pantoum's Diaryland Diary

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YEAR IN REVIEW

282.

So yeah, 2005. Cindy Sheehan and Terry Schiavo and Lance Armstrong (again) and skyrocketing gas prices. King Bush the Latter�s �Bamboozlepalooza Tour.� (Wish I could take credit for that description, but alas, a critic coined the phrase, not me.)

The year we executed our one-thousandth prisoner since the Death Penalty was reinstated by the Supreme Court in 1976. A facial transplant and two Supreme Court seats available to the neocons.

2005. The year Barbara wish-she�d-been-born-with-a-silver-spoon-shoved-up-her-left-nostril Bush said of Hurricane Katrina refugees who�d survived the squalid conditions under one dome only to be transported to another:

So many of the people here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this, this is working out very well for them.

As KRS1 said,

All you white people out there that think you're down with America can forget it! Because they tax all of us. All of us. One by one.

The re-election (sigh). Abu Ghraib. Fallujah. Wire-tapping. Camp Casey. Tax breaks for our nation�s wealthiest; abject poverty for too many others. Corporate takeover of the organic food abel (do you care that the number of approved synthetics in your so-called organic food just jumped from 30 to 500? I do.) Anti-war rallies. The ivory-billed woodpecker (again). A 27 percent increase in greenhouse gases. Disappearing ice caps. Avian flu. Abstinence. Underfinanced national parks. Pipelines. A woman president in Africa. Swaziland women�s property and loans without male sponsorship. Zimbabwean women inheriting property. Oh and we caught bin Laden. (Just joking. That would require competency. But maybe he can get Brownie right to work on that.)

My pal Zulu, who partied her way through Naw�leans and Baton Rouge back in the day, greets the dead at midnight on December thirty-first. Well, this year calls for farewells, not hellos. Farewell St. Bernard Parish: we hardly knew thee and certainly didn�t see thee. Farewell Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justice Sandra Day O�Connor. Farewell Rosa Parks: your bravery gives me hope. Farewell Terry Schiavo, who was finally allowed to die.

Farewell Richard Pryor: you made me laugh but should have known better than to do what you did with that Bic lighter. Farewell Uncle Donald: you were too young to die. Farewell Pope John Paul II: the awful spectacle of you on display in all your tremulous golden-crowned glory moved me even though you were homophobic and held firm to misguided ideas about women�s autonomy and role in the Church. Farewell 250,000+ South Asian tsunami victims whose stories Lars and I listened to somberly as we drove cross-country one year ago. Farewell 8,000 Gaza settlers who thought you�d never be evicted. Farewell UNC basketball players, most of whom went pro after returning the national title to Dean Smith's digs.

And, although Cheney insists that we should �pay no attention to the carnage,� farewell to you 30,000+ Iraqis whom my country acknowledges murdering. (And Dick, just so you know, experts say the actual number exceeds 100,000.)

Farewell 37-cent stamps and farewell to you millions of West Africans who died of starvation while we tossed half our lunches into the garbage. Farewell 2,165 US soldiers who died in the Iraqi sand. Farewell innocence of the 7,500+ other US soldiers who were seriously wounded in that sand, and farewell to your belief that those fictitious weapons of mass destruction justify this carnage. Farewell all you people who were simply eating lunch or leaving your Mosque or tying your child�s shoelaces when the suicide bombers found you.

Farewell 73,000 people killed in the Himalayas when the earthquake struck. Farewell 950 Shiite pilgrims killed in the stampede. Farewell London commuters. And farewell Christo�s beautiful mystical billowing saffron gates; we needed your magic this year.

�

And, finally, those resolutions:

1. I will spend less time working and more time making art;

2. I will finish adding the archaeology element to my novel in a comprehensive and brilliant way and begin adding the ecology elements and begin pondering how to enhance the food and music elements;

3. I will be a better correspondent with my little sister, my mother, and best friend;

4. I will go through all the papers in my home office, scan what I can, and purge the rest;

5. I will send more of my writing out for publication, thanks to my pal Zulu�s gift of a book that lists all the places I can send poetry, fiction, and nonfiction and their preferences;

6. I will lose at least twenty pounds and eat healthier food;

7. I will find a way to donate more money to worthy causes;

8. I will not be silent when it could be interpreted as complicity;

9. I will not let other people's discomfort dissuade me from holding Pottergrrrl's beautiful hands in public.

Finally, the film critic Stephen Holden said that Cach�s director Micheal Haneke is

a pitiless cultural surgeon who likes to operate without anesthetic as he uncovers the darkest fears of a complacent bourgeois society.

So hear ye hear ye: I may not have enough money to make much of a difference, but I hereby resolve to be a pitiless cultural surgeon who operates without anesthetic as I uncover the darkest fears of our complacent bourgeois society.

6:31 p.m. - 2005-12-29

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