by Jack Ramey | Jul 11, 2023 | Uncategorized
Moby Dick sits on my shelf like a faithful but jilted lover patiently waiting my return. Considered by some to be a literary rite of passage like rounding Cape Horn is to sailors, Melville’s paean to the age of whaling is at best heavy sledding. If you have not time enough in your life to tackle this beast of a book with its long digressions into the history of whaling and the minutiae of the sperm whale, then you might consider Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, the marvelous retelling of the incident that inspired the writing of Melville’s tome. In the year 1819, the Essex, a whaling ship out of Nantucket, at that time the largest whaling port in the world, was rammed and sunk by a huge enraged sperm whale. This is the horrifying tale of how the captain and a few of the crew somehow managed to survive in lifeboats for three months until they were rescued by another whaling vessel in the Pacific. It was a famous story in the early and mid-nineteenth century that inspired Melville to spin his own tale of a whale who waged war against his oppressors. The liner notes call Philbrick’s book “a timeless account of the human spirit under extreme duress, but it is also a story about a community, and about the kind of men and women who lived in a forbidding, remote island like Nantucket—a pioneer story that explores how we became who we are, and our peculiar blend of spiritualism and violence.” This is a wonder of a...
by Jack Ramey | May 16, 2023 | Uncategorized
In our recent history, wars have been fought over land and access to oil. Some geopolitical pundits predict that future wars will be fought over water, a commodity necessary to the survival of all species, and a commodity that we take for granted, sand. I was inspired, in part, to write my poem, “Shan-Shui: Rivers-and-Mountains,” by Denis Delestrac’s excellent documentary film, Sand Wars. In it, he presents a startling and shocking picture of what we have done to our rivers, streams, beaches, and ocean floors. All to support the increasing, seemingly endless lust for poured concrete construction. You need sand, you see, to make concrete. It takes 20 tons of sand to build a house; 3,000 tons to build a hospital; each kilometer of highway (concrete or asphalt) requires 30,000 tons. 15 billion tons of sand per year are consumed through construction alone. And we also need sand for glass, optical fiber, cell phone components and computer chips. Where does sand come from? Mountains. Grains of sand broken down from mountain rock and melting ice travel down streams and rivers to end up on beaches and on the ocean floor. Delestrac’s film points out that it takes “thousands even millions of years for a grain of sand to reach the sea.” That was the way it used to work, for eons. But not any more. Rivers all over the world have been dammed up to where, in China, no sand reaches the shore. In the USA, one dam a day has been built since 1776. Sand used to lay on the surface back in the day—the old sand and...
by Jack Ramey | May 3, 2023 | Uncategorized
Pigs bloated with conceit Like pink hot air balloons Sprout white wings and Fly high all over Washington D.C. In the Capital, in the Oval Office, even in Lincoln’s bedroom. Swine line up at the hubris trough On the top floor of the golden tower Snorting and rooting and waiting To get some. Get some piece of the pork- Barrel-pie before they fly away home. When swine fly in Air Force One You and your family had better run For those proverbial hills, or underground, Before it’s too late to run. Don’t forget to take your gun – you have One, don’t you? To shoot all those zombie drones Who lurk in the wake of winged flying piggies With little bombs strapped to their hooves Just in case some dirty liberal immigrant thieves Lurch into their alt-right flight paths Like Canada Geese into airplane engines. They are gonna get some, those swine, and Their zombie minions who follow them Like carrion crows followed the Roman legions. Swine and zombies love the taste of human flesh And now with wings can dive-bomb on anyone Who gets in their way to eat clean down To the bone like murder victims in the Old West Thrown into the pig pen to get rid of the evidence. Tombstone and Deadwood days are back again: The twin fasces on Capitol Hill with their axes And rods take on a new hue—begin to glow now And soon will sprout their own wings to fly With their new leaders, flying beside the patrician Swine, protecting them from all future assault. SPQR – The Senate and...
by Jack Ramey | Apr 22, 2023 | Uncategorized
Because you are neither hot nor cold, I shall spit you out of my mouth said Jesus. But what would He make of this new gang in the White House who are hot and cold at the same time? Hot to undue all progress and cold of heart as the coldest stone frozen in ice. Their tombstone minds keen to burn the world in Dante’s lake of frozen flames. The White House has become a whitened sepulcher full of the old moldy bones of hypocrites who twist the truth and with alternate facts forged in an alternate universe make fools of us all who must stand by ignored and scorned by them and the ignorant half of this nation who were fooled by a fool greater in cunning, deceit, and stealth than they themselves. Beware. The day of reckoning is coming when the storm brewing in Washington blows down your house of cards. The day will come when you will regret what you have done to yourselves, your children, and the seven unborn generations yet to come. Featured Art: America First by Edel Rodriguez, Cover of Der Spiegel – February 4, 2017 Edel Rodriguez is a Cuban American artist who has exhibited internationally with shows in Los Angeles, Toronto, New York, Dallas, Philadelphia, and Spain. Inspired by personal history, religious rituals, politics, memory, and nostalgia, his bold, figurative works are an examination of identity, cultural displacement, and mortality. Edel Rodriguez was born in Havana, Cuba in 1971. In 1980 Rodriguez and his family boarded a boat and left for America during the Mariel boatlift. In 1994, Rodriguez graduated...
by Jack Ramey | Apr 9, 2023 | Uncategorized
The School of Postmodernism Donald J. Trump, the country’s first postmodern president has shown us that there is no Truth. Truth is a relative construct and shifts with each speaker’s notion of “reality” or anti-reality which itself is a postmodern concept related to what physicists call anti-matter. Even his minions know that the meta- narratives of truth have disintegrated into a relativity that Lyotard and Einstein would applaud as gaps in the structure of the meta-verse where Truth or Fiction slip into and out of existence quite easily. As postmodern theorist of history, Michel Foucault, has often noted: It’s all about Power, baby, and he who controls it is the top cock on top of the dung heap crowing while eating the maggots beneath him, betraying Jesus each time he speaks or tweets his anti-truths before three a.m. when much of his animal kingdom sleeps. He does not know this, but the grand narratives of legitimation are no longer credible. He is surrounded by dramas of beset manhood – men becoming feminized by giving in to cultural stereotypes of what it means to be a man: ranking women by numerical systems of ten in locker rooms as if life were a Miss Universe contest and he, only he, is the judge with the Power bragging to pals about grabbing women by their “pussies” and making them do his will. They bend to his Power: I will control your genitals your hysterical vaginas. His wives must take it with a smile because they themselves are “Tens” and he is the President of The America First and they of course, are...
by Jack Ramey | Mar 28, 2023 | Uncategorized
The corpocracy that controls us all, tells us that when the great cosmic foot comes crashing down upon your own private anthill or city or hotel or public space your instructions are always to: Shelter in place. Good advice on a daily basis, they say. The Press Secretary and Homeland Security and FBI and all the news outlets say the same thing: Stay home all you roamers and rebels and thrill seekers and disrupters of all ages. Stay home all you spreaders of rumor and fear and terror. We can spread enough fear and terror for us all. Build a fire, they say. Cook some pancakes with GMO Nabisco prepackaged wheat harvested from the aisles of Walmart or Shop ‘n’ Go and please drink whatever demobilizes you: whiskey or bourbon or rum or even snort some government heroin. But please, shelter in place. Hunker down in your personal cave to keep out Muslim desert lion or Russian bear or scary negro criminal hostage-takers with guns or lying republican councilmen slavering over your children and your backyard swing sets. Stay alive for a while in situ (Latin for “in place,” where you are) and do not admonish the gods for they no longer interfere in the affairs of the human race, having long ago given them up for a hopeless case. Too far gone to resurrect from their collective coma. OR: you can wake up! crawl out from your holes, from under your rocks, and throw caution to the four winds, the four horsemen that assault us from all sides. Take up your pen, the weapon mightier than the missile or...
