What I Did on My Summer Vacation

I was trying to capture all my Facebook commentary and replicate it here for easier reference but it proved far too difficult to edit for backgrounds, omitted photographs, and links, that I'll simply refer you all to my FB page "James Stanley Manista" to look at it all firsthand. I'm certain it's all open to the public so don't feel you have to be a friend, unless, again I'm confused about how this all works.

The whole subject of social media is worthy of comment but I'll limit myself here to the most salient feature of FB: you can "Like" something but you cannot with a mouse click "Dislike" it.

More in another article soon. 

Parking Mr. Wheeler's Yacht

"How do you park into a narrow harbor a super yacht nearly the length of a football field? You back it in, of course. Very carefully. Yachtsman Andy Wheeler enlisted a drone last month to make a video of his Chopi Chopi backing into the harbor at Corsica’s port of Bonifacio. Wheeler’s yacht, the largest ever built in Italy, launched last year. Analysts at that time valued the boat at $107 million." (Photo and caption from Too Much 08/04/14)

Everybody thinks the rich have it so easy. But where do you park your extravagant yacht? Sometimes the vacation spots just don't have the extra long dock yours requires. But you don't want to anchor it out on the Mediterranean Sea where it will get lost among the other mega-yachts, where very few will see it and you'll have to row ashore in your dinghy. 

This member of the profligately wealthy managed to get his floater where everyone will see, "How much more money I can waste than you paltry peasants with your skiffs." 

You think you have problems, Punky, what if you had a boat?

Tissue Is The Issue

I've seen an increase in two items of concern on the grass and on sidewalks: 1. dead birds (I don't know why; other people say they don't see them) and 2. paper tissue (not bathroom type, mind you, just the runny nose type or for wiping makeup from one's face (same thing, cosmetic redress).

The princess and the pea. 

The stone in your sandal. 

The sand in your bathing suit. 

The bird poop in your eye. 

Relatives after three days. 

Granted no one of them big things. Not to go to war about. But they're certainly irritating to the point of instilling a need to rid the nation of them . . . this very instant. Not that I'm in favor of any other kind of injudicious discard (litter). But this one is so personal and so directly filthying up the environment that it screams for public action.

What happened to the handkerchief? I remember being surprised when I substituted in the urban middle schools how when a student hand shot up it was not to answer a question or comment on a text but to ask, "Teacher, do you have a tissue?" often with the other hand pointing to the questioner's mucus-laden nostril. "No," I'd respond honestly because I truly had none and had not been instructed to provide such as a teaching tool.

"Use your handkerchief," I'd offer, and the whole class in unison replied in disgust, "Ooow, how gross!" "Waddaya mean gross? At least you wouldn't be walking around asking for a tissue to wipe up your snootful. Besides, it's not my job to provide you with kleenex, just like I'm not expected to provide paper or pencils." 

Truth was though many teachers had for years been providing paper, pencils, pens, and tissues out of their own pockets (not literally for the last item). Often enough scrounging in the teacher's desk could turn up the nostril-mops. And, once provided, the supply was gone in one 45 minute period.

"Yeah but then you'd have to put that germy old hankie back in your pocket and carry it around all day--carryin' fresh boogers--ooo!" they explained. I should clarify someone came to Snotnose's rescue; he blew loudly, came forward, dramatically deposited the soggy mess in the waste basket at the teacher's desk, returned to his seat, but looked as if he would soon reenact the cycle. 

Kids with long-sleeved shirts did not require tissues as frequently as the short-sleeved urchins but I never could get them to see how brandishing boogers on one's shirtsleeve was tantamount to carrying a used hankie.

"You do know hankies can be laundered? and reused?" I produced my clean hankie from my pocket and again met a chorus of ooos and boos as if I had just pulled a maggot-covered rat out of a hat. 

When I see the volume of "tissues," looking like white poppies strewn over the green grass of my neighborhood park, I sincerely wonder if the whole of the last two generations need to be reinstructed on basic nasal hygiene. Not all the "tissues" are products of hooker handjobs; those are usually accompanied by a single generic ambidextral latex glove. 

My OCD about litter is getting to be like pushing a boulder uphill. Step aside, Sisyphus, I'm not stopping anytime soon.

 

Now It can be told

Scene of the crime:  Except for the Keybank Building which was not even a gleam in an architect's eye in the summer of 1968,  the newer cars parked outside, and all the trees, now missing, which made this location on that Saturday an off-the-beaten-path location, this is where I either facilitated a break-in or saved a secretary a whole weekend of dire lonely captivity in an old Flats warehouse restroom.

My First, and Last, Living Wage Job

All right, in 1968, graduated from college, half a year of graduate study, and a couple of years of chronic depression, I was grateful to be a mailman. I don't remember what the economic conditions were in those years but for me they weren't good. Because of my appearing exceptionally young for my years and probably having a voice pitched high enough to make the appearance credible, I was often laughed out of interviews with a casual, "Look, kid, I don't know who you're trying to fool, but when you get out of high school, give us another shot." 

Or the jobs just didn't pay enough to support a young couple intending soon to be married. I could have gotten into IT early on but learning Fortran and Cobol seemed dreadfully dull at the time and churning out deckfuls of mysteriously punched IBM cards looked like asking Death to kiss you goodnight. Gates and Jobs were probably still friends working in a garage somewhere. I had no crystal ball but I had taken a civil service test for the Post Office. All I had to do was wait for them to write me again instead of pitching the invitations into the waste basket every month. 

So I was a beginning part-time substitute mailman and I was delivering that Saturday on what was called a "mounted" route, a term thrown back not to the Pony Express (which was a contract service, never part of the Post Office) but to delivery involving a vehicle, possibly in earlier years a horse-drawn vehicle. 

What was delightful about this was that on a business route on a Saturday the carrier didn't even take out half the mail, leaving it in the office for businesses who chose not to have a Saturday delivery. Yet one was expected to take the full time for the route and not come in early. Yea! Lots of free time and a Jeep to drive about anywhere you wanted to go on a Saturday. 

In those days the Post Office was pretty much a hiring arm of the federal government and there was lots of slack. Unlike today's Postal Service which is driven by twin devils of government bureaucracy and business efficiency where people are subject to shooting each other if anyone is pushed just a little too hard.

"Mailman, help me! Help me, mailman!"

The area was in downtown Cleveland, actually just down the hillside from Ontario near what was then the Eagle Street ramp. But it was virtually invisible in that corner of the turn of Canal Road. The Cuyahoga flowed another plateau down and could not be seen except from the rear of the old warehouses which dated back to the 1850s or earlier. One could hear the traffic from the busy streets above but Canal Road on a Saturday was like being on the moon. And this was even before we landed on the moon. 

There were several stops along this stretch but few cars parked in the area--not unusual. As I ascended the rickety wooden stairs of the third stop I first tried the doorknob to deliver in person if I could, but the door was locked. Through the glass I could see no one inside and the lights were out. There was a slot in the door and as I pushed the tied up letters and magazines in through the slot I thought I heard a voice calling, "Help me, mailman, help me." 

I looked around. There was no one in sight. I let the slot clamp shut and again I heard the voice but this time much quieter. I knelt down and pushed the slot open so I could see and hear directly and shouted into it, "Hello, is anyone there? I just delivered your mail." 

"Mailman, Oh, my God, thank you but don't leave me," a lady's voice clearly cried out. "Whatever you do don't leave. I've locked myself in the restroom by accident." She explained she had come in to complete some office work and when she went to the restroom the door closed behind her and locked somehow so that she couldn't open it. "Nobody knows I'm here. If I can't get out, I'll be here alone until they come in Monday morning. You're my only hope." 

"Well, look, I can't be breaking into places, but I can call the police to help you, when, and if, I find a place open, which to be blunt, isn't likely to happen." These were the days before cellphones could commonly be found in every pocket and purse.  

"Take a rock and break the glass. Then come in and let me out. Look, I've got other stuff to do today and I don't want my family to worry while the police take all day to decide to help me," she stated. "Don't worry about the glass. The company will pay for repairs." 

"Lady, I'm not comfortable at all about this." I replied getting more nervous about the whole deal. 

"How comfortable will you be on Monday morning when I tell your boss about  refusing to help me?" she queried. 

Here Come the Gang, er, Door, Busters

I felt like I was sinking into a quagmire but now I couldn't just leave her. I checked the area for a rock and found a board I thought would work. "Here goes," I warned her. The glass didn't break until the third whack and it shattered into the office just like in the movies. Now I'm thinking somebody will drive by and see me at the broken door with the board in my hand and think, "Man, when they say they deliver, don't get in their way." 

I carefully reached in, unlatched the inside lock, and pushed the door over the shards. "I'm over here," came a voice from a door down the hallway. I carefully tried the doorknob which refused to rotate. "It's locked," I said stupidly. "I know that. Can you break in?" "Ma'am, I'm not a big guy but I could try."

[If you are now thinking, "This guy is a nut," I don't blame you one bit.] 

It's amazing how hard you have to hit a door to burst it open, and how much it hurts when it stops you like a rhinoceros slamming into a bridge abutment. "Third time is charmed, they say," at which point the door crashes to the floor rather than just opening and the young, powerful part-time substitute letter carrier goes sliding over its surface and ends up in a lump at the feet of the helpless maiden, who was standing there with the door's three hinge pins in her hand.

"I knocked these out with the heel of my shoe, but I still couldn't open the door," she took pains to explain as I rose from a crumpled heap and pointed at the pins. I felt like telling her that if she had mentioned the hinge pins I would have instructed her to pull on the hinges little by little to get the door open--no broken glass, no crushed shoulder. However, by then I realized I could have done a lot of things differently and let it slide.

Sheepishly neither asked for the other's name. I said I was glad to have been some help while thinking the sore shoulder should be fine by the route's end. When I got back to the post office, my shoulder was still hurting and I thought, "My boss doesn't need to know about this." 

An American Month

On June 1when I wrote "Shoving Your Nose in It" is Journalism's Job  I had no idea of the significance awarded this month:

"I’ll bet you didn’t know that June is “torture awareness month” thanks to the fact that, on June 26, 1987, the Convention Against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment or Punishment went into effect internationally. In this country, however, as a recent Amnesty International survey indicated, Americans are essentially living in Torture Unawareness Month, or perhaps even Torture Approval Month, and not just in June 2014 but every month of the year." [my emphasis, from Tomdispatch.org]

What author Ariel Dorfman relates in the link below is the human cost to both victim and perpetrator, recently depicted in the film The Railway Man, starring Colin Firth and Nicole Kidman, about a British officer, Eric Lomax, tortured by a Japanese officer, who was a Buddhist monk, during the construction of the Bangkok to Burma railway, made famous in the motion picture Bridge on the River Kwai.

I never thought that in my waning years I would be writing frequently and earnestly to dissuade our citizenry away from the barbarity of torture. But I never thought I'd have to convince people about freedom of speech or separation of church and state either. 

So here offered for your consideration another article you may decide against reading (this is rather reserved by comparison to others I have linked);

http://tomdispatch.us2.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=6cb39ff0b1f670c349f828c73&id=18744fd8cf&e=e8ee0c8340

Past the Tipping Point

Despite the ranting of crazed denialists we are on the way to destroying the planet that gave us life.

Save on winter clothing

Dahr Jamail of Truthout.org promised to update us monthly on ACDs (anthropogenic climate disrupttions) across the world. This grim series continues and, as expected, only gets worse. Like so many of us who have watched the global warming prospect for years, and have cried Cassandra-like to so many who would just not listen, Mr. Jamail presents his findings as one who believes we have already passed the tipping point. His chronicle of these latest events is linked below:

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/24370-atmospheric-co2-crosses-ominous-threshold

Warning: This article is not encouraging 

Just How Much Better Off Are They Than You?

IMAGES OF INEQUALITY

The hottest “new badge of excess” in the global luxury world? That has to be the “pawbag,” the oh-so-cute miniature replica of high-fashion, high-priced handbagsnow available for the pups of princesses and plutocrats alike. Matching sets for dog and owner start at a mere $1,118 for the Fontanelli little black handbag and can run up to $5,119 for the Leonardo Delfuoco black/green croc.

from http://toomuchonline.org/tmweekly.html

To the Bugs

To the bugs who bit me as I shoveled:

I know I upset your home, eight years' compost,

Where nature called you earnestly to churn

And make for my sake a more fertile earth.

I salute your endeavor burrowing

Tirelessly through chopped grass, dandelion,

Avoiding the cigarette cellophane, the

Silvery prophylactic wrappers my

Mower indifferently shredded with

Black and Mild tips, torn munchie bags, children’s

Carelessly wadded homework, Jehovah

Witness pamphlets freely sucked from my lawn.

Despite this good you clearly work, may your

Probosces shrink in pain, your spawn feed birds.

c. 2014,  J. S. Manista

Earning (and Trying to Live on) Minimum Wages in America Today, Part III

Don't like being unemployed? Get a job. Don't like minimum wage? Get a better job.

Things are getting better. Really? For whom?

Maybe my parents did a far better job of educating me of their depression-era young adulthood than I had come to realize until lately: of spare mealtimes--for supper each child getting only a slice of bread smeared with lard; of being told to quit school at sixteen, find work and help support the family (there were ten children in my father's family, eight in my mother's); of hoboes knocking on back doors asking for any small job they could do to offset their begging for a sandwich.

Oddly I took the stories in as a smidgeon but later linked them to romantic notions of colorful poverty (if there can be such a thing)--riding the rails, tales of the desperate Joads extricating themselves from dust of the prairies and hopefully west to California, the tenement occupants of Elmer Rice's Street Scene or poorly paid taxi drivers in Clifford Odets' Waiting for Lefty. What could be headier than popular-level economic debates with the neighborhood socialists and Marxists of the '30s?

History repeats but in a new way. Economic definitions do not let us call the Great Recession another Great Depression. But for the long term unemployed or those upper age rejects of once well salaried middle management who now struggle to find positions within 60% of their previous earnings is there really a difference? Peter Van Buren (whistle blower at the State Department and now mid-career scrambler) takes on some pertinent questions: 

    1. Who's Thomas Piketty? 

    2. Why don't poor people find better jobs? 

    3. Aren't there places all over the US experiencing economic rebirth?

    4. Get off the couch--look for work? 

    5. Get retrained? 

    6. Cut welfare and force unemployed into the work market?

    7. Shut off Food Stamps? 

    8. Raise the minimum wage and lose jobs? 

    9. Then what? 

And, as I said before, don't blame me. And now, don't blame Peter Van Buren either. Just messengers, remember?

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175851/tomgram%3A_peter_van_buren%2C_a_rising_tide_lifts_all_yachts/

"Shoving Your Nose in It," is Journalism's Job

Hey, I really hate to spoil your day

The sky here is blue. It's mildly warm. The birds are chirping. The cat's asleep on her sunny perch. And we need to talk about torture. 

Since this is the weekend after five years of being held hostage Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl was released by the Taliban in exchange for five Taliban terrorists held at Guantanamo it may seem that keeping prisoners in indefinite detention may not have been such a bad idea after all. Despite the advantages of such amoral realpolitick for prisoner swaps, this particular swap might easily have been effected totally apart from the background of torture which is the question here. 

Short of some graphic violence on 24 (which I have never seen) I question whether Americans have any real knowledge of US torture methods or history. Of course a person with internet could just Google "torture" as I did for the images I used here. But gagging (or fainting) over the variety presented--from medieval to modern--doesn't do justice to what we actually do. 

Since we never were asked politically and foolishly trusted government officials to follow existing law, it may be long overdue to find out what Cheney meant by "the dark side." I list below two articles that show: 1. We're still doing it, and 2. Yep, it's torture. 

All I'm asking is for you to become an informed citizen so you can develop a proper opinion, since except for certain especially clever folks you can't have an opinion "without you got no facs." 

So I invite you, Dear Reader, to read (and hang onto your lunch, please):

1. Link was ineffective for an article in The Atlantic website, March 13, 2014, "A Technicality Won't Excuse the Obama Administration for Torture," author Conor Friedersdorf

2. http://truth-out.org/news/item/24030-bushs-fourth-term-continues-guantanamo-torture-secret-renditions-indefinite-

Need An Example? Force Feeding

"In his May 23, 2013 speech to the National Defense University, President Obama addressed the then ongoing practice of force-feeding. Here is what he said:

'Is this who we are? Is that something our Founders foresaw? Is that the America we want to leave our children? Our sense of justice is stronger than that.' 

One year later, the force-feeding continues and Mr. Obama is silent." 
   from  Guantanamo Force- Feeding--The Resanctioning of Torture, L. Michael Hager, Truthout

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/24024-guantanamo-force-feeding-the-re-sanctioning-of-torture

Cliff's Notes for Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century

Again Too Much Nails It

If 685 pages of some of the most readable economics prose is still a little daunting for most of you, Sam Pizzigatti, of one of our favorite websites has done the chewing (eschewing?) it down to size by linking a number of excellent written and videoed commentaries. 

Whether you read the whole book or just the cribs, do not pass up this treatise on inequality, its origins and likely future.

http://toomuchonline.org/tmweekly.html

 

Our Soldiers, Dead at Our Hands

How will we remember those who died because of military-industrial-congressional greed?

Memorial Day Remembrance

May 26, 2014. There'll be a lot of remembrance of dead soldiers this weekend. But there's not going to be any remembrance of an entire class of dead soldiers. Not that they didn't give their all or didn't place the country's needs before their own safety . 

No, what got them killed were defective or badly designed weapons--airplanes which can't be flown safely--guns that jammed in combat--armor that didn't shield. No, what got them killed were the weapons given them to use in battle which were known to be defective, but whose defects were covered up by immoral contractors, corrupt military procurement officials, and congressional representatives eager to keep government dollars and contracts flowing to their constituent states. 

You might think it odd that I, as a person who doesn't subscribe to the myth of military might, would complain about defective weapons for our soldiers. But all of us grieve at the deaths of our young men and women in the military whether we believe in or abjure the use of force between nations. Each is a tragic loss to the family of humankind. 

Some will argue there will always be death in warfare. But when the needless death occurs because of military-industrial greed and pig-headed politics, the loss isn't just one of appropriate national grief. Rather we must respond with national outrage. That our young people are sent to the slaughter is horror enough. That they die at the hands of their fellow citizens is a double monstrosity. 

In the link attached Dina Rasor, who has observed firsthand the greed and duplicity in the military procurement process for over three decades, raises the issue of the many who have died "at our own hands."

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/23898-moral-robots-for-the-pentagon-let’s-work-on-pentagon-morality-first

Earning (and Trying to Live on) Minimum Wages in America Today, Part II

How 100% of the 47% breaks out

When I was young and impressionable

My parents told me that politics was a rather simple matter: Republicans favored business and the rich and Democrats tried to help the "little guys" (us, I suspected). But voting was not so clear and simple. They had voted for FDR early on but had no regrets about liking "Ike." Then with JFK in 1960, of course, as Catholics, was there another choice? 

When I was finally eligible to vote I unenthusiastically cast my lot for LBJ and a host of Democrats since. I had not given policy differences much thought until Clinton, who struck me as more of a Republican than a Democrat. The 2000 election (can we really call it an election?) of Bush over Gore raised my consciousness. Bush's presidency raised my hackles and I realized that all along I was radically progressive. 

It took Romney's 47% speech to nail the truth of what my parents related so simply years earlier. Now that Republicans are on the stump trying to forge new relations with the poor, it's time to remember just who is in whose corner. I often sympathize with those who feel there is only one ruling class in America despite the alternation of two parties who participate in a charade of democracy to keep the powerless citizenry deluded.

The op-ed linked below by Charles M. Blow of the New York Times exposes the undercurrent in Republican thinking that reveals their latest pandering to the poor as an exercise in hypocrisy obvious to everyone but them.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/19/opinion/blow-poverty-is-not-a-state-of-mind.html?_r=0

Why Don't We Stop the Rich From Getting Richer? Part II

IMAGES OF INEQUALITY

The folks at Rolls-Royce will customize just about anything for you. This new Rolls came with a bespoke picnic basket, the Pursuitist notes, “complete with custom china, silver, and glassware based on the owners' request.” Other custom requests stand out a bit more. Rolls recently delivered a new $300,000 Wraith model painted to match the color of the new owner’s pale pink leather gloves. (from Too Much, May 12, 2014, Sam Pizzigatti)

What Inequality?

Shills for the .01% will invariably raise the straw man that it would be totally unfair if everyone--regardless of talent, training, and effort--earned the same as everyone else. Should a bum working as a clerk in an all-night bodega make as much as an emergency room physician? Should a sewer cleaner make as much as a Nobel prize winning physicist? Should a cop make as much as a judge? 

Without getting into that argument (since I can think of many instances where risks and responsibilities challenge the conventional wisdom) I'll grant that for the most part there certainly must be grades of income and corresponding grades of wealth accumulation. 

I, as well as many other progressives, have no problem with wealth that is a product of hard work, exceptional talent, and fair competition. But when that wealth is really a product of inheritance, rigged markets, and tax favoritism, I think such aggrandizement runs counter to the American Dream of individual accomplishment.

Taylor Swift, for example, earned $39.7 million last year, the highest income of US singers. Maybe you think TS hung the moon or maybe you think she isn't any good at all. But compare her earnings to the top hedge fund earner last year, David Tepper, who made $3.5 billion and we begin to see a disparity which is so vast that to describe it as unequal borders on misrepresentation. Tepper's day brings $9.6 million; Swift's, $109 thousand. 

Swift's daily bucks certainly look good to minimum wage workers (who wish they could make that in a year) and, if my slight knowledge of the celebrity scene is at all reliable, she has no children to support.

http://toomuchonline.org/weeklies2014/may122014.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/09/opinion/krugman-now-thats-rich.html?emc=edit_th_20140509&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=3991573

You Hate the Rich. This is Class Warfare.

Let's get one thing straight: the rich are God's children just like us and I don't hate them. Are they swindling us and ruining American democracy? Fer sure. But put away those guillotines (sp?).  We're talking non-violent resistance--financial transaction taxes, equalizing tax rates for earned and unearned income, truly progressive taxation rates, fair inheritance taxes, and repeal of the carried interest loophole (and whole ranges of other unfair tax policies).

Believe me, the rich will be far better off once we restrain their unearned, unfair, unreal advantages. They might even get a little empathy for the lowest paid among us.

Not A Bug Splat, Drone Pilot

"How many women and children have you seen incinerated by a Hellfire missile? How many men have you seen crawl across a field, trying to make it to the nearest compound for help while bleeding out from severed legs?" She added, "When you are exposed to it over and over again it becomes like a small video, embedded in your head, forever on repeat, causing psychological pain and suffering that many people will hopefully never experience." Heather Linebaugh, former drone intelligence analyst, writing in The Guardian, December 2013, quoted by Pratap Chatterjee, in Tomgram.com.

Soccer field-sized enlargement of an image of a girl orphaned by a drone strike stretched out over  farmland because the images drone pilots see on their computer screens at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada aren't large enough or clear enough to distinguish who their victims really are.

Ground level view of the image placed in the hope of instilling empathy for victims among the  drone pilots.

"After six years, Bryant couldn’t take it any more. He saw a therapist who diagnosed him with post-traumatic stress disorder. This was a novel, even shocking development for an airman who had hardly ever come close to a battlefield. Bryant was suitably taken aback and, as a result, began speaking out against the system of killing he had been enmeshed in and what it does both to the killers and those killed. "Combat is combat. Killing is killing. This isn't a video game," he wrote in an angry tirade on Facebook. "How many of you have killed a group of people, watched as their bodies are picked up, watched the funeral, then killed them, too?" from Pratap Chatterjee,  The True Costs of Remote Control War, Tomgram.Com.

There's nothing I can add. Read the links.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175842/tomgram%3A_pratap_chatterjee%2C_the_true_costs_of_remote_control_war/

http://notabugsplat.com

Killing Net Neutrality--Your $s Up for Grabs

Dear family, friends, and colleagues,

Maybe you don't know net neutrality from my Aunt Zelda but if you'd like to get hip in less than 26 minutes pull this link:

http://billmoyers.com/video/

Bill Moyers, David Carr, and Susan Crawford lay the problem out clearly and succinctly. Mr Carr's speech is a little hesitant, but Ms Crawford's is crisp and brilliant.

The big boys are out to steal your internet. The link will explain why and how you can resist.

Maybe you don't know that lowly South Korea has internet speeds five times faster than our best at costs much less than we pay in the US or know why that is. You'll find out fast.

If you've bitched about cable costs over the years, believe me you ain't seen nothin' yet if the FCC gives neutrality away as it looks to be doing.
Miss the link? Here it is again: 

http://billmoyers.com/video/

 

Love, Peace, and Hope,James Manista

Each time I see a Sycamore

Each time I see a      Sycamore

I wonder what the hell it’s for.

It doesn’t even drop its leaves

In season like the other trees.

Nor make I any sense of its

Eternal bark psoriasis.

Among things furnitureal

Its presence is mercurial.

Perhaps its bumpy tumorous wood

Is hard to carve or shape, no good

For rails, panels, spans or dowels

On which might hang miswoven towels.

In columns they line boulevards

And singly found in some backyards

Where graciously their shade provides

Refreshing coolness while it hides

Picnic tables, swings with seats

From the summer’s cruelest heats

Although not well. The maples and the oaks

Shadow with far darker cloaks.

Perhaps one answer I have found

While casting all these thoughts around:

This tree whose wood’s so decorously curly

Supplies unique veneers called burly?

Of all sylvan varieties 

The Sycamores are garbage trees

Because of their relentless droppings:

Seeds, twigs, branches, other ploppings

Too numerous to mention

And on this point there’s no dissension.

Patience, my eager granite, wait

        Patience, my eager granite, wait.

         Suffice for now to list my birth.

         That space for when I leave this earth

         Reserve, I need not know the date.

         Blessed are they who have no stones

         To chide them of life’s bounded course.

         Must I a somber life enforce

         Before they burn my wretched bones?

         No; soon will I with my love lie

         Whose ashes are herein interred.   

        ‘Til then by grief my life’s deferred,

         And for how long? I can’t descry.

         Perhaps once all the tears are done

         And thoughts of her don’t choke my breath  

         I’ll be then free enough of death

        To stop subtracting days by one.