Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

The Naked Delusion that is Communism

Will liberalists look on Communism with nostalgia? In spite of what Communist ideas were in practice in theory they embodied ideas that progressives understood and in many cases shared. Communist regimes in The Soviet Union and in Maoist China committed fearsome barbarities but because of the ideas they depicted and declared to be for the advancement of humanity the atrocity's were unnoted by European radical humanists. It was a mythos-tradition where heroic humanity is waging war against inequality, to subservience to nature and supernaturalism alike. It was a system that unscrambled and revealed its enigmas but of which remained a communist doctrine and a doctrine nevertheless; to this day, save for North Korea and Cuba, no country on the face of the earth is governed by Marxist doctrine - the civilization envisaged by Lenin has been terminated by its own worldly-minded spiritual inertia. The spirit of a people cannot sustain on bread alone. Their radical humanism was very different to the classical definition of humanism - where poets spread art for the sake of art: Marxism denies the meaning of art. The new wave of humanists. the communist diaspora, envisaged a nakedness that was neither ashamed of itself nor aspirational for a more noble state of being. The desire for belief on the part of western intellectuals can be contrasted with communist countries where faith in a beaming future died off long since, By virtue of its decline hardened proponents of the communist system keep the faith alive among all who are disillusioned with the present; like an emotional disorder followers of Marxism feed on the idea of a revolution but if at once realised the reality is deflation, in short communism is a political delusion.

Ahhhhhhh


In a van, down by the ocean...


Sunday, December 6, 2009

The Corset by Joanna Grant, Roswell, Georgia, 1955

I am the one who knows
What needs to be done, I

Knew from the start that this day
Would come and find me climbing

The ladder to the attic where the brass-bound trunk
With its rivets, its hasps

Its mothballs, its sachets keep away
The yellowing, the stains and the tears

Of long, long wear. When I held it up
She cried. Little fool, as if she

Did not know herself. What she needs
Is bone, pounds of pressure to the inch,

Tight lacing, a knee in the back,
White knuckles on the bedrail.

Girls, I tell her, should only seem soft,
Should only look like they bend.

This is what you will not understand,
I tell this jelly, this fat crybaby girl.

Love, the real kind, is always a squeezing
A choking off all that offends.