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.

General Who Ran Guantanamo Bay Retires

Another proof that if your public service in the Bush administration is a big enough snafu, you’ll get a medal for it. In this case, the Distinguished Service Medal.

News item: man arrested for taking a cell phone picture, from his home, of the police arresting someone on the public street nearby. This is a civil rights violation, and I hope he sues them until they can’t sit down.

is just a great post, by SusanG on DailyKos. How much sweeter it was to be inspired to learn, before the era of the Wcon.

I recommend this post on Escapable Logic …

… We bloggers are, overwhelmingly, the descendants of serfs and laborers. We have opinions that are poorly informed, strongly held, weakly projected and universally unheeded. The cruel fact is that the voices of people-who-blog, like ladies-who-lunch, have a trivial effect on the vectors of our culture or our government or big business, which happily pulls the strings of government.

Yet we write as if we matter.

OK, true. But he has some interesting thoughts on what to do about it. Meanwhile, it seems to me that the mainstream media has been just as frustrated in impacting public policy as the blogosphere, under the current administration. I can’t imagine a news article or editorial that would even make Bush blink. His edifice is utterly immune.

Normally, this sort of thing doesn’t even register on my existential radar. But this is just right, like an avocado perfectly over-ripe for guacamole. And the matrimonial equivalent of a Darwin Award.