Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number
Throw off your chains, like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you
Ye are many they are few!
-Percy Shelley
The Mask of Anarchy
A Sane Revolution
If you make a revolution, make it for fun,
Don’t make it in ghastly seriousness,
Don’t do it in deadly earnest,
Do it for fun.
Don’t do it because you hate people,
Do it just to spit in their eye.
Don’t do it for the money,
Do it and be damned to the money.
Don’t do it for equality,
Do it because we’ve got too much equality
And it would be fun to upset the apple-cart
And see which way the apples would go a-rolling.
Don’t do it for the working-classes.
Do it so that we can
all of us be little aristocracys on our own
And kick our heels like jolly escaped asses.
Don’t do it, anyhow, for international Labour.
Labour is one thing a man has had too much of.
Let’s abolish Labour, let’s have done with Labouring!
Work can be fun, and
men can enjoy it; then it’s not Labour.
Let’s have it so! Let’s make a revolution for fun!
– D. H. LAWRENCE
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U-Tube KEITH OLBERMANN guy speaking his mind about Bill C
Poetry Of The Anarchist Heart
________________
The Links….
Now do you believe in the “Madden” curse?
Arinday: The Earth is not just for humans and animals
_________________
SPECIAL COMMENT BY KEITH OLBERMANN
It is not important that the current Presidents portable public chorus has described his predecessors tone as crazed.
Our tone should be crazed. The nations freedoms are under assault by an administration whose policies can do us as much damage as al Qaida; the nations marketplace of ideas is being poisoned by a propaganda company so blatant that Tokyo Rose wouldve quit.
Nonetheless. The headline is this:
Bill Clinton did what almost none of us have done in five years.
He has spoken the truth about 9/11, and the current presidential administration.
“At least I tried,” he said of his own efforts to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. “Thats the difference in me and some, including all of the right-wingers who are attacking me now. They had eight months to try; they did not try. I tried.”
Thus in his supposed emeritus years has Mr. Clinton taken forceful and triumphant action for honesty, and for us; action as vital and as courageous as any of his presidency; action as startling and as liberating, as any, by any one, in these last five long years.
The Bush Administration did not try to get Osama bin Laden before 9/11.
The Bush Administration ignored all the evidence gathered by its predecessors.
The Bush Administration did not understand the Daily Briefing entitled “Bin Laden Determined To Strike in U.S.”
The Bush Administration did not try.
Moreover, for the last five years one month and two weeks, the current administration, and in particular the President, has been given the greatest pass for incompetence and malfeasance in American history!
President Roosevelt was rightly blamed for ignoring the warning signssome of them, 17 years oldbefore Pearl Harbor.
President Hoover was correctly blamed forif not the Great Depression itselfthen the disastrous economic steps he took in the immediate aftermath of the Stock Market Crash.
Even President Lincoln assumed some measure of responsibility for the Civil Warthough talk of Southern secession had begun as early as 1832.
But not this president.
To hear him bleat and whine and bully at nearly every opportunity, one would think someone else had been president on September 11th, 2001 — or the nearly eight months that preceded it.
That hardly reflects the honesty nor manliness we expect of the executive.
But if his own fitness to serve is of no true concern to him, perhaps we should simply sigh and keep our fingers crossed, until a grown-up takes the job three Januarys from now.
Except for this.
After five years of skirting even the most inarguable of factsthat he was president on 9/11 and he must bear some responsibility for his, and our, unreadiness, Mr. Bush has now moved, unmistakably and without conscience or shame, towards re-writing history, and attempting to make the responsibility, entirely Mr. Clintons.
Of course he is not honest enough to do that directly.
As with all the other nefariousness and slime of this, our worst presidency since James Buchanan, he is having it done for him, by proxy.
Thus, the sandbag effort by Fox News Friday afternoon.
Consider the timing: the very weekend the National Intelligence Estimate would be released and show the Iraq war to be the fraudulent failure it isnot a check on terror, but fertilizer for it.
The kind of proof of incompetence, for which the administration and its hyenas at Fox need to find a diversion, in a scapegoat.
It was the kind of cheap trick which would get a journalist firedbut a propagandist, promoted:
Promise to talk of charity and generosity; but instead launch into the lies and distortions with which the Authoritarians among us attack the virtuous and reward the useless.
And dont even be professional enough to assume the responsibility for the slanders yourself; blame your audience for e-mailing you the question.
Mr. Clinton responded as you have seen.
He told the great truth untold about this administrations negligence, perhaps criminal negligence, about bin Laden.
He was brave.
Then again, Chris Wallace might be braver still. Had I in one moment surrendered all my credibility as a journalist, and been irredeemably humiliated, as was he, I would have gone home and started a new career selling seeds by mail.
The smearing by proxy, of course, did not begin Friday afternoon.
Disney was first to sell-out its corporate reputation, with “The Path to 9/11.” Of that companys crimes against truth one needs to say little. Simply put: someone there enabled an Authoritarian zealot to belch out Mr. Bushs new and improved history.
The basic plot-line was this: because he was distracted by the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Bill Clinton failed to prevent 9/11.
The most curious and in some ways the most infuriating aspect of this slapdash theory, is that the Right Wingers who have advocated itwho try to sneak it into our collective consciousness through entertainment, or who sandbag Mr. Clinton with it at news interviewshave simply skipped past its most glaring flaw.
Had it been true that Clinton had been distracted from the hunt for bin Laden in 1998 because of the Monica Lewinsky nonsense, why did these same people not applaud him for having bombed bin Ladens camps in Afghanistan and Sudan on Aug. 20, of that year? For mentioning bin Laden by name as he did so?
That day, Republican Senator Grams of Minnesota invoked the movie “Wag The Dog.”
Republican Senator Coats of Indiana questioned Mr. Clintons judgment.
Republican Senator Ashcroft of Missourithe future attorney generalechoed Coats.
Even Republican Senator Arlen Specter questioned the timing.
And of course, were it true Clinton had been distracted by the Lewinsky witch-hunt, who on earth conducted the Lewinsky witch-hunt?
Who turned the political discourse of this nation on its head for two years?
Who corrupted the political media?
Who made it impossible for us to even bring back on the air, the counter-terrorism analysts like Dr. Richard Haass, and James Dunegan, who had warned, at this very hour, on this very network, in early 1998, of cells from the Middle East who sought to attack us, here?
Who preempted them in order to strangle us with the trivia that was, All Monica All The Time?
Who distracted whom?
This is, of course, whereas is inevitableMr. Bush and his henchmen prove not quite as smart as they think they are.
The full responsibility for 9/11 is obviously shared by three administrations, possibly four.
But, Mr. Bush, if you are now trying to convince us by proxy that its all about the distractions of 1998 and 1999, then you will have to face a startling fact that your minions may have hidden from you.
The distractions of 1998 and 1999, Mr. Bush, were carefully manufactured, and lovingly executed, not by Bill Clinton, but by the same people who got you elected President.
Thus, instead of some commendable acknowledgment that you were even in office on 9/11 and the lost months before it, we have your sleazy and sloppy rewriting of history, designed by somebody who evidently read the Orwell playbook too quickly.
Thus, instead of some explanation for the inertia of your first eight months in office, we are told that you have kept us “safe” ever sincea statement that might range anywhere from zero, to 100 percent, true.
We have nothing but your word, and your word has long since ceased to mean anything.
And, of course, the one time you have ever given us specifics about what you have kept us safe from, Mr. Bush, you got the name of the supposedly targeted Tower in Los Angeles wrong.
Thus was it left for the previous president to say what so many of us have felt; what so many of us have given you a pass for in the months and even the years after the attack:
You did not try.
You ignored the evidence gathered by your predecessor.
You ignored the evidence gathered by your own people.
Then, you blamed your predecessor.
That would be a textbook definition, Mr. Bush, of cowardice.
To enforce the lies of the present, it is necessary to erase the truths of the past.
That was one of the great mechanical realities Eric Blairwriting as George Orwellgave us in the book 1984.
The great philosophical reality he gave us, Mr. Bush, may sound as familiar to you, as it has lately begun to sound familiar to me.
“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power…
“Power is not a means; it is an end.
“One does not establish a dictatorship to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.
“The object of persecution, is persecution. The object of torture, is torture. The object of power is power.”
Earlier last Friday afternoon, before the Fox ambush, speaking in the far different context of the closing session of his remarkable Global Initiative, Mr. Clinton quoted Abraham Lincolns State of the Union address from 1862.
“We must disenthrall ourselves.”
Mr. Clinton did not quote the rest of Mr. Lincolns sentence.
He might well have.
“We must disenthrall ourselves and then we shall save our country.”
And so has Mr. Clinton helped us to disenthrall ourselves, and perhaps enabled us, even at this late and bleak date, to save our country.
The “free pass” has been withdrawn, Mr. Bush.
You did not act to prevent 9/11.
We do not know what you have done to prevent another 9/11.
You have failed usthen leveraged that failure, to justify a purposeless war in Iraq which will have, all too soon, claimed more American lives than did 9/11.
You have failed us anew in Afghanistan.
And you have now tried to hide your failures, by blaming your predecessor.
And now you exploit your failure, to rationalize brazen torture which doesnt work anyway; which only condemns our soldiers to water-boarding; which only humiliates our country further in the world; and which no true American would ever condone, let alone advocate.
And there it is, Mr. Bush:
Are yours the actions of a true American?
_________________
Poetry Of The Anarchist Heart
The man
Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys:
Power, like a desolating pestilence,
Pollutes whate’er it touches, and obedience
Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,
Makes slaves of men, and, of the human frame,
A mechanized automaton.
-Percy Shelley
—
Freedom
And an orator said, Speak to us of Freedom And he answered: At the city gate and by your fireside I have seen you prostrate yourself and worship your own freedom, Even as slaves humble themselves before a tyrant and praise him though he slays them. Ay, in the grove of the temple and in the shadow of the citadel I have seen the freest among you wear their freedom as a yoke and a handcuff. And my heart bled within me; for you can only be free when even the desire of seeking freedom becomes a harness to you, and when you cease to speak of freedom as a goal and a fulfilment. You shall be free indeed when your days are not without a care nor your nights without a want and a grief, But rather when these things girdle your life and yet you rise above them naked and unbound. And how shall you rise beyond your days and nights unless you break the chains which you at the dawn of your understanding have fastened around your noon hour? In truth that which you call freedom is the strongest of these chains, though its links glitter in the sun and dazzle your eyes. And what is it but fragments of your own self you would discard that you may become free? If it is an unjust law you would abolish, that law was written with your own hand upon your own forehead. You cannot erase it by burning your law books nor by washing the foreheads of your judges, though you pour the sea upon them. And if it is a despot you would dethrone, see first that his throne erected within you is destroyed. For how can a tyrant rule the free and the proud but for a tyranny in their own freedom and a shame in their own pride? And if it is a care you would cast off, that care has been chosen by you rather than imposed upon you. And if it is a fear you would dispel, the seat of that fear is in your heart and not in the hand of the feared. Verily all things move within your being in constant half embrace, the desired and the dreaded, the repugnant and the cherished, the pursued and that which you would escape. These things move within you as lights and shadows in pairs that cling. And when the shadow fades and is no more, the light that lingers becomes a shadow to another light. And thus your freedom when it loses its fetters becomes itself the fetter of a greater freedom.
-Kahlil Gibran
—
THE VIGIL FOR BEN LINDER
Ben Linder, 27, killed by Contra terrorists in 1987 while helping build electrical plants in rural Nicaragua.
This rain among the candle flames
under the heavy
end of April evening
falls so softly on us
listening
that it dissolves us
like salt.
A child frets.
The grieving over names.
The same anger.
There are still far countries.
Mayday! they signal,
its sinking, crashing, its going
down now! Mayday!
but it used to mean
you went into the garden
early, that first morning,
to make a posy
for a neighbours door,
or boldly offered –
These are for your daughter!
laughing, because she wasnt up yet.
They were maybe twelve years old.
Afterwards
they went to different schools.
The bringing of light
is no simple matter.
The offering of flowers
is a work of generations.
Young men are scattered
like salt on a dry ground.
Not theirs, not theirs,
but ours
the brave children
who must learn the rules.
To bring light
to flower in a dark country
takes experts in illumination,
engineers of radiance.
Taken, taken and broken.
We are dim circles flickering
at nightfall in April in the rain
that quickens the odour of flowering trees
and the odour of stone.
Over us
is a dark government.
Circles of burning flames, of flowers,
of children learning light.
Circles of rain on stone and skin.
Turning and returning in shaken silence,
broken, unbroken.
Sorrow is the home country.
Ursula LeGuinn
—
O POOR PEOPLE
Let us invoke a healthy heart-breaking
Towards the horrible world:
Let us say 0 poor people
How can they help being so absurd,
Misguided, abused, misled?
With unsifted saving graces jostling about
On a mucky medley of needs,
Like love-lit shit,
Year after cyclic year
The unidentifiable flying god is missed.
Emotions sit in their heads disguised as judges,
Or are twisted to look like mathematical formulae,
And only a scarce god-given scientist notices
His trembling lip melting the heart of the rat.
Whoever gave us the idea somebody loved us?
Far in our wounded depths faint memories cry,
A vision flickers below subliminally
But immanence looms unbearably: TURN IT OFF! they hiss.
Elizabeth Smart
—
ANOTHER REVOLUTIONARY LETTER, 1988 (Gestapo Poem)
Where is gestapo, where
does it end? Where
is it? Soweto, it is. Where
does it end? Not Oakland, it doesnt
not Bnai Brith.
Where
is it? Gaza, it is. Where
is it? San Quentin, it is. Where?
Peru. Where? Paris. Where? in Bonn
& Prague & Beijing, it is
in Yellow River Valley. Where
is it? Afghan, Guatemala, Rio,
Alaska, Tierra del Fuego, the
wasted tiaga, it is
where is it?
& where
does it end.
Not in
Oakland, it doesnt,
not in London. Not in the Mission.
Dont end in Brooklyn
or Rome. Atlanta. Where?
Morocco, gestapo is
Sudan (& death)
Where end? not Canada sold to
Nazi USA
not Mexico, Kenya, Australia
it dont, not end
Jamaica, Haiti. Mozambique
not end. Maybe
someplace it isnt maybe
someplace it ends
some hills maybe
still free
but hungry
eyes blaze over ancient guns
-Diane Di Prima
—
THE DIVINE IMAGE
To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
All pray in their distress;
And to these virtues of delight
Return their thankfulness.
For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
Is God, our father dear,
And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
Is Man, his child and care.
For Mercy has a human heart,
Pity a human face,
And Love, the human form divine,
And Peace, the human dress.
Then every man, of every clime,
That prays in his distress,
Prays to the human form divine,
Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace.
And all must love the human form,
In heathen, Turk, or Jew;
Where Mercy, Love, and Pity dwell
There God is dwelling too.
-William Blake
