I just like this poem and want to share it

** I couldn't find this anywhere on the Internet, so here it is:

Seen Through a Window
David Ferry

A man and a woman are sitting at a table.
It is supper time. The air is green. The walls
Are white in the green air, as rocks under water
Retain their own true color, though washed in green.
I do not know either the man or the woman,
Nor do I know whatever they know of each other.
Though washed in my eye they keep their own true color.

The man is all his own hunched strength, the body’s
Self and strength, that bears, like weariness,
Itself upon itself, as a stone’s weight
Bears heavily on itself to be itself.
Heavy the strength that bears the body down.
And the way he feeds is like a dreamless sleep;
The dreaming of a stone is how he feeds.

The woman’s arms are plump, mottled a little
The flesh, like standing milk, and on one arm
A blue bruise, got in some household labor or other,
Flowering in the white. Her staring eye,
Like some bird’s cry called from some deepest wood,
Says nothing of what it is but what it is.
Such silence is the bird’s cry of a stone.

Maybe it'll stop being crazy after all these years!

** I went to bed early last night, before the California election returns were fully counted. At that point it looked like the Governator's propositions, that I voted against, were winning, and the two I voted for were losing. It was depressing - having endured the incredible insult of the Bush second term and its slow, tortuous unravelling - like a desecrated mummy - I just couldn't imagine surviving in a world where official insanity continues to parade around like a naked emperor.

I woke up just a few hours later from a scary dream in which a crazy man was out to slash me. The words of Paul Simon's great song "Still crazy after all these years" then started going around and around in my head:

Now I sit by my window and I watch the cars
I fear I'll do some damage one fine day
But I would not be convicted by a jury of my peers
Still crazy after all these years
Still crazy, still crazy, still crazy after all these years

Then I read a couple of blogs that commented on the West Wing episode last Sunday, which broke some new TV ground by having its characters, presidential candidates, have a "live" debate. I had been thinking about how brilliant Alan Alda (in real life a Liberal) was in that role, so smoothly and intelligently articulating a political stance that I find abhorrent. It further depressed me that there are no Democrats with similar skills - although Jimmy Smits did a creditable job of articulating the Left's positions - and the audience that voted agreed he'd won the debate. Read these two blogs for a good description of the event: Russell Roberts in Cafe Hayek and George's at seixon.

It laid another stone on my depressed head. The crazies have got all the power, the style, the opportunity!

And then at 2:30AM I checked sfgate.com for the election results: All eight ballot initiatives fail! Even though the two I voted for didn't make it, the failure of the Governor's props lifted my mood. Hope is stirring (barely) - the whole bad dream may be dissolving. (Ah, dreamer!)

If Fox News Had Been Around Throughout History

** At the start of the Iraq war I found myself drawn to watching Fox news on TV. It was very seductive and when it started casting aspersions on NPR and BBC I found myself being suspicious of those long-admired institutions. I even started getting into the O’Reilly hate-fest. But gradually, I started to feel annoyed by the pushy, aggressive nastiness of every one of the on-air personalities. Somehow I pulled out of it and went back to my usual sources of news, including CNN.

But nothing set me against this poor excuse for a news organization more than the film “Outfoxed.” It reveals the anti-journalistic basis of the whole organization, its malevolent influence on the country. I hope you can see it.
So it’s with pleasure that I refer you to this site:

More on Bennett's racism

** A little discussion is happening over at salon.com about the Cecelie S. Berry article (cited here on September 30). I think this comment is well said (of course, it agrees with mine):

Once again a virtue-crat has stepped in it, and once again he has proceeded to defend himself by mischaracterizing his critics' arguments. Obviously he wasn't advocating the abortion of black babies. He's against abortion, period, so he'd hardly be in favor of even hypothetical abortions. Just as obviously, when reaching for a counterexample involving demographics and crime rates, he came up with "black," as opposed to, say, "poor." He still doesn't understand what he did wrong, and no wonder. All the best people -- all his virtuous, high-placed colleagues -- talk this way as a matter of course. (Not in public, though, Bill.)

-- Jincy Kidd

Ummmm….lemme guess…YOU’RE a real racist!

** Responding to aramis comment a couple of entries back:

Charlotte Hays in her “loose canon” blog of September 30, 2005 – “Guess Who the Real Racists Are” – implies that Bill Bennett was only refuting a thesis put forward in the popular book "Freakonomics” that the crime rate dropped because of the effects of Roe v. Wade, the law legalizing abortion. Because Bennett is against abortion he is against the thesis, of course. But in interpreting it for us he specifically uses the term “black baby” in describing how the crime rate would certainly go down. Here’s what he said:

I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could, if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.

Hays claims the Freakonomics thesis is “inherently racist” because “black males make up a disproportionate segment of the prison population.”

But as always, it’s good to read the book before you comment on it. The book never mentions race as a factor. It cites poverty and poor family conditions as the factors in the creation of a criminal class. Here’s the verbatim from the book:
P. 6 Freakonomics

So, how did Roe v. Wade help trigger, a generation later, the greatest crime drop in recorded history?

As far as crime is concerned, it turns out that not all children are born equal. Not even close. Decades of studies have shown that a child born into an adverse family environment is far more likely than other children to become a criminal. And the millions of women most likely to have an abortion in the wake of Roe v. Wade—poor, unmarried, and teenage mothers for whom illegal abortions had been too expensive or too hard to get- were often models of adversity. They were the very women whose children, if born, would have been much more likely than average to become criminals. (For author Steven Leavitt's respone to Bennett's remarks see this in the Freakonomics website.)

A post in the Hays blog (rea 1219) sums it up:

Well, of course race isnt itself a factor. Its poverty. The culture of poverty (and need and hopelessness) breeds criminals. Our black communities often times are also our poorest. Thats a reality, and thats why there is a correlation. And of course there are several reasons for this (stemming from racial inequality) but none having to do with skin pigmentation, (unless we include others' perceptions of it.)

Even if the statistics are skewed, it’s important how you choose your words. And Bennett’s words are the words of a racist – maybe even in spite of his intentions.

BTW, it's "Banned Book Week"

** The American Library Association reminds us that it's the last week in September. So grab a banned book and sin away!

Some families devalued

** Bill Bennett's remarks about how aborting every black baby would effectively reduce the crime rate (see previous post) brand him as a flaming racist, albeit a sanctimonious one. This former government official whose reputation was built around "family values" blatantly acknowledges that he believes some families have no value at all. The religiosity he, and the so-called religious right, espouses apparently doesn't include the biblical description of man being created in the image and likeness of God (Gen 1:27). Or else it attempts to correct God's sloppy handiwork by eliminating a few duds, huge batches of them - 10% or more of the US population. Crimestoppers like Bennett certainly know the efficient ways to manage it - using the tools of genocide. Why does this moral idiot have a radio program - and who listens to him? And why? Could it be that we are truly sinking into a moral tar pit, led by swaggering moralists like Bennett - and his audience?

Cecelie S. Berry delivers eloquent but reasoned excoriation in this Salon.com article, excerpted below:

There has been among African-Americans a lurking suspicion that the family values movement is not about values but about how some groups, blacks in chief, are morally void, and therefore expendable. Is it any wonder that we postulate, when this view is popularized by conservative leaders, that it might help explain why inner-city schools remain segregated, underfunded breeding grounds for delinquency; why government policies make prisons a better investment than early education programs; why the death penalty, though embattled by DNA evidence, still remains unbowed in many states? And is it so surprising for us to ask whether the racist assumptions of Bennett and men like him were behind the federal government's dilatory rescue of the overwhelmingly black and poor residents of New Orleans?