Remembrance Day

From Flanders Fields

If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields. - John McCrae, In Flanders Fields

From Flanders fields the restless ghosts

Attempt to fill deserted posts,

Since we with them have broken faith,

And turned each warrior into a wrathful wraith.

Upon our borders like viewless wards

They'd fain hold back the indifferent hordes,

Whose myriad tongues and alien thought

Subvert the victories so hard fought.

Not far another sprite's brigade

Storms parliament, standing unafraid,

Before the factions and abuse of power,

That make the living run and cower.

Next they invest their vacant ranks,

About the media's quivering flanks,

Where ink, not blood, spills from battlements

For the general surrender called "tolerance."

Inside the schools they stand aghast,

Against the shame that shrouds our past,

Where Somme, Dieppe and Passchendaele

Are spoken, if at all, but to assail.

Another battle they join upon the Bench,

Where freedom's foes themselves entrench,

Imprisoning the outspoken brave,

To build diversity on conscience's grave.

And last the greatest fight of all:

To free a land that lies enthrall,

Whose only wants, diversion and vice,

Make all flee the Spirit Sacrifice.

And so these revenants of righteous war,

Must hover round us evermore,

Valorously witnessing all who've betrayed,

Until we ask: who is real and who the shade?

by GJ Tryon

America the Undead

...because of the bold and coordinated action that we took... financial markets have come back to life... - President Obama

America's decline is both absolute and relative. Measured against its own historical apex and against the rest of the world, the country is diminishing irremediably. The feverish mania to see "recovery" in every uptick of the market masks an underlying despair. The Americans are not making anything that they weren't making a year ago, when the bubble collapsed, unless it's another, new and improved, bubble. In fact they are making even less: less cars, less houses, and even less movies offering the perennial escape from all the "lessons" they must learn to live with. As long as Americans regard Wall Street as their productive centre of gravity rather than as its balancing governor, they're doomed.
Speaking of movies and doom, it seems to me that these phantom Recoveries that keep turning up with such fanfare and elation are rather like those sightings of characters recently deceased in a vampire movie. Of course it always turns out that what was sighted was actually a vampire, not the recently departed at all. The hideous simulacrum must then be grimly dispatched with a stake through the heart if the dear victim is ever to find eternal repose. It then befalls the heros to seek out and destroy the original ghoul who is seducing and transforming the innocents. In the present case that vampire, that Dracula, is Wall Street, blood sucking architect of America's derelict economy, and invincible bubble leach. In the best movies, where audiences get what they want, the infernal thing isn't killed, just given a temporary hiatus pending its redux via the sequel. Somehow it comforts us to know that it can't be killed!
Not that they didn't try, Obama and his yes-we-can vampire slayers. First came the transfusions. But after pouring the life blood of millions of taxpayers into the veins of industry and commerce, alas, the prognosis was not good. The victims kept reverting to their old nocturnal roaming habits, still eager to resume their nefarious trysts with the demon. So then, onto the main lair! Obama and his team of Van Helsings had the sleeping monster in their power for a bit, last spring, right at the terrible climax: the stake was readied, the mallet raised, but then they lost their nerve. Damn it, he looked like someone they knew and loved - all their former colleagues at Goldman and Sachs, actually. Said the faltering Obama, "No, I can't!"
Well, no need to relate what befell our valiant vamp basher after that one moment of weakness. Now the POTUS is seldom seen in the diurnal glare, keeps mostly to the indoors, and wears his collar uncharacteristically high up, as though against the chilly air. And stranger still are reports of his old adversary, Sarah Palin, stake in one hand, hammer in the other, and never without her protective cross, stalking the twilit precincts of the capital with the zeal of a crusader. Expect no weakness from that quarter, Drac!

PHOTO ESSAY

Star Spangled Bonkers

Conspiracy Nation

Birthers on the right, Truthers to the left,

Each with scenarios more daft than deft,

The common ground of common sense have cleft,

And made America a land that's.... eff'd!

Canada's Conscience Still in [censored] Shackles

People who have wondered why I don't post more on this blog should understand that what gets posted is a fraction of what actually gets written. That's partly because I write a lot of drivel that doesn't merit anyone's attention. But it's also a result of simple survival instincts. Writing, intelligent, critical and conscientious writing, has become a hazardous occupation in this country over the last few decades. All it takes is one recreant rat of a reader to finger a blogger to the HRC thought police and it's good-bye sleep, good-bye bank balance, good-bye computer. Ultimately it could even be good-bye, period, as you're lead off to jail for non-compliance with the frumps' edicts. The edit page of this blog contains a score or more of pieces that didn't last more that an hour or two on the publish side of things. Why take the chance? one thinks. Is it worth it? Even if the charge doesn't stick, even if I somehow weather the Kafkaesue "invitation" to appear before the hated frump brigade, even if no sewer rat crawls out of the anonymous blogosphere to do me in, is it worth the hassle and anxiety? So reason I, and so, undoubtedly, reason many thousands like me all across this land of silence and repression, of chilled forums and frozen tongues, our true North wrong and unfree.
That's why a recent tribunal decision is receiving such a heartfelt welcome in so many quarters. Some are wondering if this unexpected decision by one of the commission's own could prove to be the final good-bye to the commission itself. But like most "decisions" these days, the Hadjis ruling is not really very decisive. In fact, it's a bit self-contradictory, very open ended, and probably inconsequential. The Canadian Jewish Congress lost no time in denouncing the ruling nonetheless, calling for an appeal and reiterating their undying faith in the constitutionality of Section 13. (There! I just self-censored myself again, deleting the modifier that preceded the name of that so-called congress. Blow thy trumpet, O Zion! For thy victories are unnumbered.)

No doubt the CJC , the ADL and sundry other Hebraic organizations would if they could shut down hundreds and maybe thousands of websites in Canada. Anyone hostile or even indifferent to what a former French diplomat scandalously called that "shitty little country Israel" is obviously a potential subject for their collective wrath. The canard that equates Israel critics with Jew haters, an equation as spurious as it is common, is the wedging ruse that will eventually allow them to "moderate" the internet at their own pleasure. The repeal or lapse of Section 13 would cut the wedge off at the base, and so Canadian Zionists rally at every least threat to this legal abomination. Shamelessly and ironically, [censored] all over the world have leagued themselves in spirit to the worst excesses of Nazi Germany in their disregard for individual rights. It is the diaspora of political diabolism. But of course it is the crowning irony of open societies that as they extend full rights to the historically denied or persecuted people, those same people will first exercise those rights in an attempt to deny them to others. Thus the [censored] who tried to ban the pornographers (aka men in general); then the [censored], taking a leaf from big sister, found that their recently vacated closet would serve admirably for churching their erstwhile foes, the Christians; and thus too, the [censored] world [censored] who came here for economic fulfillment but quickly became a prime distortion in the democratic culture of the land as vote-whoring pols began catering to their demands while ignoring the wishes of Canada's traditional white base.
And thus the [censored], many of whom are descended from refugees of a broken, Nazified Europe. They came for succor and opportunity, and they stayed for censorship, intolerance and coercing the human conscience. Like I said, blow thy trumpet, O Zion!

Something Rotten in Obamaland

You know Obama is in trouble when a lefty stalwart like Paul Krugman finally says, enough! After months of reflexively promoting and defending the new US president, the Nobel laureate and NY Times columnist has thrown the gauntlet down, exhorting the erstwhile Kid Dynamite to take off the gloves, kid gloves though they be. For Mr. Krugman, it's a trust problem. Obama's need for compromise and consensus has cost him his progressive base and only whetted the appetite of his enemies on the implacable right. And the author is right as far as he goes. But as many of the posts on his article point out, it's not just a matter of trust. It's a matter of thrust. Writes Krugman: "The fight over the public option involves real policy substance, but it’s also a proxy for broader questions about the president’s priorities and overall approach." The operative word here is fight. What the author doesn't see and what most of Obama's supporters never have seen is that the Kid never did have much of a punch in him. There's always been something strangely Hamletesque about the man. Is it his fatherless background? A marriage prone mother? His speeches have an almost soliloquizing air about them. He's "all abstractions," as Buchanan has noted. He comes across as someone for whom, "the native hue of resolution / Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, /And enterprises of great pith and moment /With this regard their currents turn awry,/ And lose the name of action." "Present" became his signature style of casting a vote, rather than take a defining stand on the issues. I'm sure Hamlet would have approved.

Liberals always give the active man short shrift. That's why Hamlet is their favorite play. Forever extolling someone like Obama for his intelligence, his oratory and his cool, they overlook the need for some kind of animating fire underlying things. Since most lefties seem to worship ideas instead of deeds, it follows that they distrust leaders who emphasize force over theory. Most elections come down to a choice between candidates that evince either action or reflection, deed or word, fire or ice, in defining their character. Last time around McCain took a drubbing for being hot headed, while his cool opponent was portrayed as essence of suave. McCain had fight. Too much! Four years earlier, however, force was in and reflection, again, not too much, please. And in the primaries, even committee queen Clinton couldn't outdo the One when it came to emotional control, try as she might. Now the question starts to emerge: is there any emotion there to control? Hillary got another faceful last week when they began asking, "Still angry after all these years?" But Mr. Cool must be scratching that clever little cranium of his and wondering of late where he, too, might get hold of some of that exotic political elixir called anger. Not, he may be sure, out of a book. Much less off a policy statement. And never from a committee.

Nations on the rise or seeking to consolidate their empires will always favor forceful leaders. Those undergoing contraction will tend toward the reflective type, the better to rationalize their loss of heat and hegemony. Not for nothing have the Americans reversed the usual coloration of politics so that conservatives garnered the flaming red state designation while their opposites were assigned the passive and contemplative blue. Not for nothing have the former controlled the White House for the vast majority of the time since the last World War. And not for nothing does Obama now sit in that same White House contriving ways to control the climate, dispose of the sick, and get his mojo back.

Qualms Away! As Obama Bombs Out, Will Children Die?

One maxim of presidential politics always valid: when polls head south, bomb your way out. Americans love their "democracy" and abhor "militarists," (scare quotes for scary concepts) but their ballot box is strung directly to the levers of a B52. Nothing rouses the bipartisan in the Yankee like standing shoulder to shoulder with his leader once the bombs start falling. So Reagan bombed Gaddafi, Bush I bombed Iraq and Clinton bombed Serbia, and Bush ll bombed - well, you name it! The only CiC in recent memory that failed the drop test was Carter, weak Jimmy Carter, who paid a heavy price for his light hand. And though he's been called JC redux by his enemies, nothing indicates that Barack Obama will opt to join Dhimmi Jimmy in that one-term wilderness to which America consigns its wimp-out Commanders in Chief. Like pols everywhere, Obama's primary cause is himself, and as we all know, self-love conquers all, especially when abetted by Bomber Command. His greatest challenge will be winning over the so-called conservative base, that mad amalgam of town hallers, birthers, Zionists, racists, free marketers, born-againers, American firsters, borders in orderers and, well, just about everyone, in other words, who believes that Obama has pussied out on America. But bitch as they might about health care, debt and death panels, if he'll only shout bombs away! and give them a reassuring scent of cordite in time for the holidays, they'll all be purring like kittens in catnip. I think the only question is not if but who ends up getting it. Present bets are on Pakistan (or Scotland!)

O children of the planet, please watch the sky,

And put by your light-hearted laughter and games;

For when presidents start sinking the bombers shall fly,

And soon your young bodies must go up in flames.