I Would Like To Think

I would like to think
Like Noam Chomsky
But talk
Like Bill Maher.

If I could put
My thoughts together
The way the eastern sage
Chomsky chomps away at them,
Making finally and at last,
After too many words and paragraphs
That can leave me gasping for brain oxygen,
With the sense I need to
Make sense of what is often not,

And then at some other time,
Reconvene those thoughts,
Have them meet up
In Real Time
More Maher-like, curt,
Smarting , smart and pointed
Like bullets clearly
In the direction
Of some who then wish
They had not been in
The line of fire;

If I could coalesce like Chomsky
And reconnoiter like Maher,
If I could trap logic like the Noam
And grind up raw thought
Like the Billy gnome, gruff,

Then I would like to think
That I could write like…
I had thought to say
A Frost or a Hemmingway, but
I would probably just write
Like me

and
I would like to think
That would be
Just fine.

Social Injustice!

This should perhaps be a headline in The Onion...but it's not!

Iraqi Shoe-Thrower Gets Three Years in Prison!

Protesting journalist goes to jail for heaving a heel at a heel! Three years in prison for doing right is wrong! He should have gotten:

-Three years in the Caymans

-The use of a yacht

-At least some of those virgins I keep hearing about!

Threw the Glass darkly

The nation’s conservatives still seem to maintain an insatiable need for juvenile , pseudo-celebrity-like, temporarily spectacular diversions from the world in which the rest of us live. I think this is called “accident avoidance”: they are actually trying to accidentally avoid actually “thinking”. For instance, you have these annoying, recurrent anomalies:

-Rush ”I want Obama to fail” Limbaugh, bouncing up and down for 85 minutes in front of dazed and confused CPAC attendees; then he stayed on television, doing that for days for even more dazed and confused TV viewers;

-Karl “This economic mess is not George Bush’s fault” Rove, appearing almost everywhere on TV, almost all the time. Why is anyone still listening to him? He can do that but he can’t testify to Congress?

-Ann “I’m an anorexic asshole” Coulter, using up planetary oxygen for no discernible reason;

-Glenn “Stem cell research will lead to a master race” Beck, proving nightly that someone can repeatedly put together two sentences in the same paragraph that have nothing to do with one another. Yes, CNN really pays him to do this;

-Sarah “I can be as dumb as an Alaskan moose” Palin, who makes up both legalities and realities as she goes along, and is still seen as a heroine. I am just waiting for the revelation about heroin;

-A fourteen year-old talking ditto head who can rattle off conservative vapid talking points better and faster than

-Newt “I will run for President if it looks like it’s worth it and won’t if it don’t” Gingrich, who has not figured out that A) no one listening , B) no one gives a damn, and C) that nostalgia died with Ronald Reagan;

All of these appear to both resist and foil any attempts at serious thought. It is easier, I surmise, to pretend at thinking rather than actually do it.


Then there is the Pope: he is forgiving or excusing or absolutionizing (?) a holocaust denying priest and then says he is travelling to Israel and Palestine to pray for peace. I used to pray that pedophile priests would derail the catholic Church. That didn’t work, so maybe this obvious proof that papal infallibility is in fact complete absurdity will help the cause.

The Congress is battling over $8+B in earmarks which are “only a small %” of the total budget bill (but still $8+B, which we are not supposed to noti ce), which John McCain said he deplored during the campaign, then said were OK now that he was not the President. And of course Lindsey (“I am as dumb as a post”) Graham said they were horrible except for the ones that will fund his convention center in Myrtle Beach. And Obama and Enamuel think they are OK because they are “Bush’s earmarks” and not their fault. Maybe. Possibly.

And the fight over Prop 8 in CA is a mis-guided mal-a-prop-ism and a waste of time, money and energy. Even the venerable conservative George Will, on television, on Sunday morning, said that “homosexuality is about as interesting for most people as discovering that someone is left handed. Who cares?” That may be the only thought-provoking conservative thought I’ve heard in years. The end of times?

And “Daylight Savings Time” does not save any daylight: it is only supposed to save electricity. We can’t even freakin’ save energy in this country and get the terminology right. I only threw the glass darkly because I couldn’t see anymore…and neither could anybody else, apparently.