"Indubitably an American in Every Pulse-Beat"

HL Mencken said that about Carl Sandburg. That's not indubitably "un-American," like this politically charged crap going on over the 'bail-out bill.'

It's fall; colors are peaking here, and yesterday the FFM and I traveled farther than we'd expected, a loop that took us into northern Colorado, through the Rawah Wilderness and Cameron Pass and back home via Walden. Autumn is as good a time as any to read Carl Sandburg's poems, especially when a person grows weary of hearing media and political representatives talk about the miserable mistake Congress made in not passing that bill today, that we're not rescuing Wall Street fat cats, but small businesses that need to make payroll and regular people who want to get loans, if it passes.

People, this is going to sound harsh, but let's face it: We take a risk when we invest in stocks, in IRAs; when we take out a loan to buy a house or a car, assuming we'll keep our jobs so we can pay them back. And somebody else always makes money off us. The woman who called Talk of the Nation today and said that there are those who can and those who cannot, and she happens to be one who cannot, is someone who cannot get a loan; she's living from paycheck to paycheck, and she would pretty much like to know why any of those people who don't give her the time of day would expect her to want to give them her tax dollars.

Look, I know it's not as simple as that, but let's get really honest here: if we let the government bail "us all" out this time, we are going to be beholden for a very long time and on many occasions in the future, and as one Congressman I was happy to hear finally said, he would not let his children and grandchildren take on our present problem in the form of financial debt for which they are not responsible... I will say no more...except

Carl Sandburg. A poem, from Cornhuskers (1918):

"Autumn Movement"

I cried over beautiful things knowing no beautiful thing lasts.

The field of cornflower yellow is a scarf at the neck of the copper

sunburned woman, the mother of the year, the taker of seeds.

The northwest wind comes and the yellow is torn full of holes,

new beautiful things come in the first spit of snow on the north-

west wind, and the old things go, not one lasts.