Dr. Guy Standard

ONCE THERE WAS A MAN NAMED MURRAY CHOTINER  and he taught a young chincapin-eyed Candidate how to get elected all over a place and he told unto this guy with a dog for support here’s going to be the Rules, from now and on to any end of anything, are we clear he asked Mr. Nixon:

1.  No ideals and no ideas needed — and no holds barred, make it personal, no such thing as dirty mud you sling, just don’t get noticeably philosophical.

2.  For sure, don’t worry about what you promised in Cucamonga when you’re in Tennessee. Lie as much as you like, but more, too, if you do it eye-to-eye like you damned-well meant, and in-addition mean it.

3.  Then there’s Rule Three: get used to being bought year-round so you (“naturally”) have to hustle year-round for the best democracy money can buy, etc.; And by all means, stay ready to be bought for thousands by a Koch and by another Koch with billions to blow: be as cheap as you are, said Murray to Dick to rover Grover.  God help us all, and any god at all will do.

I.

There is a national rhythm for each nation
Which abused gives rise to great fatigue;
Rhythm which like the national flag must be
Used sparingly. All else is emptiness

Filling non-existence with non-existence,
A country’s broken melody, silently
Keeping no time, out of time, silent,
And never more than as war roars.

Where harmony might be, is discontent;
Where a nation’s rhythm might be found
Is found instead great national weariness.
There is no song a poet might sing, right now.
Instead, brute earless ignorance would war
Against a winter’s weary world, pretending
to call the dance.

II.

Stars will remember,
As years passed by;
Stars will remember,
And so will I:

Leaving a highway
For a street;
Leading a street
For a road,

Singing against the howl
Of black freezing wind;
Singing against the howl,
Coming home again,
And home again,
America.

III.

And children are found where shadows
Falling from shattered walls and windows
Exile the light, growing up never knowing
Flowers are calling unto a day of distance,

Wind and wild. Here too is rubble
Shored against ruins. Beloved poets,
Memory indeed shows so little respect
Before the look of a land, this season;

And ill fares a land, to hastening
Ills a prey, where wealth accumulates
Only for war, a world marked only for
Death, a people marked only for fear,
A people marked, for decay. Now,
All are tired and afraid, and I too
thirst, I thirst
for accusation.

IV.

But who was Democritus, after all?
Another human, all too human, ash
On air, at last. What was Alexandria,
After all, but scrolls in flames?

Tibet? Tibet? What is one Buddha
Cut into stone, before the newest
Truest shatter of maddened belief?
Old Savoy women still start morning

Fires with Corot rolls, Mayan bark
Libraries long gone ash on air and
Now? The latest dogs of war are loosed
On Baghdad of prehistory and artifact
To win the hearts and minds of all
A country’s crippledom. Now, see
The latest Ozymandias — cruel cold
sneer turned lying
smirk.

GOVERNOR CHRISTIE’S CASE consists of a series of adverbs: if he didn’t know, he is, wonderfully, dense; if he did know, he is, surprisingly, criminal; at all events he is astonishingly stupid.

11.5, 32, 32,000, … if the Kochs decided to spend a dollar a second, they would be dead before reaching a billion dollars. They don’t have that long to live, no matter how sweet a health plan they buy, and they like all of us will be dead a long long time, as dead as Franco, as dead as Ivy Lee, no matter how many solid gold toilets they could afford. And yet, they want more, and so they feel they must continue to buy more congressional creatures, if only because they are to be had for chump-change. Corruption has now for some time been corrupted and Koch principal need never be touched: interest accruing will much more than cover the going price for a whored democracy.

How about ten dollars a second then? Surely the Kochs can see their way clear and still be alive after having tied up one of their billions in just a little over three years. Ten dollars a second… how about $10 and 10¢ — an hour? As Hamlet might say, look at this picture and on that. What might the shade of Joe Hill sing? And when do the Indians dance?

NUMBERS YET AGAIN: For a million seconds to pass takes 11.5 days; for a billion 32 years; for a trillion 32,000 years. Let us express that in dollars, but call it $10.00 a second. Now it would take 3,200 years to pay back a trillion dollar note. At $100.00 a second it would still take 320 years to pay off a trillion dollar debt, and 32 years at $1000.00 per second. But one hears of four trillion or more than ten trillion being owed. Let us be conservative and say the United States of America owes somebody five trillion dollars. At $1000.00 per second, it would take 160 years to pay off. N.B.: the people who took on this debt for some us to pay off are the selfsame people who say it is outrageous to suggest paying $10.10 an hour to the help.

A GROUP OF ALTRUISTS will beat a society of selfish individualists every time, it is said. Start with the flat fact that the latter are suicidal. Altruists, on the contrary, have, precisely y nature, a reverence for life in all its forms. One is not unmindful that what has been said, so far, is general and cast in the plural. Very well, seeking to be, occamistically, singular and particular, image up, if you will, Eugene Victor Debs sitting down to tea with Bertrand Russell and Noam Chomsky and having their chat vetted by Richard Dawkins and Paul Farmer. Something on that order. Now say you came into an expensively-attended venue which promised to let you hear and look at Mr. Beck appreciating the very latest word of Ms. Bachmann and that of Mr. Gohmert audited by either Mr. Koch, or variously, Mr. Koch. Let the subject for both groupings by “Global Warming and the Florida Keys.”

IAGO, the Shakespearean critics pretty much agree, “lacks motive.” Why does Iago hate the Moor so much? Asked another way, how was it that Shakespeare’s own audience seems simply to have accepted the situation as it was offered, as indeed is still pretty much the case with audiences down to our own time. Isn’t the most obvious answer implicit in the image of a black ram tupping a white ewe — an image that needs no further motive, being so repellant? Picture Mr. McConnell as our own Iago imaging up a black man in the very whited house imaginable. Does one discern froth around this gopster mouth and that? Why, really, might Mr. Gohmert want to impeach a President?

AMERICAN LEGISLATIVE EXCHANGE COUNCIL (ALEC), being parasitical, either knows quite explicitly it is suicidal, or is in various degrees unconscious of the fact. If ALEC knows it is suicidal, then it harbors a death wish of the sort nursed and nourished by rapture boobydom. If on the contrary ALEC is incapable for whatever reason of following out the logic of a parasitical proposition, then ALEC is Hitlerian and lacks only a Schickelgruber to paint its own self-deluded picture of the next thousand years.

THINK FOR A MOMENT about this Florida of our time: an armed man in a vehicle stalks a teen-aged boy who is taking home a package of Skittles. The man is in communication with a police dispatcher who instructs him not to get out of the car. The boy, as it happens, is also in communication, by cell-phone with a girl friend and is telling her he is being followed and that he finds it “creepy.” The man gets out of his vehicle, confronts the boy, and shoots him. He is tried for second-degree murder and found innocent. A short time later, in this Florida, a mother faces her abusive husband and fires a warning shot into the wall. She too is tried and sentenced to twenty years in prison. And this is America?

Then there are three students waiting for their bus. The judge in this case, vested with the full majesty of the law, rules they are to be allowed to wait for their bus, even though they are Black and one of them is particularly black. This, too, is in the America of our time.

ONCE MORE A SUMMARY of numbers whose perspective is called for: it takes 11.5 days for a million seconds to go by; it takes 32 years for a billion seconds to pass, and 32,000 years for a trillion seconds to pass. A trillion (one trillion) dollars, then, is a large, a very large sum of money. Mr. Cheney has personally seen to it that he and Halliburton and Mr. Bush sink numbers like that into the sands of Araby — just not deep enough to strike oil. Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Bremer, Perle… names like that had (have?) leave to play and puddle bloodily about with numbers like that — with plurals of numbers like that.

One has no idea who they might have been, or still might be, but suppose some different set of names had had leave to encumber such sums and used them not only for roads lined with trees (one-dollar trees in ten-dollar holes), and bridges, but for manufacturing jobs that currently say Made in China, and a bullet train or two? It could have gone that way, with billions left over for Doctors Without Borders and education K through Ph.D. paid for with chump change. Do the arithmetic.