Oscar Wilde famously warned that one should never trust a woman who revealed her true age; anyone so inclined to do so was bound to tell you anything. He also, in his characteristic stab at modern manners, suggested that no woman should be quite on the money about her age for another reason: “It looks so calculating.”
I was at a city hall meeting in Beaverton, Oregon, the other day when a few questions I had for the presenters dropped jaws. We’ll get to that later, the jaw-dropping effect I and those of my ilk have when we end up in the controlled boardrooms and chambers of the controllers – bureaucrats, public-private clubs like Chamber of Commerce, Rotary, and both political operatives and those who liken themselves as the great planners of the world moving communities and housing and public commons around a giant chessboard to make things better for and more efficient in spite of us.
The establishment of a republic… means insurrectionary war, it means the desolation of a thousand households. When the question shall arise, it will be determined… by balls from cannon and from musket, by grape and shrapnel, by bayonet and by the sword.
— Sir Alfred Stephen, NSW Legislative Council, June 16, 1887
Lady Liberty’s ghost haunts these hallowed halls.
Leaders line their own pockets, ignoring any calls.
The people weep and gnash their teeth, begging for new light,
But all the windows are cloaked in shrouds and shut against our plight.
A disembodied voice upon the wind, her wail.
She sees the downtrodden endure travail:
Children parted from their mothers,
Punished for merely being “others.”
All the leaders turn away
Wearing masks to shield their shame.
Lady Liberty’s ghost won’t rest,
Her troubled shade a constant guest
The story broke of former Cosby Show actor Geoffrey Owens working at Trader Joe’s, despite the fact that Mr. Owens himself was more than happy to move on, the story spread as people suddenly discovered that actors have to pay the bills like everyone else. The actress Tamara Braun summed it up on her Instagram:
Stealing Life with the Big Bad Retail King — One-third of All Buying Transactions
Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,
Is the immediate jewel of their souls.
Who steals my purse steals trash; ’tis something, nothing;
‘Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him,
And makes me poor indeed.
— Iago, Shakespeare’s Othello
The irresistible allure of invasion and interference has never been far from US law makers. The imperium needs its regular feed and what a feed it has been over the decades, notably within the sphere of influence discomfortingly termed Washington’s backyard. The current US president has shown himself a keen follower of the idea that the US military, that old, and not yet diminished strongman of capitalism, might come into play to rid Washington of various irritations in Latin America. Venezuela has featured very highly in that regard.
Every notion of progress is refuted by the existence of the Iliad.
— Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, February 8, 1994
The spectacle is the nightmare of imprisoned modern society which ultimately expresses nothing more than its desire to sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of sleep.
— Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 1967
The white race – and I mean Israeli, Iberian, Slovak, Anglo-Saxon, Caucasian, and the lot of us – is crazy. We do not need Susan Sontag to declare the white race as cancer on the world to ramify the point, since it’s been more than 50 years since she declared:
Contrary to any popular perceptions of Australia’s legal system, a dislike of rights reigns with pious conviction on both sides of the political aisle. Rights are the stuff of nonsense and nuisance, revocable for those deemed undesirable.
