Obama Continues Rendition - Screw Him

Quick post today. I am too angry to try to be witty.

L.A. Times reports that the Obama administration will continue the rendition policies of the former regime. Some apologists bandy semantics and assert that we we will only kidnap folks and send them to countries that don't torture, but that smacks of bullshit to me. If we want to be sure suspects aren't tortured, then bring them here and make the process transparent.

To clarify: I could give a good goddamn about five minutes of waterboarding. We had a ridiculous national argument about that while we were haveing people's teeth broken with hammers in Syria and people raped with broken bottles in old Soviet gulags in Uzbekistan. I voted for Obama with some hope things might be different, but the cynicism I manufactured to shroud my optimism has been borne out. Barack Obama is a bad guy owned by the same interests that W. was. Fuck him and all the other professional dissemblers.

much peace

Go Rush!!!!!

Rush Limbaugh is in the headlines again. He's not smuggling drugs this time, or displaying his phenomenal football illiteracy (I mean Jesus Christ, Donovan McNabb has carried this Eagles team on his back his whole goddamn career). This time he's resuming his role as the premier fat-ass megalomaniac of the GOP, which is good news for the Democrats. When the most visible face in your party is a crazy, sweaty, xenophobic talk show host who does no research and doesn't check his "facts"... well, you get the picture. It's way early of course, but if this trend continues the GOP will buck history and lose more seats in the midterms, and probably nominate Sarah Palin or someone like her in 2012. I am not a supporter of any politician, per se, at least not on the basis of their personal identity, so I am reserving judgment on Obama as pResident until I see his policies in action, but he is an infernally intelligent person, and one of the better speakers I have seen in the last couple of decades. Palin barely survived a gaffe-prone Joe Biden. Can you imagine her opposing Obama directly? It would be like sandblasting a damp graham cracker.

If I were the GOP, I would beg George Will to beat Rush to rhetorical death with the lead pipe in the library. If I were the Dems, I would revel in the fact that Rush is again in the news representing the worst and the dimmest of the opposition.

(Author's note: I apologize to George Will for mentioning him in the same sentence with Rush. I know, Mr. Will, that Rush couldn't carry your jock strap.)

much peace

" ... And we did want to be respectful of the neighbors of the Obama family, of all the many people who are feeling great congratulatory happiness. But I think that we have to recognize where—well, that President Obama has now become the chief arms exporter in the world. He’s in charge of the most massive killing machine in the world. ... "
(Kathy Kelly, international peace activist, as told to Amy Goodman on DemoocracyNow!)


Are my sons safer now that Israel has demolished Gaza with U.S. money and technology? Are we safer with 600,000 - 1 million Iraqis dead? I doubt it. After 9/11, this country reserved the right to remember and hate without stint or discretion. What about the Iraqi shopkeeper who saw his son blown in half by good old American know-how, or the 8-year-old who saw his parents murdered in an elective war? Don't the friends and relatives of the dead and maimed in Iraq and Gaza have the same perpetual right to rage and hatred that I would if my toddlers were murdered by another country's bombs, or is the horrible choking, desperate grief of middle-eastern non-christians and non-Jews somehow less real, their bereavement less keen, because American exceptionalism has designated their sacrifice acceptable?

Let's for a moment pretend that these actions have made us safer, rather than simply hardening another generation of anti-American sentiment. I still can't look another father in the eye and say, "your child shall be killed, blown apart, so that mine can maintain the lifestyle to which he is accustomed," or to another son, "Your father will be burned to death with white phosphorous so that my old man can retire without stress." The price is too great.

Self-congratulatory, preening fucks like W.F. Buckley will prate about the existential threat; neocons think it's our divine right to conquer the world. The world bank, the military-industrial complex, and all their economic hit men think only of profit. I just can't get that orphaned father out of my head. I know how I would feel if my boys were taken from me. There is no amount of bloodshed that would sate me, no salve would tame the violence. Our American attitude, though, doesn't recognize our murders as real people or real deaths, just acceptable statistics in pursuit of our "interests." I don't know, maybe we've killed enough people to make us more secure for a little while. I don't think attrition is a long-term fix, though, unless we're willing to implement a Final Solution and simply kill everybody whose interests run contrary to ours. Otherwise, it's only a matter of time before those we've brutalized gather enough strength and numbers to attack us again. Hopefully I can manage the casualties in my family.

much peace,

Poem I Wrote Five or Six Years Ago

Vanished Girl

The westering sun decomposes on the asphalt of Grover Street,
pools in windshields and the glass fronts of stores,
searching for somewhere permeable to fall

Old woman - prisoner in the throes of growth on the prairie's edge -
steps from the faux brick mouth of the Four Seasons Apartments:
Four seasons, maybe; but all four four of them Autumn:
all descending steadily towards winter

In and out of the postage stamp sunset she moves,
turning towards the bus stop, carrying the gaunt
austerity of her shoulders and the fallow poverty
of her hips, ilea jutting akimbo like the skeletons of horses
bleaching in the desert sun

Startling blue veins twist across her forearms and hands
like back highways in an atlas,
her papery skin in the last stages of a backward alchemy:
transmutation of living gold to a pale leaden grey

Her colorless gaze drifts above the town homes down
Fiftieth Street; she avoids in her exile
all communion with shoppers, mothers and
the cruising proletariat

In the utter loneliness of bustling Middle
America she waits alone, and accepts without
question the injustice of invisibility

------------------------------------------
In the sere lines of her face are mapped years
of such silent stoicism - centuries since youth
and usefulness were exhausted
-------------------------------------------

She recalls, though, in the grass-green days of spring,
the hot breath and rough hands of man;
damp Julys before the bowl of her hips fell barren,
was once filled to bursting with sunrisesexlilac
and foggy river valley funk

Farmers' and ranchers' sons drowned in the flood of her:
in the pendulous weight of her breasts, heavy
with the life of this place: in her warm belly and
eager hips, milk and honey rhythms and August evening
cherry pits
and the nameless eyes falter for a second,
overtaken by memory and loss
so long - an ocean since that touch of heat –

What man would now reach his hand to the vanished girl,
her hunching shoulders and wasted hips,
withering skin and arid lips slowly
folding in upon each other

Too long - too far for a forgotten woman in the
invisible twilight, where the sibilant wind cannot be heard
through the switchgrass and little bluestem,and
the tides no longer roll up the wide Missouri

So, in the failing light, her eyes resume their practiced vacancy
and she waits alone, in the chill of early evening,
staving off memories of warmth

(Copyright 2002, Thomas J Burbach)

Much Peace,
tjb

White People Should Not Attempt to Play Jazz

Am I racist? A little bit against white folks, I think. I really like this coffee shop. The baristas are pretty and sweet, and the drinks are well above average. But Holy Mary's sweet untouched tits, I am going to go insane from all the lily white self-styled jazz musicians tap dancing around the downbeat with all the soul of a corpse bled dry and washed up and washed out on the banks of the Elkhorn after a spring flood. I mean, it's as bad as Stevie Ray Vaughn playing variations of the riff from Red House over and over and styling himself a blues artist. What is it with white people trying to find soul in places in which it just isn't accessible for them? It's the same stink as Frank Sinatra (the Chairman of the Whitey) and Tony Bennett singing the same old shit that cost them nothing, NOTHING, to trot out. For chrissake, does anyone really think Jack Benny and his ilk could even play fluffer to Charlie Parker?

Don't get me wrong, white people have soul. Walt Whitman, Thomas McGrath, The Who, Michelle Shocked, Steve Earle, U2, me, the list goes on.... White people should just not play jazz or blues, unless, of course, they're sitting in with black folks.

Anyway, I have to endure another month+ of inane Christmas music pretending to be jazz. I will try very hard to avoid proselytizing to my fellow white people in this small-city cattleyard, but I may well end up on a street corner in full beard spreading the word of God, otherwise known as John Coltrane.

Much Peace, and a Love Supreme
tjb

"Nothing's the same, the whole city estranged, and restless since you've been gone." (Thomas J Burbach)

Kids are out of town with their mom and I am purposeless, on my third cup of joe and staring at the world in squigglevision.

Forty-eight degrees: warm enough that my surgically-repaired and recreationally re-destroyed knee does not ache. This shoulder, though, is one more avatar of encroaching age, along with the hints of grey in my beard and the slow retreat of my voice from its upper ranges. Knee, shoulder and vox: all three need surgery, for ligaments, labrum and nodes, respectively. Who the hell has time for crutches, slings and silence, though? I can't imagine hobbling after my soldiers for 12 weeks, then only using one hand and no scary voice to keep them out of the street.

Enough self-indulgent bitching. I am still young and charming enough for any 10, well, six people. Here's the deal with Obama (I voted for him, by the way):

1) He has to do what he said he would do during the campaign and his acceptance speech: Audit Government. Separate the wheat from the chaff. Keep the social safety net and cut ridiculous expenditures like a pedestrian bridge across the Missouri and dueling atomic clocks in the same town square. There are billions to be saved. Obama has to draw a clear distinction between being being liberal/progressive (which I am) and being an enabler for pork barrel slush funds. He won't make any friends cutting billions in pet projects, but there's no other way to fund the things that need funding.

2) Absolutely veto the so-called Fairness Doctrine. Look, right-wing talk radio is ridiculous, dishonest, anti-intellectual crap. It flees from facts like kids from a turd in the pool. Studies have shown that folks who get their news from talk radio (or Faux News) are just horribly misinformed. I listen to Hannity, Beck and O'Reilly to find out what's NOT going on in the world (then I go read the Christian Science Monitor for real news). There's a reason George Will isn't guesting on Limbaugh (George Will is very smart). If you take talk radio seriously, I probably think you're a troll whose parents should have considered birth control; but you CAN'T legislate it away. First Amendment. Period. Progressive radio failed because folks that tune in to radio didn't want to listen. You wan't people to listen, craft a more radio-friendly presentation. Passing something like the Fairness Doctrine is an effective admission that we can't spread our message on its own merits, which is clearly not the case given the last election. Let the truth-defiers have their antebellum circle jerk and let's get on with the honest business of revitalizing America.

There will be more to come. As I am something of a midwestern circle jerker (when it comes to football, anyway), I gots to git along and watch the game.

Much Peace,
tjb

The boys and I were up well before dawn this morning to take their mom to the airport. We drove back in the early cold, stopping to get coffee, and I directed their attention to the methodical advance of light in the east. I saw the color and shadow over the abandoned grain elevators, their bases overgrown with rough weeds and rougher trash, and I was reminded of thousands of mornings in hundreds of places...

-over the battered, scarred bluffs in Gering, NE

-avatars of sun from over my shoulder, past the guides on my fishing pole to touch the surface of the poor, abused Caloosahatchee River

-through weariness and terrible sorrow, cajoling my failing car to find my Friend in Ames, IA

-from Omaha to the Northern Territories; unbroken prairie, wind and song

-bourgeois sun over bourgeois snow and a decidely un-bourgeois blown knee in Silverthorn, CO

-febrile with caffeine and exhaustion rolling into a party in Austin, TX

-light cold, pale and intense, and me mostly dead from altitude sickness at 17, 000 feet in the Andes

-innumerable bicycle rides through empty Omaha streets, shirt and tie in my backpack, wondering at my good fortune

-everyone but the horses asleep on Mike and Mary's farm inAberdeen, SD; I sneak to the lake in the early dark to catch a fat catfish not two feet from shore

-making insane love for hours with Jennifer on the big red couch...six years of want sated...She left at sunrise, the last time I saw her alive.

-down, down, forever down, via an old ramshackle bus with one headlight out, down at unsafe speeds on narrow mountain roads, my Friend wisely asleep from a Valium...racing the sunrise from Huaraz to the coastal city of Chiclayo.

-cowboy coffee, bracingly bitter, brewed in a saucepan over a butterfly camp stove in the Boundary Waters. Oyster Lake shines like a pure shard of the sun.

-eyes itchy and frustrated...driving back and forth between Squaw Lake and Deer River in the Chippewa National Forest, trying to find the goddamn turn to reach Campbell's Empty Bar

-my big brother Max and I leave the less-dedicated anglers wrapped in their blankets, and we throw buzzbaits and Hula Poppers into the weedbeds of Sand Lake

-Pembina, ND, and dawn falls like honeyed poison through the trees in the churchyard; even the sun fears the violence remembered here

-16, torn with love and sociopathy, pacing all night; morning finds me awake on my knees and hopeless in the absence of prayer

-stoned: really, really stoned and seven solid hours of video game football. Keyshawn Johnson had over 10,000 receiving yards

-a little light seeps through a gap in the blinds; Max and Will are only a few weeks old, tiny, curling aginst each other asleep on my chest

-men and boys from 10-50, playing soccer at the crack of dawn on a basketball court in Lima...an enormous staircase from Alejandro's flat to the beach below


...and sunset on that same stretch of Peruvian sand: my Friend and I standing together, but quite apart, looking out at the endless Pacific. The boys still sleep in the back seat in Omaha, but I am taken. I remember in my body that which I have never known, have always remembered. The ocean: ages of restless harmony and dissonance falling into me, briny and cold. Somwhere past brother and Friend, beyond lovers and sons...in the rhythmic depths is my undiscovered home...rest from this unbearable restlessness.