I read this poem more than a half century ago in a college literature class. Up to then reading poetry was something I didn’t do. I played sports, drank beer on country roads and cemetaries, and, with a little fire water in my belly, acted stupid at record hops. According to my high school yearbook, my favorite saying was, “I find every book to long.” The only reading material I devoured at the time was Sports Illustrated, but not much else, book wise, found it way onto my night table.

Thankfully, and I’m not sure why, but my attitude shifted upon entering college. Perhaps my step mother who told me in no uncertain terms that if I didn’t succeed in college, I wasn’t coming home, but going straight into the army had something to do with it. In any case, I buckled down upon arrival and became a fixture in the library. In my second semester, I was assigned and read “Augeries of Innocence,” in a literature class. I don’t know how much I understood at the time, but it was hard not to appreciate on some level the beauty, images, and rythmn of Blake’s poem.

Fifty years later, I can’t claim to be any better interpreter of Blake’s poem than I was then. But I still like to read it aloud from time to time.

Like during Blake’s time – early industrializing England – we live in a time of transformation, contradiction, and shakeups in economic, political and cultural life. Life affirming and life denying signs show up in the public square. Morbidity, meaness, and ecological destruction runs up against new visions of freedom and new waves of freedom fighters. What goes unanswered, for now anyway, is which side, which way of life will win out. What fate awaits the Wren?

Anyway, here’s an excerpt:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour
A Robin Red breast in a Cage
Puts all Heaven in a Rage
A Dove house filld with Doves & Pigeons
Shudders Hell thr’ all its regions
A dog starvd at his Masters Gate
Predicts the ruin of the State
A Horse misusd upon the Road
Calls to Heaven for Human blood
Each outcry of the hunted Hare
A fibre from the Brain does tear
A Skylark wounded in the wing
A Cherubim does cease to sing
The Game Cock clipd & armd for fight
Does the Rising Sun affright
Every Wolfs & Lions howl
Raises from Hell a Human Soul
The wild deer, wandring here & there
Keeps the Human Soul from Care
The Lamb misusd breeds Public Strife
And yet forgives the Butchers knife
The Bat that flits at close of Eve
Has left the Brain that wont Believe
The Owl that calls upon the Night
Speaks the Unbelievers fright
He who shall hurt the little Wren
Shall never be belovd by Men
He who the Ox to wrath has movd
Shall never be by Woman lovd
The wanton Boy that kills the Fly
Shall feel the Spiders enmity
He who torments the Chafers Sprite
Weaves a Bower in endless Night
The Catterpiller on the Leaf
Repeats to thee thy Mothers grief
Kill not the Moth nor Butterfly
For the Last Judgment draweth nigh
He who shall train the Horse to War
Shall never pass the Polar Bar

• If the hearings last night made anything crystal clear, it was that Trump was the main organizing agent of the January 6 insurrection. What wasn’t so obvious was the footprint of the Republican Party in this insurrection and its aftermath. But the GOP was anything but onlooker. Some Republicans were active participants in the conspriracy, while others, intially shocked by this singular event in U.S. history, quickly morphed into spin doctors, at once sanitizing what happened, minimizing Trump’s role as the primary agent of insurrections, and eargerly embracing and spreading the Big Lie – a rigged election that Trump actually won.

• I was struck by the extent of the coordination between Trump and his inner circle and the proto fascist groups, like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. In the immediate aftermath of the elections I underestimated the likehood of a violent insurrection to overturn the elections and impose, if not all at once, a white nationalist, anti-democratic, authoritarian political order. Not the first time I was wide of the mark, and probably won’t be the last.

• 20 million people watched the hearings. And according to one report, focus groups of independent voters were disturbed by what they heard and saw. How that will translate in the voting booth this fall is anybody’s guess at this point.

Looking at the primary results of the Democratic Party primaries tells me that its voting constituency is politically more complex and varied than we on the left like to believe. Not everybody is on the same page, leaning left, and ready to cast their ballot for the most radicial candidate. Election messaging, therefore, has to account for this variance – congressional district by district and within each district. This requires that candidates have space to modulate their message to fit their constituency. Full speed ahead, damn the torpedoes, and relentlessly tack left might feel good to some, but as an election strategy it can quickly become a recipe for defeat.

An old radical that I read years ago and still read today insisted that people on the left, if they hope to go beyond performative politics, should derive their tactics – and election message – from “a strictly sober and strictly objective” accounting of where people are at and – more to the point – what kind of candidate they are ready to vote for. Good advice back then and remains so now.

I honor the fallen in wars, but I can’t buy into the claim that their sacrifice preserved our freedom here and extended freedom abroad. That is a pernicious notion that conceals geopolitical, geoeconomic aims of the war makers who are found at the top layers of the state and society, while acculturating the rest of us to support for wars of aggression.

Consider, one example, the wars in the Middle East in this century. Did they defend or expand freedom anywhere? Were lives needlessly lost? I think the answer is obvious. History is replete with other examples.

Looked at the agenda of the upcoming Labor Notes conference and couldn’t help but note that the fall elections and electoral work generally were nowhere to be found. There’s an explanation for this omission, an easy one I would think. In any case, it’s a missed opportunity.