The Crow's Eye: Not wasting

"...it's not the training to be mean but the training to be kind that is used to keep us leashed best." ~ Black Dog Red

"In case you haven't recognized the trend: it proceeds action, dissent, speech." ~ davidly, on how wars get done

"...What sort of meager, unerotic existence must a man live to find himself moved to such ecstatic heights by the mundane sniping of a congressional budget fight. The fate of human existence does not hang in the balance. The gods are not arrayed on either side. Poseiden, earth-shaker, has regrettably set his sights on the poor fishermen of northern Japan and not on Washington, D.C. where his ire might do some good--I can think of no better spot for a little wetland reclamation project, if you know what I mean. The fight is neither revolution nor apocalypse; it is hardly even a fight. A lot of apparatchiks are moving a lot of phony numbers with more zeros than a century of soccer scores around, weaving a brittle chrysalis around a gross worm that, some time hence, will emerge, untransformed, still a worm." ~ IOZ

Sep 22, 2010

Not wasting

If I belonged (by official assignment, or accident of birth) to a debased or bogeyman minority (no one really holds Sephardi or Indian against you, these days) I would not want to (a) fight for the ruling factions, killing other debased minorities who accidentally exist atop resources the imperial powers want, (b) take their dollar, and therefore their orders, (c) waste precious percentages of my very limited life allotment struggling for the "right" to do (a) and (b), or (d) attempt to persuade all the fuckwit bigots who don't like women, homosexuals, blacks, hispanics - or whatever - of my own claims to liberty and freedom, which of necessity must include freedom from their very presence, and liberty in the face of their customs and laws.

If I don't get to live forever (and who'd want to, anyway), why would I want to yield up any of my time serving the needs of cowards who live very full lives on account of the rest of us not living fully?

1 comment:

Joe said...: I'd say one of the most successful con jobs in history has been to convince people on the lower half of the socio-economic pyramid (not to even mention debased minorities) that it's somehow in their interest to risk their lives for the benefit of shit-spewing millionaires in suits.; September 22, 2010 at 1:53 PM

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This one took a while to put into words.

I don't kid myself that I've stumbled upon a unique insight and I have little doubt that someone has already written or said this better than I. Five minutes after I hit the "publish" button, I'll probably regret the choice of words more than I already do now - because it's difficult to get my head outside of English language usage, to comment on a problem with that usage, whilst using the English language to do so.

In the interest of not making more of an ass of myself than necessary, I've pared a very long thesis down to a paragraph:

I find it troubling that, using English, I have very limited choice in expressing how I relate to people with whom I have ongoing interaction. If I want to reference the nature of my relations with the woman who has challenged me to grow in ways I never imagined possible, the woman who howled with a primal, gorgeous, earth shattering, mother bear of a refrain, transcending pain and pleasure in act of creation to which I will never be immediate party, who has with her defiant and proud womanhood still intact forged a family out of disparate parts - I have to write "my wife." I have to reduce her to property. That really pisses me off. I don't own her. I don't fucking want the title or the claim. I don't want to express possession, simply to refer to her (without writing a discursive dissertation). I don't like one bit that the short hand for "association" in English is expressed in the possessive. I don't own my wife or my children. They're not mine.

So, fuck you Latin and Germanic branches of the Indo-European language group.

That is all.