Jeremayakovka

Chillin', Not Trillin (No. 9) - "The O-Bomb Threat"

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The O-Bomb Threat

That prickly old pear Uncle Sam
In '45 finally proved, Yes, we can
Crush foe Jap and German.
FDR's war was finished by Truman
Who acknowledged the next one
By dropping A-bombs on Japan.

Times today are as hopeful as grim
When enemies without and within
Swoon for "change" adorned by Guevara.
This makes Uncle Sam wanna holler
O America -- I ain't yo' Mama!
As all 'round Obama fallout descends.
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Previous "Chillin', Not Trillin" here.
What's "Chillin', Not Trillin"? and Why? here.

Chillin', Not Trillin (No. 8) - A Propos Of Bush's Middle East Tour

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Pakistan

Paki "democracy" bears a pall
Devoted hands can scarce recall,
Tilling soil despoiled by th'assassin's brawl
When Reaper Grim made his Bhutto call.
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Israel

J-town's in western Hamastan
Quds Auntie Condi and Uncle Sam
Took a humpty-dumpty in the Holy Land.
Ehud went south, Pa. Understand?
Ain't no more cunning in his right hand.
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A Smiling Airman Foresees His Epitaph

Chanting, Amrikia's days are numbered!
Jihadis think I'm just a dumb bird.
Well, thirty years on I'll be a tombstone under.
It'll read, George W. Bush: One-Term Wonder.
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Previous "Chillin', Not Trillin" here.
What's "Chillin', Not Trillin"? and Why? here.
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(re #3 cf. "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death"; "Globaloney")
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Chillin', Not Trillin (No. 7) - "San Francisco Is Here, Wish You Were Beautiful"

Dear Lawrence,
San Francisco is here. Wish you were beautiful.
love,
Jeremayakovka
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Like a war criminal "exposing" past infamies in the service of his horrid cause, long after the fact, long after remorse or retribution or even right recall are possible, mumbling bumbling memories to keep from nodding off, let alone for anyone else's enlightenment (or rather, entertainment) or like a soggy, sorry drunk kneeling in his puke on the stoop of a church basement as the town's last AA meeting of the evening is wrapping up, last month the last big Beatnik left standing, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, related:

Before things went bad [in the late 60s], everything was light, in both senses of the word, light physically in the sky, and also in the sense of light versus heavy. After that year, everything got heavy. Things just degenerated more and more. I think it was that summer [of '67, the "Summer of Love"]. It's so long ago. I'm looking through the wrong end of telescope. It's hard to differentiate one year from another.
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Here's the most incriminating gem Ferlinghetti related:
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What if we're all wrong?

- Allen Ginsberg (below, left) to Lawrence Ferlinghetti,
at the Human Be-In, Hippie Hill, Golden Gate Park
San Francisco, California
Summer 1967
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Chillin', Not Trillin (No. 6) - "Close, But No Cigar"

A journalist asked Bill Clinton whether French presidential candidate Ségolène Royal conformed to his idea of a beautiful woman. He said, "Close, but no cigar."
-JMK

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For previous "Chillin', Not Trillin" click here.

Chillin', Not Trillin (No. 5) - "Ann of Arc"

I was going to have a few comments on Ann Coulter, but it turns out that you have to go into rehab if you compare an American conservative to anything French.

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Ann Coulter these days reminds me of Joan of Arc, to wit:
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Ann of Arc

In a land overrun by foreign enemies ... divided within ...
she's the bravest warrior to appear in generations ...
inspiring thousands to battle ...
and victory.

Then she's betrayed by her own people ...
put on trial for heresy ...
convicted ... condemned ...
and publicly executed on a pile of faggots.

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And now, a public service announcement and station identification politics....

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It's a subject "polite" people don't talk about, but every 11 seconds in America a woman thinks Well-behaved women rarely make history. A woman can think about making history anywhere, anytime: at home, work or school ... in a back alley or bedroom ... behind closed doors or in the great outdoors.

Often a woman thinks about making history in the presence of a man she knows intimately. It can be her husband, boyfriend or even another family member. Only a fraction of the times after a woman thinks about making history does she ever tell anyone about it. A woman who thinks about making history might spend the rest of her life burdened or even consumed by intense feelings of shame, inadequacy, and rage. And studies show that thinking about making history damages not just the woman who thinks, but all her relationships. Everyone is affected when a woman thinks about making history.

But there's hope. Thanks to the courageous efforts of many women (and men), today all across America women are no longer just thinking about making history. Women are talking about and women are making history. Now. More than ever.

The next time a woman thinks about making history in America -- the next time a woman makes history in America -- what are you going to do about it?

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I have pre-dated this post for March 8 in honor of International Women's Day Ann Coulter.

Fox News Channel recently rolled out the 1/2 Hour News Hour featuring her as vice president. So far, so good. I dare Fox and the Rightosphere to take it to the next level by declaring

March 2: "International Ann Coulter Day"

Lenny Bruce was reincarnated as a shicksa Republican goddess and career conservatives can't deal with it. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, George Will.

Ann, you are right, it was an excellent joke. Thanks for beginning "the conversation"!

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Rehab "a total indulgence," says American Idol judge.

From George Bernard Shaw's introduction to his play Saint Joan (which I read in high school and out of which copied the following into my diary): The test of sanity lies not in the normality of the methods, but in the reasonableness of the discovery.

Edwards "kind of cute." -- Barack Obama

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Oh, and I was going to have a few comments about the other Democratic presidential candidate, Ms. Rodham Clinton, but it turns out that under a Hillary Administration you could be audited by the IRS if you use the word "dyke."
-- JMK

Chillin', Not Trillin (No. 4) - "Rush lied!"

On The 1/2 Hour News Hour

Rush Lied

"Rush lied!"
Liberals cried.
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In the debut episode of THHNH Rush Limbaugh played the next president of the United States, using a cigar in the Oval Office in an appropriate manner and meeting with Vice President Ann Coulter. The pair do have a certain star power, WaPo concedes.

Per Robert at Seraphic Secret, this explicitly conservative comedy pilot is racking up great ratings for Fox TV and is immediately competitive with the aggressively anti-Bush, anti-conservative Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Bill Maher, etc.

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(For previous entries in this series, see the "Chillin' Not Trillin" category in the left column.)

Chillin', Not Trillin (No. 3) - "Nox Praecox"

Nox Praecox

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Shuddersummoning schemer
blistery Dylan sounds
angels' worsting lots

Couching near upon
our Devildancer guileless, whelmed
outstrutted before dawn

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"Nox Praecox" ("Precocious Night"; more literally, "Ripe-Beforehand Night") has in mind, mostly, Israeli children killed by Palestinian terror.  It's a trimmed scrap from last night and this morning, after watching this video of Dylan Thomas declaiming:

A Refusal To Mourn the Death, By Fire, of a Child in London

Dylan wrote it in Wales, in the United Kingdom, sometime in 1944/1945. He had enlisted for home front media efforts, chiefly in broadcasting. During those years he also managed to apply his timeless capacities to other duties -- in this case, commemorating a child victim of belligerent, totalitarian terror.

[T]he danger, for what a reader aloud of his own poems so often does is to mawken or melodramatise them making a single simple phrase break with the tears or throb with the terrors from which he deludes himself the phrase has been born.
-- Dylan Thomas

As opposed to the actual terrors from which it has been born, terrors of which he may (or may not) be aware, quite. Even if he is not aware of them he still must force himself to go on.

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Previous:

"Chillin', Not Trillin (No. 2) - 'You think I sing...'"
"Chillin', Not Trillin (No. 1) - 'Jews Item'"

Chillin', Not Trillin (No. 2) - "You think I sing..."

Neo-neocon is definitely chillin', not Trillin. She waltzes across JMK's stage today with verses from a recent post:
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You think I sing a repetitious dirge
“Iraq, Vietnam; please let the two diverge!”
But here’s some news: the Democrats they urge,
“Oh Mr. Bush, don’t recommend a surge!”

And why? They say we’re surely on the verge
Of failure. It’s inevitable. A scourge
Successor Pres (a Dem?) will have to purge
As copters on the roof, they re-emerge.

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Related: Bill Kristol, "There Is a Way Forward in Iraq"
Previous: "Chillin', Not Trillin (No. 1) - 'Jews Item'"

Chillin', Not Trillin (No. 1) - "Jews Item"

Jews Item

Men seldom make passes
At girls who wear bomb belts.
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If you were raised in or around a left-leaning intellectual ilieu, as I was back in Manhattan, then you were raised around The Nation magazine. For years my mother subscribed to what is plainly the American Left's flagship publication. It has been published continuously since 1865, outstripping in longevity Mother Jones (1976), Dissent (1954), and even the truly erudite The New Republic (1917). As David judges summarily, The Nation is "a left-wing propaganda mill whose efforts to promote socialism in America and abroad have everywhere failed." To my mother, however, a woman not actively engaged in politics but who in her psychic and temperamental way felt in excess, The Nation was a primary source for synthesizing current events and sympathizing with much of its sorrow and some of its socializing hope. During the years of my first formation it was, then, one of my primary sources as well.

I remember that floppy, gray rag arriving in the mail each week. This was before it caught up with 20th Century publishing standards, when (at the dawn of the 21st) it finally decided to go with a four-color cover. How I wormed my way through its articles, same as I did with the Village Voice, absorbing in chunks the latest received wisdom about, say, Ortega's Nicaragua or Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition. Such soft piety left its mark: in the 1988 New York Democratic primary I cast my first ever presidential vote for Jesse Jackson. Later than year I went on to defy Democratic (and probably The Nation's) logic by writing in Jackson's name on the November ballot. Alreadyy I was showing signs - as former Nation-columnist Chris Hitchens would say - a young contrarian: a young contrarian among (and already contrary to) other contrarians. I'm still the contrarian I once was, if not more so.

Which brings us back to The Nation.

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If you know anything about The Nation, then you know the weekly, wee too witty rhymes penned by- quirky in-house bard, its left-wing limericist, its "deadline poet" Calvin Trillin.

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Typical Trillin:

Cheney's "Last Throes"

When rockets fly and battle smoke is thick,
It's good to hear from "Four Deferments Dick."
He's always sure. He knows what warfare is--
Enough to know it's not for him or his.
Insurgents somehow, though they're in the throes,
Kill more GIs-- but no one Cheney knows.
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Here are two recent impressions of the man (like Philip Roth minus the moxie, no?):

Calvin Trillin is not a physically imposing man. He is short, maybe 5’6” or 5’7”, with a slight build. But when he begins to speak, Trillin’s low monotone voice is transfixing. He rambles and reminisces and digresses freely, his speech broken by the words “uh” and “sort of.”
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You know, I read this and think Lenny Bruce would wipe his ass with Calvin Trillin. Even as The Nation, and every foul-mouthed comic, milk Bruce's misfit martyrdom to demonstrate how much they extol (i.e., the Left extols) "free speech" ("freedom," which the Left often conflates with "license") there's just no way Bruce would let himself be caught -- dead or alive -- with Calvin Trillin. No way. Not if I have my way, that is.

I think it's time to get in touch with and purge my "inner Trillin."So  I pledge, Gentle Reader, for your consumption and amusement to start coming up with nifty "neoconservative" limericks. Hey, if you can't join 'em, beat 'em. And what better way than at their own game? Do I have the right stuff to be the War on Terror's "deadline poet"? With Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom single-handedly redefining the post-9/11 haiku, maybe I can turn a trick with the limerick.

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The two-line ditty that started off this post is an homage to "News Item" by Dottie Parker (to whom JMK recently paid affectionate tribute). Like Trillin, Parker was an Smart Assimilated Jew who did well in New York magazine publishing. Like some SAJ's, though, she may have been too smart for her own good. For Judaism, perhaps, and in some ways even that of the reading public.

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More to come. Many thanks to all of JMK's amazing, amusing friends, friendly, main muses, and the Blogfather, who, in their own priceless ways, have  made "Chillin', Not Trillin" -- and the entire Jeremayakovka project -- possible.