toritto's Open Salon Blog

The Messenger - 1967

Wed, 22 May 2013 09:05:10 -0400

Memorial Day is coming........

When your son was killed that Summer night

you were filling up the car.

You didn't know 'till you saw my face

what I already knew.

While you slept your husband died

on a hill outside Dak To.

You had no idea when you awoke

what I already knew.

It was I who was the messenger

in green adorned with gold

who brought the message of his death

ripping out your soul.

It was I who ordered that his friend

escort his body home.

Completed all the paperwork

no wish of yours too small.

Each day the names came in to me

the casualties of war;

for each there was a messenger

to knock upon a door.

No one ever shot at me

those Summers long ago

'cause someone else went in my place

while I stayed safe at home.

The Army in it's wisdom

chose me to bring the dread.

My unit left without me

left behind to serve the dead.

But when I saw your name my friend

I pray that you did know

I'd have gladly died beside you

not to have to tell your mom.

For the New York wives and lovers, mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters to whom I had to bring the news.

1966 -1967

How About We Just Send Our Prayers?

Tue, 21 May 2013 11:05:56 -0400

Oklahoma has suffered another tornado disaster, including apparently significant loss of life, children among them.

We know disaster here in Florida; we haven’t had a major hurricane since 2004 when four monster storms crossed our state leaving folks living in FEMA trailers in their wake.

Speaking of FEMA, Oklahoma’s two GOP Senators, Coburn and Imhofe, have repeatedly voted against FEMA budgets (“wasteful spending”) as well as relief for Hurricane Sandy victims and funding for the National Weather Service.

They usually don’t however vote against disaster relief when their own state needs it.

Oklahoma ranks third in total disaster relief, behind Texas and California. Maybe the rest of us should call it “really wasteful spending”. Maybe the burden should be shifted to the private insurance sector.

The hypocrisy is just astounding. Coburn and Imhofe consider it "wastful spending" when disaster falls elsewhere - but will undoubtedly take the money now, even if it is not "paid for" by reductions elsewhere in the federal budget.

Maybe instead of financial relief for Oklahoma, instead of temporary housing, instead of funding to rebuild, we should simply send our prayers.

Yes, I know that’s mean.

It’s simply to remind Oklahomans that is exactly what their representatives did when the disaster befell others.

Hurricane Sandy - Breezy Point, New York

Tearless the Enemies of Peace

Mon, 20 May 2013 19:05:09 -0400

Memorial Day is coming

Dalton Trumbo with his wife Cleo at the House Unamerican Activities Committee hearings in 1947.

"World War I began like a Summer festival - all billowing skirts and golden epaulets. Millions upon millions cheered from the sidewalks while plumed Imperial Highnesses, Serenities and Field Marshals and other such fools paraded thorugh the capital cities of Europe at the head of their shining legions.

It was a season of generosities, a time for boasts, bands, poems, songs, innocent prayers. It was an August made palpitant and breathless by the pre-nuptial nights of young gentlemen officers and the girls they left permanently behind. One of the Highland regiments went over the top in its first battle behind forty kilted bagpipers skirling away for all they were worth - at machine guns.

Nine million corpses later, when the bands stopped and the Serenities started running, the wail of bagpipes would never again sound quite the same"

Dalton Trumbo - May 25, 1959

"Eleven years later, numbers have dehumanized us. Over breakfast coffee we read of 40,000 American dead in Vietnam. Instead of vomiting, we reach for the toast. Our morning rush through crowded streets is not to crymurder but to hit that trough before somebody gobbles our share.

Do we scream in the night when it touches our dreams? No. We don’t scream because we don’t think about it. We don’t think about it because we don’t care about it. We are more interested in law and order, so that American streets may be made safe while we transform those of Vietnam into flowing sewers of blood which we replenish each year by forcing our sons to choose between a prison cell here or a coffin there. "Every time I look at the flag my eyes fill with tears".

Mine too.

If the dead men mean nothing to us (except on Memorial Day when the national freeway is clotted with surfers, swimmers, skiers, picnickers, campers, hunters, fishers, footballers, beer-busters) what of our 300,000 wounded? Does anyone know where they are? How they feel? How many arms, legs, ears, noses, mouths, faces, penises they’ve lost? How many are deaf or dumb or blind or all three? How many are single or double or triple or quadruple amputees? We don’t know. We don’t ask. We turn away from them".

Dalton Trumbo - January 3, 1970

And so we still send our fine young men to war - our sons who worked in factories, bakeries or the local food market. The rich and mighty point the way to aim the guns - "the slime that rule, that would have one cobbler kill another cobbler.....a man who works kill another man who works....a human being who wants only to live kill another human being who wants only to live.".

We are eleven years at war and there are no demonstrations for peace.

Memorial Day will come and many are looking forward to the sales at the mall and the start of Summer at the shore.

The Veteran’s Administration is years behind in its basic work - to look after veterans.

American soldiers died in Afghanistan this month while the media mentions only our "mission" to "train Afghan forces" which is in a shambles.

No one cares because only "volunteers" have to go. War is fought by other people. Fought by kids from Flint, Michigan or West Virginia with high school diplomas and no prospects; fought by kids whose dads are out of work.

Tearless, the enemies of peace.

Green Cathedral

Sun, 19 May 2013 12:05:11 -0400

Memorial Day is coming............

The son of the Allentown butcher

will lead the way

point man on the sweep today

through God’s heavenly green cathedral

Verdant canopy reaching to heaven

flickering sunlight illuminates

mottled parrots red and blue

on the moss a mantis waits

Her body rises as he kisses her mouth

he knows not where he ends and she begins

Pistol and stamen

intoxicating flower

Why am I here carrying a gun

and not with her

where I would rather be

inhaling her scent?

Tread softly lest I become

a clump of earth.

Will the cathedral know

I have passed this way?

If I do not bleed

and mix my essence with the ground

will my footprint remain

a calling card of our appointment?

This afternoon just before

the twilight of Apollo

I will kill or be killed

by the son of the rice farmer.

Watch the video. It is from a time when "war correspondents" brought you the war.

An excerpt from "Initial Verses - A collection of poems on

Love, loss, Poverty and War."

http://www.amazon.com/Initial-Verses-Collection-Poems-Poverty/dp/1475082681/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1333202962&sr=1-1

Picking Up The Flag

Sat, 18 May 2013 11:05:17 -0400

Yes. I busted my ass for Obama the first time around.

Opened my checkbook, campaigned, knocked on doors. Did everything I could to see that he carried Florida in the Presidential election.

Not easy in a place where Fred Thompson signs were as common as plastic pink flamingos at the time during the primary and right wing nuts carried Soviet flags outside of local Obama campaign headquarters. Where women thought Palin was the essence of true feminism. I had the lone Obama sign on my lawn in a sea of McCain - Palin cardboard.

But I got the last laugh. At least I thought so at the time.

We had elected a Democratic President and controlled the two Houses of Congress. And we carried Florida.

Maybe something would get done.

Maybe universal healthcare. Maybe peace would come. Maybe a society which would leave behind racism. Maybe repeal of the Bush tax giveaways to billionaires. Maybe we would spend money on people rather than aircraft carriers. Maybe we would stop torturing people. Maybe Gitmo would close.

Maybe.

I knew progressives were in trouble when the public option went down without a fight. When the government would not negotiate with drug companies to set the price of drugs under the Medicare prescription drug program. When our war adventures continued. When Gitmo didn’t close. When no one was indicted for torture. When no bankers went to jail. When the assault on civil liberties was embraced and left standing.

What progressives got was precious little. We got ignored. Thank you Dems. Seems like progrssive ideas migrate to the Democratic Party - to die.

And in the mid-term elections of 2010 every candidate I voted for lost. We had two billionaires running for Governor (We have 26 living in Florida) in the GOP primary, one of whom should be sitting in federal prison for Medicare fraud but instead he is now our Governor. The other billionaire candidate simply hung around on his yacht with Lindsay Lohan..

The mid-term election saw much of the same across the nation - a Republican / Tea Party tide. The Dems lost the House. Why were we so surprised at the assault on the middle-class we saw in Wisconsin, Indiana and Ohio?

"Toute nation a le gouvernement qu’elle mérite"

Every country gets the government it deserves.

So true.

So here we are into Obama’s second term with the wheels of government paralyzed by “scandal” - not that the wheels of government were turning anyway. The gerrymandered GOP House recently approved the dismantling of “Obamacare” for the 37th time. Great work. The Senate can’t take a dump without 60 votes - and neither party wants to change the rules.

Five Americans were killed in Afghanistan this week. Did anyone notice but their families?

Gitmo is still open while prisoners are being force fed to end their hunger strike. Gitmo is a CONCENTRATION CAMP. Call it anything you like - but that is what it is.

Our militarized police in Boston give an order to “stay home” and everyone does. If martial law ever comes it will really be easy.

Thousands of Americans are killed each year by other Americans but Congress sees fit to veto legislation requiring a background check at “gun shows”.

The IRS is accused of targeting conservative 401 c (4) organizations; now 401 c (4)s are supposed to be “social welfare” organizations - kind of like volunteer fire departments. They are allowed to take out ads to endorse political positions - but not specific candidates. Yet tens of millions were spent in the last election by both sides to do exactly that. The organizations are fighting tooth and nail because if they lose tax-exempt status they have to disclose their donors. Can’t have that can we?

"The law defines such groups as "civic leagues or organizations not organized for profit but operated exclusively for the promotion of social welfare" notes Lawrence O'Donnell. The IRS has been reading "exclusively" as "primarily" since 1959. This puts the burden on IRS agents as investigators and judges of the level of politcal activity and the inclusion of the words "Tea Party" in the name of your 401 (c) 4 should probably preclude tax exempt status.

Oh well.

The Justice Department is chasing “leaks” which affect “national security” (doesn’t it always?”) and now has the Associated Press up in arms - like there are real investigative journalists anymore anyway. They have mostly been silenced and the few that are left take their futures in their hands when they speak out. Don’t make donations to Wikileaks lest you find your name on a terrorist watch list. If someone leaked the “Pentagon Papers” today they would undoubtedly spend most of the rest of their lives in prison.

We are leaving Afghanistan - except for the 9 military bases we will continue to occupy for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile the Afghan Parliament declined to approve a law guaranteeing women's rights. Seems that a father should be permitted to marry off his daughter at an age much younger than the proposed 16, reducing the number of wives a man can have to two is not in accordance with Sharia and safe houses for abused women beaten by their husbands or brothers are simply immoral houses of prostitution. Right. Eleven years and a trillion dollars of nation building.

Today, this very day, guys armed with automatic weapons and dressed in kevlar could break down your door and whisk you away under Presidential order without public charges, without the right to face your accuser, without the right to trial, habeas corpus or judicial due process - all under the umbrella of "protecting Americans" and fighting future "terrorism". And then they can water board you.

If you happen to be a "suspected terrorist" and US citizen overseas, the President can order you killed without charges, trial or presentation of evidence to the public. Your "due process" will be a meeting in the Oval Office on a Tuesday afternoon over coffee, before the drone takes off.

After Boston, members of Congress stated publically that they had no objection to "enhanced interrogation" of the remaining suspect - i.e torture him for information. Many would support moving him, an American citizen, to Gitmo to be held at the King's pleasure. To hear such statements from Glenn Beck is one thing; to hear it from a Congressman is just, well breathtaking.

Recently here on O/S a number of folks have been accused of being somewhat overwrought and hysterical about the state of our national politic. Ready to throw America under the bus at every opportunity; unwilling to recognize the “good” of America and this administration.

Now let me be fair. In the interest of full disclosure I got mine already. I live comfortably in the sunny South in a gated community on a golf course, got my steady income, my "socialist" medicare and prescription drug coverage that younger people wish they had but will never get. I sent my girls to college and they are successfully out on their own. The world won't run out of gas before I go and the planet won't get too hot.

I no longer march for anything - going on 71 I don’t want to get my head busted. I write mostly my “poetry” and I like to think some of it has “sting”. Writing about the current political scene seems to me a waste of time - but someone has to do it.

Sometimes I think nothing will change unless things get worse. A lot worse.

Call me when they take away your right to organize and bargain collectively. When they defund public education. When the Department of Education and the EPA are abolished. When they do away the minimum wage "to create jobs". When they do away with unemployment insurance to discourage your shiftlessness. When the people imprisoned in Gitmo are dying of old age. When they revoke choice. When they imprison you without charges. When you have to steal to feed your kids.

Old guys like me did Vietnam and won the Cold War. We got medicare, civil rights and voting rights.

It's time for younger people to pick up the torch.

If they want to.

Real change will mean taking it to the streets. Cities had to burn before the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.

I can’t change anything; but there is a difference in knowing you can’t change what is and being blind to what is..........especially when you are not really blind but just find it comfortable to keep your eyes closed.

I see what is - even if I don’t write about it everyday. And I appreciate that others have picked up the flag and do.