It’s a Quarter to 2020. Do You Know Where You Stand?
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WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
Welcome to the New American Digest: 2003-2020
Gerard Van der Leun
Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way.
straying planets,
These poems, people,
lost ponies with
Dragging saddles –
and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like an endless
four-dimensional
Game of Go.
ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
all change, in thoughts,
As well as things.
Gary Snyder
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.
Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.
This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.
— BY THEODORE ROETHKE
The scientists are in terror
and the European mind stops
Wyndham Lewis chose blindness
rather than have his mind stop.
Night under wind mid garofani,
the petals are almost still
Mozart, Linnaeus, Sulmona,
When one’s friends hate each other
how can there be peace in the world?
Their asperities diverted me in my green time.
A blown husk that is finished
but the light sings eternal
a pale flare over marshes
where the salt hay whispers to tide’s change
Time, space,
neither life nor death is the answer.
And of man seeking good,
doing evil.
In meiner Heimat
where the dead walked
and the living were made of cardboard.
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
— Eliot
I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this
air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their
parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
— Walt Whitman
Comments on this entry are closed.
Can’t agree with the Paid Family Leave. It’s extorted by force.
My workers actually are worse off for it. Before, they essentially got as much time off as needed.
Now they’ll only get what is mandated because it has raised overhead such that the only way to control labor cost is by reduction of hourly pay offsetting the additional costs of the benefit with the additional bookkeeping administrative cost.
While on vacation I had limited access to news. One brief visit to internet news read that the farmer’s union was complaining about Trump’s China policies vis lower wheat prices.
Three, two, one…what “farmer’s union”??? Farmers don’t unionize.
You need to read the news very, very closely nowadays. They will bullshit you nine ways to Sunday.
Trump for the win. Anyone else is just a government agent, out to take your property, your rights, and your dignity. Politicians suck ass; Trump comes from outside of that horseshit factory.
I just returned from the coast, where logging is the economy. While I was gone, the news starts bitching about the Amazon burning. A little research, and it becomes evident that the fires are no more numerous than in the past; perhaps a little more than last year but not as much as last decade. Look around you: much of the prairie land in otherwise green parts of my state were burned by the indians to provide hunting grounds. The Amazon is not a precipitate crisis – it is a manufactured one. Ever watch a jungle grow? It grows like a weed.
The newsies are pulling your leg, man. Believe almost nothing at face value.
Trump remains as something akin to a Force of Nature. In a straight-up, no voter fraud, no democRat nefarious dirty deeds election, Trumps Election Night victory should resemble Secretariat’s Belmont Stakes prodigious domination.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V18ui3Rtjz4
Wish I could feel confident about the above, but when it comes to the opposition’s ability to plumb the depths of sleaze, I suspect we ain’t seen nothing yet.
None of that stuff has anything to do with me.
If Trump wants to get on my good side he can cut sales tax, property tax, hell ALL taxes by 50%, to start, then he’ll get my attention.
If Trump wants to get my vote, for the first time ever, he can fire half of all gov’t employees and delete all their benefits.
Otherwise, it is life as normal around here.
Sales taxes and property taxes are controlled by your state and local governments not the federal government.
I agree that the family leave act is poor policy.
Why are you making excuses for Trump?
If he can force change around the world I’m sure he can force change right here in the country he lives in. Doesn’t anyone know how to think any more?
I think Anon was being pragmatic. Without becoming a complete dictator certain things will not and cannot be changed in four or eight years from the executive branch.
Sales tax here used to be 3%. Now it is almost 8%. FFS. How did we manage to get by at 3%? Give me the wheel and I would make it happen…. but would be blocked by countless judges. I’ve managed large budgets in business and I could always find the dead wood to cut out when necessary.
Noticed that the comment line here seems to be complaining. Folks, if you have another alternative to Trump, let’s hear it. It was a great ad, of course, but do you want any of the 20 Dems? He has labored against non-stop 24/7/365 opposition in the media, education, entertainment, shutting down of conservative voices. We all could be further ahead if half the nation wasn’t trying to destroy it.
I made a promise to myself that I’d allow Trump many, almost endless missteps, since he’s the bull in the China shop that I very desperately wanted. I’ll be straight with you, the disappointments I have with him are his one-time supportive statement for red flag laws, and the unintended consequence of lower wheat prices this year. I’m not mad at him for his centrist stuff, driven by his daughter.
His rhetoric is beyond great. My hope is that he’ll take that even further, since my sense of what’s happening now is that if we don’t speak clearly we’ll go down in flames. Twitter: own that shit. Double it down.
Then, there’s the economic boom we’ve enjoyed. Overseas, we are respected as much now as ever with maybe the exception of the WW II victory. Trump is as dovish as any president in my lifetime, with maybe the exception of Ike (you can argue Vietnam, but Ike didn’t “start” it in the way Johnson started it). This is good.
Opening a dialogue with NoKorea was a Nixonian moment, for sure. Very good.
Like I said previously, the news cycle is constant bullshit on an epic level.
My brother in law, whom I admire and respect (Korea/ Vietnam war army veteran) tried to get into complaining about trump with me. My sister and he live so far from Seattle, existentially, that I didn’t consider his mindset to be crazy. He’s more of a Roosevelt-era liberal than anything else. My defuse and comeback was to say that it is good to hear a complaint against the president because the 8 years before Trump you couldn’t complain about Obama. That was a scary time politically. I like hearing thoughtful complaints about Trump.
Another very close friend, who lives in Fla., was calling trump a lier. That one comes up often, so I thought it through. I know I am Trump-biased, so I wondered what lies he has supposedly told. My friend deflected to some shit about something – no lie related. I Googled Trump’s lies, and the first 2 results were some heap of smelly shit about the environment. My F-ing stars. This is what they’ve got: trump lies about the environment. Hold my beer while I almost puke from laughing. I want to know the lies. Send em to me.
Take it easy.
Casey said: “I wondered what lies he has supposedly told”
===========
Same here, and I looked it up.
Just as I thought.
The lying liar tried to make me jump through endless hoops to find out Trump didn’t lie at all.
I’m not saying Trump doesn’t lie, after all he’s a politician, but not in the ways the LSM is describing.
Probably the most atrocious LSM media Trump lie came early on – the pussy grabbing thing.
Have you seen the vid?
He didn’t say what the LSM and all of it’s downstream mindless parrots claim.
The LSM is not broadcasting to thinking people, they know they are lost on that genre.
They are catering to the low intellect, adolescent minded drones that are easily led by the snoot.
Just like all the other corporate and political entities are doing.
They don’t yet realize which side of their bread is buttered.