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Kenneth Patchen"No One Ever Works Alone" from
Panels for the Walls of Heaven (1946)
No one ever works alone.
Put the good things here. There is so much, so very much!
O trees flowers birds the face of my darling! hurry hurry the great
tongues of truth! O speak out!
Against the dead trash of their "reality."
Against "the world as we see it."
Against "what it is reasonable to believe."
Out with the rascals
And all their bloody works!
There is a beautiful sun today.
Have you change for one hundred and ninety odd dullards, sir?
Look you have a life--use it! No one ever works alone! Hate and
fear O blast them to hell for love everyway and every old how
you can! There is so much, so very very much!
Gategeese the windopeninghosts of air. My invitation--O come
if you like: I won't forget your kindness. Live gently. Now is the
I wouldn't kid you time to stand up and count them.
My conclusion is:
There is only one thing that matters and that is life.
No one ever works alone.
Life needn't be ugly. I don't protest great good God I demand!
All this ratty lying murderous swindle of theirs be damned!
There's a beautiful sun today! When are we going to throw the
bastards off our backs. Art has no place for lies.
Jesus the earth is real and it warms like a hand in the sun.
Three green white horses. Look you have a life--put your soul
into it! When you buy a suit don't just get something that will
look good on your boss. If you won't mind I'm going to say get
with it! Live your own life for a change, eh?
The leaves fall. The chances don't lessen.
Nothing of flesh should be treated shabbily.
I at any rate cannot resist trying a little one-step even on the brink.
What are you in terror of?
The baby fox goes to sleep under the thousand-ton tree.
Life needn't step to their dirty tune.
Each pays for his own piper
When you get right down to it.
Taibbi:
We are in the last week before midterm elections in George Bush's second term, five years after 9/11, three and a half since the beginning of the Iraq war. By now we can say without much hesitation that the media establishment has turned not only on George Bush, but on the public attack-dogs of his right flank who dominated the national political media for so long. There's no more free lunch for the likes of O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh, the latter of whom also took an unusually savage fragging in the national media last week for his attack on Michael J. Fox.
* * *
What's happening is that these talk-radio pit-vipers who for a decade or so had us all wondering, "How the fuck do these guys get away with this stuff?" are now no longer getting away with it....
* * *
What's dangerous about what's going on right now is that an electoral defeat of the Republicans next week, and perhaps a similar defeat in a presidential race two years from now, might fool some people into thinking that the responsibility for the Iraq war can be sunk forever with George Bush and the Republican politicians who went down with his ship. But in fact the real responsibility for the Iraq war lay not with Bush but with the Lettermans, the Wolf Blitzers, the CNNs, The New York Timeses of the world -- the malleable middle of the American political establishment who three years ago made a conscious moral choice to support a military action that even a three-year-old could have seen made no fucking sense at all.
It doesn't take much courage to book the Dixie Chicks when George Bush is sitting at thirty-nine percent in the polls and carrying 3,000 American bodies on his back every time he goes outside. It doesn't take much courage for MSNBC's Countdown to do a segment ripping the "Swift-Boating of Al Gore" in May 2006, or much gumption from Newsweek's Eleanor Clift to say that many people in the media "regret" the way Gore was attacked and ridiculed in 2000. We needed those people to act in the moment, not years later, when it's politically expedient. We needed TV news to reject "swift-boating" during the actual Swift Boat controversy, not two years later; we needed ABC and NBC to stand up to Clear Channel when that whole idiotic Dixie Chicks thing was happening, not years later; we needed the networks and the major dailies to actually cover the half-million-strong protests in Washington and New York before the war, instead of burying them in inside pages or describing the numbers as "thousands" or "at least 30,000," as many news outlets did at the time; and we needed David Letterman to have his war epiphany back when taking on Bill O'Reilly might actually have cost him real market share.
* * *
This assault on the Republicans that's taking place in the national media right now is partially a reflection of national attitudes, but mostly a matter of internal housecleaning. The members of the Bush administration have proven to be incompetent managers of the American system, and so they are being removed. It's that simple. They screwed up a war that all of these people wanted, turned public opinion against the dumbed-down militarist politics that until recently was good business for everybody. And so they have to go. Mistake any of this for ideology or principle at your peril.
Now it's the people's turn to clean House -- though we may never really know what the people want.
Do You Know Where Your Country Is?
