Insert a Trite Metaphor About a Corral

Posted on May 21, 2004 in Roundup

I will marshal against you

the fireflies of the dusk

  – Charles Reznikoff

Rages at the world tend to be followed by a natural desire to stand up in the bilges of ship and sing at the top of one’s lungs: not about the issues, but about the joys that would be lost if we let them get to us.

Many bloggers turned away from the issue of Nick Berg early in the week and began talking about the movies they saw, the books they read — anything, it seemed, except the horror being wreaked on human bodies and our consciences by the Bush Administration.

Can you blame them?

Culture

• Among those celebrating same sex marriage in Masschusetts: Jody, Stacy, Kynn
  
• Bill recounted what he saw on a trip to a neighboring small town:

  As in most old towns businesses have moved out to strip centers along the highways. Much of the old town square was boarded up….When we stepped back out on the square though we didn’t see another soul. There was nothing else open except for a police station. Nevertheless it was a workable town square with a post office and a library.

• Maria reflected on two startling animal episodes that appeared on the Bay Area news:
  

  The ancients and those riddled with superstitions would mumble something about signs here. The likes of Stephen King would be making notes for their next supernatural thriller. The way I see it? It’s much easier for the media to bring us stories of this kind of wildlife that strays into our streets than the other kind that assaults our consciousness … and, for some of us, our conscience.

• Seraph called Troy a “Tie Dye”.
  
• Natalie sees transformation:

  The anger that so many of us all over the world are feeling and, as bloggers, expressing online is different from the normal ranting that humans are prone to. There seems to be a new and growing collective consciousness that stupidity is no longer acceptable as the guiding principle in world affairs and in our lives.

• Brian weighs out the advantages and disadvantages of being able to choose exactly which cable channels you can receive.
  
• Andrew thinks we should not call off the Olympic Games.
  
• Tracy tells us:

  Saturday is National No-Panties Day! In recognition of this glorious holiday, I ask that each of you state, in comments, what kind of panties you won’t be wearing on Saturday. This holiday is sacred and deserves respect. At noon, there will be a moment of silence followed by a vow of continued worship for the Victoria Secret underwear models.

• Susan attempted to congeal her theory of literature.
  
• Nancy went to watch the filming of a serial — in Tamil:

  In the middle room, technicians were setting the lights and cameras, getting ready to shoot a scene. An actor was dressed as a rich man from the countryside (I know this because I saw the movie Thevar Magan): oiled hair combed back, a red tikka on his forehead, a (fake) handlebar moustache and sideburns, a big diamond in each ear, white kurta, angavastram (a cotton towel worn on the shoulder), floor-length veshti. He read a newspaper, sitting on one of the Victorian sofas.

Politics

• Mileah is dumbfounded — almost — by Dennis Hastert’s insistance that John McCain doesn’t know the meaning of sacrifice:

  Hastert, if you want to see sacrifice, try spending 5 or more years in a North Vietnamese prison camp.

• LQ also jumped to McCain’s defense:

  why are we having the poor sacrifice so much, whether it be fighting the war or getting peanuts compared to what the wealthy gets from the tax breaks? It makes no sense. All McCain was saying is that the sacrifice should be a little more spread out instead of disproportionately on the shoulders of the poor.

• Jack caught our government in a disturbing revelation of its arrogance and misuse of “wartime” powers:

  when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg asked Deputy Solicitor General Paul Clement in the Hamdi cases whether judicial review should be foreclosed even in cases of alleged torture, Clement dodged the question. “Our executive,” he insisted, doesn’t engage in torture. “Judicial micromanagement” was inappropriate in wartime; “you have to trust the executive.”

• Randy quoted criticism of the U.S. State Department’s report on human rights, then defended himself:

  Before anyone gets all self-righteous on me and accuses me of being anti-American, consider Voice of America And Radio Free Europe during the Cold War. They succeeded because they were credible and they maintained this credibility by showing the USA warts and all. Nothing could be more pro-American and less anti-American.

• Jeremy stands against unjust authority:

  should a National Draft be reestablished, and the age raised to 34, and my number is called, I will suffer the consequences of refusing to serve in any military capacity whatsoever.

• Allison cried:

  If Kerry threw his medals onto the White House lawn in protest against a war in which he served capably and well, at least he had medals to throw. What, pray tell, could George Bush have thrown? An empty beer can? A used syringe?

• Kathryn compared Nick Berg to a friend of hers who was killed in Nicaragua in 1987.

Religion

• Irene wonders if she’s found her spiritual home:

  all this emphasis on numbers. I think this gets to me the most. Goal-setting is not wrong, perhaps. And, as someone once said to me, “You can’t tell me numbers don’t matter, because every number represents one person, and each person is important.” But, oh! — all this targeting of how many members we must have by when and how many cell groups must multiply (split, because the group has grown too big) by when still makes me extremely wary.

• Rae quit her church feeling that it had lost the heart of the Christian message.

Personal

• Jenny writes about a “day in the life”. It seems that when she gets home at 8:00 PM, she goes straight to bed. Or else she isn’t telling.
  
• bittersweet works something through:

  The simple fact is that you never have the right to demand that someone behaves in a way that is acceptable to you and expect that they will change their behaviour to suit you. You have a right to tell them that you find their behaviour unacceptable and you have a right to walk away if they choose not to take your comments and feelings onboard. It’s a not so subtle difference.

• Caterina tells a fascinating tale:

  She had a reputation as a trollop, my friend told me. She slept with everyone, her husband’s brothers, the meter reader, members of parliament…and it was because she was such a tramp that he even existed, he said, because she was one of the jews that was on a boat escaping from Belgium in the 1940s when a Nazis boarded the ship, captured all the jews, and took them back to Germany to die in the camps. His grandmother survived only because she’d been in bed with the captain at the time, and hid in his cabin. The ship, manned only by a skeleton crew, was permitted to continue on to America.

• Elkit got so much spam in her mailbox that she thought she must have gone to work in a Hormel packing plant.
  
• Francis confessed his fears:

  Like many of your garden-variety great big homo types, I’m easily intimidated by certain bastions of maledom – the barber shop, the garage, certain hardware stores, old-fashioned gyms – and the men who work in these places.

• Kimber gets a break

  I had another Mother’s Day surprise. John is giving me a Mommy’s Weekend Away!!! I am going to The Eastland for 3 days of no kids. YIPPEEEEEE!!!!!!! I am going to be on the Consierge Club Level. Free Breakfast and a Complimentary Cocktail every day. And I don’t have to go down to the regular restauraunt with the rest of the riff raff. I get to go to the Top of the Eastland.

• Michael revealed how to garner visitors from a single Slashdot post.
  
• Kate suffers from a virus and worm infestation.
  
• Vic was shocked when a young man passed her on the stairs:

  I used to take the stairs two at a time, and it wasn’t that long ago. I started to wonder when I had stopped. I did it when I worked in the other building and I’ve only been in this building about a year and a half. I wonder if I COULD still do it. I used to do it without thinking. I used to fly up them and considered it saving energy by only taking half as many stairs. Now I walk slowly and sometimes find myself out of breath when I get to the top.

• Mary Lou is under attack:
  

  Please tell me it isn’t so!!! I sprayed out back, and it killed all the ones I sprayed. Then yesterday I sprayed out front, and it killed all the ones I sprayed. Now they are migrating in from the woods, and are all over the backyard again! It is really getting to me. All the articles I have read said that they will continue to migrate in from the woods until their cocoons are all spun. THEN the moths will hatch!

• MacDiva reported her fear of being insufficiently anesthecized:

  I have been putting off an operation to remove a defective cornea for more than a year. Part of the reason for the delay is that I fear being paralyzed under anesthesia and in pain. One of the criteria for choosing a doctor for the surgery will be the availability of a BIS monitor.

• MetaManda crosses Europe:

  In Trieste, someone walked up to me and said “Your hair is blue. Why is it blue? Are you Chinese?” and then offered us some wine and pasta cooked on their camp stove as they were staying in a tent pitched in front of the bank.

• Bea has a cat problem.
  
• Gray Bird explains why she hasn’t been blogging.
  
• Mike took a break from his recent Jeremiads (an honorable art form) to celebrate South Africa winning the right to host the 2010 World Cup.
  
• Sally was demotivated by a cloudy day.

Photos

• Theodore: Ohio
  
• Coup de Vent: Sights yet Unseen
  
• bobbi: Heavenly Balance

Poetry

• Gregory writes about spring.
  
• Pam: Spontaneous Combustion
  
• Michael: According to Google
  
• Yule: Excellent Enabler
  
• Daniel: Notes as Well

Missing Bloggers

• Artichoke Heart (since May 11)
  
• A Clever Sheep (since April 28)
  
• Tamara (since April 18)
  
• Raven (since May 4)
  
• Teresa (since April 5)
  
• Mayamaya (since May 5)
  
• Treesong (since April 15)
  
• Kris (since May 8)

Recent Reading

• Fat Land : How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World by Greg Crister

• Paris Spleen by Charles Baudelaire
  
• The Birder’s Handbook: A field guide to the natural history of North American Birds by Paul Ehrlich
  
• In the Palm of Your Hand:The Poet’s Portable Workshop by Steve Kowit
  
• The Voice That Is Great Within Us: American Poetry of the Twentieth Century by Hayden Carruth (a well-read, dogeared copy)
  
• New Selected Poems by Phillip Levine

• Wheelock’s Latin, 6e and Workbook for Wheelock’s Latin, 3rd Edition, Revised
  
  Buying books through these links does put a little money in my pocket. Thank you!

Web Links

• Community of Sant’Egidio: AIDS Prevention in Mozambique
  
• Friendeavor
  
• Open Season on American Wildlife
  
• Misleader: Daily Chronicle of Bush Administration Distortion
  
• Pax Christi
  
• Freedom from the Past
  
• Space Weather
  
• Iraqi Prison Abuse Hearings
  
• Alien Fisherman

But Peace cried I loud in the night

You are my freedom. And they let me be.

  -Marie Ponsot