Just ran across this article I thought might be of some interest to some of you. It’s a bit high level in terms of detail and depth, but poses some interesting thoughts.
Author Archives: Tony Brown
About Tony Brown
From our good friend (cough), Rev. Donald Wildmon.
Respond and repost, everybody.
AFA distortion attempt:
This organization tried a survey as a propaganda tool a couple of years
ago and it crashed and burned when LBGT and Friends overwhelmed their
results. Here’s another chance to tip the scales of this VERY HOMOPHOBIC
group’s town survey. The AFA (American Family Association) is expecting an
overwhelming majority of respondents to say that they would be ‘less
likely’ to do business with a company if they knew it supported the
“homosexual agenda” – whatever that is. So far, they are getting the
results they seek. Of course, they are only sending it where they will get
the expected results. Let’s change the outcome by completing the
1-question survey and sending it to everyone we know who is tired of this
archaic and hateful way of thinking.
Follow the link below to take action on this important issue.
http://www.afa.net/petitions/businesses/businesses.asp
Now, if you do this, when they ask you to confirm your vote, you’ll be registered as a member of their miserable organization. If you can stomach that (and possibly use it to do some jamming from the inside, although I just marked any future messages from them as “junk”), I suggest you go fuck em up as much as you can.
She Responds To A Pagan Seducer
Do not speak to me
if you’re going to speak of
the way
my aura shines.
Do not say things about
the clan to which my ancestors belonged
or imagine the way my sun sign
could heat you up.
I wasn’t born yesterday,
or even ten thousand years ago
in Atlantis or its suburbs.
I know the score:
you want to and it’s unseemly
to say so, so you invent
a soulmate and make me
stand in for that Angel.
I am my own light, I can see you,
and if you need me to shine hotter
for you, just say so.
I’m no fickle candle. I’ll burn
without resorting to mystic fire.
I’ll just burn the way anyone does
when presented with the here and now
of shared attraction. No need
to gussy it up with some magic
you got from a paperback grimoire.
I’m ok being earth without heaven,
body without familiar.
Throw yourself against me solidly and I’ll
push right back until you push me
some more and we feel each other
without benefit of the Lord and Lady’s
heavy baggage. Want is its own
religion, lust its own spiritual practice.
The Wolf Clan, if it ever existed, won’t howl about
how we tangle each other up.
A hand is all you need, an empty hand. Let the crystal
and the athame fall. I don’t much care for the soul kiss
and the melding of our chi. Just give me your profanity,
and that’ll be Godhead enough.
In other news…
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/6586879.stm
Which is sad, because, you know, he just wanted to leave a tip.
::rimshot::
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For the first time in a while — since before the tour, in fact — I’ve recorded a brand new poem and posted it in my Song listing.
It’s a little ditty regarding class warfare called “So Much Depends.” I posted it here a short while back. Just a nice springtime poem. 🙂
Enjoy, and let me know what you think.
http://www.myspace.com/poetrybytonybrown
T
fragment: surfacing
I’m unafraid now
of this urge to be
empty. Simulations
of men are everywhere
and I can see that inside
them there’s air and
not much else.
So from here on in
let it be known
I don’t want
to talk to anyone
who doesn’t know
that he’s also a shell —
a husk open and clean
as a closet.
Note (revised)
good morning
everything’s
quite astonishing outside
and cliches on the radio
are stirring me
for the first time in
i can’t remember
how long
good morning
a grand morning
a stunner of a day ahead
walking around stunned
is on my calendar
which is on my desk
next to the unpaid bills
i’m still in bed
but i’m working on getting up
good morning
a grand day
a worth a grand day
worth a million bucks day
and something tells me
it’ll all be spent
i’m working on getting up
trying to get up
thinking of haze on the meadow
starshine and wood
there’s none of that here
those are some other guy’s
beautiful mornings
that million bucks says
a good morning’s always
followed by afternoon
followed by dusk
and then night
i’m working on getting up
before that happens
good morning
i guess it can’t be helped
it’ll be here and then be gone
my getting up gets it on its way
one leg at a time
my mother used to say
up and at ’em
my father used to say
good morning
i turn the radio off
spread myself across
the whole bed
pull the covers
way up over my closing eyes
get on with
the good morning
the best i hope
to ever have
Fuck. Me. Now.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070420/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_neighborhood_barrier
I love the part later in the article about how the strategy for Iraq is all about reconciliation. This orta do it.
Regarding the VT Gunman in the News
NBC said the package contained a rambling and often incoherent 23-page written statement, 28 video clips and 43 photos.
It was given to State Police but contained little that they didn’t already know, Col. Steve Flaherty said Thursday. Flaherty said he was disappointed that NBC decided to broadcast parts of it.
“I just hate that a lot of people not used to seeing that type of image had to see it,” he said.
Oh, I dunno. Personally, I kinda think that’s a good thing.
People all over the world regularly watch friends, relatives, children, parents, neighbors dying. They see dismembered, starved, sick, smelly, disfigured people live in front of them all the time without the benefit of the television filter. They see the bombs, the random gunfire, the tsunamis, the hurricanes, the sewage in the open channels of their streets carrying dysentery and cholera to them, the AIDS virus depopulating whole countries before their eyes. We don’t get all that upset about their having to see it live.
I really have no problem with this video being shown to a desensitized nation that spends more time worrying about Sanjaya than starvation. Maybe that nut in the video ranting about how his obsession with the insensitivities of the rich was leading him toward mass murder might make one person recognize a similar disaster in the making, and take steps to stop it.
As always, I have a certain level of sympathy (admittedly very small in the this case) to anyone dealing with a mental illness. And without justifying what he did, I can say that I’ve felt that way myself, often, about the shallowness of some folks with money. When I went to prep school I hated the rich kids and the legacies for their easy materialism and callous disregard for those of us not to the manor born. I get where this guy was coming from.
He was obviously, recognizably crazy; it was identified well prior to the events; people who knew used their judgement well or badly or to the best of their ability and made their choices as to how to deal. This happened.
It will happen again. We live in a world that combines great good with great evil. Get used to it. You can’t escape.
And while you’re waiting, watch the video once or twice, and remember it’s a real person in real pain who’s really, really, unbalanced in his anger toward something that is worth being angry about.
Home from Toronto
finally got everyone’s voicemails — couldn’t retrieve them while I was up there, due to some technical glitch. i wasn’t ignoring you. not that anyone said i was, but just in case anyone felt that way.
be advised that i’m not answering phones, email, or any other stuff tonight — tired, overwhelmed, and just need to hibernate and regroup.
more in the am.
Bizarre
I just woke up from snoozing with the TV on to hear Floyd Westerman Crow, a Lakota actor, shilling for a pain remedy of some sort (something like Ben-Gay, I think) called “Lakota.” “Try Lakota,” he said. “You have nothing to lose but your pain.”
Then I heard the computer ping out a mail alert. It was for a piece of pharmaceutical spam from Adelbert Patel, and the subject was “pork.”
Based on this I expect that any day now I’ll receive a piece of spam for “White People” headache powder from Ethelred Gupta. The subject will be “smoked sausage.”
I fly home this evening. God, I can’t wait.
so much depends — 4/11/07
so much depends on them
the crumpled toyotas and buicks
bearing the kohl’s and tj maxx masses
of women who work for median pay
just to hold families together
and/or pay for saturday nights
so much depends on
the workaday pickups and vans
that shuffle the turnpikes a car length at a time
manned by the men who wear carhartts for function
just to hold families together
and/or pay for saturday nights
to earn their stripes in
the army
of the ignored
you depend on them
you who sneer at large eyeglasses and broad bellies
who swear to never walk the walmart aisles
who do not understand the necessity of shopping
at the only place you can afford any sort of glasses
the only place left in the half-rural towns
you’re buying into
the towns you’re buying out from under them
who put up the mansions on their grandfathers’ lands
who cheerfully toss your cash at the work of their hands
who do not understand how little of your money
goes into those hands
who would sneer at the smell of the dirt on those hands
who would never tolerate it on your own
so much depends
on the world where they live
which you see and sneer at
from the seats of your bluetoothed cars
from the seats of your business class flights
from the seats at the indie rock show
from the floor where you mock the old time rock and roll
that keeps the flame burning for some folks’ saturday nights
from the seats where you look up from professional screens
and imagine the pleasure of loving rap for its image
from the seats where it’s easy to pretend
you could rough it like them
slumming for a week or so
from the seats at the poetry slam
where you manage to muster a pitiable shake of the head
at a poem about class and indifference
so much depends
on not admitting a divide exists
or denying that the divide’s near impossible to bridge
without leaving some piece of you behind
so much depends
on the crumpled toyotas
the not quite late model enough hondas and saturns
the cars that struggle to pass you to get there on time
because there’s no flextime in a retail backroom
because there’s no daycare in a call center’s perks
because a car isn’t a way of life but a workhorse
because a paint job’s a luxury and a dent is a shrug
so much depends on
you not seeing yourself as remotely
a part of that mass on the highway
there’s a hell in every payment
you make on your life
and you’re not the one
who burns in it
Dark Matter 