guide me

guide me to your smooth soft breast.
feed me cake as i stare at the ceiling.
let me nibble that crumb
that one
from your fingertip.

trump world notes

handel:i hear
a lament.louder:mask
the rage-sonata inside
the tv.
music.music.save me.save
a fragile spirit.

this violin will play
as we are led away.


...................

i take issue with the hatred
in the hearts of men.



..................

i can't stop watching as the key
is handed to
(dear god)i can't
stop watching.

Glitz Wins

In the brilliant light of this perfect fall day in Berlin it makes more sense.  Two weeks ago I was explaining to a German friend why Hillary Clinton was assured a victory in our upcoming presidential election.  She was more qualified, she had a coalition that included all the groups Donald Trump had personally insulted, her email "scandal" was overblown and didn't resonate with a majority of Americans.  He listened politely, then said, "No, Trump will win.  He is a showman.  You know, the glitz.  That's what America is all about."

The sun right now out my window this morning after the election is as brilliant as a klieg light, and I realize that of course my German friend was correct.  To wit:

1. Reality TV is more fun than reality.  America votes for fun, every time.

2. Melania is glamorous. Bill looks terrible these days.

3. It's really tough for a party to win three terms in a row.  America's attention span is too short for that.

4. America remains proudly anti-intellectual.  Trump comfortably speaks that language of conspiracy theory and willful ignorance.

5. It's easier to drive home and make stick one "scandal" (emails) than 100 scandals.

6. Trump says he's a multi-billionaire.  Money is the final value that matters in America, now and forever, amen.

I was absolutely wrong about this election, partly because I couldn't see my own country and its values, or lack of values, as clearly as an outsider like my German friend could.

He added one more thought, after stating unequivocally that Donald Trump would be America's next president: "You won't have to worry about him.  Your country's system of checks and balances will keep him in line."

One hopes he's right on that one, too.

lines june 8

what is the reality of a poem?why
the long face,blue donkey,why
the balloons?we floated above the onion
dome & shouted to mayakovsky,to marx,
to danton on the other side of history.heads
rolled for the right to grieve.heads rolled
in the right direction,downward
on the map,tho you know,poem,& i,
the map is not the
it's not the

still,it caught the blood of royals,turned
to ink by divisions of diddlers penning
apologies for aristocracies washed
away,the tonnage ot text devoted
to the few thousand dead of the terrors,
scarcely a word for the millions
who came before,robbed & raped,
maltreated,murdered,mulched
beneath the ermine cloak of probity,
what is the reality of a poem

modern fascism has no ezra pound

saints must be poets for their memories
to last.myth-
                 making needs song/
modern fascists:you don't get this.
your ugliness of language
is your doom.


our best hope is our wit.

lit brut

the neobrutalism of the plastic
pistols on the graves,the siege
of mecca & the death of cowboys
in the snow,the anthem
of the marchers in the street &
pipelines bursting at the seams:we
stumbled into this,a clean,well-
lighted hell,& every plaint now ends
'we have a pill for that'.

for a friend & teacher dead now 30 years

still working out the act of making,the process,
gerald.remember when you taught me
how to carve a villanelle?form as curio &
artifact,like string quartets or rock
n roll,but now we have this pencil,all we have,
this scrap of hope that somehow something
from your teaching will return.maybe a dirge,
a memory of your face,a pale rider on a yellow
horse,remembering how pretty you were.your death
can't be contained inside a villanelle,or any poem.

here lies my friend,my teacher,whose last words
were a muffled laugh,a whimper of despair,
an ironic 'oh god' like a prayer.

lines may 25

a sex memoir in a block of prose would be easy enough
to swallow:i remember the eighties,& youth.a few
brain cells survive the sonic assault,the alcohol,
cocaine,aluminum can hash pipe fun.i remember
you,& you,but decent recollection & honesty
do not coincide.you women who shaped me in your hands
& licked up my lies,i think you are all still living & deserving
of peace.

poetry is dead,or should be:

words are sounds freighted with ideas.words
connected form commands.'bend over.fetch.kill.'my
words are words of liberation,but everybody thinks
that.some words create beauty/called
poetry.poetry is dead,or should be.
these are lines of tension.

paris 1968

badiou marching contra pacem,hand-in-hand
with mao & plato/sartre hawking broadsheets
on the street/tel quel spinning candy
in its turbine:where is their world now?i
spy it in the library between the shelves
of shite,glimpses of another country:some-
where there's a city built on seven tasteful hills.
somewhere we will meet.

lines may 20

the marks & drips off the edge of the canvas
were more interesting than the picture,
according to the artist's statement.she thought
about hanging the dropcloth but no,she took pictures
of the dropcloth & made a video destroying
first the original canvas,then the dropcloth
then the photos of the cloth.we watched the video
at the kunsthalle near the rathaus in kreuzberg then
went out for espresso.
                                   the watercolors
on the wall of the bakery:figures.one,
an old woman with her walking sticks
like a cross-country skier,i had a hard time
with her at first but by the time
we were finished with our coffees
my conception of the world had normalized.
i had grown fond of the brutal little woman &
considered buying the comfortable,
unremarkable watercolor
for 30 euros,unframed.


.....



the asian store down the alley in steglitz
where we bought rice noodles & cilantro
& the vietnamese woman's english
was better than my german &
we filled your backpack up with rice
papers & bean paste & mae ploy chicken
sauce & outside the sun shined,was
that a dream?my eyesight had returned,
the operation at the charite putting the world
back in my head for a few more years
& i would make dinner that night,able to see
the rice papers as i rolled them up,
no longer cooking only with my fingertips.it
wasn't a dream though it feels like one
today,here,on the other side of the earth.

lines may 19

we saw the heads of presidents up
on a rock & walked around
where custer lost.then pecan
shakes at stuckey's.
my memory
of america is straight
& gray like the highway
across that flat banality.


..........


we have a pill for that,the blood
that runs like current through
the wall,the sound of other voices
& the call of night.it can be fixed.
stillness without practice & peace
without victory.

lines may 18

the problem with this picture is the border
where it ends.


.....



lines written in blood on the streets of athens
lines copied from the foreign affairs' contents page
lines without borders
lines without tenure
the call-&-response opening ceremony of the 1000th international
lines whispered in your ear like my fingers between your legs
lines in the water catching hell.


.....


text has been tight from the beginning when
we pressed the word into brick or tiny-printed on papyrus,
impressed,compressed to save space.vowels dropped,sensible
enough,who needs them?but you have no authority,you
ancients,you

have no authority in this text.



.....



while baking bread with tesla & arguing the future
of a common currency with soros i saw the future
of fascism like muscle under a skin of stone,flexing
in response  to the matron of maastricht:blood
inside that smooth white rock.

lines may 16

anthropomorphize yourself:leave the animals
out of it.they're not here to speak to you
in secret code,the eagle has no opinion
on the justness of your coup.respect the blood
of the lamb by not spilling it.humans:
get over yourselves.

lines may 12

stained glass futurism,hershey bar
colonialism.europa we will rape you
like a cow:mytho-magic dulles
bros,from frankfurt into gitmo

we've trained our black sites on you.
i smell a new world odor.


.....


spray paint.whitewalls.interactive
sensors call your phone.smart-
gouache.tactile.metabolizing
sulfites in the wine.critics.
bunched up.finding words
to clarify your dream.patrons.
outside.
             looking for the stars


.....


the decorative.the gestural.the knife
in my sciatic nerve.the shoes.the self.
the giggle from the far side of the room.


.....


beauty:is
discredited
in visual art
only at the level of idea.
the plastic arts
exist
in the world
of ten thousand things.

but words are dull,ideation
a soup of gray
in the bowl of your head.


.....


the non-motif,resistant to convention,degree zero
behind the code,the black word on the white page,
the spark in the brain struck:bells in the distance.

lines may 11

rhymey slangy singsong limey:your
'meaning torqued by artifice'
spangles on the page.like
similes.smiles.smelly emojis for the formal
set.i like larkin as much as the next white
male but:he's dead,his time has gone.mine,
too.

.....


when it became too painful to read poetry i
took to reading criticism:the best lines pressed
between blocks of pleasant prose & then
it(or i)became a bore to read the books
of criticism & i took to skimming reviews
of books of critiques of poetry.i have never
been so well read.

lines may 10

phenomenology


1.

everything i'm reading reads like everything i've read.
all the charms of sycorax are messing with my head.

2.

i was a genius before all the drugs.
i climbed a mountain in my skull.

3.

no matter how forcefully i push this mop
i can't push it through the wall.

lines,may 9

language is a misunderstanding that grovels
to assent.we come to a pack consensus &
my pack butchers yours.i write its history &
feed it to the children like communion.

.....

reading a paper on density in ceramic plating i
anticipate words like a telegram stop
or words like a dark age copy run together
for the sake of space & stripped of punctuation stop
mathematical formulae illuminate the text stop
a new & better war machine will be built,wealth
will accrue stop

.....

her work is a pattern that communicates.a
grid of color.a color field of breath.her
breath is a work of color that:i tasted
the sun on my tongue as her breath
entered my mouth,my lungs.

dear nsa

the manifesto has been stripped
of all consonants.false flags fly from
foreign flotilla.sex without sin indicates
the banality of fortification.an aggressive
defense allows one to play the sicilian
for the fool.reference the band anthrax
& you will find your reader:a
lonely apparatchik glances once

lines, may 8

what is to be done with dada.
why have we sacrificed ourselves 
to sense.does the wind spell pariah:
a product of the trench & chlorine gas.
but now.but now
the poetry of precarity must resign
itself to transparency.
it's a long way to temporary.

i've made war on myself long enough.
dada-breached defenses compel surrender.
i will let you unlock my phone.
the peace to end all has begun.

portraiture

the artist who painted herself
into a corner became:a 
caricaturist,a capitalist,
a crier in the square,became
a he:meat hanging in a gallery.

technik,ja,& a craftsman's pay,
portraiture persnickety
as language:the syntax of the eyes,
the mouth around the grammar,
the mother tongue inside.the bones 
of money in your hand,manipulation
of the spine:

sit
& let me please you.

lines may 7

coded


the compression of data
between two bricks,lines
of code:binary code/genetic code/programming
code=cartography:writing is a map 
to an unknown country.code
is a lyric when it becomes a flower.




triolets:


freya's offspring.
kinder on the bus.
ss hair & vacant eyes.


absent sister:doppelganger.
notes in a higher register.
our voices overlapped.


whose flesh in this bread.
blood on your skin.
explicitly political.


you have a sad religion.
mine is a color. 
a bright line in the night.

at a museum

space behind the frame.
i admire your use of space.
but that's actual space:
quasars&whatnot.
dip a finger in the gravity well,
angel,& hold my hand:we
will go out for drinks,after,
if there is an after,&
enchilada plates at that place
on kaiser wilhelm strasse.

.....

writing is a map that brings
another country into being:

.....

the surveillance state.

the eye of the lord looks down on us.
he speaks in the tongues of our mouths.
his tender mercies give us the commandment
to worship.

art installation haiku

a clean room in white,a red brick
on the floor:my heart


we brought a tree into the gallery.leaves
grow when you whisper.
it bears fruit.

words without meaning are sounds

the base of the world:a desacralized
tongue.grammar without meaning.hearts
pledged to violence.liquid youth:
your hand in mine is a performative gesture,
a suspended monorail.

words in the air are dangerous:
sharia law in wuppertal,marxists
in your closet:stripes on plywood 
like fabric,textiles that are too textual.
blood is thicker than your watercolors.
words without meaning are sounds.


.....


haiku

the balloon in my lung,the bullet
pops.pink mist.


.....


my seaweed is radioactive.my oils
are exhibited at moma.my true
love went riding with the foxes.when
ever the sun slants on the sidewalk i
stop.

death of the reasonable

inaction,consideration.our legacy:
enlightened beasts in tatters.questions
of alterity,allowance for the other.
our enemy is boldness.we have reached
a state of purity & will die for it,if
not from without,within.action,belief,
triumph of the willful:the death
impulse is here:
anders breivik,pediga,idf,ukip 
trump the decency of gentle men,
& only women can save us.

maggots & fire

maggots will take you for what you are
unless you go the way of fire.
we're none of us christian anymore:the body
intact on judgement day?

who among us thinks the flesh will animate
& dig up out of earth as trumpets
tootle in the sky?no one here,not you,
not i.wash yourself with fire when you die.

lines

anachronism

it's hard getting woad into a line now.
saranwrap fits the time more neatly.
paint on my cheek as blue as my heart,
sealed in plastic.fresh as a wound.


...............................


eye surgery

such a pleasure,my new plastic lens.
ready for gunplay on parnell bridge.

lines

i hadn't been in church for so long
i feared i would combust,begin
speaking in tongues of fire.but
we weren't there for god.you
were there for music,some
stolid irish slag,burl ives
for the 21st century.twas
a long way from tipperary but
i enjoyed the call-&-response
warm-up,a european attempt
at gospel.watching berliners
try to get down,heh.& you.
i enjoyed you.

integrity

who's making literature out of this madness?
who is pouring the concrete of diaspora into forms
that can hold it? who understands the warp
of the brain that composes in psychosis?nobody

i know.

lines for national poetry month composed abroad

another nutter mutters
at your dress.you:animosity
in drag.i love you,hag.
were you ever young?i never
was.i'll put a bluetooth
in my ear & natter through the day.
we'll ride the 83 to kreuzenfeld & play.




.............................




the casual laziness of american lines:poets
who never learned their latin.it makes
for lazy causality.new york school I'm
talking at you.& beats & brutes &
whoop-de-doo.

neo con

houellebecq punks the world with pretense
of nihilism,jesuit in skunk's clothing,will
'rediscover' a grand old faith soon enough:
a few old men in dresses will pretend to care.

shuffling

what fools these corpses   :animated
for a time,wind up the ass & tongues of air.
at some point it's all just words.your flesh
a word to me('love'),your hand in my hand.
that sparkle at the edge of things:the reality
of orgasm/or medications in confusion.
let us medicate upon these things:the code
of anti-anxiety,anti-oedipus rewrites our lives.i
don't know what/we will be/when we emerge.

rip

you've stopped alarming yourself:siren on the rocks.
it's impossible to lyricize your death.
foolishness of 'the gated community'.safe,
fortified with alcohol,prescriptions of sundry
sort & gunz.gentlewoman.i'm not blaming
the victim but wish you hadn't gone back
for your clothes.wish you hadn't embraced
false security,hadn't wandered through
a pretty maze,with a well-alarumed fool.

unruly/unholy

acolytes of no-futurism
pourers of language
mixers of sand & water.
the earth is hard.fingers
press against concrete.
we are post-hope.
the real is ephemeral.
the eye in the sky is not a god.



.....



i'll write a lengthy screed on 'manifesto',now
a vilified word,& why 'conspiracy' is now a joke.
or i'll visit my provider & confess
to dark thoughts.we have a pill for that.

lines from 'unruly/unholy'

memento sum mori

you're all going to die.before that happens,some advice:unleash
your skull with fermentation.grab hold of desirable bodies.
reproduce.don't forget:clothes make the manacles.

.....

encomia

personal names will be given in the old norse font.
tresspassers will be shot.
a penny enslaved is a penny burned.
destroy the world of the other then shoot them at the border.
walk tonight in your neighborhood:bring your torch.
london's burning.

.....

unholy

my enemies have joined the church.

i would be on the side of the antichrist
if i believed in the antichrist.

i'll fall in love with this pope
when he acknowledges the church
is a dress-up scam:hocus-pocus flimflam man.

your texts have interest for the folklorist & the philologist.
the rest of us would do better studying math
& music.

anyway rip,steve

we drank so much.remember that?of course
you can't,you're dead now.you've been dead
for 20 years.explains a few things,like:
why you've been so standoffish.why
i never run into you on the street
where you seduce me into a three-day drunk.
i thought of it as bacchanalian,tho
it was more construction-worker
sleaze than divine.fucking heroin
anyway.dead in the bathroom
of a chinese restaurant in tacoma,washinton.
very pnw way to go.if it wasn't for
the fucking heroin you'd probably be dead by now
anyway.rip.

unruly lines

no,in the beginning was the written word.
no oral culture could force on us
the totalizing crush of one true god.that
takes lines,ruled,copied,transmitted
by pinched men with little pointy sticks.
in the beginning was the written
word,the tyranny of text.the word
made flesh on little lambs,vellum
& a stylus & the need to tell
the wild creatures what to do.

lines from 'unruly/unholy'

i should have taken up painting.a stroke of red
on a white canvas justifies the ways of god.words
are thin air,nothing intrinsic about them,meaningful
only in a context on which none of us agree.
.....

formal quatrain

how is it possible to despise so much & still function?
dyspepsia abysmal,lying stommick coded for misery:anything
can make me stop reading a poem now,the word
'nonillion',a sly slant rhyme,the latin names of plants.

.....

things got so much worse when i quit drinking.
i've been thinking about a whiskey barrel,a keg
of hope,100 liters of forgetfulness,a tomb.sacred
wine:i assert the possibility of communion.
we can allow the legitimacy of one another's subjectivity.
we can,but we seldom do.

.....

there are voices of reason & tenderness.i know this.i
am not one of them,not through reason but through fear.
i am as filled with sorrow,hate,& the queer thoughts
of desperation as any other european.

.....

famine is not a subjective state of being.

.....

rhymey limey

the war on terror works for every mother's son.
the war on terror shuts your face.
it is a drone strike in the sun.
the war on terror can be fun!
hush now or you're one of them.
the war on terror is a scam.

.....

for the concept of satan i thank you,christian.
& for the concept of sin.
.....

the christian's inward eye removed us
from the world.the world of things,made
profane by the christian's inward eye.
.....

tree.sky.real things that are not your god.
tongue.breast.the blood inside your veins.
my god is in the world of things.

lines away from home

reading newspapers in languages i don't understand,
surrounded by strangers,my brain mushing
through undiscovered skiffs:the iron sky 
is familiar,the coffee in this fragile cup, too.

lines for berlin

cheering for hertha.hoping for the wurst.
vertigo on the ring train.wagner 
from a produce stand.the dogs 
seem arrogant,the flowers pale:
the women beautiful but cruel.

..........

i direct your attention to the air
around you.in that park
in 1933 a father's father
beaten with a club.overhead 
you see the sky.the eye of odin
looks upon you still. 

sonnet

we will go riding,you behind the wheel 
driving me,my blind eye focused on the sky.
we will motor up to mahlow & i'll wonder
why i feel alone & when i'll die.

silly thoughts.greek food & a glass of ouzo 
in the afternoon will lead me to confession
if not god.i'll stumble through a conjugation 
& i'll place a promise on your foreign tongue.

back to lichtenrade & my emails,wondering
who will write & how,if i'll ever see
my ancient enemies again.for now
we'll turn the music up & make-believe

(but it's real enough,your sturdy thighs 
near mine.your hair.this glass of wine).

lines

it is impossible to take
seriously a poem
titled 'europe:
1914-1918.' why not offer up
the quatrain 'holocaust'
or the couplet 'god and man'?

lines

a runic font on the skin of the earth.
tanning(hiding)stretched from tree to tree.
you see me in the eyes of the sky:a sacrifice.
we will burn for a day then die.

fascism

the golden dawn is here in amerika:rosy 
fingers of rosenberg's myth of the 20th cent:
fascism an old broom,most effective when it pretends 
otherwise.trumpism will survive long after 
trump has crawled into his mobster hole.covered
with dirt his little fingers will poke & pull 
at the minds of fools.europeans have alreadly learned:
don't call yourselves fascists

lines

don't know how i feel about dying
on a distant shore.the baltic sea 
where the thudding germans go.
does it matter tho:here or there i'll elbow
thru my poems like that old lady 
pushing to the front of the line 
at steglitz.

my weimar

a wheelbarrow full of poems
to buy a loaf of bread

markings

your lips are a tattoo of historicity,the runes
inscribed on your breast a linguistic monument.
when i feel your heart beat against my heart
i think in verse:raven's wings,a sound that sparks
an image:a v-slash against the sky.

northern poem

hanne,

under the sonne,walk
with me(and love:
the grass,the toes
that press against the grass),
moist.morning mist
and your breathing self.

berlin poem

berlin you didn't vote for hitler but you
are still married to him.berlin your parks,
flat like world war 2 filmstock,i expect a tiger
tank to clatter out from diorama trees.berlin
i don't blame you for pegida,plz don't blame me
for the drone wreck of amerika,the wedding/
funeral pictures,children dead(or alive
with death inside their eyes).

some berlin poems

your friend a pleasant old
fashioned flirt,unlike
anything we have
in amerika,our womyn
all tough until they're tender,our
men easily confused,your
friend pipecleaner thin,charming
in her summerdress,50
years old,still cute until
the talk turned
to refugees.

berlin poem

bewildered w/multiplicity i
turn off the tv
set.here in lichtenrade
watching 'berlin
tag und nacht'
admiring the writing
on the wall.a communist
graffito in my heart
prompts me to travel
east.when i met her
father he took me out
back & showed me
where the wall ran,where
the blood ran red.this
was early on & i took it
as a threat.as i take
most things.taking the x83
east to the s-2 thinking
about a new neighborhood,one
with ddr democratic
architecture tho i will
probably just end up
at the brandenburg gate
again.silly but this bookstore
nearby has a great selection
on east berlin.that's where
the dream of it all lives,on
paper,down the way
from the starbucks near
the u.s.
embassy.

some berlin poems

smoking cigarettes in alexanderplatz:

wondering which wurst
you'll bring home

which mustard:
the uncertainty of kraut

the only uncertainty:
i get to be

the moody one.
you get to cling

to me,
capuchin monkey.

here in a-platz smoking
cigarettes watching

tourists lined up
at the tv tower

up and down all day long
to look over a city

that isn't even a city.
berlin: an intersection

of neighborhoods,
interchangeable,

a legoland
of plastic pieces,

every street the same: a
bakery, eine apotheke

eyeglasses, a turkish
produce stand, but:

every cigarette
in this american pack

is the same,
too, and every cat

in the dark.


..........

when you worked at the food bank:

all that anger
pointed at you
because:

you fed syrians.


..........

i looked like a berliner before i got to berlin

that one thin reed of flesh
could hold this much bile: i've
been told i look with disdain
on everything i see: i fit in
with berlin.

PDX BundyGang Update

***update*** An hour later: Our numbers got up to around 80.  Did see one traitor rebel flag, in a pick-up with a U.S. flag. What's with that, anyway? Pick a side, motherfucker. Our side shouted things at them, variations on go home and leave our public lands alone.  They pretended not to hear, with their hands cupped up next to their ear.  "I can't HEAR you...I can't HEEEAAARRRR you."  Gavin Slime engaged in some public prayer and said a few words.   They put a tarpman voodoo doll up and black voudon clouds lowered overhead.  Then a heron flew overhead and Jesus smiled down and the evil spirits were frozen again inside their dildo simulacra.  Police presence is visible but fairly relaxed.  Word had it some Black Lives Matter got in the protesters' faces but I only heard tell of such things.  Such excitement was too much for me, so I left in search of snacks.

***transmission over***

Portland Public Lands Counter-Protest, 3-5-16

Back briefly from the Portland, Oregon, "LaVerle Finnamacher You're Name Will Not Be Forgotten" militiaman protest and snackfest.  I counted approx. 200 "patriots" in cowboy hats and carrying the misspelled LaVoy Finnicum meme blown-up to protest signage sign.  I didn't see dildos, but I'm sure I saw some Doritos.

Our side had maybe 40 folks. THEY ARE WINNING IN DOWNTOWN PORTLAND, PATRIOTS.  But "intel" from around the country indicates that we're winning most other places, with only a dozen or so "Steal Public Lands" protesters at various Fed buildings.

Things seemed peaceable enough.  They sent little toads over to our side of the street to get in our face and take pictures, but what the hell, we're taking their pics, too.  I didn't see any firearms.  Asked a Multnomah County sheriff and she hadn't seen any, either, which works for me.  (She's a real sheriff, by the way, so I take her word for it.)

They could out-shout us, but we had louder horns.  I'd heard they had Sho Fars but I didn't see them.  We had those loud plastic horns you hear at footie matches, the kind that sound like Glenn Beck farting.  Our horns were louder, so sho far, sho good.

I saw a lot of US and Gadsden flags, but no rebel traitor flags.  

They had been walking in circles around the block at one of our delightful downtown parks when I arrived and were singing one of those patriotic songs when I left, indicating they really do actually love America, I guess, just not its government or institutions or its rule of law.

Now for a quick snack, maybe pick up the items on my hold shelf, and back down there.

#OregonStandoff #TeamIntel #ReportingOut

***update*** An hour later: Our numbers got up to around 80.  Did see one traitor rebel flag, in a pick-up with a U.S. flag. What's with that, anyway? Pick a side, motherfucker. Our side shouted things at them, variations on go home and leave our public lands alone.  They pretended not to hear, with their hands cupped up next to their ear.  "I can't HEAR you...I can't HEEEAAARRRR you."  Gavin Slime engaged in some public prayer and said a few words.   They put a tarpman voodoo doll up and black voudon clouds lowered overhead.  Then a heron flew overhead and Jesus smiled down and the evil spirits were frozen again inside their dildo simulacra.  Police presence is visible but fairly relaxed.  Word had it some Black Lives Matter got in the protesters' faces but I only heard tell of such things.  Such excitement was too much for me, so I left in search of snacks.

***transmission over***

Ten Things I Learned from the GOP Debate

1. The GOP can't even walk onto a stage without screwing it up.

(Dr. Ben Carson, calm center of the storm, stands around for a while offstage after his name is called. Logjam ensues.)









2. Marco Rubio needs to find a new line of work.  Get out now, that's all one can advise.  Otherwise we'll hear about him hunkered in a corner of a padded cell muttering "Barack Obama knows exactly what he's doing" over and over and over.  He's a well-groomed young self-starter type and will land on his feet.  Opening act at a Tony Robbins seminar seems about right.

3.  Donald Trump is really several small children inside a suit made in China.  Look at his hands.  He has the tiniest hands of any grown man I've ever seen.  IT EXPLAINS EVERYTHING.  It's why he whines all the time.  It's why he can't answer a question. What is your health care plan?  "It will be so great!"  How will you build your wall?  "It will be so huge!"  How will you pay for it?  "Mexico!"  Only the infantile base of the right wing of the GOP could love such a toddler.

4.  Jeb Bush can't do much, but he can navigate his way onto a debate stage.  I'm sure his mother was very proud.

5.  Can anybody track what John Kasich says?  Does it turn into white noise after a few seconds for you, too?  Has 90 seconds ever lasted so long?

6.  If Republicans had a brain in their head they'd get behind Chris Christie immediately and ride that Clydesdale all the way to the finish line.  He's the only natural politician up there.  He can debate, he can work a rope-line, he has a certain weird charisma.  If the other "establishment" candidates bailed out IMMEDIATELY and supported him, he could compete in a three-way with Trump and Cruz (ew), and it would be handed to him at a brokered convention.  They won't, and he won't, so it's a moot point.  He committed the cardinal sin: He got along with the President JUST ONCE (Hurricane Sandy, the HUG), and said sin cannot be forgiven in the weirdly eschatolgical theology that strangles today's Republican Party.

7.  Cruz is a shitbird.  Everybody knows it.  He can lie about the CNN/Ben Carson-dropping-out thing knowing perfectly well everybody will find out it's a lie and he just doesn't care.  He's pathological that way, and his supporters love him for it.

8.  It doesn't matter how much money Jeb Bush has in the warchest.  Nobody likes him, not the left, not the right, not the center.  Who doesn't enjoy seeing him get shushed by the other toddler on the stage?  Bring Mom out again, Jeb.  Nothing says commander-in-chief more.

9.  "Barack Obama knows exactly what he's doing."  I kind of already knew that, but it's good to have it confirmed by the Republicans.  "Barack Obama knows exactly what he is doing."

10.  So why is anybody still voting Republican?  Tax breaks?  White Nationalism?  A mythic sense of the grandeur of this country, rooted not so much in the past as in Hollywood's re-creation of the past?  That's it. Or as Hellboy would say:

Murica.

Fiorina Banned From The Arena

Carly Fiorina won't make the A stage at the next GOP debate, prompting such questions as, Who will she kick around on the B stage now that Rick Santorum is gone?  The Gilmore guy?  And another question: Why does she keep trying?

Every election she's been involved in has lost.  She was an adviser to John McCain's presidential campaign in 2008, which he lost.  She ran against Barbara Boxer for U.S. Senator from California in 2010 and lost, even after her campaign outspent Boxer's by a factor of some 48,000-1. Approximately.

Perhaps she's still not accustomed to failure, what with all the massive success in the high-tech sector (printers) she experienced prior to getting fired by HP, the famous high tech (printer) giant.

(One of HP's many high-tech items, features anti-gravity generator upper left, next to "print 2-sided" button.)










Fiorina is justifiably angry about being excluded from the debate.

(Former high tech-industry titan [printers] Carly Fiorina indicating anger at a recent GOP debate.)








ABC's rules for debate participation require landing in the top three in the Iowa vote, or the top six in recent New Hampshire polling, though it is rumored that the A-stage candidates also had to sign an affidavit swearing they would not show up wearing anything stitched from the fur of 101 Dalmatians.

We for one want to see Ms. Fiorina in the debate.  The high-tech world of Silicon Valley (printers) is underrepresented in politics. And as annoying as this liberal blogger finds Ms. Fiorina, he must acknowledge that there is something inarguably grown-up about her, as opposed to one of her primary challengers, who recently began campaigning with his mother:

 And Ms. Fiorina encapsulates the essence of the Republican Party, from her wholesale firing of employees during her tenure at HP to her incessant lying about Planned Parenthood, even after her comments radicalized a demented wingnut.  Or, as Hellboy would say:

Murica!

Post-Iowa, Santorum is All Over Everything

Post-Iowa, the lightweights are falling like (insert simile here) and everything smells of Santorum.  What the fuck happened to him?

Just four years ago he seemed to be on the cutting edge of GOP insanity, wanting to define life as beginning at the moment of flirtation, but this year he just didn't bring it.  Or time has passed him by.  Sweater vests don't cut it.  The extreme right is moving toward camo.  In a Duck Dynasty world, he's Father Flanagan's bent-over altar boy.

Once upon a time he won Iowa.  He fought Romney to the end.  He was the Working Man's Asshole.  Now he's lost that title to a pampered "billionaire."  Faretheewell, Santorum.  Sniff.

.......................................



Rand Paul will leave us now for four years as well, though we will doubtless hear about auditing the Fed again in 2020.

That's a burning issue for the few people old enough to have been at Jekyll Island.  Good-bye, li'l liberty lover, and thanks for all the freedom.

............................

Mike Huckabee...

Him I won't miss.  That picture makes you wonder what's in their basement.  And the dog.  Will the dog be okay?  Go play with Ted Nugent some more, huckster.  GRIFTER.  (Con man.)

And good-bye to Martin O'Malley, one of two Democrats running in the Democratic Primary.  His numbers almost rivaled those of Carly Fiorina's, as did the tenor of his "debate-voice."  Though every sane American admires his brave stance on the NRA, the sooner the Democratic side of things gets down to Hillary Clinton, the better.

So adieu, adieu, to you and you and you.  Someday, soon, I expect to see Fiorina and Jebya! gone, and, the Holy Grail of campaign suspensions, Trump.  We live in hope.

Militia: The Gathering

From the new card game Militia: The Gathering!  Fun for the whole family!  Great for Homeschoolers!  This exciting trading-card game will include such memorable characters as General Fatton:

General Fatton is the most powerful militia member, with 1,000 Hit Points. Must be deployed with a Snack Card.













Captain Continental, aka, "The Judge":

The Judge "mediates" conflict between any militia card and any LEO card, resulting in automatic victory for the militia.  Requires two Pocket Konstitushoon cards to deploy.











King Cliven

King Cliven, playable as a power-up card with any other militia member card; increases that card's Hit Points by a factor of 2.










Included in the game (not pictured here):

Snack Cards
Pocket Konstitushoon Cards
LEO Cards
Zellot Cards (Zellot cards will remain "forthcoming")

and such exciting characters as:

The Great Santilli
Ghost of McVeigh
Smokin' Woman
Smokin' Hot FBI Guy
Small Fry
Ammo Bundy
"Two-Face" Bundy
Baby Bundy
Tarpman

Iowa: All Caucused Up

First: Caucus is an ugly word. Primary is so sweet, but caucus sounds like something that should be done in private, not in the group clusterfuck way Iowa chooses to do it, arcane and complex, which should and does benefit the motivated, the committed, the extremist, the zealot.

And speaking of Bernie Sanders: If this is the best he can do, he might as well hang it up.  Iowa is as white as it's going to get for him and he can't pull better than a tie with HRC.  A tie isn't good enough for the man who's essentially said he's counting on the caucus states and the whiter, whitish, whitesque states to keep him competitive.  It will be all over for him after South Carolina, a winner-take-all state that will crush his hopes like a dialectical antithesis.  Congratulations, President Clinton, on the first step of your inevitable slog to victory.

Regarding the GOP: Trump is a loser.  Trump got schlonged by Ted Cruz's big Canadian schlong.  Or smallish, who knows?  Do we really know anything about the plucky Canuck?  Do we care?  He will be perhaps the least likable major party nominee since...Calvin Coolidge?  He's footnoteworthy only in that he schlonged Donald Trump.

Marco Rubio seemed quite pleased with his overwhelming/unstoppable 3rd place victory.  And of course it was something of a victory.   In a sane world the other so-called "normies" in the GOP would drop out and support him, putting the party above the petty, but Jeb Bush is nothing if not petty and he won't be dropping out soon.  Rand Paul has the warmth of Freedom to keep the cold sting of defeat from his free Texas skin.  Chris Christie is probably just happy for an excuse to be out of New Jersey.  Kasich is, apparently, quietly demented.  None of them will be inclined to drop out, though the one way to stop the Cruz/Trump derailment of their party necessitates they do so, they drop out immediately, endorse Rubio, and turn their side of 2016 into a three-way race.  Who would win such a race?  God, who knows.  Clinton will beat any of them.

What else did we learn?  That polling is absurd, because it had Trump ahead in Iowa most of the way?  No, we didn't learn that.  Polling isn't absurd, Trump supporters are.  They are infantile, clueless White Nationalists who enjoy bellowing about how their Whiteness is not quite as adequately recompensed as in days of yore and then are easily distracted.  A set of car keys jangling-in-the-face distracted.  Too distracted to go out and vote.  Perhaps in non-caucus states a greater percent will make the bother, and Trump still might win the GOP nomination.  Or he could be so devastated by Iowa that he throws in the monogrammed towel.

We can happily say good-bye to Martin O'Malley, who absolutely didn't belong in the last debate, or perhaps should have been placed on a B-stage debate by himself, where his pre-planned responses would have not sounded a note different in stridency or beat.  Without his presence we will see a more focused contrast between HRC and the non-Democrat running in the Democratic primary.  It should be interesting to see if Bernie Sanders has much to say about much of anything beside the billionaire class.  Perhaps he will discuss Hillary Clinton's damn emails.  Stay tuned.

South Carolina will Decide the Primaries

Iowa and New Hampshire exist this primary year only to weed out the candidates who properly have no business campaigning.  On the Democratic side, that is Martin O'Malley.  On the Republican side, it is everyone not named Trump or Cruz and, perhaps, a sole surviving "establishment" candidate.

South Carolina will decide the nominee of the Democratic Party, almost certainly, and quite possibly that of the Republican Party.

Iowa and New Hampshire, with their proportional delegate distribution, will keep Bernie Sanders in the race until South Carolina.  He and Hillary Clinton will split the delegates in the two states in whatever way the chips happen to fall, 55% of them to Clinton, 45% to Sanders is my guess, but South Carolina's entire 50 delegates, with its winner-take-all distribution, will all go to HRC.  She will have a huge lead, and at that point Sanders will, presumably, drop out of the race.  The only reasons he wouldn't: desire to keep his "message" out there (kudos to him, yes, and fuck the billionaire class); the conviction he is inspired by whatever god he believes in (probably something to do with dialectical materialism); he's a bored old man who likes the attention -- the Ralph Nader Syndrome (I doubt it).

Things are much more interesting on the Republican side, in a horse-race sort of way, with a dozen or so candidates still in the mix at this point, though "mix" might not apply to the candidates who seem to have fallen out of the mixing bowl.  Several of them simply don't belong here, polling very badly, "Martin O'Malley" bad, even: Santorum, Huckabee, Fiorina, Paul.  To receive any delegates in Iowa and NH a candidate must get at least 15 percent of the vote.  None of those four will.  The first three will fold after Iowa, unless they're simply having too much fun with all the fol-de-rol, though Rand Paul might stick around as a "message" candidate -- and of course he won't want to disappoint Dad. Ben Carson will continue to run as long as it generates decent book sales.  Frankly, his campaign should more properly be covered by Writer's Digest than by the news and politics journals.  His is one of the more outside-the-box book-marketing campaigns I've seen, and will no doubt inspire dozens of future memoirists to run for the highest office in the land.  The real race is and will be between Trump and Cruz -- and one and no more than one surviving "establishment" candidate.

As with Clinton and Sanders on the Democratic side, delegates will split neatly between Trump and Cruz, quite possibly all of them, as no other candidate might achieve the 15 percent level to be considered for delegate apportionment.  South Carolina, again, will decide the story.  If Cruz wins all the delegates there, his lead will be substantial enough that Loser Donald might not want to continue running a Loser Race, the dummy.  Sad.  If Trump wins, Cruz will probably drop out, if his national polling numbers are still substantially lower than the Donald's.

For an "establishment" GOP candidate to survive after South Carolina, the others had best drop out soon after Iowa.  Of the four: Bush, Kasich, Rubio, Christie -- Gov. Christie probably has the best chance of competing against the Trump/Cruz phenomena.  Bush is simply unlikable.  Unless you're Eric Cantor.  Which proves the point.  The only thing Left and Right agree on is that Jeb Bush is truly unlikable.  John Kasich is simply unlistenable.  He is as unlistenable as Bush is unlikable.  Has 90 seconds ever lasted so long than when listening to a Kasich response to a debate question?  Rubio is a lightweight, to put it mildly.  He belongs running the gate at a Tony Robbins seminar.  Christie, however, for all his flaws, or perhaps because of them, can be seen as a viable alternative to the "nutty" candidates.  He can bluster and bully like Trump.  (One imagines his dismay when Trump entered the race just before him, immediately staking out a claim to the "shout out your love for bullying" terrain.)  He can be as mean-spirited as Cruz.  ("Bridge Lane to Nowhere.")  He embraces the blame-the-victim generator that keeps the lights on in the bunker that is the postmodern GOP.  (Lock you up if you've ever been anywhere near Ebola.)  If he survives after New Hampshire, and if the other "establishment" candidates drop out and endorse him, he could be disruptive enough to keep either Trump or Cruz from a clear majority.  At which point Christie would likely be anointed at a brokered convention as the only seemingly normal GOP choice.

Handicapping the races at this point is simple on the Democratic side: Hillary Clinton.  On the Republican side, not so much.  Trump, if he dominates early on.  If he doesn't, then possibly Christie, if enough of the others drop out and endorse him.  Cruz does not seem likely.  He really is as unliked as all the rumors indicate, and dislike at the highest levels of politics, as always, has a way of bringing you down.

We will know so much more after South Carolina.  Perhaps more than we want to know.