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Sunday, October 17, 2010

Coming to HBO--the new post-apocalypse series for women, "Mad Maxine"

The soccer moms and cheerleader assassins are about to inherit high office throughout America, writes Maureen Dowd in today's NY Times. Wait until you see these Bella Abzugs of the Right strut their stuff. Bronx bravado is nothing compared to Reno rage. Now we get to be cowed by the wives of all those orange grove owners like those in "Grapes of Wrath." What did you think these women did all day? Read their bibles and preach tolerance and compassion to their menfolk? They're going to show those simpering husbands of theirs what real wives do to rule the unruly. Get ready for a new post-apocalypse HBO series called "Mad Maxine" and watch her take to the open road in her hoverchair armed with magnum to mow down all opposition. How good, the satanist in me says, to watch the final distinctions between men and women disappear in the false equality of ignorance and harmony of hate.

OP-ED COLUMNIST

Playing All the Angles


LAS VEGAS

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

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As I sat above the Hoover Dam under the broiling sun, I was getting jittery.

There was Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona, speaking at the dedication of a bridge linking Arizona and Nevada 890 feet above the Colorado River.

As the politicians droned on and my Irish skin turned toasty brown, I worried that Governor Brewer might make a citizen’s arrest and I would have to run for my life across the desert. She has, after all, declared open season on anyone with a suspicious skin tone in her state.

We are in the era of Republican Mean Girls, grown-up versions of those teenage tormentors who would steal your boyfriend, spray-paint your locker and, just for good measure, spread rumors that you were pregnant.

These women — Jan, Meg, Carly, Sharron, Linda, Michele, Queen Bee Sarah and sweet wannabe Christine — have co-opted and ratcheted up the disgust with the status quo that originally buoyed Barack Obama. Whether they’re mistreating the help or belittling the president’s manhood, making snide comments about a rival’s hair or ripping an opponent for spending money on a men’s fashion show, the Mean Girls have replaced Hope with Spite and Cool with Cold. They are the ideal nihilistic cheerleaders for an angry electorate.

Seated next to Brewer at the bridge dedication was Harry Reid, the slight, mild-mannered, 70-year-old Senate majority leader who has wandered into the surprise fight of his career — a race where the fur is flying.

“Man up, Harry Reid,” Sharron Angle taunted him at their Las Vegas debate here Thursday night. That’s not an idle insult, coming from a woman who campaigns at times with a .44 Magnum revolver in her 1989 GMC pickup.

With casino red suit and lipstick, Angle played the Red Queen of the Mad Hatter tea party, denouncing career politicians and ordering “Off with your head!” and “Down with government benefits!” Even sober and smiling beneath her girlish bangs, the 61-year-old Angle had the slightly threatening air of the inebriated lady in a country club bar, tossing off outrageous statements and daring anyone to call her on them.

The debate between the former boxer and the former competitive weight lifter, the soft-spoken Mormon and the outspoken Christian, was a source of fascination because the rivals perfectly represent the two caricatures of the midterms: The Washington incumbent and master of back-room deals who’s been around forever and lost touch with people versus the wacky new-breed Tea Party challenger who’s hiding from and hating on the press, spouting a lot of weird stuff and vowing to do what Barack Obama didn’t: Shake up Washington.

The senator began the debate with a gentle reminiscence about his mother, who took in wash from the brothels in scruffy Searchlight, Nev.

Angle could have told the poignant story of her German immigrant great-grandmother who died trying to save laundry hanging on the clothesline in a South Dakota prairie fire, which Angle wrote about in her self-published book, “Prairie Fire.” But instead the former teacher and assemblywoman began hurling cafeteria insults. “I live in a middle-class neighborhood in Reno, Nevada,” she said. “Senator Reid lives in the Ritz-Carlton in Washington, D.C.”

Reid did not man up enough to mock Angle’s nutty assertion that Shariah law exists in Dearborn, Mich., and Frankford, Tex. (a town that hasn’t existed since 1975). But he did rebut Angle’s inane contention that health insurers should not have to cover anything, talking about how important it was to be covered on mammograms and colonoscopies.

“If you do colonoscopies,” he said, “colon cancer does not come ’cause you snip off the things they find when they go up and — no more.”

“Well,” Angle replied tartly, “pink ribbons are not going to make people have a better insurance plan.”

Angle has been pressing the case, underwritten by Karl Rove’s operation and other conservative groups that have made the majority leader their No. 1 target, that Reid must be punished for being in a socialist triumvirate with Nancy Pelosi and President Obama. In the debate, she went for the jugular, asking him how he became “one of the richest men in the Senate” after coming from Searchlight “with very little.”

Reid, who cloaks his ambition and brass knuckles under a mousy facade, looked as if she had slapped him. He called her “my friend,” but clearly did not think of her as his “pet,” as he unfortunately dubbed Chris Coons, the Delaware opponent of the bewitching Christine O’Donnell.

He said that was “really kind of a low blow,” adding that he had been a successful lawyer before becoming a pol, and “did a very good job in investing.”

After the debate was over, Angle scurried away and so did I — in a different direction. I was feeling jittery again. If she saw me, she might take away my health insurance and spray-paint my locker.


Monday, October 11, 2010

Before saving the world I like to save myself from and for it

Dear Aha,

I'll stay short and (bitter)sweet.

Last night, I ended my day by reading front-page Sunday NY Times account of a Bronx gang-battering of gays so brutal that I found myself running out of cheeks to turn and wanting to famish sudden blood-thirst with steely-eyed, in-your-face broom-handle sodomies of macho straights.

This morning, I begin, or long to begin, for a return to the golden, or hearts-of-gold, standard. We are about to need the capital of compassion, forbearance and love. That is what I mean by the hearts-of-gold standard: the stubborn, ineradicable residuum of virtue. Adopt this standard--even if you are the only one you know who does so. Nothing, a Buddhist I listened to the other morning, feels and does as much good as ungovernable faith in mankind. Goodness is the flesh and bone of such being and beings. That was his working definition of hope. Mine is to return to CCP class on Wednesday against all odds of succeeding.

What was it I was thinking when I awoke the other morning? "The heart is the only chakra you will need from this point on." That's a central bank with God-backed unlimited funds from which you can draw night and day. No foreclosure signs on that earth overlooked by its cloudless blue-sky horizon.

The daily commute is this--from zero to One. As zeroes, we swig oil and anti-depressants, keep the Metamucil handy to soften our bowels, worry about being down to our last $5 million and scratch in the hard earth for soft touches and present ease. There is no present tense as long as we are tense. As Ones, we are taken by giving, given into taking pause, and able to laugh every time Kinky the Parrot interrupts our latest fetishistic appeasement of god or guilt with squawks of "Schmuck!"

Back to the daily transport from lost-in-hate to lost-in-love with greeting from Han Shan:

Cartographers of body, heart, mind and soul: Get thy bearings straight!

Love,

David

Sunday, October 10, 2010

For Mr. Lennon

ABSENCE NOTES
some hallmarks for John Lennon's 70th birthday 10/09/10

1
You could get used to love
with or without desire.
Soul stem or cock root
your choice of pivots for
the one-trick pony of the needy heart.

2
Guess who I saw in my dream last night?
Nikita Khruschev.
He came to borrow a book
circumstances implied only I had.
"Glad I had the last copy," I told him.
"It's the first copy," he corrected.

3
The earth needs to haunt our dreams
to unfurl through all of space like a parachute
that lands us softly
in a life on earth.

4
John Lennon went 5 years without writing 1 song
then 15 of them in 3 weeks
sitting on a Bermuda beach
talking to Yoko every day on the phone
back in the later days of sky-high long distance rates.

5
You could get used to beauty.
Global warming
that stops at room temperature
and leaves any boiling points
to be reached by teas
served to stop wars.

6
This body is a haunted house
filled with ghosts of ambitions
for riches, women and
Buddhahood.

7
You could get used to splendor
standing still as trees
on windless days.
You could get used to splendor
stopped still as breath
the morning borrows
in reciprocal awe.

8
If the best of you is birthless
then deathward is not exactly
where you are headed
as you retrace your steps
back to the owning light.

9
Full moon matches full sun
in less glandular eruptions
and less grandiose efflorescence
of light to read by.

God is man-sized salience
on the surface of the brain
sharing all he knows
in continued perceptual prowess.

Praise is whatever is seen
once desire becomes wisdom
in no need of causation
or in any danger of cessation.

Night is an intimacy of day
passion focused to a single fruited flame
bursting with sweetness
from the sugars of sentience.


10
Guess who I saw in a dream tonight.
Nikita Kruschev come to return a book
of prayers common to moments
beyond hot pursuit of joy or despair.
"I liked the part where heroism is hearing
and hell cools to a heaven of cliffless heights," he says.
"I liked also the part where the drowning man rises
and bobs like a cork
on the surface of a sea with towless depths."
"You always were a sucker for happy endings," I tell him.
"What ends well must have begun well," he says.
"Thanks for reminding me."

--David Federman, Ardmore, October 10, 2010