Birdie Sanders

On a day in which the internet was aflame with the National Enquirer's #CruzSexScandal and Donald Trump's relentless misogyny, I got home from work to find this video from today's Bernie Sanders rally in Portland, Oregon.

"I think...I think there may be some symbolism here.
I know it doesn't look like it,
but that bird is really a dove
asking us for world peace. No more wars."
-- Bernie Sanders, 25 March 2016

While Bernie Sanders gives the little avian attention hog a loving smile, I can't help picturing Donald Trump flinching backward and letting one of his bald goons "take care" of the little feathered creature. That, of course, would never happen. Birds are far from stupid. Birds know kind people and they know to give the unkind a wide berth.

This is what a nation looks like before American bombs fall.

Meet some of the people whom John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Dick "Dick" Cheney, Bibi Netanyahu, et al. would like to bomb in our name as soon as possible:

I want to travel to Tehran just to have the psychic parakeet at the 3'50" mark of this video tell me my future.

Mitt Romney's Escalating War on Avian Americans

Debate #1, Denver Colorado, October 3:

"I’m going to stop the subsidy to PBS. I’m going to stop other things. I like PBS. I love Big Bird. I actually like you [Jim Lehrer] too. But I’m not going to -- I’m not going to keep on spending money on things to borrow money from China to pay for it. That’s number one."

Debate #2, Hempstead New York, October 16:

"The administration brought a criminal action against the people drilling up there for oil, this massive new resource we have. And what was the cost? Twenty or 25 birds were killed, and they brought out a migratory bird act to go after them on a criminal basis." 

Which bird(s) will Mitt Romney attack in Debate #3 next Monday?

It makes you wish that famous flock of crows in The Birds would make an appearance.

one more way of looking at a blackbird

I'm not sure if this fourteenth way of looking at a blackbird is a nod to Wallace Stevens' essential poem, but this rumination on blackbirds from Milan Kundera may help you put the Romneys, Santorums, Fox Newsies, and Tea Partiers in their insignificant places. 

"Over the last two hundred years the blackbird has abandoned the woods for the city -- first in Great Britain at the end of the eighteenth century, then several decades later in Paris and the Ruhr Valley. Throughout the  nineteenth century it captured the cities of Europe one after the other. It settled in Vienna and Prague around 1900, and journeyed eastward to Budapest, Belgrade, and Istanbul.

"Globally, the blackbird's invasion of the human world is beyond a doubt more important than the Spaniards' invasion of  South America or the resettlement of Palestine by the Jews. A change in the relationship of one species to another (fish, birds, people, plants) is a change of a higher order than a change in the relationship of one or another group within the species. The earth does not particularly care whether Celts or Slavs inhabited Bohemia, whether Romanians or Russians occupy Bessarabia. If, however, the blackbird goes against nature and follows man to his artificial, anti-natural world, something has changed in the planetary order of things.

"And yet nobody dares to interpret the last two centuries as the history of the blackbird's invasion of the city of man. We are all prisoners of a rigid conception of what is important and what is not. We anxiously follow what we suppose to be important, while what we suppose to be unimportant wages guerrilla warfare behind our backs, transforming the world without our knowledge and eventually mounting a surpise attack on us."

-- The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

(trans. from Czech by M.H. Heim, pp.196-197 of 1981 Penguin pbk)

Go out and watch the chickadees and cardinals by your bird feeders, or the pigeons on your stoop. There are truths there.  (There are probably none in anything you might find on TV tonight, or in a blog).

The new World Trade Center's cool and tall and all, but it doesn't hold a candle to this seagull.

I'm just saying.