25 September 2012

GOP Animus Outed

I concur with the GOP's unofficial ministry of propaganda that Mitt Romney is, at best, a sub-optimal Presidential candidate.

However, Mitt Romney's metastasizing campaign says more about the message than the messenger. The oft overlooked story of the 2012 election cycle is this:
Once the animus and vitriol of today's GOP party slithers into public scrutiny, whether by words or deeds, we find the GOP vision for the country is wholly unpopular.
Scott Brown's staffers making war whoops and tomahawk chops in apparent
reference to challenger Elizabeth Warren's Cherokee heritage
From Todd Akin's inexplicable legitimate rape statement to Scott Brown's campaign staffers tomahawk chopping to belittle their opponent's claim to ethnic origin -- these egregiously insensitive, tone-deaf spectacles are not gaffs. Rather, they are the unvarnished expression of:
The GOP's regressive, hate-filled, anti-people world view
Few would argue that the GOP has been hijacked by wing nut nincompoops like Grover Norquist and Paul Ryan, whose political philosophy and vision for the country, by definition, exclude the best interests of large blocks of voters (e.g., women, seniors, students, Latinos, gays, etc.).
The GOP animus has been outed in 2012.
It is not so much that "Thurston Howell" Romney is a coin-operated doofus, as it is that the GOP's vision does not serve a majority of the people.

REFERENCES

15 September 2012

Metaphysical Gravity

There are phenomena I have observed that seem to defy the laws of nature. I visited Bannock, a abandoned town in southwest Montana, in 2004.

Something in the way life in Bannack seemed fixed in time like artifacts in amber, prompted this poem:

Defying Gravity
Bannack, 11 October 2004

On most mornings sunlight
Splinters ghost town curtains
Like dust dancing in a spotlight
Splaying warmth across bare wood

Sun swells the heartwood between grains
While its heat blisters window-well paint
Into a primordial cartography, giving us
Timely but transient navigation

Yet, if days are measured by sleeps
And the seasons measured by moons
How does the architecture of existence
Defy gravity?

By the mystery of poetry, the artifacts of Bannock defied gravity, but those same artifacts could have just as easily defied the conservation of mass.

The comforting lure of the laws of nature is that they appear constant and immutable, at least until proven untrue.

Buckmister Fuller said,
"Love is metaphysical gravity", 
which is unprovable, but I suspect is true.

Gravity outlasts us. So our defiance of gravity is unsustainable.

Perhaps love is like gravity. Love outlasts us. Those who love us continue to love us after we depart to the netherworld.

08 September 2012

Conduit for Discovery

Artists and writers have long talked about visits from the muse. Even as an unaccomplished poet, I have experienced the rush of strangely coherent words arriving to march through me into a poem. Others have talked about being a vessel or a conduit.
...there I was in my rented room with the wooden floorboards, getting up each morning and creating beautiful dancing prose, drinking buckets of tea, pacing about as the world in my head became brilliant, flashed, gave off sparks—sitting down again for lines that ran and flowed and surprised even me the creator. But that was the joy of it, I wasn’t the maker. It wasn’t me hammering it out, hacking at the reluctant material. I was the conduit for a magic energy. I was possessed of it, there to deliver it, deliver myself of it. The delivery boy. I was elated and humble. It was a holy time.
Philip Ó Ceallaigh on writing Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse

Artists and writers have also talked about making a deep connection with a physical place.
 Find your place on the planet. Dig in, and take responsibility from there.
 ~ Gary Snyder
I have wondered about the nature of discovery (cf., Discovery and Natural Wonder).

I am beginning to see a connection between the notion of a muse, in the conventional sense of the artist’s muse, and the the would-be muse of the discoverer. Perhaps scientists, anthropologists, and explorers also operate as a vessel for inexplicable insight and discovery -- insight and discovery that arrives unannounced as if broadcast from the great beyond.

Discovery is some combination of preparation and dumb luck. As discoverers,
"We cultivate the probability of discovery when we shed the baggage of expectations to meet the world with openness.” 
Many of us have an affinity to the Buddhist notion of beginner’s mind.

I have found
“When I am a beginner, everything is discovery.”
Perhaps there is something about vastness, whether a glorious horizon-to-horizon physical landscape or the vast landscape of inquiry into the unknown that renders one beginner --
  • always open, 
  • always fresh, and 
  • always present to experience and understand new phenomena.

05 September 2012

Arms Are The New Cleavage

Has there ever been a more eloquent First Lady? Intelligent and heart-felt, Michelle Obama's 2012 DNC opening night speech was one for the ages.

Floats Like a Butterfly, Stings Like a Bee

Without mentioning her husband's opponent by name, the much beloved first lady defined presidential hopeful Mitt Romney as a man who was born on third base, but thinks he's hit a triple.

Favorite Michelle Obama Convention Quotes
  • "...these issues aren’t political—they’re personal. Because Barack knows what it means when a family struggles."
  • "If you are fortunate enough to get an education and be successful, you don't slam the door on the others behind you."
  • "How hard you work matters more than how much you make; helping others means more than just getting ahead yourself."
  • "I have seen firsthand that being President doesn’t change who you are. No, it reveals who you are."
  • "...success isn’t about how much money you make, it’s about the differences you make in people’s lives."

Favorite Convention Tweet

On Michelle Obama's chiseled physique:
Arms are the new cleavage
Kim Bondy
Favorite Convention Picture

The Obamas watching the First Lady's DNC Convention Speech