Rasp Off the Grass

One fact alone is enough: that over fifty thousand Federal soldiers perished of starvation in Southern prisons. Malarial fever contracted in camps and hospitals had wrecked his health. --Mobi text, Literary Times Supplement, 1915

The inconsistency of ideology. Moderates like David Brooks and the dame of Wapo want to save monogamy by expanding the tent. What does it lead to? Idiotic political articles about the manicures of Cory Booker and masculine identity. On the basis of my experience with urban black culture, African American sexuality is more fluid than what is admitted. This includes the innuendo, allegations, and political demise of Jennifer Carroll, let alone my fount of follies with blacks in attendant care, graphic sordid tales that would make Kathleen's chastisement of Miley seem positively preschool. Ms. Parker now says the pendulum always swings back. This is an over simplification of social retrenchment, because now we have a new closet, one not initiated by Cory, granted, but one that stipulates "since my orientation does not matter there will be neither confirmation nor denial regarding my sexual preferences."

The Roman Empire did not fall due to the sexual bestiality of its ruling elite; it fell due to overt military pressure and over- extension, which does not mean the distraction of bread and circuses doesn't have a pertinent analogy to the sheer scope and breadth of American materialism and callow corruption through video saturation. I am as much at fault as anyone; my online footprint is overpersonalized, graphic with anger, and at least on Blogger nibbling at tinsel town bread crumbs.

My study of a pansy like Walt Whitman was cursory at best, and of the little I know of Leaves of Grass from upper track summaries of the Transcendentals, I never found the verse particularly moving. My Mobi purchase was partially obligatory thereby, trying to cram everything in before my occlusion or stroke hits, which it will, invariably-- but, and this is the caveat, the Transcendental movement had a point. Whitman's fame rests not on his homosexuality, but on his grandiosity and idealism, his hope that the revised editions of his work would halt the nation at the brink, before the shot at Fort Sumter. Gay and lesbian couples in and of themselves aren't going to destroy anything, as they have existed as long as human awareness, but radical egalitarianism is well on its way to turning everything into a triviality. In Whitman's era, the belief in transcendence was possible, despite the horrors of collateral damage we can now only imagine. I never liked MTV.