Contemporary Class Warfare

The 1st time heard a Republican operative I knew use the term 'class warfare' was when I interviewed him on Wellesley College radio in the late '80s. It came out of nowhere, & went nowhere we were talking about. He was just trying it out because he was on the radio. It was the propaganda hot-bullet of that year. Now it's back.

It's an attempt to make a European term American, but only applies to the American present if you admit that if any class suffers a relative taxation injustice, it's the middle- vs the upper-. Which pays a higher % of taxes? (You know the answer.)

Post WW2, a greater number of Americans have aspired to & achieved many traditional middle-class perks: a college education, a white collar job with a larger paycheck, a car, country-club membership. Owning a home became the American Everyman's Dream. When polled, most Americans soon claimed they were middle-class. Those middle-class people whose homes were (temporarily) worth a realty (not real) million imagined they were actually millionaires. They've just had a rude awakening recently: what goes up, can come down. Nonetheless, their delusion persists:

http://finance.yahoo.com/retirement/article/113526/
what-it-takes-become-millionaire-cnbc?mod=retire-planning

Rabid Republicans are belatedly conning them with the propagandistic distortions of the "Death Panels","Death (Estate) Tax" & "Class Warfare."

Demonstrating that: some people never learn; some don't want to; some don't want you to. Which are you?

Early Riser

EARLY RISER

w/out radio

Wake @ daybreak.

Take a dump & flush it.

Take an Extra Strength Tylenol.

Go back to bed, get under the quilt.

Rub my cat Reggie; put him aside.

Drift off...composing this poem;

bolt up & type it out.

(20 SEP 11, Santa Clara CA)v2

Footcare

Footcare

My feet get prickly, hot;
I pull off my crusty sox,

soak my feet in cold water,
then in soapy hot water,

apply clear aloe lotion,
rub on oatmeal lotion,

pull on clean white sox.

One day later,
my feet feel much better.

(20 SEP 11, Santa Clara CA)v7

Public Transit Blues

Public Transit Blues

The more you read about the S.F. Bay BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) system, the worse it gets.

The system that I, as a lifelong Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority (MBTA) rider, had longed to ride is now in constant turmoil over its police shootings. (cf. Oscar Grant, fatally shot by BART police officer Johannes Mehserle in the early morning of New Year's Day 2009)

Once I'd come to live on S.F. Bay, & rode the BART, I was chilled, & exhausted by its long distances. Now I avoid them entirely..

But not the connecting CalTrain commuter line on the Peninsula. It's an hour & a half from S.F. to Santa Clara (48mi.). The view’s the industrial side of every stop: lots of car repair shops & municipal yards. Riders often fall asleep. I quickly learned to store my black Shogun 105 in the final bike-car & sit in one of the bank of seats reserved for stringy, fraternal bikeoids who noisily drank beer, offering me none.

Repugs Conclude

A time-traveller asks

the R-presidential candidates

to discuss welfare: First

they call it workfare, then

they call it payfare.

Lacking any idea

of a life worth living,

they won't consider

population control;

finally reaching a really

Repugnant Conclusion:

A world of miserable people

is more affordable than

a world of happy people.

(15 SEP 11, Santa Clara CA) v5

11 SEP 2001

11 SEP 2011

Like chloroform-soaked sponges,

gravestones silence questioning;

grief extends from year-to-year,

decade-to-decade, necessarily.

The perpetrators are dead,

but the exploiters are alive

with ever-expanding strategy.

Nobody wants this to end.

(11 SEP 01, Santa Clara CA)v3

on The New Verse News: Tues. 13 SEP 2011
www.newversenews.blogspot.com

on 11 SEP 01

My sister, (who I hadn't spoken to for years), called me in the morning from Spring Hill FL (at her children's insistence) to tell me my mother (b. 13 SEP.14) had just died in an Alzheimer's care-facility there. I couldn't fly anywhere.

I wasn't shaken by what was happening in NYC & DC.

Perspective: The aerial attack on NYC was much less devastating than the London Blitz. (Sept.7. 1940- May 10, 1941), or the atomic bombing of Hiroshima (Aug. 6, 1945) & Nagasaki (Aug. 9, 1945)
.