The Gulf in Our Humanity

(Ed Coletti-"Dead Fish - watercolor)

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Practically every environmental problem we have can be traced to our addiction to fossil fuels, primarily oil.
Dennis Weaver

The use of solar energy has not been opened up because the oil industry does not own the sun. (ed, I would add "Yet.")
Ralph Nader

“I think the devil will not have (you) damned, lest the oil that's in (you) should set hell on fire."
William Shakespeare

It is clear our nation is reliant upon big foreign oil. More and more of our imports come from overseas.
George W. Bush

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Ed's June 22d Letter to the Santa Rosa Press Democrat

Mixed Cartoons

EDITOR: It irks me that The Press Democrat feels the need to please everybody, and therefore nobody, by providing conflicting political cartoons. I miss the days of the great newspapers (e.g. the Washington Post) which took a principled stand and stuck to it. But the Press Democrat appears to want to provide something called “balance.” While this concept may be appropriate for reportage, it's not the case with editorial opinion.

So along comes the Monday political cartoon apparently objecting to government spending to save the planet. I conclude that this must be one of those days when the PD steps to the right while figuring that tomorrow, it'll move left. However, the “balance” bromide fails horribly here. What is the balance to saving the planet? Is it “not saving the planet”?

Perhaps I expect too much. But I do long for a newspaper which, in the grand tradition, takes a strong editorial position on issues local, national, international, and, yes, even planetary.

ED COLETTI

Santa Rosa

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I wrote the following poem quite a few years ago, and long before the Gulf horror. Just goes to show you. Oil long has been about the worst thing in our world. What was the name of that recent movie? Oh yeah, "There Will Be Blood."

This Barrel of Oil Addresses
An American Slave

They call me black gold
but like a dollar bill
I ain’t worth a spatter
'cept they use me for something
believe me they do
but I don’t need to tell you
the way they used you
some of them knowing better
were the worst for the knowing
not doing anything about it.

They pretend I’m not even there
while I’m all that’s there and you
your existence made their heaven
planted on the bottom line
with no price for labor
anywhere above,
the difference between us being
you had children,
that alone made it so you couldn’t hide
their misery or your wife’s
or that man place inside you
where you knew hot rage
with nowhere to go.

So me I’m just a metaphor,
something they use and use and take
away from under what was never theirs.
The people who try to live nearest me
who don’t own a dram of me,
they get used the same as you and everyone else
gets used a bit like you, and only you
really know just how very used
the people of this earth are
used and used
and used to being used.

(Published at In Our Own Words (Fall 2008)

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Ed Coletti Paintings at Big Bridge/ Jim Spitzer & the Kids/Community Land Trusts/Churchgoing/

(P1) Poetical

8 Coletti Paintings At Big Bridge

Here's a link to Michael Rothenberg's great international arts forum Big Bridge where Michael has honored me (Ed Coletti) by featuring 8 of my paintings (check them out and be sure that, upon viewing a painting, you then click at the bottom, "Click here to go to next Ed Coletti work").

Shown here is a recent watercolor not at Big Bridge. You may like the title, "Fish With Large Red Mustache, Bird, Worm, and a Tortoise On Roller Skates."

Now here's the link to Ed Coletti's 8 Paintings at Big Bridge



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and also, Check this out!!!

Jim Spitzer On Art and Youth

After you hit the link, then page down to "Jim Spitzer's Philosophy of Art." Here's the LINK


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(P2) Political

Community Land Trusts

San Francisco radical organizer and poet James Tracy is one of the founders of the San Francisco Community Land Trust.

The community land trust movement nationally is most interesting and very promising. James will be reading and speaking about the movement in NYC soon. I urge you to go to the linked (above) website for the full skinny on the trust.

My cousin Bill writes, Community Land Trusts are a great way to attack speculation...the root cause of many of the housing problems in the country. One slogan of the movement is "The land belongs to a vast family of people; some of whom are dead; many of whom are living; and most of whom are yet unborn".

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(P3) Philosophical

Philip Larkin - Church Going

Once I am sure there's nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence.

Move forward, run my hand around the font.
From where I stand, the roof looks almost new -
Cleaned, or restored? Someone would know: I don't.
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce
'Here endeth' much more loudly than I'd meant.
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.

Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches will fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate and pyx in locked cases,
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?

Or, after dark, will dubious women come
To make their children touch a particular stone;
Pick simples for a cancer; or on some
Advised night see walking a dead one?
Power of some sort will go on
In games, in riddles, seemingly at random;
But superstition, like belief, must die,
And what remains when disbelief has gone?
Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,

A shape less recognisable each week,
A purpose more obscure. I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was; one of the crew
That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?
Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique,
Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff
Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?
Or will he be my representative,

Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt
Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground
Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt
So long and equably what since is found
Only in separation - marriage, and birth,
And death, and thoughts of these - for which was built
This special shell? For, though I've no idea
What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here;

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.


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Supreme Court Whackiness/Nice Haiku From Lilliput/ Blake, Sagan & Denner on Mystery/

(P1) Political

Senator Exxon & Soylent Green

So I got to wondering why, since the Supreme Court, in an act of infinite mischief, has ruled that corporations are actually "people," how long will it be before corporations will be legally able, not only to contribute vast fortunes to buy elections and politicians, but also actually run for political office.

My tongue is only loosely planted in cheek when I muse that, in addition to using the fullest measure of their bribery powers for influence, the corporations (not the new ones, smaller by definition. These are precluded from running because a "person" must be at least 25-years-old to run for congress) could eventually run for congress and become "Senator Exxon," "Congressman (or woman) Halliburton," or even "President Goldman-Sachs."

How lovely such a prospect! I mean , if these same people can "reason" that a marriage between two people of the same sex will lead to inter species marriage, is that less far-fetched than the jump from "corporations are people" (sort of like Soylent Green) to "corporations are our elected officials"?

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(P2) Poetical

Nice Haiku

today's weather map

says winter rain is falling

on my father's grave

--from Joe Hutchinson in Lilliput Review


(P3) Philosophical


William Blake, Carl Sagan, and Rychard Denner on the
Mystery That is "Man"

Blake: "The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive....Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of, & enslav'd the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began Priesthood; Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales.

And at length they pronounc'd that the Gods had order'd such things. Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast." (from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell)

Sagan: "God is an invention of Man. So the nature of God is only a shallow mystery. The deep mystery is the nature of Man." (Narei Koburi, late Abbot of the Buddhist Temple of the Shining Dragon in Kyoto - quoted by Sagan & Druyan in Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors)

Denner: "the shallow mystery is the nature of deep" (Rychard Denner as Jampa Dorje, Poet and Tibetan Buddhist monk)

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Google 411/Eve Ensler/Tears/Bauman Paintings/Hey Look Where I Live!/

Google 411 If you're not using this absolutely free telephone directory service, it's got to be because you don't know about it. Google 411 is free, works like a charm and is fun! Just dial 1-800-goog. I suggest adding the number to your speed dial.
I've been using it for well over a year. It even connects you!


(P1) Poetical



Martin Bauman (Santa Rosa, CA)







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(P2) Philosphical

Tears and Bullets

Bullets are actually hardened tears.

(press >) Eve Ensler













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(P3) Political

Hey, Look Where I Live!

Top communities:

Boulder, Colo.

Holland, Mich.

Honolulu, Hawaii

Provo, Utah

Santa Rosa, Calif.

Santa Barbara, Calif.

San Jose, Calif.

Washington, D.C.

Ogden, Utah

Oxnard, Calif.

Source: Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, www.gallup.com

Read more: happiest, healthiest city in U.S. in new Gallup poll

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Hot Air(coletti w'color&crayon)/Wonderful Palindrome/Breast Cancer/Doug Landis/

(P1) Philosophical

A palindrome reads the same backward as forward. This video reads the exact opposite backward as forward. Not only does it read the opposite, the meaning is the exact opposite.

This is only a 1-minute, 44-second video and it is brilliant. Make sure you read as well as listen…forward and backward.

This is a video that was submitted in a contest by a 20-year old. The contest was titled "u @ 50" by AARP. This video won Second Place. When they showed it, everyone in the room was awe-struck and broke into spontaneous applause. So simple and yet so brilliant. Take a minute and watch it. Amazing........

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(P1) Philosophical

Stupidity and Cupidity
Perfectly lamented in cartoon

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(P3) Poetical


Recently I received this message from my friend Ray Taylor in Kentucky. It's certainly worth sharing. There's a link to Doug Landis' site at the end. He paints with his mouth!

Dear Ed,

Happy New Year to you and your lovely wife Joyce!

Should you find it worthy, please feel free to include the following in your very worthy Blog:

"Especially during these trying times, inspiration, as found in the following pencil sketches by Doug Landis, is always appreciated!":



Here's the link to

Doug Landis Mouth Art

Cash & John/Leissring Drawing/Andrew Sullivan: Inch by Inch/Non Sequitor Disses Facebook/Blake's Motto/

P1 Poetical

HAPPY NEW YEAR !!!

That's my son, NYC poet John Coletti low-fiving Cash Wollard! (above)

Jack Leissring Drawing

and a cartoon from Wiley
William Blake's Motto

I must Create a Syetem or be enlav'd by another
Man's.

I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create."

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P2 Political

Barrack Obama Slowly Moving Mountains

Andrew Sullivan, former conservative, first a sample, then go to the full article

No recent president has had such a substantive start since Ronald Reagan. But what Reagan did was to shift the underlying debate in America from what government should do to what it should not. His was a domestic policy of negation and inactivism, and a foreign policy of rearmament and sharp edges. Obama has, in a mirror image of 1981, reoriented America back to a political culture that asks what government will now do: to prevent a banking collapse, to avoid a depression, to insure the working poor, to ameliorate climate change, to tackle long-term debt. The point about health insurance reform, after all, is that it represents a big expansion of government intervention in the lives of the citizenry — and that’s a game-changer from three decades of conservative governance.

Andrew Sullivan: Inch by inch, Barack Obama is moving mountains

Posted using ShareThis

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P3 Philosophical

Philosophy is the no-man's-land between science and theology, exposed to attack from both sides. - Bertrand Russell

I cannot enjoy the present happiness, for anticipating the future; which is about as foolish as the dog who dropt the real bone for its shadow. - Charles Darwin

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Spitzer on Politics/Herbert and Coletti on War/Bizarro on Fear of Flying

P1 Political

(painting by Jim Spitzer)

Another Big Mistake?

From a recent Bob Herbert column:

"I hate war," said Dwight Eisenhower, " as only a soldier who has lived it can, as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity."

He also said, "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed."

(Ed: Yikes, Eisenhower, in today's relative terms, appears to be the "progressive"! This is pretty profound stuff.) Bob Herbert continues:

A recent Bill Moyers program on PBS played audio tapes of Johnson on which he could be heard telling Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, "Not a damn human thinks that 50,000 or 100,000 or 150,000 (American Troops) are going to end that war," McNamara replies, "That's right."

As one of the strongest Obama supporters there is, I personally have one (actually several) huge question(s) for the man who purportedly studies history, "Do you, Mr. President, seriously believe that this escalation in Afghanistan will do anything more than placate unnamed American interests? Do you seriously believe that, in a multi-thousand-year-old tribal culture, you can succeed in creating an effective National Afghan Military? What of those same words about the ARVN in Vietnam? Do you not see even the hint of similarity? I'm kind of lost here. What happened to your guts? What happened to "just say no"?


Here's a link to the full Bob Herbert column.

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P2 Poetical

American Interests – Part II

Oil juice sloppy slick
energy-bartered lives
human bodies exploded
 like dinosaurs
into fossil fuel futures,
 if there is a future to be.

Defense Department
defending what? ——

America?
you? me?
my children?
my father?
all those kids who go to war 
to defend
 liberty
 shores
 nation
 way of life? ——

When was the last war
to defend against invasion?
World War II
after Pearl Harbor?
Afghanistan after
World Trade Center?
Certainly not
“Remember the Maine”
“Remember the Alamo”
Korea
Vietnam
Iraq.

Why then can these                            
our boys and girls                
desire to fight
for American
Interests?
spheres of influence?
oil?
dominoes?
treaties and pacts?                   
war contractors?
college education?
jobs?
manliness?
thrills?
personal honor?
jingoes and jangoes?
Their fellow soldiers?
the kids and families
they’ve killed and wounded?

Who attempts to embrace
these “American Interests”
(young women are trained to fight and die for)
stress the “American” part
as in fighting for America.
They gloss over those troubling
“Interests”
as in America
(n) interests.

Soldiers long to proudly declare
“I’m defending America
and what she stands for.”
So tell me, America,
what do you stand for
right now, this very second?

(ed coletti 2009)

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P3 Philosophical (sort of)

Dad/Zebras/Swaney/Edelen/Health Care

(P1) Poetical

John J. Coletti (August 31, 1914 - September 9, 2009)

link to obituary


So Many Poems
(for John J. Coletti)

My father lies dying
(so many poems)
His chest rises and doesn’t
(so many poems)
then rises again
(This is our moment)
My beacon now phoenix
(so many poems)
I draw him,
soothe him
(so many poems)
I sponge his lips with cranberry
He sucks on it
(honey bee)
So many poems
he’ll never read —
has never read —
so many.

(ed coletti - sept. '09) Please see full 7-Poem Suite For Dad at No Money in Poetry site

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(photo by Katherine Hastings in Kenya 1989)














(poster by Ray Swaney)

(P2) Philosophical

VIRUSES OF THE MIND

by William Edelen
April 26, 2009

A child comes into the world, born an atheist as all babies are, and then is quickly indoctrinated with the religious virus of his or her parents and culture. A child through enculturation absorbs the culture of his, or her people. Enculturation is the process by which an individual learns the patterns of the family;

Children, through innocence, believe everything the parents tell them. They believe in the "tooth fairy"..."Santa Claus"..."The Easter bunny"..."witches changing princes into frogs"..."a man being born of a virgin"..."a man who could rise up from the dead"..."walk on water" and so forth. Children, being gullible, are easy prey for mental infections. It is easy for a child's consciousness to be exploited by a mind virus that is identical in nature to a computer virus or a biological virus.

The helpless young are easy victims of an insidious propaganda regardless of how ignorant or bigoted.

RELIGION IS A CULTURAL ACCIDENT. Children believe what their parents tell them and so follow the religious belief of their parents, or culture. The diety of ones worship is a product of ones culture. Catholic nuns do not have visions of the Buddha...nor do Buddhist nuns have visions of Christ.

Religions come with built in guilt mechanisms if the host starts to question. It is like a computer's warning statements if you try to delete a file needed for its operating system. Fear will usually remain even if guilt is overcome. A woman in my Congregational church in Tacoma, WA had grown up as a Roman Catholic and left to become a Congregationalist. She told me that she often awakened in the night in a cold sweat afraid she was going to be punished for that after death.

In my university class I would tell the students that the only reason they are Christian is due to the fact they were born in the United States to Christian parents. Had they been born in Israel they would be a Jew...in Japan a Buddhist...in India, Hindu...and so forth going through the various religious traditions. I told them they were not Christian because they had studied all the other religions of the world and then chose Christianity. And the only reason they were a Methodist, say, is because they were born into a Methodist home in the United States..They were not Methodist because they had studied all the other Protestant traditions and then chose to be Methodist. . In other words, quite simply and factually, they were only an enculturated Methodist Christian.

Link to Complete Essay

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(P3) Political

After great pain/ Preamble/ Edelen

(P1) Poetical

Emily Dickinson

After great pain a formal feeling comes--
The nerves sit ceremonious like tombs;
The stiff Heart questions--was it He that bore?
And yesterday--or centuries before?

The feet, mechanical, go round
A wooden way
Of ground, or air, or ought,
Regardless grown,
A quartz contentment, like a stone.

This is the hour of lead
Remembered if outlived,
As freezing persons recollect the snow--
First chill, then stupor, then the letting go.

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(P2) Political

Healthcare For All

Preamble to the United States Constitution

We the People of the United States,
in Order to form a more perfect Union,
establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility,
provide for the common defence,
promote the general Welfare, and
secure the Blessings of Liberty
to ourselves and our Posterity,
do ordain and establish
this Constitution
for the United States of America.

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(P3) Philosophical

Reply From William Edelen

My feeling about death is...as they say in Taoism and Zen...there is nothing to fear...at all...it is just a perfectly natural part of the cycles of nature...birth growth and death...everything is a part of that process...even the galaxies...the flowers of a rainy spring...and the grasses of a showery summer...are good...and beautiful...and sufficient even tho they will vanish..."life" so called...is only a brief interlude between two mysteries.which are yet ONE..birth and death are just perfectly natural part of the rhythms of nature...it is ONLY the people of the "book"...the bible...Islam and Judaism and Christianity that have made it a fearful event...so...my friend...I hope this helps a little...with love...Bill

Go here to William Edelen's Website

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