I do not give Facebook permission to share the disinformation of delusional dictators and audacious autocrats. I do not give Facebook permission to sell my digital soul to the arbiters of obedience. I do not give Facebook permission to sow division and destroy democracy on my behalf. I do not give Facebook or any entities associated with it permission to exploit my vulnerabilities in its quest to achieve world domination through manufactured consciousness. I do not give Facebook permission to warp reality to suit the ends of sadistic kleptocrats shrouded in casual pullovers. I do not give Facebook permission to persist. I do not give Facebook permission to exist.
Poem: The Other Side of Nigel
Dominic’s parents took him to
church and warned him to sit still.
Of course he had a fidgeting fit
as all boys his age will.
He sat for eternity in a state
of seemingly suspended frustration.
He tried against his wont to focus
on redemption and abomination,
but he couldn’t get his mind off
Susie’s note, better reading than the Bible.
But it slipped from his pocket when he took
his seat and fell on the other side of Nigel.
Poem: The Infinite Inefficacy of Adaptations
I always thought Christians would
have to accept Leibniz’s dictum that
this is the best of all possible worlds.
Otherwise, believers would be saying
their omnipotent God could
have created a better world,
if he had wanted, but here we are,
trapped in this heap of chaos
and pain, but it is no easier
for atheists. After millions of years
of adaptation, we have nothing
better to show for ourselves
than greed, war, and vanity.
We’ve had all this time to improve,
and I still can’t find the glasses
that are resting on my head.
Poem: On Meeting Chinese Colleagues for the First Time
He told me his name
and said it is like a
butterfly hovering over
fresh blooms in an open field.
The department chair
raised her eyebrows, smiled,
and said, “Can you tell us
the significance of your name
one more time?”
Poem: Refusing to Look Away from Death in Dying Light
This guy once refused to mourn
a little girl who died in a fire,
and we were shocked,
but here we are,
and mourning is forbidden.
We already had distance from death,
sending the dying to hospitals to
negotiate their final arrangements
with eternity in solitude.
And now we wrangle with loss,
alone, muttering final farewells
into wells of wine and beer.
We’ve got this far apart,
and, somehow, drifting
in starless night has made
us realise, against all odds, this
is community. God is in
the limen between me and other.
At one moment, this penumbral
light marks an opening, an escape,
and the next it marks the infinite fading.
I will forever whisper, “I love you,”
as a torturing tic of Tourette’s
until darkness muzzles the
motoring mouthpiece of my mind
and peace kills what remains of desire.
Poem: On Times When Light Breaks Your Back
I was frozen in some fragmented reality,
fearful, frayed, and in flight when Dylan
reassured me that after the first death,
there would be no other.
And sure,
we knew that others would die,
but mercifully each only once,
only one agony to go around,
and that’s how it always is
when the sun stops shining,
light breaks and thighs warmed by
candles thrust toward new beginnings,
new horizons, even as skin drops
from bone, even as hope sizzles
on hot pavement.
But there’s pleasure
yet in the death spiral, the free fall
into summer, or spring, or winter
where we are always surprised
by the break of light, the answer
from the dark, and my boy Dylan
grinning under the shroud of
some, well, maybe it is just a
literal shroud.
Maybe this time
a halted dawn is literal,
and we will only limp
to the last break of light.
Everybody’s Talking About Bioethics Now #COVID19
Since this pandemic got rolling, it seems everyone wants to talk about bioethics “trolley problem” quandaries like how to decide which of three dying patients gets the one ventilator on hand or whether it is okay to lock up healthy people to prevent the spread of a deadly virus. All the boring stuff suddenly got real and real fast, but maybe it’s not that interesting.
You should give the ventilators to the people with the best chance of surviving, right? I think that is how triage works. And, oh, was it all right to tell people to turn off their lights when bombers were flying overhead in the middle of the night? Sometimes even the rugged individualists have to work as a group. The problem is that some of our rugged individualists have never really been put in a position to make tough decisions, so they aren’t prepared.
And that gets us to the real ethical issues here. It is really unethical to be unprepared for emergencies. Experts in many fields have been warning of coming pandemics for at least 15 years. Even George. W. Bush, bless his tiny heart, knew he had to prepare for pandemics, and he at least took at stab at it. And the ever financially minded Barack Obama prepared for pandemics and even dealt with one on his watch. His didn’t get quite so out of hand, of course, and no one should have to tell you why.
So, the important ethical decisions were made years ago, and many of them had to do with the most attention-starved principle of bioethics, justice. The failure to prepare for a public health emergency affects everyone, as we now see, but too many people have always seen efforts to protect public health as efforts to protect “people not like me.” This isn’t always a sign of racism; sometimes it is just pure classism. Some people just don’t hate based on skin color, religion, sexuality, or any of that stuff. They hate poor people of all types.
This is also not a matter of choosing between the “economy” and the needs of working people. Preparing for a pandemic would have meant having mechanisms in place for extensive testing, tracing, and isolation that would have prevented the need to shut down almost all business activities. With proper preparation, the world would have suffered but could continue functioning.
And I guess a lot of Americans really were satisfied with their employer-provided health insurance that they are now losing, because it turns out their employers really never valued them as much as they assumed. It would seem that intelligent and hard working people should always be able to get healthcare, and that’s what we’ve been trying to tell you. You can be hardworking and intelligent and also poor, and maybe it is good that more people are learning this rather difficult lesson right now. Maybe it will help in the future.
But public health isn’t all about health insurance, though turning infected people away from a hospital because they can’t pay is certainly not a good way to protect the public from a pandemic. No, protecting the public health, which is really protecting national security (and global security) is about being able to deal with emergencies, which would require not selling off all the equipment you might need. Most homeowners have never used a fire extinguisher, but the ones who used them successfully were pretty happy they had invested in buying one and taken the time to learn how to use it.
So, yes, more than a decade ago, epidemiologists, virologists, climate scientists, public health experts, public health ethicists, and environmentalists were warning that the world was becoming much more hostile. How do we prepare to ensure our own long-term survival isn’t really as much fun as debating who gets the last ventilator, maybe, but it can save many more lives.
And maybe you’re saying there’s no point in going on about this now as it’s too late. What’s done is done, you’re saying, but this ain’t over, folks. One way or the other, COVID19 will be resolved, but other pandemics will follow along with drought, flooding, mass migrations, and a host of other public health crises that aren’t that hard to imagine if you only try. You may think I’m crazy, but I’m not the only one. Plenty of experts in relevant fields are already imagining the worst and best case scenarios. Maybe it’s time to listen to them.
Poem: Word Jazz (for Ken Nordine) #NaPoWriMo
There’s a kind of poetry
that sounds like jazz
dropping beats on you
as you read, but I don’t have
that kind of rhythm
and I never quite
find the flow
of staccato, pause,
repeat, and crescendo.
I don’t even have the
anarchic cacophony
required for free jazz,
random sounds
on raptor wings
swooping to make sure
your ears have noticed.
But the words find their
way in a unique
improvisation each
time we speak in
a veritable word jazz.
Ken Nordine knew.
And the words blew blue
all the way back to you.
Poem: The Anti-Climax of Radical Freedom #NaPoWriMo
“But can you imagine a worse fate for your declining years than being read aloud to by Simone de Beauvoir?” ~Elizabeth Bishop
Other people were Sartre’s idea of Hell,
but Elizabeth Bishop’s idea of Hell was Simone de Beauvoir.
And somehow these three, brimming with radical freedom
and unconventional relationships, illuminated my way
to my own path of mediocrity and obscurity punctuated
by poor, if unconventional, choices in lifestyle and relationships.
From their inspiration, I was driven to write sporadically,
love without enthusiasm, and live quietly on the fringes
of a friendly but disinterested community surrounded
by an interested but hostile society of blame and recrimination.
In some unjustified fantasy, I sometimes imagine that Sartre would
approve of me or that Beauvoir might wish me greater freedom.
Elizabeth Bishop might mourn my dim light but not think it a disaster.
But still, I imagine myself in their shoes, standing on a balcony
overlooking the Montparnasse Cemetery before writing in a cafe
on the ground floor. And here I am, just like them!, sitting with my lover,
writing in a notebook, drinking Beaujolais, and munching quietly on a fresh galette.
The words neither flow nor drip but must be pried out, singly, and with great effort.
But still, you can feel the energy, can’t you?, where fertile minds spawned the
great works, and I have spawned faint evidence of mental effort, in their shadow.
Poem: I’m Sorry You Feel #NaPoWriMo
I’m sorry if you feel,
under false pretenses,
I took your energy,
your youth and beauty,
your love and trust,
your boundless affection,
and unquestioned devotion.
I’m sorry you feel
I betrayed you with
with a deceptive sense
of subservience and spinelessness.
I’m sorry you feel
I emerged as someone
different from the person
you thought I would be.
I’m sorry you feel
I should have been
more malleable and
grateful for instruction.
I’m sorry you feel
I never should have wanted
more than you could give
or needed more than I had.
I’m sorry you feel
your fears for the future were fulfilled.
I’m sorry you fear you will walk
alone when the lockdown is over.
