is the pudding done?
Hurrah for the pumpkin pie!
Lydia Maria Child (February 11, 1802 – July 7, 1880) was an American abolitionist, women’s rights activist, opponent of American expansionism, Indian rights activist, novelist, and journalist.
I don’t know about you, but when I learned to sing this ditty in grade school I had no idea that it even had an author, let alone such a distinguished woman author.
May your holiday be filled with rivers and woods, peace, joy, and plenty.
May you find a bit of Camelot restored.
This post was written by sherry
One more idea for a shopping alternative this week-end, the FairWorks Open House at the offices of the Central Kentucky Committee for Peace and Justice, 112 North Upper in Lexington, on November 24 from 3 - 7 p.m.
From the JusticeList:
FairWorks is a nonprofit fair trade project of the Central Kentucky Council for Peace & Justice. In November and December we will be bringing our fair trade market to houses of worship and other central Kentucky organizations.
FairWorks will be featuring fair trade crafts from UPAVIM / Mayan Hands and 10,000 Villages.
If you’re booked up this weekend, you will find a schedule of upcoming sales at the JusticeList link. If your church or organization would like to schedule a sale, contact Billie Mallory .
This post was written by sherry
I, and I think a good part of the nation, have always been puzzled by how badly the Bush wars went wrong. It was as though no one in the administration took them seriously.
As I may have said before, when Bush first invaded Iraq, my greatest fear was that it would be such an easy success that it would validate the “Bush doctrine” of pre-emptive war and we would, as a nation, just continue to romp and stomp our way around the world.
That did not pan out.
But why?
Over at Tom Dispatch, John Brown has a theory. In his article Too Parochial for Empire, Brown opines that it was never world conquest that drove the Bushies. Or rather, that world conquest was secondary to winning the power struggle inside the bubble that is Washington, D.C. Bush was ignorant and indifferent:
George W. Bush was incapable of having a global vision himself, imperial or otherwise. In the words of commentator William Pfaff, “Bush is happy deciding, even though he knows nothing.” The President’s major foreign-policy decision — to invade Iraq — was certainly not based on any understanding of the global implications of what he was doing (including, conceivably, expanding an empire). It was taken for reasons that still remain unclear, but may have ranged from his tortuous relationship with his father to his desire to portray himself as a decisive commander in chief to the American electorate. Perhaps, to use his words, the former cheerleader frat boy just wanted to “kick ass” overseas to show the media, voters, and possibly even himself, that he was doing something other than sitting in the Oval Office preaching the virtues of compassionate conservatism.
Condi and Colin were incompetent for the jobs they were given:
Given the tabula rasa in Bush’s mind regarding the world outside “the homeland” (a word his administration has regrettably contributed to the American language), it is hardly surprising that he selected as his main foreign policy advisers two people with very limited global visions of their own: Condoleezza Rice as National Security Advisor and, as Secretary of State, Colin Powell. (Rice herself admitted in 2000 that, as a “Europeanist,” “I’ve been pressed to understand parts of the world that have not been part of my scope”; and Powell’s qualifications were based on his military savvy — and loyalty — not his geopolitical perspectives. The general, as Bill Keller of the New York Times reported in 2001, was “a problem solver, not a visionary.”
As became clear after the horror of 9/11 — a foreign policy failure of the first order, if ever there was one, that no “empire” in its right mind would have allowed — Rice and Powell essentially became talking-point briefers…
Which left Cheney and Rumsfeld in charge and they had old scores to settle:
As for the once-dynamic duo who characterized much of this administration — Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (and those clustered around their “offices”) — the only “empire” that really counted for them was the parochial world of Washington, DC, with its lobbyists, bureaucrats, politicians, and assorted supporting think-tankers, all absorbed in their petty turf-wars about who among them would get government money for their minions and projects, overseas or at home. This was the narcissistic province that the Vice President and Secretary of Defense had the urge to dominate with their “unitary executive,” “wartime,” commander-in-chief presidency and the foreign wars that made it all possible. Developments outside the U.S., however, mattered largely to the extent that they helped in the aggrandizement of their own power, their fiefdoms, and those of their cronies, on the banks of the Potomac.
In short, Cheney and Rumsfeld were very smart about doing very stupid things. And so, to misquote Stan Laurel Oliver Hardy,* “here’s another fine mess they’ve gotten us into.”
(These two have a history of getting us into messes that goes clear back to Nixon.)
Read all of this highly readable article. The notion that two men would set the world aflame as a way of consolidating power in D.C. makes sense with this lot but it is almost incomprehensibly shocking.
*Thanks to Lance Mannion for the correction. I never did know which one was which. I meant to check before I clicked the publish button but I forgot. What a revoltin’ development. (And that I do know was William Bendix in The Life of Riley. It certainly describes the last 7 years.)
This post was written by sherry
Windows toward the World announces the Special Fall Poetry Issue of the Dead Mule:
featuring poetry by Dale Wisely, Carter Monroe, Jilly Dybka, Ross White, Leslie Joseph, Evie Shockley, and Tim Peeler and an interview (listed under “Essays”) with Evie Shockley
The cover photo, by Bill Losse, will bring a much-needed smile.
My family contains its fair share of linemen for the utilities companies, but none who climb poles the way Shamash’s “friendly telephone man” does:
The friendly telephone man (who I offer a monthly contribution of “tea money” for keeping my phone lines in order), climbed up, barefoot and without a single safety strap, to fix the phone line right outside my front gate. Not long before I snapped this photo, he was sitting on top of the pole. It’s amazing to watch these climbers navigate the high places.
Every once in a while I hire a climber to harvest the coconuts on my three trees in the garden so that they don’t fall on human heads,
Click through to see the photo. Also a nice one of her oh-so-elegant cat.
On the subject of neat photos, Heraclitean Fire offers a slide show of the ancient sweet chestnuts of Greenwich Park. Treebeards grandfathers, no doubt. They date from about the 18th century.
Alan MacKellar has added some new slide shows. The one of “alternative processes” includes this image of James Baker Hall.
Added: On the subject of remarkable photographs, I don’t know how I failed to draw your attention to this white-breasted nuthatch in mid-flight at Pocahontas County Fare. Rebecca’s fast lens caught the bird between “flaps” of his wings, so he looks perched in mid-air.
Lance Mannion offers an argument why Rudi Giuiliani is The Nastiest Candidate:
Rudy Giuliani does not play well on television.
He may look fine to Republican audiences watching their guys debate, but love is blind. Maybe Dennis Kucinich looks like Cary Grant to his supporters.
Come the general election though, when Rudy starts appearing on TV screens all across America, when he stands on the stage at the debates next to Hillary Clinton—note to Progressives. It’s going to be Hillary, folks. I’m sorry. That’s the way it’s going. Start getting your heads around it.—people are going to look at his long, narrow head, that high bony bald dome, the sunken eyes, the livid skin, and that toothy rictus of a grin and they’re going to say, “Whoa! Who let Death in the room?”
He will frighten children.
And that’s just the beginning!
Added: Building on Lance’s post, P3 riffs on rictus. He has illustrations, since photographs seem to be my theme here, of famous rictuses you will no doubt recognize, so be sure to click through for the whole post:
while I like the directness of rictus, I can’t deny that there’s always been something about the word that just plain creeps me out. Even Merriam-Webster can’t define it without using unpleasant g-words like “a gaping grin or grimace.”
Gag me. No one would ever use the word rictus to describe, say, Molly Ringwald’s adorable pout in “Sixteen Candles.”
We reserve the word for mouths like an unbleeding wound: lipless, ghastly, twisted–and barely concealing teeth like broken glass. Or a decrepit picket fence. Or tombstones.
The point is, when something gets called a rictus, it means we’ve already decided it’s not something we want to let the baby’s fingers anywhere near.
Have Coffee Will Write offers a powerful argument on why Torture and Terrorism Are Not Equivalents:
If only violence on the national scale could be settled using some form of the Marquess of Queensberry rules. If only armies could engage each other on sterile battlefields, far from productive farmland and civilian populations. If only the people who died in wars were adults who chose to take up arms and agreed that their life was more than an acceptable exchange for the liberty and freedom of those they fought to protect.
But that’s not the way we fight wars.
…
In war, the slaughter of children, women and other non-combatants at any time is morally wrong at every level I can conceive of.
But until we are prepared to recognize that a mother cradling her dead child does not care if the child died from a 500-pound bomb dropped by a B-52 or the detonation of 500 lbs of explosive in the trunk and back seat of a Mercedes, and universally condemn both acts as immoral, we will have no standing in the argument.
And to raise our spirits after these arguments about politics and war, Raven’s Shadow offers a poem, Adoni, that begins like this:
I searched for you when I was young
among yellow weeds and oil wells
beyond cliff edges and found you
buried beneath brown leaves
with mushrooms and black earth
Read the rest of this lovely offering.
This post was written by sherry
