letters to politicians
2005-04-03— Posted by: allegra
I have now forwarded the letter shown previously to the editors of the Sun and Province, and to 20 MLA’s including my own local one. I will be judicious about posting any responses; I am trying to establish dialogue, not demonstrate something about politicians and newspaper editors that most of us already knew.
Oh, by the way…. if any of the constituency office staff delegated to deal with my letter are smart enough to find this website (which is not easy to find because nobody can spell my name and I don’t do the live link thing) be advised that I only get 3K hits a month to this site, so you can cheerfully ignore me – media wise, I don’t even rate as a drunken heckler. And besides. I’m not left wing, I’m actually an anarchist or I CALL myself an anarchist, so I’m even lamer, politically, than those NDP warhorses you’re so bored with. I must state publicly, however, that my religious beliefs prevent me from being personally violent unless you actually hit me first. That means, essentially, that I don’t care about your spoken politics. I care a lot more about what you do. (It also means that other people who call themselves anarchists disown me, because I don’t have the chops to perform direct action. Give me a break kids, I’m 46 and my hip hurts! But I’ll hide you while the cops are looking for you, so I have my uses.) And I will cut immense amounts of slack for a politician, any politician, no matter his or her party, who gives me a response in a human voice, as per the Cluetrain Manifesto, quoted earlier in this blog. So dear constituency assistant, congratulations! I send you a big hug and hope you’re giggling to yourself, now that you’ve found my belated Easter Egg.
I light a candle for John Paul II. I really wish he’d been a little easier on the birth control issue (and I would have forgiven him, teeth gnashing, on both the ordination of women and homosexuality had he lightened up about population control) but he made a good death, and I have to grant him that.
Paul’s off at church. Good on him! I’m going to finish up here and start cooking for Rob and Liz.
FDR quotes
2005-04-03— Posted by: allegra
Dear (politician, newspaper editor, religious leader, business leader):
The world is running out of cheap oil, and this will trigger events that require a measured response, rather than whining or partisan posturing. What are you, personally and politically, doing about the end of cheap oil?
Sincerely, me.
You know, I was thinking I should write a goddamned diatribe, but I can’t. The facts are now plain. I’m leaving out climate change and environmental destruction and all the other things I could throw into a letter, as that would just be me touching myself inappropriately in the hope of getting off (so to speak) some gonzo shots. It’s the oil that is going to break us… the question is, how badly, and at one point are the politicians gonna think about Franklin Roosevelt and Mike Pearson instead of Jeb Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger?
Which reminds me. Somehow – books are like this – I inherited a history book called Pageant of Europe and I bought, at the amazing Renaissance Books, one of the best used book stores in the known universe, a book called Light from Many Lamps. Let me excerpt in large part from these books
These, quoted from Lillian Eichler Watson’s Light from Many Lamps, are the last words FDR wrote for public utterance. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage the next day. Think ye o readers of a day when men were elected President who actually *could* think and write like this.
“Let me assure you that my hand is the steadier for the work that is to be done, that I move more firmly into the task, knowing that you – millions and millions of you – are joined with me in the resolve to make this work endure.
The work, my friends, is peace; more than an end to this war – an end to the beginnings of all wars; yes, an end, forever, to this impractical, unrealistic settlement of the differences between governments by the mass killings of peoples.
Today as we move against the terrible scourge of war, as we go forward toward the greatest contribution that any generation of human beings can make in this world – the contribution of lasting peace – I ask you to keep up your faith. I measure the sound, solid achievement that can be made at this time by the straight edge of your own confidence and your resolve. And to you, and to all Americans who dedicate themselves with us to the making of an abiding peace, I say:
The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today. Let us move forward with strong and active faith.”
The passage in quotes is taken from Pageant of Europe. After asking Congress to agree to send munitions and material to the democracies fighting Hitler, on January 6, 1941, this is part of what FDR said, “In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.
The first is freedom of speech and expression everywhere in the world.
The second is freedom of every person to worship God in (his) own way everywhere in the world.
The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants everywhere in the world.
The fourth is freedom from fear – which, translated into world terms, means a world wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbour – anywhere in the world.
That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.”
Setting aside the terrible irony inherent in some of his words, doesn’t it sound wonderful? You’d think he had actually read the Constitution and the Bible and decided to try to apply them in real life! <*?Anyway, I’m off to fax this letter to the unsuspecting opinion makers and politicians of the GVRD. May Cthulhu have mercy on all of us.
Thunder of God
2005-04-03— Posted by: allegra
It was very strange but fitting that the Pope died the same day I went to Chor Leoni’s Thunder of God concert. The Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring that they sang was dedicated to his memory. The organ at Christchurch Cathedral is awesome but new, and so a little ‘buggy’. But it was still a great concert. I kept thinking that both of my parents would have enjoyed it tremendously.
Calling Emperor Norton
2005-04-03— Posted by: allegra
By virtue of the power invested in me, with the assistance of the moon and a bad tempered mule, I issue a Proclamation Of Things That Shall Cease To Exist.
Ordnance larger than 50 calibre.
Disney retail stores.
Bill Gates, except as a legend to scare children with.
My arrhythmias.
People who spam indiscriminately.
Bedside clocks with alarms.
Bad Shakespearean ecktors.
People who think they are as witty as John Cleese, but aren’t.
Indigestion.
Starving children.
Big hair. I mean ARTIFICIAL big hair.
Duly witnessed by a dust mote exhaled by Caesar as he expired, I remain Dowager Empress Allegra, channeling my spiritual ancestor, Emperor Norton.