Frederick, Frederick
don't you understand that the issue here is not anti-Americanism but a
discomfort at rhetoric. A high number of those who were killed on Sept 11
were Brits, but I'm not looking to garrotte anybody. I hear lots of people
here expressing similar views to yours, with that comes a tonnage of racism
and hatred. Leicester is one of the most racially tolerant cities in the
world, but as a result of the rhetoric that is being used it's festering, I
fear what could happen here as a result.
I don't think any sane person doesn't deplore the horror of what happened in
NYC, but that doesn't mean we should forget the greater horrors of what
happened in say Rwanda, which wasn't a matter of 3000 lives, nobody really
knows how many, we're talking attempted genocide on this. Ok, they were just
Africans, and we know black lives count for less in the world's eyes.
And as for books with titles like 'The Book of Hope' and readings to heal
New York, no matter the status of the contributors, it's like a death of
sensitivity to the language, however grave the subject, when I see titles
like that I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Even a Christmas card poet
would be embarrassed with inventions like that.
Best (and Pax)
Dave
David Bircumshaw
Leicester, England
Home Page
A Chide's Alphabet
Painting Without Numbers
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/index.htm
----- Original Message -----
From: "Frederick Pollack" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Saturday, May 18, 2002 10:24 PM
Subject: "The Car Alarm"
A majestic - almost Beckettian - nothingness greeted the last poem I
showed y'all ("Betting on the Being"), so I'm trying one more time. Of
course I know I'm an accursed American, whose protestations of
bleeding-heart leftism don't count because I care more about 3000
American dead than about 3000 dead elsewhere and because I would
cheerfully, personally GAROTTE Osama bin Laden and because I regard
Palestinian suicide-bombers as psychotic scum thugs not as in any sense
heroes ... and all that probably gets in the way of appreciating my work
... but anyway, here's my latest ... love and love ... shiny gooey
person ...
The Car Alarm
Somewhere a car alarm, deeply upset,
parades its repertoire of bleeps and blurts
( - question: as various as a bird's?) again.
Indoors, nanotechnology,
with quiet smoothings, roughenings, and shadings,
steadily joins furnishings
to their owner's taste.
From his changeless desk, a philosopher
observes these continuities and thinks
awhile of the obsolescence
of the critical gesture
that tacitly dismisses brutal thoughts
and actions as in some way inauthentic.
He wonders whether a worldview
or art pursued in ignorance
of vital facts the rest of the world knows
may be in some sense true.
Is any question actually invalid?
He ponders the reactionary
concept of *metaxy -
the "middle" stance, the Mean we should agree on -
and thinks that, with the amount
of suffering in the world
(including that car's),
the balance would have to be placed
to one side:
far nearer the untrammeled
breast-possession fantasies of infancy
than any fact.
Which reminds him where he got started:
one of those parties in high school
where the constraints of selfhood
are eagerly discussed.
He forgets if it was the tone
or point of someone's chatter
that made him see and say, "You're a total jerk,"
but he remembers the dude
collapsing on himself -
teeth and grieving eyes
dissolving into
a stain among the other party stains.
Girls standing around
protested, but the philosopher
thinks: If I'd done a few more of those,
everything would be better.
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