|
His Pet Goat's Silence, Again
Bush and Katrina: The Smoking Gun, on Tape
Candide's Notebooks/March 2, 2006
Not too long ago the great American Rabelais of our time wondered what, if anything, it was going to take to surprise anyone over the sheer sludge of mendacity flowing out of this White House. A segment of the public (about 34-odd percent at last Nixonian count) will always find a way to excuse the crimes. It’s either that or conceding complicity, which the craven by definition cannot do. They manage to insist, as always, that there is no smoking gun, that the mainstream media, given the diseased-like acronym “MSM,” is the conspirator. Now comes the gun, smoking, reeking, dripping: the Hurricane Katrina video showing, in a confidential briefing for the president, a slew of emergency personnel, “you’re-doing-a-heck-of-a-job-Brownie” among them, warning the president that this was “the big one,” that levees were in danger, that the Superdome might not cut it, that big loss of life was anticipated. This was a full day before the storm hit. And Bush in his labyrinth in Crawford, Texas, making assurances that everything was under control, asking not a single question and, as it turns out, lying as casually as if he were snacking on pretzels: when he was asked four days after the storm hit, on ABC News, about his catastrophically anemic response, he claimed no one could have anticipated the storm’s violence. Proof of the man’s dishonesty, to be sure, but mostly of his incapacity to lead, his utter cluelessness, and it should be said, his Pet Goat-vintage idiocy, for wasn’t that silence during the Katrina briefing the same silence with which he took in Andy Card’s Sept. 11 announcement, in that Florida classroom, that the nation was under attack?
—Pierre Tristam
|
| THE DAILY JOURNAL |
VANPOEM |
| |
As One Put Naked Into a Cigarette Boat
Continue chiding, since it's part of the new aesthetic,
and parcel to our coming home, as if
we'd disappeared into the burning bush
that calls to those who sit vacantly in parlors
awaiting a fate freighted with song and dance.
I stroll while staring and raging
with difficulty at the stubborn sky.
On my honor I step a little distance
from behind the curtain, only to disappear
the moment no birds sing, which occurs frequently.
Leaves dustier than furniture, the sound
of sleeping grating through the cosmos,
my footstool, my only talisman.
It's been real, arguing on your behalf.
Gray cobweb shadow, falling, floundering,
finding a place to not be shy and think
boldly about the oldness of beauty, a place
to rest its weary insubstantial head.
It may be that I stand on the threshold
of the checkout line, unsure of what
to be impulsive about, which momentous emptiness
to spontaneously identify my alienation with,
what kind of languor to slide into
before being reduced to grubbing for credentials,
locked in that tumid late-afternoon skin,
effervescing in its sea of dreams.
And all the things hearkening back to it,
the boat ride to breaker beach
there at the end of one world
where it paid to rage at the stammering waves
that kicked and screamed solely for my benefit,
staged objections to the inexorable fact of me.
Look: I've installed a turnstile in my kitchen,
so your picture-postcard of desolation has no power over me.
In this doggy-dog world land is made motionless
and the broads are standing on the wharves
with some of that sipping whisky on those silver trays,
which we'd be a bear to pass up. You speak
of the old gods who've washed up on shore,
but I don't see them, don't hear their hue and cry,
though their maze awaits us, will amaze us.
Here, let me get this little rock out of my damn shoe.
Then we can talk about paddling off to parts unknown. |
|
| |
—Van Foreman |
| |
|
|
|
