dd 12/30/08 STATEMENT BY ISRAELI PEACE ACTIVIST URI AVNERY AT PEACE CONGRESS CONVENED IN HONOR OF HIS 85TTH BIRTHDAY IN ISRAEL

THIS IS FROM DEC. 27. AVNERY IS THE GRAND OLD MAN OF THE ISRAELI PEACE MOVEMENT.


A Congress of Peace Seekers
27/12/08 I couldn’t imagine a more enjoy able and exciting birthday.
“Gush Shalom” has acceded to my wish to mark my 85th birthday not with a public celebration, as on my 80th, but with a brain-storming session devoted to the main issues concerning Israel.
At the close of the event, I was given the floor. This is what I said:
DEAR FRIENDS, DEAR PARTNERS,
I have to admit that I am moved. Throughout my long life I have not been pampered with expressions of affection. I am much more used to manifestations of hate. Therefore, please excuse me if I am a bit embarrassed.
PEOPLE ASK ME: How does it feel to be 85?
Well, it is strange. After all, only yesterday I was 42, the youngest member of the Knesset. I don’t feel any older or wiser than I did then.
85 is (in the old Hebrew way of numbering by letters) PH. PH can mean “poh”, here - and yes, I am here and fully intend to remain here for a while to come – first, because I enjoy it, and second, because I still have some things to finish.
PH can also mean peh, mouth – the mouth that enables me to voice my thoughts. I would like to take this opportunity to share with you some of the thoughts that are occupying my mind today.
What is special about 85-year-olds in Israel? First of all, we are the generation that founded the state. As such – I feel – we bear an additional responsibility for what is happening here. If our state is not what we imagined it should be – it’s our duty to act to change it.
AND HERE we face a strange paradox. We are partners in a historic success. And we are partners in a dismal failure.
Perhaps only members of my generation can fully grasp the extend of our success in the transformation of the national consciousness.
Many people ask me: where do I draw my optimism from when the situation becomes very bad, when good people are seized by depression and despair? At such moments I remind myself - and remind the people who listen to me – where we started from. I bring this up again and again for those who did not live through it, and those who have forgotten:
On the morrow of that war, the ‘48 war, when some of us said that there exists a Palestinian people and that we must make peace with them, we were a tiny handful here and in the whole world. We were laughed at. There are no Palestinians, we were told. “There is no such thing as a Palestinian people!” Golda Meir was still asserting much later.
Is there anyone today who denies the existence of the Palestinian people?
We argued that in order to achieve peace, a Palestinian state must come into being. They laughed at us. What? Why? There is Jordan. There is Egypt. There are 22 Arab states. That’s enough!
Today it is a world-wide consensus – two states for two peoples.
We said that we must talk with the enemy, and the enemy was then the PLO. Four cabinet ministers demanded that I should be put on trial for high treason when I met with Yasser Arafat in Beirut during the siege. All four of them later met with Arafat, and the State of Israel signed official treaties with the PLO.
True, the treaties were not implemented and did not lead to peace. But the mutual recognition between Israel and the PLO, between Israel and the Palestinian people, became a fact. That was a revolution, and it cannot be reversed.
Today we are saying: we must talk with Hamas. Hamas is an integral part of the Palestinian reality. And this idea, too, is gaining ground.
What an uproar we caused when we said that Jerusalem must become the capital of the two states! Today almost everybody knows that this must happen, that it will happen.
I have devoted 60 years of my life to this struggle, and it is still in full swing. But we have defeated the idea of a Greater Israel and put forward the alternative of the two states, which has carried conviction in Israel and throughout the world. So much so, that even those in the successive Israeli governments who strongly oppose the idea are now compelled to pretend to support it in order to attract votes.
Think about this when you feel despair. Look at the whole picture, not only at the nearest small part of it.
BUT AS BIG as our victory is our defeat.
It is enough to look at these coming elections: the three big parties talk almost the same language, and not one of them puts forward a plan for peace.
There are small parties which say good and honest things, but at this juncture we simply need more than that. What is lacking is a major political force that is ready to come to power in order to make peace.
It is quite clear that the results of this coming election will be bad – and the only question is whether they will be just bad, or very bad, or even worse.
Why is this happening? There are many reasons, many pretexts. We criticize – and rightly so - many things, the media, the education system, all our successive governments, the President of the United States, all the world.
But I miss one criticism – the criticism of ourselves.
My father used to tell me: if the situation is bad, the first thing to do is to ask yourself if you are alright. So I am asking: Am I alright? Are we alright?
Yes, we have voiced the right ideas. Our ideas have won. But what have we done to realize these ideas in practice, on the political battlefield?
Politics is a matter of power. What have we done to create a progressive political force in Israel? How did it happen that the Left, the camp of peace and progress, has almost been eradicated from the political map? Why don’t we have political power, why don’t we have, for example, even one newspaper, radio or TV station? How did the Israeli Left lose, in the last generation, all its levers of power?
We in the peace camp include many wonderful men and women, who confront the army every week in the fight against the Wall, who monitor the checkpoints, who refuse to serve in the occupation army, who fight against the occupation in dozens of ways. Many of us, of all ages, take part in these actions.
But while we stand and protest, the settlers rush ahead. Another goat and another dunam (1000 square meters), another hill and another outpost. Sometimes I, too, have the feeling that the dogs bark and the caravan moves on – and I am not content with being the dog. We chase the mosquitoes, but the swamp that produces the mosquitoes gets bigger and bigger.
The swamp is political. Only a political force can drain it. In other words: only a force that can confront the ruling powers, influence the decisions of the government and the Knesset.
That is a historic failure, and we bear the responsibility for it.
IF I may be permitted to voice a birthday wish: the day after the elections I would like us to start thinking about the next elections.
We have to think anew. From the ground up. Examine everything we have done up to now and find out where we went wrong.
Why did we not succeed in convincing enough of the young, of the Oriental Jewish community, of the immigrants from Russia, of the Arab community in Israel, of the moderate religious sector – that there is somebody to talk with, that it is possible to bring about change, that indeed – we can! Why did we not succeed in touching the heart of the young generation that is disgusted by politics – by the politics they know?
What is needed is something completely new, a new act of creation. I would say: we must prepare the ground for an Israeli Obama.
Obama means: to kindle hope where there was no hope before. To demand a change from the foundations up and believe that it is possible to bring about this change. To ignite the enthusiasm of masses of young people for a message that stirs the heart, a message of ending the occupation, of social justice, of caring for the planet. The longing for a different system – secular, just, decent, seeking peace.
The new message must address the mind and the heart, speak to the emotions and not only to the intellect. It must arouse again the idealism that is hiding in many a heart and dare not show its face.
The great obstacle to such an explosion is despair. It is so much easier to despair. So much more comfortable. It doesn’t demand anything. It is easier to say that everything is lost. That they have stolen our state. But pessimism, as is well known, does not give birth to anything, it just leads to internal or external emigration.
I refuse to be pessimistic. In my 85 years I have seen too many unexpected, surprising, amazing, things – both good and bad – for me not to believe in the unexpected. Obama was unexpected, and here it happened before our very eyes. The fall of the Berlin wall was unexpected, and nobody could even have imagined it a moment before it happened. Even the victory of the Greens in the recent municipal election in Tel-Aviv was like that.
I WANT to propose the start of a new endeavor a day after the elections. I would like the best of the intellectuals and the peace activists, the social activists and the fighters for the environment to gather and start thinking together, in order to bring about the Israeli miracle.
Perhaps there should be a grand congress of those who want change, a Sanhedrin of peace and human rights activists, a kind of alternative Knesset.
From the heights of my 85 years I want to call all those to whom our future here is close to the heart, Jews and Arabs, and especially the young, to mobilize for a joint effort to prepare the ground for the big change, for the Other Israel, for a state where it will be fun to live, an Israel we can be proud of.
This is not a game that can be played between existing organizations, but a completely new political creation, that will speak a new language, that will bring a new message.
I believe that this will happen, if not tomorrow then the day after. I wish for myself, and for all of you present in this hall, that we shall see it with our own eyes, that we shall be partners, that we shall be able to say: we have succeeded, we are entrusting the state to good hands.
AND NOW I want to express my heartfelt thanks to all of you, my friends, who have come to mark my birthday with me by exchanging views and debating the issues that are so important to all of us.
Heartfelt thanks to the moderators and the speakers, who have bared the issues for us, to the organizers of this beautiful event, to the members of Gush Shalom who made it possible. Thanks to all of you, who have come from near and afar, and thanks for the good wishes you have showered on me.
I couldn’t imagine a more enjoyable and exciting birthday. Thank you.

BLOG OF THESE POSTS CAN BE FOUND AT http://papamousedailydose.blogspot.com/

12/23/08 DAILY DOSE lyrics to "If I ever leave this wold alive," by FLOGGING MOLLY

If I Ever Leave This World Alive lyrics
If I ever leave this world alive
I'll thank for all the things you did in my life
If I ever leave this world alive
I'll come back down and sit beside your
feet tonight

Wherever I am you'll always be
More than just a memory
If I ever leave this world alive
If I ever leave this world alive
I'll take on all the sadness
That I left behind
If I ever leave this world alive
The madness that you feel will soon subside

So in a word don't shed a tear
I'll be here when it all gets weird
If I ever leave this world alive

So when in doubt just call my name
Just before you go insane
If I ever leave this world
Hey I may never leave this world
But if I ever leave this world alive
She says I'm okay; I'm alright,
Though you have gone from my life
You said that it would,
Now everything should be all right
She says I'm okay; I'm alright,
Though you have gone from my life
You said that it would,
Now everything should be all right
Yeah should be alright

DD 12/16/08 Song by Marie Summerwood

The Syracuse Community Choir had our Winter Solstice conert, this past Saturday night. We sang this sweet little song by my dear friend Marie Summerwood.

Dark of December by Marie Summerwood


We had a little dream in the dark of December
A magical thing and sweet to remember
We had a little dream in the dark of December
A magical thing and sweet to remember

And sing, and sing, light up our hearts and sing
And sing, and sing, we can do anything.

We heard a little bird in the dark of December
A magical thing and sweet to remember
We heard a little bird in the dark of December
A magical thing and sweet to remember

And sing, and sing, light up our hearts and sing
And sing, and sing, we can do anything.

We lit a little candle in the dark of December
A magical thing and sweet to remember
We lit a little candle in the dark of December
A magical thing and sweet to remember

And sing, and sing, light up our hearts and sing
And sing, and sing, we can do anything.

We sang a little song in the dark of December
A magical thing and sweet to remember
We sang a little song in the dark of December
A magical thing and sweet to remember

And sing, and sing, light up our hearts and sing
And sing, and sing, we can do anything.

NOTHING LIGHTHEARTED TODAY... DD 12/2/08

HERE'S A GREAT ARTICLE ON OBAMA'S CABINET CHOICES

Barack Obama's Kettle of Hawks
Monday 01 December 2008
»
by: Jeremy Scahill, The Guardian UK
Barack Obama's national security team has been called a cast of rivals. (Photo: Reuters)The absence of a solid anti-war voice on Obama's national security team means that US foreign policy isn't going to change.
Barack Obama has assembled a team of rivals to implement his foreign policy. But while pundits and journalists speculate endlessly on the potential for drama with Hillary Clinton at the state department and Bill Clinton's network of shady funders, the real rivalry that will play out goes virtually unmentioned. The main battles will not be between Obama's staff, but rather against those who actually want a change in US foreign policy, not just a staff change in the war room.
When announcing his foreign policy team on Monday, Obama said: "I didn't go around checking their voter registration." That is a bit hard to believe, given the 63-question application to work in his White House. But Obama clearly did check their credentials, and the disturbing truth is that he liked what he saw.
The assembly of Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, Susan Rice and Joe Biden is a kettle of hawks with a proven track record of support for the Iraq war, militaristic interventionism, neoliberal economic policies and a worldview consistent with the foreign policy arch that stretches from George HW Bush's time in office to the present.
Obama has dismissed suggestions that the public records of his appointees bear much relevance to future policy. "Understand where the vision for change comes from, first and foremost," Obama said. "It comes from me. That's my job, to provide a vision in terms of where we are going and to make sure, then, that my team is implementing." It is a line the president-elect's defenders echo often. The reality, though, is that their records do matter.
We were told repeatedly during the campaign that Obama was right on the premiere foreign policy issue of our day - the Iraq war. "Six years ago, I stood up and opposed this war at a time when it was politically risky to do so," Obama said in his September debate against John McCain. "Senator McCain and President Bush had a very different judgment." What does it say that, with 130 members of the House and 23 in the Senate who voted against the war, Obama chooses to hire Democrats who made the same judgement as Bush and McCain?
On Iraq, the issue that the Obama campaign described as "the most critical foreign policy judgment of our generation", Biden and Clinton not only supported the invasion, but pushed the Bush administration's propaganda and lies about Iraqi WMDs and fictitious connections to al-Qaida. Clinton and Obama's hawkish, pro-Israel chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, still refuse to renounce their votes in favour of the war. Rice, who claims she opposed the Iraq war, didn't hold elected office and was not confronted with voting for or against it. But she did publicly promote the myth of Iraq's possession of WMDs, saying in the lead up to the war that the "major threat" must "be dealt with forcefully". Rice has also been hawkish on Darfur, calling for "strik[ing] Sudanese airfields, aircraft and other military assets".
It is also deeply telling that, of his own free will, Obama selected President Bush's choice for defence secretary, a man with a very disturbing and lengthy history at the CIA during the cold war, as his own. While General James Jones, Obama's nominee for national security adviser, reportedly opposed the Iraq invasion and is said to have stood up to the neocons in Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon, he did not do so publicly when it would have carried weight. Time magazine described him as "the man who led the Marines during the run-up to the war - and failed to publicly criticise the operation's flawed planning". Moreover, Jones, who is a friend of McCain's, has said a timetable for Iraq withdrawal, "would be against our national interest".
But the problem with Obama's appointments is hardly just a matter of bad vision on Iraq. What ultimately ties Obama's team together is their unified support for the classic US foreign policy recipe: the hidden hand of the free market, backed up by the iron fist of US militarism to defend the America First doctrine.
Obama's starry-eyed defenders have tried to downplay the importance of his cabinet selections, saying Obama will call the shots, but the ruling elite in this country see it for what it is. Karl Rove, "Bush's Brain", called Obama's cabinet selections, "reassuring", which itself is disconcerting, but neoconservative leader and former McCain campaign staffer Max Boot summed it up best. "I am gobsmacked by these appointments, most of which could just as easily have come from a President McCain," Boot wrote. The appointment of General Jones and the retention of Gates at defence "all but puts an end to the 16-month timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, the unconditional summits with dictators and other foolishness that once emanated from the Obama campaign."
Boot added that Hillary Clinton will be a "powerful" voice "for 'neoliberalism' which is not so different in many respects from 'neoconservativism.'" Boot's buddy, Michael Goldfarb, wrote in The Weekly Standard, the official organ of the neoconservative movement, that he sees "certainly nothing that represents a drastic change in how Washington does business. The expectation is that Obama is set to continue the course set by Bush in his second term."
There is not a single, solid anti-war voice in the upper echelons of the Obama foreign policy apparatus. And this is the point: Obama is not going to fundamentally change US foreign policy. He is a status quo Democrat. And that is why the mono-partisan Washington insiders are gushing over Obama's new team. At the same time, it is also disingenuous to act as though Obama is engaging in some epic betrayal. Of course these appointments contradict his campaign rhetoric of change. But move past the speeches and Obama's selections are very much in sync with his record and the foreign policy vision he articulated on the campaign trail, from his pledge to escalate the war in Afghanistan to his "residual force" plan in Iraq to his vow to use unilateral force in Pakistan to defend US interests to his posturing on Iran. "I will always keep the threat of military action on the table to defend our security and our ally Israel," Obama said in his famed speech at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee last summer. "Sometimes, there are no alternatives to confrontation."
--------
Jeremy Scahill pledges to be the same journalist under an Obama administration that he was during Bill Clinton and George Bush's presidencies. He is the author of "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army" and is a frequent contributor to The Nation and Democracy Now! He is a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at the Nation Institute.

November 25, 2008 - Tuesday DD - A Pirate Poem by the Great McGonagall

CAPTAIN TEACH ALIAS "BLACK BEARD"
by William McGonagall

Edward Teach was a native of Bristol, and sailed from that port
On board a privateer, in search of sport,
As one of the crew, during the French War in that station,
And for personal courage he soon gained his Captain's approbation.

'Twas in the spring of 1717, Captain Harnigold and Teach sailed from Providence
For the continent of America, and no further hence;
And in their way captured a vessel laden with flour,
Which they put on board their own vessels in the space of an hour.

They also seized two other vessels and took some gallons of wine,
Besides plunder to a considerable value, and most of it most costly design;
And after that they made a prize of a large French Guinea-man,
Then to act an independent part Teach now began.

But the news spread throughout America, far and near,
And filled many of the inhabitants' hearts with fear;
But Lieutenant Maynard with his sloops of war directly steered,
And left James River on the 17th November in quest of Black Beard,

And on the evening of the 21st came in sight of the pirate;
And when Black Beard spied his sloops he felt elate.
When he saw the sloops sent to apprehend him,
He didn't lose his courage, but fiendishly did grin;

And told his men to cease from drinking and their tittle-tattle,
Although he had only twenty men on board, and prepare for battle.
In case anything should happen to him during the engagement,
One of his men asked him, who felt rather discontent,

Whether his wife knew where he had buried his pelf,
When he impiously replied that nobody knew but the devil and himself.
In the Morning Maynard weighed and sent his boat to sound,
Which, coming near the pirate, unfortunately ran aground;

But Maynard lightened his vessel of the ballast and water,
Whilst from the pirates' ship small shot loudly did clatter.
But the pirates' small shot or slugs didn't Maynard appal,
He told his men to take their cutlasses and be ready upon his call;

And to conceal themselves every man below,
While he would remain at the helm and face the foe.
Then Black Beard cried, "They're all knocked on the head,"
When he saw no hand upon deck he thought they were dead;

Then Black Beard boarded Maynard'a sloop without dismay,
But Maynard's men rushed upon deck, then began the deadly fray.
Then Black Beard and Maynard engaged sword in hand,
And the pirate fought manfully and made a bold stand;

And Maynard with twelve men, and Black Beard with fourteen,
Made the most desperate and bloody conflict that ever was seen.
At last with shots and wounds the pirate fell down dead,
Then from his body Maynard severed the pirate's head,

And suspended it upon his bowsprit-end,
And thanked God who so mercifully did him defend.
Black Beard derived his name from his long black beard,
Which terrified America more than any comet that had ever appeared;

But, thanks be to God, in this age we need not be afeared,
Of any such pirates as the inhuman Black Beard.

Daily Dose 11/12/08 IN OU TIME OF JOY, SOBER OBSERVATIONS BY A GEAT UUGUAYAN AUTHOR

Subject: Eduardo Galeano: Hopes and Fears
Eduardo Galeano: Hopes and FearsThe Progressive posted November 7, 2008

http://www.progressive.org/mag/galeano110708.html

Hopes and Fears
by Eduardo Galeano

Once in office, will Obama prove that his bellicose threatsagainst Iran and Pakistan were just words spoken to lure ina certain category of voter during the election? Let's hopeso. And let's hope he isn't for a moment tempted to repeatthe exploits of George W. Bush. After all, Obama had thedignity to oppose the war in Iraq while the Republican andDemocratic parties cheered the announcement of thisbloodbath.

During his campaign, "leadership" was the most frequentlyused word in Obama's speeches.

As President, will he continue to believe that his countrywas chosen to save the world, a toxic idea that he shareswith almost all of his colleagues? Will he continue toassert that the U.S. is the leader of the world and believein its messianic mission to command?

Let's hope that the current crisis, which is shaking theimperial foundations, will at least serve to provide theincoming government with a healthy dose of realism andhumility.

Will Obama accept that racism is permissible when practicedagainst countries that his country invades? Is it notracism to meticulously tally the deaths of the invaders ofIraq while ignoring with Olympian arrogance the far largernumber of Iraqi dead? Isn't it racist that the world hasfirst, second, and third class citizens and first, second,and third class dead?

Obama's victory was universally celebrated as a victory inthe battle against racism. Let us hope that from his firstacts as President he accepts and lives up to this beautifulresponsibility.

Will the Obama Administration confirm yet again thatDemocrat and Republican are two names for the same party?

Let us hope that the will for change that these electionshave consecrated is more than just a promise and a hope.May the new Administration have the courage to break withthe tradition of the single party disguised as two that atthe hour of truth behave almost identically while theypretend to be fighting one another.

Will Obama make good on his promise to close the sinisterprison at Guantanamo?

Let us hope so, and that he will end the sinister blockadeof Cuba.

Will Obama continue to believe that it is a good idea tobuild a wall along the Mexican border to keep Mexicans fromcrossing into the US., while vast sums of money move acrosswithout ever showing a passport?

During the campaign Obama never candidly discussed thesubject of immigration. Let us hope that from today on, nolonger having to worry about losing votes, he will be ableand willing to abandon this idea of the wall--which wouldbe far longer and more shameful than the Berlin Wall--andindeed all walls that violate people's freedom of movement.

Once President, will Obama, who supported the recent giftof $700 billion to the banking industry, continue the usualpractice of privatizing profits while socializing losses?

I fear that he will, though I hope that he won't.

Will Obama sign and abide by the Kyoto agreement, or willhe continue to allow the biggest polluter on the planet topollute with impunity? Will he govern for people, or forautomobiles? Will he shift the devastating course of a wayof life in which the few steal the destiny of the many?

I fear he won't, though I hope he will.

Will Obama, the first black President of the United States,realize the dream of Martin Luther King, or the nightmareof Condoleezza Rice?

This White House, which is now his house, was built with the labor of black slaves. Let's hope he never forgets that.

[Eduardo Galeano, Uruguayan writer and journalist, is author of Open Veins of Latin America and Memories of Fire.]

[IN HONOR OF OUR BELOVED ELECTORAL PROCESS, I WANTED TO SEND OUT A PIRATE SONG FOR ELECTION DAY... NOT A REAL PIRATE SONG BUT MY FAVOITE ONE.]

Stan Rogers - Barrett's Privateers Lyrics Album:

Oh, the year was 1778, HOW I WISH I WAS IN SHERBROOKE NOW!
A letter of marque came from the king,
To the scummiest vessel I'd ever seen,God damn them all!
I was told we'd cruise the seas for American gold
We'd fire no guns-shed no tears
Now I'm a broken man on a Halifax pierThe last of Barrett's Privateers.

Oh, Elcid Barrett cried the town, HOW I WISH I WAS IN SHERBROOKE NOW!
For twenty brave men all fishermen whowould make for him the Antelope's crew
God damn them all!I was told
we'd cruise the seas for American gold
We'd fire no guns-shed no tears
Now I'm a broken man on a Halifax pierThe last of Barrett's Privateers.

The Antelope sloop was a sickening sight,HOW I WISH I WAS IN SHERBROOKE NOW!
She'd a list to the port and and her sails in rags
And the cook in scuppers with the staggers and the jagsGod damn them all!
I was told we'd cruise the seas for American gold
We'd fire no guns-shed no tearsNow I'm a broken man on a Halifax pier
The last of Barrett's Privateers.

On the King's birthday we put to sea, HOW I WISH I WAS IN SHERBROOKE NOW!
We were 91 days to Montego BayPumping like madmen all the wayGod damn them all!
I was told we'd cruise the seas for American gold
We'd fire no guns-shed no tearsNow I'm a broken man on a Halifax pier
The last of Barrett's Privateers.
On the 96th day we sailed again, HOW I WISH I WAS IN SHERBROOKE NOW!
When a bloody great Yankee hove in sight
With our cracked four pounders we made to fightGod damn them all!
I was told we'd cruise the seas for American goldWe'd fire no guns-shed no tears
Now I'm a broken man on a Halifax pierThe last of Barrett's Privateers.

The Yankee lay low down with gold, HOW I WISH I WAS IN SHERBROOKE NOW!
She was broad and fat and loose in the staysBut to catch her took the Antelope two whole daysGod damn them all!
I was told we'd cruise the seas for American gold
We'd fire no guns-shed no tearsNow I'm a broken man on a Halifax pier
The last of Barrett's Privateers.

Then at length we stood two cables away, HOW I WISH I WAS IN SHERBROOKE NOW!
Our cracked four pounders made an awful din
But with one fat ball the Yank stove us inGod damn them all!
I was told we'd cruise the seas for American gold
We'd fire no guns-shed no tearsNow I'm a broken man on a Halifax pier
The last of Barrett's Privateers.
The Antelope shook and pitched on her side, HOW I WISH I WAS IN SHERBROOKE NOW!
Barrett was smashed like a bowl of eggsAnd the Maintruck carried off both me legsGod damn them all!
I was told we'd cruise the seas for American gold
We'd fire no guns-shed no tearsNow I'm a broken man on a Halifax pier
The last of Barrett's Privateers.

So here I lay in my 23rd year, HOW I WISH I WAS IN SHERBROOKE NOW!
It's been 6 years since we sailed away
And I just made Halifax yesterdayGod damn them all!
I was told we'd cruise the seas for American gold
We'd fire no guns-shed no tears
Now I'm a broken man on a Halifax pierThe last of Barrett's Privateers.

DD 10/29/08 Poem by my hero, the Great McGonagall

THE TAY BRIDGE DISASTER
by William McGonagall

Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv'ry Tay!
Alas! I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember'd for a very long time.

'Twas about seven o'clock at night,
And the wind it blew with all its might,
And the rain came pouring down,
And the dark clouds seem'd to frown,
And the Demon of the air seem'd to say-
"I'll blow down the Bridge of Tay."

When the train left Edinburgh
The passengers' hearts were light and felt no sorrow,
But Boreas blew a terrific gale,
Which made their hearts for to quail,
And many of the passengers with fear did say-
"I hope God will send us safe across the Bridge of Tay."

But when the train came near to Wormit Bay,
Boreas he did loud and angry bray,
And shook the central girders of the Bridge of Tay
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember'd for a very long time.

So the train sped on with all its might,
And Bonnie Dundee soon hove in sight,
And the passengers' hearts felt light,
Thinking they would enjoy themselves on the New Year,
With their friends at home they lov'd most dear,
And wish them all a happy New Year.

So the train mov'd slowly along the Bridge of Tay,
Until it was about midway,
Then the central girders with a crash gave way,
And down went the train and passengers into the Tay!
The Storm Fiend did loudly bray,
Because ninety lives had been taken away,
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember'd for a very long time.

As soon as the catastrophe came to be known
The alarm from mouth to mouth was blown,
And the cry rang out all o'er the town,
Good Heavens! the Tay Bridge is blown down,
And a passenger train from Edinburgh,
Which fill'd all the peoples hearts with sorrow,
And made them for to turn pale,
Because none of the passengers were sav'd to tell the tale
How the disaster happen'd on the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember'd for a very long time.

It must have been an awful sight,
To witness in the dusky moonlight,
While the Storm Fiend did laugh, and angry did bray,
Along the Railway Bridge of the Silv'ry Tay,
Oh! ill-fated Bridge of the Silv'ry Tay,
I must now conclude my lay
By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay,
That your central girders would not have given way,
At least many sensible men do say,
Had they been supported on each side with buttresses,
At least many sensible men confesses,
For the stronger we our houses do build,
The less chance we have of being killed.

Tuesday DD 10/21/08 Poem by William Stafford

Traveling Through The Dark

Traveling through the dark I found a deer
dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.
It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:
that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.

By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car
and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing;
she had stiffened already, almost cold.
I dragged her off; she was large in the belly.

My fingers touching her side brought me the reason--
her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,
alive, still, never to be born.
Beside that mountain road I hesitated.

The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;
under the hood purred the steady engine.
I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;
around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.
I thought hard for us all--my only swerving--,
then pushed her over the edge into the river.

William Stafford

DD 10/14/08 Broadside ballad THE RAT-CATCHER'S DAUGHTER

Broadside ballad published in mid 1800s
Transcription
THE
RAT-CATCHER'S
DAUGHTER.
In Westminster, not long ago,
There lived a rat-catcher's daughter-
She was not born in Westminster,
But on t'other side of the water.
Her father kill'd rats, and she sold sprats;
All round and over the water,
And the gentlefolks they all bought sprats
Of the pretty rat-catcher's daughter.
Of the pretty, &c.

She wore no hat upon her head,
No cap, or dandy bonnet-
Her hair it hung about her neck,
Just like a bunch of carrots,
If she cried sprats in Westminster,
She'd such a loud sweet voice, sirs,
You might hear her all down Parliamentstreet,
As far as Charing Cross, sirs.
As far, &c.

The rich and great came far and near,
To marry her all sought her,
But at friends and foes she cock'd her nose,
Did the pretty rat-catcher's daughter.
For there was a man cried lily white sand,
In Cupid's net had caught her,
And over head and ears in love,
Was the pretty ratcatcher's daughter.
Was the, &c,

Now lily white sand so run in her head,
When coming along the Strand, sirs-
She forgot she'd got sprats, so 'tis Said,
And cried, "buy my lily white sand O!"
The folks amaz'd all thought her craz'd,
All along the strand O-
To hear a girl with sprats on her head,
Cry, "buy my lily white sand, O!"
Cry, &c.

The rat catcher's daughter so run in his head,
He didn't know what he was arter-
'Stead of crying, buy my lily white sand,
Cried, "d'ye want any rat-catcher's daugh-ter?"
The donkey cock'd his ears and bray'd-
Folks wonder'd what he was arter-
To hear a lily white sand-man cry,"
Do you want any rat-catcher's daughter?"
Do you, &c.

Now they agree'd to married be
Upon the Easter Sunday-
But the rat catcher's daughter had a dream,
She shouldn't be alive on the Monday,
To buy some sprats once more she went,
And tumbled into the water-
And down to the bottom, all cover'd with mud,
Went the pretty rat-catcher's daughter.
Went, &c.

When the lily white sand-man heard the news,
Both his eyes run down with water-
Says he, " in love, I'll constant prove-
Blow me if I live long arter!"
So he cut his throat with a bit of glass,
And stabb'd his donkey arter,
So donkey and lily white sand-man died
Through love of the rat-catcher's daughter.
Through, &c.

DD 10/7/08 THEY'RE MOVING FATHER'S GRAVE TO BUILD A SEWER

Here's an old favorite British drinking song. For some reason, it kept unning through my head during the Obama Mc Cain debate tonight.

They're moving father's grave to build a sewer
They're moving it regardless of expense.
They're moving his remains to lay down nine-inchdrains
To irrigate some rich bloke's residence.

Now what's the use of having a religion?
If when you're dead you cannot get some peace
'Cause some high society twit wants a pipeline for his shit
They won't let poor old Daddy rest in peace...

Now father in his life was not a quitter
And I'm sure that he'll not be a quitter now.
And in his winding sheet, he will haunt that shit-house seat
And only let them go when he'll allow.

Now won't there be some bleedin' constipation,
And won't those city toffs begin to rave!
But it's no more than they deserve, 'cause they hadthe bleedin' nerve
To muck about a British workman's grave.

Tuesday's Daily Dose 9/23/08 THE MOON'S THE NORTH WIND'S COOKY

This poem is in my all-time favorite anthology, which my mother read to me from though my entire childhood. The book is called Silver Pennies, and it was edited by Blanche Jennings Thompson, and published by MacMillan in 1927.If you can find a copy get it! It's filled with poems about fairies, and about children in touch with the world's magic.Last time I looked on line, used copies were easily findable.


THE MOON'S THE NORTH WIND'S COOKY
[What the Little Girl Said]
The Moon's the North Wind's Cooky.
He bites it,day by day,
Until there's but a rim of scraps
That crumble all away.

The South Wind is a baker.
He kneads clouds in his den.
And bakes a crisp new moon that... greedy
North...Wind...eats...again!

--Vachel Lindsay

DD 9/16/08 TIM WISE THIS IS YOUR NATION ON WHITE PRIVILEGE

Date: Mon, 15 Sep 2008 From: news@freedomarchives.orgSubject: [News] This is Your Nation on White Privilege
This is Your Nation on White Privilege
September, 14 2008
By Tim Wise
For those who still can't grasp the concept of white privilege, or who are constantly looking for some easy-to-understand examples of it, perhaps this list will help.

White privilege is when you can get pregnant at seventeen like Bristol Palin and everyone is quick to insist that your life and that of your family is a personal matter, and that no one has a right to judge you or your parents, because "every family has challenges," even as black and Latino families with similar "challenges" are regularly typified as irresponsible, pathological and arbiters of social decay.

White privilege is when you can call yourself a "fuckin' redneck," like Bristol Palin's boyfriend does, and talk about how if anyone messes with you, you'll "kick their fuckin' ass," and talk about how you like to "shoot shit" for fun, and still be viewed as a responsible, all-American boy (and a great son-in-law to be) rather than a thug.

White privilege is when you can attend four different colleges in six years like Sarah Palin did (one of which you basically failed out of, then returned to after making up some coursework at a community college), and no one questions your intelligence or commitment to achievement, whereas a person of color who did this would be viewed as unfit for college, and probably someone who only got in in the first place because of affirmative action.

White privilege is when you can claim that being mayor of a town smaller than most medium-sized colleges, and then Governor of a state with about the same number of people as the lower fifth of the island of Manhattan, makes you ready to potentially be president, and people don't all piss on themselves with laughter, while being a black U.S. Senator, two-term state Senator, and constitutional law scholar, means you're "untested."

White privilege is being able to say that you support the words "under God" in the pledge of allegiance because "if it was good enough for the founding fathers, it's good enough for me," and not be immediately disqualified from holding office--since, after all, the pledge was written in the late 1800s and the "under God" part wasn't added until the 1950s--while believing that reading accused criminals and terrorists their rights (because, ya know, the Constitution, which you used to teach at a prestigious law school requires it), is a dangerous and silly idea only supported by mushy liberals.

White privilege is being able to be a gun enthusiast and not make people immediately scared of you. White privilege is being able to have a husband who was a member of an extremist political party that wants your state to secede from the Union, and whose motto was "Alaska first," and no one questions your patriotism or that of your family, while if you're black and your spouse merely fails to come to a 9/11 memorial so she can be home with her kids on the first day of school, people immediately think she's being disrespectful.

White privilege is being able to make fun of community organizers and the work they do--like, among other things, fight for the right of women to vote, or for civil rights, or the 8-hour workday, or an end to child labor--and people think you're being pithy and tough, but if you merely question the experience of a small town mayor and 18-month governor with no foreign policy expertise beyond a class she took in college--you're somehow being mean, or even sexist.
White privilege is being able to convince white women who don't even agree with you on any substantive issue to vote for you and your running mate anyway, because all of a sudden your presence on the ticket has inspired confidence in these same white women, and made them give your party a "second look."

White privilege is being able to fire people who didn't support your political campaigns and not be accused of abusing your power or being a typical politician who engages in favoritism, while being black and merely knowing some folks from the old-line political machines in Chicago means you must be corrupt.

White privilege is being able to attend churches over the years whose pastors say that people who voted for John Kerry or merely criticize George W. Bush are going to hell, and that the U.S. is an explicitly Christian nation and the job of Christians is to bring Christian theological principles into government, and who bring in speakers who say the conflict in the Middle East is God's punishment on Jews for rejecting Jesus, and everyone can still think you're just a good church-going Christian, but if you're black and friends with a black pastor who has noted (as have Colin Powell and the U.S. Department of Defense) that terrorist attacks are often the result of U.S. foreign policy and who talks about the history of racism and its effect on black people, you're an extremist who probably hates America.

White privilege is not knowing what the Bush Doctrine is when asked by a reporter, and then people get angry at the reporter for asking you such a "trick question," while being black and merely refusing to give one-word answers to the queries of Bill O'Reilly means you're dodging the question, or trying to seem overly intellectual and nuanced.

White privilege is being able to claim your experience as a POW has anything at all to do with your fitness for president, while being black and experiencing racism is, as Sarah Palin has referred to it a "light" burden.

And finally, white privilege is the only thing that could possibly allow someone to become president when he has voted with George W. Bush 90 percent of the time, even as unemployment is skyrocketing, people are losing their homes, inflation is rising, and the U.S. is increasingly isolated from world opinion, just because white voters aren't sure about that whole "change" thing. Ya know, it's just too vague and ill-defined, unlike, say, four more years of the same, which is very concrete and certain.

White privilege is, in short, the problem.

Tim Wise is the author of White Like Me (Soft Skull, 2005, revised 2008), and of Speaking Treason Fluently, publishing this month, also by Soft Skull. For review copies or interview requests, please reply to publicity@softskull.com

Freedom Archives522 Valencia StreetSan Francisco, CA 94110
415-863-9977
www.Freedomarchives.org

DD 9/2/08 Line from a poem by Lea Walker Wood

From the poem EARTH DAY, by Lea Walker Wood:
"How can every day NOT be Earth Day?"

DD 8/19/08 Poem about the moon by William Topaz McGonnagal, Poet and Tragedian

The Great McGonnagal [as he was known in his lifetime]was widely regaded as the worst poet in the English language. He lived in the city of Dundee in Scotland. His work is widely loved in Great Britain and elsewhere. If you, like me enjoy his work, you can find all his published poems at
www.mcgonagall-online.org.uk
you can subscibe, like I do to receive a poetic gem a day at this link
http://www.mcgonagall-online.org.uk/cgi-bin/mcmail
The Moon

Beautiful Moon, with thy silvery light,
Thou seemest most charming to my sight;
As I gaze upon thee in the sky so high,
A tear of joy does moisten mine eye.

Beautiful Moon, with thy silvery light,
Thou cheerest the Esquimau in the night;
For thou lettest him see to harpoon the fish,
And with them he makes a dainty dish.
Beautiful Moon, with thy silvery light,
Thou cheerest the fox in the night,
And lettest him see to steal the grey goose away
Out of the farm-yard from a stack of hay.
Beautiful Moon, with thy silvery light,
Thou cheerest the farmer in the night,
and makes his heart beat high with delight
As he views his crops by the light in the night.

Beautiful Moon, with thy silvery light,
Thou cheerest the eagle in the night,
And lettest him see to devour his prey
And carry it to his nest away.

Beautiful Moon, with thy silvery light,
Thou cheerest the mariner in the night
As he paces the deck alone,
Thinking of his dear friends at home.
Beautiful Moon, with thy silvery light,
Thou cheerest the weary traveller in the night;
For thou lightest up the wayside around
To him when he is homeward bound.

Beautiful Moon, with thy silvery light,
Thou cheerest the lovers in the night
As they walk through the shady groves alone,
Making love to each other before they go home.

Beautiful Moon, with thy silvery light,
Thou cheerest the poacher in the night;
For thou lettest him see to set his snares
To catch the rabbit and the hares.

DD 3/22/05 A LITTLE MADNESS IN THE SPRING BY EMILY DICKINSON

Emily DickinsonA little Madness in the Spring

A little Madness in the Spring
Is wholesome even for the King,
But God be with the Clown --
Who ponders this tremendous scene --
This whole Experiment of Green --
As if it were his own!

DD 5/3/05 POEM BY DENISE LEVERTOV

The Métier of Blossoming
Denise Levertov
Fully occupied with growing--that'sthe amaryllis.
Growing especiallyat night:
it would takeonly a bit more patience than
I've got
to sit keeping watch with it till daylight;
the naked eye could register every hour's
increase in height.
Like a child against a barn door,
proudly topping each year's achievement,
steadily upgoes each green stem, smooth, matte,
traces of reddish purple at the base, and almost
imperceptible vertical ridges
running the length of them:
Two robust stems from each bulb,
sometimes with sturdy leaves for company,
elegant sweeps of blade with rounded points.
Aloft, the gravid buds, shiny with fullness.
One morning--and so soon!--the first flower
has opened when you wake.
Or you catch it poisedin a single, brief
moment of hesitation.
Next day, another,
shy at first like a foal,
even a third, a fourth,
carried triumphantly at the summit
of those strong columns, and each
a Juno, calm in brilliance,
a maiden giantess in modest splendor.
If humans could be
that intensely whole, undistracted, unhurried,
swift from sheer
unswerving impetus! If we could blossom
out of ourselves, giving
nothing imperfect, withholding nothing!

DD 5/17/05 POEM BY MICHELANGELO

For those who occasionally feel discouraged...

After Michelangelo had finished his work on the Sistine Chapel he wrote a poem of his agony during the painting of this Sistine Chapel.
I've got myself a goiter from this strain, As water gives the cats in Lombardy Or maybe it is in some other country; My belly's pushed by force beneath my chin.
My beard toward Heaven, I feel the back of my brain Upon my neck, I grow the breast of a Harpy; My brush, above my face continually, Makes a splendid floor by dripping down.
My Loins have penetrated to my paunch, My rump's a crupper, as a counterweight, And pointless the unseeing steps I go.

In front of me my skin is being stretched While it folds up behind and forms a knot, And I am bending like a Syrian bow.
And judgment, hence must grow, Borne in mind, peculiar and untrue; You cannot shoot well when the gun's askew.
John, come to the rescue Of my dead painting now, and of my honor; I'm not in a good place, and I'm no painter.

DD 12/11/07 LITTLE POEM BY STEVEN CANE

A man said to the universe, "
Sir, I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation."

DD 1/22/08 REBECCA SOLNIT ESSAY

Diary
Rebecca Solnit
The West began at the pay phone at the gas station at Lee Vining, the little town next to Mono Lake on the east side of the Sierra Nevada, too remote for cell phones. I was standing around in the harsh golden light at eight thousand feet waiting to make a call when I realised that the man on the line was trying to patch up his marriage, and the task wasn’t going to be quick or easy. ‘You just aren’t going to let us get back together, are you?’ he said in a tone at once supplicating and truculent. I thought that maybe she had her reasons and wondered how far away she was on the other end of the line.
At Lee Vining, named after a miner and Indian killer, the rain shadow begins: the Sierra, which are just a hair shorter than the Alps, scrape off the Pacific clouds and keep everything east of it arid. There are few real boundaries in nature, and this is one of the most astounding: from the west, you can hike up a green mountain slope and come to the divide, where you look over at the beginning of a thousand miles or more of desert, stand in patches of deep snow from the winter before and look at a terrain that receives only a few inches of moisture a year. In most of California, all water flows west to the Pacific, including that of the western slope of the Sierra, but on the Sierra’s other side it goes east, into salty lakes like Mono and the Great Salt Lake, into sinks and subterranean spaces, into thin air. The Great Basin, so called because its scanty water doesn’t drain to any sea, is mostly a terrain of north-south-running ranges, sharp-edged raw geology, separated by flat expanses of sagebrush.
In the desert, plants grow further apart to accommodate the huge root systems they need to collect enough water to live, and so do communities and ranches. Few but the desert’s original inhabitants found it beautiful before cars. The extremes of heat and cold, the vast scale and the scarcity of water must have been terrifying to anyone crossing it by beast or on foot. On a hot day, water is sucked straight out of your skin, and you can feel how fast dying of thirst could be, but the aridity is what makes the air so clear, what opens up those fifty-mile views. Now with air conditioning and interstates and the option of going several hundred miles a day with ease, desert austerity is a welcome respite from the overdeveloped world. The aridity and the altitude – the lowlands are mostly more than four thousand feet high – make the light strong, clear and powerful; and the sky in these wide places seems to start at your ankles.
Because wildlife, too, is spread far apart and often operates at night, because the colours and changes of the plant life can be subtle, it often seems as though the real drama is in the sky; not exactly life, but life-giving, the light and the rain. Summer thunderstorms in the arid lands are an operatic drama, particularly in New Mexico, where the plot normally unfolds pretty much the same way every day during the summer monsoon season: clear morning skies are gradually overtaken by cumulus clouds as scattered and innocuous as a herd of grazing sheep, until they gather and turn dark, then the afternoon storm breaks, with lightning, thunder and crashing rain that can turn a dusty road into a necklace of puddles reflecting the turbulent sky. But New Mexico is besieged now by a multi-year drought, and watching the clouds gather every afternoon as if for this dionysian release that never came, I thought of the Salt Lake City scholar Paul Shepard’s claim that Yahweh was originally a Semitic storm god. I also felt for the first time something of the beseeching powerlessness of those who prayed to an angry, unpredictable God, and felt how easy it would be to identify that God with the glorious, fickle, implacable desert sky.
Every summer I go live in the sky, I drive into this enormous space whose luminousness and emptiness, whose violence, seem to give this country its identity, even though few of us live there. It’s hard to convey the scale of the empty quarter. The Nevada Test Site, where the US and UK have detonated more than a thousand nuclear bombs over the past half century, is inside a virtually unpopulated airbase the size of Wales. Nevada is about the size of Italy and has a population of a million and a half, which wouldn’t sound so stark if it weren’t that more than a million of them live in Las Vegas and most of the rest in the Reno area, leaving the remainder of the state remarkably unpopulated. At one point the state decided to capitalise on this and named Highway 50, which traverses the centre of Nevada, ‘the loneliest highway in America’.
From Mono Lake, I drove about forty miles on 120, crossing from California to Nevada at some point along the way, then a stretch along the Grand Army of the Republic Highway, Route 6, over to the small town of Basalt, another hundred or so miles up to 50. At first the country was high enough that it was green, beautiful and stark and treeless, until the altitude climbed a little into piñon-pine and juniper country, then dropped down into the drabness of most of the Great Basin, the colour of sagebrush and the dirt in between. A grove of trees is a sure sign of a ranch house and irrigation, though there are entire valleys – and a valley means a place five or ten miles wide and several times as long – in which there is no house to be seen. Highway 50 traverses a dozen of these valleys and passes; driven in a day they succeed one another like musical variations, with their subtle differences of colour and form. One range looked like mountains, another more like cliffs, with tilted strata clearly visible, one valley was full of dust devils, those knots of swirling wind that pick up dust and debris and move them across the land.
Most of California is west of the Sierra, where a dramatic change of scale takes place and the infolding, the lushness, the variety of the terrain, seems to invite the social density and complexity of California, with its thirty-something million residents from all over the world. The two coasts of the United States often strike me as rather like a pair of parentheses enclosing the inchoate outback, a part of the country coloured red for Republican on the voting map for the last Presidential election, when the coasts were Democratic blue.
The red lands are a steppe, a Siberia, far removed from the cosmopolitanism of the coasts. When I come out here, it seems hard to believe in cities, let alone in nations, in anything but the sublimity of this emptiness. The Great Basin is wide open topographically but introspective in spirit, turned in on itself, and news from outside seems like mythology, rumour, entertainment, anything but part of what goes on here, or doesn’t, out here where the sparse population is interspersed between sites for the rehearsing of America’s wars. A lot of people have been preoccupied with Area 51, an off-limits part of the eastern periphery of the Nevada Test Site where aliens are supposed to have landed, or been captured, or had their flying saucers tested, and the logic behind these beliefs seems to be equal parts creative interpretation of military secrecy and a sense that everything from outside is alien.
On another road trip a few years ago, my friend Grace and I had joined Interstate 50 further west and driven through the part of the highway that is also the Bravo 17 bombing range, past the electronic warfare installations, past the fake town they bomb for practice, to the turnoff to Dixie Valley, a ranching community whose population was forced out by sonic-boom testing in the 1980s. Fallon Naval Air Station – a naval base in this driest of the 50 states – was testing the military uses of sonic booms on livestock, school buses, and homes. The animals stampeded and aborted, the windows shattered, cars went off the roads. The Navy solved the problem by eliminating the population in this oasis, where clear spring water breaks the surface of its own accord.
The few dozen houses had been burned to the ground and tanks used for aerial target practice were scattered between them. As we looked at the ruins of one ranch house, a noise erupted behind us so powerful it seemed more physical than sound. I turned just in time to see a supersonic jet disappear again, after buzzing us from 200 feet. It came from nowhere and went back there almost immediately, as though it had ripped a hole in the sky. The wars fought in the Middle East have been fought here first, in ways that one might imagine made them more real but instead make them more removed.
Once, driving a back road in Nevada, I was stopped for half an hour by a road construction crew. The woman in the hard hat who’d flagged me down spoke wistfully of San Francisco when I told her where I was from. She’d visited once in high school and spoke as though the seven-hour drive was an impassable distance, and for her perhaps it was. Her town was called Lovelock, and it had a few casinos but no movie theatre or bookstore. When I think of how Americans could fail to judge the carnage caused by hundreds of bombs in Baghdad in terms of that caused by two hijacked airplanes in New York, I think of her.
And I think of the wars fought for our cheap gasoline, the wars that make viable not just my summer jaunts but year-round homes sixty or seventy miles from the grocery store (to say nothing of military flights measured not in miles per gallon but gallons per mile). On a freeway clotted with roadside businesses south of Salt Lake City, a car dealer flashed a signboard: ‘Our Troops. God Bless Them.’ And maybe all the talk about freedom means freedom to drive around for ever on $1.67-a-gallon petroleum, out here in a terrain just a little less harsh than Afghanistan. Thomas Jefferson was afraid of the red lands, afraid that where the arable soil ended so would his arcadian yeoman ideal, and that Europeans would revert to nomadism. There’s something roving and ferocious about the Euroamerican West that suggests he’s right; the US is really more like the lands it’s been bombing lately than like Europe.
Red stands for a kind of cowboy ethos that society is optional and every man should fend for himself. This vast space was where people stepped out of society when their domestic lives failed or the law was after them. The ethos ignores the huge federal subsidies that support cattle-growing, logging and mining, just as Republican tax-cutters overlook the fact that the military they wish to expand consumes a grotesque proportion of tax revenue. Western and action movies concoct countless situations in which belligerence is justified and admirable, in which such autonomy is necessary, and the current President, like Ronald Reagan before him, portrays himself as a representative of these places and their cosmology, an act of self-invention as bold as that of any renamed outlaw. Reagan went from the Midwest to Hollywood; Bush is a product of East Coast privilege, even if he did go to flat, dry Midlands, Texas, to cultivate his insularity and a failed oil business.
For more than a decade I’ve been making compilation tapes to listen to on these drives, mostly of country music, which seems to suit the road best. For long stretches there is nothing on the radio, but around a big city – Salt Lake, for example – there’s a kind of aural density, with hip-hop and classical as well as pop, rock, country and right-wing talk shows; the latter two seem to last furthest into the remoteness, and then they fade, and it’s silence or tape. On my way to Highway 50, it was still cool when I ran over a huge snake sunning itself on the asphalt – chipmunks and squirrels you can dodge, but not something three or four feet long and writhing – as Hank Williams was singing ‘Lost Highway’.
Never mind contemporary country music, with its upbeat insipidity, which is to the genre at its best as a giant shopping complex is to the wild terrain eradicated to build it. Tragedy is about being cast out from the community; comedy ends in marriage; over the past couple of decades tragedy has been turned into humourless country-and-western comedy affirming the virtues of the status quo. The original stuff is rancorous, melancholy, as often about couples falling apart as coming together, and it’s about this kind of space.
Love between human beings is always failing in these songs – he leaves her; she cheats on him; somebody dies; everybody drinks; it wasn’t God who made honky-tonk angels; even the bottle let him down. The old Scots and Irish ballads were as gory and gloomy, but they are generally heirlooms now, and country and western is their immigrant bastard grandchild, something that came into its own only half a century ago and hasn’t died out yet. In these songs the lovers, the plaintiffs, the protagonists are mostly anonymous; it’s their geography that is named and listed and described with passionate fondness. When people fail, places remain; you can always have recourse to the landscape, and it will never leave you, though you may leave it. Leaving home and returning are the main narratives. Rivers and roads, the long-distance elements of the landscape, are the geographical refrains of the genre. Williams’s lost highway is a metaphysical condition more than a place, a sort of Dantean circuit for damned souls, though real highways provide refuge for those who’ve cut themselves off, as his protagonist did. The name of the beloved is Texas, is Tehachapi, is Tennessee, is the murmured names of rivers, bridges, roads, small towns, radiant in the late-afternoon light of regret and backward glances.
For me, country’s definitive song might be ‘Long Black Veil’, whose way with time is straight out of the Brontës. A dead man sings ten years after his hanging for a crime he didn’t commit, but his only alibi is unutterable: ‘I’d been in the arms of my best friend’s wife,’ who when he died ‘stood in the crowd and said not a word’. Now she wanders the hills in a long black veil and, well, visits his grave where the night winds wail. Hills and the night winds are still there, are reliable, are what you have in the end. ‘Wanted Man’, which Bob Dylan wrote in 1969, is a boastful list of all the places a criminal is wanted, a recitation that includes Albuquerque and Tallahassee and Baton Rouge and Buffalo, ‘but there’s one place I’m not wanted/Lord, it’s the place that I call home.’ Nothing ever made it clearer that geography is compensation for society, and the song raises the question of what, when you love these places, do they give you back? The answers sound American, too: freedom, solitude, communion with creatures and the inorganic creation, space to think.
Not that it’s all so overwrought. A couple of days later, in Utah, I was still driving east, through canyon country so stark nobody seems to live anywhere but along the cottonwood-shaded oases of rivers, but I could pick up a great classic country station. Around where I saw the sign warning ‘Eagles on Road’, it broadcast a song by David Frizzell, a barfly’s monologue repeating his wife’s extensive home remodelling proposal that begins: ‘I’m going to hire a wino/To decorate our home/So you’ll feel more at ease here/And you won’t need to roam.’ It’s scathingly funny, but it’s still about discord, abandonment and restlessness.
I’ve been trying to get at the heart of this geographical passion for years, through the compilation tapes: an early one was called Geography Lessons, Mostly Tragic; one about drinking and rivers The Entirely Liquid Mr North (after an alcoholic composer in Tender Is the Night); and the most recent, from a line in one of Johnny Cash’s final recordings, ‘Hurt’, is My Empire of Dirt. I love the place names, too; before I left, a friend – who’d also lived in New Mexico – and I induced a nostalgic haze in each other sheerly through place names, places we’d been, places to go, and there’s a passion for place in this music that’s also my passion.
Maybe the seductive whisper of these empty places says that you don’t have to work things out, don’t have to come home, don’t have to be reasonable; you can always move on, start over, step outside the social. To think of a figure in this vast western space of the Great Basin is to see a solitary on an empty stage, and the space seems to be about the most literal definition of freedom: space in which nothing impedes will and action. The Bonneville Salt Flats – a dry lake-bed in northern Utah – where some world land speed records have been set, and Nevada’s Black Rock Desert dry lake-bed, where the bacchanalian Burning Man festival takes place every September, seem to have realised this definition in the most obvious ways: speeding cars, naked hallucinating tattooed love freaks partying down. And, of course, US military training for foreign adventures. (In the first Gulf War, the commanders referred to the unconquered portions of Iraq as Indian Territory.)
Easy though all this is to deplore on moral grounds, the place is seductive; there’s a sense for me that all this is home, that every hour, every mile, is coming home, that this isolated condition of driving on an empty highway from one range to another is home, is some kind of true and essential condition of self, because I am myself an American, and something of a westerner.
A year ago I was at a dinner in Amsterdam when the question came up of whether each of us loved his or her country. The German shuddered, the Dutch were equivocal, the Tory said he was ‘comfortable’ with Britain, the expatriate American said No. But I said Yes. Driving across the arid lands, the red lands, I wondered what it was I loved. The places, the sagebrush basins, the rivers digging themselves deep canyons through arid lands, the incomparable cloud formations of summer monsoons in New Mexico, the way the underside of clouds turns the same blue as the underside of a great blue heron’s wings when the storm is about to break.
Beyond that anything you can say about the US you can also say the opposite of; we’re rootless except that we’re also the Hopi who haven’t moved in several centuries; we’re violent except that we’re also the Franciscans nonviolently resisting nuclear weapons; we’re consumers except that this West is studded with visionary environmentalists, and on and on. The evils in this country tend to generate their opposites. And the landscape of the West seems like the stage on which such dramas are played: a space without boundaries, in which anything can be realised; a moral ground, out here where your shadow can stretch hundreds of feet just before sunset, where you loom large, and lonely.
From the LRB letters page: [ 6 November 2003 ] Leon Lewis, Rebecca Solnit.
Rebecca Solnit lives in San Francisco. Her books include Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power and A Field Guide to Getting Lost.

DD 5/6/08 GET A WITNESS, BY GANET ROGERS

GARNET ROGERS IS A WONDERFUL CANADIAN FOLKSINGER, NOT AS WELL KNOWN AS HIS OLDER BROTHER STAN ROGERS WHO DIED IN AN AIRLINER CRASH IN CINCINNATI IN 1983. GET A WITNESS
Garnet RogersThree long months
Ah Lord it's been that dry
Sun burning down from a cauldron sky
I woke up this morning
Clouds piled up above
Blessed rain
Ah it poured down like love
Can I get a witness
For this perfect day
Swallows chase their reflections
Above the pond
Cool green shadows
Sweep across the lawn
Nothing calls me
I've got no place to go
Ah just the birds like graceful angels
Flickering to and fro
Outside our door the world it moves too fast
Takes my breath away at how the years have passed
We'll let the world go, love, do what it will
Look into my eyes make my heart stand still
Cool sweet evening
Falls upon the fields
Battered old moon
Hangs like a broken shield
The birds have flown
Out behind the sun
Lord, maybe somewhere, somehow
Today the good guys won.
Can I get a witness.....................

DD 5/6/08 GET A WITNESS, BY GANET ROGERS

GARNET ROGERS IS A WONDERFUL CANADIAN FOLKSINGER, NOT AS WELL KNOWN AS HIS OLDER BROTHER STAN ROGERS WHO DIED IN AN AIRLINER CRASH IN CINCINNATI IN 1983. GET A WITNESS
Garnet RogersThree long months
Ah Lord it's been that dry
Sun burning down from a cauldron sky
I woke up this morning
Clouds piled up above
Blessed rain
Ah it poured down like love
Can I get a witness
For this perfect day
Swallows chase their reflections
Above the pond
Cool green shadows
Sweep across the lawn
Nothing calls me
I've got no place to go
Ah just the birds like graceful angels
Flickering to and fro
Outside our door the world it moves too fast
Takes my breath away at how the years have passed
We'll let the world go, love, do what it will
Look into my eyes make my heart stand still
Cool sweet evening
Falls upon the fields
Battered old moon
Hangs like a broken shield
The birds have flown
Out behind the sun
Lord, maybe somewhere, somehow
Today the good guys won.
Can I get a witness.....................

DD 8/21/07 CHANT BY SHERI TEPPER

I was recently told by SophiaHeath about a wonderful fantasy author many of you may know already - Sheri S. Tepper. I've enjoyed 4 of her books so far, including the Family Tree, Gibbon's Decline and Fall, Northshore, and Shadow's End. This fragment of a chant appears in Shadow's End:
Mother Darkness come to me,
Father Endless, come to me,
Mother and Father of peace come to me.

Tomorrow will be easier
And the day that follows easier yet.
And I will grow to age in tranquility,
In contentment approaching you,
whom my kindred have forgot.

DD 5/10/05 GANDHI QUOTES

I went searching for my favorite Gandhi quotation, and couldn't find it. It goes like this: He was asked once, toward the end of his life, how he was able to prevail against far stronger opponents. His answer was, (approximately!) "I came to every struggle with the knowledge that my opponent had at least as much chance of being right as I did." In my search, I did find these quotations, all by Gandhi:
Where there is honest effort, it will be realized that what appear to be different truths are like the countless and apparently different leaves of the same tree.
A seeker of truth will never begin by discounting his opponent’s statement as unworthy of trust.
It is unwise to be too sure of one's own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err.
An opponent is entitled to the same regard for his principles as we would expect others to have for ours. Non-violence demands that we should seek every opportunity to win over opponents.

DD 2/28/05 A MESSAGE FROM THE WANDERER BY WILLIAM STAFFORD

A MESSAGE FROM THE WANDERER
William Stafford

Today outside your prison I stand
and rattle my walking stick: Prisoners, listen;
you have relatives outside. And there are
thousands of ways to escape.

Years ago I bent my skill to keep my
cell locked, had chains smuggled in to me in pies,
and shouted my plans to jailers;
but always new plans occurred to me,
or the new heavy locks bent hinges off,
or some stupid jailer would forget
and leave the keys.

Inside, I dreamed of constellations --
those feeding creatures outlined by stars,
their skeletons a darkness between jewels,
heroes that exist only where they are not.

Thus freedom always came nibbling my thought,
just as -- often, in light, on the open hills --
you can pass an antelope and not know
and look back, and then -- even before you see --
there is something wrong about the grass.
And then you see.

That's the way everything in the world is waiting.

Now -- these few more words, and then I'm
gone: Tell everyone just to remember
their names, and remind others, later, when we
find each other. Tell the little ones
to cry and then go to sleep, curled up
where they can. And if any of us get lost,
if any of us cannot come all the way --
remember: there will come a time when
all we have said and all we have hoped
will be all right.

There will be that form in the grass.

DD 12/20/2004 To Gaheya by Ursula LeGuin

TO GAHHEYA
By Stone Telling of the Blue Clayof Shinshan

Old stone, hold my soul.
When I am not in this place
face the sunrise for me.
Grow warm slowly.
This is my hand on you, warm.
This is my breath on you, warm.
This is my heart in you, warm.
This is my soul in you, warm.
You will be here a long time
facing the sunrise
with the warmth in you.
When you roll down,
when you break apart,
when the earth changes,
when the rockness of you ends,
we will be shining,
we will be dancing shining,
we will be warmth shining.

Ursula LeGuin, From AlwaysComing Home

DD 8/12/08 THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS, BY ARUNDHATI ROY

K]athakali discovered long ago that the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don't deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don't surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover's skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don't. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won't. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn't. And yet you want to know again.
That is their mystery and magic. To the Kathakali Man these stories are his children and his childhood. He has grown up within them. They are the house he was raised in, the meadows he played in. They are his windows and his way of seeing. So when he tells a story, he handles it as he would a child of his own. He teases it. He punishes it. He sends it up like a bubble. He wrestles it to the ground and lets it go again. He laughs as it because he loves it. He can fly you across whole worlds in minutes, he can stop for hours to examine a wilting leaf. Or play with a sleeping monkey's tail. He can turn effortlessly from the carnage of war into the felicity of a woman washing her hair in a mountain stream. From the crafty ebullience of a rakshasa with a new idea into a gossipy Malayali with a scandal to spread. From the sensuousness of a woman with a baby at her breast into the seduct! ive mischief of Krishna's smile. He can reveal the nugget of sorrow that happiness contains. The hidden fish of shame in a sea of glory.
He tells stories of the gods, but his yarn is spun from the ungodly, human heart.
KATHAKALI IS THE TRADITIONAL DANCE/DRAMA OF KERALA, IN INDIA. http://www.cyberkerala.com/kathakali/

DD 3/14/02 LEUNIG CARTOON"LET IT GO"

DD 3/30/02 LINE FROM GREG BOWN SONG

Enlightenment doesn't come all at once. It comes in grubby little
pieces every day. -Greg Brown

DD 1/28/03 POEM BY WILLIAM STAFFORD IN HONOR OF THE PRESIDENT'S STATE OF THE UNION SPEECH

In honor of tonight's State-of-the-Union address:
AUNT MABEL
by William Stafford
This town is haunted by some good deed
that reappears like a country cousin, or truth
when language falters these days trying to lie,
because Aunt Mabel, an old lady gone now, would
accost even strangers to give bright flowers
away, quick as a striking snake. It's deeds like this
have weakened me, shaken by intermittent trust,
stricken with friendliness.
Our Senator talked like war, and Aunt Mabel
said, "He's a brilliant man,
but we didn't elect him that much."
Everyone's resolve weakens toward evening
or in a flash when a face melds - a stranger's even -
reminded for an instant between menace and fear:
There are Aunt Mabels all over the world,
or their graves in the rain.

DD 2/4/03 QUOTE FROM DERRICK JENSEN ABOUT HIS DOG

Derrick Jensen, describing one of his cocker spaniels:

The male, especially, never seemed to slow down. He ran this way and that, ears flying, tongue flapping. He was an eternal child on an everlasting Christmas morning, wearing PJs and running from gift to gift saying, "Oh, Mom. A baskeball! I've always wanted a basketb--- Ah, man! You got me a book! I love books!" Had I told him to sit in a corner, and had he heard me, I'm sure he would have run to the spot, tail wagging as if to say, "Oh, man, I've always wanted to sit in this corner. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you." That's not to say he didn't have a mind of his own. Even when he heard me, he still disobeyed more often than not — one of his mottoes seemed to be, "Rules are meant to be acknowledged and then ignored." Even, or especially, in ignoring my wishes he acted as he always did, exuberantly, joyously, with an abundance of life.
I can't imagine a better teacher.

Derrick Jensen, "A Language Older Than Words"

DD 2 /11/03 QUOTE FROM RICHAD STINE

When the mind speaks, which words do you listen to - the ones that spin endless mischief on the surface, or the slower deeper ones that are always true? -Richard Stine

DD 2/18/03 QUOTE ABOUT THE IMMINENT IRAQ WAR FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES

The fracturing of the Western alliance over Iraq and the huge antiwar demonstrations around the world this weekend are reminders that there may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion. --Patrick E. Tyler, NY Times, Feb. 16

DD 2/25/03 A VERY BRIEF STORY BY MAYER

Tomorrow is my birthday; I will be spending it in a Rochester hospital supporting my mom, who is having surgery this afternoon. So today's "daily dose" is the birthday card I wrote to myself last night...
Mayer
_________
BIRTHDAY PUZZLE
I’d like to share some very odd information. Before rejecting this unlikely story out of hand, at least stay open to the possibility that it might be true.
I’ve recently learned of an amazing, impossible-seeming place. Not only that: I’ve actually met some people who have been there. Apparently, there is, in our very own galaxy, a star that came into being in such a way that it threw off chunks of itself that coalesced into planets, orbiting it at various distances. Some were crumbled or exploded by the enormous energies buffeting them; others were thrown free of the star’s pull; and several went into stable orbits around the star. Each developed its own sustained relationship to the star.
One particular planet was so placed that it developed a skin of gas and vapor, cooling, very slowly, over millions of years, condensing into water, freezing into ice, constantly in motion and yet stable, rhythmic, rushing, flowing… singing. This planet circled the star, and with each revolution the rhythm became more familiar, more of a story known to itself, a ritual re-enacted: each time the same, each time different.
As time went on, smaller bits of the pattern began re-enacting themselves. Like the planet, they too were constantly moving, singing, creating rhythms that echoed and amplified each other, always changing, always the same.
Even better, some of these things are actually alive – they grow, reproduce, die, decay – always changing, always being themselves. Of those living things, some are like nothing you have ever seen before, and others might seem like you’ve always known them.
This place is the source of opulent variety: more environments, landscapes, living things, quirky relationships, improbable vistas and breath-taking juxtapositions than could ever be known or even dreamed of…
Here’s the thing: you can go to this unimaginable place; more than that, it waits to bid you welcome. I know that seems incredible, but it’s true. To make the journey, you need only answer one question: _______________________________________?

dd 3/5/03 quote from "jesus christs"

A brazen girl posessed of seven devils was brought before Jesus to be cured. "I am going to cast out those seven devils from you," he said.
"May I ask you for a favor?" she spoke impudently.
"What is it?"
"Cast out six."

from A.J.Langguth, "Jesus Christs"

DD 3/11/03poem by Aurora Levins Moales

This poem is from a lovely poster with a Passover theme published by the Northland Poster Collective www.northlandposter.com .The picture, by Ricardo Levins Morales, is of an exodus of people crossing the Red Sea, which in the picture turns into a seder table.
THIS TIME
Aurora Levins Morales

They say that other country over there,
dim blue in the twilight,
farther than the orange stars exploding over our roofs,
is called peace,
but who can find the way?
This time we cannot cross until we carry each other.
All of us refugees, all of us prophets.
No more taking tuns on history's wheel,
Trying to collect old debts no one can pay.
The sea will not open that way.
This time that country is what we promise each other,
Our rage pressed cheek to cheek until tears flood the space between,
Until there are no enemies left,
Because this time no one will be left to drown and all of us must be chosen.
This time it's all of us or none.

DD 3/25/03 TEXT OF MICHAEL LEUNIG CARTOON

This text is from a cartoon by the wonderful Australian author Michael Leunig:

HOW TO SLEEP WELL "GOOD PYJAMAS: GOOD SLEEP," so goes the old saying, yet many people do not understand the vital significance of pyjamas in the achievement of deep and restful sleep. SLEEPING IS A RELIGIOUS ACTIVITY: a holy communion with the inner world of dreams and darkness. The appropriate ceremonial attire is important for a smooth passage into the Land of Nod. ESSENTIALLY, PYJAMAS MUST FEEL COMFORTABLE AND LOOK RIDICULOUS. Wearing them is a ritualistic renunciation of the conscious, external world: the world of looking good and feeling stressed. As we approach the cot, pyjama clad, the LUDICROUS SELF is proclaimed, triumphant and free. The vestments of the outer world lie cast off and crumpled on the floor. We look soft and child-like, inept and shambling; primitive and funny. The pyjama fabric droops like tired old elephant skin. The buttons are done up in the wrong holes. The trousers are hitched up nearly to the arm pits. The cuffs wag above the ankles. One side of the coat is tucked in, the other hangs out. We have no place in the "real" world looking like this! WE ARE THE STUFF THAT DREAMS ARE MADE OF. What freedom! What peace! What blessed relief! "GOOD PYJAMAS: GOOD SLEEP." Michael Leunig, from
"You and Me", 1995

DD 4/1/03 DEKANAWIDAH PLANTS THE TREE OF THE GREAT PEACE

The opening paragraph of the constitution of the Iroquois Confederation:

I am Dekanawidah, and with the Five Nations confederate lords I plant the Tree of the Great Peace… I name the tree the Tree of the Great Long Leaves. Under the shade of this Tree of the Great Peace we spread the soft white feather down of the globe thistle as seats for you, Tadodaho and your cousin lords. There shall you sit and watch the council fire of the confederacy of the Five Nations. Roots have spread out from the Tree, and the name of these roots is the Great White Roots of Peace. If any man of any nation shall show a desire to obey the laws of the Great Peace, they shall trace the roots to their source, and they shall be welcomed to take shelter beneath the Tree of the Long Leaves. The smoke of the confederate council fire shall pierce the sky so that all nations may discover the central council fire of the Great Peace. I, Dekanawidah, and the confederate lords now uproot the tallest pine tree and into the cavity thereby made we cast all weapons of war. Into the depth of the earth, down into the deep underearth currents of water flowing into unknown regions; we cast all weapons of war. We bury them from sight forever and plant again the Tree.

DD 4/9/03 WHAT WOULD MR. ROGERS DO?

WHAT WOULD MR. ROGERS DO?

DD 4/14/03 POEM BY ROBELEY WILSON

I Wish In The City Of Your Heart
Robley Wilson
I wish in the city of your heart
you would let me be the street
where you walk when you are most
yourself. I imagine the houses:
It has been raining, but the rain
is done and the children kept home
have begun opening their doors.
from The Invisible Ladder, 1996

DD 4/ 29/03 QUOTE FROM MICHAEL LEUNIG

Dear Mr. Curly,
I have not written to you in quite some time, I suppose because there has been very little to report. My journey has appeared to have developed into a process of steady plodding which I rather like. When you plod, everything seems to take forever and forever is a lovely thing once you stop being scared of it.
Strange, how something that takes a lot of time can give you a feeling that there IS a lot of time - and a lot of space and a great mesure of ease. So onward I plod, through beautiful things and terible things, too numerous to mention, with my duck ahead of me and my gargling angel to protect me from above. I am well and I hope you are too.
Best wishes, yours truly,
Vasco Pyjama
PS: Is it "gargling" angel or "guardian" angel? Somebody once suggested it should be "guardian," but I grew up believing it was "gargling" - my "gargling angel" and that's how I think of it. Oh well, whatever, it seems to care for me!
...from "The Curly Pyjama Letters," by Michael Leunig

DD 5/6/03 QUOTE FROM EUGENE V. DEBS

Years ago I recognized my kinship with all living things, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on the earth. I said then and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.
- Eugene V. Debs

DD 5/13/03 QUOTE FROM DALIA

Last Monday, my daughter Dalia read "The Frog Prince" to the children at the preschool where she works. On Tuesday, Michael came up to her with a frog puppet on his hand. "I'm a frog," he said. Dalia asked, "If I kiss you, will you turn into a prince?" "No," said Michael, "but kiss me anyway."

DD 6/2/03 EATH BLESSING BY JACK MANNO

Thanks to Appletree for suggesting I pass this on...
EARTH BLESSING
May earth's song reach us in our deepest and wildest places.
May it be heard as we move upon her, as we partake of her sustenance, as we nestle in her waters and grasses.
May we hear the voices of the stones, the winds and waters, creatures and plants, above the human chatter, softly but not silently, so we can heed them when we must.
May all those who try to conquer earth's powers learn instead from compost and humus and take from them humility, knowing any force conquered is lost forever to the conqueror.
May compassion wrack the polluter's heart, so stunned by the earth's gifts their poisons cannot be released.
At long last, may earth's protectors throw grand parties where victory is declared in a mighty sigh of relief.
May this exhalation resound in ocean depths, reverberate in humpback flesh and please all the watery souls.
May whales and wolves rejoice with weird shouts that all is well.
May we have a world's celebration where everyone stays put, our roots seeking amusements together deep in the earth, our branches entwined in the winds.
May our grandchildren's grandchildren share legends of when we brought about the end of the time of arrogance and waste. May they toss stones from shores, hearing our names echo in the ripples.
So may it be.
-- Jack Manno

DD 6/10/03 GREAT WALT WHITMAN QUOTE

Sometimes with one I love I fill myself with rage for fear I effuse unreturn'd love,
But now I think there is no unreturn'd love, the pay is certain one way or
another...
- Walt Whitman, in "Leaves of Grass"

DD 7/7/03 DOUGLAS ADAMS QUOTE

There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
Douglas Adams

DD 7/16/03 POEM BY ARCHY THE COCKOACH

there are two
kinds of human
beings in the world,
so my observation
has told me
namely and to wit
as follows
firstly
those who
even though they
were to reveal
the secret of the universe
to you would fail
to impress you
with any sense
of the importance
of the news
and secondly
those who could
communicate to you
that they had
just purchased
ten cents worth
of paper napkins
and make you
thrill and vibrate
with the intelligence
--archy (Don Marquis)

DD 9/2/03 VELMA FRYE SONG

I will believe the truth about myself,
No matter how beautiful it is.
--Velma Frye
(These are the worlds to a beautiful round. Get in touch with me if you want to learn the tune .)

DD 9/8/03 ETERNAL LIFE, BY LEE HAYS

ETERNAL LIFE
Lee Hays (of "The Weavers")

If I should die before I wake,
All my bones and sinews take
And put them in a compost pile
To decompose there for a while.

When water, sun have had their way
Returning me to common clay
All that I am shall feed the trees
And little fishes in the seas.

When Radishes and corn you munch,
You may be having me for lunch,
And then, excrete me with a grin,
Saying, "There goes Lee again!"

All this, my happy destiny
To die, and live, eternally.

DD 9/16/03 MAN IN BLACK BY JOHNNY CASH

Man In Black
by Johnny Cash
Recorded February 16, 1971
Well, you wonder why I always dress in black,
Why you never see bright colors on my back,
And why does my appearance seem to have a somber tone.
Well, there's a reason for the things that I have on.
I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down,
Livin' in the hopeless, hungry side of town,
I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime,
But is there because he's a victim of the times.
I wear the black for those who never read,
Or listened to the words that Jesus said,
About the road to happiness through love and charity,
Why, you'd think He's talking straight to you and me.
Well, we're doin' mighty fine, I do suppose,
In our streak of lightnin' cars and fancy clothes,
But just so we're reminded of the ones who are held back,
Up front there ought 'a be a Man In Black.
I wear it for the sick and lonely old,
For the reckless ones whose bad trip left them cold,
I wear the black in mournin' for the lives that could have been,
Each week we lose a hundred fine young men.
And, I wear it for the thousands who have died,
Believen' that the Lord was on their side,
I wear it for another hundred thousand who have died,
Believen' that we all were on their side.
Well, there's things that never will be right I know,
And things need changin' everywhere you go,
But 'til we start to make a move to make a few things right,
You'll never see me wear a suit of white.
Ah, I'd love to wear a rainbow every day,
And tell the world that everything's OK,
But I'll try to carry off a little darkness on my back,
'Till things are brighter, I'm the Man In Black.
© 1971 House of Cash, Inc

DD 9/23/03 SAND ROADS BY MARGE PIERCY

From "Sand Roads"
By Marge Piercy
You are standing too tall for
this landscape. Lie down.
Let the grass blow
over you. Let the plover
pipe, the kestrel stand beating its wings
in the air, the wolf spider
come to the door of its burrow,
the mouse nibble on
your toe. Let the beach pea
entangle your legs in its vine
and ring you with purple blossoms.
Now get up slowly
and seek a way down off the dunes,
carefully: your heavy feet
assault the balance.
Come down on the bench
of the great beach arching
away into fog.
Lie down before the ocean.
It rises over you, it stands
hissing and spreading its
cobalt hood, rattling
its pebbles.
Cold it is and its rhythm
as it eats away at the beach,
as it washes the dunes out to sea
to build new spits and islands,
enters your blood and slows
the beat of that newish contraption
your heart controlling the waves
of your inward salt sea.
Let your mind open
like a clam when the waters
slide back to feed it.
Flow out to the ancient cold
mothering embrace, cold
and weightless yourself
as a fish, over the buried
wrecks. Then with respect
let the breakers drive you
up and out into
the heavy air, your heart
pounding. The warm scratchy sand
like a receiving blanket
holds you up gasping with life.

DD 9/30/03 WE, ALONE BY ALICE WALKER

WE ALONE
By Alice Walker
We alone can devalue gold
by not caring
if it falls or rises
in the marketplace.
Wherever there is gold
there is a chain, you know,
and if your chain
is gold
so much the worse
for you.
Feathers, shells,
and sea-shaped stones
are all as rare.
This could be our revolution:
to love what is plentiful
as much as
what is scarce.

DD 10/14/03 A SHORT PRAYER OF MINE

In the Catholic tradition, an "ejaculation" is a short prayer, spontaneously spoken. Here's one of mine.
ON PASSING A SUPERMARKET LOTTERY MACHINE
Today, may I gamble for much higher stakes.

DD 11/11/03 STEVEN WEINBERG QUOTE

With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
Steven Weinberg (1933 - ), quoted in The New York Times, April 20, 1999

DD 11/18/03 KAREN HALL QUOTE

My friend Karen Hall has created a beautiful piece of art with this phrase on it:
ONCE, A POND OF TIME...
What I love about the phrase it it gives us access to a whole new world of imagination than the one we are used to. What stories can you think of that begin, "Once, a pond of time..."?

DD 11/25/03 POEM BY ELLEN BASS

GATE C 22

At gate C 22 in the Portland airport
a man in a broad-band leather hat kissed
a woman arriving from Orange County.
They kissed and kissed and kissed. Long after
the other passengers clicked the handles of their carry-ons
and wheeled briskly toward short-term parking,
the couple stood there, arms wrapped around each other
like satin ribbons tying up a gift. And kissing.
Like she'd just staggered off the boat at Ellis Island,
like she'd been released from ICU, snapped
out of a coma, survived bone cancer, made it down
from Annapurna in only the clothes she was wearing.
Neither of them was young. His beard was gray.
She carried a few extra pounds you could imagine
she kept saying she had to lose. But they kissed lavish
kisses like the ocean in the early morning
of a calm day at Big Sur, the way it gathers
and swells, taking each rock slowly
in its mouth, sucking it under, swallowing it
again and again. We were all watching—
the passengers waiting for the delayed flight to San Jose,
the stewardesses, the pilots, the aproned woman icing
Cinnabons, the guy selling sunglasses. We couldn't
look away. We could taste the kisses, crushed
in our mouths like the liquid centers of chocolate cordials.
But the best part was his face. When he drew back
and looked at her, his smile soft with wonder, almost
as though he were a mother still
opened from giving birth, like your mother
must have looked at you,
no matter what happened after—
if she beat you, or left you, or you're lonely now—
you once lay there, the vernix
not yet wiped off and someone gazing at you
like you were the first sunrise seen from the earth.
The whole wing of the airport hushed,
each of us trying to slip into that woman's middle-aged body,
her plaid bermuda shorts, sleeveless blouse,
little gold hoop earrings, glasses,
all of us, tilting our heads up.


Ellen Bass