POEM: NEWS OF THE WORLD #3

    MOTHER NUKES BABY! Oh, she did not!

Did she think it was a tater-tot?

Or a tissue full of day-old snot?”

GOOOOOD MORRRRNIN’ THIS MORNIN’, WORLD!

 

Retrospective page in the Sunday news.

It seems we’ve got those 50s blues.

Again we have to pick and choose

between what's real and realer.

 

One penny, two penny, three penny, three

little brown babies sleeping ‘neath a tree.

A-long comes a bomb-er bombing his-tor-eee.

(In between SPORTS and the WEATHER.)

 

Great Leader held a Greats meeting.

Great Leader was great at Greats greeting.

But Great Leader telled at great cheating.

(With his fly way down again.)

 

Put down the paper, Eye-leen.

Don’t you read that ma-ga-zeen.

Don’t listen to those ray-dee-oh screams.

“Let’s just eat our breakfast, shall we?”

 

The world’s now a convenience store

where shoppers get more, and then more,

and discounts are just to die for!

And it’s open 24/7.

 

Huffing air from dirty brown tins

(just like it was some Great War sin.)

Can we say now our time begins?

But quick before the ink dries!

 

So what do we do now, Boo-Boo?

Between what is wild and the zoo?

Do we heed what is all too true?

Or take our lumps with our pudding?

 

 

Ursula K. Le Guin

WELL THAT WAS AN INTERESTING WEEK! Next door they’re digging up the street to connect the new build’s services to the main line, while down south they dug up Old Joe and made him president. Who would have thunk it? A lot of dust, noise, vibration, clanging and squealing, and then an eerie silence when the jack hammers stop, much like those brief moments early Wednesday morning following the returns in the American elections just before the competing bands’ cacophonies started up again. As expected, Trump is claiming voter fraud, but it seems unlikely he’ll make his case. It remains to be seen how much damage he’ll do on his way out; he’s a bull in a china shop, and no doubt he’ll be around for some time to come. It’s rumoured he wants to start his own TV network after he’s out of office—no quiet retirement for that fellow! I breathlessly await for my cable subscription to arrive.

Then there’s old Covid, of course. We’ve entered the expected second  wave and it sometimes feels like we’re in over our heads. There have been over ten thousand deaths from the disease in Canada; in America—over a quarter of a million. World-wide 1.2 million have died. But, there are a couple of promising vaccines in the trials phase: one from Russia—the cheekily named “Sputnik V”, and one from Pfizer that is reported to be 90% effective in preventing Covid-19 infections. That’s good news. And with the current simmering brew of economic meltdowns, foreclosures, shuttered businesses, unemployment, homelessness, and hunger in many parts of the world, along with some potentially worrying political instabilities and military conflicts, a bit of positive news is welcome.

 

JESTER QUITS! KING'S FOOL LEAVES PALACE

I was reading a collection of Ursula K Le Guin’s non-fiction writing the other day and this quite helpful, and I think timely, excerpt from an essay she wrote discussing her 1969 novel, The Left Hand of Darkness, seemed appropriate to share with you:

“Finally, the question arises, is the book a Utopia? It seems to me that it is quite clearly not; it poses no practicable alternative to contemporary society, since it is based on an imaginary, radical change in human anatomy. All it tries to do is to open up an alternative viewpoint, to widen the imagination, without making any very definite suggestions as to what might be seen from that new viewpoint. The most it says is, I think, something like this: If we were socially ambisexual, if men and women were completely and genuinely equal in their social roles, equal legally and economically, equal in freedom, in responsibility, and in self-esteem, then society would be a very different thing. What our problems might be, God knows; I only know we would have them. But it seems likely that our central problem would not be the one it is now: the problem of exploitation—exploitation of the woman, of the weak, of the earth. Our curse is alienation, the separation of yang from yin. Instead of a search for balance and integration, there is a struggle for dominance. Divisions are insisted upon, interdependence is denied. The dualism of value that destroys us, the dualism of superior/inferior, ruler/ruled, owner/owned, user/used, might give way to what seems to me, from here, a much healthier, sounder, more promising modality of integration and integrity.” (168-9)  [Italics mine. ed.]

 

THE PROBLEM OF EXPLOITATION—in our politics, our economics, our social orderings, and our personal lives—as Le Guin suggests, is the great bugaboo of modernity. So often our lives are lived distracted and distanced from this reality. At times, we are exploited, at other times we’re the exploiters. And while it is fairly certain Entropy always wins in the end, how we spend our energy in the course of our lives—developing our skills and knowledge, building resilient families and communities, sharing with, caring for, loving and accepting others will surely make our lives, and the lives of all those who share our world, that much richer, longer and more enjoyable.

 

Cheers, Jake.

 

 

 

Ursula K. Le Guin, “Is Gender Necessary?” in The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction, ed. Susan Wood, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1979