Not There
noon found her frozen
in the snakes
of her own veins.
she had married her own medusa,
commemorated
the fatal event.
to look inside
and turn to shocked stone,
could any pain
squeeze worse?
to show in eyes
a wound so bright
that blood relinquished fire?
to go down, to seek
a twin in a steep pool,
unaware she is dead
until she kisses you.
===============================
Ethics Review: I Care
A Lot
Welcome to my ethical reviews! These reviews will focus on the underlying
messages of a movie, series, book, song or other sort of artwork or entertainment.
I Care A Lot (ICL) is a Netflix movie release,
currently on the most-watched list. It
is a comedy that attempts almost no emotional depth, and when it does the
effort only makes things worse. Cringe-worthy
cheese across the board.
Shallow is okay when you are going for easy laughs and slapstick--if
there is nothing insufferably offensive.
But the plot of ICL is so vile, so abhorrent, that it practically shoves
you into a pit of darkness, even if you are doing your best to tune out and
just have fun. This is the kind of movie
that, if analyzed for what it says about us, shows a serious problem.
The protagonist, Marla Grayson, is a predator. She literally enslaves senior citizens who
have worked all their lives to get a home and amass saving. How? By
having a doctor (who is in on the scheme) declare them mentally unfit and in
need of a legal guardian. Grayson,
acting as said guardian, locks the victim away in secure retirement home (whose
director is also in on the plot), takes their phone, has them medicated, and
proceeds to liquidate their assets for her benefit.
All the while, Grayson pretends to care about the victim,
lying straight to their face with a concerned smile. Hence, the title of the movie.
Yes, the title is an ode to a gaslighting slaver.
There is zero remorse and lots of scenes of Grayson enjoying
time with her attractive girlfriend and generally living it up. ICL takes seamless effort to make her look
cool, sexy, confident and, well, what we all want to be, right! More than once, to justify her vicious,
parasitic lifestyle, she co-opts the ideals of feminism.
Yes, feminism, which is about liberation and dignity for
women, is used in ICL to justify slavery and degrade women.
At this point, one might hope that the antagonist, the
villain, is actually a true hero who will take down Grayson’s evil empire. Nope. He is just another predator who kills and enslaves the weak, someone Grayson accidentally
crossed by enslaving his mother. Just to
show how horrible this villain is, we are shown, for a few seconds, pictures of
women who look beaten, women who are his drug mules.
Maybe the director thought these two seconds of shockingly brutalized women were necessary, to ensure that we didn’t get the idea that this movie could in any way validate a moral compass higher than slavery.
The rest of the movie is these two monsters battling it out,
sprinkled with moments of ghastly violence, mostly against women, such as two black-clad
thugs savagely throwing Grayson’s girlfriend to the floor and beating her in
the face. The female redhead doctor
who assisted Grayson’s scheme is abducted and murdered. The other accomplice, the male director of
the retirement home, only gets stun gunned.
Poor guy.
Aside from the misogynistic violence, and the smearing of feminism,
there is the one black actor in the movie, a clueless judge (described as “stupid”)
who always rubberstamps Grayson’s court orders; and there is also, yes, the
stereotypical dwarf who we are supposed to laugh at because, well, he is a
dwarf in a position of power and authority.
Ha ha.
By the end of the movie, if you are hoping for some
comeuppance for Grayson, or her equally loathsome opponent, well, no. Grayson and her opponent call a truce, join
hands, and combine their skills and assets to prey on the innocent. They are both doing great!
And the moral of the story is …
Someone might try to defend this awful movie as ‘just kidding
around’. That sounds far too much like
what people at a Trump rally say about his speeches. In fact, this movie is basically a paean to
someone like Trump. Zero conscience, lie,
worship greed, and prey on the weak.
Ethical movie score (ICL): Abysmal. No ethical message. Promotes the worst in people.
(sexism, racism, mockery of dwarfs, praise of predators, praise of avarice, graphic gratuitous violence)
===========
The Perverse Inverse:
How To Heal America
As America stumbles, the odds increase that we will be ruled
by Trump or someone in his vein. A
Tucker Carlson, Ted Cruz or Josh Hawley. Dictatorship becomes more probable in times of
political unrest and pernicious corruption.
Trump himself did a lot to advance our decline. He upped the graft, wrecked alliances, and
cemented international opinion that the US has gone bonkers. His goal, after
all, is still maximum adulation. He
craves the spotlight himself, rather than a competent US on the international
stage.
How do we save democracy?
We should ask how Trump came to power in the first place. A big part of it is racism, a virulent fulcrum
used by the Republicans at least since the Southern Strategy. But what other evil effect heightened the
hate, added more leverage, and tipped the scales to fascist Trump?
The answer is the utter misery of the people, accompanied by
continued fleecing. It’s hard to choose an epitome. But how about Big Pharma reaping profit off
heroin-strength opioids. People
suffered. Loved ones died. The rich battened their coffers.
This is the crux of it: the economic system is stuck in a
perverse inverse proportion. Benefit to
the wealthy means suffering to the majority.
During the pandemic, the stock market sailed upward.
In contrast, when wages rise, the stock market suffers, due
to worries of inflation. The perverse-inverse
has been entrenching for a long time.
Now many people are ready to accept a monarch who promises to ‘shake
things up’.
The misery of the people has awesome political clout. Republicans are able to get praise by
promoting any sort of a job, even the most mindless, meaningless, benefit-less,
and temporary. This in the wealthiest
country in the world.
What needs to happen, to inoculate against the takeover by a
Trump, Carlson or Cruz? It’s simple. Get rid of the perverse-inverse, the
parasitic economics. Try to imagine a
healthy system, the sort advanced by Adam Smith, where benefit to business also
benefits the people. How shocking.
As it stands, healthy economics is going to require careful recalibration. It will have to be enacted slow, and probably
with some short-term compensations. We
can’t immediately get rid of the casino stock market initiated by Reaganomics.
But change needs to happen, and proceed steadily. The jacking up of Game Stop does nothing to
help the general public. Or improve the
company. Indeed, why strive to be a
competent company when you exist to gamble with your shares?
A lot of wealthy people want to be taxed more. They even ask for it, some of them in op-eds. Change, to a large degree, is about
culture. It is about ethics. It is about seeing yourself as a member of a
country-sized family, at least as much as a competitor for cash.
History tells us that the elites can and will tilt toward
dictatorship. Jackbooted tactics enforce
the ‘law & order’ needed for happy oligarchs and suffering masses.
By continuing the skewed status quo, we advance the pitiable
decline. Or we can become reasonable and
sane.
Right now--this moment--this is democracy’s last stand. We can fall into the spiral of dark history. The decline of the American empire. Or we can buck the trend. Reverse the slide. Show that we are an adaptable republic. A truly great nation.
Anyone calculating their own best interest should step back
from the perverse-inverse, and embrace mutual benefit instead. Why? For
the simple reason that dictators not only accelerate chaos and decline, they also
foment war.
Let us revisit the words of someone who had the insight of
proximity to ultimate destructive force:
I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War
IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
=
Thank you for looking at the poems!
A quick note. I often edit a piece quite a bit after it goes up. The more-or-less final version, the one that settles in, arrives after a few days of the initial posting. (It's almost fair to say that a true 'final version' is like the Holy Grail and not likely to ever materialize).
Admittedly, this is a feeble strategy. I use it simply because it gets me to edit faster and more attentively than if the poems were merely tucked away in a folder.
The big downside is that readers who visit right after a work goes up are often met with a less-than-stellar version. For this I apologize. Again, my only excuse, albeit feeble, is the quirkiness of my own craft.
If you have comments or suggestions, or potential topics you'd like to see, you can email me:
owlwholaughs@gmail.com
Fly Well in the Dark,
OWL
===================================
New Game
it was only weather.
a hydrocarbonous tilt of priority.
so said the profiteers and the politicians,
while they gainsaid every threat.
they preferred oil and cattle futures,
maybe a few tradeoffs, down the clock,
to deeper, more susceptible speculations.
the golden king at the head
said of the surly clouds and simmering blue
that they were only playing a game.
trading pieces over our tragic race.
so said the golden king,
whose crown was actually old, cruel and White.
and so the people hid.
they lied from the prowl of consequence.
they lied about their losses,
whenever a storm
swallowed what they knew.
fanaticism ran as a amok
as the spreading wildfires.
ignorance.
it became a new kind of swarm.
arm-and-a-legs fell into place.
and everyone gave. bent spines
low in shame, a whipped pyramid,
from poor to rich,
a new level of false idol,
a new kind of game
for propping up the facade of ideals.
a superficial pretty. stuffed yet empty heads.
a taxidermy, a toxicology,
of destruction and deceit.
==================
8/27/24
To the Dandelions
the clouds,
those zinc lids on february,
open to your omens.
i dance to gather
the whisk of your touch,
cool under my naked soles,
and must ask:
why did the stars erode,
those discs of a shattered spine,
not alert or tangy or able to pout,
concerning this day?
why did they falter,
whose stellar wishes and silvers
pale before your fulgent, yellow blush?
maybe they knew--
how you adorn spring’s dress,
combed in turn by a susurrus.
you who herald the silks of sensuous corn
please
enchant me one last time,
while i skip imbued
with the skyblue daisied glee
of a child.
=============
8/27/24 eds
Anniversary of my brother's death. He liked sunflowers ... but somehow this has turned out as dandelions.
Song of a Prophet
brilliance flooded me,
such unwanted weather.
i became the crossroads
in a quandaries of connections
that carved me out like a trench.
there were parched scorpions
and rattlesnakes of thorns among
the freshest, most vivid lilies and begonias,
while fossils flipped under my naked soles,
revealing the runes of the whys.
i pitied the gods
and had the stamina to wrestle
the most implacable angels.
power lost its daring and thrill,
able and eager to forfeit the game.
it was such a sparse opiate,
the addictions and fixations and dysfunctions
which kept the players
rolling their stones up and down and around
and back again to all sides.
looking down,
through my fleeting omniscience,
that sweet bliss of cherished nanoseconds,
at love and beauty and care,
the way their flaws avoided all failure;
and how their tears lit pure and moral candles,
these the only real light, and yet, in paradox,
the only approach we could never complete,
it became clear to me then
that the rest was just
assemblages of unfolding, foggy math,
what fed the before and the after,
those larger, troubled oceans, so hungry,
on either side.
=====================
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