C'mon, Pruitt, there's something we haven't destroyed

Our metric reference for today's

celebration of the new government

is the immortal exhortation from

Rock Hudson to Elizabeth Taylor,

in George Stevens' 1950s romance

on Texas, Giant. Embracing inter-

racial enlightenment during the

Eisenhower Administration, hotly

rejected in the rise of our New

Greatness (hilariously interpret-

ed only this week by David Brooks

as the rebirth of a frontier spir-

it), Stevens' screenplay finds a

newlywed couple disembarking from

their private rail car at their

imperial ranch in Texas, as the

élitist coastal bride graciously

accepts a welcoming bouquet from

a sub-captive Hispanic retainer

of her man-of-the-people husband.

A touch annoyed by this forbidden

interaction, his final demand to

get into the car for the drive to

the house, rings loud and clear -

C'mon, Leslie, it's 50 miles to coffee!

Amidst all the buffoonery of the new government, yet coiled in plain sight in its horror of illegiti-macy, it is easy to over-look its childlike agony. A workmanlike apparatchik was certain to emerge in the maelstrom of hate mongering headliners staffing the regime. He is the former attorney general for fossilized Oklahoma, and he is destroying everything he possibly can, before the nation's day in Court, much less at the polls. 

In all the President's frenzy in

the stealing of myths, is said to

be some cover for his henchmen's

theft of resources. But his clock

is right, twice a day. They are

inextricable. Nice car, not his.

i    Xavier Serrano

ii   Luc Défont Saviard

iii  Kenneth Blom

      Les palmiers

      2013

v    George Stevens

        director

      Giant

      Elizabeth Taylor

      James Dean

      1956

Canada at a hundred and fifty

     Not that anyone's counting
     or anything, but how could
     Canada have whupt our ass,
     in the War of 1812, and be
     younger than you'd expect?

Quiet jetty

  A breakwater, possibly the allusion drawing

  Roosevelt to plant trees to hold the land in

  the first worst hard time, in lieu of pursu-

  ing advice to adopt soils management by sci-

  entific scruples, comes to mind in the pres-

  ent worst hard time, a dust bowl degradation

  of the framework of community, the language.

  The clean white shirt, possibly an allusion

  to a breakwater, is resorted to repeatedly,

  rather, for its porosity, permeability, clar-

  ity, coherency, and transparent antecedents.

  This gives a taste for it, generic as it is.

  I think of soils management these days, as a

  friend was writing to me only the other day,

  to do: you can defend, simply by reading a

  poem. This I hadn't discovered I'd known to

  do, until I glanced again at prose just now,

  so steeped in Scott Fitzgerald, that it had

  held in ground and flowered, another season -

          Snatching her hand, he pulled her along with him,

          and they ran until they reached a side street muf-

          fled and sweet with trees. As they leaned together,

          panting, he put into her hand a bunch of violets,

          and she knew, quite as though she'd seen it done,

          that they were stolen. Summer that is shade and moss

          traced itself in the veins of the violet leaves, and

          she crushed their coolness against her cheek.

Timothy Egan
The Worst Hard Time
  The untold story of those
  who survived the great
  American dust bowl
Houghton Mifflin, 2006©


Truman Capote
Summer Crossing
ca 1959
op. posth.
The Truman Capote
  Literary Trust
Random House, 2006©