The announcement of financial overhaul legislation in the U.S. Senate this week smacked of irony as its author, Senator Chris Dodd—the recipient of a sweetheart rate on his own home mortgage—announced a sweeping 1,136 page piece of legislation to “protect consumers.” It appears at this point that the protection consumers and Middle America really need is from this nation’s politicians, who have too long lined their pockets with campaign contributions from big business and who have allowed financial institutions to fleece Middle America.

It wasn’t but a couple of years ago that big business and congress all but eliminated the ability of consumers to effectively discharge their debts in bankruptcy proceedings. At the same time, banks and financial institutions were making loans to borrowers who clearly could not qualify. Banks, financial institutions and credit card companies continued extending generous limits on credit cards and lines of credit to consumers. Now be fair, much of the mortgage activity came from Democrats in congress who believed that everyone had an inalienable right to own a home, evidently whether they could afford it or not. And naturally, Republicans, who long ago sold their soul to big business, positioned their bank and financial institution contributors for all of the mortgage business.

“Disillusioned” is the word that best describes how many Americans feel after eight years of George Bush and the election of Barack Obama a year ago. Republicans had a majority in congress and the presidency, yet achieved little for Middle America. They betrayed voters by inflating the deficit and growing government, sending men and women into nation-building wars whose purposes are still unknown, and created a culture of moral and ethical corruption in Washington D.C. It was under lax and pathetic regulatory oversight that a Republican president and Republican congress allowed corporations to betray shareholders with questionable and highly leveraged credit default swaps, only to be followed by a $700 billion taxpayer bailout created by the Bush administration—so much for limited government. Republicans are a party without a message and without a messenger.

Graham has posted a today's poetry thread here. Give it a read.

Beginning next Tuesday we have a new regular guest poster for 'A Poem For Tuesday.' Bruce Jacobs of AliasBruce, has kindly accepted our offer to guest post on a regular basis. A little about Bruce:

Bruce A. Jacobs is the author of the book of poems SPEAKING THROUGH MY SKIN (MSU Press) and the nonfiction book RACE MANNERS FOR THE 21st CENTURY. He blogs at aliasbruce.typepad.com. He has been published in a whole lot of poetry journals and anthologies, including 180 MORE, edited by former Poet Laureate Billy Collins. He plays drums (pretty well) and saxophone (not so well), and he lives in Baltimore.

And here's an introductory poem from Bruce himself:

ON AN ANTIDEPRESSANT, WEEK 3

Look at the blackbirds,
says my friend, but I am already
at the window, wondering
if I will feel it, watching
their hundreds and hundreds
fling a net of themselves
into the gray surf of the sky
as if heading off a school
of flying baitfish, or trying to capture
the current. Such a reckless unfurling
of skins – into a whipping April wind
that smacks of snow.
But even as the flock’s fabric
rips loose from the treetops
and twists up into the storm,
it’s clear: the birds hold their grid,
its black mesh cuts the dusk
into diamonds, the trusted
invisible knots
still hold.

If you knew you were going to stranded on a deserted island for a full year with no cable, iPod, DVD/Blue Ray or any other assorted form of entertainment and only had room for five books, which five books would it be?

Me? The Histories of Herodotus, The Divine Comedy by Dante, the complete Essays of Montaigne, The Complete Poems of Yeats and East of Eden by John Steinbeck.

You?

These are mostly random thoughts, for the future never really coheres into a narrative until it is long since past. I'll address the Rights of Women and the Environment tomorrow. I'll be adding random thoughts as they occur.

Military/War/Diplomacy:

The US retains it's dominant power position, if only just. Most of it's power will rest on innovations long since past. China and the EU will have set up an alternative to the US's space dominance, however. The US will be unable to affect it's will in the Asia heartland but will still dominate the global littoral. The SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization) will emerge as a serious player led by China, Russia and a nuclear Iran.

I was going to start today, but Numerian beat me to the punch:

The Rights of Women

Women will have made advancements across the globe – chiefly in those countries where their rights today are heavily restricted, such as in the Middle East. In most countries, women will enjoy the same rights available to a woman in France or Japan or the US today, but in these countries, women will improve their situation only marginally. This will still be a patriarchal world, and wars and insurrections will remain the work of men.

How about a little light verse today? It gets too serious around here at times and remember: humor is good!

Common Sense ~Ogden Nash

Why did the Lord give us agility,
If not to evade responsibility?

Do you have any light verse favorites? Limericks? Doggerel?

While I was in Denmark my best friend, Stuart, asked me what I thought the world would look like in thirty years. Yes, yes, I know it's prediction and a lot of people don't like to speculate. But I think exercises like this are good, even if all they do is project the attitudes and prejudices of the present onto the future. In that vein I'd like to offer a challenge to all the readers/diarists here and the writers/editors including Don, Numerian, Brian, Tina, Nat, QB. In a nutshell: a short essay, say a thousand words or less addressing how you see the future developing in five broad categories. Those categories are: agriculture/food, economy/development, environment, military/war and the rights of women. You can write about just the US, or the world at large, or, if you are an ex-pat the country in which you live.

I'll start tomorrow.

There is a great deal of truth in Barbara Ehrenreich's new book. Of course village media-folk don't see it that way. After all, it's much easier to compare her to Michael Moore than take her criticism seriously. But no one, in my opinion, is better at shattering dearly held American myths better than she is.

The gist of her criticism is pretty indisputable if you ask me. She writes that we live in a society where we are taught that unemployment is your fault--actually, pretty much every economic ill that befalls you--is your fault. It's not the fault of rogue bankers and criminal executives. It's not the fault of spineless politicians and failing institutions. It's your fault--you, the individual because you didn't pray, wish, or 'visualize' well enough to find a better job, or grow thinner or find a new and improved spouse, soulmate or whatever.

Look, the world is a rough place. And America is certainly a much easier place to live in than say Cambodia or sub-Saharan Africa. But that doesn't mean that economic life here is not cutthroat and brutal. That doesn't mean there isn't an elite in this country that's pillaging the place. Both are very real. And American's passion for the power of positive thinking, as she notes, "has become a potentially deadly weight – obscuring judgment and shielding us from vital information."

It also shields us from making rational decisions, decisions based on our economic self-interest as opposed to some phantom based self-esteem issues. Did you lose your house? Well, it's your fault. Work on your self-esteem and you'll be content with less.

Did your husband leave you because you are too fat? Never mind that an individual may have a genetic predisposition to obesity, or the simple reality that most people in the world don't grow old so gracefully? Well, it's your fault that you don't look like Brad Pitt or Uma Thurman. There's something wrong with you! Think positive and buy this new weight loss pill advertised on TV!

Are you unhappy? Has the stress of having $50,000 in unpayable medical bills got you down? Just lard yourself up with anti-depressants until you're too numb to give a shit.

It's the perfect prescription for elite control of a post-Modern society and the best way to curtail the growth of angry populism.

The Romans called it bread and circuses.

I cannot but help but to applaud the new (at least new to me) Dove Campaign for Real Beauty. It is a much needed counter-narrative and antidote to the anorexic, stick figures with implants culture we live in. Real beauty is a flawed beauty. Real women have flaws that are to be celebrated, no retouched by photo shop.

If you haven't watched the videos, I encourage you to do so. They are refreshing.

Here's a classic by Yeats:

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

I'm working on two deadlines right now. Sorry for the non-existent blogging, but next week will be better.

In the meantime, enjoy the fun wordplay and completely shredded proverbs over at Schott's:

You’ve buttered your own bread, now lie in it.

Speak softly and get out of the kitchen.
If you can’t stand the heat, carry a big stick.

More here. Feel free to create your own in the comments.

It's Tuesday and though I haven't done it in a long time, it's poetry day here at The Agonist.

Here's a good one:

BROADWAY MELODY

A naked woman my age is a total nightmare.
A woman my age naked is a nightmare.
It doesn’t matter. One doesn’t care.
One doesn’t say it out loud because it’s rare
For anyone to be willing to say it,
Because it’s the equivalent of buying billboard space to display it,

Display how horrible life after death is,
How horrible to draw your last breath is,
When you go on living.
I hate the old couples on their walkers giving
Off odors of love, and in City Diner eating a ray
Of hope, and paying and trembling back out on Broadway,

Drumming and dancing, chanting something nearly unbearable,
Spreading their wings in order to be more beautiful and more terrible.

Be sure to read the post at the NYRBlog about the poet as well. It's enlightening, if enraging. I would add that in my reading of the poem, knowing what I know of the poet, there is a winsome hint of jealousy about not knowing love at his age, which reminds me of the Russian proverb: if a man wants love after fifty he should be sure to have daughters.

Post your favorites in the comments.

Lance Mannion has a great post on the 'service' economy I recommend reading. My favorite graf:

By the way, this is why I boycott the automatic check-out at the supermarket even when I’m buying a single loaf of bread. The robot cashiers don’t put two people out of work, a human cashier and a human bagger, they put one human to work doing the jobs of two---me. They make me an unpaid cashier and bagger. They make me a component in a system of robotic money dispensing and accepting.

There's a lot of humor in his point. But it is a point well worth making: you are the one doing the two jobs that have been lost.

Read the whole post.

Note to self: when sick, go see a doctor. Don't continually put it off, thinking, 'I'll be better tomorrow.'

Apparently I needed to be reminded of the fact that infections don't cure themselves and when untreated tend to lead to all sorts of nasty side effects.

Lesson learned.

I have an immense case of the lazies. Bad. I've been meaning to write but all I've been capable of is watching Law and Order, Psych and other particularly dreadful and empty entertainment on my iPod and decompressing. I'm not sure what came over me the last few days in Nicaragua, but I was concerned for a while that it might be Swine Flu (it isn't). It was very uncharacteristic to be so lethargic, tired and unwell. I'm glad I'm mostly over it--although there are some residual effects still lingering. Like laziness--I already mentioned that, a severe case of unenthusiasm and pretty much being lame all the way around.

It's hard to conjure up thoughts of sunny Nicaragua while it's pouring sheets of cold drizzle down on me. It's funny, too, that I was craving the cold so much while in Costa Rica and Nicaragua and now? Not really. Two days of it was nice, but I'd prefer to wear shorts and sunglasses again very soon.

I'm sitting in my 'office' hoping some form of inspiration will strike. Alas, it's never really about the inspiration, more perspiration but it's so chilly here it's hard to work up a sweat. The thing I am struggling with is the storyline for Granada. I was so wiped out by the time I arrived there isn't much of one. And there is even less material in my travel journal than normal.

More after the jump.

My post on the lack of a Meta-narrative in our current culture got a lot of response so I thought I'd pull a couple of points made in the comments into a full post.

First off, we should define the terms. Brodix provided an excellent definition:

A narrative is the series of events which the individual organism experiences. The meta-narrative is the collective history by which a group defines itself.

In the comments I elaborated a bit on what I hope a new Meta-narrative would accomplish:

The myths that drove Western society to make so much progress from 1400 to 2000 are played out, we need a new goal to aspire to if we are to advance the ball. Currently I would argue that there is no remotely satisfactory answer to the questions "who are we? why are we here? where are we going?"

The anwers MUST include the progressive values but it must imbue them with the power of myth. We can't be debating whether or not it's moral and right to destroy our biosphere with every individual of every generation. Certain things must be accepted wisdom.
Our generation is having trouble maintaining the proscription on torture which was adopted by advanced societies since 1700, and locked down after 1945. I fear we have lost a great deal of experiential wisdom and are stumbling forward in a haze without a compass.

The meta-narrative must meet the needs traditionally met by religions -- explaining and inspiring and successfully imposing a workable communitarian ethical system that can be internalized by the vast majority of the population. But, not being a religious person myself, I do not believe it needs to be burdened with the weight of religion qua religion.

Having said all that, we still don't have a Meta-Narrative and in the mean-time, our tradition of civil authority over the military is being aggressively attacked. From David Sirota:

The war-mongering political class has called for presidential and congressional deference to military demands since Hollywood movies and anti-communist ideologues began countering the public's "Vietnam Syndrome" by blaming that quagmire in Southeast Asia on elected officials. In the purest articulation of the argument, Ronald Reagan asserted in 1980 that Vietnam was lost not because of flaws in mission or strategy, but because politicians allegedly forced soldiers to fight "a war our government (was) afraid to let them win."

Avoiding another Vietnam, says this school of thought, requires a figurehead government -- one that delegates all military decision-making power to generals and effectively strips it from elected civilians who will supposedly be too "politically motivated" (read: influenced by voters).

Sirota's post brings to mind an older post by Jack Whelan on "Latent Authoritarians":

One thing that has become clearer to me in the last six years is that democracy is for grownups, and most people, whatever lipservice they give to the concept, really don't want the responsibility of self-rule. I didn't used to think that. I don't know what the percentages are, but I've come to believe that far greater numbers of Americans or Germans or French or whoever, would have no problem embracing authoritarian rule or to hand over their republic to a big daddy like Petain if he promises to keep them safe and relatively prosperous and mouths patriotic slogans about the greatness of the national soul. (If you want more on this tendency authoritarianism among a swath of Americans, read John Dean or the new book by former NY Times war correspondent Chris Hedges.)

It doesn't require enormous intellectual capability to grasp this point. At first I thought the problem was that most people didn't understand the threat, but I'm more inclined to think now that it's not a question of understanding but caring. If the U.S. became an authoritarian state, I've become convinced that most Americans would accept it pretty much the way the French accepted the Nazi occupation and Petain's collaboration with it. The Germans were smart enough to give the French the illusion of independence and in doing so to neutralize them for the rest of the war. I believe something similar if subtler is going on in this country-- as long as most people feel independent, they don't care what kind of government they have or what crimes it commits.

Again, without a compelling emotionally resonant meta-narrative which progressives can draw from when trying to explain why civilian control of the military is essential and why authoritarianism is bad, we are sweeping the sea.

From the Three Pillars of Zen--which I am re-reading, one of my favorite anecdotes:

One day a man of the people said to Zen Master Ikkyu: "Master, will you please write for me some maxims of the highest wisdom?"

Ikkyu immediately to his brush and wrote the word "Attention."

"Is that all?" asked the man. "Will you not adds something more?"

Ikkyu then wrote twice running: "Attention. Attention."

"Well," remarked the man rather irritably, "I really don't see much depth or subtlety in what you have just written."

Then Ikkyu wrote the same word three times running: "Attention. Attention. Attention."

Half-angered, the man demanded: "What does that word 'Attention' mean anyway?"

And Ikkyu answered gently: "Attention means attention."

From David Foster Wallace:

Just Asking

Are some things still worth dying for?

Is the American idea one such thing?

Are you up for a thought experiment?

What if we chose to regard the 2,973 innocents killed in the atrocities of 9/11 not as victims but as democratic martyrs, “sacrifices on the altar of freedom”?

In other words, what if we decided that a certain baseline vulnerability to terrorism is part of the price of the American idea? And, thus, that ours is a generation of Americans called to make great sacrifices in order to preserve our democratic way of life—sacrifices not just of our soldiers and money but of our personal safety and comfort?

In still other words, what if we chose to accept the fact that every few years, despite all reasonable precautions, some hundreds or thousands of us may die in the sort of ghastly terrorist attack that a democratic republic cannot 100-percent protect itself from without subverting the very principles that make it worth protecting?

Is this thought experiment monstrous? Would it be monstrous to refer to the 40,000-plus domestic highway deaths we accept each year because the mobility and autonomy of the car are evidently worth that high price?

Is monstrousness why no serious public figure now will speak of the delusory trade-off of liberty for safety that Ben Franklin warned about more than 200 years ago? What exactly has changed between Franklin’s time and ours? Why now can we not have a serious national conversation about sacrifice, the inevitability of sacrifice—either of (a) some portion of safety or (b) some portion of the rights and protections that make the American idea so incalculably precious?

In the absence of such a conversation, can we trust our elected leaders to value and protect the American idea as they act to secure the homeland? What are the effects on the American idea of Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, Patriot Acts I and II, warrantless surveillance, Executive Order 13233, corporate contractors performing military functions, the Military Commissions Act, NSPD 51, etc., etc.? Assume for a moment that some of these measures really have helped make our persons and property safer—are they worth it?

Where and when was the public debate on whether they’re worth it? Was there no such debate because we’re not capable of having or demanding one? Why not? Have we actually become so selfish and scared that we don’t even want to consider whether some things trump safety? What kind of future does that augur?

Pass along without comment. H/T Charlie.

Two years ago, today, I wrote this from Denmark. It's no less true today than it was when I wrote it. Hell, it may be even more appropriate, considering the health-care fight we are currently engaged in.

On an altogether different note: I was in rough shape personally when I wrote that. And while my life has certainly changed for the better, it makes me sad to think that in two years America hasn't much changed at all.

Regular posting will re-commence on Wednesday--I'm off for a late weekend, early week lakeside retreat. Until then, might I suggest we all take a moment and think about all the hard work Americans put forth so that we could have a labor day, and a five day work week? It wasn't always this way. Those that came before us are owed a debt of gratitude and at the minimum a moment of our thoughts.

Have a great holiday. See you all Wednesday.

I reflected a bit as I cooked supper last night. I began to think about the barter system, and how it would fit into today's society. I realized that, for the past two days, my wife and I ate for pennies. Granted, the food was not totally free; someone paid for it in one way or another. Saturday's supper came in the form of gumbo. Big, tasty okra from my sister's garden, wicked little heirloom tomatoes from Don's garden, and some spicy boudin my brother in law got from his local meat market for free. "Here, try it and see if you like it." The butcher gave him about four pounds, two of which made it into my pot. This little network, this normal interaction between people caused what was excess, potential waste, to turn into two very tasty meals.

Escher recently wrote in a post of mine that “termites build mounds out of dirt; humans build ours out of thoughts.”

Food for thought, no doubt, as I wasted several days on a Mexican beach and then a long mid-night drive across the coast of Michoacan to Ixtapa.

I may be poor. And a struggling writer at that. I may never see the success I hope for. In the end, success is ephemeral, anyway, which is something I remind myself of every morning when I wake up and ask: are you having fun?

Now, when I use the word ‘fun’ I’m not talking about an everlasting party—although there has been some of that lately; it’s hard to begrudge a guy two weeks on a beach in Mexico, no?

More after the jump.

I am verb hunting today. Suggestions welcome. Favorites in the comments if you are so inclined! But please, no passives, no subjunctives and no conditionals. Action verbs! Archaic verbs and verbal constructions most welcome too!

Here's something we haven't done in a long, long time. Poetry Tuesdays. Post your favorites in the comments. Here's one I read today, from the movie "Born Into This" about the life of Charles Bukowski (after the jump):