Cowpies and McCain

In a recent speech John Sidney McCain asks in many of his speeches, "Who is the real Barack Obama?" In one clip you could hear shouted from the crowd, the word, “terrorist!”

The reaction of McCain was to continue with his speech.

In one of Palin’s speeches the following took place:

"Now it turns out, one of his earliest supporters is a man named Bill Ayers," Palin said.

"Boooo!" came a thundering roar from the crowds..

"And, according to the New York Times, he [meaning Ayers] was a domestic terrorist and part of a group that, quote, 'launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and our U.S. Capitol,'" she continued.

"Boooo!" the crowd shouted again.

More than one of the reporters covering this event report that they easily heard one man in the audience should,

"Kill him!"

Did Governor Palin pause and say that was wrong? [It’s not just morally wrong, it is an actual crime.] Palin continued with her speech saying, "Obama held one of the first meetings of his political career in Bill Ayers's living room, and they've worked together on various projects in Chicago."

Of course the spin doctors from the McCain campaign say that neither McCain, nor Palin heard these comments. Assume that these crowd comments were not heard by the speakers, they have certainly heard news reports that the comments were made, yet they have not come out with a memo or some public statement to the media condemning such comments and asking his supporters to be civil and to not break the law by threatening to assassinate his opponent for the office of President of the United States.

The crowds at McCain/Palin rallies are getting more and more angry. This does not make them evil people.

The candidate seems to be purposely stirring up the crowds to reach the point where the followers may lose self-control and do the patriotic thing by killing Barak Obama.

If you shout fire in a crowded movie theater that is a crime. I recently watched a crime show on truTV where a White Supremacist Leader was convicted of a crime because his incendiary speech had stirred up followers to murder some black people. Is McCain falling into this area by not calming the crowds who are slowly losing their tempers over losing in the poles? Just losing is not justification for the irresponsible inflammation of the conservative base of the Republican Party? McCain and Palin appear to be one tiny baby-step away from inciting violence at their rallies. The physical threats that have taken place at these McCain/Palin rallies must not go unchallenged.

Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart, for his purity, by definition, is unassailable. ~James Baldwin

If you remember the contentious Democratic primary campaign, there was at least once instance that I watched on TV where Obama was speaking to his supporters, he mentioned Hillary Clinton's name, the crowd booed. Obama immediately told the crowd to stop. Barack Obama intervened when his supporters booed his opponent, but McCain and Palin have not, not even after the fact, after the inflaming comments were reported in the media. . He called for civility.

The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it. ~Albert Einstein

This is how evil spreads, from domestic violence to genocide. People in a position to stop it choose to do nothing.

All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing. ~Edmund Burke

When I was a kid I remember getting a hold of some Black Cat firecrackers. I was a foolish boy, with no fear for my fingers, and there was mischief in my mind. I remember me and some buddies going out into a pasture and planting a firecracker in a nice pudding firm cow pie. You would plant the firecracker carefully in the dung pie’s center, light the fuse, and then you had a few seconds to get as far away from the blast cite as possible. The fun of blowing up a cow pie is always tempered by the possibilities of getting spattered with the cow pie yourself.

Consider:

• Sarah Palin’s husband was a member of a group seeking to secede from the United States, and although Governor Palin was not a member herself, she has attend and given speeches at their meetings.
• John McCain is a long time friend of G. Gordon Liddy one of the Watergate buglers and Nixon bad guys.
• John McCain was one of the Keating Five, and a Congressional inquiry found him guilty of exercising bad judgment. John McCain is the only candidate who has his poor judgment documented by the Congressional Record.

When you are blowing up a cow pie, it is almost impossible to light the fuse and be far enough away when the blast occurs to avoid being slathered in sh#& yourself.

Panacea Poison

Our word, panacea comes from Greek mythology, the myth tells of this babe Panacea (Greek Πανάκεια, Panakeia) and she was the goddess of healing. Panacea’s mama was Asclepius, the god of medicine, and her grandpa was Apollo, god of healing (and a bunch of other stuff). For most of us, the word panacea means a cure-all. Unfortunately a cure-all cures nothing. For me the word panacea represents one of the most significant causes for my depression. I am a depression prone dude. I don’t just get blue, I get Navy Blue. The causes of depression are myriad, but the panacea problem is a problem in coping with depression.

Maybe I inherited a down in the dumps gene. I can possibly blame my melancholy on harsh and insensitive parenting, or maybe on traumatic stress. There may be value in exploring the causes for your depression, but I’ve been working on those causes since 1983 and I pretty much have an idea of the hurts and losses of my childhood. I am not concerned about the unfairness of my early years, I am concerned with salvaging what life I have left, and this is where the panacea problem causes me serious trouble.

.

What I want, what most of us want, is A cure. Note the capitol A. What is desired by all of us is one thing that will fix what is broken. We want this for every problem we face. With this current economic meltdown going on now, we want someone to come in and say, “Do this one thing, and all our economic woes will evaporate, leaving behind the crystallization of mass prosperity." We want some guy to come in and say, “Cancer? All you have to do is take this Asparagus Supplement and Cancer will be forever eliminated from the human race.?"

.

When I first caved in to the crushing depression that I’d been carrying around with me for as long as I could remember, I went to see a psychiatrist and was prescribed an antidepressant. I remembered being sick, getting a penicillin shot and I swear I could actually feel the bacterial infection dying off. I expected this antidepressant to work like that. I swallowed the pill and waited for the depression to lift. I wanted that pill to be my panacea for my pathetic aching existence. When that pill didn’t cure me, I went into talk therapy, and jumped around over the year from shrink to shrink looking for some therapist to shrink my problems. I was wanting some mental health practitioner to be the panacea that made my depression go away. I gave up on a pill and went to see Psychiatrists who would prescribe an anti-depression cocktail. I figured, me being a complicated guy, I needed a complicated solution. I figured a combination of different types of medications would work together to cure my depression. The cocktail did not turn out to be a panacea for my problem.

At this point in my life, I feel that anything that appears to be a panacea is Panaceic Poison. The cure for my depression is unlikely to happen. Notice that the sentence I just wrote contains the words the cure. THE CURE is a panacea. THE CURE is what I want, it is what we all want, but the word THE is sometimes call in grammar, a determiner, or an article.

An article is a word that, combined with a noun, indicates the type of reference being made by that noun, and to specify the volume or numerical scope of that reference. In-other-words, when I say the cure, or a cure, I am indicating how many cures there are: there is one, and only one cure, and such a belief is the perfect definition of panacea.

Juan Ponce de Leon supposedly searched the jungles of Florida looking for a Fountain of Youth. It didn’t exist. Ponce de Leon wasted a significant part of his life searching for something that did not exist. Will I do the same? Will you do the same?

This is your life and it’s ending one minute at a time. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

I am 58 years old and I can see 60 from where I stand now. I know a lot of people my age who are already dead. Life is short, death is forever, and I can’t waste my life looking for THE CURE for depression.

I believe that my depression comes from negative thinking and self-destructive behaviors. If I want to be better then I need to change the way I think and the things I do. Knowing the causes of depression may be helpful, but at most, it can only be part of the process of coping with the inner tormentors.

A donkey with a load of holy books is still a donkey. ~Sufi saying

There is no pill, or person who is going to fix your thinking or make you do healthy, life affirming stuff.

. . . an intellectual understanding of concepts is important, but ultimately the only thing that counts is what we do. ~David Michie

The essence of living is the doing. ~Ted Kooser

Ayers aired

My mother-in-law, a fine lady in her mid-80s, recently said, in my presence, that she has never liked John McCain, but she was voting for him, because she was afraid of Barak Obama. I think my mother-in-law is similar in many ways to a lot of older white voters in this country, in not being comfortable with Barak Obama. Obama has a funny name, which sounds Islamic to them, especially his middle name. My mother-in-law’s friends fill her email in-box up with stuff circulating around that is unsigned, cites no sources, but, it is in an email, it did come from a church friend of hers, and it claims that Obama is a Muslim, and he is going to take her Bible away and take Lawrence Welk re-runs off the air forever. People like my mother-in-law are part of the target audience for the campaign to attach Obama to William Ayers, a man they say is a domestic terrorist.

When I heard that Obama was 8 years old when William Ayers committed his terrorist crimes, the allegation lost its fear-factor for me, but it did peek my interest. I wanted to know more about Mr. Ayers. Here is what I found out, and my reaction to that information:

William Ayers came from a fairly well off family, and was attending college during peak of the Vietnam war. Ayers was affected when the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) President, Paul Potter, at a 1965 Ann Arbor Teach-In against the Vietnam War asked his audience,

"How will you live your life so that it doesn't make a mockery of your values?"

Ayers later wrote in his memoir, Fugitive Days, that his reaction was:

"You could not be a moral person with the means to act, and stand still. ...To stand still was to choose indifference. Indifference was the opposite of moral"

Now I was in high school when all this stuff was happening, but I remember that there were hundreds of thousands of teens and young adults protesting lots of stuff during this period in our history.

Ayers was involved in a 1965, protest at an Ann Arbor Michigan pizza place because they had refused to seat black people. Later Ayers was arrest for participating in a sit-in at a local draft board.

Ayers jointed the SDS, and became one of their leaders being active between 1968 and 1969. As outrage grew toward the atrocities of denying civil rights to blacks, and the growing entanglements of the US in Vietnam, a more radical segment of the SDS separated and became what was eventually known as the Weather Underground. The Weather Underground is most famous for a campaign consisting of bombings, jailbreaks, and riots that took place between 1969 and 1970.

Something called the Days of Rage was scheduled for October 8-10, 1969. Mr. Ayers wrote of the Days of Rage:

"The Days of Rage was an attempt to break from the norms of kind of acceptable theater of 'here are the anti-war people: containable, marginal, predictable, and here's the little path they're going to march down, and here's where they can make their little statement.' We wanted to say, "No, what we're going to do is whatever we had to do to stop the violence in Vietnam."

Ayers has admitted that in an effort to jump start the “all out civil war” he and others bombed a statue on the evening of October 6th 1969. Only property damage was caused by this bomb set at a statue in a park, but it did break hundreds of windows.

[The statue selected as a target was one commemorating the death of riot police killed in an 1885 riot with labor supporters. What is even more interesting is that this statue was rebuilt, and unveiled in May 1970 and was blow up again by Weather Underground members 5 months later.]

The Days of Rage protest was actually intended to show some support for a group of protest leaders known as the Chicago Eight (or the Chicago Seven), protest leaders accused of inciting the riots at the Democratic National Convention. Most historians today consider that riot to be a police riot, but at the time, many Americans were shocked by the long haired hippie protesters and felt the country was chaotic and in desperate need for this violence and unconventionality to be stomped out.

The Days of Rage protest turned out to be a failure. The Weather Underground and Black Panther leaders had expected 25,000 to attend, and instead only a couple of hundred showed up.

In 1970 Ayers and several members of the Weather Underground had assembled a nail bomb and the devise exploded killing Ted God,, Terry Robbins, and Ayers’ girlfriend, Diana Oughton. Kathy Boudin and Cathy Wilkerson both survived the blast. Although Ayers was not, immediately charged with a crime he choose to became a fugitive and went into hiding. Later, charges were filed against Ayers in that bombing.

Ayers, admitted in his book, Fugitive Days, that he was later involved in other bombing incidents:

• a bombing of a New York City Police Headquarters (1970)


• the bombing of the Capitol Building (1971)


• the Pentagon in 1972

The bombing of the Pentagon actually was, in Ayers’ opinion, of limited success, because the explosing caused a water leak, and that caused enough damage that aerial bombardments during the Vietnam War were halted for several days.

Ayers writes:

Although the bomb that rocked the Pentagon was itsy-bitsy - weighing close to two pounds - it caused 'tens of thousands of dollars' of damage. The operation cost under $500, and no one was killed or even hurt.

Eventually, Ayers married a fellow Weather Underground member, Bernardine Dohrn. The two remained fugitives together, changing identities, jobs and locations. In 1976 the charges against Ayers and Dohrn were dropped due to prosecutorial misconduct. The Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) within the FBI, used a number of covert operations in order to disrupt dissident political organizations. The target of COINTELPRO included the Klu Klux Klan, the Black Panthers, and the Weather Underground.

The tactics used by COINTELPRO included

Infiltration
---not merely spying on political activists, but with the goal of discrediting and disrupting the organization. Their main purpose was to discredit and disrupt. Their very presence served to undermine trust and scare off potential supporters. The FBI and police exploited this fear to smear genuine activists as agents.

Using psychological warfare
---planting false media stories
---circulating bogus leaflets
---a whisper campaign spreading misinformation
---intimidated parents, employers, landlords, school officials, and others to cause trouble for the targeted activists.

Using the legal system for harassment
---using perjured testimony
---fabricated evidence as a pretext for arrest
---discriminatory enforcement of tax laws
---overt or conspicuous surveillance
---free and frequent use of grand jury subpoenas as a tool to silence or intimidate targeted supporters.

Using authority figure force and violence. The FBI and police would:
---threaten, and use vandalism, assaults, and beatings aimed at targeted people including Blacks, Porto Rican and native American activists, and actually there are allegations that political assassinations took place.

Apparently there were enough questions raised regarding the FBI/ COINTELPRO activities against Ayers and the Weather Underground had tainted the charges against them, and so all charges were dropped.

Since Ayers has admitted domestic terrorist crimes in his book Fugitive Days, we can say that while he is not legally guilty of domestic terrorism, he is certainly morally guilty, and he is most defiantly Not Innocent.

Nevertheless, Ayers today is not the Ayers of those turbulent Vietnam protest days. In Chicago Magazine, in 2001 Ayers and his wife Dohrn apologised for their part in those violent protest activities.

Ayers has not received general forgiveness, despite his apology because of an interview he gave to the New York Times when he is reported to have said he did not regret setting those bombs, and that he felt they [the Weather Underground] hadn’t done enough. When asked if he would do anything like that again Ayers reported answered, "I don't want to discount the possibility.”

So when Republican’s say that Ayers is an unrepentant domestic terrorist, they have some grounds for that statement. For his part, while Ayers has not actually denied saying these things about his terrorist past, he did write a letter to the editor saying that the report had deliberated distorted his words and taken things out of context. Ayers could have out right denied the statements, but he did not do that.

Ayers did, however, write a letter to the editor in the Chicago Tribune, in which he wrote:

"I condemn all forms of terrorism — individual, group and official".

He also condemned the 9-11 terrorist attack in this same letter, saying:

“Today we are witnessing crimes against humanity on our own shores on an unthinkable scale, and I fear that we may soon see more innocent people in other parts of the world dying in response."

Ayers has never been convicted of a crime [although he probably should have been], and Mr. Ayers is currently working as a Distinguished Professor at the University of Illinois at the Chicago College of Education. He is a free man, he is not a fugitive from the law, and he is interested in and involved in a number of social issues and causes, some of which involved urban educational reform, and working with and for children in trouble with the law.

Ayers worked with Chicago Mayor Daley in shaping the city's school reform program,[and was one of three co-authors of a grant proposal that in 1995 won $49.2 million over five years for public school reform. Also, in 1997 Chicago awarded Ayers its Citizen of the Year award for his work on the project. Since 1999 he has served on the board of directors of the Woods Fund of Chicago, an anti-poverty, philanthropic foundation. Mr. Ayers was not, however the ONLY member of the Woods Fund of Chicago. Among the other board members was a rising young politician named Barack Obama.

Here is my point:

1. Ayers admits having a domestic terrorist past, but when he was committing his crimes Barak Obama was a little boy. In no way is Barak Obama to be considered connected to those crimes.

2. Ayers is not a fugitive from justice, law enforcement knows where he is, and they have not arrested and prosecuted him. This means that Ayers is a citizen of this country and as a citizen he is active in politics, and community development. This means that other people involved in politics and community development will cross paths with him.

3. Ayers was supportive of the political ambitions of Barak Obama. However, this is not the Ayers of 1969, a young angry protester of the Vietnam War, this is an older wiser, man who has behaved with some responsibility since these sins of his past. Obama has had associations with Ayers, but so has Mayer Daley

When asked about his associations with Ayers Senator Obama said:

This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who's a professor of English in Chicago who I know and who I have not received some official endorsement from. He's not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis. And the notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was eight years old, somehow reflects on me and my values doesn't make much sense.

There is evidence that Ayers, at one time, contributed $200 to the Obama re-election fund,.
If Ayers so evil why is he allowed to walk our streets? Why is Ayers allowed to teach at a public University. Why isn’t he hounded out of neighborhoods and forced to register like some sexual predator where ever he goes? Do we have a list of everyone who knows and has had associates with William Ayers? Should we? Would it be legal and morally right to isolate and persecute William Ayers for the rest of his life because of something he did during his youth, but was never prosecuted for?

If we are going to castigate political leaders for their associates then why is not more made of the fact that Republican Vice President candidate Sarah Palin’s husband Todd Palin was a member of a separatist group in Alaska calling for the secession of that state from the United States. While the McCain campaign has denied this story the director of Division of Elections in Alaska, Gail Fenumiai, has revealed that Todd Palin was registered in October 1995 to the Alaska Independence Party, a radical group that advocates for Alaskan secession from the United States.

With the exception of a few months in 2000, Sarah Palin’s husband remained a registered member of AIP until July 2002 when he changed his registration again to be an undeclared voter.The founder of the Alaska Independence Party was a guy named Joe Vogler who has professed his "hatred for the American government" and cursed the American flag as a "damn flag."

The AIP founder, Joe Vogler, in a 1991 interview Oral History Program in the Rasmuson Library at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.

"The fires of hell are frozen glaciers compared to my hatred for the American government," ~Oral History Program in the Rasmuson Library at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks

Vogler has made no secret of his desire for Alaskan secession, and secession is the main purpose for the formation of the Alaskan Independent Party.

"And I won't be buried under their damn flag I'll be buried in Dawson. And when Alaska is an independent nation they can bring my bones home." ~Joe Vogler

Even Senator John McCain may have connections to Iran-Contra. News outlets are reporting that in the 1980s, McCain served on the advisory board to the U.S. chapter of an international group [U.S. Council for World Freedom] linked to ultra-right-wing death squads in Central America.

The U.S. Council for World Freedom, created by retired Army Maj. Gen. John Singlaub, was the U.S. chapter of the World Anti-Communist League, an international organization linked to former Nazi collaborators and ultra-right-wing death squads in Central America. After setting up the U.S. council, Singlaub served as the international league's chairman. For a time, this questionable group had John McCain’s name on their letterhead.

McCain later resigned from the group, and asked that his name be taken off the letterhead. I do not believe that McCain is a terrorist, or that he is unqualified to be President because of this past association. I do, however, feel that McCain was an adult when he got involved with this organization and Obama was 8 years old when William Ayers was doing his terrorist stuff.

Sara Palin mocks Obama for “paling around” with a domestic terrorist, but she is married to someone who has years of membership in a group headed by someone who hated America and wanted the secession of Alaska from the Union. The last time States tried secession we had a Civil War.

I find the Ayers story interesting, and obviously he is not someone you would want to pal around with while running for public office, but the truth is that Obama is not associated with the crimes of Ayers, he was a child when they took place, and the guy is actually not been convicted of anything. The slight connection between Ayers and Obama is very thin, but McCain and Palin are trying to make things look worse then they are because they want to distract voters from the bad economic news.

Jesus said:

"Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye. ~Matthew 7:3-5 (New International Version)

When Palin and McCain start exaggerating stories to spread fear and misinformation they need to remember that the too have a past that can be questions, inspire fear, and can also be distorted. Remember:

When the poop hits the fan the crap is not distributed evenly.

A Brave Working Poet Laureate Who Never Served

William Carlos Williams was a medical doctor, a dedicated poet blazing a path to modern poetry. Being a doctor is enough for us to admire him. Being a doctor and prolific brave doctor is even more to be admired. But Dr. Williams was also a man of principal, he had spine, grit, and for that I find the man amazing.

Perhaps the two most famous poems by Dr. Williams deal with rain falling on a red wheelbarrow and a note left to explain to a host that he had eaten the prunes he found in the ice box. At a time when most poems told a story and were restricted by inflexible rules of meter and rhyme, these simple little poems were stunning. Few of us are stunned today, but at the time those poems were written almost no one was brave enough or forward looking enough to conceive of such poetry.

Dr. Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, in 1883. Apparently poetry had a hold on him very early in his life because there are actually poems still in existence that he wrote while a student in high school It is claimed that in high school the young Williams made an overt decision to become both a writer and a medical doctor.

Dr. Williams earned his M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. It was at the University of Pennsylvania that he met another Poet Laureate candidate who never actually severed, Ezra Pound. While Pound is accepted by the world as a great poet, his most profound contribution to the art is, in my opinion, his influence on other poets, Dr. Williams being only one of a long list of notable poetic artists. For example, Pound is responsible for getting a London publisher to produce Dr. William’s second volume of poetry The Tempers.

Dr. Williams returned to his hometown of Rutherford, where he set up and maintained a medical practice that remained active throughout his life. Eventually Dr. Williams began publishing in small magazines and embarked on a prolific career as a poet, novelist, essayist, and playwright. Today Dr. Williams is recognized as one of the principal poets of the Imagist movement, a movement also closely associated with Ezra Pound.

Dr. William’s major works include:

• Kora in Hell (1920),
• Spring and All (1923)
• Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962)
• Paterson (1963, 1992) a the five-volume epic, and
• Imaginations (1970).

Dr. Williams' health began to decline after a heart attack in 1948 and a series of strokes.

It is at this point in the good doctor’s life that he demonstrated that old and ill as he was, he had a spine of still and was unwilling to bend to the political winds of his time.

You see, Dr. Williams was appointed as the Library of Congress Consultant in Poetry and thus began the last significant strangeness of his life, and of the Poet Laureate position. You see, like many intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s he explored some interest in communism. Many intelligent thinking Americans did this, and most drew back from it once they noted the tendency of that political system to spawn dictatorships and a loss of human rights. Dr. Williams was appointed to this Consultant in Poetry position (later the name was changed to Poet Laureate) near the end of his life. The proposed appointment of the old and ailing William Carlos Williams in the early 1950s was problematic. He may have been one of the most famous and widely-respected poets in the country, but he was investigated by the FBI for Communist sympathies. Any questions regarding his political carelessness took place years before, but we were in the midst of a Cold War, and the country was in the clutches of that fear mongering Witch Hunting jerk Joseph McCarthy. So in 1952 Library of Congress halted, his appointment was cancelled, then he was told by the Librarian of Congress that he had been appointed to the job again effective May 15, 1953 ‘or as soon thereafter as loyalty and security procedures are successfully completed.’ The Library of Congress wanted this life long small town doctor and world recognized poet to go down to his local police department and be fingerprinted like a common criminal.

Dr. Williams flatly refused to comply with these requirements. Dr. Williams stated that he considered all this fingerprinting nonsense to be an indignity. This act of protest was not a protest against finger printing so much as it was a protest against McCarthyism and the fear mongering of the United States Government. Time ran out, and Williams was never appointed.

If you go to the Library of Congress website and click on the list of Poet Laureates you will see that they list William Carlos Williams as one of the Poets Laureate, but in truth, he never actually served in that position.

At the time of this literary brouhaha, The Washington Post editorial called the affair ‘surprising, shocking and distressing’ and quoted the critic John Barkham, who said, “Williams is the concentrated essence of Americanism in everything he says and does’, and the poet himself was quoted as saying, ‘For heavens’ sake, what kind of country is this?’

The Williams question is one that I continue to ask. What follows are three short examples of Dr. Williams’ work:





The Red Wheelbarrow by William Carlos Williams

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.


This Is Just To Say by William Carlos Williams


I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox



and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast


Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold


The Uses of Poetry by William Carlos Williams

I've fond anticipation of a day
O'erfilled with pure diversion presently,
For I must read a lady poesy
The while we glide by many a leafy bay,

Hid deep in rushes, where at random play
The glossy black winged May-flies, or whence flee
Hush-throated nestlings in alarm,
Whom we have idly frighted with our boat's long sway.

For, lest o'ersaddened by such woes as spring
To rural peace from our meek onward trend,
What else more fit? We'll draw the latch-string

And close the door of sense; then satiate wend,
On poesy's transforming giant wing,
To worlds afar whose fruits all anguish mend.

America’s Most Controversial and ALMOST 7th Poet Laureate

The man who was almost the 7th Poet Laureate of the United States was Ezra Pound. Mr. Pound is generally considered the poet most responsible for defining and promoting a modernist aesthetic in poetry. Ezra Pound was born in born in Hailey, Idaho, in 1885, but his influence was on the entire world of poetry in virtually every country of this earth.

All of my early struggling poetry loving life I have read about Mr. Pounds work with and generosity for, and his efforts to advanced the work of such major contemporaries as William Butler Yeats, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Marianne More, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and perhaps most famous of all was his work with T. S Eliot. I recall reading that line by line of the famous Eliot poem The Wasteland, was worked over by Mr. Pound. Ezra Pounds own poetry was influenced by the poetic technique he found in classical Chinese and Japanese poetry.

Personally, I found Mr. Pound’s work to be over my head, esoteric, and intentionally difficult and obscure, nevertheless, I am no equal to the intellect of Ezra Pound, so my bewilderment over his work means very little.

Ezra Pound left the United State around 1924, and lived in various European countries. Eventually, during World War II Mr. Pound lived in Italy and became a supporter of the Fascist politics going on there. Some of Mr. Pound’s Fascist activities included radio broadcasts to the United States that were considered anti-American. When the US liberated Italy from the Fascism of Mussolini Ezra Pound was arrested by the army and held in a Pisa, Italy detention camp.

When the army shipped Mr. Pound back to the United States, in 1945, he was arrested and charged with treason. A trial was held, and there was some controversy over this matter because Ezra Pound was admired for his work and influence as a poet. Some feel that the reputation of Mr. Pound made it politically difficult to send him to prison for treason, so, in 1946, he was acquitted, but declared mentally ill and committed to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C.

I was living in the Washington DC area and a school friend had a father that worked at the Saint Elizabeth Hospital and had known Mr. Pound. So when it comes to that 6 Degrees of Separation, I am three people removed from knowing Ezra Pound, for what it’s worth.

Now we come to the Poet Laureate controversy. During his confinement to the mental hospital, the jury of the $1,000 Bollingen-Library of Congress Award (which (which included a number of the most eminent writers of the time) chose to overlook Pound's treasonous past, and to give him the Bollingen Prize for his work Pisan Cantos written in 1948. This means that most of these poems were written while Mr. Pound was sitting in a Pisa, Italy detention camp, or later in the nuthouse where he was forcibly hospitalized for mental incompetence.
Making a guy, in the nut factory the position of Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress created a huge public protest.

Congressman James T.Patterson, of Connecticut was quoted at the time of this controversy asking:

Should we encourage the activities in literature of moral lepers?

Under pressure, the Library of Congress withdrew their decision to make Mr. Pound America’s 7th Poet Laureate, and that honor went instead to Leonie Adams.

The Congressional then did what Congress always does in the face of voter rage, they passed a resolution that forced the Library of Congress to stop giving prizes or making awards. This ban on the Library of Congress giving out awards lasted for 40 years. A Congressional Joint Committee gave the Library approval for the resumption of prizes — in 1990 James Merrill won the $10,000 biennial Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry. (The prize is a memorial to the late Mrs Bobbitt, who was the sister of the late President Johnson.)

What follows are two poems by Mr. Pound. The first is Haiku-like:

In a Station of the Metro By Ezra Pound

The apparition of these faces in the crowd :
Petals on a wet, black bough .


Canto I By Ezra Pound

And then went down to the ship,
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
We set up mast and sail on tha swart ship,
Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also
Heavy with weeping, so winds from sternward
Bore us out onward with bellying canvas,
Circe's this craft, the trim-coifed goddess.
Then sat we amidships, wind jamming the tiller,
Thus with stretched sail, we went over sea till day's end.
Sun to his slumber, shadows o'er all the ocean,
Came we then to the bounds of deepest water,
To the Kimmerian lands, and peopled cities
Covered with close-webbed mist, unpierced ever
With glitter of sun-rays
Nor with stars stretched, nor looking back from heaven
Swartest night stretched over wretched men there.
The ocean flowing backward, came we then to the place
Aforesaid by Circe.
Here did they rites, Perimedes and Eurylochus,
And drawing sword from my hip
I dug the ell-square pitkin;
Poured we libations unto each the dead,
First mead and then sweet wine, water mixed with white flour.
Then prayed I many a prayer to the sickly death's-head;
As set in Ithaca, sterile bulls of the best
For sacrifice, heaping the pyre with goods,
A sheep to Tiresias only, black and a bell-sheep.
Dark blood flowed in the fosse,
Souls out of Erebus, cadaverous dead, of brides
Of youths and at the old who had borne much;
Souls stained with recent tears, girls tender,
Men many, mauled with bronze lance heads,
Battle spoil, bearing yet dreary arms,
These many crowded about me; with shouting,
Pallor upon me, cried to my men for more beasts;
Slaughtered the herds, sheep slain of bronze;
Poured ointment, cried to the gods,
To Pluto the strong, and praised Proserpine;
Unsheathed the narrow sword,
I sat to keep off the impetuous impotent dead,
Till I should hear Tiresias.
But first Elpenor came, our friend Elpenor,
Unburied, cast on the wide earth,
Limbs that we left in the house of Circe,
Unwept, unwrapped in sepulchre, since toils urged other.
Pitiful spirit. And I cried in hurried speech:
"Elpenor, how art thou come to this dark coast?
Cam'st thou afoot, outstripping seamen?"
And he in heavy speech:
"Ill fate and abundant wine.
I slept in Circe's ingle.
Going down the long ladder unguarded,
I fell against the buttress,
Shattered the nape-nerve, the soul sought Avernus.
But thou, O King, I bid remember me, unwept, unburied,
Heap up mine arms, be tomb by sea-bord, and inscribed:
A man of no fortune, and with a name to come.
And set my oar up, that I swung mid fellows."
And Anticlea came, whom I beat off, and then Tiresias Theban,
Holding his golden wand, knew me, and spoke first:
"A second time? why? man of ill star,
Facing the sunless dead and this joyless region?
Stand from the fosse, leave me my bloody bever
For soothsay." And I stepped back,
And he strong with the blood, said then: "Odysseus
Shalt return through spiteful Neptune,
over dark seas,Lose all companions."
And then Anticlea came.
Lie quiet Divus. I mean, that is Andreas Divus,
In officina Wecheli, 1538, out of Homer.
And he sailed, by Sirens and thence outward and away
And unto Circe. Venerandam,
In the Creatan's phrase, with the golden crown,
Aphrodite,Cypri munimenta sortita est,
mirthful, orichalchi, with golden
Girdles and breast bands, thou with dark eyelids
Bearing the golden bough of Argicida. So that:

Affirming Affirmations

I went to see my new shrink yesterday. She is actually a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and she suggested I use affirmations. The suggestion makes some sense. If you have depression, anxiety, frustrations, low self-esteem, or any other something that is bothersome in your life, then the affirmation may be at least part of the solution to coping with, or even defeating your problem.

I have struggled with depressed for a number of reasons:

1. I may be hypersensitive by nature.

2. I was raised by parents who married too young, held hard inflexible, fundamentalist views, were poor and their problems caused them to do and say things that gave a hypersensitive child problems.

3. I got into the habit of punishing myself if I ever find my parents absent to do the punishing.

I know this may sound stupid to you. It sounds stupid to me, but it is the truth. I don’t need to call my parents up to hear their advice because it is there in my mind all the time, and it is constant, consistent, blunt, harsh, vitriolic, verbal poison.

I spent about 18 years being criticized, belittled, and punished for my flaws, and then I took on that role and spent 40 more years bustin’ my chops, and feeling like a loser.

I have probably said a million plus bad things about me. I grew to hate myself. I’m better now, certainly, but there is still hypersensitivity, self-loathing, and low self-esteem just under my skin looking like a bad tattoo.

How can you counter these millions of belittling words other than to stucco over that acerbic labeling with positive affirmations of the SELF?
Tips for Affirming the SELF

1. If a positive affirmation is to have a positive effect on your life it must be worded positively.

That may sound like a big ole “Duh,” but remember, I have hated my own guts for 40 years, and felt unworthy of drawing in air, and so making my positive affirmations positive is no “Duh” not for me.

DON’T SAY
I will stop being such a pitiful, stupid loser.

DO SAY
I deserve and accept all the love, joy, and abundance of the universe.

DON’T SAY
I’m going to stop being such a fat, ugly eating machine.

DO SAY
I will eat healthy, and enjoy looking and feeling healthy.

2. Have a bunch of affirmations.

It isn’t hard to write your own affirmations, and it is very, very easy to find affirmations already written and available to you.

The Internet has millions, maybe billions of affirmations free and ready to be used. No need to recreate the wheel. Just type the word Affirmation in the search box, click “go,” and the affirmations will be there in abundance.

Have a bunch of affirmations because human beings get bored easily, and because we are multi-faceted we need a lot of different affirmations aimed at the different problematic parts of our life.

3. Use your affirmations repetitively.

Make a recording of your affirmations and listen to them in the car, on your MP3 or Walkman, tape the affirmation of the day on past-y-notes a stick them to mirrors, doors, the edge of your computer screen. Make little rules for reciting your affirmation:

• When I see yellow I will repeat my affirmation 3 times.
• Every time Sarah Palin says maverick I will repeat my affirmation 6 times.

When you say your affirmation, it is helpful to place an emphasis on different parts of it. Look at the following affirmation and say it with stress on the all caps, bold, italicized word:

I deserve and accept all the love, joy, and abundance of the universe.

When I stress the word I, I remind my SELF that this affirmation is for me. I’m not talking theory. This is not a general truth. This is a truth for me and I will pay attention to what is directed towards my SELF.

I DESERVE and accept all the love, joy, and abundance of the universe.

When I stress the word Deserve I am saying that love, joy, and abundance are not pity gift, that all this good stuff belongs to me, and I have every right to have love, joy, and abundance in my life. Maybe I don’t have it, or maybe I won’t have it for a while, or perhaps I won’t have it all the time, but that takes nothing away from the fact that I deserve to have love, joy, and abundance in my life.

I deserve and ACCEPT all the love, joy, and abundance of the universe.

When I stress the word Accept, I am reminding my SELF that I am committing my SELF to accept love, joy and abundance. If I have love, joy or abundance shortages in my life, it is NOT going to be because I am punishing myself by not accepting it when it is available to me.

4. Make a list of areas of the SELF you want to heal and then work on the SELF one area at a time.

I spent so much of my life messing my life up, that I can’t reasonably expect to repair it all instantly. I am a mess of many facets, so I realize I am going to have to polish my SELF one facet at a time.

This does not mean that I have to perfectly polish one facet before moving on to another. I can move from area of need to area of need, but perhaps some segment of time will be dedicated to one specific problem area at a time. Perhaps I will spend the day using one affirmation that addresses self-esteem. The evening I may use an affirmation aimed at soothing my guilt feelings.

Ben Franklin wrote in his autobiography that he made a list of traits that he thought would make him perfect and he worked on that list one area at a time. He found that once he had a couple of them down pretty perfectly, and moved on he would notice that he would mess up on an area he’d previously had down pat.

The goal of my affirmations is not to reach perfection but to make some degree of progress. I don’t want to be perfect. I want to be better.

To The Bus Stop By tex norman

I watch them walking. Clearly
they’re together, they’re a group.
Even from this distance I
can see that something isn’t
right. To me they look like kids
forced to walk on mattresses.
As they get closer I can
see their bodies are confused.
One rising shoulder is
shocked that the left one has gone
south. Each elbow has a mind
of its own. Some feet step high,
and proud, and purposefully
as if they were supporting
a trumpet player in a
marching band. The other feet
are baffled, because the toes
are locked in this hot debate
and every ballot ends with a
tie. On each and every vote
the little piggy abstains.
One word passes through my mind.
From here they’re easy to love
and difficult to care for.