The Crow's Eye: The Other Way Around

"...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

Nov 5, 2010

The Other Way Around

Oscar Grant was sentenced to death, today.

[how it would have gone, had Grant shot Mehserle]

4 comments:

Anonymous said...: This is one of those times it sucks to agree with you. But agree I must. Does the inequity strike enough people, and strike them deeply enough?; November 6, 2010 at 12:58 AM
Jack Crow said...: Charles,

I don't think many people really care. Perhaps I'm jaded beyond all sensibility; but the popularity of cop shows would seem to confirm my impression. Americans root for uniformed thugs, especially when they're fucking up the Other...

Respect,

Jack; November 6, 2010 at 8:48 AM
Anonymous said...: Yeah, that's why it sucks to agree with you. Because it means most everyone else just doesn't care. And they are the ones who will say,

"What are you talking about, civil rights infractions and personal privacy invasions? If you are a good honest citizen you have nothing to fear because you have nothing to hide."

That I have to live among such people, and that they have to be in the majority, this is not an uplifting point of reality.; November 6, 2010 at 11:48 AM
Rachel said...: Agreed, Charles. It was having repeated discussions like the above, in law school that shocked and horrified me enough to drop the last shreds of my "good moderate"-ness. I went into criminal defense, and the reaction of most upstanding, self-described liberal citizens to learning this is always to crinkle their noses like I've just farted. It is very sad.; November 11, 2010 at 3:53 PM

Post a Comment

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.