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Showing posts from December 1, 2019

the strike in France

There is no more telling symbol of my lackadaisical – my bobo – leftism than the fact that as I write this, I am enjoying a  manifestation  in the little sidestreet near us in the Marais. Enjoying it, in fact, from our terrace. Adam, my boy, home from school because of the strike, and I have enjoyably stamped around the terrace swinging our arms and shouting Macron démission! I have a strong suspicion that the little group of militants, who are stopping the traffic on the Charlot, have slipped the cop net. Adam, who is convinced that all  manifestation  end in the throwing of lachromygene by the police, is expecting this denouement. Myself, I am not,  since driving a crowd up a narrow street is an invitation to disaster, but it is always possible, given the ultra-authoritarian tendencies of Macron’s horrible interior minister (the cop minister), Christophe Castaner, surely the worst cop minister since the dark days of the early seventies, when Raymond Marcellin declared war on the “

No time for Political Nostalgia

The GOP won’t vote for impeachment ever, but I’m glad the Democrats have decided to expand it – cause the more infuriatingly corrupt we find Trump to be, the better for the Democrats – obviously. But it is time to see a bit into the future. If, as I expect, the Democrats elect a president next Nov., Trump is not going away. He is going to sit on Fox news and punish any republican who dares cooperate in any way with the Democratic president. I think, frankly, this is what Obama should have done to Trump, but Obama. has never really understood that underneath the racist posturing of the Republican politicians, they really are racist, sexist, and contemptuous of democracy. They are not the friendly debater Republicans he met at Harvard. Anyway, forget cooperation. It will be political warfare. So the Democratic president will have to be in campaign mode for at least the first two years of the presidency – by which I mean leveraging legislative loss into campaign issues to blow up Repub

all the Karen Chamisso poems so far

I'm thinking that I need to print these out in traditional chapbook form. Anyway, this is a part of The misogynist stripped by the bachelorettes, even , Chamisso's second collection. They’re going, 3-2-1 The intentions of the Burning Bush Would make a good study for those who come armed To wrestle with the Angel Spread sheets in hand. Oh, this Eldorado of all the Old Boys! Already they are on another planet, Though inconvenient biology Has Excel-ed them in for death. Meanwhile the Burning Bush Bides its time, having wasted Its word on a desert no account.   Its “I” Was the breath of life to me, once. Meditations in the Laundry Room with Leila, 1988 The wrinkles yield with sexual abandon to the furious onslaught of the iron bullish, implacable as though the panics of the tumble dry the labyrinth of hot water had never been. They always say, it never happened. They say, this won’t hurt. They, they -- chthonic emissar