thursday

As far as a shake-up, McClellan's resignation and Roves "reduced" role was hardly an earthquake, and really, not even a tremor. There isn't going to be anything that ever fundementally changes about this administration because never has there been a more misguided presidency so certain that it alone knew the correct path.

Rove's position was taken over by one of his top disciples, a man who made his reputation by orchestrating a fake riot during the Florida confusion of November/December, 2000 and really, what more could you expect? And we can be sure that Rove will be attempting to play doctor to the ailing hopes of House and Senate Republicans as we appraoch the 2006 elections. The man is simply an oozing puss of slime, and he will spread his message of hate to willing and desperate ears throughout the country.

The great sin of this administration is hate. It believes in division and conflict. It believes in principles that are antithetical to a free society and nowhere is this more obvious than in the relatively small issue of homosexual marriage. I believe that the reason this caused such a firestorm politically over the last few years is a window into how those in the Bush Administration have managed to wrestle control from, if not people who believed in democracy, at least people with rational minds.

Most people support the administration's view on homosexual marriage, that it's wrong and an affront to morality. That's hate. Every American afraid of homosexual love is complicit in the war in Iraq because it's their fear which allows people like these to capitalize on the resulting hate and run it to its logical conclusions.

It's tortured logic that fears homosexuality and tortured logic that has chosen the policy of confrontation in a region that begs for engagement instead.

Some point to the Bible as the basis of their hate in much of the same way the administration pointed to the documents Colin Powell waved on the floor of the U.N. The Bible, as beautiful as it is, was written by men, perhaps occasionally enlightened by the Will of God, perhaps not. That is a mystery for God or the Lack but what is obvious, on any examination of the Bible is that even there God exists in many Forms as is not a coherent God for creating an ethic that can stand on its own. Everywhere in the Bible there is prejudice and fear, and that conclusion is only one possible interpretation of Christ's parable of the Samaritan, a man from a group much despised in the Bible. Man is responsible for his beliefs and cannot point to the Bible to excuse any hate that he has. It is his.

It's amazing how people select parts from the Bible that support their prejudices and say "there, that's the Bible", the entire damn thing. And because they have audiences, because they have power and because they don't challenge the traditional hatreds of humanity, they are believed. The Christian Right should be ashamed of itself for encouraging such hate. And in a world that demanded even all of Christ's courage (Gethsemane), for encouraging such fear.

And they talk about Muslims? They talk about Secular Humanism?

If poetry is imaginary gardens with real toads in them, as Marianne Moore wrote, then the Christian Right's world is a real garden full of imaginary dragons, but as Rilke pointed out, the dragons of myth need only love to be revealed as they are, the persons of our better half.

My uncle died. Much of his life was self-loathing, even self-revulsion, another part of it was fear, simply because he was gay. As Gandhi and Christ both showed, no matter how much love you show, there's always somebody there to insist on the triumph of hate, fear and ignorance. Those bastards, so self-righteous and disgusting, so able in spreading fear, have found a vulnerable group, and from focusing their hate on that group (of course, they wouldn't call it hate, they would say "we disagree with their choices" -- choices...wonderful) and from that agreement on hate and fear (the fear of being identified as "the other" which is why so many people that could give a fuck about anybody's "choices" are silent, because they DO care about being labeled as an other) it's easy to create a pattern. What right do they have to define my uncle's life according to their stunted standards of truth?

Millions of people in this country who nodded their heads at the words hammering home the idea that "sanctity of marriage" rested on the fact that it would involve sex between a man and a woman because after all in the apocryphal story of Adam and Eve there was "no Steve" as they like to point out, were also told, in the same days of this current mess that is engulfing the Mideast (Iraq, bin Laden still at large, the prospects of nuclear Iran and our own uncertain and unengaging policy, the call for European Muslims to go to Israel to blow themselves up, etc.) that what was happening needed to happen in terms of U.S. policy. We were confronting evil after all, and it could be trusted that we were thus "the Good". Confronting evil and making a stance for our "values" was the same theme of both messages, and both messages depended on the other for their logic.

In the days of the homosexual marriage controversy (February, 2004 - June, 2004) about the same percentage of people believed that the war in Iraq was misconceived as believed that homosexual marriage was acceptable. While faith in the war has eroded steadily with the continuing situation steadily deterioriting, support against gay marriage has reamained steady, which only shows you how little we have learned about the policies of hate as a people.

I despise the Christian Right because of its embrace of hate and division. It's belief that it is oppressed and it's self-righteous and Pharisaic approach to God which it believes justifies its prejudiced and hateful actions, for this reason most religious extremism is contemptible. Having said that, I despise no individual, but I reserve the right to despise the movements they follow. Religion is policy.

Outside of my parents, nobody taught me how to be a human being more than my uncle, I will hate forever any manifestation of that hate which forced him to feel such shame for his desires. There are so many Gods in the Bible because there are so many images of God; if there is divinity in the Bible, I like to think it is this, it is not what we desire to be that God is, but what we love. The other thing I like to take from the Bible is rather New Testament and it is this: there are no dragons. Evil, after all, is only made up of those things that take us away from love.

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A lot of good and bad for the Cubs last night. D. Lee is obviously the big story, and I'm hoping his wrist is just bruised or else I don't want to think about what it means for the Cubs. Don Aardsma's disappointing appearance also was a major downer as well. He has great stuff, but he seems to freeze up when he's called up and suddenly he's wild or throwing flat. This is not a player you figure will blossom under Dusty, unfortunately.

Playing the Dodgers in a tight game is always nerve-wracking, because of that speed they have, it always seems like your a walk and a flare away from disaster.

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"If I had sinned terribly the night before, next morning, well before dawn, you would see me crawling on my knees through the Stations of the Cross. I choke, I weep, I strike my face, my breast, my arms and legs, my hands. I bleed, I make the Sign of the Cross with my tears. At the end, God is taken in." --Max Jacob, in a letter to Marcel Jouhandeau
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Present among us, giving tone to the little group, was Max Jacob, pessimistic and full of verve simultaneously, the Italian ceramist and sculptor Giovanni Leonardi, the painter and conservator at the Museum of Brest, Jean Lachaud, the writer and doctor Pierre Minet, my sister Henriette Bauguion, and myself, poet.

Now and then, Max Jacob, bitter, glancing back at his past and pining for his youthfulness of those years, would take from his breastpocket a worn daguerreotype photograph. Exhibiting it with emotion, he would say: "And here's the young man I was at 20!" He wasn't far from shedding tears, and ours as well were on the verge of overflowing our eyelids, knowing to what an extent life effaces all innocence.

Max Jacob had the fine head of a monastic bishop, and yet there nonetheless flashed forth at times, from behind his lorgnon, an incisive gaze, searching always for the fault in his interlocutor's speech. He was not at all only a little proud of his hands, saying that an artist must ostentatiously display these noble parts of himself. If for Dr. G. Desse the hand is a claw, for Max Jacob it was a kind of scepter, able to bless, create beauty, direct, command--a kind of device to uplift the soul toward God, in an offertory gesture.

One problem Max Jacob did not like to enter upon was the problem of Love. At those times he became silent, as if folded into himself, withdrawn. However he resolved this problem, it is certain that he never loved anyone absolutely, passionately and decisively. The Love of God was for him the only basis for the problem, human love being but an accident--and perhaps unfortunately for him, deviating from its normal course. Women had nothing to fear from him in this area--he treated them always as comrades, amiably.

This curious man, whose fashion of moving about through life was so original (and I am not only speaking of his physical comportment--which was the butt of laughter for the Quimper bourgeois, when they saw him strolling about on the city quays in a silk shirt and ragged shoes, for example--but also of his moral, intellectual and spiritual bearing), this man whom Paris was not far from considering a buffoon--for he put so much of the fantastic and occasionally such cynicism into his speech in order to ward off questions, in order to demonstrate the inanity of everything--was in the last analysis a very serious man, profound, mystical, and almost in despair because he could not demonstrate the proof of God before the skeptics, which proof was nevertheless demonstrated in his unquiet and tormented life. --Clotilde Bauguion