Please, and Thanks

We seem to scrape by every year, though some years are leaner than others. This has been a very lean year, partly because we’ve lost one of our largest donors, who had graciously supported CounterPunch for 15 years. He said that it’s time to see if we can swim against the current on our own. I told him we’re all taking swimming lessons and are intent on drowning as slowly as possible. But he was quite right. We now have more than two million unique visitors to the site every month. If each of them gave merely five dollars a year we wouldn’t have to run another fundraiser until 2030.--JSC

A day in the life.  Give.


TS

On Writing

Poetic Measures of Illumination in a Time of Calamity


When writing of love in a time of calamity
keep a sure method of squirming out of it nearby

When pondering your relationship with the
universe keep in mind that God isn't in play

When probing your childhood you best leave
out the tantrums you once felt in your bones

When tackling politics in an age of unreason
allow for the possibility that everyone is stupid

When musing in a coffee shop know that your real
purpose is to create jobs for the underemployed

When scribbling profundities that first appear
lucid allow that they may be poor replicants

When researching the lives of the poets consider
they may all be drunks and highly refined assholes

When printing out the pages of your best poems be
clear that Whitman and Melville died penniless

When drinking while writing know that your best
edits await you in the doctor's office next year

When considering your choice between a rhyming
word and a destructive one choose the latter

When sitting at your writing table causes despair
move to your drawing table and reinvent yourself

When choosing a theme for your next masterpiece
avoid religion unless you want to be a known sap

When composing an anti-war poem do not pretend
that a killer is not weighing his next victim just then

When strolling to your university poetry writing
class inspect the insitution's military contracts

When measuring your words and lines in poetic
sequence understand beauty is the life of poetry

When writing in a time of calamity believe for
one  transcendent moment in pity and hilarity


TS

Ghazals

A friend sent me a link to a ghazal by Denver Butson that he admires (thanks RP).

Which got me, naturally, delving deeper into this old Middle Eastern form this morning.

Here's another one I like:


Ghazal: America the Beautiful

Do you remember our earnestness our sincerity
in first grade when we learned to sing America

The Beautiful along with the Star-Spangled Banner
and say the Pledge of Allegiance to America

We put our hands over our first grade hearts
we felt proud to be citizens of America

I said One Nation Invisible until corrected
maybe I was right about America

School days school days dear old Golden Rule Days
when we learned how to behave in America

What to wear, how to smoke, how to despise our parents
who didn’t understand us or America

Only later learning the Banner and the Beautiful
live on opposite sides of the street in America

Only later discovering the Nation is divisible
by money by power by color by gender by sex America

We comprehend it now this land is two lands
one triumphant bully one still hopeful America

Imagining amber waves of grain blowing in the wind
purple mountains and no homeless in America

Sometimes I still put my hand tenderly on my heart
somehow or other still carried away by America

Alicia Ostriker (1937--present)


TS

Spare Us Burns

The U.S. carried out industrial-scale chemical warfare on Vietnam, spraying it with 21 million gallons of the carcinogenic defoliant Agent Orange.  It destroyed half of the nation’s forests, leaving the greatest man-made environmental catastrophe in the history of the world.  When the U.S. destroyed neighboring Cambodia to cover its retreat from Vietnam, the communist Khmer Rouge came to power and carried out the greatest proportional genocide in modern history.  The U.S. dropped 270 million cluster bombs on neighboring Laos, 113 bombs for every man, woman, and child in the country.  Vietnam had never attacked the U.S., had never tried to attack it, had no desire to attack it, and had no capacity to attack it.  All of this was justified through a purposeful campaign of lies to the American people that was sustained by five presidential administrations over more than two decades.--RF

A brilliant essay at Common Dreams.


TS

Time to Give

It's the weekend, thank goodness.

That means it's time for the weekly barrage of brilliant leftist writing at CP that everyone should read now.

When you read it, understand that the lefties are on your side, and Becky Grant needs you to pony up.

Give, don't be a partisan cheapskate. Help crush oligarchy.


TS

Poem of the Day

Time

In the winter I play the piano
Begin to noodle out phrases and figures
Without knowing where I’m going
But for the rain on the windows
And later a few snowflakes

I play to ground myself
It is difficult because my playing
Takes wings of its own
And up in the atmosphere the
Ideas can melt faster than the
Icecaps of the Antarctic

I play to take off and hide from
The rain pounding the windowpanes
Which displeases me so and it is
Certain then finally
That I want to compose something
Anything to
Live on for now


TS

So it Goes

What the Burns documentary does not tell us  – and it is this that makes the work superficial – is that none of this was new. Almost all preceding American violence abroad had been rationalized by the same or related set of excuses that kept the Vietnam slaughter going: the revolutionary War was about “liberty,” the genocidal wars against the Native Americans were about spreading “civilization,” the wars against Mexico and Spain were about spreading “freedom,” and once capitalism became officially synonymous with freedom, the dozens of bloody incursions into Central and South America also became about our “right” to carry on “free enterprise.” As time went by, when Washington wasn’t spreading “freedom,” it was defending it. And so it goes, round and round.--LD

The lies that never stop giving.


TS

Jerry Jones is a Racist!

No more kneeling, says the hypocrite.

Wow, for a minute there I thought chattel slavery was over and out.


TS

RIP Y.A. Tittle

The frame caught the then-37-year-old quarterback, who looked older than his years, after throwing an interception returned for a touchdown by Pittsburgh's Chuck Hinton. Tittle is seen kneeling in exhaustion and pain from an injured rib, blood dripping down his face from a head gash.--AP

Check out the goal posts in the era before a single stanchion became the norm.  Taped and lightly-padded, the dual posts sat at the goal line, giving players another way to hurt themselves by slamming into them at full speed.

Of course this was before football, in Trump's mind, became too "nice" and stupid rules were enacted for the safety of the players.  You know, back when America was great.


TS

Love, NRA Style

Love it or leave it, you liberal commie bastards!


TS

A Confederacy of Dunces

Let's hope, against all odds and reality as we've adorned it, that what happened in Las Vegas stays in Las Vegas.

Not a chance, you say?

Come now, why in the hell not, but for the morons in Congress and the Orangutan in the White House?



TS

Hey Everybody, Look at Me!

TS

Suddenly Thrifty USA

Tom Price was too expensive.  Now, how about the Pentagon and the endless wars?

Well, liberals are happy for a moment, but when will they quit supporting Wall Street's wars?

TS

Say Hey!

In 1954, the year Willie Mays made his epic Game 1 catch at the Polo Grounds in New York, the most replayed highlight in World Series history, there was no World Series most valuable player award.

The first World Series MVP was awarded in 1955 to the Dodgers’ Johnny Podres.

Now, the award will be named after the great Mays, starting this season — the Willie Mays World Series most valuable player award.--SF Gate

One of my earliest childhood heroes, along with Muhammad Ali.

It's always refreshing to hear that an award is named after a human being rather than a major corporation.

The big picture.


TS

The Commies are Everywhere!

Make no mistake about it: The United States has entered an era of a New McCarthyism that blames nearly every political problem on Russia and has begun targeting American citizens who don’t go along with this New Cold War propaganda.

A difference, however, from the McCarthyism of the 1950s is that this New McCarthyism has enlisted Democrats, liberals and even progressives in the cause because of their disgust with President Trump; the 1950s version was driven by Republicans and the Right with much of the Left on the receiving end, maligned by the likes of Sen. Joe McCarthy as “un-American” and as Communism’s “fellow travelers.”--Robert Parry

This is an important essay.

I cringe every time someone starts talking about Putin and his "meddling" habits. The word is useless because there is scant evidence to back it up, and were it true in any case what are you going to do about it?

Bomb Moscow?

The talk always comes around to this: "The Russians have compromised our democracy."

Folks, we don't have a democracy to compromise.

Here's a word I like to use on occasion: "prattle," defined as foolish or inconsequential talk.

You hear a lot of it these days.


TS