Roomey's Crisis Critter

Roomey is a zookeeper; a global caretaker is he,

with his flockey herd of critters, the endangered managerie.



He tends glazeebos, ampheebos, orangoupangs and slangs,

while feeding facecub pups and reptilimups, doozyewes and falangs.



One day he had a scare event, urgent animal alert,

when he found his biggy globelephant flailing in the dirt.



So he called in a panel of pakkidharmologists for their expert opinions

as to how this mammouth mammalian crisis could strike down the flappy-eared minions.



The first 'xpert said I believe we have here a globel problem of elephantal proportions,

with overextended ears, trunkated dysfunctions, and pakkidharmal distortions.



The next guy grabbed our pakkidharmal hunk's trunk,

proclaimed this big critter's really in a funk,

asked how this catastrophe could have struck, who'd have thunk?

I think our globelephant is sunk!



The third 'xpert held the critter's ears.

"Oh my!" he cried. The core data confirms our worsest fears.

This mammal's flappy ears have been caught up in the gears

of all our das kapital industrial carbon-spewing years.



Authority number four stroked the mammoth critter's world-class tusk.

Methinks this overprized trophy's been the object of some rapacious hunters' lust.

It's time to save globelephant-- We must!

To prevent it getting caught in carbon dust.



The next pakkidharmologist grabbed that globel animal's legs.

There oughta be a law! he said. What we need are more strong regs!

If we're gonna arrest this sixth extinction, we really gots to peg

this carbon contagion down; coal and oil and gas spews out emissionary dregs!



Now the next guy took up the matter of globelephant's long tail.

I do believe this monster's like a rope, said he. It keeps us tied to stinkin' gas, oil shale.

Now the climate's waggin' us all around with floods and snows and what the hail.

If we don't put a stop to this dirty carbonous gale, the whole frackin' planet's gonna fail!



Here we stand beneath biggy globelephant's vast belly.

Now something's dropping from behind, something rather smelly.

Better turn on the tube, the phone or web, to view it on the telly,

where we learn at last the sky's been fallen, our true foundations turned to jelly.



Have a Smoke

A New Social(ism) Contract?

As near as this under-employed citizen can determine, the (over)simplified net effect of the Affordable Care Act will be this:

A big pile of money will be collected from employed people who can afford health insurance, and that money will be used to ensure health care for poor people who would otherwise not be able to afford health care or health insurance.

This will help poor people. Everybody else will, by premiums or by taxes, ante up some money to assure that the po' folks will be minimally cared for whenever they have health or medical problems.

Okay, this working Republican can live with that, even it will cost me a few bucks, because, you know, I have a heart and I am a Christian and we're all in this together and I don't want to see riots in the streets etc etc etc.

My mind wanders every day between the poles and polls of this controversy, as I am under the influence of so many information sources, whether it be sound-bite Congressional rhetoric, or a morning email from Erick Erickson, or listening to a panel discussion on Diane Rehm or hearing Tom Ashbrook orchestrate an exploration of the issues, or reading a UPI report.

Here's the problem: Our original social contract, which is the Constitution with its tripartite governmental institutions, does not effectively address all the divisions that arise in this post-modern predicament. For some people, such as Tea Party folks, or persons of independent means, that incongruence becomes a big objection to what is happening now. For others, who are poor or who want to, by grand design build a great society, our Constitutional freedoms and rights are not such a big issue.

Since the New Deal, the disparities and eccentricities of capitalism have driven us away from the original social contract enacted in the Constitution by our nation's founders. We've tacked on Medicare and Medicaid. This is not your father's oldsmobile; nor is it your grandmother's household with muffin-buns and berries by the steamy kitchen window. We have evolved to a post-democratic, post-republican, post-capitalist, post-expansionist, post-consumer-waste welfare corporate State.

And hey, it is what it is, like it or not. This is 2013. I mean, 1984 was 29 years ago already.

But the libertarian folks who identify with Constitutionally-protected rugged individualism are still with us. God bless 'em. They figure we didn't sign up for this redistribution hijinks. I can relate. I live in a mountain town that was named after a musket-totin' trailblazing pioneer named Daniel Boone. I wish everybody had the initiative and self-respect that the libertarians have. But alas, there are many other folks out there in the great cities and amongst the urbanized conglomerates who are quite comfortable, even fat n' happy, depending on the System that we've patched together, which is not the same as the visionary government that our Founders had wrought from the virgin soil of a vast contintent back in the day.

Now this whole Affordable Care vs. Obamacare mirage has got us all torn up, living on the edge of fiscal disaster or social dystopia or government shutdown or Default or some combination thereof.

We need a new social contract. I propose a national referendum on the Affordable Care Act so we can settle this thing once and for all. Instead of depending on the Democrats or Republicans to interpret the polls, let's take a real vote on the issue so we'll know where the simple majority of Americans stand on this landmark issue of subsidized health care.

Glass half-Full

Shades of things to come

"It might have been seventy million years ago that a large asteroid hit the earth somewhere near Cancun. And it might have been that the big space-tossed boulder would have thrown such a cloud of dust and disturbance into the earth’s atmosphere that it probably altered the pecking order of biological kingdoms for thousands or even millions of years thereafter.

Earth shaking events. They happen.

It might have been that the severe rearrangement of earth’s biomes had put a major crimp on the old dinosaurs. Maybe they became like DOS after Microsoft, just slipping down into the dark hidden recesses of the new program, relegated to subterranean, hydrocarbon pools of potential energy, their giant-generating introns and exons having been unraveled and liquefied like the assets of international corpuses and cartels that would later profit from their demise. It might have been that the superbad, supermad totally-rad reptile kings and queens of the jungle could no longer compete with the smaller, sleeker, smarter, uppity mammals who were in the ascendancy and currently favored by the committee for Natural Selection. It might have happened that way. And maybe the superbad supermad totally rad reptile kings and queens of the jungle found themselves faltering, over the next few eons, losing their command of the playing field, becoming more and more baffled at their waning ability to throw their weight around any more, until finally they just, maybe, gave up the ghost and conceded their diminished reptile role to those miniscule, dust-lickin’ mutated cousins who would later distill all that serpentine angst and alienation into a venomous infusion of death—inflictible on those new-kid-on-the-block mammals who were ruining the neighborhood. Equipped with the ugliest, hissingest triangulated head that God ever allowed on a breathin’ creature, these slitherin’ peabrains could nevertheless still proudly carry on, simply by opening their mouths, the dominance and intimidation of their ancestors. Speak of the devil……

“Watch out for the damn snake!” yelled Simon."

from chapter 19 of Glass Chimera

And this just in, Cen0zoically speaking...from Ezekiel, at the River Chebar, among the diasporas:

" Thus says the Lord God, 'Behold, I am against you, O Gog, prince of Rosh, Meshech, and Tubal. I will turn you about, and put hooks into your jaws, and I will bring you out, and all your army, horses and horsemen, all of them splendidly attired, a great company with buckler and shield, all of them wielding swords--"

"...Persia, Ethiopia, and Put with them, all of them with shield and helmet, Gomer with all its troops..."

Stay tuned for more planetary updates on the continuing crisis of Darwinian survival of the fittest on the third rock from the sun.
CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress