Updated: The Magic Of MacNeice

Aesthetics, Art, English, Literature, The West

Beauty is the best antidote to politics, my daily drudgery. The poetry of Louis MacNeice is a salve for the soul. It inoculates against the Maya Angelou bastardizations. (She was court poet to the Clintons.)

From “Louis MacNeice From Cradle to Grave“:
The final poem in Louis MacNeice’s collection Plant and Phantom (1941) is the lyric, “Cradle Song”:

Sleep, my darling, sleep;
The pity of it all
Is all we compass if
We watch disaster fall.
Put off your twenty-odd
Encumbered years and creep
Into the only heaven,
The robbers’ cave of sleep.

The wild grass will whisper,
Lights of passing cars
Will streak across your dreams
And fumble at the stars;
Life will tap the window
Only too soon again,
Life will have her answer –
Do not ask her when.
When the winsome bubble
Shivers, when the bough
Breaks, will be the moment
But not here or now.
Sleep and, asleep, forget
The watchers on the wall
Awake all night who know
The pity of it all.

Update: Please people, this post was about transcendence. I mean, I’m no poetry expert, but I know beauty when I read it. That’s why I like MacNeice. So I beg of our reader hereunder, spare me mumbo-jumbo. Give us “Snow,” rather, will you, please?

Updated: Militant Mama Obama

America, Barack Obama, Democrats, Education, Elections 2008, Media, Race

Exhibit #2 in my case against Barack’s bride: “As a black man, you know, Barack can get shot going to the gas station.” So spoke M. Obama.

Indeed, “Michelle Obama’s gaseous swipe reminds me of the last two black men picked off while pumping gas. Wait a sec, I got my facts topsy-turvy. Two of the D.C Snipers’ 13 victims were murdered in gas stations. Neither was black. The Snipers, on the other hand, were both black. The pattern of racial victimization in the country Mrs. Obama will likely officiate as first lady is unidirectional.”

In “Militant Mama Obama,” I make the case that, “if anything, her charmed life has made Michelle Obama more racially militant.”

Updated: “Michelle Obama thesis was on racial divide,” reports Jeffrey Ressner of the Politico.
So the moribund media is catching up with us and reporting on the thesis I mentioned in Militant Mama Obama.

Questionnaires, the kind M. Obama relied on to arrive at her conclusions, are notoriously unreliable and riddled with bias. Methodology aside, this woman is an identity activist through-and-through.

She concluded:

“I hoped that these findings would help me conclude that despite the high degree of identification with whites as a result of the educational and occupational path that black Princeton alumni follow, the alumni would still maintain a certain level of identification with the black community. However, these findings do not support this possibility.”

In Mama Obama’s view, blacks at Princeton assimilated excessively. Also, in her first sentence above, she ought to have written, “I HAD hoped…”

Foreign Interventionism Chickens Come Home to Roost in Balkans

America, Foreign Aid, Islam, Neoconservatism, The West

Europeans take a little longer than Middle Easterners to get lathered up over American meddling. Clinton and his coterie of left-liberal neoconservative advisers led the 1999 NATO intervention into Yugoslavia, intervening in this centuries-old, ongoing dispute on the side of the ethnic Albanians (and their terrorist arm, the al Qaida-backed Islamic Kosovo Liberation Army).

There was no genocide. The killings were of the large scale craven kind the locals had engaged in for centuries. Soon after the “salve” we Americans applied to solve the problem, Serbs were ethnically cleansed from Kosovo, leaving only approximately 120,000 under NATO protection. Ancient churches were burned to the ground by the triumphant Albanian Muslims who turned on the Serbs.

America’s national interests were not served in choosing Albanian Muslims over Christian Orthodox Serbs, although Kosovars promise they practice what they term euphemistically “Islam lite.”

Bush followed in Clinton’s trails to hail Kosovo’s recent declaration of independence. Kosovo is home to the most sacred of Serbian relics and lands. It was Christian before it was Islamized.

Up-to-the-minute reports speak of close to a million Serbians gathering in Belgrade to protest the Kosovo declaration of independence and to express anger at the US. It’s all very well when a handful of people on the Side We Don’t Like break into the U.S. embassy and wreck it. But when close to a million march in solidarity against American policies—a decade hence, no less—they become harder for neocon think tanks to dismiss and diss.

For once, the blame lies squarely at the feat of Hillary’s husband. Former Clintonite, James Rubin, Christiane Amanpour’s toy boy, blames the Russians for the fever that is gripping Serbians—the Russian and Serb leadership. We all know that the people upon whom we visit our policies are but puppets manipulated by evil marionettes–unless those pulling the strings are American. Then the puppets—or puppies—are praised.

Mama Obama

Barack Obama, Democrats, Elections 2008, Judaism & Jews, Race

As you can imagine, it wasn’t an easy item to find in mainstream media. I looked all over for Michelle Obama’s bitter slip of the tongue—at MSNBC’s website, the Washington Times’, and others—before finding it buried at the bottom of the New York Times’ page and framed as cat fight initiated by Cindy McCain. Ditto Time. Michelle Obama makes a snide snippy comment, and Time asks the McCain campaign to comment on Cindy McCain’s retort. Apparently, anyone shining light where the media sheds only darkness must answer for it.

Here’s what Mrs. Obama told a Wisconsin audience:

“For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country.”

A good column calls the events and the characters correctly. I hate to keep reminding my readers, but, if I don’t, who will? As Hillel, the Jewish sage, said, “If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, then what am I? And if not now, when?” (Let Obama beat that brilliance) In “Homie Has Some Rings to Kiss,” I did not delude readers about Obama’s militant wife:

“Obama has always seemed a reluctant recruit to racial politics; driven more by expediency and fear—fear of his overbearing wife and the Reverends Jackson and Sharpton.”

Mark Halperin of “The Page” worried that conservative media would begin to scrutinize Michelle Obama if she kept such comments coming. He saw no reason to dissect the sainted one’s vicious remarks.

There is no finessing what Michelle Obama meant. Her comments come from the same bottomless pit from which the Reverends Sharpton and Jackson launch their periodical grievance campaigns; that festering reservoir of racial animus and envy. This is a comment from a woman who’s led a charmed life, yet feels aggrieved and angry.

(An aside: Mama is quite masculine.)