I'm heading off for a rainy weekend in Point Arena, leaving my home, the cats and the chihuahuas in Susie's capable hands. Jasper the cat with the broken jaw has been eating food on his own over the last few days and I can postpone the cost of more vet care for a few days, and Joey, my - dare I say it - favorite black cat came home the other night with a hole in his head. Seriously. He and I have been sitting on the bathroom floor with the peroxide, warm compresses, and antibiotic cream while he purrs like an engine and I clean pus and blood from his noggin. What an idiot. Some dogs, those with the ability to pee and poop outside (those screwy chihuahua's just don't get it!) are coming along for the ride and mud slides, rainy beach walks and the glistening leaves with drips cascading off them and the ticks beginning to emerge from the hibernation of summertime. Oh well. Countryside is countryside and I love it. There is a ready made pumpkin pie, some salad stuff and my fair trade coffee in the cooler and I am excited about being away for a day or two.
For those of you who care, it's obvious I haven't blogged for a while, didn't write impassioned dispatches from London, Berlin or Cornwall. Suffice it to say the delicious experiences, flavours and sights and sounds of those two weeks will burst out of my consciousness soon enough.
But today, I just happen to be in combat mode. Some people seem to think I am often - or even always - in that frame of being. Not true. There is a real difference between being hyper- aware and sensitive to even miniscule changes in the emotional temperature of people around you (that is the sad state of being what is broadly described by the psych profession as PTSD) and being a combative type. Contrary to popular belief I hate conflict. But, having said that, I rarely walk away from a fight about an issue I care about if it is offered up to me. The windmills to tilt at are reproducing faster than you can say bunny rabbits, it seems.
I could get agitated about any number of things happening in the world, happening in the US, California or my backyard of Berkeley. I am absolutely mystified that two former female CEO's of major corporations are in the running for the most significant political positions in California - Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina - for Governor and Senator respectively. Spending millions of their own money, proving that for some women the term 'glass ceiling' is what they see over their luxury penthouses, these job slashing, self satisfied executives don't have an original idea between them.
In Texas a first time political challenger, Republican Stephen Broden shocked a few people by saying that violent revolution was an option if the upcoming elections didn't bring a change in leadership in Washington. Oops. Students at Kent State were massacred by the National Guard for saying a helluva lot less than that. But the mania of the right wing media in the form of talk radio has produced this evangelical hyperbole and we barely blink. The obsession with returning to whatever the Framers and Founders may have thought in 1776 has created an originalist fervor in America that is bordering on the extremely dangerous. 'Taking our country back' is code for taking it backwards.
We would do well to look back to a 1920 poem by WB Yeats 'The Second Coming' and to some of the greatest lines of warning ever written in the English language:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
But I have digressed - far far away from my original(ist) intent in this blog.
Back to more mundane things. Dogs and Cats. It is raining cats and dogs. 10 pups in a box on Telegraph Avenue, 14 pups just aborted from a dog living loose on the Albany Bulb, 57 dogs killed in one bloody day at the Martinez Animal Shelter (your tax dollars proudly at work), cats arriving in cages at the front door, and out the back to the euthanasia room and their paws don't even touch the floor, pitbulls and chihuahuas being bred in someone's garage and sold on Craigslist under the guise of 're-homing' fees, including the 8 week old 'border collie' for $250 (excuse me while I splutter at the sight of this little pitbull mix pup being masqueraded as a herding dog).
10 years ago California passed truly progressive legislation about animals in animal shelters - the Hayden Bill - which changed the way animal shelters do business in California. A decade later, the bill has almost entirely been abandoned, shiny new shelters have been built with reluctant taxpayer dollars which are busting at the seams with unwanted animals, non profits have become bloated 'rescuing' dogs and cats from 'high kill' shelters and yet we still have virtually no (truly) low cost pet care for those struggling in this economy and the numbers of animals remaining unspayed is rising, creating a crisis of unwanted animals all over again. Low cost is not a $50 spay for your dog. Low cost is not a $15 vaccine. Low cost is not a $50 vet exam the moment you step in the door. Low cost is when you can go to a wellness clinic seven days a week and have a vet look at your flea infested cat and give you the comforting flea medication for no charge. Low cost is when you can call a vet and say 'I don't want my dog to breed' and have them say 'we can help'.
We must, just must create a wellness system for pets - at least here in this one of the richest places on earth - based on the public health model for people. Because you know what, you cynics - everytime you help a domestic cat or dog (or rabbit, guinea pig, lizard, snake etc) you are assisting a human being. And from the other end I'm sick of the moralism pointed towards low income or homeless people when they have animals as companions and need help.
Okay, gotta get dressed, spend a moment at the demonstration at a vivisection lab here in Berkeley (yes) and pick up a dog that got fixed the other day by a fund I manage for a small non-profit, and drop it off at it's home and head north with my happy band...have a great weekend!
I am a friend of Ilene Isseks-i sent her this poem recently-It may be of interest to you.
Be well.
Anarchism fragment
In the light of history.
Those wanting are undernourished.
No jobs or care or even noticed.
Before is perpetual
Of this evening’s suppression.
Metal warped speed dance.
Dark wooly eye-sockets,
Viewing their gruesome victims,
Like kings of sensation,
Rulers with freedom amnesia.
Church whore with bloated vitals.
Bishops with bent ploughshares.
I am letting go of the blow,
And the deception,
On my own augmented earth,
To make whole the battered,
In their institutional beds,
In the cabinet of dream,
Plucked from the trauma sleep,
With the power of doomed sparks,
That never summons their dignity.
I like you am growing older.
The ocean is meekly emptying.
The rooms of memory unfurnished.
My knees and face quake.
Images are blurred shapes,
Showing their fickled moods.
Wrinkles of liberation.
But the quest continues
In the critical lanes.
The hot wire
Hissing in the basement.
The boiler of revolution
Rumbling.
The dust of my own shadow,
Fallen from the rooftops,
Is my ambivalence
Of eroticism,
Under a conative sun,
Whose mesmeric,blood action,
At life’s lodestar barricade,
Is born from struggle.
Posted by: Howard Roberts | October 23, 2010 at 11:30 AM