night-walker's song

so now this clarity in unflawed glass

allows a truth that we must never bend

these are the days that far too swiftly pass

you'd challenge what is said just for its brass

words that would hurt but had no warmth to mend

so now this clarity in unflawed glass

not clear to us the road through the morass

nor what to do to change the downward trend

these are the days that far too swiftly pass

leaving us with no grace but drying grass

and sullen folk who will not comprehend

so now this clarity in unflawed glass

the wisest one looks foolish on his ass

nor will the servile bother to pretend

these are the days that far too swiftly pass

into the memory of the tardy class

as one more message that we cannot send

so now this clarity in unflawed glass

these are the days that far too swiftly pass

what has been seen

fractions and fragments broken on the head

of tiny knowledge things that have been turned

between swift signals when the court adjourned

throwing us out into the wider dread

of rotting time and weeds in the rose-bed

such were the wages which our fear had earned

in the dry season while the forest burned

you spoke and no one heard a thing you said

justice requires a citizen must pay

for all the pleasures and the sins of state

since honour's lash is straightforward and harsh

this rule is clear there are no shades of grey

nor compromises on the road to fate

just noisy birds that call out on the marsh

human veins

knowing the hour must mean we know the place

where justice meets with anger and they ride

the horse of pain this is where heroes stride

in open season none would fear disgrace

since not a one would dare bow or abase

his own deep need before the other side

there is a proper setting for true pride

where understanding gives each monster space

between the echoes we might hear a word

conveyed with clarity and given due force

by those whose task it is simply to speak

of matters complex and of the absurd

conditions under which we chide the weak

obliging them to step out of the course

a simple matrix

those who mean well end up not knowing much

our very reason in the end rebels

at what are simple but resounding yells

we cannot reach and so we have to clutch

before calm force absorbs or else impels

those who mean well end up not knowing much

we watch the ball bounce hard right out of touch

our ears are deafened by the warning bells

nothing remains but what we hope excels

those who mean well end up not knowing much

so now change

the autumn flower's not delicate of kind

but sturdy growth is what we most desire

a stunning smile then winter's stern attire

we must take on these are the goods we find

as times grow stern to our hard tasks we bind

so many wishes and we hope the choir

sings just as clearly as the days require

for all our visions now have left us blind

so much that's good has passed out of plain sight

into the dust where we cannot recall

just how to make what should matter suffice

but now fresh day has come out of the night

and there's no reason for a soul to stall

while double sixes come up on the dice

out past the blue

to reach the realm that lies beyond the sun

takes so much effort that most folk will fold

their angry hands and let their eyes grow cold

tell you their patience long ago was done

you have to finish before you've begun

and understand the lies you have been told

it is too hard these days to be true bold

and reach out past the stars just for the fun

what good is given we shall have to take

not with a smile but with a steady look

just so each knows the proper word to say

the world we leave is easy to forsake

and much is written in the golden book

but that is matter for a calmer day

Foolish Virgins & The Wrath to Come

John Maxwell

 

Eighty years ago the giant American company, General Motors decided on a strategy to sell cars, not Just to sell cars but to convert first the United States into an automobile owning democracy. ‘Automobile’ – a heavy and clumsy word, conveyed subtle hints of free range, autonomy and capitalist self determination. ‘Car’ – on the other hand was redolent of old fashioned modes of transport like street cars and railway cars all public transportation.

Though it was never put in these terms, automobiles would be the motive power behind leaving the herd and joining the rat race.

Beginning in the twenties, GM conducted widespread PR campaigns against public transportation, particularly aimed at getting streetcars - trams - off the roads. streetcars, buses and trains were limiting to personal mobility GM said.  Although no one had noticed those limitations before, GM was selling the idea that cars were the ticket to the wide open spaces of America, although few roads then existed to get to those wide open spaces and there wasn’t much to be done there, except for hikers, nature-lovers and gangsters looking for places to dump dead bodies.

General Motors, through a dummy corporation, began buying up tramways and shutting them down on the ground that they were old fashioned, slow and got in the way of cars. in collusion with Standard Oil of California and Firestone (tyres) GM bought the largest makers of buses in the US so that public and private transportation would not only be controlled by Detroit but tied to the internal combustion engine.

Americans loved their cars. Some early movies seemed to be more about cars than people and pretty soon the charms of “Chattanooga Choo Choo” were blown away in the exhausts from “Route 66” where you could get your kicks fleeing dead ends like New York and Boston for the wide open soullessness of Bakersfield Calif or Oklahoma City, which was ‘mighty pretty’.

‘A basketful of King Cobras’

Detroit built automobiles, big, clumsy vehicles with soft suspensions and inefficient engines. In the 1950s writer Tom McCahill reviewed new cars for Mechanix Illustrated magazine though he continually lambasted American automakers for their sloppy suspension and inefficient engines. He once criticised the suspension of Ford’s Edsel as so dangerous that "I wouldn't own one except with the export kit; without stiffer suspension, a car with so much performance could prove similar to opening a Christmas basket full of King Cobras in a small room with the lights out".

But McCahill  was also a nationalist and went along with the US auto industry as it defied  commonsense and continued building gas guzzlers. Of course, at that time, gasoline was priced in cents per gallon, not dollars. But California was already beginning to enforce fuel consumption and air pollution standards on cars,  so they can’t say they didn’t know which way the wind was blowing. McCahill did tend to laugh at the small European and Japanese cars which were beginning to nibble at GM’s near monopoly on the US market.

“Unsafe at any Speed’

  Fortunately for him he didn’t live to see the huge swing to those cars, although Ralph Nader's sensational expose, a book entitled “Unsafe at any speed”  revealed that many American automobiles were extremely  unsafe.  The worst was the Chevrolet Corvair manufactured by General Motors. This car was becoming notorious  for accidents involving spins and rollovers, and there were over 100 lawsuits pending against GM in connection to accidents involving the Corvair. Instead of fixing the problem immediately, GM at first attempted to smear and terrorise Nader, hiring private detectives to tap his phones and investigate his past, and hiring prostitutes to trap him into compromising situations. GM  had tried intimidating McCahill some years earlier, but McCahill a strong, burly six footer, beat up GM’s goons, sending one to hospital. Nader sued GM and won a hefty award which he used to set up his environmental investigative NGO.

GM never learned. Until recently they were still trying to belittle the Japanese hybrids like the Prius while continuing to build the Hummer – the most environmentally unfriendly and criminally wasteful vehicle ever aimed at a civilian market

Last week, GM, once the world biggest and most profitable company, was in Washington along with Ford and Chrysler, literally begging the taxpayer’s representatives for a bailout. Nearly 50 years ago,  George Romney, Mitt Romney’s daddy briefly rescued American motors (Nash, Judson, Jeep) from financial disaster and became so popular in Michigan that he was elected Governor. His son, running on his dad’s name was a candidate for the GOP presidential nomination this year. A few days ago, in the New York Times, Romney came out against any bailout, it would he said, be throwing good money after bad. He thought the auto industry should go bankrupt and then shed many of its workers and its obligations to its pensioners. It didn’t seem to him that government would have had to bailout out the workers and pensioners and the nearly five million people directly connected to the industry, making almost all the parts used in Detroit's products. Detroit actually manufactures little more than the engines and gear trains of its vehicles. It then buys in the seating and furnishing like instrumentation etc from outside suppliers.

The problem is that not only do mastodons like GM corrupt the public agenda, multiplying  the pace of global warming; they occupy such a large area of what should be public space that governments feel obliged to come to their rescue with the aim of rescuing their workers and the economy at large.

Even Tom McCahill may have seen this coming. He didn’t quite agree with GM’s  former Chairman and Eisenhower’s secretary of Defence, ‘Engine Charlie’ Wilson that “what was good for GM was good for America” but like many other Americans he didn’t see too much wrong with it.

GM and the unbridled, go-for-broke capitalism that it epitomised has left the United States and the world between the devil and the deep red ink, between catastrophic climate change and perpetual debt and penury. Our children and grandchildren will be paying for those mistakes well into the next century.

Foolish Virgins

The media in Jamaica are in one of their periodic  froths about violent crime and capital punishment. Homophobia, having been exhausted, has been given a break.

Nobody seems to be aware of the real disaster on the horizon, the economic collapse, starvation, privation and public unrest that are likely to follow.

Have you checked the increase in the number of ‘sturdy beggars’ on the road. Unemployment and privation are increasing, fast.

While the small hotels and soon, some of the larger ones, will be asking for a government bailout, the government is digging down the beaches and offering all sorts of incentives to foreign hoteliers.

And worse, it is negotiating with a consortium of foreign oligarchs to finally destroy what is left of the Jamaican environment: it is planning to increase the rapacious exploitation of bauxite, turning thousands of hectares of Jamaica into desert for a pittance and  destroying our atmospheric quality for a chimera known as clean coal technology.

This particular piece of lunacy has gained some respectability because Barack Obama has seemed to endorse the idea that it is possible to use coal hygienically.

It isn’t. The technologies now existing will still produce enormous quantities of particulates and ozone harming chemicals as well as increase global warming. More, ‘clean coal’ uses so much water than all Jamaica will be suffering water shortages unless somebody (guess who) sets up desalination plants. And pumping the pollution into the ground of this seismically active country is guaranteed to produce a new kind of environmental catastrophe.

The intention is to rape the parishes of St Ann and Trelawny, to destroy the Cockpit Country, its precious environs and environment and  all presumably, because the Jamaican ginnigogs either can’t read or are afraid of the Swiss, Chinese, and Russian ‘investors’ who are planning to devastate this country.

I challenge Mr Golding, the Prime minister, to explain to Jamaica how it is possible for us to get greater benefit out of tearing great holes in the landscape, and  destroying farmland  than it would be to plant food to feed ourselves.

I challenge  Mr Golding to explain why it is better for us to depend on foreign exchange from tourism and remittances – a diminishing resource – than to depend on our own talent for growing food and feeding ourselves.

I want Mr Golding to explain why he feels no pain in watching half a million tons of Jamaican topsoil end up in Kingston Harbour annually  when the 5,000 acres of topsoil it represents is lost to productivity.

I want him to explain why we should sacrifice our beaches and our recreational possibilities to allow foreigners to destroy our assets while exporting the profits of that destruction.

The government and the media seem to expect that crime can be solved by hanging or by sending out more lethal policemen. I am reminded of a conversation I had with Michael Manley after the elections of 1972. The sense of the discussion was as follows:

Well, I said, we have a mandate for our austerity programme, to straighten out Jamaica, rebuild the community,  increase employment, cut the crime rates and ask people to sacrifice for the greater good.

John, he said, how can I implement that programme after the tremendous support that the people have given us. I said that the people had given us that support because they expected to be asked for sacrifice in the cause of real development. He told me that what I proposed was not practical.

Mr Golding and the rest of our Parliament apparently think so too.

In 1972 I lost my temper with Michael Manley. I am too old to repeat that mistake.

 I do know though, that if we take our destinies into our own hands, take care of our children, restore our communities, use Jamaican hands to grow Jamaican food and  build Jamaican infrastructure, we have a chance. Especially if we insist that we will not pay the extortionate debt charges.

And I believe most Jamaicans agree with me.

Walk Good.

Copyright©2008 John Maxwell

jankunnu@gmail.com

eyes long blind

too easy it is these days to be hip

but one can be a fool at any age

just move towards the door at a fast clip

you think that you are wise and not a dip

yet all of us will boo you off the stage

too easy it is these days to be hip

so simple to load wisdom on a chip

no effort then to read the weather-gauge

just move towards the door at a fast clip

it is no crime to give your elders lip

you have to laugh at their most earnest rage

too easy it is these days to be hip

a normal matter to let anger rip

the walls of cities and unbar the cage

just move towards the door at a fast clip

until the moment you too lose your grip

and learn your story has a closing page

too easy is it these days to be hip

just move towards the door at a fast clip

come walk on mountain

words seem to scatter down the shadowed hill

like running goats in the fast-fading light

there's too much work to do and soon comes night

and care is needed with this long cane-bill

so much of life seems to defy plain will

beauty is just another boring sight

to be ignored while getting the job right

since practice makes each lad develop skill

this evening dapple under mango trees

comes with an odour of harvested spice

soon we will pass the wall and close the gate

be very grateful for the evening breeze

and happy to have salt-meat with our rice

not thinking how our meanings might translate

ill fares the land

you counted golden the worth of your name

now see it tarnished by this acid rain

not generations will remove the stain

of knowing you thought life and death a game

worth playing just so you won greatest fame

while blood and water swirl down every drain

and soldiers laugh at each new orphan's pain

you speak of cities that might feel the flame

so fools cry out and call on you for aid

while skies turn darker and rivers run dry

your mighty shadow seems to many blessed

by divine power so you lead the parade

smiling as you're the focus of each eye

ready to guide us on with massive zest

but not so eager to confront the test

at sight of hardship your star seems to fade

and calls for effort lead your force to die

we ask for help but you won't make the grade

instead you look down from a brazen sky

as the red sun sinks into furthest west

the journey's long the hills hard to ascend

but choosing you is something we could mend

blue

when the storms break change comes upon the land

new rivers rise each clearing a fresh course

having pushed up from a surprising source

that is a matter we can understand

in books and pictures we might think it grand

a fact of nature each fool would endorse

as being nothing more than goodly force

and proof that death is but a gentle hand

we let things happen and they do not slip

past our control into some roaring drain

as blank-faced masses wait to see things pass

value remains beyond each rise or dip

that has been measured or been written plain

and we see clearly through transparent glass

so now applause

the age of miracles is not yet past

we see the light and are constrained to weep

at finding out that we have got off cheap

while others suffered from the sudden blast

and learned the price of what they got to keep

the age of miracles is not yet past

this turning world now seems to move too fast

for those of us who have no time to sleep

while others think that centuries just creep

the age of miracles is not yet past

landing at midday

those massive towers that seem to draw in cloud

on rainy days now stand revealed and clear

clean and beguiling in the autumn air

announcing more than properly allowed

to those who pass to the amazing crowd

who pause to think and to those brave who dare

to tell us what is right and what is fair

the truths that make us stand up tall and proud

now fun inheres in many things we make

both in real life and all the times we dream

hope into being for our better days

all of our joy is in what we partake

with fellow framers of the human meme

creating subjects for a higher gaze

evaluation

so much was lost and now so much is found

each tiny gain has much to signify

yet still the fear that we may run aground

a single word can the whole world astound

and utter silence be the best reply

so much was lost and now so much is found

now all may see beyond the narrow bound

set by our masters and reject the lie

yet still the fear that we may run aground

in solemn order we shall soon expound

upon just meanings and true reasons why

so much was lost and now so much is found

you would have bowed if  one of them had frowned

can stand upright now under this clear sky

yet still the fear that we may run aground

these are the times we have with glory crowned

made into visions pleasing to each eye

so much was lost and now so much is found

yet still the fear that we may run aground

no king returns

we wait for rescue and beseech for aid

lacking in energy to build our hope

we'd hang ourselves had we a length of rope

our teachers have worked well we are afraid

of secret forces that have been arrayed

against our interests and we cannot cope

with any hard idea we need soft soap

to soothe us now as we accept the blade

those who would warn have nothing more to say

in all this noise and might as well shut up

letting what happens simply take its course

the foolish are supposed to have their way

while we're constrained to drink from the dark cup

and see the final cost of all their force

some sort of game

no one expects the answer to be quick

a simple matter is not what we know

still pride demands that we give the last lick

after warm rain cold air makes the fog thick

but it would take a fool to want breeze blow

no one expects the answer to be quick

you were taught long ago the price of brick

and how to make the faster ones go slow

still pride demands that we give the last lick

to those who demonstrate that they are thick

in spite of all the efforts that we show

no one expects the answer to be quick

only that some good sense be made to stick

within the hardest heads with no outflow

still pride demands that we give the last lick

on the behinds of those who think to prick

our solid patience and escape the blow

no one expects the answer to be quick

still pride demands that we give the last lick

the observer

it is my task only to note the hap

you may not ask me to take up a side

there is no honest claim here to abide

nor to pass on just listen for the clap

of daily thunder and wait for the snap

as rushing fools in their great haste collide

and will not yield because of spite or pride

when you see this you understand the trap

the only job that pays has its own cost

you won't find out until you've signed the form

and by that time you are no longer whole

but fallen deep among the wholly lost

ashamed to say you had not felt the storm

but sorry at the low price of your soul