England’s Trump in a brilliant ad.
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Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress.
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
– – WH Auden
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
As if I had just woken from all water into dream.
— Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 1973
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The steel mill sky is alive.
The fire breaks white and zigzag
shot on a gun-metal gloaming.
Man is a long time coming.
Man will yet win.
Brother may yet line up with brother:
This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can’t be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise,
You can’t hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?
In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people
march:
“Where to? what next?”
— Carl Sandberg
Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.
I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.
BY GARY SNYDER
Starry-eyed an’ laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look
Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
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That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
– – W. B. Yeats, 1865 – 1939
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
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
As if I had just woken from all water into dream.
— Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 1973
Comments on this entry are closed.
Cute… but still… pretty weird. You’d never see Eisenhower or Truman squirting whipped cream into the mouths of willing, kneeling sycophants. And they sure as hell wouldn’t do a commercial like this one. And what IS IT with the interracial couplings… like this is the new norm? I don’t watch TV but friends tell me the commercials have gotten surreal with all of the chummy diversity these days. This is not for real.
Like Tom, I don’t watch TV, but even the clips I see here and there are amusingly diverse.
Boris Johnson is smart. He has the potential to be the British Trump: The guy who shoves the Overton Window right out of the frame. Heaven knows the UK needs it. They’ve tossed away their birthright, their free speech rights, their rights to self defense and their children’s futures to appease the demon of diversity.
Imagine if Boris wins, and tells the First Sea Lord that he can either stop the boats bringing illegals from France, or he can resign. Then all of those people on that little list, the one that MI-5 has, start disappearing from the streets of Birmingham and appearing in Lahore, Pakistan, pissing and moaning about being kidnapped. Then he announces that everyone with “Diversity” or “Health and Safety” in their job description is now redundant, and the savings will be invested in making the country’s religion, the National Health Service, responsive and efficient.
We watch Jeopardy at suppertime but the diversity commercials are causing the remote buttons to work overtime. If an outsider were to watch “over the air” TV today they’d get the distinct impression the US is at least 90% negro and all the white women are attracted to the negro males.
The heads of the media and all of it’s underlings are the enemy and should be rounded up and dragged in mass while doused and burning. It’s easy to believe there is something behind all of this but no one thus far has been able to draw a distinct proveable line between A and B. Just suspicions.
The “provable line” is as obvious as ever. Government, and the deep pocket deep state, creates crimes and criminals by breaking down the fabric of human connectedness. The family is being killed and the heterosexual male is the hunted. It’s a well known fact that most murder, in America, is black on black. But the family unit of every color is being destroyed. The endgame is a population confused by their sexuality and encouraged to switch genetic direction at age 4. The endgame is rampant depression, suicide/murder and chaos embraced as normal that can only be fixed with more laws, more government. YAY!!! Government wins! Please mommy government, stop me before I hurt myself. YAY!!
The provable line between A and B is more obvious than ever. The objective is more control and less freedom. By destroying the family unit… mom, dad & kids… conflict, depression, violence and murder will result. Children are prompted to switch their genetic formula at age 4. Children are instructed in sexual abnormality and punished if they show disrespect. Children become criminals if they point a finger that means “invisible gun.” Though most murder in America is black on black, the family unit of every color is being destroyed. As depression/suicide/murder increases only government can intervene with more laws and less freedom. YAY!! Government wins! Please mommy government, save me before I hurt myself. YAY!!
Gerard, is your comment mechanism broken? I’ve written two previous answers to ghostsniper’s inquiry and when I hit “submit” the items disappeared.
[GV: Tom, please forgive me for this. The comment/spam guarding machine every so often kicks out comments to a holding place. I do not know why it does this. I’ve looked into in some detail and cannot understand why. What I can do is monitor comments 3-6 times a day and approve them manually. In this case the comment came in before I was awake but as you can see I restored it. I wish I knew why it does this but it seems to hit one comment out of every twenty or so.]
Tom, I don’t disagree with anything you wrote there, but I’m looking for a more pointed answer.
The way you explained it it seems that all of this nonsense is unplanned and simply the result of random politician behavior.
For example, why the upsurge over the past year or two of unnatural occurrence of so many negro’s in the media and especially the TV commercials. Are the politicians behind this?
BTW, many of my posts have vanished into the spam filter only to be rescued later by Gerard.
Tom, agree that Ike or Truman would not have done an ad like this. The thing is, the people they were talking to are not the people Johnson (or Trump) need to reach.
It’s planned, ghostsniper… believe me… IT’S PLANNED. Do you like to do a good job? Like designing and fabricating excellence and getting paid deservedly for it? Me too. I design and paint and carve and fabricate and my job is making folk’s businesses look like a class act. Everybody likes to do a good job. How gummint folks feel all warm and fuzzy at the end of the day is when they have asserted more control and stolen away more freedom. Their position is strengthened by laws they write for us and which they personally don’t have to obey. That’s why practically everything is a crime if you haven’t paid permission to do it. Our “framers”… a popular phrase this week… understood very well the type of human slime that is attracted to gummint, thus, these are the very creatures that have to raise their claws upright and swear they aren’t going to violate our Rights. But they DO VILE anyway.
Undermining the fabric of the organic human family is a war against civilization and it’s plays into the interests of the control freaks. The mass media makes money reporting hysteria and violence. The entertainment industry… Hollywood and their putrid spawn… pander to the lowest base human reflexes… telling us ANYTHING GOES… just don’t get caught. The gummint supervised education departments punish children for independent thinking and failing to succumb to the slave mode. There is a world wide war on America. The American male is being disappeared, the family is dying, the children are being mind fucked. I want Trump to build that wall so high and impenetrable. Let’s watch the impeachment scam fail so the most important tasks at hand may receive undivided attention.
Well said, Tom.