Know Your Enemy

Thought:
The best way to get rid of most middle class ‘friends’ is to tell them you like them
It makes them question the market value of the relationship
because if you tell them you like them then you must be trying to impress them which means you must be worth less than they thought.
They may not always think consciously in those terms but the given assumption is the ‘friendship’ must be based on self interest
Whats he after

In contrast my lasting friendships are based on the given assumption that we’re so fucked up we better stick together or we’ll really get fucked
But mostly now I look for comrades not friends.
We don’t have to like each other as long as we agree on who the enemy is.

She'll remember us

Too rainy to take photos of Ray in the streets of East Verdun so we drive over right away to the Tuesday 'Stuffed Peppers on Special' waiting for us under the hotlights at Vichy’s buffet on Newman Boulevard
We get in line and there's the manager giving one of the young waitresses royal shit cause she didn’t place the cake properly on one of the dessert trays
Later when the young waitress comes over to our booth to pour us some water I said
"Ya know your boss doesn't have the right to talk to you like that-I mean do you like it when he talks like that?”
“..well..he’s not a bad guy”
“Not a bad guy?”
“Just worrys too much”
“Yeah well-that water you’re pouring?- pour it right on his head the next time and then he’ll really have something to worry about”
She laughed and then looked uncomfortable but she’ll remember us.

Blood Thicker Than Oil

Fred
Here in Mtl on the front page of Gazette an article on military families making an official protest against having relatives fighting in Afghanistan.
One military father quoted as saying:

"I am completely opposed to my son being used as ground fodder for an undisclosed reason.I want to know why we're there.The arguments that havfe been thus far presented don't do it for me.They don't explain why my son and his friends should be maimed or killed in a far-away country."

Since it seems we're in general agreement with this critique,judging from discussions I've had with the family,I'm just wondering if we could also express our objections publicly.
As a former combat soldier you'd make an ideal spokesperson on this issue
It's a question of time before troops will be pulled out of Afghanistan but it will come even sooner if we put more pressure on the government

You can be damn sure Stephen Harper and his corporate cronies won't be sending their kids over there any time.

No Blood for Oil
Troops out Now

Dave

Who is that guy with the bad teeth

In Westmount for barbeque where a psychiatrist makes middle class chitchat talking about having special moments on vacation in Peru but I'm thinking please just don’t ask me to talk stupid or pretend I’m just like you
How many people died so you can have that special moment in Pitou Mancu is what I didn’t say
Can’t be hip and live in Westmount and expect my approval.
Can’t really pretend or expect us to believe that you’re not the enemy not now not in 2006 after decades of middle class consensus on cutbacks and downsizing of social programs
Its all based on class
Who benefits

Autographed Copy

A Bravo TV documentary profile made in 1980 on Alden Nowlan the maritime poet who states that writers only write about themselves,the implication being that the individual is hopelessly and totally isolated and self centered.
How this view affected his writing can be made clear by this poem by Nowlan

Not every wino is a Holy Man.
Oh, but some of them are.
I love those who've learned to sit
comfortably for long periods
with their hams pressed against their calves,
outdoors,with a wall for a back-rest,
contentedly saying nothing.
These move about only when necessary,on foot,
and almost always in pairs.
I think of them as oblates.
Christ's blood is in their veins
or they thirst for it.
They have looked into the eyes of God,
unprotected by smoked glass.

A good poem especially in comparsion to most academically approved writing but what about those guys dying on the streets that Nowlan lies so sweetly about?
Hasn't he made it easier for readers to accept their pain and suffering by his subjective distortion of their misery?

Contrast Nowlan's approach to that other maritime poet,Milton Acorn


'Knowing I live in a dark age before history
I watch my wallet and
am less struck by gunfights on the avenues
than by the newsie with his dirty pink chapped face
calling a shabby poet back for his change

The crows mobbing the blinking,sun-stupid owl
wolves eating a hamstrung calf hindend first
keeping their meat alive and fresh…these
are marks of foresight,beginning of wit:
but Jesus wearing thorns and sunstroke
beating his life and death into words
to break the rods and blunt the axes of Rome:
this and other things followed.

Knowing that in this advertising rainbow
I live like a trapeze artist with a headache,
my poems are no aspirins…they show
pale bayonets of grass waving thin on dunes;
the paralytic and his lyric secrets;
my friend Al,union builder and cynic,
hesistating to believe his own delicate poems
lest he believe in something better than himself:
and history,which is yet to begin,
will exceed this,exalt this
as a poem erases and rewrites its poet. '

Acorn is out there alive and living
He does not accept things as they are or write about people as if they only existed in his own imagination.And his passion, based on his activist approach to life, gives Acorn's poetry a range and edge that Nowlan in his self centered asocial detachment could never match

Don't Expect Any Mercy

I'm sitting on a bench in the Westmount greenhouse when a young guy walks by catching everyone’s eye by his groomed manner and aristocratic poise,the arrogant curl in his lip marking him as one of the uppermost elite,the son of the son of a son of a millionaire

His disdain was more than just the middle class status game of deliberately not acknowledging others,because he did acknowledge us but not as human beings,frowning in the irritated way people do when they see litter on a lawn
We were in bad taste

Don’t expect any mercy from these people

Democratically Elected War Criminals

In the past the Suits in the US have routinely blamed the military for the failures of various military adventures including the Vietnam War
Washinton officials have stated in their memoirs and historical accounts that they were deceived and bullied by the Pentagon into supporting the war in Vietnam,when in fact some of the strongest critics of that war were in the Pentagon.
Many high ranking officers in private top level sessions warned Kennedy,Johnson and Nixon that American troops should be pulled out of Vietnam,not because the officers were nice guys but because they knew a war against a mass insurrection could not be won,short of killing off the whole population.
The Suits wouldn’t listen so the military did what they were told,and managed to kill two million Vietnamese before they were forced to call it quits when their own troops refused to fight anymore.
Now again its the military telling the Suits to get the troops out only this time they’re doing it in public
A month ago five retired American generals came out on mainstream media to voice their opposition to the war-an unheard event without precedence- and then just yesterday a British General on active duty called for troops out of Iraq now,stating that their presence there is part of the reason why civil strife is escalating out of control in that country
Is there an historical parallel where a general on active duty has publicly differed and challenged the decision made by a democratically elected government that ordered him to take charge of a military campaign?
That’s how bad it is
That’s how really bad it is

The Butcher's Bill

2,749 American soldiers officially dead in Iraq and over 600,000 Iraqi civilian casualties according to a recent independent poll survey,the figures contradicting the Pentagon estimate of 150,000 in a major way
Interesting that the mainstream media like CNN is not challenging the new estimate
Interesting too how little public agonizing is being done over these equations by the few remaining middle class liberals
The Suits get annoyed when the butcher gets the bill wrong,but hey the price is still right

Had To Be There

The magic in my life is not that I became famous,the magic is being famous but still riding on the Bannantyne 108 uptown with backstreet buddies like Linda
She asked me,when the bus turned into the Atwater tunnel,if I’d sit on the outside of the bus seat cause she’s getting deaf in her right ear
I told her I couldn’t cause if the bus veered too sharply I’d fall off the seat cause I still don’t have much of a grip.
“..But hey,maybe then you could just hold out your hand and get change from people passing by”

Sue Tyseck

Over in the rain as promised to café on Verdun Avenue where Linda works as temporary(and quite deaf) waitress for weak coffee and overpriced fried egg sandwich and a too chummy owner that wants me to donate autographed book to one of those big organized charities for crippled kids
No menu cause someone stole the computer
Linda,after appropriate pause-she loves being the first to know- tells us that Sue Tyseck age 54 was found dead at home on Cheque Day
There’ll be no laying out or funeral with the body to be disposed of by the City and death under investigation
Suspicions
Not like Sue to die on Cheque Day,the one day she came alive.
Liz,on hearing the news,went over to Bingo’s to find out if Steve,one of Sue’s ex-boyfriends, had heard that Sue was dead and there she breaks out crying when recognizing Kelley,one of Sue’s castoff kids,sitting at the counter having a hangover breakfast special
Kelley didn’t cry
Steve didn’t cry
Liz is probably the only one that ever cried over Sue
Once a gorgeous big-eyed blond until hollowed out by booze and drugs into bitter dregs of herself
The swing and sway of her at twenty years old in that Rock n Roll glitter t-shirt she wore once to a party in prime
A walking corpse the last time I saw her with face of surprising rage and eyes like an evil curse when she took off her sunglasses
And me, the one that said years ago that we let Sue Tyseck down somehow,let her walk by that day without recognition.
Afraid to look too close into her eyes