Most of us ('liberals'?) finding ourselves in 'the nearer places' most
of the time, Fred?
Ah, caustic for the masses (messes)...
Doug
On 1-Oct-07, at 7:02 AM, Frederick Pollack wrote:
> The Liberal
>
>
> They settle in. Testosterone
> and an obvious need for decision
> as to who gets top bunk, top spot
> in rapes, main share of the food, etc.,
> reciprocally cause each other. Plus
> ideology: Aryan Christian types,
> more common-or-garden
> bigots, and other believers contend
> for corporate spokesmanship. The few
> real corporate figures who weren’t
> sufficiently faceless to escape
> my dragnet try to act
> like regular, prayerful, duckhunting guys,
> but learn that distance is the price of love.
> (In another block, the women
> find their own ways to hierarchalize.)
> The room, initially clean enough,
> soon smells the way these places do.
>
> When I allow a meeting,
> manifesting myself
> on an indestructible screen high in the wall
> as a rigid golden figure like an Oscar,
> they get it together, proving
> the ultimate necessity of reason.
> They elect a charismatic or Opus Dei
> Father to follow my directions through
> the wall, to my universe. When his
> anathemas, prayers, impotent
> violence are exhausted he remarks
> that I’m as much a prisoner as they;
> that unless perfect love casts out fear
> there is no end short of eternity.
> I tell him to preach this to his flock.
> Predictably he won’t accept the point;
> sees only power and a loathsome pity
> sculpted into a stylized golden man.
>
> So through that monitor the inside
> of the mind like a warden watches
> the outside pace and hate;
> and cannot look away, and broadcasts
> Tolerance and Rights and Science,
> the whole dispirited reflex rosary,
> to no avail. I think my charges, clients,
> (masters perhaps?) are worthless
> because they doubt these things;
> they know I think this of them
> and therefore despise me and will never
> listen to anything I say, and are therefore
> worthless. The mind holds them
> the way a captive is held
> one doesn’t know what to do with
> but can’t allow to roam unsupervised
> (which is why anyone is kept in hell
> or, really, any of the nearer places).
>
Douglas Barbour
11655 - 72 Avenue NW
Edmonton Ab T6G 0B9
(780) 436 3320
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
Latest book: Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
When you combine two unique voices
it creates a third, phantom voice.
Emmy Lou Harris
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