Of course Obamadick was Topic One at Thursday Night Pints. Don't I feel betrayed, I was asked. Today's kaboom, I said, a week from now everyone will have settled into the positions you can predict today: everyone will have shifted whatever number of hexagonals in exact relationship to anyone else. I will hate motherfucking crackers, I will hate Team Corporate GOP and Team Corporate Democratic and hate The Villagers who blow them then tell you how good it tastes; I will hate motherfucking Obama and his motherfucking obamapologists and I will especially hate motherfuckingly complicitous obamapostates like me, in no more or less proportion to any of them than I do right now, though we'll all be, in exact ratio to each other, another incremental kaboom closer to Serbia.
The ridiculously priced scotch was Glensomething. It tasted like NyQuil. Next time I want a beer, I said. Play by the rules or shut the fuck up, snorted L.
- Shit, I bet pints on Obama the Gameplayer. If I had any faith in Obama the Gameplayer, and by that I mean solely in terms of innate political savvy and clairvoyance and superior political survival and killer instincts, I could believe he'd designed, patiently lured, more patiently waited to spring this elegant trap for two years. If he is the gameplayer I once thought, it's brilliant, he can ride this to an easy landslide reelection.
- Not your friends.
- Condoning evil.
- Can you imagine Obama saying this at the 2012 Democratic Convention? For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves. We will keep our sleeves rolled up. We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred. I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master.
- I can, if he thought he needed to. And Ronald Dworkin is a fool. And FDR was running a reelection campaign.
- Profile in courage.
- And yes, of course Corporate wants him to win reelection: he can do more damage to safety nets than any Republican currently could, and will, in 2016.
- Petraeus in 2016.
- Krugman's obamapostasy will never be ready.
- Screwing America.
- The pathology of elite organizations.
- Count on this.
- Slap in the face.
- The sorrow and the pity.
- Derrick Jensen revisited.
- Unfoldings.
- News, out of the world.
- Multiplicity.
- Yes, I have posted the Spicer poem before.
- Burning Man, part 8. I've tried three times, not going to work.
- HEY! Any of you read Vladimir Sorokin's Ice Trilogy? Whatcha think?
- Lit links.* (K: this.)
- The genesis of Nick Cave.
- Big Star documentary in the works.
- I've no Pale Saint CDs, just cassettes I found last night looking for something else; tape would crumble had I a cassette player and tried.
ORPHEUS IN HELL
Jack Spicer
When he first brought his music into hell
He was absurdly confident. Even over the noise of the
shapeless fires
And the jukebox groaning of the damned
Some of them would hear him. In the upper world
He had forced the stones to listen.
It wasn’t quite the same. And the people he remembered
Weren’t quite the same either. He began looking at faces
Wondering if all of hell were without music.
He tried an old song but pain
Was screaming on the jukebox and the bright fire
Was pelting away the faces and he heard a voice saying,
“Orpheus!”
He was at the entrance again
And a little three-headed dog was barking at him.
Later he would remember all those dead voices
And call them Eurydice.
