A Thanksgiving Day Fast For Peace By Gary Corseri (2005; repost)

First published on Dandelion Salad in 2008. Originally published in 2005.

By Gary Corseri
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Nov. 20, 2012

Image by Dandelion Salad via Flickr

“Our lives flow from our beliefs, and our beliefs are conditioned by our daily actions. As we act, so we build our character and so we become.”

***

“Because of the industrialization of food production, we eat artificially colored, flavored, refined, processed, irradiated, engineered, and chemical-laden products that confirm we will eat virtually anything and everything.”

Heroes By Gary Corseri

By Gary Corseri
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
January 8, 2012

Image by Collin David Anderson via Flickr

Do not call them “heroes”
if they have done your killing for you.
Say that they have done your bidding;
say they were your “soldiers.”

Say that you have trained them well:
They are the oiled machinations of war,
performing as expected.

The Lion and the Ox: The Winter of Our Discontent By Gary Steven Corseri

By Gary Corseri
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
December 30, 2011

Image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr

“One Law for Lion and Ox is Oppression.” –William Blake

“Where is the place of understanding? Where is wisdom to be found?” –The Book of Job

Info coming at us at the speed of light—gigabytes per nano-sec—and our horse-and-buggy bio-chem brains struggle with ancient grammars, syntaxes and texts! Even our metaphors are now wretchedly overwrought: Not, “how to connect the dots,” but how to perceive, measure, record and duck the shot-gunned info-pellets rushing at our faces!

Occupy The World… And The Values Revolution! By Gary Corseri

By Gary Corseri
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
29 October 2011

Last week, Barbara “wah-wah” Walters—thank you, Gilda Radner!—was trotted in front of ABC’s Evening News cameras to assure those familes still chowing down that the brutal, disgusting, illegal, savage beating, sodomization and execution of Libyan “dictator” Gaddafi was… understandable… because, he was “crazy.”

Solving the Poor By Gary Corseri

By Gary Corseri
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
September 13, 2011

Image by bradbridgewater via Flickr

1.

He hoisted her a little higher on his back. …

If only Mother had followed Sister’s counsel about the pumice stone—or had allowed Sister to use the stone on her (and to trim her long toenails, as well!)—her calloused heels would not be chafing his ribs and hips through the thin fabric of his summer yukata.

But, she had always been a stubborn, proud woman; and in her youth she had been considered a bijin—a beauty—who had held her head high among the courtesans—the first wife of the Lord’s First Minister, with her own retinue of servants in the apartments near the Daimyo’s own.

Farewell Content: Class Wars and Ass Wars By Gary Corseri

By Gary Corseri
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
August 12, 2011

Image by Juliano Mattos via Flickr

“Farewell the tranquil mind! Farewell content!
Farewell the plumed troops and the big wars
That make ambition virtue!” — William Shakespeare (Othello)

“It would be supererogatory for me to list those areas in which thoughtful Americans feel that collapse is coming.” — Anthony Burgess, “Is America Falling Apart?” (1971)

Let Them Eat Cake! By Gary Corseri

By Gary Corseri
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
July 28, 2011

Image by frankkeillor via Flickr

The people of Somalia are not like us.
Their skin is black and gray and parched by sun.
They carry their babies on bony hips,
Walking for miles for a little water.
Even their babies are resigned to death,
Hollow-eyed, fly-covered, without the strength
To cry, without the will to endure.

First the axmen came… By Gary Corseri

By Gary Corseri
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
July 23, 2011

Image by dincsi via Flickr

Attitude

He brought his poem to the workshop.

First the axmen came to chop off the legs.
Then chiselers came to chisel out eyes.

Dabblers daubed painterly oil,
deconstructing carping scaffolding.

Pointing A Way: A Review of Morris Berman’s Counting Blessings By Gary Corseri

By Gary Corseri
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
July 10, 2011

Image by Frédéric Renaud via Flickr

Among the nostrums I was taught as an English Lit under-grad, and then a grad student, was the idea that biography had no place in Criticism.  This notion arrived with the “New Critics” of the 1930s—some pretty bright lights, actually, who—as the best of us are wont to do—were in rebellion… in their case against the schmaltzy kind of newspaper “criticism” and reviews—especially of poetry—that preceded them.  That schmaltzy stuff was all about praising the poet’s “sentiment” or good-heartedness, and it was more often than not aimed at women—the main writers and readers of “sentimental” novels and all-too-flowery and rhymy “verse.”

Our Supreme Corporate Court: 3 Strikes and We’re Out! by Gary Corseri

By Gary Corseri
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
July 3, 2011

Image by takomabibelot via Flickr

First, some aphoristic opals:

“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” — Wendell Phillips (1811-1884), abolitionist, orator and columnist for The Liberator.

“Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believ’d.” — William Blake

If Only They Had Tweeted Then! By Gary Corseri

By Gary Corseri (with special thanks to A. Weiner!)
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
June 13, 2011

Image via Wikipedia

1. The Garden of Eden

Yo! A-man! Evie? Where U at?—G-D
Behind the bushes, Big Guy!—E.
What the? U hiding?—G-D
We’re naked, Lord!—A.
Whoa! Who tole u u were naked?—G-D
Duh! I thought u knew everything?—E.

Geneva Conventions Redefined: The New U.S. Department of War By Lt. Eric N. Shine and Gary Corseri

By Lt. Eric N. Shine USNR – USMMRR/USMMA KP/ and Gary Corseri
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
June 7, 2011

Image by 917press via Flickr

“What’s in a name?”

–William Shakespeare

Most people are unaware of the larger picture developing over the past seven or eight decades, or have been willing to ignore it. This still-developing image portrays matters requiring knowledge of world history, a degree of self-education and a global perspective to recognize and decipher.

Dear William and Kate: Cut the Crap; This Is Our Home! By Gary Corseri

By Gary Corseri
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
April 12, 2011

Image by Ben Sutherland via Flickr

“Beware of these eyes. … I’m the devil in disguise.”
“Take all you can get… and give as little as possible.” — Mae West (in “I’m No Angel”)

Dear William and Kate,

A thousand apologies for this tardy response to your late-arriving invitation!  (I must confess, after my first question, “Why me—a humble-as-kippers American poet?,” my second question was: “In this era of girdle-tightening austerity, why the gilded note; would some churls think that ‘bad form’?”)

Small Talk (in memoriam, for Joe Bageant, 1946-2011) By Gary Corseri

By Gary Corseri
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
March 29, 2011

Image by sbisson via Flickr

(for J.B.)

This one—tack-witted, sharp of tongue—
thinks he’ll die soon, and so,
smokes on (although he loves his wife).

He has made peace at 62 (my age)
with demons, destiny, and even
the C.O.P.D. that will
kick him in.

Joe Bageant: “Who are we as a people?” By Gary Corseri

By Gary Corseri
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
March 23, 2011

Image by Alaskan Dude via Flickr

RAINBOW PIE: A Redneck Memoir, by Joe Bageant
Scribe Publications, Melbourne, 2010  (U.S. edition, 2011).  310 pp.
Reviewed by Gary Corseri

Lose all your troubles, kick up some sand
And follow me, buddy, to the Promised Land.
I’m here to tell you, and I wouldn’t lie,
You’ll wear ten-dollar shoes and eat rainbow pie. –“The Sugar Dumpling Line,” American hobo song.

“Today, almost nobody in the social sciences seems willing to touch the subject of America’s large white underclass,” writes Joe Bageant on page 2 of his second book, RAINBOW PIE.