Baals Lied, Bertolt Brecht

Early Brecht poem, my translation:

Baals Lied

Hat ein Weib fette Hüften, tu ich sie ins grüne Gras....
Rock und Hose tu ich lüften, sonnig – denn ich liebe das.

Beißt das Weib vor Ekstase, wisch ich ab mit grünem Gras
Mund und Biß und Schoß und Nase: sauber – denn ich liebe das.
Treibt das Weib die schöne Sache feurig, doch im Übermaß
Geb ich ihr die Hand und lache: freundlich, denn ich liebe das.

……….

Baal’s Song

If I had a woman with big fat hips I’d take her on the green grass.
I’d lift her skirt and her shirt in the sun – I’d love that.
I’d bite that woman to ecstasy, wash her clean in the green grass,
her mouth and her teeth, her nose, her lap – I would love that.
I’d set that beautiful woman on fire. I’d lose control, giving her the hand,
then the smile – amiable again. And I’d love that.

Trump and White Nationalism

A few notes to a friend who thinks Donald Trump's support comes from economic issues:

No. It isn't. Trump's supporters are the spear's edge of the White Nationalist movement in America. They're the hardcore right wing of the right wing party. I don't believe the anger is about economics, but race-based. Every other Trump supporter on Twitter who trolls me has the #WhiteGenocide hashtag in his bio. (Yes, overwhelmingly "his.") The anti-immigrant rhetoric is racism wrapped up in legalities. The anti-"welfare" rhetoric comes from the belief that dark-skinned people are mooching off the system. The gun rights rhetoric comes from the fear that the dark-skinned people will come and hurt them if they aren't armed to the teeth. They've coalesced around hatred of a dark-skinned man in the White House. The economic or alleged constitutional issues that they pretend animate them were not discussed at all when a white Republican was in the White House. Fortunately, I don't think their schtick will play outside the neo-John Birch movement that is the Tea Party and Trump's support won't expand beyond the hardcore White Nationalists who currently propel him.

marriage poem

honestly it was okay to dislike
almost everything

even the graffiti on the wall
of the Standesaamt

as we walked, you holding
my hand, leading me

to the realization
that marrying is easy

for an American.
it's not as though I'm Syrian.

Germans, those I've met,
certainly you, like Americans

(which gives some cause
for concern)

& that graffiti, gangland
chic phony filtered

through a Euro trash
bin still a touch of home

remembered as I waffled through
the interview

my pidgin hoch-Deutsch on display.
we didn't want to pay

for a translator
250 Euros better spent

on rings
though the broad-gestured

bureaucrat almost insists.
these women

brassy with their chubby-
armed semaphore,

hatchet-scowled
until they flirt --

I chattered something
a remembered line

Goethe or Brecht
or boilerplate

from a standard contract
& she stamped my future

but left me with a murder-hole
I could slip into,

one last document
to be procured a long-

form birth certificate,
the short-form will not do

& I used the paper's edge to leap
back

across the ocean
wondering,

now,
as I check my pockets,

repeatedly,
what I forgot.

Bernie Sanders, Letter to a European Friend

Hola from America:


I'm a huge Bernie Sanders fan and have been for the 12 years that I've been aware of him.  He's the only socialist in Congress, as far as I know, a longtime Independent who caucuses with the Democrats.  I prefer his politics to Clinton's certainly, BUT!!! I support Clinton because I don't think Sanders has as good a chance to win in the general election.  Clinton's centrism is considered less threatening, while Sanders' socialism, in America, is perceived as extremist.  Many centrist Americans see him the way I see Ted Cruz, for instance.  I think the negative impact of a Republican in the White House outweighs the positive influence of Bernie Sanders, who can continue to do very important work in the Senate.  I'm glad he's running, though, as he very clearly outlines some basic tenets of socialism, which, frankly, many Americans know nothing about, and equate it with either Soviet-style Stalinism or godless Satanism.  I'm not exaggerating.  It's a good
thing that all of America will hear him.  He'll singlehandedly push the dividing line in our country to the left, a line that has been pushed constantly to the right since Ronald Reagan's election in 1980.  But because I believe he'll lose in a general election, I don't want him to be the Dem nominee.  And I don't dislike Clinton.  She will be a practical, pragmatic steward, sort of our version of an Angela Merkel, say, building on the slow, plodding work Obama has begun of moving America into the 21st century.  William F. Buckley, Jr., the great conservative writer, said he would always support the most conservative candidate who had THE MOST REALISTIC CHANCE OF WINNING (my emphasis).  Exactly.  In short, "Run, Bernie, run!" but then when Clinton leads in the delegate count, "Drop out, Bernie, drop out!" and support her wholeheartedly.

I despise Martin O'Malley.  He gave the worst speech I've heard in years, if not decades, from a Democrat, at the Democratic National Convention in 2012.  He sounded like a wind-up Amway salesman.  Also, a few weeks ago he started talking about Benghazi, and Clinton's role in it, something Republicans do, just because he's desperately low in the polls.  I expect that from a Republican, but from a Democrat -- well, I despise him, I'll just put it that way. 

Jim Webb is interesting, a bit too far to the right wing of the Democratic Party for my taste, but he's...interesting.  Known as a very good novelist (a few Vietnam War novels, a conflict he served in), and a former senator from Virginia, which will be a battleground state, very close to going either D or R this year.  He might make a good VP running mate for Clinton, a manly macho manly man for all the swing voters who might be uncomfortable with a woman president.


All best,
Bill

Do it, GOP, Make this thing a real TV show

Dear Reince Priebus, you and the Republican Party have it in your power to make this primary season the best freaking reality TV show ever. 

Start with the first debate.

Throw out all the old formats.  You have sixteen relatively legitimate (lol) candidates; now if you only have the will you can design a bracket battle that will enthrall America.

First, rank them by latest polls, Trump at the top, and the people whose name I don't want to bother loking up at the bottom, like...Topkapi?  Poughkeepie?  That guy, and Jindal, at the bottom.  Then bracket them in four groups of four each, 1 and 16, 5 and 12 in the first bracket, etc.  Make the first debate a quad slugfest, with four debaters a time on stage for thirty minutes total, no screwing around, cut their damn microphones if they go over their thirty seconds.  Let that British asshole from American idol moderate.  "Illegal immigration: Rand Paul, you have 30 seconds!" or "Don't Ask, Don' Tell, Ben Carson, you have 30 seconds!"  Then, and here's the genius, LET THE VIEWERS DECIDE who advances.  The viewers vote in real-time, kind of like Dancing With the Stars.

One person advances.  One from each quad.  So the sixteen are winnowed down to four at the end of two hours.  Then those four square off a week later.

Ratings would go through the roof.  I would guess the Final Four would be something like Trump, Bush, Walker, and whoever.  It would be a freaking blast getting to the Final Four, all America would be talking about you.

Basically, we'd be talking about what assholes you are, but we're already doing that.

Think about it, Reince.

Afghan Heroin Spikes

The default assumption of U.S. ideology regarding the Afghan heroin spike centers on the argument of unintended consequences.  In other words, "Gosh, we sure tried to stop heroin production in Afghanistan, but you know...shit happens."

http://www.geopoliticalmonitor.com/afghan-heroin-the-cia-519/

http://rt.com/news/156128-afghanistan-drugs-usa-heroin/

A far more interesting connection would center on the near collapse of the heroin industry after the Taliban took over most of the country; by 2001, heroin production was close to nil for the region that provides 90 percent of the world's heroin.

Somebody was losing a lot of money.

Enter 9/11, the invasion of Afghanistan, spearheaded by the CIA, which has proven a dab hand at generating drug money when needed for black ops. 

Fifteen years later, and billions of dollars spent to "eradicate" the poppy fields, more heroin than ever is flowing from Afghanistan.  We can argue and assume incompetence to explain this heroin spike, but it can just as easily be inferred that the point of the Afghanistan invasion was to get the heroin supply flowing again, reclaim the black market fortunes that were being lost.

The "War on Drugs" meme needs to be reframed and rethought for what it is: The war to keep the drugs flowing.

New Book

http://www.amazon.com/Density-100-Page-Suicide-Note/dp/1514691175/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1436459095&sr=8-1&keywords=bill+clunie

Varoufakis on Saving Capitalism from Itself

Varoufakis:

"A Greek or a Portuguese or an Italian exit from the eurozone would soon lead to a fragmentation of European capitalism, yielding a seriously recessionary surplus region east of the Rhine and north of the Alps, while the rest of Europe would be in the grip of vicious stagflation. Who do you think would benefit from this development? A progressive left, that will rise Phoenix-like from the ashes of Europe’s public institutions? Or the Golden Dawn Nazis, the assorted neofascists, the xenophobes and the spivs? I have absolutely no doubt as to which of the two will do best from a disintegration of the eurozone. I, for one, am not prepared to blow fresh wind into the sails of this postmodern version of the 1930s. If this means that it is we, the suitably erratic Marxists, who must try to save European capitalism from itself, so be it. Not out of love for European capitalism, for the eurozone, for Brussels, or for the European Central Bank, but just because
we want to minimise the unnecessary human toll from this crisis.

Excerpt from an alternative memoir

    I can still see a little bit, one word at a time, 48-point type on the computer screen and of course I can touch-type, and if my fingers are positioned properly I can blaze across the screen like "the milltails of hell" as my grandfather used to say.  A logging term.  Arthur participated in the stripping of the world.  The ends of the boards, the "milltails" flying as logs are processed at breakneck speed into lumber.  Whoosh, I type fast.  I used to do physical labor, like the rest of the menfolk in my family, construction workers, timber men, mechanics and truck drivers all of them.  Then I did intellectual labor, staring into the digital sun.  Now I'm going blind.

But I can still write.  Unless my fingers are improperly positioned on the keyboard.  Then I get: S ejp;r nimvj pg honnrtodj yjsy hprd pm smf pm smf ejp vsm frvo[rt oyz  A cryptographer could decipher it, a cryptogram where all the e's are r's, etc.  Nobody wants to work that hard for somebody else's writing, though, not even my editor, though she does go the extra mile.  The extra kilometer.  She is German.  I can see well enough to send it to her and she will edit it after a fashion and publish it on one of the many self-publishing platforms that cater to the failed writers of the world and give us all hope.  A place for our maunderings and our trunk stories, our ersatz memoirs and our sexual fantasies.  Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, Smashwords and Kobo.  Others, too inconsequential to mention.  We are all writers now.  It's the easiest art form.  With music you have to practice for a while and it's immediately obvious if you're not yet competent.  Painting costs money, lots of money for tubes and brushes, and it takes space and solvents to clean the brushes, and, like music, it's pretty obvious if you're terrible.  But every person who is literate is a writer.  Everybody who has commented on a Yahoo news story feels they have been published.  Everybody who's gotten a thumbs up on a Facebook posting feels like Beckett.  Everybody can publish, and does.  Everbybody transmitting all the time.

synthesis

the boat in the water carrying
half of eritrea to safety
is not the stuff of myth
or poetry but divine,
still, retribution
& poetic justice. half
the world has bludgeoned
half the world & now
the battered half
is coming
like a chromosome
seeking
completion.

Kaleidoscope Dope: Stories & Plays

http://www.amazon.com/Kaleidoscope-Dope-William-Clunie/dp/1508623724/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1426657843&sr=8-1&keywords=william+clunie

Kaleidoscope Dope

Stories and plays.

http://www.amazon.com/Kaleidoscope-Dope-William-Clunie/dp/1508623724/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1426657843&sr=8-1&keywords=william+clunie

Get used to hearing about the cum-stained dress

The Bush name is so ruined it's laughable. Everybody knows George W. Bush was the worst president in the living memory of the oldest human being in America.  Everybody.  Our side knows it.  Right wingers know it.  So Jeb Bush has a problem because of that damnable last name.  What can he do?  Change his name?  He could change it to "Reagan," run as "Jeb Reagan," and he's probably considered it.  Trying to defend his idiot brother is pointless, because we ALL KNOW George was the worst president in living memory.  Yes, even right wingers know that.  No, the point is not debatable.

So Jeb does what all right wingers do.  They transfer their biggest problem to their opponent.

The Rove team did it with John Kerry.  Their man, George, hid out from the Vietnam War, playing fuckaround (with jets! VRRROOOMMM!!!) while the real men went off and fought.  Like John Kerry.  So they smeared John Kerry's heroic service, swiftboating him enough to get the vote close enough they could steal the election.

Bush's biggest problem in a matchup with anybody, and it will be Hillary Clinton, is that fucked-up last name, and how everybody in America, EVERYBODY, knows GWB was the worst president of all time.  So all they can do is smear the Clinton name, in any way they can.

Enter the cum-stained dress.  It rolls off the tongue, that cum-stained dress, much more pithily than "wrecked the economy, upended the Mideast, allowed 9/11 to happen, murdereed too too many troops in an unnecessary war."  Cum-stained dress.  It's easier for idiots to say.

Get used to hearing it.  You're going to hear it for the next 16 months, as Jeb BUSH tries to make his opponent's last name the issue, and not his  own.