Dope

The enemy that I see
wears a cloak of decency
-- Bob Dylan

Is Bob Dylan the Very Jones of our time or what? LI has just finished to the funeste tones of our President. The poor man is being forced, dragged, pulled into a war that he wishes and prays he could avoid.

Yeah, right. That and a nickel won't get you a pack of bubble gum.

Press conferences have become embarrassing exercises in kissing the imperial behind anyway. After Nixon, the wolfish aspect of the press corps was pretty much brought to heel. We can take only so much lese majeste, as they say in the newsrooms.

Bush rambled on about intelligence reports that trumped anything mere arms inspectors from the U.N. could hope to accomplish. His enunciation, which seemed set, by some advisor, on the very slow and the very repetitive, reminded me of nothing so much as a Sunday School teacher denying a dangerous liason with some likely student. It radiated the ersatz dignity of the provincial. No questions, of course, were asked about the intelligence reports that were quoted by Colin Powell in his speech in the U.N., some of which turned out to be plagiarized by Tony Blair's PR team from a Ph.D student's dissertation. Nobody asked, even, if the scope of our omniscience, which can apparently pluck the thoughts from the missile shifting part of Saddam Hussein's cerebellum before they reach his tongue, shouldn't be trained on, oh, finding out who ground up anthrax spores and sent them through the mail for a week back in November 2001. And nobody asked whether the U.S. shouldn't share its intelligence with the arms inspectors. Questions about anthrax, by the way, have simply fallen through the cracks. Even the evening's obvious question -- if Iraq disarmed, but Saddam Hussein remained at the head of the nation, would Bush be satisfied? -- was not put.

When LI dislikes a person as much as we have grown to dislike Bush, we have learned to distrust our first hearing. We need second hearing -- listening outside of our own densities and voids, dreads and bents. And for second hearing we've increasingly turned to the past -- to dead writers from the eighteenth and nineteenth century, and to the writers of the middle part of the twentieth. Alas, living writers have let us down. Second hearing is what they want to rob you of -- that conglomerate of D.C. media folk. Their reaction will be predictable -- sober when the president's words cry out for parody, frivolous when the president's questioners cry out to be more pressing.

At the moment, I get my second hearing from Burke. Odd, that.

Oh, and Very Jones -- if you don't know the American poet Very Jones, here's a link . And here's his poem The Canary Bird, which I've been memorizing:


I cannot hear thy voice with other�s ears,
Who make of thy lost liberty a gain;
And in thy tale of blighted hopes and fears
Feel not that every note is born with pain.
Alas! That with thy music�s gentle swell
Past days of joy should through thy memory throng,
And each to thee their words of sorrow tell
While ravished sense forgets thee in thy song.
The heart that on thy past and future feeds,
And pours in human words its thoughts divine,
Though at each birth the spirit inly bleeds,
Its song may charm the listening ear like thine,
And men with gilded cage and praise will try
To make the bard like thee forget his native sky.