Category Archives: politics

10 years on, from the quakers

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In struggling to figure out some lesson, something of import and intelligence to read about in relation to the anniversary of 9/11, something to break through the noise and confusion of the cable talk shows and the politicians and the melancholic proclamations of strangers on the street, I want to share the best thing I have read about it all.  The following is the approved minute by the New York Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends:

Ten years ago members of al-Qaeda used four passenger aircraft as weapons
to kill nearly 3,000 people on September 11, 2001. The United States
Government’s response was to answer violence with violence. In the ensuing
wars, hundreds of thousands more people have been killed. New York Yearly
Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) urges everyone to
recognize this anniversary as an occasion to remember that there are always
alternatives to violence and that there is a Spirit in every human being which
responds with gratitude to these alternatives.

The Religious Society of Friends has always upheld the way exemplified by
Jesus, who taught us never to return evil for evil, but to love our enemies and
pray for them, forgiving them every offense. We confess that we, being
human, do not always fulfill this high standard. Nevertheless, we continually
strive to discern the guidance of the living God who loves unconditionally,
and extends unlimited compassion, comfort, mercy, guidance, grace and
revelation to all who ask.

We testify to the world that we disown all wars and fighting with outward
weapons for any cause whatsoever. These are never necessary. There are no
“just wars.” Among the weapons we renounce are the tongue and the pen,
when these are used to provoke prejudice and hatred. Neither will we be
silenced by fear when we are called to witness against evil masquerading as
good. We seek to build a world in which a just peace is possible. We seek the
strength to support and keep faith with those who suffer for nonviolent acts of
conscience. We live by the gospel of God’s love for all. Join us.

http://www.nyym.org/index.php?q=summer2011min.html

the saddest night of august yet

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johnny’s, tonight ‎with cinnamon toast crunch shots and prairie fires and white russians and a man screaming while justin beiber played, and the same man, who an hour later couldn’t stand to walk home; pizza deliveries and girls with scars on their necks that told the future and girls with tattoos on their shoulders where there shouldn’t've been and christmas lights blinking in august and the counting crows singing about a long december and the strokes and johnny cash and marvin gaye and two men riding the same bike the wrong way down greenwich and the street and the summer and a tuesday and the city…

everyone is exhausted but trying to make it through, august weighing heavily and not even half way done. the music was twisted and all over, even though the heat, which isn’t even that bad, it’s been almost like september, is almost gone. the bartender, she’s always been good to us, but tonight she poured drinks diligently. once we caught her smile as her shirt fell off her right shoulder, but it was all tired and we all needed a break, i think. we all needed… i don’t know but something, though, so i paid my tab which was more than i thought, deservedly so, and caught a cab downtown with my friend, and the cabbie joked at us and we joked about ground zero and how ten years is actually a long time and it was hard even to remember back then.

and so then we got there, to a whole other place, a shitty bar where we’re supposed to play pool but where the a/c is broken and it feels like the heat from a few weeks ago, but this time indoors, and there’s just as little chance of it getting better as there was in july. the bartender is wearing a bra and a pair of panties and torn stockings, her unvoluptious curves confused with rolls of fat running down her sides, she was ugly in the face, and maybe looked like she was fifteen and a little retarded, there was thick red lipstick smeared along the approximation of her lips and she seemed like she didn’t know where she was or at least’d never been there before. maybe it was the powder she was doing in the bathroom with the guy with tattoos from staten island who’d left his wife that morning, crashed his truck on the other side of the verrazano and took the ferry in. he offered us some advice about the consumption of alcohol and to buy us drinks but got distracted by the black lace of those sweat stained and ridiculous lingerie. those two were going to fuck, that was clear, probably on the pool table, and the drunk wasted drugged out retarded fifteen year old bartender with weird lipstick seemed to regard that as a distinctly positive outcome to the evening, at least based on how she climbed over the bar to lick her man’s face while we all tried not to look and waited instead for our drinks.

and there was another girl there too who told some strangers she was an actress but was open to doing photo shoots, “photo shoots of any kind, just as long as i have a chance to rest inbetween”, she said, and they smiled and drank their Heinekens and put Motorhead on the juke box and my friend drank his pineapple and vodka and i shuffled my feet and looked at the time and the girl who was probably a freshman in college or something like that laughed and raised her hands, thrashing to the dissonance of the sound system that was too loud for the small room.

and then of course lastly, the club. some cuban girl who used to clean houses told me this was the best gig she’d had since she’d taken the boat and all i could think of was how sad castro would be and some big black man in a nice suit and fancy spats lost control and grabbed things he shouldn’t've and puked on the way out, next to the glass stage and some mexican guy who has to clean everything up is asking some anorexic russian girl to step aside and ke$sha vibrates in waves in the pool of vomit and upstairs some fuck in a pink shirt and penny loafers started yelling at the bathroom attendant about how he shouldn’t have to wash his hands at all and next time he’s just gonna wear diapers…

it was late and i was tired and the cab seemed to float over the bridge on the way home. tonight it’s all been too much and it makes me sad. about us. you and me and our friends, our citizens and kids and families and daughters and economies and tonight i know that i have been surrounded at every moment by a sadness, a kind of optimism of the soul infused with desperation, delirious delusions, at every moment, unrelenting and concentrated, a confusion that is the specificity of august in new york and a people in decline.

i think i should call my doctor and for the first time in almost a year, i actually miss vermont.

a little bit, oh just a little bit, of hurt is coming

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this debt ceiling, these markets, the financial ups and downs, taxes and politics, fear and demographics, a burning earth under clouds of methane, the promises of a democracy for the wealthy, and the sacrifices of everyone else; everything is collapsed, everything is not and it’s all, well, it’ll all end in just a little, coming quicker in the promise of a little bit of violence, a burning car on the corner, a brick in your face, a little bit of hurt, a man at your door holding a knife or a bat or a gun and telling you: you don’t get to decide, you don’t get to tell me anymore…  a man black or brown or masked or dirty or just plain too tired, he’s coming: that’s what i think.

and i’m scared.

of it and him and… what i’ll have to do then and if i won’t be able to.

this mayor fuck in florida, he’s just an example, telling poor people they don’t get the help they need because he doesn’t think it’s right… they’re gonna figure it out, they’ll realize it and  realize what’s happening, when they become suddenly tired of being told by some rich white man who thinks he’s their dad and herding them into corners and there’s a time when they walk into the offices of their government carrying guns, not paper, and all of a sudden everything everywhere explodes and all of a sudden no one’s buying ysl bags in china town and kanye west will’ve left the country, and netjets will be sold out, time shares on the wing, sold out and all of everyone who could having flown for some other borders besides ours.

you tell me, when the swat teams are on the street and m16′s and tear gas’re in the subways, you tell me what it’s gonna fucking matter who you voted for and who gives a fuck about what you think about marx and einstein and if you even know how to spell plutocracy.

we’ve seen it and it’s happening now and we want to think it’s somewhere different, somewhere like london, syria, egypt, libya, bahrain; somewhere like not here, like it’s going to happen on the block down your street, and what will you do?  what will you do?  when it is here.  when you hear the sounds of unrest and when you smell the sulfur of dissatisfaction?

they will slaughter us, the poor.  while we listen to katy perry and biggy smalls and run for our escalades, they will wrap our children’s necks in plastic and hang them from the trees of our park lined blocks.  they will drag us behind their cars and burn us from their mountains.  they will execute their anger against this wild injustice that is nothing but a temporary mirage of civilization.

my friends, i’m telling you, this tea party is over,  this dream is called.  this short is long and the markets won’t matter a damn when they fucking tell us they can’t eat any more…

i’m afraid.  scared.  i have water in my basement and rations in a bag; whistles waiting and bars of gold just in case.  a friend of mine is waiting for his shotgun to be delivered and i’m waiting too, our mutual safety  depending on access to the boat.  i’ve got a zodiac in jamaica bay waiting to take me to connecticut; i’ve got a gas mask under my desk and a fiberglass tactical tomahawk in my hand:  when it comes to getting me and mine out, i guess it just comes down to if i’m willing to put the metal in someone else’s temple.

which is what it’s seeming it all comes down to anyway.

 

an alternative to dreamlessness

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i’ve been sort of sad since the space shuttle sent up its last flight, and reading the paper this morning just made me more so.  if you ask me, i think the political parties in washington, fueled by a misguided and uneducated populace are hurtling this country towards irrelevancy and decline.  discussions about debt ceilings are meaningless in light of a 1.2 trillion dollar ongoing war effort.  handwringing about job creation is disingenuous if not criminal in the context of a run away wealth gap.  and in order to protect barrons and emperors, we cut and slash at vital social programs like education, medicare, emergency services, and the development of science.  it’s all backwards and confusing and makes no sense to me.

then, thank god, before the paper got to be too much, I read this: How Seawater Can Power The World.  Amazing.  Only 30 Billion!  Within reach.  100 million degree plasma?  And that’s Celsius.  Unlimited clean power.

Now that doesn’t look TOO hard…  It seems that for a very long time, perhaps as long as I’ve been around, I’ve been reading about things that are important/critical/revolutionary that we must do, can do, ought to do, but can’t because we “lack political will”.  Who is it, exactly, that keeps lacking the will to do these things?  Who is it that keeps stopping these things from proceeding or not proceeding fast enough?  It’s interminable and exhausting and even more depressing.  Damn it.  I thought I was happy I read that article.

What are the 5 big super projects that we could and ought to embrace?  Budgets of >50 billion.  Thousands of people across all walks of life working on?  That would reinvigorate and unite our country?  Get us over this “political will” hump?  Make a difference?  In our life time?  250 billion?  That’s a couple of Groupons, a Joint Strike Fighter, a Bill Gates, and a year or two of Iraq…  seems a no brainer to me.

goodbye space shuttle

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today i watched the final lift off of the space shuttle program, sts-135.  my daughter was sitting in my lap and i was a little teary eyed about the whole thing.  why haven’t i been paying attention to this thing more?  30 years this thing has been doing this and man,  i love it!  i really do.

 

on a technological level, it is absolutely insane.  i don’t even understand .1% of what all what happens to make it work.  but i do know it’s amazing.

on a political level it is confusing and strange that we live in such a stupid country that so many people believe NASA and the space shuttle to be an example of wasteful liberal government programs.  but don’t get me started on that.  and god help me if you start talking about private space exploration and the x-prize and richard branson, my brain will explode.

but, and on a human level, though, we put people inside a machine stacked on a bunch of other machines that are filled with millions of pounds of explosives and light a fuse and shoot it into the sky and people in different control centers push different buttons and 99% of the time everything goes right and it goes up, flies around, builds space stations, fixes things, does science and then comes home and everyone has a beer and can you imagine what it’s like to be the person driving that thing or the person who built a little tiny weeny little switch for the toilet or the flight director or the fuel director or just even someone sitting somewhere watching it shoot up into the sky and hoping and dreaming and imagining what it might one day be like for them to fly into space?

i don’t really remember where i was when the challenger blew up – i was in fourth grade i guess and if pressed i’d say i remember watching it in the library at my high school which would be impossible since i wasn’t in high school, i was in fourth grade.  i think i’m confusing the first gulf war with the challenger, which would make sense to my brain.  i do, though, remember being only somewhat upset, probably because i didn’t really know what it all meant except that it was bad.

and then columbia, i was an asshole in grad school and wrote a stupid play about two guys who find pieces of debris and try to sell it on ebay; it was a bad a play.

and now?  well, now the whole thing is over.  i don’t know what will come next.  the orion space craft, in 2020?  9 years from now… my kids will watch it go up, i hope.  it seems a disappointingly long time.  but maybe that time will give us some room the breathe and think and try to remember why all this matters in the first place.