Appalachistan

The autumn clouds were like an unmade sheet
tossed across the empty mattress of
the slept-in sky; although it wasn't love
it was love-like enough to beat
back the draft with just-sufficient heat,
an embered fire; on the sill a mourning dove
cooed once; a truck rolled by below; above
a jet growled; across the world a fleet
of buzzing robots like a deadly swarm
of bees deprived of order, purpose, sense,
propellered toward a town much like the town
where I grew up, impoverished, gray, hill-borne,
back-broken, deprived of any future tense,
except that's not the fall rain raining down.

Ender's Game

The Tea Party is racist.  Occupy Wall Street is antisemitic.  Religion is apology for genocide. 

Richard Dawkins is such a twit.  Accusations of genocide apologism are the that's gay of adult politics.  Here you have some nonentity trying to raise his own lantern a little by harrassing a famous atheist into debating him, and the famous atheist accuses him of supporting genocide . . . because of his theological interpretation of a fictional, ahistoric event mentioned in passing in a book of myths and legends.  I mean, does my affection for the Iliad make me an apologist for genocide?   Is there anything lazier than digging through the toybox of religious literature to find the textual inconsistencies and then using them, of all things, as a trump in the eternal debate over the gods of the sky?  The Midrash got there over a thousand years ago, guys.  Jesus Christ, ahem, you can't simultaneously say that the Bible is fake and then castigate a believer for his expalanation of events that didn't actually happen.

Costaguana

I am really enjoying the United States these days.  It has come more and more to resemble the sort of tawdry, ramshackle, sweaty, tumbledown, corrupt Greeneland that it was always destined to be--or that it always was but managed to hide behind a mountain of dollar-menu burger patties and tip-hazard SUVs.  Well, it sort of sucks to live in a decrepit police state, but at least it finally feels a little more like a real country: demonstrators, work stoppages, tent cities, felonious oligarchs helicoptering to-and-fro, private security firms, a hapless and yet still terrifying apparatus of state repression.  A fat cop on the edge of cardiac arrest swinging a knightstick fruitlessly at a dirty kid.  Forever.

The New, um, Black

Occupy Wall Street is anti-Semitic is the new Tea Party is racist!