LIFE IN PALACE-STINE or IS NETAN THE YAHOO A TEABAGGER?

I heard an NPR interview with an Israeli government spokesman about the unfortunately timed announcement of new housing projects in Jerusalem made while VP Biden was visiting Netanyahu. The official story goes likes this: some low-level underling made the announcement unaware that Biden was in town or that anything in it could be offensive; besides, the spokesman added, the decision is only at the stage 4 level of a seven-stage process and is by no means a fait accomplit. NPR asked was she fired? "Of course not," he was answered. Why? She was just some schlub doing her job. Earlier in the week, while watching C-Span to hear Dennis Kucinich announce his support of the health care bill, I watched three AIPAC lackeys get up and chastise the president for being so upset by the mistake. The third schmuck actually said that Jerusalem and the West Bank are Israeli territory and that this beloved ally of the US can do whatever it damn well pleases with and in them. He all but called them the spoils of the 1967 war.

Is it any wonder why so many on the Left are burned out? Wars, our own and those of our dearest ally in the Middle East, are just a tiresome, no-longer-worrisome, fact of life. Sorry, Palestine, your captors are instating their own novel version of a two-state solution--Palestine will henceforth be known as a Soweto-type homeland for Arabs and a crazy quilt of condominiums for Jews known collectively as Palace-stine. Israel proper will simply function as some mother ship of state, periodically sending its citizens to Palace-stine to live in luxurious apartheid supremacy in choice locations such as the Golan Heights.

In protest, I'm thinking of building an Apartheid museum next to the Holocaust museum in either Washington or New York. Maybe AIPAC will buy me out for ten times the price I paid for the building. Hey, I'm Jewish. I know a good deal when I see one. Besides, I'll have made my useless symbolic point and can retire to my own condo. Maybe I'll even exercise my right of return and live in the Golan Heights. You never know when automatic biological Jewish identity and the citizenship it confers on angel and demon alike will come in handy.

And that's really what the insult was all about--Netanyahu is a Jewish white supremacist teabagger from Cheltenham as incensed by having an African-American in the White House as Rush Limbaugh. This "accident" was simply a deliberate act of racism. And please don't call me anti-Semitic for accusing Israel's leadership of racism. The irony would make laugh so hard I may choke.

Obama Unmasked: Darth looks best in banker's blue

Please watch this 11-minute clip of an interview with true media watchdog Jeff Cohen and see for yourself the final unmasking of Obama as a corporate puppet masquerading as a populist. This charade is placed in a historical context of corporatization of the Democratic Party starting with Bill Clinton and its complete capitulation to Wall Street. Mailer talked about the takeover of the Republican Party by the New Money of the West back in the 60s and 70s. Now the Democrats belong to the Old Money of the East. Obama shrewdly became--literally and figuratively--the dark horse candidate for the forces of darkness. Darth looks so much better in banker's blue. But the slight stammer is a giveaway. Do not be fooled any longer by this well-coached, earnest-seeming Macbeth. And realize why both parties are now minions of a corporate cabal so small and strong that the country has become classifiable as a full-fledged plutocracy (i.e., a government run by, not just for, the wealthy).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfLJIfRUBkU

Personally, I have reached the point of needing the great release from political obsession that Philip Whalen attained in the late Spring and early Summer of 1966 when he wrote his mighty WAR POEM FOR DIANE DIPRIMA in Japan where he had gone to study Zen. At the poem's end, drenched in zazen calmness, fortitude and primal power, he vows a return to America--but not before imagining an apocalypse of swarming invaders which is gleefully, glowingly interrupted by zazen's triumphant empowerment. I hope to find the same in Mexico (I had a foretaste in Arizona in February). Notice, too, Whalen's allusion to the great invasion of song and art from England that was sprightly succor of the time.

What Whalen didn't foresee back then is that the barbarians would enter in millions of Trojan horses of foreign-made automobiles and television sets and that they wouldn't make a blood-thirsty beeline for the homes of the bankers and factory owners. Operatives are always rewarded not punished. The spoils of war go to the spoiled. So the empty-fisted and growling-stomached mobs will be comprised of our own alienated blue and white collar workers mouthing hate slogans against the very forces that could liberate them. No one knew we would turn this dumb and dreadful. But I remember reading this poem when it was published during the last great shrieking scrimmages of the anti-war populace against the pro-war powers that be. I remember being flooded by the comfort of Whalen's meditations which he shared with his reader and then that hammer-blow ending (as thunderous as the ending of Mahler's 6th symphony). The last line of this incredible poem still rings as true as any dong from the long out-of-order Liberty Bell and will do so in timeless after echo:

Nobody wants the war only the money

fights on, alone.

If you have time AFTER WATCHING JEFF COHEN return here for Whalen and solace I believe we all need. To cope with vibrant eyes, Whalen taught me this morning, is to hope--successfully:

III.

The War. The Empire.

When the Goths went into Rome

They feared the Senators were gods

Old men, each resolutely throned at his own house door.

When they finally come to Akron, Des Moines, White Plains,

The nomads will laugh as they dismember us.

Other nations watching will applaud.

They'll be no indifferent eye, nary a disinterested ear,

We'll screech and cry.

A friend tells me I'm wrong,

"All the money, all the power's in New York."

If it were only a matter of money, I'd agree

But the power's gone somewhere else . . .

(Gone from England, the English now arise

Painters and singers and poets leap from Imperial tombs

Vast spirit powers emanate from Beatle hair)

Powerful I watch the shadow of leaves

Moving over nine varieties of moss and lichen

Multitudes of dragonflies (all colors) the celebrated

Uguisu bird, and black butterfly: wing with trailing edge of red brocade

(Under-kimono shown on purpose, as in Book of Songs)

I sail out of my head, incandescent meditations

Unknown reaches of clinical madness, I flow into crystal world

of gems, jewels

Enlightened by granite pine lake sky nowhere movies of Judy

Canova

I'll return to America one of these days

I refuse to leave it to slobs and boobies

I'll have it all back, I won't let it go

Here the locust tree its leaves

Sharp oval flat

I haven't lived with you for over twenty years

Great clusters of white blossom

Leaf perfumed also

Lovely to meet again, far away from home

(the tree-peony too elegant,

Not to be mentioned, a caress, jade flesh bloom)

My rooms are illuminated by

Oranges and lemons in a bowl,

Power of light and vision: I'll see a way . . .

Nobody wants the war only the money

fights on, alone.

31:V:66-25:viii:66

from: The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen, Wesleyan Press, 2007, pages 504-5.