Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Suns and Notes

Sign found in a rest room:

Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity.
--The Bayou, Baton Rouge

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If I read the news right, the administration and GOP is considering a change of course in Iraq. (By the way, W says they never said “stay the course.) Remember there is an election three weeks away, so it is time to wag the dog, even if only a little bit. Do you want to bet the talk will end after the election?

And whether we will have an orange alert around Halloween?

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Check out Portland Horses

The poem is by MJM, one of the owners of Wild Poetry, a good friend and great poet.

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More Suns

Bright Star, Artist

The long green season fades into scarlet,
gold, orange – colors brightened by noon’s light –
an artist’s genius charms our senses
before the canvas brushed with frosted white.


Match, Generations

Like Grandma sliding into base,
like Dad stuffing the quarterback -
he shines, goal blocked to win the game
in which no one is keeping score.


Candle, Wickless

Faded words cross the page, a verse incomplete –
difficult to read in the taper’s last smoke.
In the light of day, do we know the poet’s
intent among empty bottles, torn paper?


Sun Song, Last Note

Ten thousand sparks, ten thousand suns brighten
the way to ten thousand resurrections –
each meant to lead me to the Golden Land,
ten thousand times ten thousand necessary.

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We are about to head to Mexico for a long vacation. (Can a retiree really have vacations?) Therefore, my next blog will not be until after the 14th. Maybe then, we will see a MindFire War and Peace Supplement.

Under next month, be cool and

Smiles.

Gary

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

Another Sun and A poem by Thomas

Thomas Fortenberry agreed to let me give you this poem about one of our too many holidays:

Columbus Day

anchored expectations
line the rails of their arrival

burned sailors bend oars for shore
bringing two continents together

pale priests hold their skirts above the surf
not wishing to dirty themselves
on these native shores

silently they scan the surrounding savages
minds full of crucifixion and anxious to begin
their lessons, spreading the Word

Apocalypse

It will also be published by Silvia in her El Nuevo Malcriado, a print magazine.

Silvia also sent me this brilliant work by Chris Hedges:

Bush's Nuclear Apocalypse
by Chris Hedges

The aircraft carrier Eisenhower, accompanied by the guided-missile cruiser USS Anzio, guided-missile destroyer USS Ramage, guided-missile destroyer USS Mason and the fast-attack submarine USS Newport News, is, as I write, making its way to the Straits of Hormuz off Iran. The ships will be in place to strike Iran by the end of the month. It may be a bluff. It may be a feint. It may be a simple show of American power. But I doubt it.

War with Iran‹a war that would unleash an apocalyptic scenario in the Middle East is probable by the end of the Bush administration. It could begin in as little as three weeks. This administration, claiming to be anointed by a Christian God to reshape the world, and especially the Middle East, defined three states at the start of its reign as "the Axis of Evil." They were Iraq, now occupied; North Korea, which, because it has nuclear weapons, is untouchable; and Iran. Those who do not take this apocalyptic rhetoric seriously have ignored the twisted pathology of men like Elliott Abrams, who helped orchestrate the disastrous and illegal contra war in Nicaragua, and who now handles the Middle East for the National Security Council. He knew nothing about Central America. He knows nothing about the Middle East. He sees the world through the childish, binary lens of good and evil, us and them, the forces of darkness and the forces of light. And it is this strange, twilight mentality that now grips most of the civilian planners who are barreling us towards a crisis of epic proportions.

These men advocate a doctrine of permanent war, a doctrine which, as William R. Polk points out, is a slight corruption of Leon Trotsky's doctrine of permanent revolution. These two revolutionary doctrines serve the same function, to intimidate and destroy all those classified as foreign opponents, to create permanent instability and fear and to silence domestic critics who challenge leaders in a time of national crisis. It works. The citizens of the United States, slowly being stripped of their civil liberties, are being herded sheep-like, once again, over a cliff.

But this war will be different. It will be catastrophic. It will usher in the apocalyptic nightmares spun out in the dark, fantastic visions of the Christian right. And there are those around the president who see this vision as preordained by God; indeed, the president himself may hold such a vision.

The hypocrisy of this vaunted moral crusade is not lost on those in the Middle East. Iran actually signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It has violated a codicil of that treaty written by European foreign ministers, but this codicil was never ratified by the Iranian parliament. I do not dispute Iran¹s intentions to acquire nuclear weapons nor do I minimize the danger should it acquire them in the estimated five to 10 years. But contrast Iran with Pakistan, India and Israel. These three countries refused to sign the treaty and developed nuclear weapons programs in secret. Israel now has an estimated 400 to 600 nuclear weapons. The word "Dimona," the name of the city where the nuclear facilities are located in Israel, is shorthand in the Muslim world for the deadly Israeli threat to Muslims' existence. What lessons did the Iranians learn from our Israeli, Pakistani and Indian allies?

Given that we are actively engaged in an effort to destabilize the Iranian regime by recruiting tribal groups and ethnic minorities inside Iran to rebel, given that we use apocalyptic rhetoric to describe what must be done to the Iranian regime, given that other countries in the Middle East such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia are making noises about developing a nuclear capacity, and given that, with the touch of a button Israel could obliterate Iran, what do we expect from the Iranians? On top of this, the Iranian regime grasps that the doctrine of permanent war entails making "preemptive"
and unprovoked strikes.

Those in Washington who advocate this war, knowing as little about the limitations and chaos of war as they do about the Middle East, believe they can hit about 1,000 sites inside Iran to wipe out nuclear production and cripple the 850,000-man Iranian army. The disaster in southern Lebanon, where the Israeli air campaign not only failed to break Hezbollah but united most Lebanese behind the militant group, is dismissed. These ideologues, after all, do not live in a reality-based universe. The massive Israeli bombing of Lebanon failed to pacify 4 million Lebanese. What will happen when we begin to pound a country of 70 million people? As retired General Wesley K. Clark and others have pointed out, once you begin an air campaign it is only a matter of time before you have to put troops on the ground or accept defeat, as the Israelis had to do in Lebanon. And if we begin dropping bunker busters, cruise missiles and iron fragmentation bombs on Iran this is the choice that must be faced either sending American forces into Iran to fight a protracted and futile guerrilla war or walking away in humiliation.

"As a people we are enormously forgetful," Dr. Polk, one of the country¹s leading scholars on the Middle East, told an Oct. 13 gathering of the Foreign Policy Association in New York. "We should have learned from history that foreign powers can¹t win guerrilla wars. The British learned this from our ancestors in the American Revolution and re-learned it in Ireland. Napoleon learned it in Spain. The Germans learned it in Yugoslavia. We should have learned it in Vietnam and the Russians learned it in Afghanistan and are learning it all over again in Chechnya and we are learning it, of course, in Iraq. Guerrilla wars are almost unwinnable. As a people we are also very vain. Our way of life is the only way. We should have learned that the rich and powerful can't always succeed against the poor and less powerful."

An attack on Iran will ignite the Middle East. The loss of Iranian oil, coupled with Silkworm missile attacks by Iran on oil tankers in the Persian Gulf, could send oil soaring to well over $110 a barrel. The effect on the domestic and world economy will be devastating, very possibly triggering a huge, global depression. The 2 million Shiites in Saudi Arabia, the Shiite majority in Iraq and the Shiite communities in Bahrain, Pakistan and Turkey will turn in rage on us and our dwindling allies. We will see a combination of increased terrorist attacks, including on American soil, and the
widespread sabotage of oil production in the Gulf. Iraq, as bad as it looks now, will become a death pit for American troops as Shiites and Sunnis, for the first time, unite against their foreign occupiers.

The country, however, that will pay the biggest price will be Israel. And the sad irony is that those planning this war think of themselves as allies of the Jewish state. A conflagration of this magnitude could see Israel drawn back in Lebanon and sucked into a regional war, one that would over time spell the final chapter in the Zionist experiment in the Middle East. The Israelis aptly call their nuclear program "the Samson option." The Biblical Samson ripped down the pillars of the temple and killed everyone around him, along with himself.

If you are sure you will be raptured into heaven, your clothes left behind with the nonbelievers, then this news should cheer you up. If you are rational, however, these may be some of the last few weeks or months in which to enjoy what is left of our beleaguered, dying republic and way of life.

Chris Hedges is the author of the bestselling and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning and What Every Person Should Know about War. His newest book, Losing Moses on the Freeway will be published in June 2005 by Free Press.
Copyright © 2006 Truthdig, L.L.C.

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And from Thomas this important link about the film, Quiet Revolution, which is a must see:
Quiet Revolution

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Finally, my last Sun:

Sundowner, Night’s Day

He waits hidden behind dusty curtains
for the last light to fade, the sun to sleep.
He waits for an evening when ghosts walk
and his kind can hide among the costumed.

Until next week.

Smiles.

Gary

Monday, October 09, 2006

Still more Suns and misc stuff

I went to Corvallis to see the Oregon State/Washington State game on the 7th. While I don't have much interest in the game, my money went to Oregon State. Odd place - the fans stand nearly the whole game. BTW, Oregon State lost.

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Thomas Fortenberry sent this

Two Thousand Six Hundred Souls

a song by Paul Hipp. Every one should listen to it.

He also wrote "Someone Please Save the World" which you can listen to on his MySpace.


I see trees of green
Burn in the west
Storms in the south
While the icecaps are a mess
And I think to myself
Someone please save the world


I see skies of grey
Ink marks of black
Left on scientific texts
By White House hacks
And I say to myself
Someone please save the world


The colors of pollution are so nasty in the sky
They're also in the cancer cells of people walking by
I see folks in high places saying global warming¹s crap
They may as well be saying
Earth is flat


I hear babies cry
As well they should
The planet they're inheriting
Might just be screwed for good
And I think to myself
Someone please save the world
Yes I say top myself
Someone please save the world
Yes I think to myself
Someone please save the world.

Email: decider.koo.koo.ka.choo@gmail.com

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The Suns as promised:

Sun Blind, Highways

Headed east on the early morning run,
glare on the windshield speaks as if from God;
returning west in the late afternoon,
sharp glints map the way to my place in Hell.


Sun-up, To the Farm

Café invasion - a large family
on their way to the best jack-o-lantern –
french toast, biscuits and gravy, eggs over –
daughter’s trauma of whites not fully cooked.

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Until next week. Please cool and remember you can make a difference if you help throw the villians out this November.

Smiles.

Gary

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

More Suns and a Letter to W

Lamp, All Saint’s Eve

Spider webs glisten
in the candle’s glow,
piercing the orange dusk
through carved pumpkin shells.

Jack-o-lanterns line
the leaf-blown sidewalk,
beacons for witches, ghosts –
children in search of treats.


Orient, Poet

The eastern sun warms his morning coffee;
afternoons, an eastern view shades his nap
interrupted when she walks up his steps,
new jueju lost when he hears her voice smile.



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Provided by my friend, Silvia Antonia

A letter to President George Bush

The Olympian's Editorial Board, September 11


Mr. President, aren't you tired yet?

How often can you mouth the same meaningless platitudes, the half-truths, the thinly veiled linkage between Iraq and 9/11, the ever-shifting excuses for failure?

You and your administrations' bully boys are on the third national tour to drum up support for your war of choice in Iraq and nothing has changed.

You and your administration say: stay the course; fight them there so we don't have to fight them here; don't cut and run; critics are unpatriotic or worse, appeasers to Islamic fascism; we'll stand down when they stand up; Iraq is the central front on the war on terrorism.

We're tired, Mr. President. We're tired of the rhetoric.

Remember: Iraq is a growing and immediate threat; Mission Accomplished; we'll be greeted as liberators; I can't imaging the war taking more than six months (Donald Rumsfeld); it's pretty well confirmed that the head of the 9/11 attack met with Iraqi secret service in Prague (Dick Cheney); it won't take hundreds of thousands of soldiers to subdue Iraq; Iraqi oil will pay for the war; we've found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (Bush); a democratically elected government will spread democracy around the Middle East; the insurgency is in its last throes . . .?

Mr. President, aren't you tired of your administration calling the more than 2,600 dead soldiers, the 19,000 wounded in combat and the more than 40,000 dead Iraqis "just a number?"

We're tired, Mr. President. We're tired of the incompetence, the death, the destruction.

Soldiers are doing a spectacular job on the ground, but even the best general has no hope when operating under a flawed strategy.

Mr. President, it's time to hold people accountable and regain the sense of unity that enveloped this nation in the wake of the 9/11 attack.

With all due respect, Mr. President, it's time to develop a bipartisan strategy for extricating this country from the misguided war in Iraq and focus on real solutions to the war on terror.

You may not be tired, Mr. President, but we are tired. We are sick and tired of the rhetoric, the incompetence and your politicization of this sacred day.

(The Olympian is from Olympia, WA.)