Poems and Verse I Remember (or Misremember)

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April is National Poetry Month, I'm told.  That's at time of going to press; it could easily turn into World Spank Your Kitten Month by action of the appropriate legal body or trade group, who knows?  If they can privatize human DNA, nothing is sacred after all.

Poetry is an exalted art-form which once belonged to the people, but ... evidently no longer so.  Nowadays, the poetry is never learned by heart, but merely read aloud, and rarely read aloud more than a dozen times altogether before it passes from public knowledge.  It has degenerated into mere journalism.

The stuff that millions learned from memory has been de-canonized, and is now only verse.  Okay, then, this is about verse I learned as a child and a youth (youth tooth?), a glorification of the joys of committing to memory rhymes and doggerel which may or may not be poetry.

Enid Blyton:
"It was a cough that carried her off,
It was a coffin they carried her off in."

Unknown:
I had a little nut tree, nothing would it bear,
But a silver nutmeg, and a golden pear.

Quoted by my friend Glenda:
"Jack be nimble, Jack be quick,
Jack jump over the candlestick"

Quoted by Alyssa:
"Roses are red, violets are blue,
Sugar is sweet, and so are you!"

Lewis Carrol, Quoted by Kevin:
"How doth the little crocodile
Improve each shining scale,
And splash the waters of the Nile
On ...?"

[Kevin quoted it accurately, and I misremembered it.  Here is the real thing:

    How doth the little crocodile
    Improve his shining tail,
    And pour the waters of the Nile
    On every golden scale!

    How cheerfully he seems to grin,
    How neatly spreads his claws,
    And welcomes little fishes in
    With gently smiling jaws!
]

Unknown:
There was a young man with a hernia,
who said to his doctor, Goldurnia,
When fixing my middle,
be sure you don't fiddle,
with matters that do not concernia."

Unknown, attributed to Jesus:
Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they shall be called the children of God.

Edward Lear, from The Owl and the Pussycat:
The Owl looked up to the stars above,
and sang to his soft guitar:
O Beautiful Pussy, O Pussy my love,
What a beautiful Pussy you are, you are,
What a beautiful Pussy you are!"

Anonymous:
This is the maiden, all forlorn,
Who milked the cow with the crumpled horn,
Who chased the dog,
That swallowed the cat,
That killed the rat
That lived in the house that Jack built.

Woody Guthrie (lyrics sung by Pete Seeger)
I'm a gonna wrap myself with paper,
I'm a gonna stick myself with glue,
Put a stamp on top of my head,
I'm a gonna mail myself to you!

[Added later:  There are more verses:

I'm gonna tie me up in a red string
I'm gonna tie a blue ribbon too
Climb up inside my mailbox
I'm gonna mail myself to you

When you find me in your mailbox
Cut the string and let me out
Wash the glue from off my fingers
Stick some bubblegum in my mouth

When you find me in your mailbox
Wash the glue from off my head
Fill me up with ice cream sodas
Tuck me into a nice warm bed.
]

Christina Rossetti:
How would you like to go up in a swing,
Up in the air so blue?

Unknown, possibly Longfellow:
I shot an arrow into the air,
It fell to Earth I know not where
I sang a song into the air,
...
Long, long after, in an oak,
I found my arrow, still unbroke,
The song, too I did find again,
In the heart of a long-lost friend.

[
Yes, it was Longfellow, "The Arrow & the Song":

I shot an arrow into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For, so swiftly it flew, the sight
Could not follow it in its flight.

I breathed a song into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For who has sight so keen and strong,
That it can follow the flight of song?

Long, long afterward, in an oak
I found the arrow, still unbroke;
And the song, from beginning to end,
I found again in the heart of a friend.
]

Unknown (Stevenson?):
Behold her, single in the field,
Yon solitary highland lass
(...) and singing as she reaps,
Stop now, or gently pass.

Unknown:
"Will you walk into my parlor"
said the spider to the fly,
It's the prettiest little parlor
That ever you did spy."

John Donne:
...
Therefore, ask not for whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.

Please submit your own memorized rhymes, verses and other doggerel!  No fair looking it up; it's gotta be whatever you remember (or misremember!).  I may supply a corrected version if I deem it valuable for the present purpose, anyway.

Arch

Corruption and Pedophilia: The Face of the Catholic Church as we Know It

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A few decades ago we could have hoped that, with new leadership, with greater awareness of the moral environment with which the Catholic Church was surrounded--an environment that derived its moral values either from sources that did not refer to religion at all, or where those values were not mediated by clerical authority-- that the Catholic Church could purge itself of its incredible moral liabilities.  But it did not happen.  Evidently the Catholic Church thought itself Too Big To Fail.

I'm far from being an oracle of any sort, but Rome is circling the drain.  For centuries, Rome --and I mean the church hierarchy, not a geographic location, necessarily-- provided a putative moral and philosophical compass to the feeble-minded Catholic masses, inspiring the phrase Opiate of the Masses, one of the lines for which Karl Marx will be remembered for ever.  In return for their loyalty and money, Rome provided assurances that the misdeeds of the faithful had been adjusted in the big Account Book In The Sky.  But over the years, children molested by priests had come to believe that their disgust and self-respect mattered more than the authority of the church.  Rome had miscalculated.

What was the result of the miscalculation?  It is clear now that Rome is no more The Church than any other denomination.  And the clergy of most other denominations conduct themselves with a great deal more decency, pound for pound, than do the clergy of Rome.  Or maybe not; we know that there's many more tons of Roman clergy than there is of most other denominations, and it's all pedophilic dead weight.

What is going on?  Rome had come to regard pedophilia as an occupational hazard.

Well, of course it is.  Rome wants to attract vital, passionate men to its service, and then keep them celibate.  In hindsight, this is such a laughable plan.  As long as society condoned the abuse of women and children in certain "special circumstances", you could have the pretense of Brother John being a saint, and you could turn a blind eye on him feeling up your young daughter.  Our standards of sainthood have gone up, and the volume of crap that our daughters --and sons-- are willing to put up with has gone down.  And Rome will go down with it.

You can't have pedophilia being considered an occupational hazard of anything.  There is one word that comes up when we talk about any sort of sexual activity: consent of an adult.  [OK, 3 words.]  Rome must either relax its standards of celibacy to permit sex between priests and consenting adults, or consider a catastrophic loss of its autonomy and power.

More than a religious organization, Rome has become a financial foundation that has enormous financial obligations.  Many of its clergy live well, by the grace of millions of financial contributors.  If the stream of incoming money were to be threatened, some of Rome's most effective and powerful men and minds will not be sticking around.  Once the enforcers are gone, the sheep will probably find greener pastures.  I'm not particularly happy at the prospect, but the combination of living in denial and sheer arrogance is deeply annoying to many people.  Rome, of course, is claiming to be under siege, but it is under siege from within.  I don't think being indignant will save them.

Arch

Traffic Circles, How To Deal With

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It amuses me how some motorists simply hate traffic circles (or roundabouts, as they are called in some places, or rotaries, the term used in some New England localities).  In Traffic Engineering school, these constructions are --justifiably-- taught as being the solution of choice for low-traffic intersections.

A traffic circle usually replaces a traffic light.  Now, people are most annoyed with changes in the routes they most often take, either to work or from work, because it interferes with established driving habits.  I'm willing to bet that the people most upset by traffic circles are those who have been in the habit of making a right-on-red, which requires hardly any waiting, obviously.  The poor fellows who have to go straight through the intersection might not be quite as displeased to have the traffic light replaced with the Circle, unless they have miraculously gotten a green light every single time!  Ironically, a traffic circle simply makes every intersection and every turn effectively a right turn, which should make everyone happy.  There's no accounting for either tastes or logic.

The procedure for dealing with a traffic circle is simple, and it is the same for those who want to take a right as for those who want to go straight through:

Enter the circle when there's an interruption in traffic.  Don't signal; what's the point?  Everyone knows you're merging into the circle.  There's really no need to look both ways, because very few idiots would risk going the wrong way in a circle.  Just check by looking left, and slide in.  (Oncoming cars ought to indicate that they're leaving the circle, so you know when there's a clear spot.)

Signal when you're about to leave the circle, and leave.  Signaling tells any nervous motorists waiting to merge into the circle that they're welcome to merge.  There can't possibly be any traffic in your way leaving the circle, just like an off-ramp.  It's beautiful.

Going round the circle takes a little bit of steering, a slight problem for those who have specialized in highway driving.

The only bit of unusual etiquette is the signaling when you're about to quit the circle.  In our town we have a chain of circles, and sometimes I get lazy to signal each time I leave one circle, and go down the straight to the next one.  But there is usually no one around, so it does no harm.  When I approach a turnoff that I'm about to take and I see someone nervously waiting to merge into the circle, I signal my turn, so that they know I won't be running into them.  (Most of my good manners are triggered by the expectations of people in my vicinity, which is probably not a good thing, because Jesus is watching, I know).

Let's see.  Who wants a diagram?

OK, here you are:

When the Nagging Voice is Gone

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It just so happened that I did not have an older sister.  So I would visit friends and relatives, and watch, fascinated, as they got yelled at by their big sisters.  Big sisters, I noticed, did an awful lot of yelling at younger brothers and sisters.

It took a few seconds for them to realized that there was someone watching, and then there were a few embarrassed grins, and sometimes the big sisters involved would explain what the issue was; sometimes they yelled even more at their target for whatever they had done in front of a visitor --you know how it is-- and now, years later, I realize that I miss getting yelled at by older sisters.

Part of it is that I'm single, and have forgone the delight of getting an earful from the distaff side.  But there is something sweet about the particular kind of yelling that an older sister gives a favorite younger sibling.  Probably not in every case, but it is common in my experience.

What got me started on this train of thought was a song by the Cranberries: Zombie.  My favorite band leader and songstress, Uma of Episodes wanted to turn her hand to what is called covers in the pop music business: a performance of a song made famous by another band.  Zombie was on the list she sent to me for my information, and I was startled to see this video of a song to whose sound we had driven cross-country together often.  I remembered my strong impression of the lead singer of the Cranberries as an older sister, going on a tirade against the endless violence in Ireland.  Unlike the angry denouncements that one would hear from a typical modern young woman, this song had most definitely the sound of a wail, a dirge, a lament.  Perhaps it was the very Irish flavor of Dolores O'Riordan's voice and manner, but it evoked an old tradition of funeral dirge in which the dead were blamed for dying.  This is not what happens in Zombie, but the same impotent, bewildered fury and sorrow is most definitely present.

This kind of scolding is a disappearing remnant of an older way of life, where women were given less respect in many ways than they are now, but held in greater respect in other ways.  The dynamics of the relationship between men and women has changed, very significantly, at least on the surface, but sometimes one wonders whether it has changed all that much, or even for the better.

A.

Socialism and America

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The Republican Party appears, from the outside, to be in a flat spin.  They're attacking the Democrats, attacking their own moderates, their party chairman, and now they're apparently attacking long-held views of whether Franklin Roosevelt helped to control the fallout from the Great Depression of 1930 (or whenever).

In their anxiety, they're accusing practically everyone of being a Socialist, including the President.  American society, of course, has been conditioned to regard Socialism as a great evil, and Capitalism as its opposite.  In actual fact, Socialism is a very broad idea, and the opposite of Capitalism is Communism, which of course the US opposed enthusiastically for many decades and successfully destroyed in its embodiment as the USSR.

I don't know as much about these things as I should, but in the absence of a really learned source that I could refer conveniently, let me take a stab at defining these ideas.

Capitalism:  This is the idea that wealthy individuals and families should use their accumulated wealth to create things that they can sell, accumulate more wealth, and in the process create jobs and goods that the society at large can enjoy.  This is what we have today.

Communism:  This is the idea that the people will form a party, called the Communist Party, and will elect its officials, and the Party will run everything.  The Party will decide who will work in what jobs, and will assign rights and duties to all citizens, and provide sufficient resources to everybody.  To each according to their need, from each according to their ability.  In principle, everyone has to work, so this is called the dictatorship of the workers.  Today only North Korea and Cuba have held to this ideal.

Socialism:  This is the idea that the Government will provide many of the basic requirements of citizens using taxation, and through a government sector.  The usual services are: National Defense, Education, Housing, Support for Widows and Orphans, Flood and Famine Relief, and supports for the Arts.  The US has done this for more than a century.  Then, too, in many countries, the Government also provides: Transportation, and Health Services.  In the US, of course, these two have lagged behind most other countries, except in certain places such as New York, Washington D.C., and some progressive cities, as far as subsidized transport is concerned, and at a very minimal level, for health.  Already, the US provides health for newborn infants and their mothers (the Well-Baby program, and Food Stamps).

Capitalism and Socialism are by no means mutually exclusive philosophies, unless Capitalism is interpreted to mean that Business owners should be allowed to keep all their revenue.

Somehow, though the US has adopted many of the principles of Socialism, it has worked well for politicians of all parties to pretend to oppose Socialism, because the economic elite (which has often been able to outvote the working class and the lower middle-class) equates government services with heavy taxes.  Of course, this is reasonable; it is the wealthy (whose incomes are higher than $250 thousand a year) who pay most of the taxes.  (A lot of this money, too, inevitably gets soaked up by an inefficient bureaucracy, mostly through waste, but often through petty pilfering of public funds.  Pilfering is probably widespread in all walks of life, but somehow it is more criminal when waste is traced to the Government than when it is discovered in private businesses.)  Despite this negative attitude, nobody attacks programs such as Social Security, the Well Baby program, the State and National Parks, the Department of Education, etc etc as Socialism, though these are all the kinds of activities that Socialist governments engage in.  So despite the labeling of Socialism as a no-no and a bad word, the US has been a socialist country ever since WW2, at the very least, and that is why life in the US is as good as it is.  Why can a rich capitalist depend on his workers being able to get to work, being able to perform their job, be able to fly out to Bermuda on vacation, make sure that his investments in South America are safe, and that his kids have a good education?  Because of the roads that the government maintains, the education that the government subsidizes, the aviation system that the government manages, the airports that the government partially funds, the armed services and the intelligence agencies and their covert operations that the government bankrolls, and the student loans that even the wealthiest parents take out for their kids.  Socialism is part of the comfort of the very rich, as well as everybody else.

The fact of the matter is that some of those complaining most loudly are those who have struggled to bring themselves to the point where they were able to depend on their investments to keep them in a certain style, until the Stock Market crashed.  Now they're faced with heavy regulations that will prevent the wonderful ride that the Stock Market enjoyed before the crash.  The success of the Health Reform process seems to predict success on that Banking Regulation front also, unless the Administration can be swiftly discredited, in time to poison a serious attempt at Financial Reform.

Let's call these wealthy conservatives the Super-250K-ers.  Being unemployed is not a major problem to them, because their investments will keep them alive, as long as taxation is moderate.  (And as long as there is not an even worse Depression.)  What they do not realize is that the rest of us lose health insurance when we lose our jobs.

They also do not understand that preventing Financial Reform will not guarantee another skyrocketing Stock Market.  The only way for anyone to exploit an unregulated financial system is to have a clever way of jumping off the investment bus just before a bust.  There is just no legal way to do this.  Slow steady growth on Wall Street is good for most of us, even the millionaires.

Health Reform, if it is allowed to be implemented properly as envisaged, will help even the Super-250K-ers in one way: if they lose everything in the next Depression, they will still have health care.  It's funny how the wealthy keep imagining that they will never hit the wall, with all the evidence to the contrary.

Arch