ballade of regulation

all of our efforts fall into the shade

drastic the choice but not without its crumb

of gentle hope to keep hearts unafraid

a chance of passion that would allow some

to build new life where others would be glum

or hang their hopes upon a rusty nail

for you to laugh or others to assail

those facts of business that prove not so tame

but can stand up when others simply fail

these are the rules and we must play the game

time with its tricks our patience must abrade

or beat a rhythm on a noisy drum

such are the practices of normal trade

when all of human life is a small sum

and nothing much splits millionaire from bum

we are blown off our course by the swift gale

and can't expect to make an easy sale

since all we get is insult and foul blame

it's tasks like these that make the toughest quail

these are the rules and we must play the game

others might seek to hide or to evade

the pains and penances that have to come

in rapid series and in swift cascade

we cannot keep these things beneath the thumb

nothing is left and we have been struck dumb

preventing the recounting of detail

all  honest words are cast outside the pale

and truth becomes a matter of ill fame

against the facts there is none who would rail

these are the rules and we must play the game

prince you receive no message through the mail

and find the secrets have turned very stale

there's no one left who can ignite the flame

but many where who hard fate could bewail

these are the rules and we must play the game

in the swamps

across the solitudes a single moan

passes and we are locked into the plight

of one far distant who is not alone

although that pain is hidden from our sight

nothing is done by you in our despite

at invocation we will light the blaze

we see again the colder harder days

you know the value of a simple stone

and how to make it shed a little light

that will convert to something hardly known

to those who claim to be straight and forthright

our task is not to hasten nor excite

but to take you most swiftly through the maze

we see again the colder harder days

we know the colour of the human bone

and how to polish it and turn it bright

as instrument to punish and atone

plain cure for darkness and the coming blight

this product of the sacrificial height

must be exposed unto the divine gaze

we see again the colder harder days

hopes and desires are wholly overblown

what is to come will never give us right

nor any justice since the truth is flown

out of the window into the cold night

and what is left is not for our delight

no one would want to give us love or praise

we see again the colder harder days

Count no Chickens

John Maxwell Sunday, October 19, 2008

 

Barring some transcendental upheaval, some unforeseeable catastrophe or the kind of unconscionable 'October Surprise' to which the US Republican party is so addicted, John McCain has almost no chance of being elected president of the United States. This is despite one of the nastiest, most dishonourable election campaigns ever conducted anywhere.

Months ago, during the Democratic Party primaries, I predicted in this column that this would be the dirtiest election campaign in American history. It was worse than that - dirtier than any election campaign I have ever heard of.

John McCain, unfortunately, has never heard of David Coore's first law of holes: when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

Instead, he recruited battalions of assistant diggers and welcomed the contributions of hundreds if not thousands more eager volunteers with the result that, approaching the end of his final election campaign, he has lost electoral support, public respect, his own honour and the prospect of enjoying in in public admiration and goodwill in his sunset years.

I know the exact moment when I realised that McCain had lost the election. It was during the second debate with Obama and I was watching, as I always do, the little meter at the bottom of the TV screen which reflects the feelings of a specially selected group of uncommitted viewers. I soon realised that while there were clearly favourable and adverse reactions to Obama, for McCain the meter mostly remained flat.

I thought this was a little odd and wondered if the meter wasn't working, because I expected some reaction when McCain said something I thought they may have disliked. But no, the meter flatlined for most of his time. The uncommitted had effectively tuned him out.

THE LEADERSHIP DILEMMA

I am writing this column before the final debate, but I don't expect it to be any different from the others. There will be some reaction when McCain makes some particularly outrageous statement, but as far as real content is concerned I am expecting the meter to flatline for most of McCain's arguments.

This is a pity, because the world deserves to hear serious argument from aspiring leaders of "the free world". We're not going to get it for two reasons: one is John McCain's formidable inadequacies; the other is the structure of the US political system. The American president is effectively an elected king. Some, like Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) considered it important to enjoy the "consent of the governed". Others, most notably Nixon and Bush/Cheney, consider the governed to be an inconvenient nuisance to be ignored whenever practicable.

Constitutionally, the president is as carefully segregated as possible from party. The parties are hobbled by the carefully engineered disconnect between the hoi polloi - in the House of Representatives - elected every two years, and the Senate, elected in tranches - one-third every two years - so that popular feeling, enthusiasms and indignations, are as diluted as possible and the status quo is massively immobile.

Even presidents elected by landslides like Johnson, Reagan and Clinton, find it extremely difficult to promulgate the mandates they appeared to have been given by the body politic and to fulfil the promises they made.

Only a president with very long coat-tails may find sufficient support among his party/coalition to implement anything that resembles what the people want.

Between the will and the deed are the inertia of long-serving conservatives and some notable boobies in both parties on the one hand, and on the other, the millionaire journalists who claim to represent the public interest.

Media monopolies chain them to conservative positions, manacled by ephemeral privilege based on an irrefrangible sense of obligation to their masters. This may be why the US media, almost alone in the world, played pied piper for George Bush in Iraq and for Alan Greenspan in his dour pavane to economic and financial disaster. It may be why some areas of blatant and obscene injustice get such short shrift in the US press: the continuing torture of the Palestinians, the subjection and rape of Haiti, the economic and social exploitation of Africa and Latin America, and the continuing injustice of the Iraq war are mainly publicised only in the blogs, the flourishing outhouses of the American press.

In such a ménage, any presidential candidate would be cutting his own throat were he not to promise eternal fealty to Israel; the idea that he might talk to Iran or Cuba without preconditions is as bizarre as the idea of Lyndon Johnson recognising China.

China was recognised, by Nixon of all people, and - even more bizarre - the American banking system is even now being nationalised by George Bush and the former chairman of Goldman Sachs.

Nothing, they say, happens before its time.

Barack Obama has proven that he can organise, build coalitions and mobilise masses of people. If he becomes president the question is whether he will be able to organise himself and the United States out of the abyss into which they have been plunged by imperial capitalism.

The British, followed by the Europeans and finally the Americans, have recognised that social institutions that are as massively integral to civilised life as the banks cannot be allowed to operate their own planet. That is why they have nationalised the banking system - or the most important parts - and why the taxpayers across the Atlantic will have representation on the controlling boards of the financial institutions.

But even as the United States has surrendered its right to elect the head of the World Bank, the multilateral financial institutions still stand as a massive roadblock between the public and those who are technically accountable for the management of our financial affairs. These institutional usurers will continue to say, with straight faces, that countries like Jamaica which have never defaulted are less worthy of credit than Bear Stearns, for example, or Donald Trump.

PUBLIC ENTERPRISE

Mr McCain speaks about greed and cupidity, apparently completely unaware that while we have greed and cupidity always with us, we do not need to carry around the parasitic weight of greedy and irresponsible moneychangers who produce nothing but propaganda on behalf of their class. The next few years, particularly in Britain and Europe, will demonstrate that it is possible to manage gargantuan economies and intricate trading arrangements without the necessity of creating billionaires out of bookkeepers.

At the same time, in the case of the Europeans, with more democratic systems of government - at least more responsive to the popular will -important segments of the power structure will once again be in the hands of the people's representatives. The state, which is us, has paid - coming and going - for the extravagances of our bookkeepers. Now that we have real equity in the system itself, the question is whether and why we would again be crazy enough to surrender the commanding heights of the economy to hysterical gangs of pirates, gamblers, sociopaths and common criminals.

In the United States the intent is that when the delinquent and incompetent elements of the system have been restored to financial health and good hygiene, they will again be privatised. Some Americans regard Franklin Delano Roosevelt - a real American aristocrat - as a Communist, because he believed that great wealth did not confer sainthood. He thought that the world should be a rational place, run on behalf of everybody.

He was not a leveller, not the sort of person who Bustamante alleged would cut pigs and goats in half to fulfil some insane idea of egalitarianism. He was not even a democratic socialist or even close to it. He believed in capitalism, which he thought was a civilised system which could take care of all and provide good living for many if the essential rules were enforced.

But he died (10 years younger than John McCain is now) at the apex of his achievements, just before the end of the Second World War, and people less wise than he allowed, and some aided and abetted, the parasitic and strangulatory growth of what Eisenhower called the military industrial complex and its efflorescence, Imperial Capitalism. This increasing cohabitation between the military and finance capital is the centre of the system which has now demonstrated so graphically, its moral, ecological, political, economic and military failure. In its febrile greed and acquisitiveness it bribed and blackmailed its workers and customers to expect irrational and unrealistic living standards based entirely on the ravaging of natural resources and the ruthless exploitation of subject peoples. These injustices require in turn, or are said to require, enormous parasitic military and industrial establishments essentially meant to keep the natives in their places, whether in Moscow, Havana, Milwaukee or Kingston. To protect the primacy of the United States, the neo-cons conjured up a dream of total domination - American lebensraum in a world denominated by the principles of the 'Bell Curve' and dominated by the essential wickedness of Ayn Rand and her philosophy of self - über alles.

It worked for Alan Greenspan and fortified the animal spirits of his disciples in Goldman Sachs and similar joints. It cannot work for the rest of us, because if we are all to live according to those principles we would require the resources of three planets just like this one.

As Imperial Capitalism attempts to rework itself into its former positions of absolute power it will have to accomplish this with our cooperation.

Especially if Barack Obama becomes president of the United States it will become increasingly clear to the majority of us that we have the solutions in our own heads and the means in our own hands.

As we watch the process and begin to take a more active part in it, we will begin to understand the enormity of our own servitude and the need, in the worlds of Norman Manley, to 'dis-enthrall ourselves'.

To be enthralled is not only to be seized by rapturous adoration, it is also to be enslaved, to abandon freedom and liberty in favour of self-administered lobotomy - to be infatuated with death.

Walk good!

Copyright©2008 John Maxwell
jankunnu@gmail.com

listening harder

this is the meaning of the open gem

word after word and not a one of praise

much will depend on what is on the stem

these are the matters that we would condemn

without more thought minds all within a haze

this is the meaning of the open gem

all has been marked and made neat on the hem

we don't expect a change in this new phase

much will depend on what is on the stem

still you will be expected to show phlegm

not be the one on whom others will gaze

this is the meaning of the open gem

we might expect in this case to contemn

but not to execute nor to amaze

much will depend on what is on the stem

you do not think that you are one of them

of those who can't be counted on these days

this is the meaning of the open gem

much will depend on what is on the stem

autumn lives

we break the shadow and bring out the sun

winter is coming but we know its end

this is a battle that has once been won

each tempest must in turn finish its run

some idiot will claim there is a trend

we break the shadow and bring out the sun

you can't be sure of truth before it's done

but know that even hardest steel must bend

this is a battle that has once been won

the word has force that will break down the gun

and nothing has your back  except a friend

we break the shadow and bring out the sun

the principle must be that it's begun

with happy heart that good things should intend

this is a battle that has once been won

truth is that each of us is having fun

knowing that there are things that we transcend

we break the shadow and bring out the sun

this is a battle that has once been won

now down below

if you have measured breath in weight of gold

no one has spoken of the need for haste

nor of the reasons why the flock were chased

out of safe shelter back into the cold

such a short time ago now just enrolled

in this man's army and out on the waste

not one of us but knows we are disgraced

by this sad service and now you are told

say this when time returns you to your place

in the long record of the failing years

that we have done our task and gone our way

said our defiant words right to your face

cast off our clothes and let loose our tears

but never once have we refused our pay

in the realm of the dog

some meaning must inhere in what's not said

by any of the folk who claim our time

with words as filled with music as with slime

and promises to scare off all the dread

that's come upon us now the wiser head

knows what is common and what things are prime

those measures suited for a harsher clime

like ours now that the heroes are all dead

so that we listen all the claimants shout

enough to shake the earth and raise up high

those who have passed beneath the heavy soil

but none of us knows what it's all about

or can discern small truth from the big lie

without expenditure of too much toil

with reason and with nature too

our task is to destroy the trade of kings

looking past mountains to the open plain

we reach the place we seek on outspread wings

of little value are the golden things

piled high upon the smiling traitor's wain

our task is to destroy the trade of kings

the freshest water from the coolest springs

must serve to cool each brow and cleanse the stain

we reach the place we seek on outspread wings

no one expects to bear each of the swings

from past to future but we can't abstain

our task is to destroy the trade of kings

and so we must withstand the constant stings

of noisy insects and ignore the pain

we reach the place we seek on outspread wings

you can't ignore the loudest bell that rings

fervent with joy at the returning rain

our task is to destroy the trade of kings

we reach the place we seek on outspread wings

a sort of wager

this is the place where odd and even meet

in point of fact there is a choice of gloom

in how and when the fire will best consume

each one of those who dares not to retreat

before the voice that speaks of death and doom

this is the place where odd and even meet

another sort of messenger might greet

any who comes to open up the tomb

to sweep it out with an old-fashioned broom

this is the place where odd and even meet

passion and desire

where passion and desire blend into sense

of who each is and how each came to be

not just alone but cast out on that sea

where navigation is without pretense

of other purpose where the smooth immense

circle of waters is the referee

and gives hard answer to each hopeful plea

since when it strikes there can be no defence

those who now smile have not the least good thought

in what might pass to others for a mind

to let you know the harshness of this scrape

nor in what trammels you might soon be caught

since they prefer that you advance so blind

as to be swiftly where you can't escape

a lower form of knowledge

no one who listens notices the word
spoken by those who have forgotten speech
so further action seems yet more absurd

no greater title ever was conferred
yet now it seems so far beyond our reach
no one who listens notices the word

not even one whose choices were deterred
by sudden silence which enforced a breach
so further action seems yet more absurd

now these were matters of which we had heard
before we started well within our reach
no one who listens notices the word

that has been uttered by those who preferred
action to thought and who just had to preach
so further action seems yet more absurd

but we unbroken still see things unblurred
and have learned lessons that you did not teach
no one who listens notices the word
so further action seems yet more absurd

names do not matter

we might forget the sadness of these ways
in deep engagement with the warming light
across the valley is a greater sight
the sort of thing that would our friends amaze
or in good times bring nothing else but praise
but at this moment does not seem quite right
more like a signal set off by great spite
and not a symbol of the coming days
this is a part of some more horrid fall
from what we hope was a much larger grace
to justify our actions and our crime
since none of us would dare to stand up tall
or make a claim to a much better case
and all that passes is just vulgar time

free paper burn

we enter on a time of hardest labour

each of us knows too well just how to weep

nobody will delay to screw their neighbour

the smilingest dragoon will draw his sabre

and swing it hard in order to cut deep

we enter on a time of hardest labour

too soon we learn the meaning of your favour

and what an evil gift it was to keep

nobody will delay to screw their neighbour

there is no time to waste upon the savour

or to take pleasure in the crops we reap

we enter on a time of hardest labour

a message has been left for the engraver

to write upon the wall for all the sheep

nobody will delay to screw their neighbour

this is once more the age of king and slaver

with no safe place for anyone to sleep

we enter on a time of hardest labour

nobody will delay to screw their neighbour

cast the die

what's missing is a sense of what is just

our vision is not shaped only by art

we have to live and so we have to trust

words have true power to freeze and combust

but action has received the greater part

what's missing is a sense of what is just

you do not see us as strong or robust

only as weak and ready to depart

we have to live and so we have to trust

in what we have as more than just a crust

over the pain inflicted by each dart

what's missing is a sense of what is just

we have to matter and be more than dust

stirred up by every trader in the mart

we have to live and so we have to trust

that what we are will raise more than disgust

but will inspire some joy in pain-filled heart

what's missing is a sense of what is just

we have to live and so we have to trust

ballade of eternal war

some parts of memory are never green

pressed into service they cannot retire

nor can they hide behind a pleasant screen

too many symbols have come down the wire

too many songs been belted out by choir

it is the season for us to deceive

not just ourselves but those who have to grieve

and have no time to beg nor to deplore

so much their sorrow that we can't conceive

yet when we started we all knew the score

there is not time for anger nor for spleen

nor any sentiments we don't require

these are not matters to bee heard or seen

you aren't allowed to think nor to aspire

about such things don't bother to enquire

just take a breath and give the foe a heave

tell folks to go when it is time to leave

just say enough and not a sentence more

there is no good that any will achieve

yet when we started we all knew the score

our thoughts have all been branded as obscene

and all our books must go into the fire

our presence here shall soon have never been

that is the goal at which we must conspire

our signal glory is to be denier

of that which honest folk might all believe

remove those things so no one can retrieve

and once we've finished simply close the door

those who thought otherwise are just naïve

yet when when we started we all knew the score

prince there's so much that you will not achieve

because our target you just can't perceive

so many good materials we abhor

since all we do is shatter and bereave

yet when we started we all knew the score

at last understanding

this is where meaning yields to hard desire

for more of what nobody truly needs

the shady outcomes of unwanted deeds

drugs bought from the old street-corner supplier

swift-acting poison for this case is dire

and no good remedy ever succeeds

instead we turn to all the aging creeds

and preach old words to the devoted choir

in places where they sing all has turned mute

on days like this we face a deeper rage

than any seen by you there is no balm

that soothes us now the pain is absolute

and letters burn in anger on the page

it is too late to ask the folk for calm