Anchormen Interupted

It is the old tug-of-war. We've lived through it before. Two parties trying to survive in this country, each thinking they have the answer. I was born under a Democratic administration that strayed. Granted there were fateful distractions like assassination, the party failed to deliver on the precepts it espouses. The Democratic Party came close to falling in the metaphorical mud. We lived through that. We were not interminably discouraged by McGovern's devastating loss, indicating most of the country was deaf to any voice but their own. All those Yippies who were beaten, all the McCarthy Democrats that voiced how Vietnam was wrong and required an immediate and unmitigated end, all felt silenced. They hurt, some were tearful, and they felt a sense of loss. They saw a tired war that was sentenced now to continue indefinitely. Wounds heal. Wars feel injustice. People will sense when they have no appeal. Turned out a Republican won, and turned the war his own way, presumably in ways his “Democratic” predecessor never dared. Fate intervened and opened a Watergate. Maybe Nixon would have eventually found Saigon, but Ford did. The healing began. We got through it, hopefully wiser for the wear.

A slip on the Soviets by Ford gave us Carter. Democrats back on solid ground. Okay, I look back and think he was weak. He did some things good for no one—the Olympic boycott—but he got us through a gas crisis, a nuclear disaster, and forged a peace plan in the middle east. In four years. Then the Republicans pulled harder. Reagan lived as a Democrat for much of his young life (as did Trump). His “Reaganomics” served no one but the one percent. He did limit nuclear weapons, helped end a cold war, and had a wall dismantled. Al Sharpten says today “We got the down, but not the trickle.” The other 99 percent is used to waiting. A gold, more likely brass, ring dangles. It's pulled, then released in frequencies of 4 to 8 years. The 99 percent are pursuing happiness for sure, but it gets closer, some feel it (if it stays long enough) and then it gets pulled away. One side of the country hiccups. We waited through the Reagan administration. Slaves waited, women waited, gays et al waited to be free to marry. In a democracy a lot of waiting is tolerated for greatly disproportionate rewards. That is a given most seem willing to accept. The anarchists, the rouge members of democracy, those who are either not educated enough to follow the democratic process or too impatient to follow it, won't accept waiting.

George HW. Bush had a Republican agenda that was destined to lead to war. For months he played cat and mouse with Saddam. The spider-hole poet fooled everyone. Bush pounced thinking Saddam had WMDs. He dropped bombs on Iraq in a prelude to his son's future.

In four years the Democrats mustered more strength, enough to have reign for eight years this time. Bill Clinton was at least as popular as Reagan In a video that was never show during this last campaign Trump praises Bill. He says he did a great job with everything. He said Hillary did well as first lady and senator. Clinton left jobs in his wake. He left a balanced budget. He signed the ADA. Personally, during the 90s I don't feel I ever benefited directly for any of these.

Enter W. A war his father ended cleverly is stupidly ignited again. It rages on for. . . Jobs go overseas. War crimes are committed. Cheney gets rich off the war. Wall street goes unchecked until the bubble bursts. The Democrats pull back tighter. This time, I think largely due to the major damage W caused, they squeeze in a black president. Surprise, from the beginning I am quite sure that his skin color colored peoples' opinion of him. He got more done then any president in my lifetime, in spite of it.

A billionaire business man, an outsider with zero public service steps up to the line. He holds the rope with more experienced politicians, but none who had yelled “you're fired” on a reality show. He came flawed, in any American's estimation, reeking of bigotry, misogyny unscrupulousness, and narcissism. He proved himself to be debatable by a tweet with a child-like distractability. His celebrity knocked all the “better” cookbook Republicans down the line. He did not win by popular vote. For winning still, Trump has James Madison to thank. Only in America.

We have lived through this before, although never this far from sanity. However I think a lot of that crappy, injurious, talk that belonged in the mouth of a dictator was more words than reality. We'll see. Regardless, politics in America is crying out for a third party. LBJ should have signaled it. Since then, the need or want for one has only gotten worse. I am convinced that without one a tug-of-war will persist as long as there is rope. Has everyone in this country ever been truly happy?The best scenario is a percentage is happier than another much larger percentage. Their anchor man pulls and they get a new breed of happiness until the other anchor pulls away that flurry of happiness.

This time, the Republicans pulled so hard, the constitution is threatened. Every minority who has been heard from, silenced, heard from, silenced now feels they will never be heard from again—or at least for the next four years. Immigrant families feel threatened. Muslims feel threatened. But it is not the end of the world, just close to the end of a rope. The donkey symbol goes back to Andrew Jackson. Fittingly, people called him a jackass. It is also fitting that the donkey represent the Democrat, as they are usually the ones following the eternal carrot. But when you begin a government with only white, slave-owning men voting, the wait for the eternal happiness of all is not surprising. Nothing's 100 percent.

masking tapes frayings

A Halloween eulogy

Oh as I was young and fanged, beneath a full moon's breaths of sustenance, I collected my Halloween booty. In the dawn of the 70s, not abated by false ends and all too true starts of a war, my biggest October surprises were how much people dropped in my orange UNICEF box and if the house on the end of our block would re-treat last year's popcorn ball.

Election cycle

Billy Bush accomplices to groping accessibility. Twelve women advance accountability. FBI investigates email's culpability. And a Wiener inserts its proximity. And many more surprises to digest between sound bytes. All before Halloween. October surprises they're called. Millennials won't scare anyone on Hallow's Eve. Politics takes away the element of surprise on presidential years—particularly this one. As I neared the end of my annual booty call in the name of maturity I recall the candidates. Names like Richard Nixon, George McGovern, Wendell Anderson, and local politicians drown in leaves on lawn signs as I kicked. I approached house in my vampire best, hurrying to get home before a glimpse of light fell upon the signs.

Payback bars

Oh the millennials and their spawn. They came in droves for Bernie to awake the trumpeters at dawn. And now, with a rightful sense of complacency, I watch our nominee castigated and investigated. I devalue validity as my candidate's illustrated to bend more than Nixon's crookedest day. November, December—and 2017 summer's surprise. It won't end until Trump's ferrets are wasted, rabid and red, until they can no longer chew documents but yearn to be fed. And then, after four score and three years—and as long as those rodents can go—a new nation will be conceived. In the next millennium political historians will look at 2020 as the year a nation was born. Forget Lincoln keeping it together, forget emancipation, forget the Declaration of Independence, forget Thomas Payne's pamphlet that suggested we have the power to begin the wold over. But that is as good as hindsight gets.

an observation

Saving America

by Michael P Amram

patroling the residentials as the neighbors

pleat Old Glory to wave from their door

posts so it saves America and makes its

citizenry happy again—indifferent and

ignorant of consequences of intolerance;

America can't be brave

America can't be free

America won't sever

its DNA strands for slavery

Riot squads return to the race they left five

decades ago when images weren't sent in

viral forms and facts could chase certainty

before tweets can re-claim liberty;

but no one's ever truly satisfied

and America can't fly free

Glory's doors hinge just so

blue stripes over red to see

the marching on battlefields of Falcon Heights

or Watts—behind Dallas's sniper depositories,

in Ferguson and places Kings were born to live

(or die) like Martin Luther and Rodney who

thought love should eclipse pride;

esteem in America's a vacuum and

faith in America dilutes truth's feign

for the racial paths America treads

tenuously and thrives on to contain

and police kill the accidents or be killed as sure

as the badge they wear—to serve and protect

behind kevlar vests' design to put

lives “on the line” for Philandos' quest for

some peace of mind;

black lives matter dissipates air

they hear with idiosyncrasies,

they inherit trigger responses while

victims cough to breathe

mind games are played in city streets

and stakes are life's blood traced

in urban decay with blunt ends of old

protest signs from '65—when everyone

agreed which race had won;

still America tries to be brave

still America strives to be free

and all will carry opposable guns

with holsters they don't fit.

HANDLING PATIENCE

Too few like Job

by Michael P Amram

swimming for the nexus of

the universe I

seek some recognition,

I peek around corners

blind needing to know the

keys to gratification

I want notoriety—isolation

from that below average

banner I wear to be.

Drowning in seas of madness

fights the depression—an

anxiety of recidivism—I'm

a pummeled peon who licks

boots quietly clean to

get kicked some more and

finally bleed like a trusted

brown nose siphoned dry

from nourishing its leech,

And I sell my soul to God

for adequate success

I fathom the universe to

calculate the odds of

winning in this life without

a name—without a lottery

ticket to make a claim—on

everything that's good when

this life waits out of reach.

I sell my soul to my god

for a moderate belief

in myself—a wager of time

I calculated to expire my

life on the shelf—so I

pay the price to be hailed

on a dirigible, swimming

again to a nexus of clouds

that total the end.

grandstands

Twitter feeds are like drunken mis-speaks. They're the bytes of thought typed to pass—hopefully. Why does Donald Trump tweet anything? He says foolish enough things live, in person, when the “whole world is watching.” He says them and mostly it ruins him, loses credibility (if he ever had any), and points his oar-less rowboat upstream.

In response to the killing in Orlando he wondered nimbly when President Obama would ever say the words radical Islamic terrorism. Our president saw it for what it was, no more, no less. He said live—as the whole world watched—the words acts of terror and hate. On the subtext the difference is negligible. It is not really relevant that the Orlando gunner was Islamic (or of Islamic descent) and radical. What is pertinent, TO THE FAMILIES OF THE FALLEN, is simply that it was an act of terror obviously—in this case—motivated by a bigoted hatred of gays.

Presiding over insanity

Orlando marked the deadliest attack in America since September 11, 2001. The fact that 9/11 was the act of natural-born Islamic terrorists shares no common link to Orlando. As President Obama said, it was an act of terror and hate carried out but estranged, deranged, usually mentally unstable people. In this case the gunman had been investigated by the FBI on more than one occasion, but qualified to be sold a firearm. In almost all of the cases of people opening fire on citizens it surfaces that the assailant had some “red flag” in their psychological history that was missed. Even the September 2001 attack had a red flag early on that was missed. Eden Prairie, Minnesota airport was the fight school that decided to teach Arabic students who only wanted to fly a plane. They did not need to know how to land the plane. In 2007 Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people at Virginia Tech. A simple check of his records at the school would have revealed that the senior had a severe anxiety disorder which placed him in special education classes. In more than a dozen mass shootings during the Obama Administration the president has addressed the nation with a similar message. In each instance he conveyed grief and prayers at the fallen, but also stated how easily available guns were to the people who committed these acts of terror. He simply said we “the people” could decide what kind of country we want to be—one who makes guns available to anyone, regardless of their background, or one that makes it harder (not illegal) to buy a gun.

Xenophobic

The targeting of a gay nightclub is disturbing. It is a fact that is hard to ignore in light of Trump's attempt to grandstand from the Orlando shooting politically. The fact that the shooter was an Islamic-American is less and less relevant. This was a hate crime and it could just as well have been carried out by any extreme group. His seizing of the opportunity for political gain, his criticism of Obama only add to his image as a racist and his genuine disinterest in what's best for America.

Turn around fair play

Conservatives routinely shoot themselves in the foot. They love their guns and don't care about the consequences their accessibility can have, even if it decimates the lives of children—products of the unborn lives they fought so valiantly to protect. They stoke the fires of the NRA, a group who promotes legislation that enables mass shooters to be banned from boarding a plane but not from being sold a gun. Congress has the power to declare war. The Republicans, following the 2014 elections, have control of both the house and the senate. Declare war on ISIS. If a war were declared the FBI would have more latitude in dealing with Omar Mateen. The three FBI investigations in Mateen's past still did not disqualify him from being sold a gun—if we war at war with the Islamic State he would not qualify.

The love you take

In the end it come down to a too structured world. Love is there, somewhere. It gets blurred by politicians and groups that contort a faith into a hateful code. There is paranoia, xenophobia, ethnocentrism, self-righteous patriotism, egotism, and (in this case) homophobia stirring the pot. Each generation concocts new reasons to hate each other. Government erects barriers, political boundaries, to getting along. And, as web designs spread their message of love around the world, hateful propaganda slips in like one of those shot feet in a shoe.

Poet's log: star date June 11, 1969

Pedantics of old neighborhoods

by Michael Amram

Time's abutments work

once in a lifetime

they're the scenes of

childhood, they're

the foundations for

senility

hours run long on a

psychiatrist's couch

with residue of

brain-pan drips

screaming down

halls with Freudian

slips for free

When old neighborhoods

stop telling you the way

thing were, where curbs

where black like the streets

they gullied to lip

And a smooth slope was

there to get out of the street

before texting and friends

used their voices to cross

over to meet

They're cracks between a

therapist's couch—gaps in

a generation hours won't

close—when it's spent like

gas station gum

the bonus chew that fell

apart with baseball cards

like the hours in winter

trudging up Oak Grove

hill for fun. . .

for momentary lapse

to run in Phy Ed. To

round us—prepare us

like “Lord of the Ring”

castaways

So I'd remember the

salad days, the times when

anything was rare—and

accepted—because no one

seemed to care

in the old neighborhood

it was dog eat dog and

I saw the fight, my first

close up of aggression

people must weigh

the bare emotion was

dismal, it left me with

a weakness for humanity

that grows ears that hear

no evil to say

I'm with my shrink—in my

happy place but my hour's

up and I prattle on like a

little kid who's lost his

memory's face

theraputic poetry

Conspiring for Helios

by Michael P Amram

The times of sun find moments

wishing they lasted longer,

the nourishings and reasons

for being bold enough

to meet the seasons with

discontent measured out

for one.

apathy begins its quest

to compromise fears and

bends to negotiate

through tantrums and

storm clouds raining

hard their ruling out

of tears.

dreams begin asking when

they'll win what's all along

been bargained for like

an arrhythmic heart trained

to skip over all the

concentrated efforts to

surprise.

They're what displaces feelings'

suppressed drifts of time

renewing hope in proofs

like season's change for life,

they're waitings that keep

loosing right moments for

sunshine.