Earlier this evening on Facebook, I became a fan of a site with the appellation,"I love Jamaica" and was moved to think about my feelings, my exceedingly ambivalent feelings for my native land, and wrote this poem which may be the best verse I have ever written, not because it is the most imaginative or because it demonstrates the most literary merit of those I have created, but because I utilized language to communicate very accurately my true feelings, and thought I would share it with members of the Black Think Tank.
ISLAND HOME LOST
Some pain is beyond analysis or expression,
Some memories too poignant and private to share,
Some ironies are so capricious, they precipitate despair,
Such are my feelings with regards to my island in the sun.
Like a woman fantasized about, idealized and loved too much, now no longer fun,
When lost she fell below the radar of emotion, beyond nostalgia.
What remains is an empty, sterile zone of non being.
A spatial gap, an experience frozen in suspended animation, a period of personal history repressed beyond regurgitating.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Thursday, May 21, 2009
ADVISE FOR DICK CHENEY
For two full terms Dick Cheney served as Vice President, arguably the most influential and powerful VP ever, it may well be that he is not defending the record of President Bush but his own mistakes and inadequacies.
He had eight years to make his mark on this nation, and the results are all round us, an economy in ruins as evidenced by unprecedented increases in unemployment and housing foreclosures.
Perhaps the economy was not the strong point of his administration he claims to have done better on national security, where he engaged in a naked act of aggression against the people of Iraq with contrived justifications which attack killed over a hundred thousand Iraqis, a very, very conservative estimate, made half a million Iraqis refugees, and, destroyed the infrastructure in that country while strengthening the hand of extreme Muslim Fundamentalist factions throughout the region.
Mr Cheney, you were as good at you job as Vice President as I am a great singer, I am tone deaf but love karaoke.
When you were in office you maintained a comparatively low profile, perhaps you did not want to overshadow the President, which would have been very easy considering that he was an unmitigated idiot, now you have a very high profile and I cannot for a moment imagine why you obviously have nothing to contribute or you would have made that contribution when you had the chance.
Perhaps, you have too much time on your hands and you are doing this to stave off boredom and ennui.
If that is your problem I would suggest that you go around the country and find people to shoot accidentally, and, then also find very, very stupid people who will believe your version of these accidents.
I cannot advise you to put up or shut up, because you have already put up to the degree that would make you the most unpopular VP in the history of this nation, so can I prevail upon you to SHUT UP.
He had eight years to make his mark on this nation, and the results are all round us, an economy in ruins as evidenced by unprecedented increases in unemployment and housing foreclosures.
Perhaps the economy was not the strong point of his administration he claims to have done better on national security, where he engaged in a naked act of aggression against the people of Iraq with contrived justifications which attack killed over a hundred thousand Iraqis, a very, very conservative estimate, made half a million Iraqis refugees, and, destroyed the infrastructure in that country while strengthening the hand of extreme Muslim Fundamentalist factions throughout the region.
Mr Cheney, you were as good at you job as Vice President as I am a great singer, I am tone deaf but love karaoke.
When you were in office you maintained a comparatively low profile, perhaps you did not want to overshadow the President, which would have been very easy considering that he was an unmitigated idiot, now you have a very high profile and I cannot for a moment imagine why you obviously have nothing to contribute or you would have made that contribution when you had the chance.
Perhaps, you have too much time on your hands and you are doing this to stave off boredom and ennui.
If that is your problem I would suggest that you go around the country and find people to shoot accidentally, and, then also find very, very stupid people who will believe your version of these accidents.
I cannot advise you to put up or shut up, because you have already put up to the degree that would make you the most unpopular VP in the history of this nation, so can I prevail upon you to SHUT UP.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT OBAMA
This letter is a plea for simple justice however it will not be couched in diplomatic terminology, bromides, platitudes or flattery; nor will it mince words because I am incapable of anything but telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
First of all your reason for failing to release additional photographs depicting the atrocities committed in Abu Ghraib prison is not only reminiscent of the spin foisted on the American people by the Bush Administration, it is entirely spurious, perniciously specious and totally fallacious.
These incidents occurred in 2003:
SALON.COM
The abuses at Abu Ghraib that were photographed on Oct. 18 and 19, along with detainee testimony, show the visceral effects of the interrogation tactics once sanctioned for detainees at Guant�namo by Rumsfeld. Many of the photos depict a single detainee shackled naked to a bed with underwear on his head. A July 1, 2004, report on Abu Ghraib by the Army's CID said this man was "possibly" a detainee named H-----. Graner, however, whose camera was used to take most of these photos, told CID investigators on April 6, 2005, that these pictures showed another detainee named W-----, whom Graner called "Taxi Driver." Graner said he was ordered by a civilian interrogator working at Abu Ghraib to strip, shackle and hood the detainee as part of a sleep deprivation program.
Regardless of which detainee these pictures show, both H----- and W----- told eerily similar tales to Army investigators. "They stripped me of all my clothes, even my underwear," H----- told CID investigators on Jan. 18, 2004. "They gave me woman's underwear that was rose color with flowers in it, and they put the bag over my face. One of them whispered in my ear, 'Today I am going to fuck you,' and he said this in Arabic."
The people of Iraq who are in a position to do harm to our troops do not need photos to inflame them, they have access to the reality; if indeed children were sodomized while their mothers watched, those children and their mothers, those who have survived this act of naked aggression can provide eyewitness accounts of these atrocities; and, those who along with members of their families who entertained thoughts of revenge must have acted on these by now, or failed to act on these long since.
If the memories of these atrocities deeply embedded in the psyches of victims, that all Iraqi citizens must be aware of, have not put our troops in danger, how in the world could mere photos, pale reproductions of these horrors have this effect.
The intent of your refusal to release these photographs is political, it is driven by the fear that the conscience of Americans will be belatedly be ignited and that they will demand that justice be done.
As a human being, a member of the human species, I demand that justice be done, I demand that President George Bush be impeached, these photos document war crimes, crimes not only against members of the Iraqi population but against all humanity.
If you fail to do all in your power to ensure that justice is done, I hold you an accessory after the fact to these crimes and just another corrupt agent of the political culture that exists within the Washington Beltway - and beneath contempt.
I call upon you to act consistent with the fundamental decency Americans discerned in you that caused them to flock to your meetings and afford you an overwhelming majority in the November elections.
I say to you, whether you are aware of it or not, the road has forked for your Presidency, either you will take the high road of morality that will ensure that:
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Or you will walk the low road of political expediency, opportunism and back door deals that holds no one responsible for their actions that will destroy beyond recapture the thus far unfulfilled hope and promise of democracy.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Support the Moats Family
It is my view that the Police Officer who pointed a gun at members of the Moats Family should be fired out of hand.
Taking thirteen minutes to write a ticket is one thing and stopping those individuals from being with a dying relative by some stretch of the imagination could be considered bad judgment, drawing and pointing a gun at citizens for running a stop sign is something else.
This Police Officer needs to be terminated and never be again be put in a position of being authorized to carry a firearm and point it at anyone.
Taking thirteen minutes to write a ticket is one thing and stopping those individuals from being with a dying relative by some stretch of the imagination could be considered bad judgment, drawing and pointing a gun at citizens for running a stop sign is something else.
This Police Officer needs to be terminated and never be again be put in a position of being authorized to carry a firearm and point it at anyone.
Friday, March 20, 2009
I PERSEVERE
I PERSEVERE
Fur Elise, a composition for piano,is and always will be to me,
A piece of transcendent, incalculable, inestimable beauty.
Yet it was composed by someone losing his hearing,
Who, as a consequence, was never permitted to fully appreciate
The artistic immensity, ethereal majesty and awesome symmetry
He had brought into being.
So I dare not flinch from grappling with
The ultimate paradox and consummate irony of human existence,
I must from somewhere garner the will and spiritual resiliency
To persevere.
WILLIAM E. VIRTUE
Copyright Retained, All Rights Reserved
Fur Elise, a composition for piano,is and always will be to me,
A piece of transcendent, incalculable, inestimable beauty.
Yet it was composed by someone losing his hearing,
Who, as a consequence, was never permitted to fully appreciate
The artistic immensity, ethereal majesty and awesome symmetry
He had brought into being.
So I dare not flinch from grappling with
The ultimate paradox and consummate irony of human existence,
I must from somewhere garner the will and spiritual resiliency
To persevere.
WILLIAM E. VIRTUE
Copyright Retained, All Rights Reserved
Sunday, October 7, 2007
CONNECTING THE DOTS!
The fundamental problem and greatest obstacle to the creation of a functioning democracy in the USA is the inability of voters to process the information with which they are inundated daily into the facts that would support function.
It is clear that in law and custom they have the power to effect change, to effect positive fundamental changes in this social system.
The right to vote implies this power, and, this responsibility.
What is absent is the knowledge about just how to create the positive developments that would redound, in the long term, to the common good.
The failure, the abject failure of government is basically and fundamentally a failure of voters to perceive and describe urgent, massive problems accurately – the necessary prerequisite to their solution.
For example, a conflict has raged in the Middle East for more than five decades, a conflict that spawned the dread scourge of global terrorism, which in turn precipitated the 911 attack, the attack on Iran; a conflict that seems likely – if Iran is attacked, to become World War Three.
This conflict began with the creation of the State of Israel, more accurately; it began when the majority of nations that composed the then fledgling international organization, the United Nations, voted to recognize the State of Israel.
The first major power to recognize this new nation was Russia, which forced the USA to follow suit, triggering a seemingly never ending conflict; and, the creation of the problem of Palestinian refugees.
This was vote was tainted and skewed by the fact that the defeat of Hitler and the Nazi Regime had caused to be exposed arguably the worst atrocity committed by Germany and its Allies, the slaughter of six million Jews and other undesirables in Concentration Camps:
Prior to and during World War II, Nazi Germany maintained concentration camps (Konzentrationslager, abbreviated KZ or KL) throughout the territories it controlled. In these camps, millions of prisoners were killed through mistreatment, disease, starvation, and overwork, or were executed as unfit for labor. The Nazis adopted the term euphemistically from the British concentration camps of the Second Anglo-Boer War to conceal the deadly nature of the camps. The first Nazi concentration camps were set up inside Germany and were intended to hold political opponents of the regime.
The two principal groups of prisoners in the camps, both numbering in the millions, were Jews and Soviet prisoners of war (POWs). Large numbers of Roma (or Gypsies), Poles, political prisoners, homosexuals, people with disabilities, Jehovah's Witnesses and others—including common criminals—were also sent to the camps. In addition, a small number of Western Allied POWs were sent to concentration camps for various reasons.[1] Western Allied POWs who were Jews, or whom the Nazis believed to be Jewish, were usually sent to ordinary POW camps; however, a small number were sent to concentration camps under anti-semitic policies.[2]
Starting in 1942, Nazi Germany established extermination or death camps for the sole purpose of carrying out the industrialized murder of the Jews of Europe—the Final Solution. These camps were established in occupied Poland and Belarus, on the territory of the General Government. Over three million Jews would die in them, primarily by poison gas, usually in gas chambers, although many prisoners were killed in mass shootings and by other means. These death camps, including Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Auschwitz-Birkenau, are commonly but erroneously referred to as concentration camps, but Holocaust scholars draw a distinction between concentration camps (described in this article) and these extermination camps. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Widespread outrage and revulsion was created when Allied Forces liberated the pitiful occupants of these camps and revealed the horrific crimes that had been perpetuated against the inmates.
Humanity felt it had not done enough to avoid these atrocities and it was as this climate of guilt, blame and outrage attained its zenith that the vote was taken recognizing the State of Israel; and, made certain that there would be no end to the conflict that has plagued the human race since its genesis.
As a consequence of this conflict, the Arab races have been demonized; and, the Israeli people canonized in the eyes of those who together form Western civilizations.
As usual, this perception has no grounding in reality.
In reality, it is the Arab peoples who have been victimized; the Bedouin Tribes who roamed the deserts of Palestine since time immemorial and sold parcels of lands to Jews fleeing from pogroms and other vicious and degrading forms of persecution, culminating in the Shoah, perpetuated by Europeans; are now imprisoned and curtailed from their nomadic existence by a wall not less invidious and equally buttressing a rank injustice as did the Berlin Wall.
What would have any people have done, if a powerful, wealthy group of refugees suddenly appeared in their backyard; claiming that their objective was to regain control of the site of their holiest shrine, which as a fickle fate determined, contained their holiest shrine as well?
The Arab nations did what Americans would have done in similar circumstances, and, if they lost war after war against better trained and better equipped adversaries; they would have adopted tactics that worked – as the Stern Gang and the Irgun did when they confronted an enemy they could not defeat, the British Army.
In the same way that millions of innocent Africans were transported to the New World to cultivate sugar and cotton for Europeans, millions of Arabs are suffering for the noxious crimes against the Jews of, need I say it, Europeans.
This is not about to become a diatribe of racism and hate, it rails against the ultimate paradox and consummate irony of ancient history that causes humanity to be psychologically mired in the ‘state of nature’ where the race originated.
The perception of the Middle East conflict has much to do with the fact that International Jewry has control of banks worldwide, it is another demonstration of the fact that ‘beliefs are opportune, they conceal interests,’ no politician who depends upon cash contributions to be elected dare invoke the animus of wealthy Jews by stating that Israel was destroyed by the Roman Empire which was composed of Europeans, and Jews were dispersed worldwide during suppression of revolts in Palestine during the First Century of the Modern Era.
There is no parallel in history of a State being formed by votes in even as august a body as the United Nations; there is no parallel in history of a colonial power withdrawing to be replaced, not by the colonized people, but by refugees from Nazi Concentration Camps supplemented by previous immigrants who had purchased the land they farmed from the colonized people.
It is time for the world of men to recognize that we live in a social reality that is completely irrational, a reality not determined by the facts of experience; but by those who hold power.
From time immemorial right has been what might said it was; the Roman Catholic Church for centuries held that the world was flat, and consigned dissenters to this doctrine to the rack.
Most of the beliefs held by humanity are totally incredible and wholly irrational, they are myths, illusions and delusions, and, have to connection to the facts that would support function; they were imposed upon us, most of them, and we conditioned to accept them to avoid torture or death.
Those who live in ‘democracies’ would claim that most forms of coercion, overt or covert, can no longer be applied to citizens; nor would I dispute this claim.
What I would suggest is that over many millennia humanity became habituated to dependence, to mental slavery, to not thinking for themselves; and, to accept the version of reality being promoted by various authorities.
Based on the fifty years of failure to do anything about the dread disease of poverty, based on fifty years of incompetence and corruption there should be zero tolerance for the palpable incapacity of politicians representing every ideology and political theory; every electorate should be fed up and saying do the job or leave the job, and, if being ridden out of town on a rail, or, after being tarred and feathered would be instructive then that is what we will do.
Instead, electorates continue to accept the most facile excuses tendered by politicians to explain their failures, corruption and incompetence.
I say again, this has an ancient cause, politicians like all human beings, can play only two social roles, territorial predator or prey; and, what we are witnessing is governments preying on citizens whatever the excuse or ideological window dressing employed.
I suggest that there never will be any positive change – until humanity confronts its history; and, the fact that human culture was determined by the necessity of relying on coercion to motivate behavior.
Until we renounce coercion and determine to rely on positive reinforcements in our relations with other human beings there will be no change, just the past happening over, and over, and over, again.
Copyright Retained, All Rights Reserved
William E. Virtue
Lauderhill, Florida
Ph:(954)-731-1511
Cell:(901)201-8090
Windows Live Hotmail and Microsoft Office Outlook – together at last. Get it now!
It is clear that in law and custom they have the power to effect change, to effect positive fundamental changes in this social system.
The right to vote implies this power, and, this responsibility.
What is absent is the knowledge about just how to create the positive developments that would redound, in the long term, to the common good.
The failure, the abject failure of government is basically and fundamentally a failure of voters to perceive and describe urgent, massive problems accurately – the necessary prerequisite to their solution.
For example, a conflict has raged in the Middle East for more than five decades, a conflict that spawned the dread scourge of global terrorism, which in turn precipitated the 911 attack, the attack on Iran; a conflict that seems likely – if Iran is attacked, to become World War Three.
This conflict began with the creation of the State of Israel, more accurately; it began when the majority of nations that composed the then fledgling international organization, the United Nations, voted to recognize the State of Israel.
The first major power to recognize this new nation was Russia, which forced the USA to follow suit, triggering a seemingly never ending conflict; and, the creation of the problem of Palestinian refugees.
This was vote was tainted and skewed by the fact that the defeat of Hitler and the Nazi Regime had caused to be exposed arguably the worst atrocity committed by Germany and its Allies, the slaughter of six million Jews and other undesirables in Concentration Camps:
Prior to and during World War II, Nazi Germany maintained concentration camps (Konzentrationslager, abbreviated KZ or KL) throughout the territories it controlled. In these camps, millions of prisoners were killed through mistreatment, disease, starvation, and overwork, or were executed as unfit for labor. The Nazis adopted the term euphemistically from the British concentration camps of the Second Anglo-Boer War to conceal the deadly nature of the camps. The first Nazi concentration camps were set up inside Germany and were intended to hold political opponents of the regime.
The two principal groups of prisoners in the camps, both numbering in the millions, were Jews and Soviet prisoners of war (POWs). Large numbers of Roma (or Gypsies), Poles, political prisoners, homosexuals, people with disabilities, Jehovah's Witnesses and others—including common criminals—were also sent to the camps. In addition, a small number of Western Allied POWs were sent to concentration camps for various reasons.[1] Western Allied POWs who were Jews, or whom the Nazis believed to be Jewish, were usually sent to ordinary POW camps; however, a small number were sent to concentration camps under anti-semitic policies.[2]
Starting in 1942, Nazi Germany established extermination or death camps for the sole purpose of carrying out the industrialized murder of the Jews of Europe—the Final Solution. These camps were established in occupied Poland and Belarus, on the territory of the General Government. Over three million Jews would die in them, primarily by poison gas, usually in gas chambers, although many prisoners were killed in mass shootings and by other means. These death camps, including Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Auschwitz-Birkenau, are commonly but erroneously referred to as concentration camps, but Holocaust scholars draw a distinction between concentration camps (described in this article) and these extermination camps. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Widespread outrage and revulsion was created when Allied Forces liberated the pitiful occupants of these camps and revealed the horrific crimes that had been perpetuated against the inmates.
Humanity felt it had not done enough to avoid these atrocities and it was as this climate of guilt, blame and outrage attained its zenith that the vote was taken recognizing the State of Israel; and, made certain that there would be no end to the conflict that has plagued the human race since its genesis.
As a consequence of this conflict, the Arab races have been demonized; and, the Israeli people canonized in the eyes of those who together form Western civilizations.
As usual, this perception has no grounding in reality.
In reality, it is the Arab peoples who have been victimized; the Bedouin Tribes who roamed the deserts of Palestine since time immemorial and sold parcels of lands to Jews fleeing from pogroms and other vicious and degrading forms of persecution, culminating in the Shoah, perpetuated by Europeans; are now imprisoned and curtailed from their nomadic existence by a wall not less invidious and equally buttressing a rank injustice as did the Berlin Wall.
What would have any people have done, if a powerful, wealthy group of refugees suddenly appeared in their backyard; claiming that their objective was to regain control of the site of their holiest shrine, which as a fickle fate determined, contained their holiest shrine as well?
The Arab nations did what Americans would have done in similar circumstances, and, if they lost war after war against better trained and better equipped adversaries; they would have adopted tactics that worked – as the Stern Gang and the Irgun did when they confronted an enemy they could not defeat, the British Army.
In the same way that millions of innocent Africans were transported to the New World to cultivate sugar and cotton for Europeans, millions of Arabs are suffering for the noxious crimes against the Jews of, need I say it, Europeans.
This is not about to become a diatribe of racism and hate, it rails against the ultimate paradox and consummate irony of ancient history that causes humanity to be psychologically mired in the ‘state of nature’ where the race originated.
The perception of the Middle East conflict has much to do with the fact that International Jewry has control of banks worldwide, it is another demonstration of the fact that ‘beliefs are opportune, they conceal interests,’ no politician who depends upon cash contributions to be elected dare invoke the animus of wealthy Jews by stating that Israel was destroyed by the Roman Empire which was composed of Europeans, and Jews were dispersed worldwide during suppression of revolts in Palestine during the First Century of the Modern Era.
There is no parallel in history of a State being formed by votes in even as august a body as the United Nations; there is no parallel in history of a colonial power withdrawing to be replaced, not by the colonized people, but by refugees from Nazi Concentration Camps supplemented by previous immigrants who had purchased the land they farmed from the colonized people.
It is time for the world of men to recognize that we live in a social reality that is completely irrational, a reality not determined by the facts of experience; but by those who hold power.
From time immemorial right has been what might said it was; the Roman Catholic Church for centuries held that the world was flat, and consigned dissenters to this doctrine to the rack.
Most of the beliefs held by humanity are totally incredible and wholly irrational, they are myths, illusions and delusions, and, have to connection to the facts that would support function; they were imposed upon us, most of them, and we conditioned to accept them to avoid torture or death.
Those who live in ‘democracies’ would claim that most forms of coercion, overt or covert, can no longer be applied to citizens; nor would I dispute this claim.
What I would suggest is that over many millennia humanity became habituated to dependence, to mental slavery, to not thinking for themselves; and, to accept the version of reality being promoted by various authorities.
Based on the fifty years of failure to do anything about the dread disease of poverty, based on fifty years of incompetence and corruption there should be zero tolerance for the palpable incapacity of politicians representing every ideology and political theory; every electorate should be fed up and saying do the job or leave the job, and, if being ridden out of town on a rail, or, after being tarred and feathered would be instructive then that is what we will do.
Instead, electorates continue to accept the most facile excuses tendered by politicians to explain their failures, corruption and incompetence.
I say again, this has an ancient cause, politicians like all human beings, can play only two social roles, territorial predator or prey; and, what we are witnessing is governments preying on citizens whatever the excuse or ideological window dressing employed.
I suggest that there never will be any positive change – until humanity confronts its history; and, the fact that human culture was determined by the necessity of relying on coercion to motivate behavior.
Until we renounce coercion and determine to rely on positive reinforcements in our relations with other human beings there will be no change, just the past happening over, and over, and over, again.
Copyright Retained, All Rights Reserved
William E. Virtue
Lauderhill, Florida
Ph:(954)-731-1511
Cell:(901)201-8090
Windows Live Hotmail and Microsoft Office Outlook – together at last. Get it now!
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