The Sociologist in me won't let the writer in me sleep. I heard an interesting comment last eve on Charlie Rose, and ah Gawd-all-dumbass-mighty, I avoid Charlie Rose same as I avoid Rush(less w/o Oxycontin) Limpballs or Bill "Shanty Irish" O'Unreality--but last night Charlie's guests got me. He had on James Billington (yeah, I know, "Who?"), head of the Library of Congress, and Kay Ryan (yeah, I know, "Who?"), the poet laureate of the US of A. I know, I know, and me, too, I'd not thought of the poet laureate of the US of A since Archibald MacLeish was it. Archibald's the poet who wrote JB, the novel in verse--whooooo! I knew Archibald MacLeish from my days of Papa Hemingway adoration and inspiration! MacLeish is the dude who claimed he knocked Papa out in a boxing match in Paris back in Papa's heyday as a young, fiction-writer-therefore-liar, bullshitter. [Mr Ed: Please note, Wolfie is totally wrong about this--it was a Canadian poet named Morley Callaghan.] To be quite honest with you: I never read JB, though it was quite a sensation in the bookish world when it came out. It arrived at about the same time poets started writing potboiler novels--like James Dickey's Deliverance--sure poets had written novels before Dickey, but...--Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men is an Old South classic--and I think a damn good book--a good story--'cept it is the Huey Long story, a pretty easy life to base a potboiler novel on!
James Billington I can do without--he's an ordinary honestly sincere soul but very boring and academic, but this Kay Ryan! Now there's a real poet. Even to the point of admitting she started writing poetry at the time when Sylvia "Nobody Rescued Me" Plath and Anne Sexton--complicated poets to say the least--were the women poet guiding lights (or should we say "gaslights" in terms of Sylvia "Woe Is Brilliant Little Me" Plath). This is when Kay decided to write from without to within and there to turn the taken-for-granted into poetry. Almost adhering to Jack Spicer's "outside real" theory of the reality of all poetry--that it comes from the outside reality to be interpreted poetically (the language of the poet) by the poet's clever imagery--his poetic-photographic eye. In opposition to the romantic poets who were inspired from inside out--the interpretation of the outside real being given to them, as Kipling said, by several muses sitting on their shoulders and whispering poetic lexicons into the poetic areas of their hearing. The attempt by poets to set their work on a higher plane than the work of the plain, old, ordinary fiction writer or, oh my Gawd!, the damn nonfiction writer--like biographers--whoooo, how sickening to a poet! I believe you are a writer and a poet and a painter and a musician at the same time--your instincts decide which of those "artists" you are going to be! Predeterminalism through the religion of genetics (biogenetics)/DNA--that which contains the history of human animals--what we call homo sapiens. Tell us, Pastor Melissa Scott, does being homo sapiens make us all homos? [By the bye, it is rumored that Pastor Melissa when she was a porn star and porn producer with her first husband, she didn't accept penetration (she didn't fuck)--she only gave head and muff dived (an action verb in any tongue)! It's a vicious rumor probably, but it adds a bit of purity to Pastor Melissa that impresses an old cynic like meself--like Bill Clinton defined it, getting a blow job is not sex--I would assume Bill would verify the opposite as well--eating pussy is not sex. Today's high-school sexers believe this--the Clintonista definition of SEX!]
I had a tendency to cast Kay Ryan into the shadows--you know, into my periphery--and then she read her poem "Turtle" and I sat amused and amazed--I followed her imagery with ease--I loved the semiotical guideposts she inserts along the turtle's hairy way--like a turtle floating on its back is like a serving dish--she does a better job of explaining than I--
by Kay Ryan
Who would be a turtle who could help it?
"Turtle" by Kay Ryan, from Flamingo Watching. © Copper Beech Press, 2006.
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That's a pretty good little poem, folks--and take it from a published poet--and the grandson of a poet.
Observing Obama Empirically
This view is one of the reality Obama must face. It's a reality that he'd better go boldly forward in or he'll bog down and become just another bad president and getting us more fucked up all around. One big right-off-the-bat mistake he's making is in trying to kowtow to the Neo-Conservative Repugnicans and just plain ole Repugnicans--trying to make himself into a bipartisan kind of dude! This sounds like Obama may be simply a follower of the Clintonistas, as Sociologist Robert Kutner calls the gang of ex-Clinton advisors who Obama seems perfectly willing to let steer his ship of state as this neophyte everyman sails with his crew off into the Bermuda-Triangle realm of current reality. Kutner, same as I, is disturbed by Obama's fascination with Reaganomics (Voodoo Economics)--remember, he's already admitted Reagan was a hero of his. He got put down badly for making that statement and he tried to backpaddle out of those dark waters by hem-hawing about what he really meant was.... And what he really meant was, he believes Reaganomics and Free Trade bullshit really works. He admitted in his book that "investment bankers" fascinated him and were heroes of his--because you see at the time Obama wrote his book, the stock market was flourishing because of the hyperventilating housing market and also the influx of state and union pension funds being put into it (large enough funds to actually have some control over the going up or down of certain stocks)--and everybody knew the housing market was in a "bubble state"--and everybody, including Obama, knew about subprime mortgage loans being schemes--schemes against people in his own neighborhood in Chicago--come on, this man's black, his wife's black, she was born and raised on the Southside (the Blackside) of Chicago--SHE has to be aware--let's hope she's a major influence on her husband--related to red lining (same as racial profiling) done by banks since forever. Mr. Obama, please read up on the Florida land boom of the Roaring 20s eventually bringing down the 1929 Wall Street.
Hey, everybody, including some close friends of mine, was getting filthy rich selling homes they'd paid $50,000 for in the 1970s, or maybe $200,000 for in the 80s, or maybe even $300,000 in the 90s, suddenly for a couple'a million bucks during the early 2000s. In New York City, the real estate market was suddenly flush in the new century with the race-horse developers building a profusion of hi-rise luxury apartment buildings going up like crabgrass eating into an otherwise harmoniously verdant lawn--especially after 9/11 was foisted upon us. And suddenly there was a whole new class of newly rich, like the .com geniuses, who were easily able to shell out multimillions of bucks for stupid little studio apartments on up into the double-figure millions for Upper West Side and Midtown condos and Long Island mansions.
Those of us who are trained empiricists (we do know our history and we do include historic values in our formulae) knew at that time with the stock market traveling unbridled up over 13,000 points, a phony value and always has been, that this stock market was being propped up by phony statistics, piles of half-truth lies supplied by the phony fortunes of this real estate bubble--and sure 'nuff, folks, that bubble blew up--or hadn't you noticed?--and sure 'nuff Wall Street began to sink (or crash as we air-minded people d'rather say).
There's some wonderful irony here, too. George W. Bush, our first and only-ever Supreme Court-appointed president, this handpuppet-faux-president of the insane Neo-Conservative Movement--members of the Reagan administration, continuing on as members and advisors of G. H. W. "Pappy" Bush's administration (re: Unka Dick, Scooter "Jailbird" Libby, Karl "KKK" Rove, Kenny Boy Lay (who was an Economist by the bye), John Poindexter (where the hell is that terrerist rascal these days?), Tom "the Exterminator" DeLay), has perhaps dealt the final blow to Reaganomics--it has FAILED--and it has FAILED miserably. Let's hope Obama knows this. He should. Trouble is, perhaps he thinks he can make it work! Fixing it the Wall Street way will bring on more failure--YET, Obama has voted consistently in favor of the bailout--the original 3-page one on up to the recent 750 billion dollar (two million dollars for each American citizen) bailout scheme that included 150 billion in boondoggle monies--like millions of dollars to the NASCAR racetrack owners! Obama should be well aware, too, that the conniving bastards who came up with this subprime mortgage bullshit are still working within both parties in the District of Corruption--Hank Paulson, the head of the Federal Reserve--and Obama's own Robert Rubin (the deregulatin' fool as Slick Willie's Sec'y of Treasury; the main man in forcing Bill into putting NAFTA into existence; and deregulation of the communications industry), a former investment banker with Goldman-Sachs.
Can Obama "reorganize Reality," as Robert Kutner puts it? Will he do the right thing in terms of the economy?--will he come up with a recovery program? will he FIX the credit market?--the 750 billion dollar bailout isn't fixing anything--the TRUTH, it's making things worse!! Obama does have the right kind of progressive banking expert on his staff, Dan Cirillo--he's also got this dude Robert Wright, a progressive thinker, on his staff, too--so he should know both sides of the situation. Let's hope he doesn't fall down at the feet of Ronald "Alzheimer's Poster Boy" Reagan and give in to the bullying of Slick Willie's Clintonistas--and let's hope he kicks off the influences of Dr. Howard Dean and Nancy "Rich Bitch" Pelosi, who are scared shitless of the Neo-Cons, who gave G.W. Bush free reign without a threat of impeachment, who are basically Conservative themselves--they are both certainly filthy rich, Nancy being the richest woman in California.
You can see I can't stand the rich and the unearned privileges they wield just because they "supposedly" have more money than you or me. My ex-wife, a solver of rich men's problems, was executive sec'y and legal whiz for one of the wealthiest men in New York City at one time--the man she worked with in terms of the legal aspects of this rich man's firm was William Casey, who later became head of the SEC and then of the CIA, where his head blew up one day and sent Ol' Bill straight to Criminal Hell--and she was also a personal favorite of Adnan Khashoggi, at that time the world's richest man, and who was in cahoots with my wife's boss because they were both supported by the Saudi Royal Family--and my well-heeled wife (she died worth way over 10 million bucks) said these men were wealthy on paper but not worth a shit in terms of cash. My sweet wife called them her "Paper Cowboys."
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Check out my ex-wife's old pal, Adnan:
Adnan Khashoggi is the son of Muhammad Khashoggi, a Turkish-born medical doctor who was King Abdel Aziz Al Saud's personal physician. The family name means spoonmaker in Turkish. Adnan Khashoggi's sister Samira Khashoggi Fayed was the mother of Dodi Fayed.
Khashoggi was educated at Victoria College in Alexandria, Egypt, California State University, Chico, Ohio State University, and Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, USA. It is said that Khashoggi quit his studies in order to seek his fortune in business.
Khashoggi headed a company called Triad Holding Company, which among other things built the Triad Centre in Salt Lake City, Utah, which later went bankrupt. He was famed as an arms dealer, brokering deals between US firms and the Saudi government, most actively in the 1960s and 1970s. In the documentary The Mayfair Set, Saudi author Said Aburish states that one of Adnan's first weapons deals was providing David Stirling with weapons for a covert mission in Yemen during the Aden Emergency in 1963. Among his overseas clients were defense contractors Lockheed Corporation (now Lockheed Martin Corporation), Raytheon, Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation and Northrop Corporation (which have now merged into Northrop Grumman). A shrewd businessman, he covered his financial tracks by establishing front companies in Switzerland and Liechtenstein to handle his commissions as well as developing contacts with notables such as CIA officers James H. Critchfield and Kim Roosevelt and US businessman Bebe Rebozo, a close associate of former US President Richard Nixon. He was also involved in diamond mining in the Central African Empire, working closely with the dictator Bokassa.
He was implicated in the Iran-Contra Affair as a key middleman in the arms-for-hostages exchange along with Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar and, in a complex series of events, was found to have borrowed money for these arms purchases from the now-bankrupt financial institution the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) with Saudi and US backing. In 1988, Khashoggi was arrested in Switzerland, accused of concealing funds, held for three months and then extradited to the United States where he was released on bail and subsequently acquitted. In 1990, a United States federal jury in Manhattan acquitted Khashoggi and Imelda Marcos, widow of the exiled Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos, of racketeering and fraud.[1] He has also worked for Col. Ghaddafi of Libya in 1992 as a mediator.
Khashoggi, along with Ramy El-Batrawi, was the principal financier behind GenesisIntermedia, Inc. (formerly NASDAQ: GENI), a publicly traded Internet company based in Southern California. After the September 11, 2001 attacks, Khashoggi's U.S.-based checking accounts were frozen and Khashoggi was unable to make a margin call with Native Nations Securities, whose CEO and largest shareholder, at the time, was Valerie Red Horse, former office manager of junk bond king Michael Milken. In turn, Native Nations and Red Horse were unable to meet their obligations on the margin loan to MJK Clearing, Inc.[2][3] Trading in the stock of GenesisIntermedia was halted in September 2001. Khashoggi's unwillingness to pay his margin loan to Native Nations Securities, and Native Nations (and Red Horse's) inability to pay its debts to MJK Clearing, began a series of bankruptcies that ended in the largest payout in Securities Investor Protection Corporation history.[4][5] Native Nations Securities and MJK Clearing both eventually filed for bankruptcy.[6]
American University used to have a prominent building named the Khashoggi Center but after he defaulted on his donation pledge, the school removed his name from the building.
Khashoggi continues to live a quiet life in the Principality of Monaco, even after a British court ordered him to pay a creditor the amount of £7 million. His services as a facilitator have been a recurring feature throughout US administrations since Nixon; most recently, he met with Richard Perle shortly before the American invasion of Iraq, in 2003.
Kashoggi has also worked with the Bangladeshi Arms Dealer and the Billionaire Prince Moosa Shamser to broker deals in Russia. Prince Moosa Shamser currently lives a lavish but low profile life in Saudi Arabia and Bangladesh. Some reports claim that Prince Moosa is also involved in the Al-Yamama BAE scandal.
From Wikipedia
Adnan Kashoggi (Spoonmaker)--"Hey, Adnan, remember me, Wolfie Boy? What happened to your hair?"
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Good Luck, Obama
He looks like a Conservative to me--sorry to say that; however, I've never seen Afro-Americans so happy to be just plain Americans now--by the droves--and does Obama realize what a responsibility that is for him? His black side has to quit giving in to the honky masters--I mean he had as his spiritual adviser, Reverend Nehemiah Wright, so he certainly learned black situational truths from that man, a man who Obama eventually rebuked three times same as Jesus's main man-preacher, Old Saint Pete, rebuked Jesus X three times--remember when the cock crew? Let's hope Obama's black side wins out and he faces reality as a black man and not as a Sandman--according to Count Basie, a Sandman, is an Uncle Tom. It comes from a dance popularized in the early 1940s called The Sand, where you "sanded" when you danced it--you know, the steps were like if your were spreading out sand on a floor with your feet. Basie had a tune called, "It's Sand, Man." It also related to how a black person approached Mister Charley--you know, like shufflin' your feet as though your spreadin' sand around when you're talking to him or taking orders from him--that's the Uncle Tom definition of "sanding." Basie said, in a "however," that "sanding" was OK when you were using it to try and hustle back a young lady you'd got off on the wrong foot with and thought you were losing. Let's hope if Obama starts sanding, it's trying to appease American black people, 95% of whom voted for him! It's a tough job--he's a tough-looking dude and so is his wife--I really like his wife--they are both smart as whips--let's hope they don't get outsmarted by those D.C. crooks and hustlers and flim-flammers--Obama has to find some truths to tell us, some truths he puts into practice and which work--We the People are sick and tired of lie after lie after lie--and look at the mess its gotten us in!
More on Lawrence "Sorry Ass" Summers, too, who Obama is foolishly courting as a member of his administration. Larry failed miserably as President of Harvard--I'd forgotten that embarrassing moment in Stupid-Ass Larry's misinformed life!
Have You Heard the Scariest Cabinet Appointment of Them All?
Have you heard the rumor that Obama is considering offering Arnie "My Dad Was a Nazi" Schwartzenegger a cabinet position? Surely not. If he does--oh, man, I can't even growl about such a stupid blunder that would be.
Plus, this son of a bitch is keeping Richard Gates--he says! Obama, you've nothing to fear but these assholes you're listening to! Please use your intellect to create progressive remedies rather than trying to make the same old same olds work--and they never will work! Look out below!
theworriedgrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
1 comment:
I like the turtle poem, thanks! And I'm keeping up my hopes for Obama until he starts fucking up.
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