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Shakra Bleu!

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,

A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread–and Thou

Beside me singing in the Wilderness–

Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

Alternatively, there’s the new Aaron Shakra piece.

Where to begin? What to say that hasn’t been said before? Have we done this to death? Are we at a point where we can just let these columns just pass by unremarked upon, with nothing more than a wry laugh and a shake of the head? Is it time to move on? Has that blessed day arrived, the day upon which we finally pronounce our last word on this sage of modern times, this hirsute prophet, this… hang on a second.

Violence doesn’t solve problems; it escalates them… Yet perhaps Star Trek is a bit too idealistic in this day and age… Like children sucking on the proverbial teat, we’re milked on this stuff from birth… In this visual nation, there is little respite from the addiction to violence…. For a defenseless viewer, violence becomes associated with pleasure… without the exploitation and subjugation of women, nature and foreign peoples and countries, Western civilization simply could not exist… “progress” and “advancement” have come at the expense of a violence that is justified as truth… Violence is not just a vice rooted in the American way of life, however. It telescopes out a global scale…

People, that day is still a little further on down the road. And the road – if you’ll permit me to coin a phrase – is telescoping out on a global scale.

(Incidentally, I’m sick of seeing that Francis Bacon line about “subordination, suppression, and even torture of nature, to wrest her secrets from her” in pieces like this. For a self-professed poet, his understanding of metaphor seems to be lacking. However, I agree with him that the practice of milking children is reprehensible. And the milk that results is, frankly, substandard.)

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