05/05/2019
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The Quincunx
Further Bard's Eye Views
from the Foot of Spider Mountain
(Official organ of the Mythic Government
of the Peace Corps Epenthesis,
of the Quetzalcóyotl Foundation,
& of Babuh University of Pan-Ecleqtik Hoo-Hah)
May-Day Issue, May 1st, 2019
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Isn’t It Time Yet to Dump Trump?
“No act of this presidency — good or bad, beneficial or detrimental — can ever be considered without first contextualizing that this presidency itself was conceived in deception and is being incubated under an extraordinary lie.
“The Trump presidency is a corruption that flows from corruption. It is damned by its own damned lies.” — Charles M. Blow
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If they give me enuff room to play [& to parlay my truths into further truths], then why should I complain [or feel disdain] about the forces of repression currently at large in this plainly & painfully furshlugginer nation of ours? eh? Has it something to do with that age-old notion of altruism? wishing as good as you’ve got on the other guy? So many poets & deep thinkers have come up with the conclusion that the ultimate purpose of life, from the standpoint of someone who is actually living one [! & why not?], is to derive pleasure from the total ongoing experience [or experiment] that one has willy-nilly been thrown into.
* * *
You back-country bozos
have given this country to a clown.
And you may never live it down.
We need a new kind of school
for people who don’t think —
like you.
One real problem that no one seems to be talking about is how shall we (re-)educate that part of the U.S. electorate that, despite all indications that it would be an extremely bad choice, nonetheless chose to choose T-Rump. What were they thinking?! What had they been drinking?! I mean, just because you lost your job is no reason to act stupidly & help to elect a madman. And he truly is, you know — as bonkers as anyone has ever been as resident of our national home, the White House, which now has turned a very muddy shade of yellowish brown — a lot like what you normally find in infants’ filled diapers. Why would anyone consciously & voluntarily choose to make such a move of disruptive discoloration? White is the color of purity; baby-s**t yellow brown is the color of cowardice through & through — insulation & isolation from everything not his own.
Being an idiot & being insane — i.e. a maniac — are not mutually exclusive conditions for a human being — & especially for the so-called “human” that has, through a trap or a trick of history, been allowed to occupy & “work” from the most important governmental desk of our time — & perhaps of all of history — if importance is reckoned by what one is empowered to do from that specific place.
What Trump needs is the Siddhartha-experience : to be turned out of his insulated situation of capitalist nobility into the world of actuality, which, of course, includes, among many other things, the country of Honduras, where centuries of oppression & deprivation have turned the place into a hotbed of criminality & corruption, both at the level of the street & within the halls of government. That little country at the middle of the middle, at the center of the center of America (& when I say “América”, I mean from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego) has for decades been the Murder Capital of the World — not a very distinguished title, obviously. So why would anyone in her or his right mind not want to leave such a place? eh?
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Perhaps the worst thing about all this mess is the unthinking partisan complicity of the Republicans. If ever there were a bunch of know-nothings in our national government, they are decidedly them.
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“Seeming is almost as good as being, sometimes.” — John Ashbery
“In ruling there is but one joy : no one dares defy you. If a ruler is good & no one dares defy him, isn’t that good? But if a ruler is evil & no one dares defy him, isn’t that close to a single precept destroying an entire country?”
Confucius (Analects, 144)
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If a constitutionally established governmental system leads to this sort of political farce & charade, then isn’t it obvious that a new constitution is required? I had thought that George W. Bush’s tenure was the end-all be-all of everything politically possible in this country; but then — after a spate of more or less steady sense-making with Obama — we get this.
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At Holloway & SMB
In a little pocket park
right across the street from Barney’s Beanery,
there stands a single olive-tree,
& around it a wreath of fragments of poems
that key into various aspects
of the human horror that is war.
Where I sit I face two lines
from a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks
called “Breaking Glass” :
“I shall create! If not a note, a hole.
If not an overture, a desecration.”
And from there around the cement ring
the poignant passages go,
from Brooks to Yeats, to Dunbar & Hardy,
to Whitman & Owen,
& even some newer folks are there:
Komunyakaa & Pinsky,
& even mi tocaya Denise.
Each a piece of a different poet’s view
of why it’s so crazy to continue to believe
“That old lie : DULCE ET DECORUM EST
PRO PATRIA MORI”
when, as Whitman says,
all that’s left is what suffers.
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Where?
There’s a place the man always say
Come in here, child
No cause you should weep
Wolf never catch the rabbit
Golden hair never turn white with grief
Come in here, child
No cause you should moan
Brother never hurt his brother
Nobody here ever wander without a home
There must be some such place somewhere
But I never heard of it
Kenneth Patchen
El Grito del Coyote
We don’t care what his “beliefs” are, nor his opinions
on the 5 major issues that mass media have determined
are “the salient issues”
& which the Republican Party has cleverly engineered
& delivered to the masses
through its bullhorn commercial mass media allies.
The #1 issue for American society now
is a GOP big tent containing more liars
than in all the cowboy western poker-games combined,
Wall Street included,
pretenders to disliking Trump while voting wholly for the tyrannical brat,
who has already done more damage to Justice
than could be corrected in a decade.
If the Democratic Party can get past its reactionary rage,
grow a calm logical brain
& ditch the stable of seriously flawed losers
with second-hand ideas & naive egos,
the would-be superstars that commercial mass media
has forced it to parade,
then Peet Buddha-JEDGE
will be the tough candidate to punch down Trump ~
~ the Civil War, which never ended, will heat up again
& be re-enacted
in the Deep South & Midwest,
as unedjoomocated enraged cornpone rednecks,
dat tawk lak dey gotta MOUFF fulla mush,
they will drive their monster crewcabs
into crowds of good people ~
stay tuned to this network.
Tomás Coyote
A Friend Comments on the Current Situation
I think it is too late to use quaint solutions like a "carbon-tax." Fuel--riots in France demonstrate where this is going. Punishing the poor in order to make fossil fuel so expensive that other choices become viable will probably hurt too many and not get the result intended. Other measures might help, but they are "from above." Banning one-passenger vehicles from cities, and even banning private vehicles other than delivery- and service-vehicles from cities is one measure that may well happen.
Companies will need to move out of their suburban office-parks surrounded with parking-lots and go back to the cities where they belong -- or they need to be walking-distance from a transit-station.
Rail-transportation, which burns the least fuel per passenger, needs to be prioritized. Towns without rail-connections will be probably become ghost-towns.
People will need to live where they work, and work where they live. Good-bye commuting, and good-bye to buying a lifestyle where your kids don't have to sit in school with those minorities you hate.
Urban areas must NOT be permitted to be food-deserts. Hydroponic and roof-top farms need to be everywhere, maybe right next to all the solar power-generation-units we need to install. The entire nation's power-needs could be satisfied with wind, solar, and tidal power, with a temporary role played by nuclear (dangerous but contributing nothing to carbon-reduction).
Reforestation can and must happen.
Something 100 times bigger than the Manhattan project is needed to find technology to remove CO2 from the air, and to clean up the toxic mess we have made of the oceans.
Small steps accumulate to large solutions.
But if nothing is done, the decisions will be made by a dictatorship of technocrats, and nothing resembling nations, nationalities, political parties, religions, imagined racial identities, will be of any account whatsoever. Everything will be on an emergency-basis.
Not your problem? Go ahead, just keep having babies. None of them will have full lives, and they might be the last generation of humans.
Merry Christmas to you, too. — Brett Rutherford
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They maintain themselves with the most meager of meals :
corn & beans — rice & eggs when they have them.
[Poetry]
Poetry is a dead lamb in a bucket of blood.
Poetry is a small brown teddy bear with gilded glittery wings.
Poetry is three syllables.
Poetry does not know how to spell
or write a dissertation on the color of Coleridge’s eyes.
Poetry is a dinosaur rising out of La Brea Tar Pits
while the Roto Rooter Good Time Christmas Band
plays Pico and Sepulveda on the kazoo.
Poetry is the Watts Towers of words :
an impossibly delicate abstract of chipping mosaic
at the end of a series of dangerous neighborhoods,
built and preserved by the audacity of hope.
Truth is the only thing poetry holds in common with itself.
Poetry is not form, syntax, pluperfect indicative grammar bu****it.
Poetry is Bukowski’s wallet, pulled out of a stinking toilet of p**s and s**t,
the wet bills siphoned off before the next race on the track of life.
Eugenia Hepworth Petty
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I am happy to announce that the Mythic Government of the Peace Corps Epenthesis has a brand new member in the person of Hal Anjo, Ph.D., who has agreed to be our Minister of Public Policy. Born in Honolulu in 1939, Hal has worked closely & assiduously with problems of urban society for decades now. He & I are very much on the same page when it comes to seeing where we are in this country & where we might otherwise be. He’s a genuine mensch, & he & I used to see each other fairly regularly, for he was party to what we’d been making each Wednesday at ARTterie in Boulder Creek. He’s a docent & tour-guide at our local Big Basin State Park — California’s oldest — &, according to his own report, he can play the ukulele like Jack the Bear. I’m biding my time till I can hear this. Congratulations, Hal! And welcome aboard.
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Lines for a Drama Perhaps:
“My fellow English-speakers:
‘con-artist’
is a single word —
a two-part compound noun
that neatly expresses
what we have now come to
in our national demise . . .
one more yuge stepping-stone
to’rd the cloudy murkiness of the epoch of
ignoramuses.
‘When did the dumb-bunny bomb
first hit the U.S. of A.?’
How shall we now
exercise our intelligence
against this bout of idiocy?
together
The means are in place
for example Facebook
LOOK! what we have
@ our communicational
disposal!”
If the grapevine didn’t damp,
our communicational camp
would be filled with many more people.
The news can now travel fast,
but each hearer must also be sender anew
to ensure that the next person down the line
can likewise tune in to what’s true.
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I will turn 77 later this year, an age I never expected to attain. Do you? Then behave yourself!
Communiqués & donations should be sent to 17275 Highway 9, Boulder Creek, CA 95006. E-mails to [email protected]. Gracias por su atención,
Nicho Tongolowíchuut
