My upstairs neighbors are having a particularly loud argument. Ick. I’m thinking it’s time go go and do some of that errand running I’ve been putting off. Buh bye!

Well, if you consider it an advanture to be dealing with a computer so screwed up it crashes every 2 hours and won’t let me even *open* Photoshop. But they’re sending me a new box on monday. Considering the huge ass project they’re expecting me to complete, this would be a good thing. I just hope they remember to add anti-virus software to this one.

And this is why I still do my blog by hand. Heh heh.

So the new job is going… not so bad. My new computer is spiffy and nifty and doesn’t seem to want to play nice with Photoshop 7. Gah.

God is a word. Or maybe several words. Or maybe a bit of code…
With apologies to Mike Migurski on WD-L:

!DIETY vengeful "-//HVN//DTD XTHOR 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.valhalla.org/TR/2000/xthor1-strict.dtd"

Now we have NJ’s poet laureate being asked to step down because he implied in a poem that US and Israeli leaders had foreknowledge of the WTC attacks.

Wow. A poem…. a freaking poem people… and there are elected officials demanding he resign. He’s being branded a liar and a perpetuator of lies. Instead of perhaps looking at this piece and asking, “what does our reaction tell us about ourselves?”

My god, it even mostly *about* that day. It was about all the other days. All the other reasons we as a people have to hang our heads in shame. Because the good people among us did not act, and let atrocities happen that we then sanitize and put in textbooks.

This is not some journalist, whose supposed job is to report the cold, hard facts and nothing else. This is a poet. His job is to make everyone *think*. A poet who does nothing other than feed us self congratulatory pap is a traitor to the long line of truth speakers who came before. He is no poet, only a propagandist. Poetry is the land of allegory, aphorism, metaphor, and sideways thinking. In poetry, a rose is never just a rose, and a line supposing that the US government sat back and took no action as people died means *much more than that*.

I read that line and I didn’t just think of that day a year ago. I thought of all the foreign journalists *before* Daniel Pearl who were killed on assignment. I thought about the bombing of embassies and naval ships that elicited no public or journalistic uproar. I thought about all the things that happen in this world every freaking day that our government AND EVERY SINGLE ONE OF US turn a blind eye to. Those lines, those words weren’t just a condemnation of smug legislators, they were a commendation of every single one of us.

You cannot condemn the US government without condemning the people of this country. And I do. Because it took *this* to get us off our asses. I am disgusted with my leaders for their smug, sanctimonious, wrapped in the flag “war” that they are attempting to wage. I am disgusted with my fellow citizens for their willingness to parrot whatever CNN tells us without even wondering if there are other facts that we are not being told.

Or, as Carl Gregory put it better than I can right now:

“His is definitely a poem that gets people to start asking questions at a time when people in power don’t want us to ask questions”

The US and Israeli governments probably didn’t know what was up. (Because they didn’t *want* to know, an angry part of my brain whispers to me) But my government has lied to me enough that it’s become my boy who cried wolf. I’ll never be able to believe it/them totally about anything.

So the government wants to lean on the arts to show only what it wants shown. Speak only what it wants spoken. A year ago I asked, “where are we going?”. I’m asking it again, a little further down the path. I don’t like what I see behind me. I like what I see ahead of me even less. For too long parts of our society have been trying to muzzle the arts under the guise of decency, economy, and relevance. Now, with the anvil of patriotism, they are ready to sling rocks at a poet who writes words they don’t like. What’s next? Painters of “un-patriotic” images? Publishers of “un-patriotic” books?

When the government starts leaning on the arts, are blacklists really that far behind?

Ok, your erstwhile host is switching jobs. More, I am now going to be working for my former company’s direct competitor. (Hence the lack of mention of this before - there was enough paranoia after where I was going became public knowledge. No need to fan the flames.)

Why? Lots of reasons. Some of the bigger ones:
They cut my pay.
They dropped my benefits.
They bounced my paycheck. A lot.

I’ll be doing pretty much the same thing as I was doing at Color Quest for more money, with benefits. (paying for my own health insurance, I have found, *sucks*) The commute’s a little longer, but I can live with this.

There were plans to fly me down to Florida to meet some the big muckety mucks, but that got scrapped. All well and good. I find that the idea of flying still makes me nervous. And I *really* hate airports.