Weblog 73
July 01, 2007~ 1:00am
The past week has been a joyful, though sobering one for me as I realized how ideologically separated I am from my family.
It's been a week of ruminating on 911, and tracing the build-up of the long political manipulation toward war; retracing steps of how we got here, and realizing it was all agenda waiting for the spark of an event to serve as catapult and first salvo over the wall.
I am terribly troubled by evidence- scientific evidence by experts, that points to the possiblity of charges planted in those towers to actually bring them down. I am suspicious of the power black-out to the building the weekend before 911, when all security cameras were shut-down as crews made electric cable 'upgrades' to all the upper floors. I am upset by the suppressed recordings of two firefighters who made it to the 75th floor and reported two 'manageable fires' amid the carnage, NOT the girder-melting hell that collapsed two buildings engineered to withstand hits by passenger airplanes. I am deeply troubled by photographic evidence of orderly blowouts beneath the quickly descending top floors as they thundered down....
I've been reading online what we now know-- reading also what's been suppressed and riddled with questions-- and I can't help but nearly weep at how I shared the very same reactions to the ramp up to war as Noam Chomsky's response given during an interview:
Looking at the recent US policies in Iraq, What do you think was the real goal behind this war?
Noam Chomsky: Well, we can be quite confident on one thing. The reasons we are given can't possibly be the reasons. And we know that, because they are internally contradictory. So one day, Bush and Powell would claim that "the single question," as they put it, is whether Iraq would disarm and the next day they would say it doesn´t matter whether Iraq disarms because they will go on and invade anyway. And the next day would be that if Saddam and his group get out then the problem will be solved; and then, the next day for example, at the Azores, at the summit when they made an ultimatum to the United Nations, they said that even if Saddam and his group get out they would go on and invade anyway. And they went on like that. When people give you contradictory reasons every time they speak, all they are saying is: "don't believe a word I say" . So we can dismiss the official reasons.
I wanted to shout "YES!"- as I read that. "Yes. Exactly what I was thinking as I watched in absolute horror that week or so before the war began in March, 2003, and realized it was coming regardless.
As time goes on, more people have begun to question the entire thing-- though sadly for me, I find that not to be the case in my immediate circle of family and co-workers. They continue to row the boat. Continue to flag-wave and pray. Continue as though this has not been four of the darkest years in our history, where we've cast aside so many of our ideals by the complicit wearing of a national blindfold. This is NOT the liberation of Europe. This is a whole other kind of war, its motives cloudy at best.
Though you cannot fight terrorism with ground troops, we've sent in infantry, and new equipment launched just for this conflict- which keep the fat cats safely tied to their defense contracts and bringing home the considerable bacon. We've created an entire generation of maimed soldiers who will be forgotten except for memorial dedications and Independence Day parades- and their voices will be silent, their eyes accusatory, but those looks will be ignored.
All of this infuriating to me, so I've written a poem.
What else is there to do but to keep talking- keep writing- keep punching the bag and dancing. What the f*ck else?
1932
On the top
of a stack
of bent facts, I survey whatever
information I can
pull
from the rubble of that glorious autumn day
which becomes darker
and then clearer
as the towers fell. I lost a son to misinformation.
Lost a nation
to sleight of hand, watched millions anger
and then
cower
then strike
back blindly
at whatever
they could find to fit
the bill. I've watched twelve hundred days of war
mount
in what seems forever, added to the stack of facts
appropriately bent, but not distilled, I've heard the tolling of a bell.
I've heard
the knell
of reason
put to sleep,
and upon the munition
crested hills, the slope of a coming
Armageddon decked in expensive tanks,
young men
come up
in the ranks
of a perfectly planned
and choreographed
robot army
dying in dirty ditches from more
sophisticated ordinance as the wars
wage on and on and sides multiply the ones who hate us
as we are: a nation of fatted, grazing sheep
who cannot sleep
without a prayer
to something I no longer
truly recognize as good, that too
has been distorted
along with
patriotism, truth, and the voices
of family, who wave a rag of something
harder
to salute, as I realize
it wears the face
of 1932, when a people
were happy to go to war with what
they were pointed
toward
by bellicosing fear and a failing
Deutchmark. Heil.
The Eagle
my dear,
has landed.
July 01, 2007~ 1:15am
I just watched the final episode of The Sopranos- (and yes, I was able to steer clear of all mention of its controversial outcome)- and I found it brilliantly satisfying. For those of you who contend that Tony 'got whacked' because of the foreshadowing episode of he and Bobby in the fishing boat talking about what it's like to be shot dead, and the answer was "everything goes black".....I say that's one interpretation. Having the scene go suddenly black felt just as it should- by having them disappear in the same way the Sopranos entered my life in 1999- riding their alternate reality, whisked in and out over the weeks and months and years, and now they've blinked back out- to somewhere else- still living their Soprano lives.
And did anyone else see the significance of a cat appearing in this last episode? Surely it was symbolic of Schrödinger's Cat, with its opened-ended questions of multiple realities, multiple outcomes. For some- Tony is dead; for others, he is alive at the end of the show- and probably better-adjusted than we've ever seen him. He seemed to be making peace with all elements of his life, touching and reaching out to key characters in what felt like final resolution. Do I wish this killer well?
Yes, I do.
I've loved Tony from the very first show, and the show was magic, mostly his own. The Sopranos changed our conception of what can be accomplished on television drama for all of time. It was a world, and for me, the ending was open. It was happy. And it left me feeling satisfied. I saw Phil taken out (thank God, that sickening sadist) and I watched the sympathetic character of the FBI guy finally revealing true feelings for Tony as well as his own feet of clay, cheating with one of the female agents by engaging in some 'afternoon delight'- and in a way, that FBI guy was all of us at the end, wanting Tony to beat the system, to make it out, to slip away and live his life. My final episode says he did.
What did yours say?
"Please tell me what happened in this night.
It's like the cat inside the box.
Please tell me what happened in this night.
You don't know if the cat in the box is dead or alive.
Please tell me what happened in this night.
The cat in the box was dead."
July 03, 2007~ 5:15pm
My uncle died in the early morning hours yesterday. Peacefully. He was nearly 86 years old. Worked his whole life until illness struck him a few years back and left him in a wheelchair, but very lovingly well-tended by my aunt. The two of them were married for 62 years, working side by side in a small Italian grocery store he built into a thriving business that's being handled by my cousin and her husband, featuring homemade pasta and imported delicacies from Italy-- and he left us with his secret recipe for the locally famous sausage that he's known for- many restaurants feature it right on their menus or in advertising.
I am saddened, but so happy for the life he lived. He employed my mother too- for 20 years she weighed cheeses and learned how to pronounce the names of everything.....lol....they were like the 3 musketeers in that place, hard workers, all three of them. Tonight I'm going to the funeral viewing and meeting up with the vast extended family. How odd, how he died just days away from his birthday- his name is always one of the ones on the big birthday cake at the annual Fourth of July Family Picnic/Reunion. (The Fourth of July has always been the pivot for getting together on my mother's side of the family- and some folks were already arriving, just as he passed away.) Somehow, it just seems right that he'll be with us this last time.)
I have memories of the old store they had in East Liberty...the barrels of live snails in front- and how they'd crawl out on rainy days- the olives, the hanging cheeses everywhere. The whole family lived above it for years when my cousins were young, across the street from Help of Christians Catholic school. The neighborhood is a ghost town now-- and my cousin's new store is in an affluent part of the South Hills, much expanded with cooking gadgets and expresso machines, but I have photos in my head of the old place.....much like this
-just jam-packed with stuff, things hanging and crammed everywhere. My fourth of July will be more visitation and viewing with the funeral itself on Thursday. I hope where Uncle Joe is now, he can still see the fireworks with us. Still hear the laughter. God.......life is so damn short, but stretching it seems into forever. It goes inside us, and of course, we're all just labyrinths of the past. Some of it is carnival and color. That's the part where the old store resides, looped with cheeses and sausage and energy from morning till night. Somewhere.......it still is. That idea seems to be a theme this week.
July 06, 2007~ 11:15am
Thought I'd take a stroll around the net tonight, and peek into some places I haven't visited in quite some time. I was aghast that things are still rolling along as they have been- navel lint first, then tastelessness, then a whole GENERATION of numb-brains who do nothing but post YOUTUBE everywhere, thinking it's cool. Thinking their numbness is cool, and only the outrageous can shock us out of it. I have a few words to say about that....
Never Can Say Goodbye
The terribly
terribly,
terribly
involved with self
thick
worlds collide, go up in a YouTube flatline
finally
oh thank
god the world
has room-
there are no more winning
clevernesses- writing will seem bigger
but damn!
I thought, right there
is Haughty
Bones
in her
seventy
fifth
reincarnation of being cool
and seven
teen.
I hadn't
checked-- I'd thought
that paranoia took
her off
the map
for good
but there's that YAP
come
back
and always
will anddollwayswill, the web
is a spinning vacuum
not unlike
a centrifuge
and things
do stick
to the sides, they go
away
but oh
they do
come
'round
again and again
and again
in a brand new hairdo
showing that POP
will
survive. The worship
of all things POP
till all the fine
is gone
at last
when we are a plaster
of Paris culture
through and through.
PREFERRED ENTERTAINMENT OF MORONS WORLDWIDE
***
(Return To Weekly Archives)
The past week has been a joyful, though sobering one for me as I realized how ideologically separated I am from my family.
It's been a week of ruminating on 911, and tracing the build-up of the long political manipulation toward war; retracing steps of how we got here, and realizing it was all agenda waiting for the spark of an event to serve as catapult and first salvo over the wall.
I am terribly troubled by evidence- scientific evidence by experts, that points to the possiblity of charges planted in those towers to actually bring them down. I am suspicious of the power black-out to the building the weekend before 911, when all security cameras were shut-down as crews made electric cable 'upgrades' to all the upper floors. I am upset by the suppressed recordings of two firefighters who made it to the 75th floor and reported two 'manageable fires' amid the carnage, NOT the girder-melting hell that collapsed two buildings engineered to withstand hits by passenger airplanes. I am deeply troubled by photographic evidence of orderly blowouts beneath the quickly descending top floors as they thundered down....
I've been reading online what we now know-- reading also what's been suppressed and riddled with questions-- and I can't help but nearly weep at how I shared the very same reactions to the ramp up to war as Noam Chomsky's response given during an interview:
Looking at the recent US policies in Iraq, What do you think was the real goal behind this war?
Noam Chomsky: Well, we can be quite confident on one thing. The reasons we are given can't possibly be the reasons. And we know that, because they are internally contradictory. So one day, Bush and Powell would claim that "the single question," as they put it, is whether Iraq would disarm and the next day they would say it doesn´t matter whether Iraq disarms because they will go on and invade anyway. And the next day would be that if Saddam and his group get out then the problem will be solved; and then, the next day for example, at the Azores, at the summit when they made an ultimatum to the United Nations, they said that even if Saddam and his group get out they would go on and invade anyway. And they went on like that. When people give you contradictory reasons every time they speak, all they are saying is: "don't believe a word I say" . So we can dismiss the official reasons.
I wanted to shout "YES!"- as I read that. "Yes. Exactly what I was thinking as I watched in absolute horror that week or so before the war began in March, 2003, and realized it was coming regardless.
As time goes on, more people have begun to question the entire thing-- though sadly for me, I find that not to be the case in my immediate circle of family and co-workers. They continue to row the boat. Continue to flag-wave and pray. Continue as though this has not been four of the darkest years in our history, where we've cast aside so many of our ideals by the complicit wearing of a national blindfold. This is NOT the liberation of Europe. This is a whole other kind of war, its motives cloudy at best.
Though you cannot fight terrorism with ground troops, we've sent in infantry, and new equipment launched just for this conflict- which keep the fat cats safely tied to their defense contracts and bringing home the considerable bacon. We've created an entire generation of maimed soldiers who will be forgotten except for memorial dedications and Independence Day parades- and their voices will be silent, their eyes accusatory, but those looks will be ignored.
All of this infuriating to me, so I've written a poem.
What else is there to do but to keep talking- keep writing- keep punching the bag and dancing. What the f*ck else?
1932
On the top
of a stack
of bent facts, I survey whatever
information I can
pull
from the rubble of that glorious autumn day
which becomes darker
and then clearer
as the towers fell. I lost a son to misinformation.
Lost a nation
to sleight of hand, watched millions anger
and then
cower
then strike
back blindly
at whatever
they could find to fit
the bill. I've watched twelve hundred days of war
mount
in what seems forever, added to the stack of facts
appropriately bent, but not distilled, I've heard the tolling of a bell.
I've heard
the knell
of reason
put to sleep,
and upon the munition
crested hills, the slope of a coming
Armageddon decked in expensive tanks,
young men
come up
in the ranks
of a perfectly planned
and choreographed
robot army
dying in dirty ditches from more
sophisticated ordinance as the wars
wage on and on and sides multiply the ones who hate us
as we are: a nation of fatted, grazing sheep
who cannot sleep
without a prayer
to something I no longer
truly recognize as good, that too
has been distorted
along with
patriotism, truth, and the voices
of family, who wave a rag of something
harder
to salute, as I realize
it wears the face
of 1932, when a people
were happy to go to war with what
they were pointed
toward
by bellicosing fear and a failing
Deutchmark. Heil.
The Eagle
my dear,
has landed.
July 01, 2007~ 1:15am
I just watched the final episode of The Sopranos- (and yes, I was able to steer clear of all mention of its controversial outcome)- and I found it brilliantly satisfying. For those of you who contend that Tony 'got whacked' because of the foreshadowing episode of he and Bobby in the fishing boat talking about what it's like to be shot dead, and the answer was "everything goes black".....I say that's one interpretation. Having the scene go suddenly black felt just as it should- by having them disappear in the same way the Sopranos entered my life in 1999- riding their alternate reality, whisked in and out over the weeks and months and years, and now they've blinked back out- to somewhere else- still living their Soprano lives.
And did anyone else see the significance of a cat appearing in this last episode? Surely it was symbolic of Schrödinger's Cat, with its opened-ended questions of multiple realities, multiple outcomes. For some- Tony is dead; for others, he is alive at the end of the show- and probably better-adjusted than we've ever seen him. He seemed to be making peace with all elements of his life, touching and reaching out to key characters in what felt like final resolution. Do I wish this killer well?
Yes, I do.
I've loved Tony from the very first show, and the show was magic, mostly his own. The Sopranos changed our conception of what can be accomplished on television drama for all of time. It was a world, and for me, the ending was open. It was happy. And it left me feeling satisfied. I saw Phil taken out (thank God, that sickening sadist) and I watched the sympathetic character of the FBI guy finally revealing true feelings for Tony as well as his own feet of clay, cheating with one of the female agents by engaging in some 'afternoon delight'- and in a way, that FBI guy was all of us at the end, wanting Tony to beat the system, to make it out, to slip away and live his life. My final episode says he did.
What did yours say?
"Please tell me what happened in this night.
It's like the cat inside the box.
Please tell me what happened in this night.
You don't know if the cat in the box is dead or alive.
Please tell me what happened in this night.
The cat in the box was dead."
July 03, 2007~ 5:15pm
My uncle died in the early morning hours yesterday. Peacefully. He was nearly 86 years old. Worked his whole life until illness struck him a few years back and left him in a wheelchair, but very lovingly well-tended by my aunt. The two of them were married for 62 years, working side by side in a small Italian grocery store he built into a thriving business that's being handled by my cousin and her husband, featuring homemade pasta and imported delicacies from Italy-- and he left us with his secret recipe for the locally famous sausage that he's known for- many restaurants feature it right on their menus or in advertising.
I am saddened, but so happy for the life he lived. He employed my mother too- for 20 years she weighed cheeses and learned how to pronounce the names of everything.....lol....they were like the 3 musketeers in that place, hard workers, all three of them. Tonight I'm going to the funeral viewing and meeting up with the vast extended family. How odd, how he died just days away from his birthday- his name is always one of the ones on the big birthday cake at the annual Fourth of July Family Picnic/Reunion. (The Fourth of July has always been the pivot for getting together on my mother's side of the family- and some folks were already arriving, just as he passed away.) Somehow, it just seems right that he'll be with us this last time.)
I have memories of the old store they had in East Liberty...the barrels of live snails in front- and how they'd crawl out on rainy days- the olives, the hanging cheeses everywhere. The whole family lived above it for years when my cousins were young, across the street from Help of Christians Catholic school. The neighborhood is a ghost town now-- and my cousin's new store is in an affluent part of the South Hills, much expanded with cooking gadgets and expresso machines, but I have photos in my head of the old place.....much like this
-just jam-packed with stuff, things hanging and crammed everywhere. My fourth of July will be more visitation and viewing with the funeral itself on Thursday. I hope where Uncle Joe is now, he can still see the fireworks with us. Still hear the laughter. God.......life is so damn short, but stretching it seems into forever. It goes inside us, and of course, we're all just labyrinths of the past. Some of it is carnival and color. That's the part where the old store resides, looped with cheeses and sausage and energy from morning till night. Somewhere.......it still is. That idea seems to be a theme this week.
July 06, 2007~ 11:15am
Thought I'd take a stroll around the net tonight, and peek into some places I haven't visited in quite some time. I was aghast that things are still rolling along as they have been- navel lint first, then tastelessness, then a whole GENERATION of numb-brains who do nothing but post YOUTUBE everywhere, thinking it's cool. Thinking their numbness is cool, and only the outrageous can shock us out of it. I have a few words to say about that....
Never Can Say Goodbye
The terribly
terribly,
terribly
involved with self
thick
worlds collide, go up in a YouTube flatline
finally
oh thank
god the world
has room-
there are no more winning
clevernesses- writing will seem bigger
but damn!
I thought, right there
is Haughty
Bones
in her
seventy
fifth
reincarnation of being cool
and seven
teen.
I hadn't
checked-- I'd thought
that paranoia took
her off
the map
for good
but there's that YAP
come
back
and always
will anddollwayswill, the web
is a spinning vacuum
not unlike
a centrifuge
and things
do stick
to the sides, they go
away
but oh
they do
come
'round
again and again
and again
in a brand new hairdo
showing that POP
will
survive. The worship
of all things POP
till all the fine
is gone
at last
when we are a plaster
of Paris culture
through and through.
PREFERRED ENTERTAINMENT OF MORONS WORLDWIDE
(Return To Weekly Archives)
...
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I've written- 
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nowhere but where they are. If you stop and read a few~ or post a
few~ thanks for
the perusal. Last of all, if you've a hankering for rants and raging,
try making a stop at my other blog- 
