This year, the right is rallying behind the cry of “I built this,” a shorthand slogan pointing to the importance of individual initiative and industry. Labor Day is a holiday to acknowledge the workers whose collective effort make our individual accomplishments possible: I am able to build this because they worked so hard to build that. When you drive to work every day, who built that road? When you negotiate orderly, crime-free streets, who protects your safety? When you go to the grocery story to spend your hard-earned paycheck, who stocked those shelves?
Whenever I’m grocery shopping and see a delivery man stocking shelves, I smile because my Dad did that, driving a bread route for years. If there was bread on the shelf when you went grocery shopping this week, it was because some hard-working Teamster like my dad drove a truck to deliver it: it didn’t just appear there by accident or chance.
Morning refuge
mole:
Until enlightenment I take refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, and in the supreme assembly of the Sangha, I mutter, but I don’t really: I take refuge in the car starting and in scrambled eggs and in coffee fatted with cream. I think of all the cancers growing in my friends, and in strangers, possibly in myself: the race between cells that know restraint and cells that don’t is not a hard one to call. The worst are full of passionate intensity, and single-mindedly, bloodily intent on replication. The faces in the Republican Convention hall didn’t even look human to me: they looked like masks.
Words on the Street
The future of copyright copyrestriction
Although it is often said that a work is protected by copyrestriction, this is strictly not true. A work is protected through the existence of lots of copies and lots of curators.
[…]
Free and open source software has demonstrated the ethical and practical value of the opposite of copyrestriction, which is not its absence, but regulation mandating the sharing of copies, specifically in forms suitable for inspection and improvement. This regulation most famously occurs in the form of source-requiring copyleft, e.g., the GNU General Public License (GPL), which allows copyrestriction holders to use copyrestriction to force others to share works based on GPL’d works in their preferred form for modification, e.g., source code for software. However, this regulation occurs through other means as well, e.g., communities and projects refusing to curate and distribute works not available in source form, funders mandating source release, and consumers refusing to buy works not available in source form.
Artistic creation as a radical act
The fact is that we are living in a time when the decision to be an artist, to continue to create in spite of everything that’s happening around us, IS a radical political act. This is, I feel, quite a dark time, potentially destructive to the best and most noble aspects of the human spirit. And that’s precisely why it is terribly important for artists in all disciplines to continue to create, even when it feels like there’s little market and little appreciation for our work. Just doing it, and making the difficult decision to continue to do it — to live creative lives that celebrate what life is and can be — is both defiant and affirming, and it’s crucially important. People need to know that someone they know — a neighbor, a friend, a cousin — is committed to the arts. Young people particularly need to know this.
That Button
You were no less terrifying
for having been
entirely fictitious.
You were big & round
& very, very red.
I saw you whenever I squeezed
my eyelids shut
& faced into the sun,
practicing for the flash.
I worried that Reagan
might mistake you for
a jelly bean—
groggy from a nap,
groping for candy
he’d blow up the world.
However it happened, I knew
it was only a matter of time.
You were, after all, made
to be pressed,
shaped to fit the finger,
even if only for the briefest
of momentous occasions,
like an engagement ring
for a shotgun wedding.
Yet you wouldn’t have been
anything fancy,
just molded plastic.
When finally pressed,
you would’ve clicked twice—
no third time
for the charm.
Screw
O screw
with your fine thread
your bugle head
your shank
your sharp tip—
you with your disinclination to slip
have taught me all
I need to recall
about politics:
go left & get loose
go right & tighten
into place
like dutiful screws
but beware the quick fix
the stripped thread
the buggered head
of those who are too
truly screwed.
Constituencies of death
Just as the lightness of sleep overtakes me, I hear the phrase, “Death has its own constituency.” I wake to read of the tar sands pipeline potentially delayed by a critically endangered species of carrion beetle, the American burying beetle (Nicrophorus americanus).
With its shiny, black and fiery body and orange-tipped antennae, the American burying beetle is a vibrant beauty of the bug world. The insect’s occupation, though, is a little less glamorous. After sniffing out a freshly dead animal from up to two miles away, the beetle joins a mate in burying the carcass, stripping it of fur or feathers, rolling it into a ball, and covering it in oral and anal fluids to preserve it as a shelter and food source for the pair’s litter of lucky larvae.
A newspaper article reporting on the possible delay prompts the predictable reactions from readers: “Step on them.” “A couple of cans of RAID and the problem is OVER.” “Drill baby drill!” One ignoramus even goes on a rant:
who cares about a beetle really, this is as bad as not growing produce in Calif. because of a little 2 inch fish that died in the aqua duck system..do you think either one is more important then people lives and feeding their young children..NO NO NO the answer will always be NO, even God made insects and animals to eventually die out for what ever reason, so get a grip on it folks this is trash talk to step on you as a person and your rights….
No matter many times I hear this kind of ignorant callousness disguised as piety and concern for human beings, I still turn cold with rage, and before I know it I, too, am harboring violent fantasies…
How ironic that our penchant for unearthing the byproducts of ancient deaths, to the detriment of the planet, endangers a beetle whose role in the ecosystem is to help recycle the dead to the benefit of us all. As the CBD puts it:
The American burying beetle is one of nature’s most efficient recyclers, feeding and sheltering its own brood while simultaneously returning nutrients to the earth to nourish vegetation and keeping ant and fly populations in check.
It seems unusual for a habitat generalist to suffer such precipitous declines in population across its range, but, says the Encylclopedia of Life entry:
[E]vidence points increasingly to a cascade of changes in vertebrate communities resulting from habitat fragmentation and other human-caused disturbances. Loss of the largest mammal predators has resulted in increases of smaller mammal predator-scavengers that are more likely to compete with [the American burying beetle] for carcasses of still smaller mammals or birds.
In other words, our extirpation of top predators across North America, including wolves and cougars, may ultimately be to blame. The beetles themselves have no known predators, and appear to have a symbiotic relationship with a species of mite that helps keep them clean of microbes and fly eggs in return for access to carcasses. Even more remarkable is their habit of caring for their young:
American burying beetles provide care for their young from the time of birth until adolescence. This type of behavior is typically not observed among invertebrates outside of social bees, wasps, and termites.
Prior to birth, both parents regurgitate partially digested food in the nesting chamber, which accumulates as food for the larvae. They continue to do so until larvae are able to feed directly from the carcass. Parents also regularly maintain the carcass by removing fungi and covering the carrion ball with antibacterial secretions.
Let’s see—there’s a phrase for that sort of thing in American political discourse, isn’t there? Oh, yes: family values.
It’s sad how many people who describe themselves as conservative have, in service to corporate agendas, forsaken the most conservative principle of all: First, do no harm. “Because the American burying beetle has a highly vulnerable status in the wild, the two known natural populations (Block Island, Rhode Island and eastern Oklahoma) should be protected and maintained,” says the Encylopedia of Life. In recycling the dead, the American burying beetle helps preserve and extend the cycle of life. In advocating for its elimination, conservatives show themselves to be staunch supporters of what Pope John Paul II labeled the culture of death.
How to question authority
Loudly, so the police sirens will be abashed.
Softly, so your blood-sucking interrogator will lean in close where he can be asphyxiated by your garlic breath.
From within, so the authorities will begin to doubt themselves.
From beyond the grave, which affords some form of protection against reprisal.
Through the slogan NO, which, as nitric oxide, reduces blood pressure by expanding the veins during its brief half-life in the bloodstream.
Through songs, which spread by invisible spores and can grow six inches in a day.
In the voice of unreason, since all the reasonable men defer to whomever commands the most barking guns.
Casually, as if walking on hot coals.
Automatically, through negative phototropism.
Surreptitiously, linking to your co-conspirators only through quantum entanglement.
With an absense of authority, which calls the very logic of authority structures into question.
Joyously. Because otherwise what’s the point?
What to Call It
To the thrush singing at the woods’ edge
it must look as if I’m hitting myself
but that’s only incidental.
I’m swatting mosquitoes.
*
To the cops at the stadium
it might appear that she’s praying
when she closes her eyes
to see the afterimages on her eyelids.
*
To friends & admirers of the legendary coach
it must’ve seemed so generous,
all the things he gave those boys,
all the places he took them.
*
To us it’s a mournful song
but to the wood thrush itself?
Perhaps just the sound of dusk
passing through its windpipe.
Inspired in part by the currently serializing Fragments issue at qarrtsiluni.