Apocalypsis

Shots of angry Dawn®
reach my lips, snaps of peach
and a bit o’ vermin-tail. The women
gargoyle about the buff blinds, chains
of barbed-wire tinkle from their bras.
It’s love, the same
harsh distance as igneous
shards, rock love–
the land it’s spewed up on. In my dream
of the apocalypse, this molten stream
of steel breathes a steam of burnt
bodies: flesh made
ethereal in the moment of a shell-
shocked jubilation. What motivates us
is nothing. What moves
us is the cold, stale
scent of the void.

–E.W. Wilder

On Mediocrity

Mediocrity inspires a certain exciting familiarity. We (who think ourselves humble) see it and in it recognize something of ourselves. Mistaking the thrill of recognition for brilliance, we glorify our own identities within the mundane. Thus the success of Avatar, American Idol, Sarah Palin, et al.

–Lael Ewy

Untitled 1

 
From the Cataclysm, 

                   a girl named Pepper
emerges: a sausage from a cluster
of fey-grey petals. Drone-
                          bodied and doily-tatted, 
                                                   she wooed
 the Blue Blazer--
                   brass-buttons a-jingle--
 into pale dismastment.
                        Beer-rings blossomed in the fog. 

--EW Wilder

News in Brief

Headline: Goldman Sachs gets record $500 million fine. Passes hat in office, pays it off.

Meanwhile, Fabrice Torre gets Scootered; the truly responsible skate. As NPR reported this morning, no management changes are expected at Goldman, even after they admitted fraud. In other words, the world is still safe for the rich and privileged.

Meanwhile, the NAACP Uncle Toms on its previous statements asking the Tea Party movement to repudiate the racists among its ranks after Tea Party leader Mark Williams goes all Mel Gibson and says this:

“You’re dealing with people who are professional race-baiters, who make a very good living off this kind of thing. They make more money off of race than any slave trader ever. It’s time groups like the NAACP went to the trash heap of history where they belong with all the other vile racist groups that emerged in our history.”

So, Mark Gibso—er, Williams accuses the NAACP of being worse than slave traders and racists and gets away with it, with Ben Jealous and Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson all bowing to this guy? Really? And they wonder why the NAACP is viewed as largely ineffective?

The facts are these: Tea Party activists spat on members of the Congressional Black caucus and called them niggers. They called Barney Frank a faggot, and they support Arizona’s blatantly racist anti-immigrant law. Are they all bigots? Of course not, but Mel, er Mark Williams’ statement, if it is in any way indicative of Tea Party sentiments, would suggest that they are more racist than not.

Even more disturbing, Williams’ words provide a perfect opportunity to simply expose what these people are actually like and let their movement self-destruct as we’ve been waiting for it to do for the past year or so. All the NAACP had to do was issue a counter-statement saying “See? That’s what we’re talking about!” Even CBS, ABC, NBC and CNN wouldn’t have been able to ignore that, as they did Williams’ initial riposte.

Exposing the truth about the nutjobs, in their own words, is exactly the sort of tactic Edward R. Murrow used to stop McCarthy, and Murrow had the courage to counter the Red Scare in much more dire circumstances. After all, we had genuine worries; the Russian Bear had megatons of nukes with which to strike us. Last I checked, black folk and Mexicans were not so well equipped. The Mainstream Media has everything to gain (ratings, particularly) if they pursue this fight, and the NAACP has the chance to regain its reputation as being a genuine force against racism and of actually appealing to millions of disillusioned black youth. This is a tremendous missed opportunity, and its ramifications can be seen in what follows.

As McLatchy news service has it, a list of 1300 illegal immigrants has been anonymously circulated in Utah, causing the governor to investigate, and “worrying” Hispanic residents. So the Red Scare is replaced with the Brown Scare. But it gets worse. Not willing to simply name names, as McCarthy did, this latest list draws on the power of contemporary information gathering and provides “Social Security numbers, birth dates, workplaces, addresses and phone numbers,” along with names of children and the due dates of pregnant women. An accompanying letter “demands that those on [the list] be deported immediately.”

How long, then, before the Brown Scare leads to our own bands of Brown Shirts, harassing and expelling every Latino or Latina they see? How long before they just start beating up swarthy guys with farmer’s tans like me? It’s a chilling development, and my local paper saw fit to give it three short paragraphs on page 8.

The tendency in the ultra-right is toward ethnic cleansing, fueled by paranoia and bigotry. Whether they call themselves Tea Partiers or law and order conservatives or patriots of what-have-you, their motives are mean-spirited and their actions reminiscent of the worst history has to offer.

And we are doing little or nothing to stop them.

T.S. deHaviland