Passive Violence

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Fill For Me A Brimming Bowl

Fill for me a brimming bowl
And in it let me drown my soul:
But put therein some drug, designed
To Banish Women from my mind:
For I want not the stream inspiring
That fills the mind with--fond desiring,
But I want as deep a draught
As e'er from Lethe's wave was quaff'd;
From my despairing heart to charm
The Image of the fairest form
That e'er my reveling eyes beheld,
That e'er my wandering fancy spell'd.
In vain! away I cannot chace
The melting softness of that face,
The beaminess of those bright eyes,
That breast--earth's only Paradise.
My sight will never more be blest;
For all I see has lost its zest:
Nor with delight can I explore,
The Classic page, or Muse's lore.
Had she but known how beat my heart,
And with one smile reliev'd its smart
I should have felt a sweet relief,
I should have felt ``the joy of grief.''
Yet as the Tuscan mid the snow
Of Lapland dreams on sweet Arno,
Even so for ever shall she be
The Halo of my Memory.

John Keats

Don't stop at Tambar at night, goes the warning, they've got two heads and six fingers. It was a warning only half in jest; as they deal with the muck raking and the classic convoluted games played by every devious, lazy little prick in the area. They were so hopeless. He clung to whatever little cash he had. They had about their faces a defeated, empty look. Drained not by life and their own internal torments, but by laziness and inactivity, by the hours spent arguing over the smallest things, by a life he could only dream about. In Bondi, he watches two parking police, women, walk by in the street. They are gossiping together, these horrid, nasty cockroaches in their yellow jackets, their lined contemptuous faces. How he hated them. The heat settled into all the different gaps in his life; and all was not lost.

He could have struggled to the surface; rising through the waters to make a life anew. He drove past, time and again, the places which had been so significant so long ago. The Alemain fountain in the cross, where he had hung around as a street kid literallhy 40 years ago. Past the house in Hargrave Street, where he had lived for years next door to the pub. They had painted every top of the iron grate a different colour; the hippies, the world lives here; and he couldn't help but look to see if there was anything remaining of the silver and orange and pink. But there was nothing. Everything had settled into a kind of blank, unpleasant conformity. Oh how could these shadows be so cruel? Why couldn't the empty hole be filled?

He saw in the useless local yokels, the little country towns populated by practising alcoholics, all of them to a man and woman welfare dependent, cringing examples of what he could have been. Life was tough. Time to progress. But these people watched the sun rise and set, let their children crawl all over them, followed one course of action to another, and cried, cried, come and get me, as he alternated between bush and beach in these final days. He had spent his life in servitude to someone else. He had built elaborate constructs and surrendered to them. He wanted to be free, but did not know how. He came and went, flittering in the gathering shadows of the afternoon, not to surrender, not to be granted some grand destiny, some higher purpose, but simply to exist; there in the spaces in the middle of nowhere.

Bum f... nowhere, is the way they described it, and when he looked seriously at the prospect of spending time in this remote, desolate, lost place, he shuddered at the thought of entering their mindless world; what a bunch of useless characters, he thought. The shops, their flat faces, the dreary store fronts, all of it seemed so mundane. Bundles of them would exit from hot, sweaty vehicles. They would argue over nothing and everything. He was proud to be who he was; to stand on that deck watching the fireworks erupt accross the city; not to be trapped in these mundane places living a mundane life. He had worked so hard, had so little to show. Could see the end looming. We're closer to sixty than fifty; he said to his friend. And they shrugged. How had that happened?

He couldn't believce it either; that so much of their lives were over. Hadn't they been destined for greateness. Hadn't their wild times just been the forerunner to some bigger, grander fate; applauded by the world, thunderous applause as they bowed on stage. But nothing like that happened. The world passed on by, layer after layer of the days settling over their lives; and they were marginalised into some cul de sac or obscure avenue, not at the centre of things at all. Their children had a grasp of the technology; and laughed at their hopeless parents who couldn't work the video player much less the CDs, who couldn't work out how to download a movie or a song, who couldn't work their i-phones or their i-pods. But wait, wait, weren't we the centre of everything?

Well, if they ever had been the centre of anything it was a long time ago. He had been left crying on the pavement, to be picked up by whatever passing queen preying upon the disaffected. He had been so vulnerable; and they had attacked. Nothing he could do, lifting himself from that gutter, would alter the course life had set. These strange moments in the swirling streets, those moments when old men looked down on his young frame and said, all so concerned, not, of course, taking in his handsome face and slim features; along with his stinking clothes, those moments were long ago; injustices that could never be fixed. An entire industry had been built around child abuse; but he had missed the circus. He could only look on and say: God, what was done to me would be illegal now. The beatings. The abandonment. He forgave. He forgot. He moved on. But whether it was to a little village in the middle of nowhere populated with practising alcoholics, that was a different question.

THE BIGGER STORY:

President turns on banking industry in hope of harnessing anger that helped Republicans to Senate election victory

Barack Obama adopted a strongly populist tone today when he announced new curbs on the banking industry, a direct response to the Republicans' stunning election win in Massachusetts.

The move had been planned for a month but the timing and language were a direct result of Massachusetts. Obama, who as president has prided himself on cool, moderate language, spoke about the banks who "took huge, reckless risks in pursuit of quick profits and massive bonuses" and promised to "rein in the excess and abuse".

The Republicans immediately responded by saying that Obama was making the banks the whipping boy for the Democratic party's election defeat.

Scott Garrett, a Republican member of the House financial services committee, said: "This renewed focus on financial services reform by the Obama administration is clearly a transparent attempt at faux-populism, in light of the outcome of the Massachusetts Senate race."

Obama will make many more speeches and statements critical of the banks and Wall Street in the months ahead. It is almost certain there will be at least one such passage when he delivers his State of the Union next Wednesday.

By turning on Wall Street and the banks, Obama is seeking to tap into widespread public anger that helped the Republicans in Massachusetts, where voters expressed hostility towards Obama's healthcare plans but also towards Wall Street. Voters spoke of their outrage over the bonuses that banks who had benefited from federal bailouts had awarded to senior staff.

In poll published last November, voters were asked what issues made them most upset. Forty per cent chose "big banks and Wall Street getting handouts while nothing is done for working Americans".

What Obama and the Democrats want to do is persuade the public that it is the Republican party that is the friend of the banking industry. Obama's main White House adviser, David Axelrod, hinted at this in a recent interview with the National Journal. "[If the Republicans] want to stand with the insurance industry on healthcare and protect the status quo, let them defend that in an election," he said. "If they want to stand with the banks and the financial industries and protect the status quo, then let them explain that in an election."

This reflects the emerging Democratic strategy, presenting the Republican as elitist, on the side of big business against the ordinary Joe, and obstructionist to reform. The loss of Massachusetts has curtailed Obama's legislative options. He may or may not get his health bill, but other plans for this year, primarily climate change and immigration legislation, have effectively been killed off.

The one bill that is still alive is regulation of Wall Street: what Obama described as "the most ambitious overhaul of the financial system since the Great Depression".

The Republicans, as keen as the Democrats to swing discontented voters behind them, could back at least parts of that bill and try to avoid the Democrats portraying them as the party of big business.

Chris Dodd, the Democratic chairman of the Senate banking committee, issued a double-edged statement today, reaching out to the Republicans to back regulation while adopting similar populist language as Obama's. "Companies that choose to take such risks should do so on their own dime ," Dodd said.

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2010/01/21/john-b-judis-forget-massachusetts-obama-s-problem-is-nationwide.aspx

Bill Clinton didn’t know he was in big trouble until the very eve of the November 1994 election. Barack Obama knows now, barely a year into his presidency. While the party loyalists can blame Martha Coakley’s defeat on her ignorance of Red Sox baseball, it was clearly a message to the President and his party. Yes, a less inept candidate might have beaten Scott Brown, but if Obama and his program had been more popular in Massachusetts, even Coakley could have won — and by ten points or more.

There were no network exits polls, only a limited sample by Rasmussen, but some of the polls taken beforehand bear out Obama’s role in Coakley’s defeat. In the final January 17 poll by Public Policy Polling, a Democratic-leaning North Carolina outfit that picked up Brown’s surge early in the month, 20% of the respondents who voted for Obama in 2008 said they’d vote for Brown. Among those voters, only 22% approved of Obama’s presidency, and only 13% backed his health care plan.

In fact, the percent of 2008 Obama voters who were backing Brown almost perfectly matched the percentage who were dissatisfied with Obama’s health care plan, which Brown himself singled out for criticism in his campaign. According to the Rasmussen exit sample, 52% of Brown voters rated health care as their top issue — a clear indication that they were viewing the election in national terms.

The most important question raised by Coakley’s loss is not what she could have done better, but why Obama’s popularity is so low that a Democrat could lose Massachusetts. A conservative Republican Senate candidate winning Massachusetts, which Obama carried by 62% to 36% in 2008, is comparable to a liberal Democrat carrying Utah.

If you believe some of the blogs, the Democrats lost Massachusetts, and Obama’s approval is plummeting nationwide, because he alienated his left-wing base. Perhaps that does account for an absence of turnout among young voters in the Virginia gubernatorial or Massachusetts Senate races, but the polls have not shown growing dissatisfaction among young, minority, or liberal voters — the three voting blocs that accounted for Obama’s strongest support in 2008. Where he has lost ground is primarily among white working and middle-class voters and senior citizens.

http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2010/01/18/politics/politicalhotsheet/entry6112366.shtml

As President Obama contemplates his first year in office, he might be forgiven for recalling the words of Queen Elizabeth II, looking back on a year rife with royal scandal: an annus horribilus, she called it, and you don't need six years of Latin to translate her sentiments.

Mr. Obama has suffered the steepest decline in job approval of any first year president since they started keeping such data: in most surveys, he is barely at, or under fifty per cent. His health-care plan, the signature effort of his first year in office, has grown steadily less popular and its survival, as one Congressional Democrat put it, "Hangs by a thread."

It may, in fact, be doomed on the precise one-year anniversary of his Inaugural, if Massachusetts voters send a Republican to the U.S. Senate today to fill the seat held for nearly half a century, by Edward Kennedy, the patron saint of liberal health care.

CBSNews.com Special Report: Obama's First Year

The coming year does not appear to hold out hope for better times: the jobless rate is likely to remain at or above ten percent, and the real unemployment rate -- which includes those who've given up looking and those working part-time who want full time jobs -- is at 17 percent. And historically, no president in modern times has significantly improved his approval numbers in his second year -- a gloomy atmosphere in which to move into midterm elections.

What's happened: "Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan," John Kennedy famously said -- but political trouble also has a thousand diagnosticians, each offering (sometimes contradictory) notions.

One of the most commonly heard refrains -- one that makes a lot of sense -- is the broad appeal that was Mr. Obama's political strength became a governing liability. As he himself once said, he was a vessel into which people poured their own political desires. He was the tribune of progressivism, the man to redeem the promise of Robert Kennedy. No, he was the post-conflict president, the candidate who promised to "turn the page" on the wearisome conflicts of the past.

Because so many people expected Mr. Obama to do so many different, conflicting things, he could not possibly hold those who voted for him together. More important, he did not come to office with a strong sense of where he was going.

Bondi Beach in a dust storm.