My temple sweeps are nightly but will go largely unremembered
when the salute comes down from in front of you and covers
your heart
save and continue save and continue save
Today’s poem previously appeared in ILK journal and appears here today with permission from the poet.
Lesley Wheeler is a writer living in Kansas City. She is a co-editor of Strange Cage and graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her poetry has appeared in ILK, and Sawbuck Poetry, and translation work in the Washington Square Review. Poet CA Conrad says of her, “She is not small sticks, but flares up from them, beautifully!”
Editor’s Note: In a few words Lesely Wheeler is able to traverse time, reaching from antiquity to modernity. Today’s poem prepares us to enter the world of archaeologists—those students of human activity of the past—then takes us within the walls of temples and into the realm of the heart. But the methodology the poet proposes for commemorating her experience evokes not the past, but this very moment in history when she instructs, incants, or pleads, “save and continue save and continue save.”
Official White House photo of President Richard Nixon NARA National Archives and Records Administration (public domain)
The most remarkable thing about Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland is that it was published four and a half years ago, before Barack Obama was elected president, before the Tea Party, before Occupy. Otherwise you might be forgiven for thinking that Perlstein was drawing meaningful parallels between our era and the 1960s and early 1970s of Richard Nixon’s heyday. There’s no way he could have been, of course. But it sure feels that way.
It is easy to forget that our current toxic “red state/blue state” opposition is nothing especially new, even if it has taken on a novel geographical aspect—a “big sort,” as Bill Bishop has it. We neglect to trace our current divide back through the Reagan era, through the Nixon era, to 1965, which is Perlstein’s starting point. The United States has been two oppositional yet intermingled nations for nearly fifty years, and Perlstein sets out to find out where it started and who stood to profit from exploiting that tension.
Nixonland is about Kulturkampf, American-style, and about Richard Nixon’s manipulation of it for political gain. Perlstein’s thesis is that the future president’s worldview was formed at Whittier College, where young Nixon was shut out of the world of the Establishment swells, known there as “Franklins”; Nixon formed his own social club for the lower-class strivers, which he called the Orthogonians. For the rest of his life, Perlstein claims, Nixon saw the world as divided between the Franklins and the Orthogonians. (This is an interesting tack for Perlstein to take, given that he prefaces every psychological insight he borrows from other sources—that is, virtually all of them—with “The psychobiographers might say that…” or something similar; more on that below.) What’s more, he had a gift for sniffing out these socioeconomic oppositions and using them to further his political career. Paradoxically, Nixon positioned himself as the champion of the traditional values of the working class in spite of his membership in the party of business and wealth, and he was the first to bring many blue-collar voters into that party, which so disdained their economic interests. Before there was What’s the Matter with Kansas? there were the Reagan Democrats, and before the Reagan Democrats, there was Nixon’s “Silent Majority.”
How did he do it? The answer is obvious to us, because it’s the political air we now breathe: cultural wedge issues. It wasn’t so obvious at the time. Nixon pioneered the alchemical transmutation of fear of change and class resentment (where class is a cultural category, rather than strictly an economic one) into virtues, a subtle manipulation that Perlstein calls “political jujitsu.” How dare those artists and movie stars, those pinko professors and Establishment liberals, that liberal-biased media sympathize with the Communists we’re fighting in Korea and Cuba and Vietnam, the druggie degenerates who are tearing apart the moral fabric of our great nation and perverting our children, the civil rights activists and Yippie political agitators who want to change our venerable Constitution and overthrow our government? How dare they throw their “tolerance” and “experimentation” in our faces? We just want economic stability and peace and quiet in the streets and the kind of life our parents had, only more prosperous.
And so, after a quick summary of Nixon’s boyhood, education, and early political career—including the all-important “Checkers” broadcast, in which Nixon gave an early virtuoso performance of his uniquely passive-aggressive brand of moral suasion—Perlstein throws us into the Watts riots of 1965, where the era of Great Society peace and prosperity promised by Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 landslide victory (the 1960s equivalent of Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 premature prediction of the “End of History”) immolated itself before a shocked television audience. Nixon took in the violent cultural fault lines created by desegregation and protest against an already unpopular war. He understood that once equal rights became a statutory reality, oppressed blacks would not tolerate anything but the full and immediate fulfillment of that legal promise, which most whites, especially Southern and working-class whites, would not abide. He saw that the traditionally Democratic South was appalled by LBJ’s liberal turn on civil rights and desegregation, and that in the North, traditional Democratic stalwarts such as labor unions and big-city machines felt as though their interests were being ignored in favor of rights and privileges for blacks and the non-working poor. And in all this he saw opportunity—opportunity for a traditional-values based Republican party, led by Richard M. Nixon, to make inroads into perennial Democratic strongholds. Nixon was always a hard worker, and he put all his energy, stamina, cunning, and political influence to work.
Perlstein goes into great detail as he traces the disintegration of the Democratic party—first at the notorious 1968 nominating convention in Chicago and then at the less-infamous, but perhaps even more damaging, 1972 convention in Miami Beach—and the implosion of George McGovern’s presidential run. Perlstein rightly sees McGovern’s campaign as doomed from the start: though his ill-advised choice of Thomas Eagleton as his running mate was the coup de grace, it was the Committee to Re-Elect the President’s sabotage, the internecine skirmishes and philosophical contradictions between rival candidates and factions, and the neutering of the once-powerful bosses, capped off by a three-ring circus of a convention that showcased the party’s divisions and apparent frivolities, that preordained the Democrats’ failure. Simultaneously, he follows the rise, and the beginning of the political demise, of Richard M. Nixon.
Perlstein’s talent (at least here) is not with original research (Nixonland contains little, if any), but with sifting through secondary sources and collocating and analyzing his finds. He arranges his facts to speak for themselves, and his style of analysis is subtle and unobtrusive, interwoven into the narrative so well that the reader sometimes fails to notice that the story has taken a didactic turn. He is also an astute student of politics and a political realist, with a deep respect for the compromise, the coalition, the power play, and even machine politics to a degree (for an excellent short-form example of Perlstein at work, see this recent piece on Barack Obama’s roots in Chicago machine politics). It is here that the lessons he takes from the history of Nixon’s era differ from the usual partisan fare—even when he’s using source material written by partisan observers—and where his analysis of the politics of that time provides unsettling insights into our current situation. He stresses how radicals’ chronic aversion to compromise and coalition-building, and their incorrigible overestimation of the majority’s tolerance for rapid change and novelty, nearly always dooms their efforts to effect reform, and how the top-down reforms they are able to institute so often meet with resistance from the rank-and-file. The radicals’ fetish for open discussion and equal and democratic representation in all decisions, especially in combination with the aversion to compromise and coalition, creates deadlock and endless delay and forecloses any possibility of quick executive decision-making and nimble response—a lesson that the Occupy movement has yet to take to heart. And all too often, there is a Richard Nixon figure, an adept of Realpolitik, to capitalize on the chaos that ensues.
And about Realpolitik: an argument that Perlstein seems implicitly to make is that Nixon’s downfall was at least partly a function of his transformation from a sort of Manichaean figure, the scourge of State Department crypto-Communists and hippies and champion of the “Silent Majority,” to a disciple of Henry Kissinger’s amoral power-worship. His manipulations vis-à-vis the Vietnam war—of facts, of the lives of POWs—and his brute, naked lust to gain a second term as president, his increasing paranoia, his stonewalling of the press, his abandonment of principle in the economic realm as stagflation and competition from Japan and the Common Market created trade imbalances and degraded the value of the dollar, his need to surround himself with venal yes-men who would do literally anything to get a leg up on the president’s “enemies”: these were distortions and exaggerations of Nixon’s character flaws that only grew the more power he amassed. It is an interesting theory, if it can even be called a full-fledged theory, but it smacks of the kind of armchair psychoanalysis that Perlstein claims to disdain.
Nixonland is a big book, a sprawling history, given its seemingly narrow focus of a seven-year period, and its epic scope and accumulative nature have the virtue of presenting the reader with a wealth of trivial information and glimpses—foreshadowings—of things and people that will become important only later. We meet a young Karl Rove, a campus Young Republican who ingratiated himself into the Committee to Re-Elect the President by bringing to the ’72 campaign a bag of political tricks garnered in college elections. We meet a newly-divorced Senator Bob Dole on the prowl, sporting bell-bottoms and a fake tan. We see early abuses of the Political Action Committee in John Connally’s Democrats for Nixon, which produced one of those tasty if vapid statistical coincidences that really make reading history fun: the specious claim, in a TV ad, that George McGovern would make 47% of the population eligible for welfare. But the agglomerative method also has its drawbacks: one finds repetitions of unfortunate words and phrases—near-comical overuses of the phrases “slow, soiling humiliations” and “man bites dog,” and of the words “solons” for legislators and “exuberants” for conservative die-hards come immediately to mind—as well as the sort of minor factual errors that have the effect of calling into question the veracity of more important claims: the film Straw Dogs is not a western; Richard Nixon’s father was born in Ohio, not Indiana; and the chief official of a Nazi political district was a Gauleiter, a German word, not gauletier, a real-sounding but imaginary French one.
On a more macro level, while one shudders at the possibility of seeing scores more instances of “slow, soiling humiliations,” it might have been interesting had Perlstein lent his skills to taking the book all the way through Watergate to Nixon’s actual resignation, rather than leaving off shortly after the 1972 election. But that could well be an entire 900-page book in itself, and Perlstein succeeds admirably in proving his point in the period he allotted himself. What remains to be seen is whether American politics continue to exhibit—as in Nixon, in his pupil Ronald Reagan, and in Reagan’s student George W. Bush—the pattern of ruthless power-seeking by the Right, and rudderless floundering and fissile factionalism within the Left. The human cost of such recurrent dysfunction is higher than ever.
I must have been lazy like tepid water.
I have become a chaise lounge in the hallway
asking what will happen if the big one comes,
if it will destroy my relationship with the past. Will it?
Four beautiful women play ping-pong in my ears
and someday I will turn to watch them suffocate
into their boyfriends’ arms like leer jets,
the way they get caught between two peaks
because the pilots forgot, were lost in the snow already
before their feet even hit the ground.
My mother was my cellmate in my first life.
In this one, my mother is my mother in a cell,
her hands divided into quadrants,
an example of what melodramatic could never mean.
Her and I have become friends at the gym
where we use our eyes to signal that we are the same.
Four women talk about boyfriends like they were diets,
like we haven’t been to the same dream a hundred times.
My mother wishes they would exchange hairstyles with her,
that they would hand her gold flecks under the covers.
Today’s poem previously appeared in ILK journal and appears here today with permission from the poet.
Eszter Takacs is a Hungarian-born poet who has spent most of her life living in Los Angeles and a little bit of it living in Maryland, Hungary, and France. She is currently a first-year MFA candidate and Graduate Teaching Assistant at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. She paints, plays the flute, tinkers with digital cameras and knows more than you expect a poet to know about cars after spending the past six years working in the automotive industry. One day she hopes to live in a city like Paris. Or just Paris. She has a photo blog that really needs to be updated more often. Her poems have appeared in elimae, ILK Poetry, The Dirty Napkin, Mixed Fruit, Birdfeast, Utter, and elsewhere.
Editor’s Note: If words are glistening malleable threads then Eszter Takacs is a spider. At home within them, manipulating them, and anchoring her creation to the world which surrounds it. In today’s poem Takacs draws on popular culture, mother-daughter relations, and a kind of existentialism that straddles the spheres of the feminine and the personal. I mean it as a compliment to the poet’s talent and unique vision when I say: What a tangled web she weaves.
the garden is winter-still at lunchtime i fill the hours with something like hiding
make order
from what was
bracken
glean
sheaf after sheaf
send them to the
clearing behind
the house which
is filling up fast
a neighbor painted her red barn white how what’s under will seep through
between
mountain
garden + wild field
metal fence
deer-proofed
hoof resistant
say: we are small inside the fenced-in green even deer think so
a weed isn’t
“supposed to be there”
but what we dig out space for
is
i’m not convinced but you are
begin : to paint seeds
(summer’s over) on canvas
someone says
couldn’t anyone
paint a seed
isn’t it a circle
i say
yep.
Today’s poem previously appeared in ILK journal and appears here today with permission from the poet.
Emmalea Russo is a poet and visual artist. Recent work has appeared in ILK Journal and Wicked Alice and is forthcoming in Ambush Review and Yew Journal. She lives in New York City.
Editor’s Note: I was first drawn to today’s poem by Emmalea Russo’s invocation of women witches. Those women who are cloaked in the magical and the incantatory, who suffered historically at the hands of Christianity, patriarchy, and empire, and who have been avenged and reclaimed by feminism and the Feminine in modernity. But after reading and re-reading today’s piece, after allowing its seeds to sprout in realms both conscious and subconscious, I now know that the poet sums up the experience of this poem best when she writes, “how what’s under will seep through.”
THE STREETS MAY TURN TO PAPER SUDDENLY By Kat Dixon
I am neither shadow nor wife. I have no hand for painting
flowers nor how they fill any room or bedspread or plate
of meats for guests who come to fill my house and how
that happens. How unlucky to have a secret, women, how
unlucky it is to have. I have one broken finger
still but am no wife. Check through these windows at my
winter leaves: they are green with life. This pill-by-pill makes one
book and cowers. And so we are at home together, after hours.
Today’s poem previously appeared in ILK journal and appears here today with permission from the poet.
Kat Dixon is the author of the poem-book Temporary Yes (Artistically Declined Press 2012). She lives in Atlanta, where she is currently completing her MA in American Studies. For more information, visit www.isthiskatdixon.com.
Editor’s Note: Today’s poem is rife with mysteries and darkness hidden just beneath its surface. I am fascinated by the two sides of the coin the poet offers—that one is either shadow or wife—and by the notion that a broken finger might be akin to wifely status. The cryptic and Gothic nature of the content of the poem is corroborated by its form, by the sing-song quality that invokes for readers a nursery rhyme—that same marriage of dark and light belonging to the Brothers Grimm and Mother Goose.
I will walk you through the desert, all wolf-
wolf and blood-sandy paws. O smooth rapture
of elegant neck—O underwear hanging
on comic cactus—water-plant, prick-plant
of need. I will lead you through strange danger,
one million nights of apocalyptic lust.
Gone giddy, I’ll lick lasciviously
your Lilith lips, lunge, leap, and lie back down.
What am I saying? All sense has left me.
There’s a zero at the bottom of this pit.
There’s a note of desert music in us.
There’s no need of sense, only our senses.
You will walk me wolfily into new need,
and our oasic images will mirror-mirage.
Now that all the wasps are gone
and the hive is a silent town,
I can sleep out under this elm again.
*
I would like to explain how a house
someone has just been found hanging in
becomes different, as if the rooms widen and gape
yet hold less air. Outside
the gardenias darken in late afternoon
and sag in the rain. The light
landing on their petals is somehow unlike the light that lands
on the dead, but I don’t know why.
And above the white flowers a spider
can continue breathing quietly
and never know the difference.
its web, strung in a dogwood, waits for flies.
*
In 1981 my parents graduated from college.
Everything on the east coast
seemed quieter and heavier and naked.
All through August it was ninety and raining and I think
if my father had then stood perfectly still
before a tunnel full of wet leaves
and looked far into that darkness, he would never speak
again. But what I need to know is
when I’m fifty, will I remember how it felt
to be twenty-three and lonely in Boston?
Will I think of that park bench
and how all summer I counted the lights going out
in the apartments that surrounded me. The Charles
river to my back, dark and blind.
*
And, now, in this kitchen with its white curtains
and sink I watch an ant crawl on the table,
then up the window, and all I can be certain of is that
if I lean close enough to anything and close my eyes,
I can smell the dead. By winter
the snow will quiet everything
and teeth will blacken in their skulls
like mirrors that reflect the night. A night
that nobody owns, where the stars are a voiceless
closet that I could walk into thirty years from now,
folding a hanger carefully, and never walk out of.
And if you were to find me then
and turn and leave without ever looking up,
you would not notice the sky
and the black hole that opened and yawned over everything
as if it is a cold house that even silence
cannot escape.
Today’s poem previously appeared in The Cortland Review and appears here today with permission from the press and the poet.
Justin Belote is currently a MFA candidate at Virginia Commonwealth University. Some of his favorite poets are Larry Levis, Li-Young Lee, Ilya Kaminsky, Virginia Slachman, and Georg Trakl. He has been published in Adroit Journal and The Cortland Review, and has a poem appearing in Meade Magazine shortly.
Editor’s Note: I think if you were to type the word “lyric” into the search box in the upper right corner of this page the results would yield hundreds of entries in this Saturday Poetry Series. Why? Because I love the lyric. I am a defender of the lyric. Viva la lírica! Long live this tradition with tendrilic roots stretching back back to the first musical utterances of man and with gardenias blooming on the lips of poets like Justin Belote.
What do I love about the lyric? “I would like to explain how a house / someone has just been found hanging in / becomes different, as if the rooms widen and gape / yet hold less air. Outside / the gardenias darken in late afternoon / and sag in the rain. The light / landing on their petals is somehow unlike the light that lands / on the dead, but I don’t know why.” Need I say more?
I thought I needed to gesticulate loudly
confusing my blindness with your deafness
no matter how much I danced
my suggestions fell on deaf eyes
blind ears
so I decided I’d sleep in the kitchen
the refrigerator hum my evening lullaby
a soft wooden bed
my milk bottle filled with beer
empty of beer
awake to the sound of my inner voice
and the sting of cold sweat on hot skin
the torture of tap water dripping
down my cardboard throat
running to catch up to something
I just can’t place my finger on
a boat that never reaches port
a plane I should be on
afraid
brakes that don’t seem to work
a dark ominous room
confused
and I wander outside and listen
to the harmony of dissonance
to the reason of chaos
the silence of sound
and nature
nature
not much to qualify there
and I come to realize
darkness flows on the inside
not the outside
like a molten river under rock
insipid
adding to the hardness up above
but laughter
laughter boils to the surface
along with happiness
but only
only if you’re fast enough to catch
the sly fucker
He leaned against the porcelain sink
while I reached for him in the dark,
one hand on the cruddy tile wall, the other
at the root of it. A novice, I didn’t fall to my knees
as I had been told it was done, but instead
bended over at the hip, marionette puppet
with her jaw agape. I don’t remember asking myself
if I had wanted to do it—choice was not a language
my mouth had learned, but still I took him in
again and again. Took in everything
I itched to become, raced to the tower
of some blazing city, curled myself
around its lighthouses, morphed
like a strange creature keeping itself alive.
Then suddenly—
taste of copper, salty tip
blooming on my tongue,
alchemy of sweat and spit.
I took and took, labored
over what was broken, loved
what had been cast aside.
And in the taking,
there was reparation,
the shards of glass
finding each other
after the breaking.
HURRICANE IRENE
1.
I wake the morning of, run my hands
over the still water of my lover’s skin.
He tells me the story of how when he was a child
in the Philippines, the monsoon pulled him into the air
by his feet, lifted his miniature frame like a paper bird.
All I can do is turn into him, wonder
if the weight of my own body is enough to hold him.
But I am older now, and understand that gravity, not burden,
is necessary to love. Instead, I place wooden beads around his neck,
kiss his temple, send him out into the storm.
2.
All night the wind is a wolf.
The tree outside my window
knocks three times, scrapes her fingers
on the glass and waits. Come morning,
the stagnant air hovers like a fly stopped
above grass. The end or the eye of the storm?
It’s all relative they say.
3.
Irene, you left sixteen inches of water in my father’s wood shop, making him leave my mother alone with you while he went to pump the basement dry, caress the machines back to life and I imagine that instead of water, the basement is filled with all the whiskey and beer he has ever drunk in his life, and he is standing there waist-high in it, pumping the liquid onto the street, pumping for his life until there is nothing left but the machines, into which he places the engines he had removed the night before and they are humming again, and he is sawing wood and building new things, and the chips are flying and he is covered in sawdust and he can’t build fast enough, he can’t keep up with this newly found hunger to create which is now driving him and there is no more whiskey and there is only my father, his machines, his humming.
4.
The day after the storm mother calls
three times in one hour. When I finally answer,
her voice is an old 45 crackling before the next song. Last night the pots and pans fell to the ground, she says.
Your father slept through the whole thing.
Today’s poems appear here with permission from the poet.
Sabrina Hayeem-Ladani: A native New Yorker, Sabrina Hayeem-Ladani has been a poet and performer for more than 15 years. She was an invited author at the Calabash International Literary Festival in Jamaica and is a former member of the louderARTS Project. Her work was published in the anthology, Parse (FriendlyFire Press), and she was most recently published in the anthology So Much Things To Say: One Hundred Poems of Calabash (Akashic Books). Sabrina is an original member of the Hot Poets Collective, a group of diverse poets who have been writing and performing together since April 2011. They recently published their first collection, Of Fire, Of Iron.
Editor’s Note: In reading Sabrina Hayeem-Ladani’s poems I am reminded of the work of Ocean Vuong, one of my favorite poets of all time. And it is no wonder; these two are both graduates of louderARTS, a force to be reckoned with and an endeavor that has gifted us with some of the most talented poets of our day.
Sabrina Hayeem-Ladani’s poetry takes my breath away. Not with a soft exhale, but with a force that is at once violent and blooming. Her grip is as solid on the lyric as on the sexual and the narrative, and she maneuvers effortlessly between these realms with the skill of a true artist. This innate talent is coupled with moments where finely-tuned language and imagery exist as pure delight for the reader: “choice was not a language / my mouth had learned;” “But I am older now, and understand that gravity, not burden, / is necessary to love.”
Editors note: This interview took place at a secret location on York Street in San Francisco during 2005.
Q: Let’s start off with an easy one – how would you describe your sexuality and the sexuality of your ideal lover?
A: I think I’m mostly gay but act straight when I need to. I sometimes think my tags are the sexiest things on Earth. As for an ideal lover, I have one, Lydia Fong.
Q: Many octogenarians have tips for how to stay young as they get older – so a related question – how do you maintain street credibility in the midst of your success?
A: Um…I try to surround myself with kids that are making a lot of noise on the streets. Also I lost my street credibility about 15 years ago so credibility and respect are both concepts that have become somewhat foreign. I’m a bit weary of the idea and preconceptions of success. I mean a etch tag on a Nordstrom window has a certain feeling of achievement and success also.
Q: Most artists return to familiar images or signature elements in their work as they go from one work of art to another. Are you comfortable with that or do you try to unlearn aspects of your style that have become safe for you?
A: This is a bit tricky. I think a person can develop a style that people become familiar with and can recognize at 65 mps on the freeway. In a gallery setting it becomes a bit more safe and controlled. I have been in a rut for sometime with certain images, but have buried others. I am fascinated right now removing images altogether.
Q: Do you think success in the art world is accidental like getting hit by lightening – or is it based on talent or something else? What advice do you give to young artists trying to find their way in galleries and on the street?
A: I’m uncomfortable with this society’s idea of success. Look at commercial radio or what I’ve heard is successful television. If that is what is success I want nothing to do with it. I believe it is a bit accidental and luck. I’m not quite comfortable with the notion of doing graffiti or street art or whatever it’s called for two months then go marching into the galleries, trumpeting success. Like I mentioned before, success is defined by the individual not by the art world or gallerist. How do you define success? As for the younger generation, I would say build with a group of friends a world that no one has ever seen then destroy it.
Q: Do you care what young people think of your work? Do you want to stay connected with or relevant to the next generation of graffiti writers?
A: Yes, this is very important to me what young people think. At the same time I would like a 65 year old to understand and appreciate my work also. The next generation of kids doing graffiti and whatever should make work that confuses and upsets the older generation of writers. I applaud the outcast in the subculture, stirring the pot of crap and making the elder generation uncomfortable.
Q: When do you know a work of art is finished? Have you ever looked at a piece you did years ago and wished you could do more on it?
A: Finished is when its smoldering in a pile of embers. I myself have trouble with finishing. It can be ten minutes before an opening and then I will understand the meaning of finished. I have many pieces from the past that I would buy back and burn to the ground – whereas there’re many things on the street that I wish were still running. I recently had the opportunity to rework some pieces I did from the mid nineties, that belong to the SFMOMA. It had so many pieces that needed reworking. I would sneak pieces into my bag at night and returned them the next day finished. Until we meet again.
Q: Does the role of the artist change during wartime?
A: I’m not sure what wartime means anymore. Most of my life we, or our country, has been involved in some covert activities and meddling in other countries. I was in high school during Reganomics. Wartime is constant as far as I know it. And rocks have been thrown as long as I can remember.
Q: Does your daughter Asha influence your work? Do you ever watch her draw? Take ideas from her?
A: Yes. She pops and deflates the bubbles and complexities of both the art world and life. The eye and hand are at the purist they will ever be in both directness and complexity. Kids are fantastic for creative blocks.
Q: How do you think you’ll respond when your teenage daughter comes home in police custody after crushing the city – in the way you have?
A: Okay, this will come up. I can only imagine the political landscape at that point, but I hope she will be on our team. If not, she will need to post her own bail. Ray Fong Bail Bonds will certainly be used.
Q: Hey, maybe you’ll finally meet Lydia as a result!
A: I’m already married to her, Peggy Honeywell, and Clare Rojas.
Q: One final question, what will we do after the state is smashed?
A: We will swim in our clean ocean and drink water from our unpolluted streams – then crush the non-State, Matt. Smash the system!
As It Ought To Be 