The Left Column

Politics for Poets

filtering out disunity

This page has gotten fun lately, what with the 'spin'. In case you come here later, after I remove the effect, the text of the paragraphs will spin along an axis when you 'hover' over that paragraph. All of this through the magic of JavaScript and JQuerry add-on libraries. I shoudl proabably provide a switch so web site readers who really want to read my ranticules don't have to endure my 'spin'. Maybe I could provide soem screen shots for those of you who are not Javascript enabled, or run a non script browswer (or are wgetting my pages, or using curl and then webscraping my content). But. . . if you don't actually view the page you don't get to see the effect. There is also a randomness with the colors now. But that effect is better if you use the high-color firefox options. Firefox does not enable high-color by default. I have not viewed the page with the high-color option set. One sets that option on the firefox configure page.

OK: here is a humourous parady letter to a fictionalized senator (a novel character, if you will), from a fictional constituant who has dogged this (fictional) senator's career.

February 27, [year redacted]

An open letter to [name redacted],

Hello [elected office title redacted][name redacted], now that you are our [elected constitutional officeholder], and due to the fact of my own extreme narcissism I thought that I could somehow come down to [name of place where office is held] and hang around and observe the whole situation down there, make sure that they set you in your new digs well enough, you know how it is sweeping away cobwebs and chasing away vermin. they seem to be everywhere in a new apartment, or new office, you have to sweep them away. Some people don't like to use pesticides because they harm everyone around them, don't they? So how do people, when a place is invested with vermin, deal with the situation like that? I do not know.

Oh, wait, just a time now for me to go and get another cup of coffee. Gotta pull in to the place where I get it. It's two dollars and 14 cents now at the place I bought it yesterday to buy a large cup of coffee. And the gas for my rig was 4.15 a gallon. I try and pay attention to the indexes that matter [position redacted][name redacted], and the ones down there in Manhattan that they make up there don't seem to mean anything anymore. I've got my own. It's called the gallon of gas/ large coffee ratio. It has to maintain a very obvious level. I know, there are diminishing returns that we must observe when we are sellers of coffee. With gasoline everyone seems to need it just to go and get their food and water for their house, and apartment supplies, I suppose. Or you hire a cab. Or a delivery truck (that runs on fuel) brings it to you. Or, do you really schlep yourself down to the supply place and get the whatever-it-it doodad and bring it home with you. You want to be a purist, perhaps, back when you felt like the world was a great big eye looking at you through the clouds and fogs of war against the insanity of life, the little child who doesn't make it home, so sad . . . fortunately you snapped out of it. Meds be damned, if you are on them (may people seem to think so).

So what are we to make of it? You are the one with the degree in Economics from the great big fancy school. Your little click (we can't call it a racket, can we? you guys are so powerful if we call it a racket will ya get angry at us? It's already hard enough trying to fit in at the Harvard Book Store where I swear I thought I saw you once, over by the Dostoevsky books, with a big bearded ethnic guy with a giant cup of 16 ounce coffee. You had a beret back then. And there was that guy carrying the croissants in a giant baguette and it was that eternal Springtime of optimism, like life can always be that feel-good point in an early '70s Movie (before it was admitted in the stories of the media that the world was all high) and I could tell that you'd finally gotten some good meds. I sauntered back to the old moldy books of Moliere and Shakespeare. Back then I would haunt around the religion and philosophy aisle trying to scare up books on Arcane folklore and Mysticism of the holy dervishes. What a fool I was too.

Was a Lilac Sunday at the arboretum our next encounter some years after that? We are all so much older now, aren't we, [affectionate name redacted]? I wish that I could be in a play that was real life, like seeing you doing it in front of the council people, your veins popping out of your head. And I could tell you a thing or too about crazy, too. I channel those same beasts, at times, not wanting to, that I have seen you channel. But it seems to be working for you, [even more surupily affection nickname redacted]. Be that river-alligator lurking nearby where the thieves at the corruptocracy have loaded up their loot on illegal barges, and you rise up and open your gaping reptilian jaw, letting the water drain out of it in a manner most scary if presented at a proper angle in a montage, and with proper lighting, (the right settings for f-stop to get the depth of field just right, see how easy I can be distracted). They will start in great fear. You will send them back in the other direction. I picture a polical cartoon of you, you are dressed like Wonder Lady (from the comics) and you will have flawed the reptile retrograde counterlectual money whores.

But there you are down there in the fester-bogs of the autocracy and you can go and get them.

Do they realize that you have that super-psychic mind and you can read the greed in them? Does it bother them that you are going to go and confiscate the loot on all of their barges? I don't know how you do it? What are they to do with you there now?

I'm not giving up on you. You might have seemed hypnotized before, a mere bobble head, but now I see it. You are a queen bobble head. You are the queen of the bobble head political [ideology redacted]. You have super magnetic powers and the other bobble-head-[noun for people of a political ideology redacted] better move in sync with you or they will all get knocked over by your magnetic [redacted ideological noun for the name of an ideology , an 'ism' noun]

Oh, and I know how busy you are now.. It can't be like before when I would see you in your bliss daze at [well known thrift store] down on Haavaad Ave in Allstoned, with a trove of peasant blouses that you found for 75% off because today is red tag day and customers get 75% off for items with the red tag. Just as long as it has the red tag. It was like your angel speaking to you! You had to buy them all! And then, outside, I saw you, you went over and put them all into the donation bin, giving them back. Who would have thought?

You have always puzzled me, vexed me. Like seeing you bully your way to the front of the line at Douggaries, the home store, at their going out of business sale (back in 2007 during those 'hard times', when all of the stores changed hands) at the [Shopping plaza name redacted]. You had one of those early version electric cars, or you had a friends minivan, or maybe you were in a zip car? It was rainy that day. You gave me that super mystic stare and I was flung backwards against the empty floor to ceiling metal shelving thirty feet high. It moved it slightly, so I wasn't hurt at all, like you'd placed me there by magic, your super mystic mind.

Oh, well. You must have thought that I was a rival wizard? I am still not sure why all of that happened. I assure you that I am not. I am just a writer who wants to wish you well. Anyway. Now here we are. It's 2013, and your down in [town redacted] fighting the good fight.

I would address this letter to you directly, write it out long hand and send it right to your office. But why trouble you like that, you are so busy these days. And, I know, because the magic is about you, if you need to read this, you will find this letter on your own and know, with your super mystic mind, that I wrote it all about you.

Well good luck to you.

Best wishes.

your faithful home-state voter

[name redacted]

March 1, 2013 (3-1-2013)

well . . .

I think I've blogged enough today.

content goes stale.

~ OK Now.

Banish Nonsense was his scree. I'd have to delete this whole website!

There are new features here that are annoying at times but fun in some ways. This page is best viewed with firefox. Chrome doesn't seem to pick up all the rocking. This is very cool: angle spin gauge or John Barents Carousel. Because this page is rocking. Rocking rocking rocking. What it is, he said, what it is. The problem is, what it is. Span Rocker.Paper Sizes. envelope sizes. Look at this sample page and have some fun with it.

 

       May we say
        on this March First Day
     that no on celebrates
         the cold and gray
     the descending clouds
       the lightening flashes loud
   the humbling
          of the proud.
     Remove their masks and shrouds!

  Stand with in that great light
        and become clean
      with repentance
       and penance.
 
  Praise God!
  








Wake up!



"Apple Dappery? What the . . . does that mean?"