And thy hands be not free
From the taint of the soil, thou hast made thy spoil
The greater shame to thee."
--- Kipling
About Last year: What do want to hear first?
Mean was the new black.
A trillion-idea Socratic deficit, defended by the most overpowered regime in modern world history, was laid waist by 99 cents worth of hope on a stick.
It was the kind of Democratic moment that makes gambling a duty, and not a pleasurable one at that. There is no payout for these victors, save a punched ticket you'll wish you had down the road, when you ponder the last step towards the grave and little Sally breaks the code of death-bed etiquette to ask you: "What did you do during the war Grand-Daddy?"
Somehow the heroes who can't stop talking got blown off the map by the cowards who are afraid to speak up. Go get Peggy, and she can write it down the wind, but in the meantime make room for the meat-wagons, to haul off the scattered silk brocades of another laughless army of broken clowns and self-soiled priests.
2008 delivered the most important American political moment since 1876; the most divisive since '68 and the most fringe driven since the Salem witch trials. An aged white Republican billionaire on the right and, a young Black academic protege' of the Chicago Machine on the left battled equally against ferverous raspings from their own people that they were too moderate. The headlines still read "We are all victims."
And no one who believes a word of that sentence will ever, ever stand any better ground than they did on the last day of October, 2008.
Not victims, and not heroes either. Just the ones who chose to survive. Sully got his name in the paper, sure. When the smoke wafts in you and I will be lucky if we are even on the same vessel as Skiles or Peltz or Brittany Catanzaro. The plane is landing early, this ferry runs on time, but your old baggage is never coming back.
Memo to "Them": Stop telling me to "Wake Up". I know that This is next. I love facing it more than you love blaming other people for it's imperfections.
My Country - 'Twas of Thee
Poe's great black nightbird crashed through the cupola, to roost and cackle with a mad glee above the theatrical greatlights of our monumental Americanism. Or was it our American monumentalism? Claws grasped now a shredded sheave of bent-shaft arrows, and now a greed-stripped band of fruitless olive branches. Sticks, the same and all. A nation mourned its lost honest verbiage. The difference between our most graven and most grave symbolic images became indistinguishable.
Where have you gone
Joe Dimaggio
Muhammad Ali ?
In the beggining there was the word, and the word was occasionally OK and, rarely even brilliant, but the word was boiled by an age of wildly failed symbolic marketing tongues. Extremism was our worst enemy and we were the worst perpetrators.
See the promise of this ... new... same-ness.
See the street called main, and the house called home, and the man called dad. Dust off the morning news, it is all electric now but the coffee is still second rate. The truth is always a battered bastard. Arianna Huffington is no H.L. Mencken for these kids, but neither is H.L. Mencken.
.. Join the Vine, share a little vainglorious blame-and-attack prose with your fellow humans. Those rats were never my peers. Yelling and Singing are not even different countries that my river flows through.
Write it hot and let them howl.
We were beaten down by our own addiction to symbolic patriotism, by a white-noise stream of nothing verbiage and zampolit filtration. Every rambling man Jack fancied by his own looking glass a new bard for a new day, a remade Shakespeare. Ladies and gentlemen THAT bard wrote for the crowd and played to the King. It's a subtle difference, like Old Portrero Whiskey and grape Kool-Aid.
That trade should have been simple, a little face, for a little lower spine. Bring something new to make them laugh, or just hire a blind man to throw eggs at you from behind the cameras. "Blog-o-Sphere" my tailbone, well, history can adjust the lexicon, but a hundred thousand muskets trailed the great white column as it marched. A nick here and there, the odd man hanged. What did you do during the war old man?
They commanded us to be courageous and we pulled down the palace gates in our cowardly fear of submission.
Ask the true patriots this: Are we so addicted to painted freedoms that we'll never feel the heat of the fire itself again? Will the girl never sing the song live? All of that melodic chiaroscuro? A flawed song to be sure, and why we chose it as our own, unique, to begin with. But now thusly preserved in ether and served cold and joyless. Did you join in a national day of prayer, for touchdown passes, and bottled flames? Or did you pray a true hope for something else... something less... comfortable maybe?
Dance in your heart for that greatest wonder of life, the self-whispered notion. Ahh yes my darlings, so this is next. And this is next.
And this is next.
See a rotted bird misshapen and stuffed with paper, where blood once flowed. A beauty less winged. Let's face it, mean was the new new black.
There is only one revolution that matters for the kids now. Content is king, and The King must die. Pull the breakers, kill the noise and whisper the secret. The data stream flows both ways now Mr. President. It was a time to knock down extremists and joyless victims. The ones right here, and on all the content-addicted profitless advertising mash-houses.
The joy of my heart is that it is not yours, and I welcome one and all who can agree.
Pushed aside, these caustic balmers. A tree was planted here in faith, and one there yonder, seeds of something worth struggling to be a part of. A fruit some of us will never hold. Something flawed and scarred of face. Let us write a character driven script, one that is real because the characters are you and I and then we will burn the script.
Imperfection was the only wager to lay last season. Being wrong about anything was more honorable than being right about everything. Imperfection is the only freedom man can never misappropriate from his brother man.
Call in the kids and show them something hard and gritty and crusted with mud. At great risk of personal humility and a thousand stomp-kicks to the gut, we have to seize the flow. Here we are called but not chosen. Come back to the shadows of an American Dream worth failing for.
It was a season in a strange land. The Vox Machine blew a tube and the greasy smoke chased the novitiates away from the Americanist theocracy of the airways.
Welcome to a last slow sip of hot whiskey from a bottle without a label, before a snowy, cold and dark of night walk home. Laughing all the way. Extremism was for Seal Teams, Motorcylists and guys named Buckley. The rest of us had a thousand generations of desperate bungling to live up to, as we sought to abandon extremism, in everything but art and perhaps the design of machines that go fast.
A lot of people didn't vent for spite or glory. A lot of us had another, more careful intent. People who looked through the blasting electronica, and simply craved a tree-lined path through the din, back to the street called main and the house called home, and the raw and biting honesty of a child's sinless smile.
It was the Year of the Rat.
Ride For The High Country
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