RETURN THE CANON
� -- � It's back anyway. The new canon is multicultural, diverse in many ways, re-energized and empowering all around, etc. Beauteous in so many ways. All chiefs, no indians, happy disarray everywhere. But we need people studying the motherfuckin ancient Greeks and Romans again, and Shakespeare, too. Da Classics is the soul of our culture, as Ali G would say -- our infrastructure, architectural models, language, our iambs, form and functions of government, etc., and even future studies depend on ancient wisdom to see properly -- all of this was tossed in the 70s at great expense to our human depth. So absurd and reactionary was this move that, wanting to seem hep, even Jimmy Carter decided 'apropos of the wet snow' (Dostoyevsky) to reveal his lust for other women in the pages of Playboy magazine, becoming his own October Surprise before the presidential erection of 1976. I mean, election. His re-election. Which flopped. Thanks to Ted Koppel (where was he for the Trump hostage-taking?) and the hostages. Expand the canon of great literature and knowledge, bring old and new together. There's no reason why Toni Morrison and Aeschylus can't rumba together. Lewis Lapham makes it work at Lapham's Quarterly.
� -- � And for f*ck's sake, bring back my beloved Latin Mass. (I couldn't utter mea culpa enough times, leading up to my confirmation.) I enjoyed its pulchritude. You don't have to be Catholic to attend. Think of it as opera. Pay what you can when the basket comes around (I know a guy who put in a button; he's probably dead and paying for his sins now.). And be sure to confess on Saturday before you go and transubstantiate on Sunday (bad medicine, if you don't). You don't want the Anti-Christ to have your number when he steps off the elevator, having come up or down -- we really don't know.
REPARATIONS
� -- � Cough it up by the trillions. We could helicopter cash into the barrios and cardboard places we'd rather not go, which would provide jobs for whoever wanted one, raking up marked cash, which would then be brought to exchange centers for laundered cash, which could then be used to buy groceries and make purchase that don't require looting. (When Trump was encouraging badged thugs to be-bop Black heads with batons after the George Floyd upsetting, the first thing Trump did, after erecting a black chain-link wall around the white house, was run to his "operations" room and secure his widescreen TV. Steal that, you might as well be stealing his widescreen grin.)
� -- � The legacy of slavery will never get wiped clean, nor the genocidal slaughter of Elizabeth Warren's forbears, who never got a shot at entering Harvard and reading the white guy Narrative of what happened to them. Hell, the Mighty Whitey (MW) doesn't even try to clean it up the mess it made. They've just gone all pig sloughy with lust and greed, pearl-eating swine high on fizzle shizzle. Nope, if we don't want reparations to turn into payback, we bess cash up. Time's running out. Money, sure, but, beyond that, first world housing (no mo pro jos) or forced trading places: let the MWs live in the projects, see how their effete graffiti (effitti?) holds up against the pure rage of ages, featuring the smell of urine, vomit and cheap industrial disinfectant. Free healthcare. Free education, all the way through tertiary. Get a Black man's face on a dega dollar bill -- Frederick Douglass, sure; Richard Pryor; but maybe Malcolm X would be best, as his mission statement best aligns with American foreign policy: By Any Means Necessary (scrub out In God We Trust), plus, Malcolm features in an assassination. How American.
NADER'S SENSIBLE AGENDA
� -- � For those who want more immediate do-able action, please refer to St. Nader's excellent list of places for Republicans and Democrats to converge and get things done over mutual concerns about government integrity and the future of our country. A round table; no more head-of-the-table twattage. In his book, Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance To Dismantle The Corporate State, Ralph lists "Twenty-Five Proposed Redirections and Reforms Through Convergent Action," that he sees as do-able right now if we put our will to people power to the task now. That book and list are available for free at archive.org. Here.
� -- � Also, you might want to consider buying his latest cookbook, which is filled with homey basic recipes of family warmth and good-ol-willed American spirit, Arab-cuisine style. O say can you see. An excellent idea for a Christmas gift! Wot?
In the meantime, as John Lennon would say, wake me when the revolution is over.
(Article changed on November 28, 2020 at 15:43)
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