Tag: banality

Mar 31 2012

Nothing from Nothing: II

Don’t get me wrong, I love all 88,

But the piano’s register just below the waistline

Is The One For Me.  That’s where my own voice

Lives, it’s where my ears understand the sick

Sweet chords.  I’m no musician, but play

Billy Preston, in super slo-mo,

which is transcendent enough

for me; well, have you tried it?  Believe

you me, it transports at any pace.

irreplaceable, like the spoken word;

From friend to friend, from generation to

generation.  The human ear cannot hear

some of Bach’s melodies in the wrong

tempo.  A Viennese friend proved that

to my satisfaction, but you can play

Billy Preston like molasses, and feel fine,

All over.  Just to stroke the same chords

In order places you next to god.  Amen.

I know I’ve run this one past you before, but here it comes ag’in.  It’s unstable in flight, like a high-tech fighter plane, but this is a high-tech funky love plane, instead:

Jan 26 2009

I thought it was just me and Jon Stewart

Jon and I were in agreement that the “inaugural poem” was a pedestrian, mundane bit of instantly-forgettable fluff, suitable for lulling small children (and not a few adults) to sleep, but not good for much else. I can’t begin to tell you how happy I am that Jon and I aren’t alone.

http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs…

… it was no surprise to hear Alexander begin her poem today with a cliché (“Each day we go about our business”), before going on to tell the nation “I know there’s something better down the road”; and pose the knotty question, “What if the mightiest word is ‘love’?”; and conclude with a classic instance of elegant variation: “on the brink, on the brim, on the cusp.” The poem’s argument was as hard to remember as its language; it dissolved at once into the circumambient solemnity. Alexander has reminded us of what Angelou’s, Williams’s, and even Robert Frost’s inauguration poems already proved: that the poet’s place is not on the platform but in the crowd …

May 19 2008

They hate Us

But the one thing throughout this period that Americans could always depend on, even after Nixon and the collapse of public faith in the president’s morals, was that the lies the American president told would always be the very best lies that science, computerized research, and Washington’s most devious spooks could produce. Our president may lie, but he will lie effectively and spectacularly, with all the epic stagecraft and lighting and special effects available to the White House publicity apparatus. He is never a hack, never a half-assed, off-the-cuff, squirming, my-dog-ate-my-homework sort of liar. Or at least he wasn’t until George W. Bush came around.

“They hate us for our freedom” was possibly the dumbest, most insulting piece of bullshit ever to escape the lips of an American president.

–Matt Taibbi, The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire

They Hate Us.

Yes, They do.

“They Hate Us For Our Freedoms”

The ringing words of presidential banality.  Inspiring, after a fashion.

The community Bush limited his comments to hate us.

Not because of our freedoms…they don’t know us

We won’t let them.

They no nothing of our freedoms.

They no nothing of freedom.  Not yet.

They know what they dream, and we’re not in those dreams.

Only in their nightmares.

They hate us because they don’t trust us.  Not yet.

The people I am limiting my comments to hate Us.

They hate Us for our freedoms.

Conservatives in power and their minions selling it on cable.  They.

Liberals like me…someone with questions, actually expecting answers.  Us.

Our freedoms, guaranteed.  Us.

Freedoms, meddlesome nuisance to Standard Operational Conduct.  They.

They hate Us.