Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 456-458

To Markus and my other Australian friends, who are in the oncoming year as I post this. The future hits Australia first.

Dillingham, Alaska, the Willow Tree Bar

Gary Snyder

Drills chatter full of mud and compressed air

all across the globe,

low-ceilinged bars, we hear the same new songs

All the new songs.

In the working bars of the world.
After you done drive Cat. After the truck

went home.

Caribou slip,

front legs folded first

under the warm oil pipeline

set four feet off the ground-

On the wood floor, glass in hand,

laugh and cuss with

somebody else's wife.

Texans, Hawaiians, Eskimos,
Filipinos, Workers, always

on the edge of a brawl -

In the bars of the world.

Hearing those same new songs

in Abadan,

Naples, Galveston, Darwin, Fairbanks.

White or brown,

Drinking it down.

the pain

of the work

of wrecking the world.

Adolf Eichmann was thoughtful, orderly, and unimaginative. He had a profound respect for system, for law and order. He was obedient, loyal, a faithful officer of a great state. He served his government very well. The sanity of Eichmann is disturbing. We equate sanity with a sense of justice, with humaneness, with prudence, with the capacity to love and understand other people. We rely on the sane people of the world to preserve it from barbarism, madness, and destruction. And now it begins to dawn on us that it is precisely the sane ones who are the most dangerous.

Thomas Merton,

Raids on the Unspeakable

The real rate is somewhere around 20%. But if we acknowledged that, we'd have to admit to being on par with Europe's unemployment rate. And by diddle damned we can never do that. Every American fully understands that the purpose of life is to hang onto one meaningless job or another, two of them if possible. And by the state's official numbers more Americans have a white knuckled grip on the life's purpose than any of those pussy socialist European nations with their free healthcare, low infant mortality rates and ridiculously long vacations.To the Hope and Change Crowd -- How's It Working Out for You?
By Joe Bageant,

JoeBageant.com.
Posted December 9, 2009