Saturday, December 30, 2023

Published in Autumn Sky Poetry Journal

 Although I haven't submitted poems to journals in at least eight years (it is hard work, time consuming, and I fight with depression), I was honored that Autumn Sky decided to resurrect one of my poems from their archives for their daily:


https://autumnskypoetrydaily.com/2023/12/17/from-the-archives-joan-of-arc-by-chris-crittenden/


Thank you to editor Christine Klocek-Lim for her incredible passion, dedication and perceptive appreciation of poetry for many years now.  This was a wonderful holiday gift for me!


============










Correction was made:  eight years since I stopped submitting poetry to journals, at the turn of 2015.

Friday, December 29, 2023

Poem: Before

 

Before

 

no bald pigs slopping at troughs,

no gelded, branded, broken chattel,


instead roams of aurochs.

foams of errant bats,

 

and weaves of neon fish

who escher-float in kelp tapestries

 

luminous with pregnant medusas.

 

no satellites to slice through the waist of Venus,

no contrail cruel as a rogue bullet,

 

flatulent from an airplane’s ass.

 

instead prosperous skies,

opulent with minstrel flocks,

 

and large vivid butterflies

flirty with luna moths,

 

how they waltz, tango, pirouette,

 

no streetlamps to confuse,

no pavement to mar the esplanades,

 

pollinating golden,

 

no corporate pollutants,

poisonous to all that has ever been breathed.





====================










1/28/24 ... more mods


12/30/23 ... "has ever been birthed" replaces "had ever been made"

Wednesday, December 27, 2023

Poem: In the Field

 

In the Field

 

twitches under jackstraw husks,

those fussy rodents,

hot-hearted voles,

 

it was hard

not to see them as fate-colored,

 

creeping as they were

in a cracked paisley

havocked by the retreat of frost.

 

yes, the green had begun to birth,

rending foams of dry needles,

pricking with its little feet.

 

there would be butterflies,

those standard-bearers

for hysterias of pollen.

 

the vole-hearts 

would feed the oil-soft, yellow-striped bellies of snakes.

 

this was god’s parchment, the field:

this official yet tattered scroll,

flip-flopping with its decrees.

 

there would be plump berries,

then sturdy ladders of ice,

both of them nurtured

then assassinated.

 

and always the battling hungers,

nature’s toilsome bane of judgments,

the owl-neck twists.



==================================================


















Why do humans go to war?  Because nature linked hunger, pain, and emotion to performance and, furthermore, made trust almost impossible, not without force.      

Sunday, December 24, 2023

Op-Ed: Biden is wrong to support Netanyahu's evil


 Biden is wrong to support Netanyahu's evil


It took the death of a poet to motivate me to write about circumstances I have selfishly avoided, due to the sheer pain of confrontation.   It is a taint on my soul that I required such impetus, so belated in my response; for the horror of the butchery of war, a tyrant’s unjustified, merciless infliction, has been global center stage; first Putin in Ukraine, and more recently Netanyahu in Israel.  Both have initiated a bloody campaign of wanton bombing and rampant war crimes.  The Washington Post led off today with “More than 20,000 dead in Gaza, a historic human toll.”  Hospitals, homes, and, in general, the structural cores of communities have been pulverized into rubble.  The secondary headline read, “How Israel pushed over a million Palestinians into a tiny corner of Gaza.” 

 

A more honest headline would have used the word “herded”; for the people are being treated as subhuman, as nothing more than animals.

 

Netanyahu knows what happens when you drop so many bombs of such power, on par with the USA’s ordinance in Vietnam, and then send tanks to rumble through the annihilated areas (1).  With every such attack, it is clear that children will suffer and die in the bombardment.  Netanyahu is following his fellow dictator Putin’s strategy:  the use of atrocity and barbarism to shock and cow opposition.  The victims, those who survive, suffer and witness incomprehensible cruelties. 

 

Witnessing the slightest bit of it myself, through news media, I found myself asking, ‘Who can defeat the Devil’s sword?’

 

Such are the times in which we parlously dwell.  A wave of fascism menaces the world, and on its crest ride dictators who not only lack conscience but  unfetter pure evil.  Why?  To spread their own narcissistic reach.  To aggrandize themselves.  


Netanyahu referenced the Old Testament, 1 Samuel 15:3, to justify his actions:

 

Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.

 

 In cultish calculation, charismatic dictators such as Putin and Netanyahu are manipulative and perceptive.  In management of government or business they are corrupt, above all else, and beyond that glaringly incompetent.  And when it comes to matters of decency and ethics, they present a barren, twofold face:  the cold eyes of an insect, and the bellowing rage of a beast, one that lacks loyalty to anything except the bottomless rapacity of its insecure ego.

 

Often such leaders are called “strongmen.”  I completely object to this misnomer.  It grants them an unworthy association with the virtue of strength.  As I have written in other posts, leaders like Netanyahu should be called what they are:  parasites.  They are parasites that gorge to bloat on vitality and virtue, leaving an improverish, enfeebled nation  

 

Indeed, Israel is fast becoming hated and isolated on the world stage.  Netanyahu himself has been charged with felony corruption in Israel.  Yet he still manages to get these charges put on hold, over and over, due to political crises that he does his best to foment.  It has come out, in fact, that he was paying Hamas through Qatar, money that Hamas used to buy weapons, no doubt involved in its Octorber 7 attack.

 

My point is, these ‘strongmen’ are parasites.  They bring crises and corruption. They have, for instance, no qualms about starting a war for no reason except political gain.

 

In the sights of my pen--a far better way to target than the sights of a gun--is Netanyahu’s ethnic cleansing.  The genocide of the citizens of Gaza.  There is no doubt this is what’s happening.  The horror is as naked as a stomping footprint of Godzilla.  An area the size of Rhode Island has been reduced to ruins in a little over two months.  The people--refugees in their own land--have been herded into a tiny corner where they starve; where they lack electricity and water, and face disease.  Without embellishment, the statistics chill and render agonized anyone who dares empathy:  20,000 dead, seventy percent women and children.  Beyond the statistics, fearless journalists have recorded the travail, some of them dying for their bravery.  We see rivers of refugees, on foot and haggard, scenes reminiscent of WWII.  We hear how mothers and their children, trapped under collapsed structures, perish before help can reach them.  We see bullet-riddled hospitals, half destroyed by bombs, in which the IDF claims Hamas had been hiding; and yet the evidence is not sufficient to show any such thing (WaPo).  We learn that the so-called “safe zones" have been relabeled as “safer zones” by the IDF.  An Orwellian change that sugercoats the truth:  the refugee camps that the Palestinians were told seek have themselves been bombed.  

Overall, there are many films and images of children maimed, bloodied, sobbing ... Most recently I saw corpses of newborns in a hospital who died because Israel cut the power.

 

CNN informs us that half the bombs dropped by Israel have been “unguided” bombs, and therefore indiscriminate:


https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/13/politics/intelligence-assessment-dumb-bombs-israel-gaza/index.html


The hunger, the bombing, the internet blackouts, the disease, the treatment of humans as chattel--actually worse than chattel, for even chattel are given food and water--this all redounds on Netanyahu.  Two days ago, we learned that IDF soldiers killed three shirtless men waving a white flag.  It turned out that they were Israeli citizens who were hostages of Hamas.  The IDF soldiers seem possessed by a spirit of vengeance and bloodlust.  Their first reaction is to injudiciously kill, even if the victims have no weapons, are shirtless, and wave a white flag.  One of the men yelled out in Hebrew, and was shot anyway.

 

Does the IDF hate the Palestinians so much that their first reaction is to swiftly pull the trigger?

 

With the barest details, given above, it is evident that what is going on in Gaza is the unspeakable act of a dictator, Netanyahu, carrying out a plan of extirpation--to pull out by the roots.  It is so wicked and racist that it must be called a pogrom; and so Netanyahu is doing to others what was done to the Jewish people by Hitler.  It is a perverse version of the Hammurabic Code, a genocide for a genocide, the exact opposite of the Golden Rule.

 

At least one prominent thinker, Macha Gessen, has made a comparison between the Jewish Ghetto and the living conditions of Palestinians: 

https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-weekend-essay/in-the-shadow-of-the-holocaust

 

For this, the writer received the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought:

https://apnews.com/article/germany-hannah-arendt-prize-masha-gessen-1923648579baea413c8b35cc436375fe


To conclude this paper, I am compelled to ask, What the hell is the President of the United States, Joe Biden, doing? 

 

The world watches what is happening in Gaza as if a scene from Dante’s Inferno had risen from the mythological depths.  We witness it on handheld devices, thanks to our telecommunicated era.  We see the Palestinians, the majority of whom are not Hamas, wither and die under starvation, privation, slaughter, and forced containment in death fields that once constituted home and community.  And we see President Biden supplying the bombs.  We see Biden leveraging the USA’s veto power in the United Nation to argue against a ceasefire.  We watch this, not just me, many people--people who embrace the dire importance of “Never Again”--and we say, “You!  Aren’t you the leader of the ‘free- world’?  You!  Aren’t you the so-called champion of human rights?”

 

Repeatedly on this blog, I have argued that ethics is a technology that we humans can advance; and that a democracy should and must advance human rights, not just wave them in gilded font on its banner.  Failure to advance ethics technology will most likely result in a Doomsday War that will end civilization (2).

 

Because this is such a horrific thing to say, something that I myself find almost unimaginable, I will elaborate my arguments in respect to Netanyahu’s evil. 

 

Fascist dictators rise to power by instilling hate in their worshipful followers, hate for specific target groups--the effigies, the scapegoats.  This hate is of the most virulent sort.  It is a hate so furious, so limitless, that it does not shy from the death of children,  It does not shy from the enaction of 1 Samuel 15:3.  Indeed, this hate has to be that extreme to create cultish followers; a hate so vast that it obliterates reason and blinds conscience; a hate that implants a psychotic delusion:  that certain human beings aren’t human at all, only “vermin.”

 

This is the kind of hate that a fascist dictator must sow to seize absolute control and demand anything that he wants (I use the pronoun 'he' because sexism and anti-LGBTQ+ are inherent to fascism).  The followers sacrifice health and money, as their leader vacuums up riches.  If told to die for the dictator, they will.  If told to murder, there is no remorse.  Their reality is what the dictator wants it to be.  It is hard to fathom that people could be so ignorant and self-destructive.  It comes down this virulent hate, which draws from the worst of fear.  A hate so strong it walls off the mind from reason and rectitude.  Brick by brick the dictator builds this wall.  His tongue is the trowel.  His deceit is the mortar.  Hate is the brick itself.

 

Again, I ask, what is Joe Biden doing?  His choice to support Netanyahu is unfathomable in its failure.  Not only a failure to advance human rights but, as well, an antithetical act that disgusts the conscience--the condoning of genocide.  Even as Biden warns the world about a fascist dictator in America, Donald Trump, he turns around and supports another one.  He undercuts his own integrity and message.  He says to Netanyahu, “Go on.  Drop your 2,000lbs bombs.  I will even give them to you.  Drop them indiscriminately.  I know they will kill thousands of children, but, please, go ahead.  Rumble your tanks through the ruins created by your ethnic cleansing.”

 

I didn’t want to write this.  Evil is hard to face.  But we ought to, regardless.  I understand people are selfish, so I ask you this:  Do you want to survive?  Do you want your children to survive?  Fascist dictators seek war.  Putin  did.  Netanyahu did.  Such evil could easily spark WWIII.  Remember how WWI started:  an assassin's bullet.  That was all it took.  

 

Nationalism and hate are on the rise, taking the world to the brink of doom.  There is Xi in China, Modi in India, Kim Jong Un in North Korea, and many more.  If Trump wins in 2024, the USA will become fascist.  

And so, it is quite simple.  Do you want to survive?  Do you want your children to survive?  If so, stand up to fascism.  Civilization will not survive malignant narcissistic tyrants who use their armies to expand their egos.  Nuclear weapons will be launched. 

The poet I mentioned in the first sentence of this essay is Refaat Alareer.  The last poem he wrote before he died was, “If I Die.”  He was killed in a targeted Israeli airstrike that also killed several members of his family:

https://lithub.com/watch-brian-cox-read-if-i-must-die-by-murdered-palestinian-poet-refaat-alareer/

 

 

==========================================================


Footnote

 (1) https://www.cnn.com/gaza-israel-big-bombs/index.html

 (2) http://owlwholaughs.blogspot.com/2023/11/op-ed-trillions-of-happy-humans-its.html




=====================================






1/23/24 ...typo edits


12/26/23 ... more streamlined, better writing ... 


12/25/23 ... smoothed the writing a little




12/24/23 ...


[Although this essay needs editing, I wanted to get it posted before Christmas.  I'll edit it more soon.  On Christmas, I want to celebrate the joyous side of life.  I feel, however, that we need to face the dark side of life just as fully.  "That which we do not bring into consciousness appears in our lives as fate."]

Saturday, December 23, 2023

Poem: Her Body Becomes the World

 

Her Body Becomes the World

 

she’s branching,

each shoot a seed

birthing arabesques.

 

her flesh is her paint,

and she draws a mandala

florid and noble,

 

a kaleidoscopic eye

whose triangles are thorns

and ziggurats and yonis.

 

she’s been this way

ever since time

circled and clasped itself,

forming a web.

 

future raveled around past,

she’s unlikely to leave

the garden of her wounds,

 

or the blossoms

swarming her seams.

 

she watches

as they procreate and riot,

sustaining her spidery heart,

her uplifted wings.




=================

Friday, December 22, 2023

Poem: Black Window

 

Black Window

 

townsfolk 

pass through the crosshairs,

the fourfold of the panes that form a cross,

delicate thin white bones.

 

marble on a grave

could be this devoid,

a surface that cries,

too smooth to have a throat

 

and therefore silent,

inky yet wordless.  soundless.

no sense in its watery evasion,

scared as a cuttlefish.

 

the townsfolk keep on,

treading through the crosshairs,

over and over,

halloaing and halloaing.

 

they teem numb as zeros,

kind in the center of the squares,

so different from what goes on in the corners,

such hints of the morose.




=============










2/24/24 ... changed a word

1/28/24 ... more mods

1/1/24  "the morose" replaces "morose"

12/23/23 ... removed "maybe" before "marble ..." 











We should be kind.  But half as kind as we are now, for it fosters complacency, and twice as alert to the danger of the fascism that is about to take over.  Unless people stop using a kindness mask to hide.  

Wednesday, December 13, 2023

No poems for a while

 I won't be able to write poems for a while.  I am grading papers.  However, I have been editing poems already on the blog.   I've edited about a dozen in the last few days, usually ones that received some outside attention (I can see when a poem has been 'clicked on' in the stats section).   One poem I edited is "Wary Forest."  I can't remember the others.  I'm very tired mentally and still on crutches.   I think I can get better health insurance through the State next year.  This year, I had terrible insurance.  Even a few x-rays cost me $700.  It's an insane amount.  For some people in the world, that's all they make in a year.   I certainly can't afford that expense level, so I continue to hobble around on crutches.

Thanks to all who read the poems,

OWL


======================================

Saturday, December 9, 2023

Poem: Deer Season

 

Deer Season

 

gunfire,

prelude to a last heartbeat,

belches as i clutch zinc moss,

praying to a pale atmosphere,

such floating ribs.

 

maybe the gunfire

thumping my cochlea

won't know me from a trunk.

best not to be a mammal,

rather a cipher of xylem.

 

fleet wind

sprays the spruce with hissed jazz,

so they shimmy and wiggle,

a gleeful coniferous tribe,

unfazed by yet another ‘deer season’

in lawless 'washington county.'

 

================================================



 












12/24/23 ... "such" replaces longer phrase ... 





My brother's birthday.  He would've been 54, a far better person than me.  At least he and my father didn't live to see democracy so in peril, withering around the world, as well as here in the US.  They both believed in democracy, that it could improve and spread.  

I, too, believe it can.  Though the odds are vitiated by the rise of fascism.   Humanity, it seems, has learned little from WWII.  Abuse and Fear continue to pinion the wings of fairness, equality, compassion, and dignity.  

Fascists view the world as primarily an ugly, shallow place, and see little value in human life.  Corrupt generals shovel untrained soldiers like coal to die in heaps on the battlefield.  Money and power are the goal.  A facade of beauty is the best one can achieve.  

I think, though, that a longer life, living this way, even if you can manage it, is of less wealth than a shorter life lived as an honest person who sees fascism for what it is--the maintenance of a human ant colony held together by fear, corruption, prejudice, hierarchy, fanaticism and violence--and who does what they can to avoid becoming such an ant.

Thursday, December 7, 2023

Poem: Black Rock

 

Black Rock

 

crushed by tectonic jaws,

a chunk of prehistoric sludge

huddles in a molecular sty.

 

some kiln of ooze

etched the slaughered rhomboid

with its epitaph,

 

tile of the underworld,

stygian prism,

vestige of natal thrash--

 

when volcanoes puled

and lightning tottered,

and the blackness crept,

 

still malleable then,

quaking under the tantrums

of a brutal destiny.




===========================================







1/28/24 mods

Tuesday, December 5, 2023

Poem: Baby Picture

 

Baby Picture

 

am blonde,

have a cute smile,

none of these scars,

 

no hint of the white

which took over my scalp

at age sixteen.

 

quite a youngster there,

ready for quantum mechanics,

love,

japanese,

 

anything, really,

 

maybe because money hadn't been found me yet,

or creases of pain,

or politics or god.

 

yes,

 

a drop of light in those eyes,

so big and round and clear,

could soothe the world 

with a ripple of peace.

 

 

 

=============================







1/28/24 mods

Sunday, December 3, 2023

Poem: Slain

 

Slain

 

the edge of time is a cut.

it bleeds not into the future,

but the hungry past.

 

the best we can hope for

is the rarest sort of beautiful virtue,

kindness from a tiger,

 

or a worker ant.

 

photographs are slices

which, more often than not, force us back;

and then sometimes

you can just make out the telescoping jaws,


and how,

 

piece by piece,

we are fed to this pursuer,

history’s long inescapable throat,


and yet somehow


we get heavier as we go,

all too aware our flesh will be slain.

 

one chance is all we get,

a single moment, at last,

to look back into the eyes of the childlike monster

that hunted us down, all the while.




===========================












1/28//24 some mods

12/4/23 ... fixed typo


I've been going back and editing poems from '22 and other years.  I think some are better.  I hope.

 

Wednesday, November 29, 2023

Regarding the Poems

 I have tried to go back and fix some of the poems.  Most of them seem to need work every time I visit them.  And so I face the limits of what I am and can be.  There comes a time when it is only you and the broad canvas of your life.  What then, knowing the portrait isn't what you expected to paint?

Monday, November 27, 2023

Poem: Present Past

 

 

Present Past

 

a spell

called from a fragment of mirror

thorough time had long destroyed.

 

and yet a single shard

could subsume the world,

perform it with no sound

as fulgent as an opera.

 

such resurrection, how joyous,

even if breathed for only a while,

the past no longer a snaky highway of clocks.

 

a scent of tangerine,

a childhood meadowlark,

frissons from a strum of lost love-making,

redolent as a sonata.

 

here i am, there i was,

free of dilapidation, embodied in bliss.

here i am, there i was,

dwarfing the present.

this frail, swept place.

 

=================================














Having finished the latest draft of my first novel, and finding myself unable to work on the second novel, I turn to poetry.

Sunday, November 26, 2023

Alicia Menendez interview with poet Jung Pueblo

Advanced Psychology/Advanced Ethics


The link below leads to an interview with poet Jung Pueblo (it starts at 15:25).

 In a recent blog post, I argued that ethics is a kind of technology [1].  The poet Jung Pueblo demonstrates, through his own self-disclosures, that facing our emotions is essential to ethical advance.  He says, furthermore, that we have knowledge today that societies didn't have access to in the past.   This new knowledge--therapeutic ways to heal and become more aware--gives Pueblo hope for the future of humanity.  He explores these ideas poetically in his new book, The Way Forward.

This is a Dark time.  A time when humanity could completely destroy itself.  But this is also a time when Light can break through, like never before.  

Addressing Pueblo's insights in my own jargon:  advancing our level of psych tech advances our ethics tech.  The disciplines of psychology and ethics intertwine.  

By calling both psych and ethics 'technologies'--mental tools, systems of fine-tuned ideas developed over generations and eras--I hope to emphasize and clarify that it is plausible for society to evolve closer  to the Good.  Improved psych and ethics tools lead the way.  

Pueblo's interview is a glmpse of an inspiring, healing journey: 


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wOL9r2ZJ7I


(interview starts at 15:25)



(1) Ethics as tech, discussed in this blog:

http://owlwholaughs.blogspot.com/2023/11/op-ed-trillions-of-happy-humans-its.html



======================



Saturday, November 25, 2023

Poem: Deeper

 

Deeper

 

i sink deeper,

eager for layers and shelves of stashed fondness

to tug my embrace.

 

i sink past a whale

so barnacled it seems petrified,

past tigerfish quills, fearsome with rage,

and manta rays, cloaked and judicious,

lording over gyres of doomed grunion.

 

i sink toward bold, beautiful, lost shapes,

heroic, truthful, sexual,

far now under yellowgreen venetian slits,

and the diffracted, baffled bliss of the sun,

that coral chrysanthemum.

 

a different garden waits down below,

ripe of banishment, vibrant with love songs,

a teeming, ghost-adored depth.

no kraken except heartache.

 

will i be safe there

to plunder glints of drizzled treasure

fled from the hunger above,

the frenzied youth of sharp teeth?




==================================================








1/28/24 ... mods


12/12/23  "lording" replaces  "who lord"

Thursday, November 23, 2023

Op-ed: Trillions of Happy Humans? It's doable

 Trillions of Happy Humans?  It's doable.


In the future, there could be trillions of humans, far happier, healthier and more aware than we are today, spread throughout the galaxy.  The prospect is not all that inconceivable, and it rests on two simple premises.  First, that technology will be able to support it.  Second, that governments will be able to implement more sophisticated ethical systems. 

In terms of the first premise, concerning technology, the advances continue to astound us.  Given the accelerating reach of tech,  the bottleneck seems to be the second premise.  The question, then, is this:  does ‘human nature’ keep us from ethical progress?   Is it possible, at all, for a government to implement an advanced ethical system, the sort that could optimize human flourishing?

Try to imagine the impossible:  What if instead of greed (capitalism) or power lust (fascism) the primary focus of society became something truly good, such as optimized human and planetary health?

Is this even possible?

I’ve argued that ethics itself is a technology, a system of mental tools and ideas, capable of advanced forms, similar to other kinds of tech (1).  In this sense, ethics has already come quite far.  

An example is the codification of human rights, staring around the 18th century.  One instantiation of this is the improved political status of women, including the ability to vote and attain highest offices.  We tend to forget that this is a vast change.  Preceding it were thousands of years of oppression.  The presence of universal suffrage shows that human nature is not an immoveable wall.  It does not stop culture, and thereby human behavior, from transformative leaps.

What, then, keeps ethical progress from happening?   It isn’t simply ‘human nature.’  It is, instead, a type of acculturation, which I call an “ignorance vortex.”  An ignorance vortex is a closed idea system, reinforced in a feedback loop, that transmits from generation to generation.  It also has the ability to strengthen and spread.

By “closed” I mean that the idea system is capable of reinforcing itself over long periods of time, beyond the power of rational challenge.  It is immune to reason.  The result is a social doldrums in which prejudice reigns.

A basic example of an ignorance vortex is Western Catholicism in conjunction with medieval nation states.  Patriarchal beliefs were inculcated to induce fanatic worship, including rituals to transmit the beliefs to the next generation.  The effect on the brain is huge, including:  repression (walls in the mind), delusion (lying to oneself about reality), cathexis (embolic fear and hate), and malformed cognitive filters (confirmation bias).

Basically, people get  ‘programmed’ to think and behave in ways acceptable to corrupt leaders, whose goal is self-aggrandizement.  Like a computer virus, the program is ready to infect new minds exposed to it.  The hyper-malleable mind of a child would be especially susceptible.

And yet, despite the human propensity to get trapped in ignorance, we’ve made progress in the last few hundred years.  In an heroic surge, our ethics tech has managed to ride social movements on waves of rational perception.   Equality.  Gay marriage.  Earth awareness.

This should be happy news.  We can challenge the ignorance vortex.  And if we completely escape it, we can advance ad astra.  To the stars!

And yet somehow, the idea that humanity can achieve happiness and peace is completely alien to the 21st century mind.  What’s going on?

Escaping our ignorance vortex, similar to an actual whirlpool, is a layer-by-layer process.  If you’re near the center, you have to escape multiple swirls of current. 

And so, despite great strides, we are still mired in unspeakable prejudice, violence, ignorance, and greed.  “War is hell,” and we continue, in effect, to worship war and its warlords, as we have ever since the time of ancient Sumer.  Sexism, racism, and other 'isms' rage on.

It is a depressing state of affairs, but not necessarily damning.  The problem is not that human nature makes progress impossible; it does, however, saddle us with negative tendencies.   

One of those tendencies can be expressed in the following principle:  without specialized education, many people tend to fall in line behind the worst possible leaders.  What I’m referring to is the power of charismatic tyrants to herd people into fanatic, loyal blindness.  (It doesn’t help that such tyrants do everything they can to maintain the ignorance vortex (2)).

In a future of trillions of happy humans, spotting tyrants, narcissists and demagogues will be sewn into the fabric of the culture, as much as certain religions are sewn in today.    

Let me address another dangerous propensity of human nature.  Maybe the strongest objection to the claim that we can advance our ethics tech comes from cynicism.  We humans will throw others under the bus, so this line of argument goes, to help ourselves and those we (selfishly) love get ahead.

Cynicism has been debated since the ancient Greeks.  One problem with the view that we’re all selfish is that the label then loses meaning.  If it applies to everyone, it is incapable of distinction.  Another problem is that it is not a falsifiable theory.  No matter how unselfish a certain person may look, the cynic can always say, "Well, they are selfish down below." 

Cynicism is a common presence in movies, though curiously it is usually reserved for the villain.  Here are some bits from the movie Shutter Island, written by Laeta Kalogridis:


Warden: … God loves violence.

Teddy Daniels: I... I hadn't noticed.

Warden: Sure you have. Why else would there be so much of it? It's in us. It's what we are. We wage war, we burn sacrifices, and pillage and plunder and tear at the flesh of our brothers. And why? Because God gave us violence to wage in his honor.

Teddy Daniels: I thought God gave us moral order.

Warden: There's no moral order as pure as this storm. There's no moral order at all. There's just this: can my violence conquer yours?


Another cynical argument is that human monstrosity is brought to the surface in harsh conditions:


Warden: You're as violent as they come [spoken to Teddy Daniels]. I know this, because I'm as violent as they come. If the constraints of society were lifted, and I was all that stood between you and a meal, you would crack my skull with a rock and eat my meaty parts. Wouldn't you?


In the first excerpt, there are two arguments.  A religious one and an empirical one .  The latter points out that violence has always been integral to human life.  However, both of these arguments can be countered with the concept of the ignorance vortex.  Unhealthy patterns repeat, not because they are inevitable, but rather because of unhealthy acculturation.  

Change the culture, change the behavior.

In the second excerpt, the argument is that humans act in monstrous ways, when it comes down to basic survival.  We will murder, if necessary, to feed our family.  Fundamentally, we’re all thugs.

For the purposes of argument, I am simply willing to grant the premise.  When starving, and if required, many people will murder others to feed their families.

But what does this prove?  Only that when we are pushed to physiological extremes, and backed into a specific contextual corner, we snap.  However, a question rarely asked in the movies is this:  how would humans act toward each other if society made them secure in their basic needs?  No worries about food, no worries about shelter.  Universal basic income.  Free education and healthcare, including mental healthcare.  

In this scenario, I am inclined to predict a tremendous amount of cooperation, fellowship, and kindness.  If you beat an animal it gets violent.  If you treat it well, you create a positive relationship.  

Kindness, too, can create feedback loops that reinforce the kindness.    

Indeed, today’s therapists and psychologists have access to in-depth knowledge of techniques that foster “emotional competence”--skills at recognizing and working with one’s emotions.  What if everyone learned these skills as part of their basic upbringing, built into the culture?

Compare that to our upbringing today.  Violent rolemodels are the norm, at least for boys, who simultaneously are taught to divorce themselves from their tender emotions.

If trillions of humans do someday exist across the galaxy, it will only be because we succeeded in advancing our ethics tech.  The ethics tech we have today is primitive and fatal.  Machismo and violence will lead to World War III, which will be the end of us.

However, if the trillions of happy humans come to be, they will be grateful to us for somehow making it through this dismal, barbaric time.  Their lives, after all, will be wonderful.  They might also shake their heads at our stupidity, our backwardness, and our folly, all the misery we inflict on each other and ourselves, including the worst of atrocities and genocide. 


=========


(1) http://owlwholaughs.blogspot.com/2023/10/op-ed.html

(2) https://owlwholaughs.blogspot.com/2017/04/ignorance-as-capital.html


=================











This piece needs editing, but I wanted to get it up on Thanksgiving.   Given its length, I will probably edit it slowly over a number of days or weeks.  Thanks for reading.

Wednesday, November 22, 2023

Poem: Sudden Rain

 

Sudden Rain

 

mountainous clouds

tumble to shove dunes

of half-alive water,

uncertain with odd creatures

who crash to stampede in the flux.

 

only slowly,

as grievous as a phantom,

does color leach through the scene,

mad bottle-cap eyes

to punctuate the drab flotsam.

 

a pair of galoshes tromps through,

unaware of their lucky partnership.

while they work in tandem,

the great grey purgatory

bears their splash, on and on,

 

until gutters hiss and snarl downward,

cowed into rustling silence,

far away from such emotional

and sentient blows.





=======================================








1/28/24 ... mods

12/30/23 ... significant bunch of mods






 


 

 

Some arthritic effect in the front of the foot, damaged tendon/muscle in the back.  The only way to escape the pain is to write, play chess or computer games, or talk to other people.  Otherwise, I talk to myself and the pain is in the dialogue a lot.  "Here is life on planet Earth in all its travail and glory."


Saturday, November 18, 2023

Poem: Night Music

Night Music

 

pantomime of mist,

fey with drama,

woven into the moon’s clef,


and a cricket chirr below,

fervent of metronome,

basoon of owl,


soft viola of boughs,

breeze-grazed spruce,

prestidigitators of purl,


till dawn’s still trumpet.

 

============================








1/28/24 mods









Someone gave a sermon on Sunday, and in that sermon self-disclosued that he was angry at God.  Why?  For creating humans.  But, boldy, he went on, this is something to try to work with or through to seek Good.

Thursday, November 16, 2023

Poem: Gazing

 

Gazing

 

he was as tired as the almost-lost.

others said it too, but it was hard

to tell the suicidal from the whiners.

 

what was the point of talk, anyway?

to dampen the thrill and wonder?

to prove that everyone was small?

 

his sensitive voice leaned swift,

carried on unauthorized wings,

to swerve past the i’m-fine-and-you,

 

scorned by the bell curves in its flight,

those judgemental poles

lodged stolid in a social swamp.

 

and the reptile of that ruck,

it was hungry and stubborn,

 enough to start unwinnable wars.

 

people were far better, higher, 

if you could find them alone, 

gazing at the crystal ball

 

inside their tears.






===================================================





1/28/24 ... mods


1/1/24 "Reptile" replaces "reptile"

11/16  ... "scorned" replaces "labeled" ... fixed typo ... 

Sunday, November 12, 2023

Poem: Killing a Fly

 

 

Killing a Fly

 

the flyswatter a rod

over a squiggly bit of fuzz,

 

a merge of ballet and speed

into precise, superior force,

 

plus a quantum of delight,

bliss beyond the swat.

 

why did the fly

on its patio of vertical sun,

 

seem to nod,

and look so feisty?

 

as if the eons

leading to its final moment

 

meant something?

 

i too felt the chain of phylogeny

yank to delve past reptiles,

 

even beyond algae,


back to a pond of pregnant ooze,

when death first became.




===========================================





11/12/23 ... changed some prepositions for flow and understanding




Grading lots of papers, exhausted, ... 

Monday, November 6, 2023

Poem: Going Back

 

Going Back

 

into myself,

such fearful webs

and yet my wingless plummet

swerves from them, 


down

 

past decades of tv shows,

the  idiot jingles,

past cruel histories

in prejudiced textbooks,

past evolved monkeys,

past horns locking in fights to mate,

past plants that strangle each other

for a patch of sunshine,


down

 

past shreds of lovers

falling slower than me;

past solar systems of pain

which circle in predictable ways,

 

down into a molten womb

a womb uncertain whether to give birth

or to prevent so much misery

forever.

 

 

==============================================

 






1/28/24

A Psychedlic Collage (quote from Peter Wehner, NYT op-ed)

 Quote from an op-ed by Peter Wehner:

Many of those on the right, dependent on the web of lies and the nihilism, have twisted themselves into knots in order to justify their behavior not just to others but also to themselves. It’s too painful for them to acknowledge the destructive movement that they have become part of or to acknowledge that it is no longer by any means clear who is leading whom. So they have persuaded themselves that there is no other option but to support a Trump-led Republican Party, even one that is lawless and depraved, because the Democratic Party is, for them, an unthinkable alternative. The result is that they have been sucked, cognitively and psychologically, into their own alternative reality, a psychedelic collage made up of what Kellyanne Conway, a former counselor to Mr. Trump, famously called “alternative facts.”


https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/06/opinion/trump-allan-bloom-republicans.html


================ 

Friday, November 3, 2023

Poem: Garden Statue

 

Garden Statue

 

icicle fangs

over frost-jewelled wings

enshadowed by cold.

 

this costumed stone,

how long and pearly of teardrop

to cry ice? 

 

or does it loaf,

lathered in late-winter suds,

a sybarite who bathes,

angel turned dragon?

 

soon, though, robins will perch,

bold as apples

when the sun fletches a shaft

to strike.

 

===============================








1/28/24 ... mods


statue of an angel, ice gives it fangs and so on










Tuesday, October 31, 2023

Poem: What Of It

 

What Of It

 

to ask was not to see.

questions couldn’t polish the mirror clear.

they fell speck-like, instead,

to feed dunes of cries, loves, and stings,

a desert of dramas and urges

which had incarcerated all life, 

back to the very first plankton 

warmed by a nipple of sun.

 

every human died as fully as a beetle,

forgotten in the distance

as the shedding snake of life slithered on.

even gods, who endured a barrage of tests,

crumbled through their statuesque hearts.

 

it might have been acceptable,

except to hope was not to have.

to know was not to be free.

and justice existed to taunt.


the cruel continuous Gamble,

nothing could compensate for it,

not even joy that had no ceiling,

for fear had no floor.

 



==================================================












11/4/23 ... shortened the last sentence to remove unnecessary phrase














In philosophy, this poem would play into the "argument from evil."  It's a despairing poem.  But I see these poems as a part of a larger dialogue of truth and goodness.  That said, poems like these, similar to death, need to be taken seriously.   Why?  Because you and I, all of us, are in purgatory and, in this brutal, beautiful place, nothing is settled and everything is at stake.  Happy Halloween.

Sunday, October 29, 2023

Poem: Online Lover

 

Online Lover

 

the lack

of the ever-after that i faced was strong,

docile yet ruthless,

pregnable though nebulous,

spade of deep holes,

a stereotype of a Tarot face.


to dig in creases and flexes

of luminous facial features;

to unearth kernels of kindness and warmth,

and yet still find no truth;

to ride a wolf that becomes a shark,

as it plunges into primal meat,

and still not find an heroic bone . . .  

 

no matter how careful and tender,

i could not love the glittery script,

these ending propped with fearful hope

far too plastic.


so many calculative toads,

bubbling up through algorthims of prince and princess.

it meant that any first kiss, no matter how magical,

granted no ever-after at all.






==================================================

 

 







1/28/ 24   ... mods 



10/30 ... Removed a word  .. changed title to "Online Lover" from "AI Lover"

Friday, October 27, 2023

Poem: Finch In Drizzle

 

Finch In Drizzle

 

in the damp

of musty-moisty spruce,

smaller than the palm

of a lost child,

 

a lonesome chirp

slips from a podium of veiny branches

in flexible mist.

 

so lovely, this chrip

a high call and yet so sad,

needing a romeo for its juliet.

 

the only sound in a forest so dreary. 

yes, the only sound, tender to resonate,

as a balm.



===========================

Monday, October 23, 2023

Poem: Diptych

 

Diptych

 

once, owls fluttered as moths,

a coo and dance with bats,

thick over cougared foothills,

the colors of grapes and limes in their eyes.


cricket accompanists

orchestrated coyotes

who yowled young fugues,

sunset in the embers of their prophesy.

 

now, only one owl,

henry-the-eighth chest,

disdainful of human advances,

fluid in its castle of branches,

this duke of somber forest,

somewhere up a sawmilled trail

sapphire with smoggy fragments,

canopied to hide.




============================







1/28/24  ... mods

....   "sawmilled" replaces "sawed"  

 

Saturday, October 21, 2023

Poem: Leaf In Ice

 

Leaf In Ice

 

miniature mammoth,

gashed by a small, giant wound,

 this leaf in ice

archived in a barren field,

a place where hurt and predators

don’t matter.

 

it would take an axe

to chop the false fossil out,

to disprove the fantasy

of its adamantine cocoon;

 

and for me to remember

that the glaze of January is only a mirror

in which certain people, like myself,

choose to see fey creatures. 


sadly,

 

decaying foliage,

or forlorn bits of trash,

clasped by January ice,

these they are not specters

lucky to find their way home.


yes,

 

it would take a mental hammer

to free what the cold made fanciful.

April, though, will unleash it all,

liquefy whatever anchor, or genie bottle,

my eye chose to associate with magic:

 

‘a mammoth in a leaf!’




=======================================================







1/28/24


"There are times when dreams sustain us more than facts"




Monday, October 16, 2023

Poem: Stare

 

Stare

 

obsessed with what i cannot be,

stretched into reflections that extend to the next,

so small and dimmer, dimmer so small,

farther from the light. 

 

up front they dazzle, curves and twists,

glimpses of possible coins and flourishes, 

this fancy dance that people praise,

sunlight tripping on a surface.

 

yet it shatters into sobs,

sharp enough to reach the core,

the very pith of the sun of myself,

all these broken pieces of me.


i wish i could arrange them,

straighten the winding spirals of paths,

forge a bridge over the murky depths,

to reap treasures of glittering infinity--


no getting lost, no false dreams,

or sinking below the surface,

to reach what i am.



=======================================







12/29/23 ... some key changes, a few words

10/22 ... fixed typos

10/18  "coins" replaces "coin"

10/17 ... lots and lots of mods, new poem basically


Inspired by opposing two mirrors.


... 

Job cut back, still on crutches, not sure how to pay for heat and stuff in January

Friday, October 13, 2023

Poem: Dogpaddlers

 

 

Dogpaddlers

 

dogpaddlers in a sea of cellphones,

dollar bills as eager as mosquitoes,

 

what a vulnerable underbelly,

this braggart stress of confidence.

 

how we chain the short term gain

to the long term zero

with the interest rate of our souls,

 

how we push the illlusion fast

over an abyss of urges

below the brainstorm of our complicity,

 

a fatalism so toothy,

so cruel and voracious,

it becomes inconceivable.




==============================================









1/29/24 mods


10/13 ... big changes to last stanza... "dogpaddlers" replaces "dogpaddling"