A DIRTY WORD—AND WHAT TO DO WITH IT

Raven is wretched;
kicking along in tidepools,
sniffing at garbage—
he feels the world is ending,
and there’s nothing he can do.

He’s probably right.
All of us feel impotent
in the face of death—
more so when life seems to be
moving along like always….

********************
Just a bit of minor transitory depression for The Bird for All Seasons. He’ll be rocking and rolling again in no time.

I--his lesser half, his anima--am a different story. After reading the Strategy Document of the National Endowment for Democracy, dated January 2002 and NOT FOR PUBLIC CIRCULATION (the pages of the plan dealing with North Korea, China and Burma are even “scrambled”—any Navajo code-busters interested in this one?), I am ready to upchuck my breakfast of, yes, scrambled eggs at the mere mention of the word DEMOCRACY.

Yesterday Raven and I talked about Instant Mix Democracy, Totalitarian Democracy and even Fascist Democracy. The word has become so perverted by its misuse as the rationale for imposing free trade zones, neutralizing competition, institutionalizing greed and violence and hunger, grabbing other countries’ natural resources, dumping surplus products to ruin other economies, mounting and supporting military coups against democratically elected presidents, authorizing the running of guns and drugs and dirty tricks all over the globe by the CIA, cluster bombing women and children in mideast markets—and generally heating the planet to the boiling point—that it would be difficult to find a more cynical word to substitute for Imperialism.

Give it a try, though. If you think of one, send Raven and me a message in a bottle with The Word written on the outside of an envelope containing anthrax, the SARS virus, a medal of Our Lady of Guadalupe minted in Florida and blessed by Jeb Bush or the Bill of Rights shredded into confetti. We don’t care what you put in the envelope—we won’t open it anyway—but here in this broken down beach town we’ll use just about anything as toilet paper. (Especially copies of the Strategy Document for the National Endowment for Democracy….)