Winning, losing, and plain dumb luck!

Nothing like reading a poem after all the drama of a close election or a championship game, where there can be only one winner at the end of it all. 
I wish I could listen to James Earl Jones or Harry Belafonte reading aloud the following poem...

Dumb Luck
Corey Marks

 
The horse—its number smudged
by sweat and thumbs nuzzling
 
predictable exactas
stamped in black—stumbles
 
at the last, run too hard, run
beyond what her ankles could bear,
 
and the jockey, who’d driven
her ahead of the other horses
 
now churning past and flinging
back rings of dust, rides
 
her down, out of the grace
and rush of the race and into the hoof-
 
torn dirt, the shit and grit
and the shudder he’s lost control of...
 
Then another rush: people
flurry to the fallen animal, the jockey
 
is raised, stunned and still
he feels he’s moving—something roils
 
in him, around him, under him.
Words are inconsequential
 
as flies. Dumb luck.
The animal won’t rise.
 
Nearby, the winner paces,
cooling, saddled now with the reason
 
for the day, heavy chest
widening against his rider’s approval,
 
each breath ragged and expendable
and replaceable as the printed bets
 
that drift the grounds, skittering
between knuckles of grass
 
beneath the stands where people
stare, the ones who got it wrong,
 
used to seeing what doesn’t come,
to wagering chances bound to be
 
nothing, nothing, nothing
but lost. Though someone got it right
 
and smacks his ticket
against his palm, exactly sure
 
of what it bears. He looks away
as the crowd around him cranes
 
and gawks into the afterlife
of chance—a white truck,
 
a man with an open-mouthed kit.
A needle. A hurtling world
 
closes like a gate.


The Threepenny Review
Fall 2010
Source(ht)

Election: The insanity of the status quo!

Let us see how the President and the Congress prove that Albert Einstein was wrong.

Einstein is often quoted for his observation that "Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results."  One doesn't need to be anywhere as smart as Einstein was to notice that there has been practically no change between the distribution of power before the election versus post-election: Obama was the president, and will be in office for four more years.  The House was in firm Republican control, and will be so for at least two more years.  The Senate continues with a Democratic majority, but without a filibuster-proof super-majority.

If the last couple of years provided nothing but a dysfunctional system with such an arrangement, and if we have voted for a continuation of the same, can we expect results to be any different?  If we expect different results, well, are we insane?  Will any of the principal agents in this setup have undergone any Damascene conversion so as to produce results that will be different from what the experiments yielded the last time around?

Perhaps this election shows, yet again, that by and large Americans are conservative.  Conservative as in not being in favor of huge changes to the situation we are familiar with. The status quo is then preferred over the possibilities that a change might promise.

The election results do not mean that any of the real issues have evaporated away.  They are looming out there, with deadlines fast approaching.  The fiscal cliff is merely one.  If the President, the House, and the Senate couldn't come up with a solution to the fiscal problems over the two years, they will work it out within a couple of months?  Then there is unemployment, Iran, Palestine, Afghanistan, China, student debt, ....

Good luck to us.

Andy Borowitz satirizes thus:

One day after the costliest Presidential election in U.S. history, Americans awoke to the ugly realization that the nation had spent $2.5 billion with absolutely nothing to show for it.
“Four years ago, Barack Obama was elected President of the United States, and that is still the case,” says Professor Davis Logsdon of the University of Minnesota. “The only difference is that we as a nation are out $2.5 billion.”

Mr. Logsdon claims that America’s system of egregious political spending “has made us the laughingstock of the world,” arguing, “Even Greece would know better than to blow through money like that.”

  Borowitz is wrong; estimates are closer to $6 billion, than the 2.5 billion he writes about :)

Image of the day: I voted!

Here in Oregon, we vote by mail.  I turned in my ballot the day after I found it in my mailbox.  It seems like that was long time ago--nearly two weeks is like eons in the Twitter age!

The state's election site offers a feature that I used to make sure that my vote was in.

It also confirms to readers of this blog, and to students who visit here, that I am not affiliated with any party.  It is for two main reasons:

From a personal perspective, there is no way a single party can represent all my political preferences. So, party identification is out.
From a professional perspective, not being affiliated with a party means that I can be that much more at ease as an equal-opportunity-critic, and my students can be that much more convinced that the focus is on the substance, not on any ideology.

I don't understand, however, why people think that voting is the ultimate thing.  If people choose not to vote, well, that is also equally democratic.  Only in a democracy, after all, does one get that right not to be compelled into anything.  The bad old USSR often reported that 99.9 percent of the people approved of the candidates, and left me wondering what ever happened to that 0.1 percent that didn't.  Off to the Club Med gulag in Siberia?

So, hey, if there is anybody reading this who has not voted, I urge you to vote.  But, if you choose not to, well, I respect your choice.