Poet Laureate Ada Limon

Below is the front cover of the latest issue of The American Dissident, #45, published/distributed in May 2023.  Per usual, I sent it to those targeted in the sketch.   Normally, silence is golden for those (cogs of the establishment) who hate debate (i.e., democracy).  Surprisingly, I received one response, though it was not an intelligent one.  For the brief correspondence, see below.

.............................................................................

...............................................................................

May 13, 2023, 7:05 AM

To Rigoberto Gonzalez,

Attached is a satirical aquarelle front cover depicting you and a few others.  Why not expose your students to it?  Hell, if you did that you wouldn't be a typical academic hack...

Au plaisir,

G. Tod Slone (PhD—Université de Nantes, FR), aka P. Maudit, Founding Editor (1998)

The American Dissident, a 501c3 Nonprofit Journal of Literature, Democracy, and Dissidence

www.theamericandissident.org

wwwtheamericandissidentorg.blogspot.com

todslone@hotmail.com

217 Commerce Rd.

Barnstable, MA 02630

May 23, 2023, 3:43 PM

Sorry it’s taken me a bit to respond. I’m on leave. Anyway, where can I get a good print of this? I’d frame it and hang it in my office. 

Regards,

Rigoberto

Rigoberto González [rigonzal@newark.rutgers.edu]

Distinguished Professor of English

Director, Rutgers-Newark MFA Program in Creative Writing

43 Bleeker St.

Newark, NJ 07102

May 25, 2023, 7:50 PM

Hola Rigoberto,

Thanks for the response.  It is extremely rare for a professor to respond to my criticism.  That has been my decades-long experience.  Now, I have to wonder if you're joking, And if you're not, then perhaps you did not understand the aquarelle image.  

Au plaisir, 

G. Tod

[No further response]

Richard Blanco

The cartoon below was sketched in 2013.  I publish it now because Director Lauren Wolk (i.e., Woke) of the Cultural Center of Cape Cod highlighted Blanco for National Poetry Month.  Rather highlight a Woke Cuban immigrant, than a rare critical poet who dares criticize the political/cultural machine...

.................................................................................................

...................................................................................................................

From: George Slone

Sent: Wednesday, April 28, 2021 1:53 PM

To: lwolk@cultural-center.org <lwolk@cultural-center.org>

Cc: bruce childs <bruciea@yahoo.com>; Garry Goude <GarryGoude@mail.com>

Subject: Is silence golden on ole Cape Cod?

 

To Dir. Lauren Wolk, Cultural Center of Cape Cod:

Thanks to you, I just posted the Richard Blanco cartoon I sketched in 2013:  wwwtheamericandissidentorg.blogspot.com/2021/04/richard-blanco.html.  Are you capable of independent thinking?  If so, check it out and why not allow me, a local Cape Cod artist/poet, to exhibit at your Center some of my highly critical poems, cartoons, and aquarelles, regarding the other side, the dark side, of the Cape Cod art/poetry scene?  If not, as I suspect, then you are just another cultural apparatchik… just what Cape Cod needs.  

 

Donald Hall Poet Laureate

The cartoon below was sketched in 2018 after Donald Hall died.   

.................................................................................................

Marjorie Pritchard

Molly Norris

Dave Granlund

 

 

Dorianne Laux

 

Hi Dorianne,
You are the subject of my new blog post: http://wwwtheamericandissidentorg.blogspot.com/2012/11/dorianne-laux.html. Feel free to comment, though I expect you won't. Poets tend to scorn vigorous debate, cornerstone of democracy. 

PC Narrative vs. Facts

Already the Trayvon issue seems to have become old news.  No matter.  The above cartoon will add to the public record.  In Massachusetts, we now have PC-candidate Elizabeth Warren running for governor and claiming native-American heritage, though no proof of the assertion has been produced (a la the questionable Obama birth certificate)... and so what?!  Who gives a goddamn what color she is or isn't.  Where is the wisdom from our politicos?  In the PC world, WHITE is bad.  If you're WHITE, don't talk about it.  Or better yet stress that your great-great-great-great grandfather had black or Indian origins.  Whoopee!  Christ, what a crock of horseshite!  Identity politics has overrun the movement towards EQUALITY.  It has overrun REASON.

hass

It was sad to discover, in Kevin Kiley’s “Occupy Someone Else” article, which recently appeared in Inside Higher Ed (http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/12/09/public-universities-question-why-they-not-lawmakers-are-protesters-target), that the Occupy Cal and other Occupy university and college movements were apparently nothing more than protests about MONEY.  It was sad to note Kiley didn’t even evoke or think about that low-point in academe.   Might it be cocoon living—far from the edge—that blinds so? 

Nevertheless, perhaps I shouldn’t have been at all surprised by the Occupy Cal and other university protests over tuition-rate increases,  since most citizens—students and professors certainly included—seem only willing to stand up (albeit in herd formation) when MONEY is concerned.   

Regarding the ivory tower, students ought to be protesting instead against the dubious see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil ostrich-head-in-the-sand behavior of the large majority of their sinecured professors, not to mention the rampant intellectual corruption, including the widespread professorial-effort to restrict, if not kill, the First Amendment on public campuses and spread PC multiculti-ideology like a noose round the neck of truth and democracy. 

Mention those free-speech restricting codes, censorship of ideas and comments, and rampant self-censorship to students and most—the very large majority of them—will likely be uninformed and simply uninterested.  The same goes for their professors, at least those not directly involved in instituting the codes of civility and good taste.    

Financial concerns always motivate.  Threats against democracy rarely seem to do that.  Why didn’t students protest against the University of California’s 1.6 million dollar political contribution to the Obama presidential campaign in 2008?  Should a public-university system be manifesting such egregious Democrat Party bias as Obama’s number-one donor?   Indeed, in doing so, how can it possibly argue that it is a partisan of diversity of thought and opinion? 

In fact, if the Occupy movements were to have had any tangible success at all, they should have been focused 100% on Obama.  They should have put the president to the fuckin’ wall, make him either fulfill his hollow campaign promises of transparency, ending corporate lobbying, and war, or make him fully understand that Occupy would then campaign 100% against his re-election.   They should have put him and Pelosi to the wall to get legislation to end corporate bailouts, congressional insider trading, reduce the high salaries of multi-millionaire senators and congressmen, reduce their high pensions and favorable health-care benefits, and otherwise stop the influence the megawealthy Wall Street financiers continue to have on the Democrat-Party regime.