Doug Post

Tuesday, 13 October 2009

  • Again, Eye Rhymes


    As I noted on the What's Up page my poemin' days are done. I've exchanged the verse for the vision. I now see all in my autodidactic belfry. I have the sight. From bad poet to a boorish philodox all in the turn of a summer;  a singular accomplishment. But I'm not one to high hat it. One should never forget one's roots. So below you'll find two new eye rhymes. I spent an inordinate amount of time composing the pair. Damn near the entire halftime of yesterday's Denver v Patriot game. I must say, an arduous effort. Oops, gotta go. Rockies and Phillies.

    Case File

    I want a Fedora
    &
    A redhead in seamed stockings
    &
    Supper Club reservations
    &
    brass
    in the band
    playing droll
    Cole Porter
    &
    fronted by a platinum canary 
    who's wanted
    in
    Manhattan
    Kansas
    for
    alienation of
    affections

    ***************
    Sunday Over/Under

    Awaiting football
    I pratfall
    a poem
    about pub grub
    and a perfect
    pour
    and the
    score
    on a single
    flat-screen
    with a brunch
    blues bottom
    end
    volumed
    judiciously
    for a
    curious
    crowd
    that takes
    the spread
    seriously



  • Commonplace Propagandists

    Did you know Chef Boyardee was a real fellow. For real. And his real handle was Ettore (Hector) Boiardi. He had a restaurant in Cleveland; Il Giardino d'Italia. He swam in success because many liked his sauce. Sorry. And what does this have to do with the price of pasta.

     Last night, I celebrated calibrating the thermostat, which clues the furnace, that fights off the Hawk, that hovers over this Windy City for the better part of the year. It's a bitter and sad surrender, this turning on of the heat. And a damn fine excuse to drink. And last night I did just that. A swell of sipping whisky, after filter tip, after out of market football, and post season baseball. Topped off by the new Raveonettes CD. The end result was inevitable.

    A world class hangover chased with self recrimination. But I'm feeling better now because I took the cure. I crawled to the kitchen, grasped that can of Chef Boyardee Beef Ravioli, popped the top and forked it down cold. A wonder drug from Con-Agra by way of Cleveland. But I confess creativity is a lagging indicator when it comes to full sobriety, so he's a repost from the stone cold of last winter. 

    It's too cold to be a commonplace propagandists. Thirty below wind chill requires more flame. So I'm thinking of becoming a professional controversialist. I shall write gingery gossip and white heat harangues. Just thinking about the invectives raises the room temperature. How hard can it be to go all "Coulter" on policy and players and American politics. To hunt and peck riot and riff , a pinky on the caps lock to highlight multitudinous contumelies.

    Why be a political snob or a captive to process? Why parse numbers and read hardcover books. Why squint at reams of RSS feeds when you can bull's eye revilements. How ho-hum is the following:

    "We believe it necessary, proper and immensely satisfying to dog politicians. It’s important to howl at their hypocrisy, raise a leg against their pomposity, and bark insistently if you feel they have infringed upon your turf.

    Yet, in doing so, why resort to the methods of the mongrel? Why not measure your quarry with an eye to allowing others to glimpse what has been made clear to you: that you have considered your subject from multiple points of view and that you call into question your opponent’s angle because you’ve come to appreciate where your adversary stands.

    That you do so with faith in our system, a respect for those who choose public participation, and a modicum of manners when circumstance calls for a disagreement."

    That ain't producing a mess of thermal units now is it?  Damn near chilly, in fact. But you know something, that's how I approach and try to understand politics. And I'm too old to change and too cold to care.

    Stay Warm

Wednesday, 16 September 2009

  • Sure race is a factor.

    "But it will not work this time for the effete intellectual bullies for whom the race card traditionally has been the trump card.", post William Jacobson today.

    How quaint to conjure the old bugaboo of the revanchist right: the pointy headed intellectuals. And who does Mr. Jacobson call out?

    "Not surprisingly, the pace of racial accusations has picked up as opposition has grown. Just in the past few days the usual and not-so-usual suspects have been seeking to out-do each other in making accusations of racism including Eugene Robinson, Maureen Dowd, Jimmy Carter, Rep. Hank Johnson, Chris Matthews, a wide range of Democratic politicians, and of course, almost all of the mainstream media."

    All smart folks, I'm sure, but I would be hard pressed to spy the public intellectual in the group. But what the hey? Mr. Jacobson sees straw men everywhere, while professing concern about calling a spade a spade.

    "The effect of these accusations is poisonous. Race is the most sensitive and inflammatory subject in this country. By turning every issue, even a discussion of health care policy, into an argument about race, liberals have created a politically explosive mixture in which the harder they seek to suppress opposing voices, the harder those voices seek to be heard."

    Suppress opposing voices, my un-educated ass. It was a summer of controverted voices, and signs with swastikas, and forged Kenyan birth certificates, and photshops of watermelons on the White House lawn. It was less policy debate than commie, czars, and open carry laws. It was the rebel yell screaming WTF, and a Congressman shouting "You Lie", in the well of the House Of Representatives. Anger was palpable in the summer of the "Other".  And some of those voices, by no means all, but by any measure, many- were garden variety bigots, racist and know nothings.  And it's hard not to take a swipe at the messenger when that mess of humanity is on your side. 

    "Everyone understands that Obama was not subject to the same scrutiny as other candidates because of the fear of being called a racist. That lack of scrutiny gave us a president whose moderate campaign rhetoric belied an underlying agenda which, if revealed during the campaign, would have resulted in an electoral landslide for McCain-Palin. The vocal opposition we are witnessing has everything to do with a sense of being betrayed not just by a candidate, but by a process which was rigged by the use of the race card.", writes Mr. Jacobson.

    Everyone understands! I don't. OK. To be fair, how well the "Other" is vetted is subjective. But the ultimate scrutiny of a candidate's viability is a decision best left to the electorate. Then again, we have the Supreme Court. Mr. Jacobson did mention a rigged process. But don't you get the feeling he feels it was rigged only because the outcome wasn't to his liking.

    A pretty tepid and template post from an Associate Clinical Professor of Law at Cornell Law.  But to his credit Mr. Jacobson didn't use "Egg Head."

    Cross Posted @ Douglastpost

Tuesday, 08 September 2009

  • The stuff out there

    "Perhaps more often, greater strategy and calculation is involved. A good deal of the "conservative revolution" is produced by Patriot Depot™, a division of Discount Book Distributors, a Georgia corporation founded in 2007 by Brandon Vallorani, an MBA with a graphic design background. His Chief Operating Officer is another MBA, Jay Taylor, whose undergraduate degree was in computer engineering."

    Keith Thomson at Huffpost

Sunday, 06 September 2009

  • Death Default Swaps?

    The bankers plan to buy “life settlements,” life insurance policies that ill and elderly people sell for cash — $400,000 for a $1 million policy, say, depending on the life expectancy of the insured person. Then they plan to “securitize” these policies, in Wall Street jargon, by packaging hundreds or thousands together into bonds. They will then resell those bonds to investors, like big pension funds, who will receive the payouts when people with the insurance die.

    More from NYT

  • Cardigan



    The web is feeling a bit old sweater. Tug and comfortable, yet frayed beyond even Saturday wear. It's lost it's edge. Then again, so have I. But I've got one last thread I want to run before I turn sixty. An off-year election. To up and down and cut and paste the noise and nostrums of a political season when America has lost it's edge. We're moving middin' now. Should make for an interesting race.

    If you consider the "You Tubes" of the recess town hall meetings but a long trailer for the coming off-year, next years Congressional elections are sure to be good theater. Which isn't to suggest big box office. Yet I think interest could billow. The players are already out with this or that plot point, back story, or certain denouement. The GOP is with fever, independents on the run, and Democrats in a faint. Big Fun.

    I'm have removed the "bad poem" portion of this site. My interest in poesy has waned. In fact it failed me, more likely, I it. It was really all about word slinging. It can be fun. But it was frustrating. And being a working at it autodidact has proved to be an anachronism. All this angst is not to suggest I won't slap one up, periodically, to simply throw shit in the game. 

    I love to  snap shot. Make that freeze frame. Damn it..screen capture. That's it. To Photoshop them pixels to trompe l'oeil oblivion. There are a few sets of said here. With Autumn, there will be more.

    Here


Sunday, 23 August 2009

  • Politics.... Jamais Vu

    "Often described as the opposite of Déjà vu, Jamais vu involves a sense of eeriness and the observer's impression of seeing the situation for the first time, despite rationally knowing that he or she has been in the situation before....." Wikipedia.

    From me.

    The public intellectuals of the GOP, to the basest big mouthed "birther", all know the institutional political memory of the American polity has the shelf life of sushi. Toxic for a democratic republic. Makes it easy to fishy facts, bait but the surface, chum the current.

    We've been at battle, and in bubble and bust, and in the company of "know nothings" before.

    Social Security was going to turn us Red. Medicaid was the red menace writ large. The warning concerning the Military/ Industrial complex came from "pointy head elites", not the caution of a Republican President and the former Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe, who just happened to kicked the shit out of the Nazis.

    Civil Rights was, of course, a Kremlin coup. So, President Obama could have been born in Kentucky, and the "know nothings" would still Jim Crow his American pedigree. And those sixties; our youthful, but pagan collective sin, allow many leaders of the Religious Right to suggest, we are ripe for the "Rapture." Talk about a use by date.

    The only way to de-Palin is to juxtapose the past and present. The way to re-fit after Bush is to remember what he broke. And to decompress after Cheney; that's to be aware of the crackpot "Constitution in Exile", and the "Unitary Theory Of The Executive."

    For all of Ronnie's warmth, he was void of any ideas after the Laffer Curve, sans stiffing the middle-class with tax slices for the princely. In fact, and before Reagan, after Buckley ran for NYC mayor, the energy and new ideas of intellectual conservatism went south and died, tragically, with Terri Schiavo.

    This is not fair, but here's a sample of the Far Rights' current intellectual integrity.

    “That’s why people need to continue to go to the town halls, continue to melt the phone lines of their liberal members of Congress, and let them know, under no certain circumstances will I give the government control over my body and my health care decisions.“

    That's Michele Bachmann, of the United States Congress. Only known to take right turns, and a vicious opponent of a woman's right to choose. This is more than hypocrisy. In context, it's stark idiocy, and just a sad, opportunistic ideology. But we've been here before.

    In asking to recall history, I admit, this Nation's founding was anti-historical. Too big and diverse to Republic. And that may yet prove true.

    But if it does fail, please, not by the folly of the anti-rational, hyper-religious, pocket racists, and electoral authoritarians, who have always pimped the know nothings.

    Off to watch Bear football.

Friday, 21 August 2009

  • Tarzan is an independent.

    I've posted President Obama should stay at the shop with Bo. A delay in sunning with the stars is appropriate. But the President took a different tact. It's hard to begrudge him a week away from the Potomac vivarium, after months of policing the droppings of the former White House occupant, a miscreant elephant.

    But it's time to lead the God damn parade. Ringmaster the circus.

    Be the great white hunter. You invited us to safari, and asked us to bag the big game.

    We were going to taxidermy anti-rationalist, hobble the ignorant, trap the disingenuous, cultivate the kid. Yes we were. Yes we can. Red, blue, or bruised, we're all one America.

    So what's up, Commander-in Chief of the Army and Navy and the Vineyard?

    While you partying with the pretty people, remember, how petty the opposition.

    And how ugly they can be.

Wednesday, 19 August 2009

Monday, 17 August 2009

  • Before Whiskey and West Coast Baseball

    Enough of this heath care affray. It's boring and flavorless and thick with gristle of the dimwitted. We're in the soup and all you do is shout. And since it appears the President is about to give away the reform store, take your business elsewhere. Shop something of import, like anti-gay marriage, or pre-Galilean understandings, or draft Michele Bachmann for President, yes you can!

    The Democrats need to turn on a dime. Let's have a House party. Go to the well each week and introduce a non-binding resolution suggesting Social Security and Medicare are actual acts of a scientific soviet. And ask for a recorded vote. 

    Politics and poemin'. Need to give up both.

    Now for another filter-tip.

Micro

dougpost

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About Me

  • Just a guy on the wrong side of fifty, I’m semi- retired, pseudo-serious, and sometimes literate. I've been on and off line since the days of DOS based bulletin boards. I suffer the ills of a half century of jump-shots,snapshots, and shots of bourbon.... Basel Hayden ....neat. I’ve been to war and worship and nether came out in the wash. I smoke too much. I pray too little. I write too slow. I music too loud. Regards,

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