Genericide

"The process by which a brand name comes to refer to any product or service of its kind" (wikipedia)

escalator, koozie, onesie, taser, thermos, zamboni . . .

Moreover, by cognate antonomasia,

a proper name may come to represent a class of thing, e.g.,

 "Nero" Lucius Ahenobarbus

“Führer” Adolf Hitler (b. Schicklgruber)

“Duce”  Benito Mussolini

“Stalin”  Joseph Dzhugashvili

"Pol Pot" Saloth Sâr

have all become common nicknames for atrocity.

History’s never kind to such analogy

—it for obvious reasons cannot be.

Ordering obedience in their day,

they gave their names to help define

humanity's horror market's wicked line,

and so, for all eternity, they're necessarily damned—poor swine!

Who’s up there on the block right now

to serve us in this very special way?

Some fine specimens from the hopper

are just about to leap into the chopper.

Having foresworn and sacrificed free will,

their given names shall from now on be swill.

The road to hell is paved with bad intentions,

hoping, against hope, for special mentions.

Monday, february 3, 2025

Free Will

Free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man.—Flannery O’Connor

Freedom is always the freedom of those who think otherwise [der Andersdenkenden].—Rosa Luxemburg

Hiking for a hundred millennia

An endless trail, how do we know

What’s true? A snake (or politician) lurks

Behind each equivocating reason;

Those bright berries might be poison,

Intruders face a hunting leopard there.

“We go by signs that change,” said Running Bear.

“Only doubters in the end get to go on,

Who every instant enquire of themselves:

'Might I—might that—not, perhaps, be wrong?'”

Other thinking’s intuition’s alpenstock;

Doubting everything's the gods' physician.

Those who don’t are unwitting shills

Who march to imbecilic wills,

Their spirits too malcontent to survive.

Free will exists within the grumbling hive.

You have to want it, though, to win on through.

Those who reject it—all so sure they know—

Are flotsam in the fleecing current’s flow,

Or jetsam fleeing from a life’s boo-hoo.

Sunday, February 2, 2025

Play It as It Lays: A Life in Pictures

So long as machines puzzle—and men can be,

So long lives that; which that makes sense to me.

—"The Fourth Bridge, or, AI" (2021)*

Her name's not really “Diana Lynn.”

Born Dolores Eartha Loehr on July 5, 1926,

Paramount sensibly rechristened her.

Seen first in immortal Billy Wilder’s

The Major and the Minor—it's fluff—

by me, and then as "Emmy Kockenlocker"

In Preston Sturges’ Miracle of Morgan’s Creek—comic genius—

She gets to be female lead in Bedtime for Bonzo. Finally, in 1971, before filming of Didion's Play It as It Lays starts,

She has a stroke, hangs up her hat, and dies.

I seek here but to memorialize

this heavenly creature

Who passed before my eyes,

and then was by me seen no more.

These few reports of her life in pictures

Make about as much sense in poetry

as my own being in cockamamie history.

It’s far too late at night, I fear.

*https://www.newenglishreview.org/articles/small-things-remind-me-i-am-mad-and-the-fourth-bridge-or-ai/