The Long Arc of the Moral Universe

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Monday January 16, 2012 · 12:47 PM PST

2012/01/16 · 12:47

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.--MLK

The older I get, the more I wonder about this. Yes, things are much better for many people. Poor people are still poor, but hey, according to uber-right Heritage Foundation, it's not so bad because they have refrigerators now! Way to bend that arc, boys!

Cross posted at Backstage with Supak.

supak

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Tuesday December 08, 2009 · 12:10 PM PST

2009/12/08 · 12:10

I live with pain, depression, and poverty. I worry what affect that has on my son. I am reminded of one of my favorite poets, Phillip Larkin, who has advice for young people on this score:

This Be The Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

supak

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Saturday November 14, 2009 · 3:14 PM PST

2009/11/14 · 15:14

[This look at the NYT book review of The Ground Truth was first posted at the Bush Treason Blog.]

Maybe the better question is why don't more people call it treason. George W Bush, Dick Cheney, and most of the administration ignored warnings about Al Qaeda, were incompetent (My Pet Goat is just the tip of the iceberg) in the response to defend the nation, and then lied about it.

supak

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Thursday October 22, 2009 · 11:51 AM PDT

2009/10/22 · 11:51

Since I've been away a while (poverty is hard work), I thought I'd post this here. It was originally on Backstage w/ Supak.

Decompensation is the functional deterioration of a previously working structure or system.--Wikipedia

The countdown had been ticking for nine out of ten days while I was double bagging two week old garbage in the garage. For the last six months we'd been paring down to the minimum—paying only the bills for things we really needed. The garbage collection was the latest to go to a collection agency. Luckily, the collectors for the bills we stopped paying first, like cell phones and credit cards, didn't call as often anymore, so the slew of new calls was alleviated by the lack of old ones. No matter; soon there wouldn't be a phone to ring.

supak

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Wednesday April 01, 2009 · 11:36 AM PDT

2009/04/01 · 11:36

Dross Monolith photograph by Robin Supak I'm an award winning poet who hadn't written a poem in years. This past winter, while sitting in a parking lot outside of the emergency room, the first crumbs of this poem fell into my lap, and I worked on it for weeks. Now that it's been rejected from several poetry magazines, I'm just going to put it out there, and forget it. Please click on through for a chilling look at winter--something that's new to me.

supak

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Tuesday March 10, 2009 · 8:54 AM PDT

2009/03/10 · 08:54

That's the last line from a Lawrence Raab poem I love, Attack of the Crab Monsters.

I'm a poet. I went about 10 years between poems, having just finished one recently. I'm not really sure why that gap yawns across the last decade. I could say it's because we've been raising two kids, working our asses off, watching in disbelief as George Bush took this country down a few notches, losing everything due to my disability, and starting all over out here in Rural upstate New York. But it's really because I just didn't have much to say.

supak

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Friday March 06, 2009 · 12:18 PM PST

2009/03/06 · 12:18

George W Bush broke the world. It was pretty fucked up to begin with, after years of laissez-faire economics practiced by all American presidents since FDR, but much more so since Reagan. The conservative philosophy was corrupted by deregulators who's belief in the free market completely left out the fact that most people are greedy bastards who will steal everything that's not tied down.

Now this upper class of well-to-do Reaganites, many of them in the Democratic party, have drained the wealth of this country into their walled communities and private security forces, while they whine about their portfolios being worthless. What did they think when they were doing everything Phil Graham suggested? Did they think we could just trust the robber baron class not to be robber barons?

supak

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Thursday March 05, 2009 · 9:52 AM PST

2009/03/05 · 09:52

There are no principles left on the right, only tactics and bluster, as if John Bolton himself has taken over the GOP diplomacy wing. At this point, looking back on all the facts I collected at the Bush Treason Blog, which proves conclusively that the entire Bush administration committed treason, repeatedly: I don't really care what they say. When you say as much shit as the right wing has said in the last few decades, it renders your speech meaningless. We are for x except when we're not. We're against y except when we're not. Now we're going to do that which we told you not to. Then we're going to tell you not to again.

I often tell myself I could be a better conservative than them. It wouldn't be hard. I have libertarian bones, like most Americans. We want the government to protect us and leave us alone, that delicate balancing act that, in a world of nanotechnology, is going to get harder and harder to perform. But it's really not that tricky. Conservatives should be reality based, do what would actually make us safer (which is more like Ron Paul's position than John Bolton's).

supak

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Wednesday March 04, 2009 · 9:13 AM PST

2009/03/04 · 09:13

I'm a big fan of the Freakonomics blog. They recently announced the winner of their new 6 word slogan for the US contest. The winner was: Consumption's the Cure that Ails Us.

Today, I learned from two of my stagehand buddies that health care is the cure that's going to break the back of the unions. One of those buddies you probably heard of. He's the stagehand who "surfed" the collapsing scaffolding at the Academy Awards a few years ago, breaking his back in the process. He was a rigger, made good money, and is now disabled, but he stays in touch with old friends from backstage. Here's what he told me:

supak

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Saturday January 24, 2009 · 8:08 AM PST

2009/01/24 · 08:08

When I was a young, broke but care-free philosopher in the University of Arkansas, hanging out with poets, working at a red-neck bar for beer money, and fancying myself a writer, I worried a lot. The bar had a big red button behind the counter, right above a double-barrel, twelve gage shot gun. I was told it was loaded with rock salt. Pressing the red button killed the juke box and called the cops. I only had to use those bar-back tools once, then promptly quit.

supak

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Tuesday January 20, 2009 · 6:43 AM PST

2009/01/20 · 06:43

As a sufferer of osteoarthritis in my lower lumbar region, I am uniquely qualified to say, after hearing that Dick Cheney will be in a wheel chair for the inauguration:

Ha, Ha! [/Nelson]

Dick Cheney has supported every move made to eliminate worker's compensation protection since he was old enough to form an opinion. As one of congress's most right wing members, he did more to set back worker's rights than practically anyone before him. Even as he transformed into a neo-con more concerned about killing anyone over seas who didn't like the way he snarled, he still occasionally pointed his shot gun into the faces of workers, and let it rip.

supak

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Friday January 16, 2009 · 11:49 AM PST

2009/01/16 · 11:49

When President Eisenhower told us, in his 1961 farewell address, to beware of the Military Industrial complex, America ignored him, and built the most powerful group of private corporations ever to supply a military.

But way before Ike did his best to tell us what was going to happen if we weren't careful, another president gave a farewell address that warned us about George Bush:

Political parties serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation, the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels, and modified by mutual interests.

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The Long Arc of the Moral Universe

Therapeutic Poetry and the Death of John Lennon

Why Do I Call It Bush Treason?

Worker's Decompensation Countdown

Poetry After Years of None

Honey, Put Down Your Flamethrower, You Know I've Always Loved You

Conservative Catharsis: Blame Deregulation and Privatization

Conservative Catharsis: Don't Blame Obama

Health Care's the Cure that Ails Us

Suffering, Police State, and the Ditching of Unhappiness

Dick Cheney Hurt His Back Moving Out of Joe Biden's House

We Were Warned