Monday, July 31, 2006

Poem - Time to Rise

Every day the dream slips further out of reach
lost to a holy trinity of coin, God and fear

We search for our soul
on the border
in the bedroom
and on the backs of the
unborn

While the rich buy jewels for their pets
the Post Office collects canned goods for the hungry
and the line outside the Food Bank
winds around the block

In the name of Democracy we stain foreign soil with the blood
of innocents
ours and theirs
demand they remake themselves
in our image

But Democracy is as Democracy does
and on this desecrated turf
Democracy is peddled
like dish soap or tampons
turned into a carnival of clowns and barkers,
snake-oil wizards

Tom Jefferson’s heart is torn
Lincoln weeps non-stop
Dr. King’s dream is stuck in Louisiana mud
somebody stole Woody Guthrie’s guitar

We can’t distinguish truth from a sack-cloth coat
Sunday piety becomes Monday perfidy
the law of the temple is the law of the asphalt canyon –
exploit or be exploited
cheat or be cheated
lie or be lied to
primitive simplicity
better suited to animals than humans

Self-righteous hypocrites steal all they can carry
unable to get enough of anything
they return to tame their Jones
and their thievery is protected by a wicked few
who watch behind the safety of the laws
they made

TV reinforces our myths and delusions
murders the silence and the wonder
in the same way mega-malls and urban sprawl
murder the landscape

Afraid of our shadows, afraid of life
we swallow FDA-approved cures for imaginary ailments
patented and priced beyond reach;
ask your Doctor, read the label
watch for side-effects
don’t operate machinery

Time for self-preservation
time for the passive many to rise up
off the sofa, the curb, and the barstool
sledgehammer the TV
seek out the hands that rigged this deck
call them to account
for this misery and shame

We can mend Jefferson’s heart
quell Lincoln’s tears
rescue Dr. King’s dream
find Woody’s guitar

It’s our only hope

Friday, July 28, 2006

Doctor Duke Returns, Weighs In on School Board

The Doctor called me late last night, the first time I’d heard from him in a month. “I’ve been in Indonesia,” he said, “working on a couple of deals. If they bear fruit I’ll be sitting pretty, like mega-rich, big time. Boo-yah.”

“Congratulations,” I said. “So I guess you’ve decided not to run for school board.”

“Not so fast grasshopper,” he said. “Have you seen today’s News-Press?”

I hadn’t. Since Wendy McCaw bought the News-Press and the paper began its descent into Libertarian mediocrity I’ve avoided it like the plague. Travis Armstrong and Randy Alcorn strike me as uptight, constipated buttholes who believe that their rigid view of the world is the only view, and don’t even get me started on that airhead, Starshine Roshell. (What were her parents toking when they slapped that name on her?)

“Well,” said the Doctor, “that egomaniac Bob Noel is running again. Yep, the 76-year-old curmudgeon is going for another term because he thinks he’s the only independent voice on the Board, the great defender of the public interest, paragon of moral rectitude, the only member who can’t be bought, influenced, cajoled, blah, blah. Claims the community wants him to run. Your boy Rob Kuznia said Noel was the favorite of the ‘Educated Elite.’ Can you believe that shit? What Kuznia meant to say and would have said if he had any cajones is that Noel is the darling of well-off white folks. Jesus Christ, is Kuznia Noel’s long lost lovechild or what? Not a word about Noel’s pedantic, grandstanding style, his intellectual bullying, nada and nothing but praise. Kuznia should be ashamed of himself. He should reach around and paddle his own ass for gross sycophancy and then jump off Stearn’s Wharf.”

“I don’t think you’re going to make the filing deadline,” I said. “You probably missed it already.”

The Doctor snorted. “Yeah, maybe, but I can still toss my newfound wealth against Noel. Maybe I can buy Kuzina off, get him to write an objective piece about old Bob for a change. I mean, Bob, enough already. Slide into retirement and give up the ghost. Take up stamp collecting or nude sunbathing.”

I heard a match strike and a sharp intake of breath, followed by a long pause and then a long exhalation. “God, Indonesia was a trip,” the Doctor said. “Remind me to tell you about it sometime. I’ll be in touch – when you least expect it!”

Wednesday, July 12, 2006

Greedy Teachers & Crazed NIMBY's

Ever since Wendy McCaw bought it, the Santa Barbara News-Press has lumbered downhill, becoming more of a rag than ever. The paper is nearly unreadable now – unless you enjoy constipated pundits like Randy Alcorn and Travis Armstrong. And if what Nick Welsh recently wrote in the Independent is true, the News-Press brass is devouring its own and spitting the bones on the sidewalk.

So, when folks ask me if I saw this or that piece in the News-Press, I usually tell them, “No, I don’t subscribe,” which is the reason I didn’t catch a story about teachers or housing for teachers that got one SB resident fired up. I read this resident’s Letter to the Editor, and was as shocked by its vitriolic tone as I was by its inaccuracies.

The guy lit into teachers for working only nine months a year, for being the beneficiaries of lavish health and retirement benefits, and for earning salaries as extravagant as $62 grand a year.

If only teachers had it so easy and so good. Word up to the ticked off resident: a career in public education isn’t the laid back gig you seem to think it is. First of all, starting pay is around $35,000 a year, hardly a king’s ransom for someone just out of college and more than likely saddled with student loan debt. Moreover, teachers work their butts off, particularly at the elementary level, where they must adapt or create lesson plans to meet the needs of students with varying degrees of fluency in English. Most teachers put in far more hours than they are contractually obligated for – a testament to their dedication and commitment. And with the trend toward “accountability,” meaning high scores on standardized tests, teachers are under more pressure than ever.

As far as those lavish health insurance benefits go, well, for the past several years in the Santa Barbara School District the ride hasn’t been free. Due to soaring costs caused by our broken health care system, and the loss of revenue from declining enrollment, a decline sparked by the South Coast’s exorbitant cost of housing, teachers who subscribe to the District’s medical plan have contributed monetarily toward that benefit.

This resident also expressed outrage at the possibility – and all it is at this point is one option among several – that the District might develop one or more of its unused properties into workforce housing for teachers and support staff. He’s not alone: a simple “feasibility study” has NIMBY’s pouring from the woodwork. While some NIMBY’s attack the concept and the process, others excoriate teachers for being greedy, for wanting even more from the public purse. Huge salaries, lavish health benefits and pensions, and now, housing too! For shame! How dare teachers want to live and work on the Platinum Coast without paying full freight! The hell with them! If they can’t afford to pay a million-two for a run-down tract house, too bad! Let them move to Oxnard, Lompoc, Santa Maria, Guadalupe!

Of course, with their McMansions the NIMBY’s desire top-notch local schools staffed by experienced and dedicated teachers, but not if that means building “workforce housing” in their precious neighborhood; not if that means altering the dynamics of supply and demand that are currently tipped so handsomely in their favor. The traffic! The noise! Our property values!

We contradict ourselves at every turn. As a society we are fabulously wealthy and fabulously stingy. We can’t see what is dividing us and exterminating any notion of the common good – when the common good is all we’ve got.

As Bob Dylan aptly put it: “People are crazy and times are strange.” Amen, brother, amen.

Tuesday, July 04, 2006

Poem - People Talking

Think of all the people talking
On cell phones
Right
Now

Talking about nothing
That matters
Or everything

“Bring home Chinese food.”

“Our daughter failed Algebra.”

“Did you pay the electric bill?”

The philosophy of bullshit
The metaphysics of lies

Too many words
Too many nights

We need more silence
Fewer
Proclamations
Decrees
Opinions

We’re not as great
Or as bad
As we think

Not as cruel
Or as benevolent

Not as greedy
Or as generous

Just ordinary people
Talking
While Stumbling
Toward
Transformation

Poem - Musing on the Muse

I’ve loved her long enough to know
That she answers no summons but her own;
Coming and going like woodsmoke
Like a dream
Where and when she pleases

Indifferent to my need she’s with someone else tonight
Making another’s pulse race, afflicting another’s mind with fever
Stealing another’s breath

Is she in Peru?
Or a Dublin pub?
A farmhouse on the veld?
Or a methadone clinic in East St. Louis?

She’s wherever beauty and ugliness collide
Wherever forces seen and unseen scream for expression
Recognition
Acknowledgment
For life beyond death

My need is naked, raw, primal
But tonight she ignores my plea, toys with my devotion
Proving once again that she belongs to no one
Owes no allegiance to crown or coin
Plays no favorites

Every cell in me wants to hate her
Yet tonight, once again
I await her arrival