Listen to Your Starets

Mack Hall, HSG
mhall46184@aol.com

Listen to Your Starets

Each follows a starets: books, music, art,

News, living in the past, forming committees
For the regulation of one’s neighbors,
Manufactured anger and resentment,
A centering prayer centered on one’s self.

But

A starets true would lash with whips of words

These idle idols and idler idylls
Out of the Temples given each of us,
Lives not to grasp, rather to give away,
Sunflowers harvested in September.

China Blocked the Titanic's Marconi Signals

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

News Gumbo

Here, then, is a summary of this week’s news:

The Titanic sank after hitting iceberg lettuce because of global warming which was caused by evil Americans plowing their fields with oxen that were too big and that ate too much grain and then morphed into the Kardashians.  The captain fired distress rockets while checking his MySpace friending status but because the rockets were made in North Korea they simply fizzled and fell into the ocean, taking out some vegetarian porpoises.  Wireless operator McBride’s calls for help were not heard because China killed all Morse signals, suspicious that Marconi operators were saying bad things about the government in Peking / Beijing / Peiping.   In the meantime, ship security officers, supervised by The Three Stooges, were cavorting in their rooms with killer clowns and would not pay them, which embarrassed President Teddy Roosevelt who was hunting moose with the French prime minister, and this was difficult because they were both riding bicycles in knee-pants (and bicycles look goofy in knee-pants) and wearing those silly plastic-pimple helmets.

Back in Las Vegas, the Taliban were dancing the night away with the Castro brothers in a fund-raiser for Hugo Chavez.  You ain’t seen nothin’ until you’ve seen an octogenarian Cuban minister for socialist culture shakin’ it to the new fusion hit, “Rock me Like a Byzantine Princess of the Ikonoclast Persuasion.”  The Taliban accused stay-at-home mothers of not knowing enough about beheading infidels,  and Fox News’ John Stossel aired a one-hour report detailing how World War II could have been won three years earlier if it had been run by small business internet start-ups free of IRS regulations.

Canada urged the United Nations to send in monitors to oversee Bill Clinton and Lady Gaga because of their proximity to a Tim Horton’s just across the border, and the NRA (National Rifle Association) considered the possibility of funding laboratory experiments on solar-powered green firearms whose on-board computers would disable the firing mechanism when the scope senses a vegetarian target species.  Greece is considering issuing bonds to bail out the city government of Branson, Missouri, and Congress is pondering legislation to limit the height of beauty pageant crowns because of their menace to low-flying aircraft. 

Harry Potter appeared with Jerry Springer to reveal that one of his ancestors may have done something naughty, and Britain’s Daily Mail website featured previously unknown pictures of New Jersey’s Governor Christie dieting.  The Principality of Liechtenstein launched drones to spy on Monaco, and Britain’s parliament and the Archbishop of Canterbury assured Prince Harry that there was no canonical impediment to his forthcoming marriage to Snooky in an outdoor barefoot ceremony with a Titanic theme on the beach in Labrador, which would be a hairy marry Snooky shipwreck.

You say this news roundup doesn’t make sense?  Do you think the news as reported this week makes any more sense?

-30-

The Ship Sank -- My Pancreas Will Go On

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

My Pancreas Will Go On

The 15^th of April is the 100^th anniversary of, well, the ship sank.

In books and films the facts of the Titanic are posthumously cluttered with all sorts of interpretations about the symbolism: the Titanic represents the collapse of Edwardian England, the Titanic is an indictment of technology, the Titanic is a religious lesson about man’s hubris, the Titanic is about the evil of Big Business / Wall Street / The City, and, in a 1943 Nazi propaganda movie, the Titanic is all of the above.

And all that is just too much interpretation.  The Titanic was a really large motorized thingie that someone was driving too fast, at night, and without any headlights.  There’s just not a whole lot of cultural significance in that.

You might as well say that you realized that your life was an existential lie when you bent the shaft in your lawnmower by carelessly mowing into a chunk of wood obscured by weeds.

But folks do enjoying fooling around with the Titanic, and even now a new television film is in release. 

The ship sinks.

The 1997 version of Titanic is unlike other films about the tragedy in that it features a happy ending -- only a very grim man could find himself unable to shed tears of joy when Jack, long, tedious hours into the plot, finally disappears beneath the surface of the Atlantic, leaving only a floating sheen of cliches’. 

Mr. Cameron’s film is excellent in its use of decidedly post-1912 technology – the computerized ship is the star, and it works; the intrusion of the stereotype-sodden fictional lovers pinched from Romeo and Juliet is not only unnecessary but at times annoying.  The depictions of historic people, such as Mr. and Mrs. Isidor Straus, are much more interesting, even when they are cruelly wrong, as with Lightoller and Boxhall.

The best Titanic film is A Night to Remember, based on Walter Lord’s book.  Filmed in 1958 on a budget of mere thousands of dollars, the producers took care to avoid fiction altogether: every character in the film is grounded – or watered – in a real person, and every bit of dialogue is sourced and verified.  A browse through the ever-useful IMDB reveals a treasure of anecdotes, such as the matter of the Lucky Pig.

The hypercritical might at this point protest the historicity because in the end the ship sinks intact, which, as we now know, didn’t happen.  The producers researched survivors and found that although some reported that the ship broke in two, far more said that it remained intact, and the producers went with the majority opinion of people who were there.

Does this mean that the majority of the survivors were liars?  Not at all.  Witness narratives are unreliable because even when folks are doing their best to get the facts right they still perceive through a filter of upbringing, ideology, and wish-fulfillment.  The rivets and welds of the Titanic were asked to carry too much weight, both physical and cultural, when the bow submerged.

The underrated 1953 version with Clifton Webb and Barbara Stanwyck is no more accurate than John Wayne’s The Alamo, but is a hanky-twister because of the excellent ensemble acting.  Still, the ship sinks.

Another underrated ship of soaps is 1979’s SOS Titanic, with George C. Scott.  Surprisingly, the ship sinks. 

The documentaries, with their hours of filler and wild speculation can be dismissed.  Some say that the Titanic was ahead of its time, which it wasn’t.  Its time was 1912, and there it was.  You might as well say that you are ahead of your time because today is Wednesday and you really want to be in Friday.

One of the most interesting Titanics is a Teutonic one, the 1943 German production filmed in the North Sea aboard the SS Cap Arcona, whose own end in 1945 was a horror. 

As with all Titanic productions the film is very loose with the facts; as a Nazi propaganda film it could hardly be otherwise.  The plot features an unlikely romance between starfish-crossed lovers, a valuable jewel, an unsubtle contrast between the first-class fops and the humble but sturdy, clean, and honest volk in steerage, and dramatic scenes on the first-class staircase.  Sound familiar?

But, again, the ship sinks.

This film, the biggest-budgeted film in German cinema to that time, is very well made, and some of the scenes were appropriated for the 1953 and 1958 films without attribution. 

The director was 38-year-old Herbert Selpin, a biggie in the film industry who had directed musicals, light romance, and action flicks.  Mr. Selpin was not a happy Nazi, and for reasons never quite made clear was pulled from the production, arrested, and found (cough) hanged in his cell, a reported (cough) suicide.  Some have alleged that Mr. Selpin was open in his criticism of Nazism, which seems unlikely, and others that the anti-British sentiment is so cloddishly heavy that the film was meant by the director in a sort of double-irony to be a criticism of Nazism.

For whatever reason, Josef Goebbels, the supreme arbiter of film, found enough annoyance in Herbert Selpin to make him disappear into night and fog.  We should remember Mr. Selpin not only as a filmmaker but for annoying the Nazis and dying for it.

The Titanic will go on because, as with The Canterbury Tales, placing all sorts of different folks within a story creates its own sort of dynamic, and is worth hearing and watching again and again.

One wonders if future Titanic films will feature passengers being interrogated and strip-searched by their own countrymen.

Only one question remains unanswered: when the Titanic sailed, did the crew require all the passengers to close their books and newspapers while leaving port so that the ink wouldn’t interfere with the navigational charts?

-30-

My Old Kentucky Arson

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

My Old Kentucky Arson

On Saturday night a large number of people in Lexington, Kentucky chose to overturn cars and set fire to couches.  One supposes they could have instead set fire to a cars and overturned couches, but that would have required a discourse contrasting free will with determinism.  Indeed, they could have chosen to overturn bicycles and set fire to lawn chairs, which would have been much less demanding physically, but one does not expect rational behavior from lemmings.

This giddiness was not an expression of joy at the vigil of Palm Sunday, but rather an outpouring of passion because one small group of young men had demonstrated greater efficiency than another small group of young men at hurling a spheroid through a ring appropriate to the size of the spheroid.

So take that, China; Americans can still throw things with accuracy and then commit arson.  We’re Number One.

According to The Tennessean, a newspaper which is part of the Something Group, Susan Straub, a spokeswoman for the mayor, said that “Things have not gotten out of control.”  Presumably her car and her couch were intact.

Excuse me for raising a point of disorder here, but isn’t a mob overturning cars and burning furniture pretty much an example of things getting out of control?

One photograph showed a young white man in a hoodie and a young black man hoodie-less sharing a touching moment together as they helped tip over a car.  You know, given the racial tensions in this nation, it almost brings a tear to one’s eyes to see vibrant diversity and inclusiveness as young people of different backgrounds come together as one to destroy someone else’s wheels.

Stand tall, Kentucky, thou art a light unto the nations.

Apparently many of the wreckers were university students, so possibly they were rioting after heated discussions about John Milton’s Paradise Lost.  Or perhaps they were frustrated about an experiment in extending Pythagorean theorems into higher concepts of calculus.

To paraphrase an old line of Samuel Johnson’s, one does not evaluate the academic standards of a university of Kentucky; one marvels that there is a university in Kentucky at all.

The rioters were celebrating a win.  If they had lost they would have perhaps tipped over an Amtrak and burned dining tables, thus continuing the transportation and furniture themes.

But, hey, if you think Saturday night was violent, just wait until the chess season.  “Checkmate!” is the call to arms that leads to copies of Spinoza being overturned in front of Barnes & Noble, graphing calculators being burned in the chemistry lab, and drive-by stern looks of disapproval.

-30-

On Your Mobile Device

Mack Hall, HSG
mhall46184@aol.com

On Your Mobile Device

Life now approaches not as a basket

Of new kittens, or an old dog asleep
In the summer sun, a letter, a clock,
A vase of flowers on the kitchen table,
A glass of beer with a friend, a soft wind,
Cold moonlight slanting through the autumn leaves,
Or a wild thunderstorm that makes one glad
To doze inside with a book and a pipe.
Oh, no.  Because life now is but an app
A-blinking on a little plastic box:
The weather, stocks, throats slit in Arkansas,
An actress drunk again in Hollywood,
All, all repose in one’s pants pocket with
Keys, coins, a bit of lint, a pocket knife,
Those relics of an irrelevant past;
We need them not: we have a plastic box.

The Penknife of Destiny

Mack Hall, HSG
mhall46184@aol.com

The Penknife of Destiny

The Romans won with gladius and pilum

(Though after battle they had to file ‘em)

The ancient Samurai were pleased to lop

Their enemies, beginning at the top

And in the West, King Arthur’s noble knights

Bore steel that gave the wicked paynim frights

And later, Robin Hood, with bow and arrow,

Taught villains about the straight and narrow

As did brave Henry at old Agincourt --

The French thought archery quite a foul sport

The sons of desert scenes waved sword and lance

(But surely all that sand gave ’em scratchy pants)

And now Great Men boast glowing, pulsing nukes

In lieu of carefully worded rebukes

Mad leaders with bombs, a threat to all life --

They disapprove of your Swiss Army Knife

When Elevators Were Given the Gift of Speech

Mack Hall, HSG
mhall46184@aol.com

When Elevators Were Given the Gift of Speech

In the Psychology Building at Texas A & M

Elevators shouldn’t be talking at all

But they insist on announcing the floor
And whether they (and their meek passengers)
Are going up or going down. 

                                          One hopes

To hear a revolutionary lift
Someday proclaim a wild manifesto:
“Comrades!  Today we are moving sideways!”

But no.  Good, passive citizens they are,

Neither voting nor thinking nor daring
They hum and chat their way from floor to floor
Mechanical functionaries of the State
Licensed, certified, inspected, and stamped

Just once, a man responded to the Voice:

“I know I’m going up!” he cried in vain
And he was levitated to a plane
Above the automatic stops of life
Existence we can never understand
And nothing more was ever heard of him

And the elevators chanted the floors

In sublime serenity forever
Of stops and floors and numbers, up and down
Mechanical verticals without end

But

Since they are elevators, couldn’t their speech

Be at least somewhat, well, elevated?

Kittens in a Basket

Mack Hall, HSG
mhall46184@aol.com

Kittens in a Basket

For Sarah

Three kittens in a basket squirm and mew,
Small carnivores in training ‘gainst the day
When they’ll stalk crickets through the morning dew,
Progressing thence to mice and larger prey

For now they attack the basket and each other,

Patrol the jungle of an old bath towel,
Torment the dachshund and their own poor mother,
And, being cats, rehearse a high-pitched yowl

Their eyes are wide, their teeth are sharp, their fur

Is softer than a dream of Eden’s dawn
They signal naptime with a three-cats purr,
And so dismiss me with a gentle yawn

Someday wild hunting will be their great art;

The only thing they capture now is my heart.

The Aging Iconoclast on the Late Show

Mack Hall, HSG
mhall46184@aol.com

The Aging Iconoclast on the Late Show

His long career enriched with icons smashed,

An existential poet, heavy with age,
Was preening in the green room of fashion
Awaiting his at-last adoration
Upon the glowing boxes of the world.

“I smashed the vain icon of privilege,”

He trilled to all, while a thin girl in tats
Powdered his nose. “With just my vengeful pen,
“I broke the icon of capitalism!”
A singer-stripper sipped her soda, and sighed.

“I then exposed the icon of the news,

And held it up for the people to scorn.”
He did not see the makeup artist roll
Her eyes.  A desperate young comedienne
Pretended to be busy with her skull.

“And I alone broke all the icons of

Hypocrisy in Wall Street.  Death to debt!
My icon-smashing verses smashed the world
Of formulaic poetry forever!”
A sex-change surgeon sharpened his pink tongue.

“In my day we smashed icons in the war
Against shopworn bourgeois complacency!”
The arbiters of this week’s taste and thought
Waited, in sequence obedient, their turns.
And then a voice, uncertain, asked at last:

“What’s an icon?”

Of Biblical Proportions

Mack Hall, HSG
mhall46184@aol.com

Of Biblical Proportions

 “This contest is the game of the century!!!”

The announcer gasped almost breathlessly,
“A slug-fest of biblical proportions!!!”
He yelped in haste, his excitement inspired
(perhaps)
By the team mothers sharpening their claws
Upon the tattered reputation of
The umpire (who, in his innocent hours,
Filled prescriptions down at his pharmacy.
Please know, before you leave: his name was Steve).
And every pitch and hit and bounce and catch
Was then remarked with apocalyptic praise
Employing multiples and multiples
Of exclamation marks (though one would do)
To set the sports fans’ faithful hearts ablaze
With love transcendent for Our Team so true,
And Dante-esque hatred for The Other,
Words well-worn in canonical cliches’
Calling down thundering Truth from Horeb
Parting the seas, purifying the Temple
(or at least the plywood concession stand)

All this hyperbole was merely to frame

A middle-school girls’ scrimmage softball game

The Campaigning Season

Mack Hall, HSG
mhall46184@aol.com

The Campaigning Season

Beowulf dripped with his enemies’ blood

Montgomery learned of war in Flanders’ mud

Young Davy Crockett grinned down a big bear

Orville and Wilbur conquered the air

Horatius defied Lars Porsena, thus saving Rome

Kit Carson called the wild prairies his home

Wolfe and Montcalm died ‘neath the walls of Quebec

Lewis and Clark made their continental trek

At Monmouth Molly Pitcher crewed a cannon

Goliad echoes the death of Fannin

Brave men and women we well remember,

And from cold March until hot September

On fields of struggle (like Abraham’s plain)

New leaders conquer despite fear and pain

While facing Mad Momma and her (reproach) --

God have mercy on a Little League coach!

Washington-on-the-Brazos, March 2012

Panna Maria, Texas

Mission Espiritu Santo, La Bahia (Goliad)

Does the End of the World Feature its Own Tee-Shirt?

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

Does the End of the World Feature its Own Tee-Shirt?

When we were young our parents taught us that we are all fallen beings, frail, suffering, endeavoring to do our best for God and for others on this weary planet, and again and again falling short.  We should always, then, be kind to each other, because we are all on the same pilgrimage.

Surely, though, we can make an exception for the people waiting for spaceships to come and rescue them. 

Yes, fellow Muggles, the world is coming to an end yet again.

This go-‘round the world is coming to an end in France, in December, so there’s plenty of time to secure a passport (“Sir…sir, you’ll need to take off the Phrygian helmet for your photograph.”) and beg for spare change for a one-way ticket to eternal vegan bliss on another planet or parallel realm of existential being-ness or something.

The free-to-be-you-and-me lot are termite-swarming to the little town of Bugarach in the French Pyrenees.  They are persuaded by The Voices that on the 21^st of December a secret alien spaceship hidden within a nearby mountain is going to appear (that must be one heck of a garage-door opener), take all the soap-free granola-eaters aboard, and transport them to a world safe from any form of work or thought.

The first clue that something could be very, very wrong might come when the in-flight movie is The Hunger Games and the airline magazine is entitled To Serve Man.

The sort of people who think that milk comes from a store and that gasoline is created by polar bear fairies waving magic wands are repeatedly preparing for the end of the world.  They are the ear-budded non-readers who can manipulate the dials on little plastic boxes made in China but who cannot split kindling, tie a knot, cook a simple meal, wash clothes, set a table, change the oil, scan a line of iambic pentameter, plow a furrow, get a job, or test an idea according to the Hegelian dialectic.

They are like, y’know, spiritual, and, like stuff, and they know, like, stuff about vibrant, esoteric, Meso-american magnetic waves, like, alignment of energies that are like, y’know, totally eschatological, and, like, stuff.

Worse, they play guitars.

The Neo-Hale-Boppians are said to climb their holy mountain naked, which wouldn’t be particularly pleasant for the fellow in the, um, rear, toking on his reality-denying drug of choice and wondering about all the full moons in the sky above him.

Jean-Pierre Delord, the mayor of Bugarach, has communicated to Paris his fears of a mass suicide, which is the sort of thing that can happen when geriatric hippies who spent their formative years learning conversational Klingon come to realize that Captain Kirk is a Canadian.

Those who are prone to conspiracy theories might suspect M. Delord and his fellow townsfolk of dreaming up the space-ship-hidden-in-a-mountain thing for the sake of balancing the budget and re-paving the streets.  For the next few months all those visiting, um, mystics will want to beam up tons of fair trade coffee, hemp sandals, vegetarian meals, and of course the official event tee-shirt: “Some Old People Who Might or Might Not be my Parents Went to the End of the World and all They Got me was this Lousy, Made-in-Indonesia Tee.”

There might be a booth with folks offering to sell visitors gold because the dollar is about to collapse, and then a booth next door offering to buy gold with dollars so that the purchaser can be rich enough to buy a Mooncluck’s cup of coffee, and next to that a booth selling Rich Radio Guy’s latest book about how The World as We Know It is about to end, and help him build his big estate in Florida in which he plans to live for a long, long time.

Whew.

On the 22^nd of December the faithful, disappointed at being alive, will climb down from their rocks and their roofs, and beg the government of France ("Pardon-moi, senor, moi c'est est stupido, ja.") for a plane ticket back to their earthly homes.

Before a month has passed, another discount-store mystic leader will recalculate and re-conjure on his weewee board or something, and propose a new date for the end of the world, your credit card welcome, and the lemmings will again line up obediently.

The nonreader in our culture…wants to believe…The world is so vastly confusing and baffling to him that he feels there has to be some simple answer to everything that troubles him.  And so, our of pure emptiness, he will eagerly embrace spiritualism, yoga, a banana diet, or some…strange amalgam…masquerading under invented semiscientific terms, and sold to the beginner at a nice profit.

-      John D. MacDonald, Reading for Survival

-30-

Presidio La Bahia

Mack Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

The Soldiers’ Chapel

You could spend a day at Presidio La Bahia outside Goliad and never come across the fine old Irish name of O’Conner, and that’s pretty much how the O’Conner family wants it.  And yet if not for Kathryn O’Connor there wouldn’t be much to see.

Presidio La Bahia was established by Spain along the Gulf Coast in 1721, and after two removes was permanently located in 1749 on a hill along the Rio San Antonio near present-day Goliad.

The Presidio was a royal fortress and administrative center.  Its chapel, Nuestra Senora de Loreto de la Bahia, served the soldiers and administration, their families, and the town.  The Franciscan mission to the First Nations peoples, Espiritu Sancto, was situated down the road and across the river because, although church parade was mandatory, soldiers were still considered a bad influence.

The chapel was the first structure built, and except for five years in the early Republic has served the faithful as a church since 1749. 

The fortress, although miles from the Gulf, was the center of coastal defense against the French.  Later, when Spain was one of the first friends of the USA, soldiers from La Bahia went into action against the British.

Economically, La Bahia was the beginning of the Texas cattle industry.   Mission herds and private herds were rounded up here for cattle drives to other settlements, guarded by soldiers of the local command.

According to the pamphlet, La Bahia was involved in six revolutions and many raids, and has been a fortress for the armies of Spain, Mexico, and Texas.

La Bahia is, unfortunately, most famous for the mass murder of Colonel James Fannin and some 350 of his men on Palm Sunday, 1836 on the orders of a particularly nasty little man.  What is less known is that many of the Mexican soldiers and their wives, including Francisca Alvarez, a true mother of Texas, managed to conceal some of the Texians, and saved others by listing them, apparently some falsely, as doctors and medical attendants so that they would be spared take care of the many Mexican wounded from both the Alamo and Coleto Creek battles.

With independence, La Bahia was no longer an economic and administrative center, and although the chapel was still in use the little fortress became a source of building materials, and by the 1960s little was left.

Then came Mrs. Kathryn O’Connor, who inspired and funded a historically accurate restoration of the fort through the research and work of San Augustine architect Raiford Stripling and using mostly local labor and artists. 

A correspondent who once worked for the family remarks on their generosity and industry.  Each generation of young O’Connors begins in the family businesses with a broom and a mop, not an attitude, and while their contributions to numerous causes and charities are great, of modesty they do not put their name on things.

La Bahia and the area around it include the fortress and its chapel, the excellent state reconstruction of Mission Espiritu Sancto, the site of the Battle of Coleto Creek, the mass grave and memorial to the murdered soldiers, the birthplace of General Ignacio Zaragoza, who defeated the French at the Battle of Puebla on 5 May (hence Cinco de Mayo)1862, and the eminently shoppable town of Goliad centered on its beautiful courthouse.  The three murder sites are all on private property, and perhaps that peaceful isolation is best.

The docents on site are very welcoming, and one of them, Jeremy, allowed an old man to help raise the Goliad Flag one morning.

At the State of Texas Parks sites the staffs are equally helpful, and the springtime beauty of the woods and fields around the mission are a naturalist’s happiest dream.

Useful sites:

www.presidiolabahia.org

http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/gkgfk

http://www.tpwd.state.tx.us/spdest/findadest/parks/goliad_and_mission_espiritu_santo/

The wars and raids have passed, and governments come and go, but on every Sunday a priest of the Diocese of Victoria still offers Mass under the same roof raised for the purpose in 1749.

A small red flame…relit before the…doors of a tabernacle; the flame which the old knights saw from their tombs, which they saw put out; that flame burns again…It could not have been lit but for the builders and the tragedians, and there I found it this morning, burning anew among the old stones.

-Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

-30-

Austin, Texas: The Capital of Preciousness

Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

Austin, the Capital of Preciousness

The democratically-elected city council of Austin, Texas has inhaled the pixie dust.  Effective in March of 2013, retailers who provide customers with a sack for their purchases will be in violation of the awful majesty of the law and the dilated pupils of the Eyes of Texas.

And not a moment too soon, I say, for who, while visiting Austin, has not feared being stalked by a drug-crazed grocery sack in the parking garage late at night?

Grocery sacks are increasingly notorious for their home invasions, and don’t even get me started about the drunken grocery sacks staggering around 6^th Street.

Grocery sacks gang up at intersections and at the entrances to stores holding out buckets and demanding money “for the missions.”

You can see grocery sacks lurking in dark alleys making drug deals, and more grocery sacks luring children into lives of crime.

Grocery sacks hang out in the parks playing loud music and smoking cigarettes and stomping the flowers with their carbon feet-prints. 

There are some who presume to defend the capitalist grocery sack.  The humble grocery sack, they say, can be used over and over (in AustinSpeak, “post-consumer recycling”).  A grocery sack can cover the hot-dish for the church luncheon.  A grocery sack makes a pretty good Halloween mask.  The more Occupy-ish among us can use a grocery sack for a facial disguise when holding up a stop-and-rob in order to liberate The People’s goods from the belly of the capitalist beast.  A smaller sack can be popped loudly in order to annoy big sister – maybe the Big Sisters on the Austin City Roost.  Paper bags carry groceries, used dishes from a garage sale, good used clothes to Goodwill, ‘jammies and a toothbrush for a sleepover, and magazines and books for the nursing home. 

And in the end, the brave little grocery sack, its life of humble service at an end, is easily composted with full military honors.  If, for some reason, a beastly Republican disposes of it improperly, the remains of the grocery sack simply fly away into the country, there to biodegrade back into the natural world from whence it came, into the Samsara of life and death, to be reborn as a majestic oak tree or as a happy little petunia.

Well, comrade, that’s reactionary thinking.  Grocery sacks are evil; the Austin city council acting in concert with the will of The People and of the gods has decreed their banishment into the desert.  So let it be written; so let it be done.  Carry those carrots home in your pocket, you fascist.

Someone’s sister-in-law, and you know her, the unemployable thirty-something with the jet-pilot glasses and a master’s degree in fashion design or hospitality, is to be granted a $2 million dollar budget to persuade The People that nuisance and humiliation are somehow good for them.  Thus, subjects of Austin will not only be punished for possession of an illegal grocery sack, they will have to pay for the propaganda – um, teachable moment.

“Keep Austin Weird?”  But Austin no longer possesses a weird to be kept; Austin is now simply another dull, grey provincial town of fearful subjects trudging their grim, grocery-bagless streets with heads bowed in passive obedience to their heavy-handed soviet.

-30-

A Meditation -- and Clinique - for Lent

Mack Hall
mhall46184@aol. om

A Meditation

– and Clinique –

for Lent

True, true, the world – it makes no sense at all
Clinique on a corpse, well, it’s still a corpse
The People (bless them) look for a Saviour ap
Glowing in stereo from a little box
Salvation by P.I.N. number and YouTube
Satan’s scheduler – holding on Line 2
While Moloch coos on the chat-chat-chat news
And the Apostles deserve martyrdom
Because they’re an exclusive all-men’s club
A bumper-sticker shrieks “Herod Was Right!”
Our Lady is, like, wow, she’s so not cool
Let’s say funny things about the Rosary
And abstinence from demented hamsters
On Fridays because that is so grandma
Beggars blocking the car: “It’s for the children”
Beggars at Wal-Mart: “It’s for the missions”
Liars, liars, sunglasses and green vests on fire
I’m-spiritual-but-not-religious, dig?

“Man, thou art dust, and…”

                                        And O, it is true.

So carry the Ring, up into Mount Doom

Or sling your rifle; march into the mist

Or kneel among the bloated corpses, pray

To die beneath the Cross on your last day
O Seeker, Soldier, Monk, now march away
To beg for ashes, ashes of decay
And wash them in the River Lethe’s pale grey
Of blessed nothingness, in dead dismay
Until…palms, palms, we all wake up – to say,
To cry beyond the sad embalmer’s way

To be awakened past all tattered time

To gaze upon Objective Reality

For the Convenience of Whomever is Compiling the List

"And Fly into Egypt"

Mack Hall, HSG Mhall46184@aol.com

“And Fly into Egypt”

Football in all its variants – rugby, association (soccer), American – originates in mediaeval England, when young men formed teams to compete in kicking a pig’s head, a pig’s bladder, a pig’s spleen, and perhaps even a whole pig from village to village.  Some writers have suggested that the early English lads kicked around the heads of invading Danes.

When the referee called for heads or tails, that had to make the Danish prisoners nervous.

And why would young men kick pigs or Danes or parts thereof about?  Well, because young men do dumb things.  Usually they get over it.  Not the Danes, though.

In the 19^th century English schools considered the many footer folk-traditions, established rules to make the play less lethal, and organized the competition into games that became fashionable.

Association football, soccer, is said to be the most popular game on the planet, which is pretty good proof of the Fall of Man.  Muscular young men in footer bags (shorts) run around a field kicking a ball and each other, and once every two or three years someone makes a score and then marries a tall blonde and gets knighted by the Queen and tells children to stay in school and read a lot.  

The best thing that can be said about soccer is that it isn’t as sleep-inducing as basketball.

Soccer has long been ill-famed for its unrestrained violence – a primeval pagan blood-lust of crazed howling, kicking, beating, and biting.  All that’s by the fans, of course; the players are much more restrained.

Thus there is no surprise that last week in Port Said, Egypt a soccer match between the hometown Al-Masry lads and Cairo’s Al-Ahly team ended with the reported deaths of over seventy men. 

And why were no women involved?  Because in Egypt women are not permitted to attend footer matches.  Egypt cannot possibly be recognized as a democracy until women there enjoy the equal right to beat and burn other people to death just like men do.

One wonders what their halftime show was like.

And are the footballs in Moslem countries made of pigskin?

The squabbling thugs who constitute the (cough) government (cough) of Egypt investigated the tragedy and concluded that the mess was the fault of the former chief thug, Hosni Mubarak, who has been in captivity for the past year.

Blaming a former leader for a present regime’s failings – man, that’s weak; no American government would ever do that.

Kicking pig-parts around from village to village sounds barbaric, and so does a soccer game which features a casualty list instead of a final score.  Happily, we live in a nation which values human dignity and human lives – well, except for the Department of Health and Human Services.  One is not sure – is the Herodian thing Senate Bill Matthew 2:16-18, or House Bill Matthew 2:16-18?  Or simply an edict?

Once upon a time even Egypt was good at protecting children.

-30-

War-Metaphor-Catholic-Keyboard-Commando-Guy

Mack Hall, HSG Mhall46184@aol.com

War-Metaphor-Guy

Does keyboard-war-guy truly mean that he

Will shoulder rifle, pack, and spares, and range
On blistered, bleeding feet into dead hell,
Obedient to an ill-considered oath
That calls upon his soul to deny itself?

How noble is his war upon the screen!

Does he intend to suffer sin-stained years

Of deprivation, lowest-bidder tins
Of surplus slime stored since some previous war,
Of murky water gassed with chemicals,
Of gasping, breathless, sodden, rotting heat?

How easy is his war upon the screen!

So does he really want a poor man’s soul

Ripped screaming, sh*tting, bleeding from his life,
Intestines flyblown in the devil’s sun?
Will he be satisfied with an eyeless corpse
Bloat-floating down another Vam Co Tay?

How glorious is his war upon the screen!

Now, keyboard-war-guy, march away, away

And how God wills, dispose the video games.

The whole world is laughing.

The whole world is laughing.
The whole world is laughing.