COVID obit

The whole world is talking
about that COVID we dread;
world  biz-trade is balking
so we won’t end up dead.

Scientists snip at the micro pathogen
to concoct an effective vaccine
while we elude the awful contagion,
keeping hands and our noses clean.

To assure us the required social distance,
the system skids to a dam near-stop,
though trumpian troupes make insistence
biznez as usual shall not flop.

Let’s just slip through this quick and easy-like
while congress cooks up a free lunch;
we’ll quarantine inconvenience; we’ll sanitize hype;
cuz elixir’s gone viral in politicized punch.

Hey! if you find comfort in that congressional dole
I’ve got some covid-cure I’ll sell ya!
Let’s just slip through this corona going-viral hole.
But how it happens I truly can’t tell ya.

Our rich uncle Mitch and his significant other,
rich uncle Sam sham of flim-flam fame—
they’ll send us a check from our long-gone mother
financed with Fed-Trez lame ponzi game.

Now we dance to a red-ink tune of 23 trillion
cuz we’d rather be red than dead.
But hey! not to worry cuz its video godzillion;
If the beast gets too big they’ll chop off his head!



Glass Chimera

The SwanSwoon of our Era

In her recent article at Social Europe,  Indian economist Jayeti Ghosh  accurately identifies a major consequence of our worldwide collective anti-COVID restrictions:

  “Supply chains are being disrupted, factories are being closed, entire regions are being locked down and a growing number of workers are struggling to secure their livelihoods. “ 

  https://www.socialeurope.eu/the-covid-19-debt-deluge

Her statement does indeed identify the crux of our economic problem right now, and the global complexity does unleash trouble on a very large, international scale.
You might say this COVID-crash is the “Crash of ’29” of our era.
Some compare this tsunami to the crash of ’08, or the blah-blah of ’87 (whatever that was.)  But it seems to me this thing is unwinding as an event historically more far-reaching than those two economic downfalls. This Covid thing can be compared to  what happened in 1929.
The Crash of ’29 exposed the vulnerability of a newly-Industrialized USA. This present Covid-crash exposes the vulnerability of a newly-Internetted World.
Ms. Ghosh is correct in her observation when she writes:

  “Today’s financial fragility far predates the Covid-19 ‘black swan’."

The black swan represents the unlikely possibility that something like this could happen . . . even though it did.

It seems to me the immensity of our present global Covid co-morbidity is indeed directly related to our newfound world connectivity in trade, travel and talk. The black swan in the background represents this unprecedented development in world history.



In that same technocratic network to which Ms. Ghosh contributes, Social Europe, Karin Pettersson posts her insightful analysis of our Covid conundrum, which includes this accurate assessment:

   “Already however, we know this: this type of disease cannot be efficiently fought at an individual level, but only as a society. It requires preparation, co-ordination, planning and the ability to make rapid decisions and scale up efforts. A strong state.
But nor is government enough. The situation demands personal responsibility, a sense of duty, concern for one’s neighbour. “ 

     https://www.socialeurope.eu/the-corona-crisis-will-define-our-era

What she writes there is so true. I agree.
 Karin goes on to pose  a question that is surely the crux of the problem for millions of earth-inhabiting workers:

   “Yet what will you do if you simply cannot afford to stay at home?”

And I’m thinking . . . because of this widespread affordability problem, the response of governments and corporations in the days ahead should reflect benevolence, not authoritarian oppression. At least I hope it will.
Karin Pettersson also presents this profound thought: 

   “I wonder if young people might come to think that authoritarian China dealt with the crisis better than the US—the land of the free.”

We shall witness, in the days ahead, how this dilemma is dealt with between China, USA, and all the other nations of this planet.

Karin’s bright insight becomes dimmed, however, when she criticizes, in the same article cited above, Vice President Mike Pence’s public act of leading scientists in prayer.
She is displeased that Pence, a former Indiana governor, had cut funding for HIV-virus research and prevention, back in the day. . .

I can understand Ms. Petterssen’s emphatic let’s fix this humanism. It is quite the de rigeur among technocrat intelligencia who would like to run the world, because they could certainly do a more equitable and better job than all those corporate 1%ers whose rabid profit-taking shenanigans have now made such a mess of things.
 Yes, Virginia, the news is bad. Read 'em and weep. . . but act, benevolently. That also  goes for all you 1%ers out there who think you're in charge of things.
But I also like to remember, and take seriously, a statement that I heard, many years ago, from a fellow who was then what I now am, an ole geezer.

  “What we need now is some damn prayer!”

So Let’s all work together harmoniously to get these problems solved. And remember that a little help from the OneWhoIs could only render our burdens a little easier to bear.

Glass half-Full

The Underground

Half a century before the Russians mustered enough rebellion to  depose the Czar, a deep current of discontent had begun oozing up from somewhere deep down in those thawing Russian steppes.
Since that era, we have come to call what that discontent represents: The Underground.
Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevksy caught and early wind of it. In his 1864 novel, Notes from the Underground, Dostoevsky identified and fictionalized an uncomfortable alienation that (he noticed) was mounting up among certain attentive and sensitive citizens of that restive country.
This alienation has, since then, become a characteristic of modern life.

In our day and time, Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson points out that Dostoevsky and other writers (most notably Friedrich Nietzsche) detected this early alienation and wrote extensively about it.
There was, you see,  a deep, dark void in the European soul.
It was there. . . deep down in there, somewhere in the metamorphizing life of the 1800's . . .  a sense that something was missing . . . something important, something—it must be something— essential.
Where some spiritual or soulful entity had, through many ages, carried European civilization along a certain path of cultural development, now there was nothing.
“Nihilism” is a word that was brought in to identify that void.

In our day and time, Jordan Peterson explains the development of nihilism—how it is related to the lapse  the Church, which had formerly evolved as a religious matrix around which the framework of European civilization and culture had manifested across almost two millennia of time.
Dr. Peterson attributes the identifying of this nihilism primarily to those two 19th-century writers, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. In his lectures, Dr. Peterson often mentions that these two prescient thinkers predicted—or one could almost say “prophecied”—the horrible carnage of our 20th-century wars.  Our two modernized hyper-mechanized destructive wars broke out as modern men desperately strove—through futile attempts at communist and fascist totalitarianism—to establish a meaningful State, or Society.
Instead of—let’s just say— the Church. Comprenez-vous?

Denizens of “the Underground” are those misplaced souls who have searched elsewhere—apart from the Society or Culture at large—for their own meaning or identity.  Even further than that, they will likely work collectively with other fellow travelers, striving for some collective opus that enables us—if not now, in the future— to live and thrive together.
When I was a young man, I composed a song about some of these deep urges toward meaning and liberty.
   Underground Railroad Rides Again

I have empathy for the Undergrounders of this world, although some of them have, from time to time, carried their discontents too far, beyond the rightful constraints of decently civilized life. The Weather Underground of the 1960's, for instance,  crossed that line of acceptable protest when they began making home-bombs,  one of which enabled one Undergrounder to blow up himself and his whole dam NYC apartment building, in spring of 1970.
But hey! Life goes on, in spite of all the abuse and injustices people pile on one another. In spite of all our myriad societal dysfunctions. The world persists in its predictable revolutions, whether you approve the changes or not.  Nations change. Seasons come and go. Our winters of discontent always as mellow out as . . .

a new wind, a fair breeze, and this year's equinox a day early!
Now in 2020 A.D., about midday on this first spring day, 19  March, I was strolling along our local greenway, here in our little town of the Blue Ridge, observing obligatory social distancing protocols mandated by the COVID-19. When my walk began, the weather was dreary, misty and chilly. But as I neared the turnaround point of my 3-mile path, the sun was peeping out from behind the clouds, the air turned amazingly warm and dry, and suddenly! spring has sprung!
'T'was then I encountered an Underground of different sort:



This springtime sprung-up version of the Underground has been popping up with alarming regularity for a very long time. . . far longer than we homo sapiens have been struggling to find meaningful identity in our civilizations.
As I beheld these silly-pilly little dirt mounds, I disclosed the discovery to myself . . .  (as they say on the video spy dramas) what we have here is mole!

King of Soul

Beware the Ideas of March

Beware the Ideas of March, baby!

Evbody awoke to a manic monday in witch all of sudden them hyperventilating stocks were tanking while the black swans circled in swirls of a world wide whirlpool that no wallstreet stool pigeon would be caught dead in, all becuz the cold hard tickertape truth was unwinding plainer and plainer for all to see, or not see as the case maybe, while meanwhile the micro-droplets floated forth in the closed cabins of intercontinental flights as potent pathogens pursued perilous paths of pathogenic pandemic. yes virginia  the miniscule moana corona was erupting not  unlike moana loa spewing skyward spurts of swarmy germs squirming through the ambient air with vectors of infected droplets exacerbated through  presumptive pathogen-preventive protocols  all around us as the news of the day disclosed formerly  covert  covid was going globally overt, giving new meaning to the going-viral webspeak.
Watch out for the wuhan virus some sneaky folks uttered as if the hubei whosehoo were somehow responsible for this nefarious disease. But the truth is those unfortunate hubeis who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when the dam thing broke out in the middle of the middle kingdom—they should not catch the flak for this fluke of a flu-like phenomenon.

I mean, not even Mona Carona could have stopped this thing; nor would even Jonah Carona have the wherewithal to escape being swallowed up by its deadly medley of molecules spewing forth contagion across the world.
Read ‘em and weep, oh ye citizens of the world. There is indeed no immunitive shot to be heard of around the world becuz we dont have a vaccine.
I mean, not even a  quentin quarrentino flick could deflect all the infective flak that flies now forth from the mouths of babes and the coughs of sextarian golfers and the sneezes of wheezing whodoos—its viral voodoo i tell ya!
What we need now is some damn Social Distancing! ‘cuz in this day and time if something is unlikely to happen it will  and if something is likely to happen, it won’t.
Why, why . . . even ceasar was deceived when some weird troll sisters uttered beware the ides of march altho really and truly it was the 16th of Ides when all this pent-up pandemonium came pummeling down— he, like, um,

 he had harkened not to the, like, um, warning, choosing instead to, like, um, eschew the WHOhoos test or maybe he was just wearing the rose-colored glasses that day, eschewing the media-led brouhaha as overkill,  when . . . like . . . suddenly he felt, um, the unkindest cut of all as Bernie and Biden, not unlike Brutus, slashed forth with their brash jackass stiletto speeches,  and he found himself like, um, having to cut to the chase instead of prolonging any further display of his empire’s new clothes, and it looked as if he might even go along with Nancy’s nanny-state butt-kicking demmies in the House.
But hey . . . no worries. Its all good.

And if you believe all that, I’ve got some MBS and CDOs I’ll sell ya— so’s you can hedge your bare-sterns with some leeman broohahas as a counter-strategy against the now-going-viral Mona Carona because she’s a hot number on the net .  . . I mean she’s only, like, um, 19 . . . very contagious.
But all this viral spiral did, indeed, like, hit the fan on that fateful blue monday, the day after the ides of March. By ’n by, it like, um, metastasized into the covidized Ideas of March, 2020, and that was, like, the monday that was. Who knows what will go down next? It’s a tough act to follow!



I mean like, um, who knew?
You?

Glass half-Full

Bernie: A True Democrat

There is a reason why a donkey is the chosen animal symbol of the Democratic party: donkeys are stubborn.

A donkey can knock you down with a very sudden, strong kick, administered with both back legs at the same time.

Bernie Sanders is a true Democrat. I oughta know; I used to be one.

He is not happy about losing the Michigan primary to an Establishment guy.

Bernie has spent his whole political life kicking against the pricks. He has tirelessly pleaded for money and resources to be diverted from the high and mighty Establishment, and rerouted to the working class and welfare masses.

He has boldly pleaded for the tired, the weary, the huddled masses yearning to be led, and fed, and maybe slightly . . . red.

That’s “red” as in the old russian sense, not “red” as in red state.

But yesterday it was voters in those flyover Red states who stuck that long-dreaded dead-end sign on the shoulder of  his road to the Presidency.

Bernie has built his entire political identity pleading for the underdog. When he finally achieved a public visibility that might propel him to the kenneldom of top-dog power, middle America pulled the rug out from under him.

Now the top-dog Democrats are pleading with “the socialist” to get out of the race and let the Establishment former-VP-Top Dog-wannabee- take his place at the head of the pack.

Because we all know its all about beating the Donald.  Right?

But it’s not all about beating Trump.

For Bernie--and his legions of loyal supporters (that's important!)-- its all about raising the issues of the tired, the weary, the huddled masses yearning to be free—free from the oppressions of that elephantine, dreaded-1%—or 2%-- whatever “white-privileged” fractional faction runs this God-forsaken nation.

But the Bernie is, you see,  a true Donkey, and now he must--like any self-respecting jackass--kick those rear-view-leaning legs leftward directly into the middle of “Politics-as-usual.”

You see, the Democrats have a Bernie-Biden debate scheduled. But now—because of Big Tuesday Michigan/Missouri/etc— the top dogs, Carville et al— are trying to get him to slink back into his leftist corner like a good mutt, so top-dog Joe can take it from here without any embarrassing, debate-inflicted verbal gaffes, or memory lapses or awkward party-line gaps.

One last heehaw from the Bernie! before the Demmies put him out to pasture.

Because Bernie is a true Democrat—a donkey, maybe never a top dog.

Put yourself in his place. If you had spent your whole, long lifetime kicking against the pricks, would you let one bad night at the polls destroy your last opportunity to go on national TV and argue 1-on-1 on behalf of your loyal legions of underdogs?

Just for the sake of "getting rid of Trump"? which is probably not going to happen anyway, with the identity-OCD gender blender  obsess-regress fringes rendering the Demmie party limp as an old dishrag.

You Democrats should let Bernie have his last hurrah against the Establishment before you turn him out to pasture.

Our nation would do well  to witness a Bernie-Biden debate. It could be so much more informational than when all of them were slinging it out in a food fight.

What'd'ya say? The Socialist underdog vs. the Establishment!

Maybe ole Uncle Joe will  even learn something from it.

Maybe we will all learn something from it—even us fatn'happy Republicans who are so obsessed with throwing our supposed privileged weight around.

But hey! I do feel for you. . . Democrats, as I used to be one. What's a nation to do when--once again! we're stuck with three old white guys wanting to run the show?! Lizzy Warren, read 'em and weep.

Glass half-Full

Bikinis and Starbuck

Herman Melville wrote his epic novel, Moby Dick, in 1851; it was the great American novel of the 19th-century, and is still revered as a classic.
In the story, a mysterious Captain Ahab commands the whaling ship, Pequod, which sails from New England across the Atlantic, around Africa, through the Indian Ocean and beyond, ultimately far into the Pacific Ocean, in pursuit of whales.

During the voyage, the first mate, Starbuck, experiences doubts about ole Ahab’s sanity. After noticing a few weird indicators in Cap’n Ahab’s behavior, Starbuck confronts him with a few probing questions.
In Warner Brothers’ 1956 film version of the story, Starbuck (Richard Basehart) carefully raises some questions to ole Ahab (Gregory Peck) about his motives in commanding the ship. Starbuck’s inquiry reveals that Ahab is driven by an obsessive vengeance against a great white whale, Moby Dick; the whale had injured him in a previous encounter.  Ahab’s speech about the beast indicates that his stubborn, soon-to-be global pursuit of the beast is more about revenge than hunting whales for oil and profit.

Consequently, Starbuck realizes, the good ship and crew were maybe sailing into the very jaws of death, for no good reason than one man’s vengeance toward a dumb beast.
Seeing this in the movie, I was reminded of Cain, the son of biblical Adam and Eve. Cain slew his brother Abel, which turned out to be a bad precedent in our human history. I recently viewed a few of Jordan Peterson's lectures in which he points out Cain's tendency to blame his problems on someone else--or perhaps the world in general--instead of resolving to identify areas of his own character that might need correction.
Ahab's obsession against a brute beast is something like Cain's grudge against the world, instead of resolving to fix himself.

As events onboard Herman Melville's Pequod unfold, it becomes obvious to Starbuck that Cap’n Ahab’s manic pursuit of the “dumb brute that acted out of blind instinct” is irresponsibly irrational, insofar as it eclipses the legitimate purpose of the their mission to produce whale oil for the ship’s owners and crew.
Furthermore, the mad captain’s tyranny in this obsession ultimately endangers the lives of all the crew and the very safety of the the ship itself.
The Pequod sailors are, by Ahab’s command, sailing past whales in the Indian Ocean,  neglecting to fulfill their commission as they blow farther and farther, far into the largest ocean on our planet.
During Ahab and Starbuck’s man-to-man talk, Ahab had pointed to a map location, Bikini Atoll, located near the middle of the Pacific Ocean.


 He explained to Starbuck that he had studied the behavior of those “great solitary” whales; Ahab was sure that Moby Dick would be passing through those Bikini islands at a certain time—at the “New Moon of April.”
So it becomes obvious to Starbuck that he and Ahab and the good ship and crew were proceeding, at great peril, in a mad chase across the planet . . .
for the sake of—not oil or profit, nor any such legitimate enterprise—but rather to impose a crazy captain’s manic vengeance upon a very dangerous, dumb animal.
Ahab’s pathological character ultimately turns out to be fatal for himself and for those crewman who were with him. His disastrous OCD propels Pequod into the very jaws of death.



Cap'n Ahab's deathly voyage ends in the vicinity of the Bikini islands, exactly where he had thought  he would slay the monster, Moby Dick.
Now, as to why I write about such things as this on a spring-forward Sunday afternoon, I confess . . .
I have no real reason, except to note a couple of curious, 20th-century namesake associations that popped up in Moby’s fateful wake.
Almost a century later, the US military conducted its first explosions of atom bombs at those Bikinis. 
So we see that those itsy-bitsy teeny-weenie Bikinis signaled, on one hand, the demise of a mythically mad sea captain and his crew back in the day. . .
but they also hosted the end of our world’s pre-atomic age (and the beginning of God only knows what fate lies ahead . . .)

Four days after the atomic blast, we also acquired a tiny two-piece obsession, unleashed upon the world by a Paris swimsuit designer.

The other significant namesake association from Melville’s Moby Dick was Mr. Starbuck, first mate of the Pequod. In the great story, his unheeded warning to Ahab turned out to be prophetic. His was the voice of reason, although unable to sway the pathological Ahab from his diehard suicidal course.
As for the Starbuck  namesake itself, that farsighted first mate managed to froth up, later,  a quite impressive legacy in Moby's massive wake.



Glass half-Full

The Big Questions

The big questions are:
1. How did I get here?
2. How did we get here?
3. What is the purpose of being here?
4. What should I do while I am here?

At the age of 27 years, about 43 years ago, I had made a big mess of my life. So I turned my life over to Jesus.
I am happy about how life has turned out for me and the family that God has given me.

Prior to salvation, I was quite undecided about those big questions listed above. Now, after walking with the Lord for 41 years, I have managed to answer those questions to my satisfaction. There are, however, a few questions hovering somewhat unresolved in my mind.
For instance, as pertaining to the big question #2 above—how did we get here?—I do subscribe to the biblical explanation, although I do not understand it. I cannot comprehend all that is being described in chapters 1 and 2 of Genesis.



I do understand, and accept as true, that very first sentence of the biblical revelation:

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

The verses that follow confuse me every time I try to impose order in my mind about the sequence through which our Creator did his creative work. This confusion does not really bother me. But it does fascinate me to ponder that subject.
Cutting to the chase—that is to say—the end of the book or the end of my life, the big truth that has been shown to me is that I will live eternally after passing through this life’s death.
How do I know this?
As the old song sings. . . the Bible tells me so.
The Word tells me what I really need to know: there is one man in the history of the world who survived death itself, and lived to tell about it:

Jesus.

This is a matter of belief, and I do believe it, thank God. I have been given the faith to believe in my resurrection from death, because Jesus himself has already shone the way—has been there and done that— and has passed that privilege of overcoming death along to me and to anyone else who believes what he has said about it, and demonstrated by his Resurrection.
Now, getting to the point of why I write on this particular day, year of our Lord 2020, March 3. . . while I have been fortunate enough to answer those big questions, there are still a few curiosity points that bounce around in my mind and my soul as I live and breathe in this earthly life.

For Instance, what about that creation sequence that is is described in Genesis?
People have been wondering about it, talking about it for thousands of years. In the last two centuries, speculations about question #2 above—how did we get here?—have taken a wider swath of variation than ever before. As far as I can see, this widening of theories and enquiries is prompted by two main developments in our collective human database—
1.) the discovery of geologic time, which scientifically explains how our earth was continuously rearranged by huge tectonic and geologic forces over millions of years. 
2.) Darwin’s discovery of natural selection in the biological developments of life in nature.
As a believer in Jesus, I have no problem with either of these scientific discoveries. I believe these discoveries are merely a human way of classifying the universal and life principles that God set in motion millions of years ago.
For example: Genesis reports, in verse 1:24:

Then God said, ‘ Let the earth bring forth living creatures after their kind.’

This is just an old-fashioned way of saying: God designed into his creation a written code for ordering the development of life: DNA.


So I hope you’re tracking with me on this. I realize that some of my believing brethren do not subscribe to this interpretation. But that’s okay; we’re not going to agree on everything. By ’n by, we’ll still celebrate our eternal life together with Jesus because of what he endured in sacrificing his perfect life at Calvary.
But the reason I am writing this today is: an amazing thing happened this morning. I had a funny little revelation while reading in Genesis. 
In Genesis 2, we learn the truth that:

“. . . the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.,  The Lord God planted a garden toward the east, in Eden; and there he placed the man whom He had formed.”

So we learn that Adam—and later Eve, were a special creation, placed in a special place, for a special, divinely determined destiny. But Adam and Eve screwed that arrangement up when they opted for knowledge instead of truth.
So our Creator had to suspend their special status. Consequently, he ejected them from the Garden; they had to  go out and make their way by the sweat of their brow like  all those other humans who had evolved out there in the wild wild world.
A little further down in the scripture we learn more about historical human developments. From Genesis 6:

“Now it came about, when men began to multiply on the face of the land, and daughters were born to them, that the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful; and they took wives for themselves . . .”

Who were those “sons of God”? They were the offspring of the Creator’s special creation in Paradise, the children of Adam and Eve.
We are told the names of the created couple's first three sons: Cain, Abel and Seth.
These boys were, categorically, the “sons of God,” because their parents did not carry the same genetic imprint as those other men and women who originated “east of Eden,” outside the gates of Paradise.

Now just because they were “sons of God” does not mean they necessarily acted like it. You may remember that Cain killed Abel, and that God had a serious discussion with him about what was to happen next. But then God had mercy on Cain, even though he had committed such a heinous deed by killing his own brother, who had not deserved such a fate.
 God gave Cain a second chance anyway, by releasing him out into mankind to get a new start.
In Genesis 4, the story continues:

  “Then Cain went out from the presence of the Lord, and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden. Cain had relations with his wife, and she conceived, and gave birth to Enoch, and he built a city. . .”

For a very long time, I had wondered about . . .
 a.) these “sons of God”—who they were and where they came from? Answer: They came from Adam and Eve.
and b.) the land of Nod, and the people who populated that land? Answer: They were humans who evolved through God’s natural selection process.
Now I understand more about reconciling the revealed Truth of our Creator with what we ourselves have scientifically understood  about life on this amazing planet.



Glass half-Full