Month: January 2008

Questions From A Worker Who Reads

>>Who built Thebes of the seven gates?
In the books you will find the names of kings.
Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?
And Babylon, many times demolished
Who raised it up so many times? In what houses
of gold-glittering Lima did the builders live?
Where, the evening that the Wall of China was finished
Did the masons go? Great Rome
Is full of triumphal arches. Who erected them? Over whom
Did the Caesars triumph? Had Byzantium, much praised in song
Only palaces for its inhabitants? Even in fabled Atlantis
The night the ocean engulfed it
The drowning still bawled for their slaves.

The young Alexander conquered India.
Was he alone?
Caesar beat the Gauls.
Did he not have even a cook with him?

Philip of Spain wept when his armada
Went down. Was he the only one to weep?
Frederick the Second won the Seven Year’s War. Who
Else won it?

Every page a victory.
Who cooked the feast for the victors?
Every ten years a great man?
Who paid the bill?

So many reports.
So many questions.<< Brecht again.

Good girls gotta get down with gangsters

Moral politics regards the pop culture hype around prostitution and drug trade as a sign of decay and watch it in horror because they cannot relate the phenomenon to their picture of good old free market economy. Moral communists only see and hear the final phase of late capitalism, the cultural breakdown signalling the total collapse of bourgeois society.

Discordian Communists see capitalism in full effect and have no idea why it still shouldn’t at least sound good.

700 Intellectuals Pray to an Oil Tanker

>>1.

Without an invitation
We have come
700 (and many more are on the way)
From all over, where the wind no longer blows
From the treadmills, which grind slowly, and
From the ovens, behind which, it is said
Not even a dog remains.

2.

And we have seen thee
All of a sudden, the night long
Oil tanker.

3.

Yesterday thou wert not there
But today
Thou art the only one.

4.

Come, hurry, ye!
Ye who saw the branch on which ye sit
Working folk!
God has descended again
In the form of an oil tanker.

5.

Thou, the repulsive one
Art gorgeous!
Exercise force over us
Thou, the objective one!
Snuff out our ego!
Make a community out of us!
Then, not as we want:
Rather, as thou wilt.

6.

Thou art not made of ivory
And of ebony, but of
Iron.
Wonderful! Wonderful! Wonderful!
Thou, the unprepossessing one.

7.

Thou art not an invisible one
Nor art thou infinite!
On the other hand, seven metres high
There are no secrets in thee
Rather, there is oil,
And thou dealest with us
Not discretely, nor unfathomably
But with calculation.

8.

What is grass for thee?
Thou sittest on it.
Where, formerly, there was grass
There thou sittest now, oil tanker!
And for thee an emotion is
Naught.

9.

Therefore listen to our prayer
And deliver us from evil.
In the name of electrification
And of progress and statistics!<< Bertolt Brecht, ca. 1926.

And just for once spare me the instant reflex that makes so many people say “Iraq” within five seconds after reading just the title line.

Hume vs. Popper

>>To appeal to Karl Popper’s thesis that scientists should not pursue truth but should seek to falsify their hypotheses does not help. That thesis rest on the inductive assumption that, once refuted, a hypothesis will prove false in future.<< Letter to the Editor by High Wycombe, New Scientist 22/29 December 2007