Would it be redundant of me to suggest that it’s always wise to have a backup system, in case the best laid plans spring a leak?

Well, the motley fool has the story on the BP leakiness in Alaska.

I’m just wondering if crude adds trans fat to a moose burger.

Today is the birthday of Alfred Lord Tennyson, one of the most famous and popular poets ever. The Steven King of 19th century English letters. Well, I guess Dickens was King, but old Alfred was up there. Poets were treated differently then; Tennyson was given a Lordship for his efforts, and was a personal friend of Queen Victoria.

I’m not a fan of Victorian poetry, generally. I prefer American flavors, and the 20th century, if you please. (Robert Frost, William Stafford, Robert Bly, Galway Kinnell, James Wright, Mark Strand … and a few of you reading this blog. Oh dear, all men. OK, Sharon Olds.) So usually I look at something like Tennyson’s work as sentimental, shallow, overwrought. But I’m getting older, and when he wrote this following poem, Tennyson was an old man. He was writing about his own impending death. Now, if I read it slowly, picture a man like me but dressed differently and with a long beard, with his little leather notebook and fountain pen, on a boat sailing to his home on the Isle of White … well wait. Behind the rhyme and the contrived metaphor, there’s a real sense of commonality, of generations moving with the tide.

Crossing the Bar

Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;

For though from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar.

BAGHDAD, Iraq – While American politicians and generals in Washington debate the possibility of civil war in Iraq, U.S. officers and enlisted men who patrol Baghdad daily say it has already begun.

Army troops in and around Baghdad interviewed in the last week cite a long list of evidence that the center of the nation is coming undone: Villages have been abandoned by Sunni and Shiite Muslims; Sunni insurgents have killed thousands of Shiites in car bombings and assassinations; Shiite militia death squads have tortured and killed hundreds, if not thousands, of Sunnis; and when night falls, neighborhoods become open battlegrounds.

[San Jose Mercury News]

This is worse than even I ever envisioned it. Back in ’03, I pictured Vietnam; insurgents living among the rubble and the sand, pouring in from across Islamadom, confounding our misbegotten efforts at occupation, until we packed up and left, with nothing but our bloodied rhetoric. But I never imagined the natives would get so restless as to turn on each other, go cannibal. 

Now before I bring on Lincoln, can somebody please explain what the hell they’re fighting for? At least in the US civil war, we had a few really stupid reasons. But I hate your stupid guts on general principles is not a reason at all.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

One more point: that nation was so conceived and so dedicated in the Oval Office and at the Pentagon. The seeds of this war may have been germinating for something like 1500 years, but they were planted, watered and fertilized in this new century by US. 

The Word is Too Often Profaned

One word is too often profaned
For me to profane it;
One feeling to falsely disdained
For thee to disdain it;
One hope is too like despair
For prudence to smother;
And pity from thee more dear
Than that from another.

I can give not what men call love;
But wilt thou accept not
The worship the heart lifts above
And the heavens reject not,?
The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion to something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow?

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

No matter who you are,

no matter what you do,

you absolutely, positively

do have the power to change.

 

     — Bill Phillips

A beautiful, engaging poem by Tom Clark, The Lyric, is posted here. Please go and read it. You can even elect to listen to Garrison Keillor read it for you. It’s short and will be good for your soul.

My thoughts on the punishment dealt a jockey for head-butting his horse.

I know, I know, I whine and gripe and rant a lot on this blog, but these are rantful and gripeable times. And it’s my blog, so y’all can kiss my rumsfeld. Speaking of whom, I just can’t stand the man. Our own little reichskommissar. There are any number of good reasons, but one of my favorites is that the man speaks by asking and answering his own rhetorical questions. It makes me itchy and scratchy. Here’s today’s new low:

There are a couple of other things that are — oh, how would you characterize it? — things you wish weren’t happening. There’s some movement of Shia out of Sunni areas and Sunnis out of Shia areas, to some extent. There undoubtedly are some people who are leaving the country and going to safer places because of the violence.

Does that constitute a civil war? I guess you can decide for your yourself. And we can all go to the dictionary and decide what you want to call something.

But it seems to me that it is not a classic civil war at this stage. It certainly isn’t like our Civil War. It isn’t like the civil war in a number of other countries.

Is it a high level of sectarian violence? Yes, it is. And are people being killed? Yes. And is it unfortunate? Yes. And is the government doing basically the right things? I think so.

[link]

Believe it or not, that’s what he said. Does it make any sense to site all that horror and claim the government is doing the right things? No, it doesn’t.

One of the principal architects of all that carnage remains so detached, he may as well be talking about a movie he didn’t like. Sadly, no one can get up and walk out of this bomb. And we damn sure aren’t getting back the price of the ticket.