Researching what a faucet is
There are many bits of medical wisdom that I am loathe to follow, mostly because they sound like old wives tales or bizarre medieval superstitions – Do Not Eat an Uncooked Chicken, for it is Unclean, moans the abbot – and I set myself to abusing these doctrines, and in turn, abusing myself, so I can say, with the puff of the amateur empiricist, that I don’t eat uncooked chickens because I did once, and became ill, and I say other, similar things, about well-known medical ideas, to where I can sound like some half-wit peasant to the moderns around me.
The one field of exceptions, are the doctrines of death from small causes, minor behaviors that over-heave a whole human life in one accident or ignorance, toward these I am deferential, even to the most absurd-sounding, notions like “Blood Poisoning”, where one taints one’s own life’s-blood if even the head of a pin is unclean, perhaps another doctor will explain to me, again and again unconvincing, why I am washed with off-yellow elixirs, and how the needles are clean, because they have been kept in a tank and shrouded in blue light, ultraviolet marian, but I follow for the same reason that half-wit peasants have always followed, the fear of Hell and Death, behind the smallest mis-step.
A stout chinese man walks
slowly, a russian hat keeps
him warm, it is january in
beijing, but the hat brings
out his eyes, & cheekbones,
he has the eyes & cheek-
bones of Brezhnev, with the
hat, the whole man finally
resembles Brezhnev.
The pops started last night, late, near midnight, suddenly became paranoid that I’d remembered all the dates wrong, the eves and eves of eves of the New Year getting turned over in my head. Bolted up and ran outside, but nothing, one or two dozen shots fired, but ground level, drips and drabs of enthusiasm, seeping backward, nothing skyward.
Spent too much money, the way of things for the first day or so, found ourselves eating vegetarian food, a fucking commercial for veganism-as-class-war, (though it isn’t, it can look that way, can’t it). It was across from Old Confucius’, where inside they put a statue of him to come say hello to, and they put up a nice museum for him, and then rows on rows of big pillars, scrolled in Chinese, describing this or that grand victory over a riot, in Huis or in the countryside, or in the north, from the hordes, two dozen pillars. There has never been a document of culture, which is not simultaneously one of barbarism floats through the air, unnoticed and indeterminate.
Wandered further, ended up in a rich-person’s district, and too cash-rich and mandarin-poor to avoid the rich-person’s hotpot shop, with ponds of fish to run underneath your feet and two, no fucking shit, two different women wearing tiaras with fucking diamonds in them, at two different dinner tables. The hot pot was not just for just thin meats to melt in hot mushroom broth like the poor simpleton shabu-shabu, here were too many things to drop in and prepare, clams and shrimps and tofu bricks and noodles and dumplings and peppers, spiced beefs and a ham, called on the menu “luncheon meat”, in both a slice version and made to look like a stick of bubble gum. The goddamn chinese chopsticks fumbled in my hands, my hand, they became sore, unlearned, under the wooden oak of these oars.
Tina got sick off something, you see, hotpot is not for the hungry, you have to wait for your clam to cook all the way before you eat it, and your pork and your beef and all the other raw meats in your pile, supposedly that didn’t happen, maybe it was the clam or the raw meats or maybe some bug flew in down her throat, but she’s gut-rotten on New Year’s Eve. Here’s hoping it pours through her and we can get on with the grand business of miming the End of All Things, when human-kind finally grows powerful enough to set every spare particle on fire until it pops. That which we call progress, is this storm, I say.
Some Democratic loyalists have explicitly argued that contrasting Obama with Ron Paul on these issues is warped because issues of war and civil liberties are, at best, ancillary concerns, whileothers have gone so far as to claim that only racial and/or gender bias — white male “privilege” — would cause someone to use the Paul candidacy to highlight how odious Obama has been in these areas.
From “Who are the victims of civil liberties assaults and Endless War?”, Glenn Greenwald
No, goddammit. Deliberately misrepresenting the argument. While male “privilege” (how ugly to put it in quotes, as if it doesn’t exist) doesn’t cause someone to view Paul as a possible counter to Obama’s destruction and oppression, it allows them. When a candidate says that they will remove certain burdens that affect the nation as a whole, while greatly increasing burdens felt by minorities, the poor, women and their allies, then minorities, the poor, women and their allies will naturally find this candidate to be grotesque. To be able to ignore these concerns, to not see Ron Paul as a threat, directly targeting you because of your social status, ethnicity and gender, is the fucking definition of white male “privilege”.
A step further, the sneering self-congratulations of opposing the same policies across two administrations, refuses to ask the pertinent question: what undergirds the these two broad camps, left and right, against the war? In Paul’s case, opposition to federal meddling in private affairs is rooted in the same John Birch paranoia, that the government is out to get you, stemming from a small moment in history when the government was actively enforcing (some small piece of) the will of the oppressed onto their oppressors. Similarly, his isolationism is, like all isolationism, rooted in a xenophobia that sees a foreign, and in Paul’s case, a racialized taint. Instead of repeating the same mindless journalistic cliche, highlighting a member of the political opposition who opposes a regime on the terms with which it identifies, you have, or had, an opportunity to point out the other strain of opposition to the war, the one you cite in Martin Luther King, Jr., which refuses to see questions of war as rooted in national sovereignty, but instead in solidarity with the poor. While flirting with the enemy can satisfy your ego as some intellectually honest warrior, unbound by party in your pursuit of justice, there remains an important and necessary difference between leftist, anti-capitalist and anti-imperial struggle, and the crypto-and-not-so-crypto-racist, sexist class war, which gleefully trades State-shaped war for the destabilizing violence of international capitalism.
ARE YOU A DANGER-MOTHER
“I came at great-leap-forward speed.”
I Don’t Have Any Beautiful Memories
