Had conversations with three good workish colleagues and two email yaps with buddies, lifelong Democrats all and devout -.06%ers still, who each for the first time expressed to me genuine shock and fear Obama might actually lose to Romney. I still offer 4-1 pints on Obama's victory, there's three months of daily shitstorms to go before the conventions and Labor Day and the true beginning of the shittiness, plus he's running against a gaffe machine made out of a cardboard box, plus he can move the country further to the right by 2016 than Romney ever could, which Corporate is more than aware. My reassurances didn't assuage. The jobs news of yesterday morning (and please remember the numbers were cooked, as all administrations cook numbers, to be the rosiest possible without stinking of tilt) (made Obama's cockswording - and all he has is his Muslim-killing cred, the sole issue trending up in his campaign's internal polling - seem even more puny, cowardly, craven) made five obamapostles (and numerous bloogers and pundits) squirm to a revealed possibility the motherfucker just might lose and, most interestingly, each entertained the possibility the motherfucker is in fact a lame motherfucker.
- The best thing you'll read today.
- Think about all the things you'd advise Obama to be talking about that he's not talking about, I said to one friend, ask yourself why he isn't. She considered. June 1, 2012, maybe not a paradigm shift for obamapostles, but the day some stopped to consider the validity of the paradigm.
- Jobs report.
- I know I linked to this yesterday, but it bears repeating: The 2012 election should be a referendum between two visions of America. On the left, Obama should say that we’re in a jobs crisis, and that he’s going to do everything in his power to get people back to work — by employing them directly, if need be. On the right, Romney can say that job creation should be left to US companies, despite the fact that those companies are signally failing to increase their payrolls despite their record-high profits. And then the public can choose which side they want to vote for. Sadly, the lines won’t be drawn nearly that cleanly: Obama is bizarrely reluctant to talk about anything which rhymes with “stimulus”. As a result, the current dysfunction — and horribly weak jobs market — is likely to persist for far too long.
- Obama more likely to bomb Iran than Romney?
- The war on Iran.
- Motherfucking Obama.
- There's money to be made in a police state.
- Propaganda.
- Motherfucking Obama.
- Romney's sugar daddies.
- China's take on human rights in USA.
- North Korea on western propaganda.
- Austerity.
- Jubilee mudgeonry.
- The society of the spectacle.
- We are all anonymous.
- Teaching as librarianship.
- In which Rae Armantrout, a poet I admire, talks about musicians I, with the exception of Cohen (though I'm getting there) and Adele (what's an Adele?) run the emotional spectrum from hate to loathe.
- Scythe.
- Murakami bingo! I'm still thinking about 1Q84 daily. Yay!
- The life you save may be your own.
JUST ANOTHER PARADIGM SHIFT
Paul Grant
Just a shadow. Hardly that. But audible.
Coming out of the woods, whispering
Happily Ever After.
Even in that light—
stars with the skeletons of animals
and old friends—
visible
to the eye behind the one always
left open on the east side of the house,
downhill. Where the coffee trees
and hemp and the graves of old dogs lie,
buried themselves in leaves and left
to the sputtering wind of memory.
& if that's not enough (he says
to himself in the voice of a black-and-white
actor whose name is a moth that keeps
avoiding the tip of his flaming tongue)
to bring you home, well, there
it is again,
already exhausted
by your efforts to make it
comfortable
enough to stay. Impatient,
already headed
back down into the woods, whispering
Once Upon A Time . . .
