Read it and weep

CNN has a news piece in their Science & Space section titled Atlas Reveals Global Devastation. Please go and read it. The new atlas has photographs that show the utter devastation humans are wreaking upon the planet. "Page after page of the 300-page book illustrate in before-and-after pictures from space the disfigurement of the face of the planet wrought by human activities."
Additional reporting and photographs can be found on the BBC.

Some Things Never Change: A 50 Year Old Rant

Allen Ginsberg---photo by dread pirate roberts.
grace cathedral, san francisco, summer solstice 1970.
We wanted to celebrate Allen Ginsberg's birthday (b. June 3, 1926 - d. April 5, 1997) by sharing one of his poems. I had been reminded of this particular poem the other day when we were considering whether to participate in the Big Brass Alliance. America was written almost 50 years ago, in 1956, and yet The Beat perspective of that time is still remarkably relevant and cogent. We hope you'll take the time to read this old, beautiful, beat rant.
AMERICA
America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twentyseven cents January
17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I
need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not
the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back
it's sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical
joke?
I'm trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I'm doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday
somebody goes on trial for murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid
I'm not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses
in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there's going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right.
I won't say the Lord's Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle
Max after he came over from Russia.
I'm addressing you.
Are you going to let your emotional life be run by
Time Magazine?
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner
candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It's always telling me about responsibility. Business-
men are serious. Movie producers are serious.
Everybody's serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.
Asia is rising against me.
I haven't got a chinaman's chance.
I'd better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of
marijuana millions of genitals an unpublishable
private literature that goes 1400 miles an hour
and twenty-five-thousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of
underprivileged who live in my flowerpots
under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers
is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that
I'm a Catholic.
America how can I write a holy litany in your silly
mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as
individual as his automobiles more so they're
all different sexes.
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500
down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Com-
munist Cell meetings they sold us garbanzos a
handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the
speeches were free everybody was angelic and
sentimental about the workers it was all so sin-
cere you have no idea what a good thing the
party was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand
old man a real mensch Mother Bloor made me
cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody
must have been a spy.
America you don't really want to go to war.
America it's them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen.
And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power
mad. She wants to take our cars from out our
garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Readers'
Digest. Her wants our auto plants in Siberia.
Him big bureaucracy running our fillingsta-
tions.
That no good. Ugh. Him make Indians learn read.
Him need big black niggers. Hah. Her make us
all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in
the television set.
America is this correct?
I'd better get right down to the job.
It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes
in precision parts factories, I'm nearsighted and
psychopathic anyway.
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

Try this link if you are interested in hearing Ginsberg read Sunflower Sutra. And, click on this link if you are interested in learning more about his life and art.

Fierce Grace

a couple of months ago, in a fit of nostalgia for a time when we felt a surge of optimism for the future of our country and the world, as opposed to our current mood, the bums remembered the book titled "be here now." created by a very modern man who had found the ancient inside of himself, based mainly on hindu philosophy while honoring judeo-christian traditions and indeed all spiritual paths, goofy and sublime at once with its rippling and circular text over evocative line drawings, a worldwide best-seller, it was and is both the story of a man's discovery of self in the world and a book of pages each and every equidistant from beginning or end. aphorism's abound. good ones. you children of the sixties, and maybe you children of those children, you remember it, don't you. blue cover, white print on it, a circle full of straight lines, some white pages with regular text, the big middle of brown pages with wildly varying fonts and geometry.

getting up to speed on the author's life in the process of finding and ordering a new copy of the book, which we had both owned and read earlier in our lives, we found that he had been afflicted with a damaging stroke. we found also that there was available a documentary of his life and the consequences of the stroke, so we ordered it immediately.

fierce grace is the story of ram dass, nee richard alpert, child of fortune and overachieving academic. his father, a practicing attorney, was also president of the long island and new haven railroad and a founder of brandeis university. when richard was a young professor at harvard he met his more famous collaborator timothy leary, who died in 1996. to avoid speaking ill of the dead i will just say that in my opinion ram dass has made better use of his life than tim did of his. after they were both, famously at the time, fired from harvard for subjective psychedelic research, richard traveled to india as a spiritual seeker. he met his guru and made radical changes in his life, not least of which was, at the request of his guru, renouncing his inheritance. he did not, however renounce his family, and spent more than a year caring for his dying father.

in 1997 ram dass suffered a serious stroke. he is most gracious in allowing us to watch him deal with the loss of use of parts of his body and more difficult, with loss of access to parts of his mind. watching him is emotionally challenging for me because my father suffered similarly from a stroke, and died in 1988. neither man lost his intelligence nor self-awareness, but both lost something of their minds and knew it. in speech therapy ram dass learns to be patient with himself in his inability to find words to express a thought he knows inside; words he knows that he knew perfectly well before his stroke, when he never had to search for words to express his most complex thoughts and ideas. he learns how to ask for patience from others and how to ask for help.

we all get old. some of us are old now. many of us have family and friends who are old, and stroke does not always honor the young by its absence. ram dass offers his experience to us all as an example of living with the effects of a stroke. RD and i watched this video when we got it and cried through much of it, even many of the joyous parts. though we do not, as ram dass does, sense a personal god, we honor and court the realization of the joy in the connectedness of all life, the desire for which is a seemingly ubiquitous human trait. i watched it later with a group of friends who get together for potluck dinner and a video once a month or so. we watch documentaries, biographies, travelogues---no thrillers or entertainment movies, though we are often entertained. in a group usually ready to discuss the evening's offering after its showing, there was a profound silence of some duration after fierce grace.

you can buy fierce grace from: http://www.ramdasstapes.org/

many libraries will purchase videos which their patrons request, or you can buy it, watch it, and donate it to your library.


be here now

CNN Headline

This CNN headline struck a nerve.
FBI exhumes body of boy killed in 1955.
That boy has a name. That boy was Emmett Till. Don't call him boy.
Here try this:
The FBI exhumes the poor, tortured body of Emmett Till killed by bigots in 1955.
FBI exhumes body of Emmett Till.
Emmett Till's body exhumed by FBI
There are so many ways to convey this information.
Just don't call him boy.

UPDATE: FBI exhumes body in shocking murder of teen.

CNN actually changed the headline. I'm glad.

Telling Secrets

Ah, to be reminded of those halcyon days of Watergate. A time when the press knew how to gather information like gumshoe detectives right out of a dime-store novel. The stark contrast with what we now have that calls itself the press: Shall I kiss your butt now, Mr. President, or should I wait for the photo op? Where is our W. Mark Felt when we need him today? Who will step forward and reveal the secrets of this administration, and what journalist(s) will have the tenacity, temerity, and audacity to ask the questions? Where is our free press?
Thanks for coming forward, Mr. Felt. We've been waiting along time to say thanks for telling the secrets.

Bill of Particulars

Is there a case for impeachment?

the audio portion of our program is a group called "city folk" doing their version of jackson browne's "i am a patriot."

update: go here to listen to the whole song in good audio quality. click on the mp3 icon. we created the link above by holding the phone up to our speakers.

if bill clinton was impeached for lying about consensual sex with an adult, what do you think about george bush lying about the reasons and his intentions for taking our country into an undeclared, unprovoked war? a war that has cost us over 1600 armed services deaths, over 8,000 casualties, up to 100,000 iraqi civilian deaths, and cost more than 300 billion dollars. what do you think about major tax cuts, benefitting mainly the rich, during war? how about 8 billion dollars unaccounted for in war spending? how about that farm bill that paid big bucks to big business and began the bigtime deficit spending? how about cuts to veterans benefits and medical service? how about that secret energy task force meeting led by cheney? how about the commander-in-chief attending ZERO funerals for our fallen soldiers? how about bush's air national guard service? how about that torture?

check out After Downing Street and Big Brass Alliance.

Photographing Bald Eagles

We try to take a good 3 or 4 mile walk several times a week. There's one walk we take along the Larry Scott Memorial Trail, where we are often rewarded with sightings of bald eagles (Haliaeetus leucocephalus). No matter how many times we see these birds, it never becomes a commonplace experience. Eagles are among those animals that remind us of the wildness that still lives on the earth. They are the poet's metaphor for soaring grace, and the unblinking eye of the hunter. Eagles figure in so many native myths and legends, and when you see them you instantly know why. I've tried many times to photograph them, but I don't have a telephoto lens on the Nikon Coolpix 775. It's a great digital camera for close ups, but for zooming in, it leaves a lot to be desired. Several weeks ago, we read a post on Bouphonia, where Philalethes wrote about photographing a bird through the lens of his binoculars (scroll down to his post of April 19th). What a great idea. We always carry our binoculars and camera on our walks, so if any bird photographing opportunity presented itself, we'd be ready. (Click on the following photos to enlarge.)

In Flight

Last Friday, we saw more eagles than we had ever seen at one time. Three circled over the papermill along the waterfront. We often see eagles flying in pairs, but in this case, this apparent trio was actually a single eagle soaring a bit distantly from the pair. I couldn't get a shot through the binoculars, but I think the zoom worked well enough, so that you can see their white tails as they flash against the blue sky. Shortly after this photo was taken, the lone eagle took off.


Zoomed In

There are many trees along this particular stretch of the trail. They stand on a cliff that is about 90 feet high. The eagles have chosen only one tree to roost in, which puts them nearly 125 feet above the trail. There are no obvious nests here, but it is a fine hunting spot above the Port Townsend Bay. We've seen them in this tree on several occasions, and each time I have attempted to photograph them. But even the shots at the camera's fullest zoom, they are barely discernible except for a hint of white head and tail. You may notice a blur flying just above the tree. That's a cliff swallow zipping by.

With binoculars

On this day, I finally had an opportunity to use the camera through the binoculars approach. I turned the zoom function off, leveled the camera's lens against the right-eye piece of the binoculars, checked the small monitor (which was substituting as the viewfinder) and clicked the shutter. I took five or six shots like this. It wasn't easy determining what I was actually seeing through the monitor. The sun was high and reflected off the screen, which meant I could only make out the indistinct colors of the branches as they contrasted with the sky. I counted how many branches down the eagle was from the top, and clicked the shutter again. I turned the zoom on just once. The image looked entirely blurry in the monitor I took a single shot and turned the zoom off. I figured that one was a waste.

Perfect Shot
I finally got the photograph I was looking for. Camera zoom on through the binoculars.