WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
Welcome to the New American Digest: 2003-2020
Gerard Van der Leun
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained
thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.
— Robinson Jeffers
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
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.
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Dang. Got something in my eye.
If that don’t put a lump in your throat you’re in the wrong country and just need to get the hell out.
That was a touching advertisement and a prime example of the intersection-gack, that word!-of patriotism and consumerism.
“This is the postmodern desert inhabited by people who are, in effect, consuming themselves in the form of images and abstractions through which their desires, sense of identity, and memories are replicated and then sold back to them as products.”
― Larry McCaffrey
Wasn’t Jeep purchased by Fiat and produced only in the U.S. until 2014, not that there’s anything wrong with that? I feel a Menckenesque moment coming on.
https://www.freep.com/story/money/cars/chrysler/2015/03/02/jeep-fiat-chrysler-brazil-italy-china-italy/24234759/
I once saw an interview with Ryan Tedder the lead singer of OneRepublic. He came across as a well grounded individual.
Good for Jeep. I also watched Gladys Knight sing the NA.
I stand when I hear the anthem, even when it’s on the screen. Why? Because some kid in a dark blue uniform once ran the flag forward in close combat to rally his unit in the Civil War. Because my dad served under that flag when he exchanged direct cannon fire with the Germans in Italy.
I don’t need anymore reason than that.
JEEP! Ya done GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD.