Working Class Corner/April Ending

by Russell Scott Day

      The Transcendian national holiday was politely celebrated at the beginning of this month.

       April has always been a scary month for me as if being a poet TS Eliot was somehow too right, cursed all poets into experiencing April as "the cruelist month".

       Maybe it is because April is so confusing.    At least around here, it is with cold rains, or wind, and then warm and beautiful in unpredictable combinations.

       It really ought not be that bad a month, but somehow it is more difficult than it looks.

       I  myself had political setbacks and felt insecure about work and friends and fired my agent.

       I withdrew from my normal haunts and mostly just went to work and came home.   I didn’t sleep well and had some real nightmares.

       The news was bad.

       I watched much of the debates this week and was a bit more frightened.

       By the end of that show I wanted to hear a united Democratic Platform that was focused from these candidates.

       Watching a bit of the punditry on the tv today I heard Obama disparaged for answering that the first thing to make sure of in the case of a multitude of attacks would be to insure that the event was handled well, as opposed to the way it was handled in the case of Katrina.

       He was disparaged as sounding more like a Mayor than a President, though his main opponent on the Republican side is put up as our protector and savior because he was the Mayor of New York on the day of 9/11.

       Ms. Clinton comes out as Presidential by saying she would have more enemies killed.

       The man at the end of the line said what I felt, "These People Frighten Me."

Well at least he was there, and talking, and yes all politics are personal.

       I got down to the superficial, and my man Bill Richarson looked like the man that the international community would see as looking right and looking like the United States was not completely worthy of all its troubles.

       Since it is an impressionistic world where there is so much information and things are called by names that they are either the opposite of in reality, and advertising and reality are consistently different in our daily lives so much that we accept them in the entire sweep of our concerns, and are worn down into a numbed state of incredulity and denial.

       Is this all really happening?

       Al Franken went off the air a couple of months ago, and I remember him actually doing a segment called Liars, now dimly.

       I’ve heard liars on NPR, on TV and some of the AM radio I listen to.   Rush Limbaugh has a particular talent for lying that astounds me for I would be ashamed if my only excuse for lying was ignorance.

       Which brings me around to remembering Gonzales and hours of lies.

       He didn’t flat out take the Fifth Amendent, but just said "I don’t remember."

       In the meantime the working classes all over the world are being worked to death, if not outright murdered and starved.

       The UN seems paralized in relation to all of the problems that face working people as far as Darfur is concerned.   At some point a despot is not proper for the international community to make agreements with.

       Of course not everything and everyone is failing.   There are places we and even myself don’t know enough about as far as the successes are concerned.

       There are places in the world where the UN is the government and a great number are better off for it.   We lament that there is not more of a good thing going on, not that there are no good things done.

       I didn’t see Bill Moyer’s Show about the failures of the Media on PBS this past week.   I did read a report forwarded by my mother.

       Far as I am concerned it is a sort of feel good excercise to go on that reporters and news organizations, editors and the like didn’t keep the US out of war.

      Far as I remember they were doing their jobs and they did tell us who, what, when and where.

      They are still doing it.

      They are getting killed doing it.

      My sense of things is that it was possible, and is possible to grasp that just because someone is on TV or on the radio too many people do not have the education or a grounded point of view to parse out the truth from the lies.

       When I read the papers and saw a surfeit of acronyms like the CIA or NSA and then all caps that I had no idea what the organization was, I knew it was a planted story.

       You ought to know that the tendrils of disinformation and information are spread throughout the same stream and be well educated enough from spybooks and movies to tell when you are being manipulated, by yourself.