| I haven't seen, read, or heard very much News in the past week or so. Life interference. I continue as always to scan and skim, but at the current moment, I am lacking depth and information within the undercurrents. mea culpa. I should take my vitamins. I'm quite distracted, but I have the undercurrents rumbling like the draw of the sandbar, just look out for the undertoe.
Monday's Democracy Now with Noam Chomsky is yet another bit I missed, entitled "The Center Cannot Hold: Rekindling the Radical Imagination":
Well, it's easy to ridicule the ways in which Joe Stack and others like him articulate their concerns, which are very genuine and real. But it's far more appropriate to understand what lies behind their perceptions and actions, and particularly, to ask ourselves why the radical imagination is failing to offer them a constructive path, while the center is very visibly not holding. And those who have real grievances are indeed being mobilized, but mobilized in ways that pose no slight danger, to themselves and to the rest of us and to the world.
snip, skip ahead to the conclusion
Well, for the radical imagination to be rekindled and to lead the way out of this desert, what is needed is people who will work to sweep away the mists of carefully contrived illusion, reveal the stark reality, and also to be directly engaged in popular struggles that they sometimes help galvanize. So what is needed, in short, is the late Howard Zinn. Terrible loss. Well, there won't be another Howard Zinn, but we can take to heart his praise for "the countless small actions of unknown people" that lie at the roots of the great moments of history, the countless Joe Stacks who are destroying themselves, and maybe the world, when they could be leading the way to a better future.
The reference...
The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
~William Butler Yeats
Since I am so distant and unschooled, but always wish to know context, I went and found this about Yeats... interesting:
Yeats began writing "The Second Coming" in January 1919, in the wake of the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. It was first published in November 1920 in The Dial and later appeared in his collection Michael Robartes and the Dancer, one of several works of the period that exemplify the rhetorical, occasionally haughty tone that readers today identify as characteristically Yeatsian. In 1922 Yeats became a senator for the newly formed Irish Free State. The following year he was honored with the Nobel Prize for literature. Ill health forced Yeats to leave the Irish senate in 1928. He devoted his remaining years to poetry and died in France in 1939. ... Overall, "The Second Coming" has been well-received as one of the most evocative visionary lyric poems of the twentieth-century and widely praised for its technical excellence and extensive symbolic resonance.
Wandering. This is another one of my bouncing intuitive leap-frogging ADD essays that I expect mostly Andy S and a few dharmanauts to completely "get" while others just scratch their heads. It's okay. There's nothing to "get", really.
Has anyone mentioned the ruling re the Miranda issue? hmmmm. Well, I'll go read this NYT opinion piece about it.... in a sec. Absurdity abounds.
"Morale was deteriorating and it was all Yossarian's fault. The country was in peril; he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them." Catch 22, Joseph Heller
Oh, whoops, wrong paste. :-/
Washington -- The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that suspects must explicitly tell police they want to be silent to invoke Miranda protections during criminal interrogations, a decision one dissenting justice said turns defendants' rights "upside down."
A right to remain silent and a right to a lawyer are the first of the Miranda rights warnings, which police recite to suspects during arrests and interrogations. But the justices said in a 5-4 decision that suspects must tell police they are going to remain silent to stop an interrogation, just as they must tell police that they want a lawyer.
I can barely stand to open my email News alerts and links anymore. It's... some of these headlines are so absurd as to be comical. WTF?: News Alert: Effort to contain Gulf oil stalls with stuck saw. and then there's Israel deports activists from Gaza-bound flotilla.
I tried to read banger's excellent essay, I dropped some tips/rec's, but I just can't focus like that right now.
This is all such soul sapping stuff. It can drown you but there are ways... in the ocean, you dive under the wave.... under, then wait, swim out some, then surface. Breathe.
In my snail mail yesterday I got yet another letter from ACLU, asking for my donations, which is fine but I wish I could, but oh well... anyway, this time the mailer included a small (maybe 3" x 5") booklet, the Constitution. Pocket size.
Maybe that's what we should do. Create some pocket sized manuals... for "radicals"... and refugees. Essentials. What to take. What to know. You think I'm kidding? I am not.
The old woman learns that Catch-22 gives soldiers the right to do anything that the citizens cannot stop them from doing. The soldiers are justified in their unjust actions simply because they have the power. Yossarian realizes that Catch-22 does not exist, but it makes no difference. What does matter is that everyone thinks it exists, and this belief gives Catch-22 the power to repress the believers.
...
All The Rules will change.
Sea change.
My love for you has no strings attached.
I love you for free.
When we finally learn to Love.
...crossposted from Docudharma |
