Paul Krugman writes that "One has to admit that the Bush people are very good at conquest, military and political. They focus all their attention on an issue; they pull out all the stops; they don't worry about breaking the rules [ ... ] But after the triumph, when it comes time to take care of what they've won, their attention wanders, and things go to pot."
Consider Afghanistan, "the land the Bush administration forgot." According to Krugman, "most of the country is back under the control of fundamentalist warlords; unpaid soldiers and policemen are deserting in droves. (Remember that the Bush administration forgot to include any Afghan aid in its latest budget.)" Afghani President Hamid Karzai's brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, told an Associated Press reporter: "It is like I am seeing the same movie twice and no one is trying to fix the problem. What was promised to Afghans with the collapse of the Taliban was a new life of hope and change. But what was delivered? Nothing. Everyone is back in business."
[ full text follows ]
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April 11, 2003
Conquest and Neglect
By PAUL KRUGMAN
redit where credit is due: the hawks were right to say that a whiff of precision-guided grapeshot would lead to the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime. But even skeptics about this war expected a military victory. ("Of course we'll win on the battlefield, probably with ease" was the opening line of my start-of-the-war column.) Instead, we worried — and continue to worry — about what would follow. As another skeptic, Michael Kinsley of Slate, wrote yesterday: "I do hope to be proven wrong. But it hasn't happened yet."
Why worry? I won't pretend to have any insights into what is going on in the minds of the Iraqi people. But there is a pattern to the Bush administration's way of doing business that does not bode well for the future — a pattern of conquest followed by malign neglect.
One has to admit that the Bush people are very good at conquest, military and political. They focus all their attention on an issue; they pull out all the stops; they don't worry about breaking the rules. This technique brought them victory in the Florida recount battle, the passage of the 2001 tax cut, the fall of Kabul, victory in the midterm elections, and the fall of Baghdad.
But after the triumph, when it comes time to take care of what they've won, their attention wanders, and things go to pot.
The most obvious example is Afghanistan, the land the Bush administration forgot. Most of the country is back under the control of fundamentalist warlords; unpaid soldiers and policemen are deserting in droves. (Remember that the Bush administration forgot to include any Afghan aid in its latest budget.)
President Hamid Karzai's brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, told an Associated Press reporter: "It is like I am seeing the same movie twice and no one is trying to fix the problem. What was promised to Afghans with the collapse of the Taliban was a new life of hope and change. But what was delivered? Nothing. Everyone is back in business."
The same pattern can be seen on the economic front. President Bush won a great triumph in 2001 when he pushed through a huge tax cut — claiming that his plan was just the medicine to cure the economy's ills. What has happened since?
The answer is that things have gradually fallen apart. There was one quarter of good growth, early in 2002 — and there were cries of triumph over the policy's success. After that, however, things went steadily wrong. Growth was too slow to create jobs: at the end of 2002, after a year of "recovery," fewer people were working than at the end of 2001.
And in the last two months the situation has deteriorated rapidly. In February and March the U.S. economy lost 465,000 jobs, bringing the total job loss since the recession officially began in March 2001 to more than two million.
At this point the employment decline has been bigger, and has gone on longer, than the slump that took place during the first Bush administration. And there's no sign of an upturn: new claims for unemployment insurance are still running well above the level that would signal an improving labor market.
Some hope that the economy will turn around of its own accord — that consumers and businesses, relieved that the war has gone well, will begin spending freely. But hope is not a plan. What is the plan?
The answer seems to be that there is no plan for the economy. Instead, the White House is fixated on achieving another political triumph — the elimination of taxes on dividends — that has little or no relevance to our current economic troubles.
I could demonstrate this irrelevance by going through an economic analysis, but here's a telling political clue: USA Today reports that faced with concerns in Congress about budget deficits, the administration has indicated that it is willing to consider a phase-in of its dividend plan.
That is, it's willing to forgo immediate tax cuts — the one piece of its proposal that might actually help the economy now — in order to be able to pass its long-run proposal intact, and hence claim total victory.
The scary thing is that this slash-and-burn approach to governing may continue to work for Mr. Bush's people because the initial triumphs get all the headlines. Unfortunately, the rest of the world has to live in the wreckage they leave behind.
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The US Department of Defense has equipped soldiers with sets of playing cards depicting members of the Iraqi regime. Ostensibly, the cards are used "to identify regime leadership". During the Vietnam War, playing cards called "death cards" (usually the Ace of Spades) had a different purpose. These official and effective tools of psychological warfare were left by GIs on the corpses of slain enemies "as a reminder".
Friends-
Our team in Baghdad just called. It is difficult for us to convey the obvious relief that we experienced upon hearing from them. The phone disconnected three times giving us less than 10 minutes to communicate with them. They told us U.S. soldiers and tanks are on streets and street corners, they seem to be everywhere. Further, they expressed with great emphasis that an excessive amount of bombs have rained down on Baghdad for the last week.
Today as we watch on television the countless hours of reporting on the tangible and symbolic destruction of a Saddam Hussein statue, the number of injured civilians, families losing loved ones, lootings, fires, and fighting increases. Meanwhile our team in Amman attended a press briefing where they heard statements from United Nations humanitarian coordinators. These statements have gone unmentioned in the mainstream media.
Carel de Rooy director of UNICEF in Iraq stated, "Before this conflict took place UNICEF had networks and systems in Iraq that helped achieve our life-saving vaccination campaigns, nutrition campaigns, and work in education. What is horribly worrying about the looting, chaos, and break down of order, is that those systems we counted on may completely collapse," he added that at the beginning of this week, the UNICEF Iraq appeal has received just 1/5th of its funding. "This is obviously and simply not enough. We have an emergency on our hands. Our actions in the next few weeks will determine the physical and mental well-being of a generation of Iraqi children."
A representative from the World Health Organization, speaking to the increasing humanitarian crisis added, "Reports from Baghdad tell of serious civilian casualties and growing pressure on hospitals and health workers. Electricity supplies are erratic, the standby generators are being overworked to the point of collapse; many hospitals are running short of clean, safe water, staff are working extremely long hours in unimaginable circumstances and some vital surgical and medical supplies are running short...in a hospital with a basic infrastructure not functioning, and where doctors and nurses have to perform difficult emergency surgical operations and provide intensive care without access to some of the most basic services and supplies."
Months prior to the "shock and awe" onslaught, UN officials, as well as delegates with the Iraq Peace Team, had warned and protested against the use of such violence due to the realities Iraqis are faced with today, the realities as outlined in the statements above. Adding greater concern to an already desperate situation, UNHCI commented on the inability for UN agencies to enter Iraq at the current time, because of the lack of safety on the roads and access to warehouses and offices.
As our team in Baghdad continues to bear witness, we ask all of you to continue to do the work that has just begun. The urgency for water and relief that is felt by many civilians throughout Iraq is one that must be heard and echoed throughout the world until their needs are met. In the most recent diary from our team in Iraq, Cynthia Banas wrote, "Death, destruction, maiming, and lifetime trauma are the consequences of war. We have witnessed children frightened beyond their years, and have seen their mangled bodies in the hospital. War for them will never end."
-Bitta Mostofi
for Voices in the Wilderness
http://www.nonviolence.org/vitw
April 6th: Iraqi National Congress founder, Ahmed Chalabi is flown into the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriyah by the Pentagon. Chalabi, along with 700 fighters of his "Free Iraqi Forces" are airlifted aboard four massive C17 military transport planes. Chalabi and the INC are Washington favorites to head the new Iraqi government. A photograph is taken of Chalabi and members of his Free Iraqi Forces militia as they arrive in Nasiriyah.
April 9th: One of the "most memorable images of the war" is created when U.S. troops pull down the statue of Saddam Hussein in Fardus Square. Oddly enough... a photograph is taken of a man who bears an uncanny resemblance to one of Chalabi's militia members... he is near Fardus Square to greet the Marines. How many members of the pro-American Free Iraqi Forces were in and around Fardus Square as the statue of Saddam came tumbling down?
The up close action video of the statue being destroyed is broadcast around the world as proof of a massive uprising. Still photos grabbed off of Reuters show a long-shot view of Fardus Square... it's empty save for the U.S. Marines, the International Press, and a small handful of Iraqis. There are no more than 200 people in the square at best. The Marines have the square sealed off and guarded by tanks. A U.S. mechanized vehicle is used to pull the statue of Saddam from it's base. The entire event is being hailed as an equivalent of the Berlin Wall falling... but even a quick glance of the long-shot photo shows something more akin to a carefully constructed media event tailored for the television cameras.
Staged "Liberation" media event? : SF Indymedia
Chris Stroffolino on the challenges that different generations face in staying / being "political"
April Fool’s Day
As we thumb through the world news pages
We feel like we're back in the middle ages
Some Christian soldiers with God on their side
Now have the whole world terrified
Our young men and women in uniform
Was it for this that they were born?
They are beautiful strong and brave
They should be at work or in school not trying to save
The reputations of a few old men
Whose arrogance goes back to when
The federal government took Indian lands away
And put the people on reservations to live out their days
The Indians are a great warrior race
And many still serve in the military today
But once again they have been betrayed
As the U.S. Armed Forces penetrate
The sovereign nation of Iraq
In an unprecedented, unprovoked attack
“The outcome is certain,” the President said
I wonder what put that in his head
No outcome is certain, this we know
Except that the ranks of Al Quaeda will grow
With the pain and suffering of ancient Baghdad
Loss is the lifeblood of jihad
While generals scratch their heads and think
In Basra there’s no fresh water to drink
“We didn’t plan in our war-game drills
for irregular enemies,” General Wallace spills
We thought we’d be welcomed with open arms
As liberators removing the people from harm’s
Way when in fact since 12 years ago
They’ve mourned their war dead and suffered under embargo
Meanwhile where are the WMD’s we went to war about?
We know they exist without a doubt
Why? Because Saddam made ‘em
With stuff he got from Rummy and Reagan
Bush Younger thought he could get carte blanche
From the UN Security Council to launch
An all out attack but this miscalculation
Has led to America’s isolation
Having squandered the whole world’s sympathy
After 9-11 we are now seen on TV
From Kamchatka to Madagascar
As a dangerously out-of-control aggressor
So much for diplomacy, Mr. Powell
Should throw in the proverbial towel
While he still has a shred of credibility
Meanwhile if we love life and liberty
There is something each of us must do
Sooner or later you’ll say so too
War may be short, occupation, long
And bitter and bloody and totally wrong
As we see all this happening before our eyes
It is not too early to organize
To bring our young men and women back
U.S.A. out of Iraq!
--Kit Robinson
*****
Thing
We love our cat
for her self
regard is assiduous
and bland,
for she sits in the small
patch of sun on our rug
and licks her claws
from all angles
and it is far
superior
to "balanced reporting"
though, of course,
it is also
the very same thing.
--Rae Armantrout
Introduction by Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury
Poems by Badr Shakir As-Sayyab, Abdul Wahab al-Bayati, Nazik al-Malaika, Buland al-Haidari, Saadi Youssef, Lamia Abbas Amara, Sargon Boulus, Fadil al-Azzawi, Sadiq al Sayigh, Yusef al Sayigh, Hisham Shafiq, Sinan Antoon, and Mahmoud Darwish.
The poems will be read by Waiel Abdelwahed, Ammiel Alcalay, Haytham Bahoora, Lucas Canino, Rebecca Johnson, Elias Khoury, Khaled Mattawa, Mara Naaman, Tsolin Nalbantian, Manel Saddique, Sherene Seikaly, Shareah Taleghani and Nader Uthman.
Saturday, April 12th, from 3:45 to 5:00 p.m.
Poet's House
72 Spring Street(between B'way & Lafayette)in Manhattan
212-431-7920
For a full schedule of other events with writers from Pakistan, Bosnia, Morocco, Lebanon and many other places (including Etel Adnan, Abdellatif Laabi, Kishwar Naheed, Semezdin Mehmedinovic, Khaled Mattawa, Venus Khoury-Ghata, and many others), check the webiste:
www.poetshouse.org
www.peoplespoetry.org
Readings will be (mostly) in English translation.
Hello !
Poets for Peace invites all poets to read poems against the war this Friday April 11 from 1-3pm on the steps of the main branch of The New York Public Library located at 42nd Street and 5th Avenue (in front of the southmost lion). Look for the poets for Peace banner. Rain or shine.
I am reminded of the importance of this reading upon learning that a friend from Spain living here in New York knew the Spanish journalist who was killed yesterday in Iraq.
The talking heads on t.v. this morning as they gloried in a photo op of a statue about to be tumbled, voiced over that the reporters and journalists who were in the same hotel that was attacked by the tank, had now somehow gotten over the incident or words to that effect. As with much of what we hear these days: I can hardly believe this to be true. That any life: be it one of our peers, friends or enemies, or a stranger is treated so callously, truly sickens me. I hope you can make the time to read with us this Friday even if it's just for a short time.
peace
Nathaniel
poets for Peace
poets against the war
POETRY IS NEWS
Excerpt rom Michael Moore's website:
"The next day -- and in the two weeks since -- the right-wing pundits and radio shock jocks have been calling for my head. So, has all this ruckus hurt me? Have they succeeded in "silencing" me?
Well, take a look at my Oscar "backlash":
-- On the day after I criticized Bush and the war at the Academy Awards, attendance at "Bowling for Columbine" in theaters around the country went up 110% (source: Daily Variety/BoxOfficeMojo.com). The following weekend, the box office gross was up a whopping 73% (Variety). It is now the longest-running consecutive commercial release in America, 26 weeks in a row and still thriving. The number of theaters showing the film since the Oscars has INCREASED, and it has now bested the previous box office record for a documentary by nearly 300%.
-- Yesterday (April 6), "Stupid White Men" shot back to #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. This is my book's 50th week on the list, 8 of them at number one, and this marks its fourth return to the top position, something that virtually never happens."
[This is kind of like detournement meets Robert Smithson / land art.]
By Neela Banerjee
March 27, 2003
The subtleties surrounding the sensitive role oil plays in the Iraqi war may have eluded the United States Army. Deep in some newspaper coverage yesterday was a report that the 101st Airborne Division had named one central Iraq outpost Forward Operating Base Shell and another Forward Operating Base Exxon.
The Pentagon shrugged off concerns that now might not be the time to mention the names of foreign oil companies on Iraqi soil. "The forward bases are normally refueling points they're basically gas stations in the desert," a Pentagon spokeswoman said. "Whether or not we're going to lecture everyone that, due to political sensitivities, you should be careful what you call your gas stations, I don't know if that's something that should be done or would be done."
Neither Royal Dutch/Shell nor Exxon knew about the Iraqi bases. Cerris Tavinor, a spokeswoman for Shell, heard of the base only when a reporter called.
"We don't have anything in Iraq," Ms. Tavinor said. "Clearly they pick their names for whatever they want to use."
Tom Cirigliano, a spokesman for Exxon Mobil, said he first heard of the bases when he read a press review on Wednesday morning, but the mention did not bother the company, the world's largest publicly traded corporation.
"My first reaction when I saw it was this was not a political statement in any way by the men and women of 101st," Mr. Cirigliano said. "I think the 101st was being pretty creative and naming things after what reminds them of home. And I think that's pretty neat."
But others involved in the oil industry say the Pentagon's indifference to the names of the bases was poorly considered. "You have this atmosphere of suspicion and apprehension now, and that's just among your allies," Jan Stuart, head of research for global energy futures at ABN Amro, the Dutch investment bank, said. "And in this atmosphere, you call your own supply effort this. It's mind-boggling the degree of insensitivity. There is little doubt the Americans will win the war, but you have to wonder how people who are so insensitive are going to win the peace."
Erwin Piscator, coiner of the term "epic theater," was a big influence on Brecht, but also a big advocate of turning the theater into a multi-media realm that reflected historical realities. In Germany, we would stage productions whose text was altered based on what had happened that very day in the news. There's very little about him on the web, and I've only found one book about him back when I was trying to do some research, but I didn't try very hard. Anyway, here's a pretty good web page that runs down some of his basic ideas -- the better web pages are in German.
ACTING: development of epic theatre
"[T]he actors have a totally new attitude to the subject of the play they are acting in. The actor can no longer remain indifferent to his role, as he has done up till now, nor can he ‘lose himself' in it, that is, give up all conscious will." (43)
Series of multi-media productions:
"Film projections, the colour organ, the interchange on stage between light and ‘film light,' complete motorization of the stage--through these, and how many other, innovations modern creative science can supplant the ancient peep-show. And what would happen if it were to introduce a wholly new architecture, making the stage a play-machine, a wonder-world, an arena for battling ideas, perhaps even setting the audience on a turntable, dynamically bursting the static illusion of the present stage? I do not say that new techniques will be the saviour of the theatre. I merely say that they can express new dramatic contents by liberating the creative forces of playwrights, directors and actors."(472)
Designed to present complex social and economic forces shaping contemporary society.
"It has probably become clear from what has already been stated that technical innovations were never an end in themselves for me. Any means I have used or am currently in the process of using were designed to elevate the events on the stage onto a historical plane and not just to enlarge the technical range of the stage machinery." (244)
Technology necessary for two reasons:
[1] needed to represent contemporary reality (masses)
[2] needed to achieve function of connecting to audience and forcing them to take sides.
Here's another bit of the poem -- almost done. When I have the whole thing formatted I'll create another entry with the entire thing. I start this with an excerpt since initially it doesn't seem to do much with the site, but clearly the long passages of looking at the sky, revelling in erotic bodily pleasure, etc., play the non-abstracted self against the seemeingly otherworldly machinations of the Congress. The rhetoric still seems too self-consciously Whitmanesque to me
"I lift my voice aloud,
make Mantra of American language now,
I here declare the end of the War!
Ancient days' Illusion!-
and pronounce words beginning my own millennium.
Let the States tremble,
let the Nation weep,
let Congress legislate its own delight
let the President execute his own desire-
this Act done by my own voice,
nameless Mystery- "
...
I'm an old man now, and a lonesome man in Kansas
but not afraid
to speak my lonesomeness in a car,
because not only my lonesomeness
it's Ours, all over America,
O tender fellows-
& spoken lonesomeness is Prophecy
in the moon 100 years ago or in
the middle of Kansas now.
It's not the vast plains mute our mouths
that fill at midnite with ecstatic language
when our trembling bodies hold each other
breast to breast on a mattress-
Not the empty sky that hides
the feeling from our faces
nor our skirts and trousers that conceal
the bodylove emanating in a glow of beloved skin,
white smooth abdomen down to the hair
between our Legs,
It's not a God that bore us that forbid
our Being, like a sunny rose
all red with naked joy
between our eyes & bellies, yes
All we do is for this frightened thing
we call Love, want and lack-
fear that we aren't the one whose body could be
beloved of all the brides of Kansas City,
kissed all over by every boy of Wichita-
O but how many in their solitude weep aloud like me-
On the bridge over Republican River
almost in tears to know
how to speak the right language-
on the frosty broad road
uphill between highway embankments
I search for the language
that is also yours-
almost all our language has been taxed by war.
Radio antennae high tension
wires ranging from Junction City across the plains-
highway cloverleaf sunk in a vast meadow
lanes curving past Abilene
to Denver filled with old
heroes of love-
to Wichita where McClure's mind
burst into animal beauty
drunk, getting laid in a car
in a neon misted street
15 years ago-
to Independence where the old man's still alive
who loosed the bomb that's slaved all human consciousness
and made the body universe a place of fear-
Now, speeding along the empty plain,
no giant demon machine
visible on the horizon
but tiny human trees and wooden houses at the sky's edge
I claim my birthright!
reborn forever as long as Man
in Kansas or other universe-Joy
reborn after the vast sadness of War Gods!
A lone man talking to myself, no house in the brown vastness to hear,
imaging the throng of Selves
that make this nation one body of Prophecy
languaged by Declaration as Pursuit of
Happiness!
I call all Powers of imagination
to my side in this auto to make Prophecy,
all Lords
of human kingdoms to come
Shambu Bharti Baba naked covered with ash
Khaki Baba fat-bellied mad with the dogs
Dehorahava Baba who moans Oh how wounded, How wounded
Sitaram Onkar Das Thakur who commands
give up your desire
Satyananda who raises two thumbs in tranquillity
Kali Pada Guha Roy whose yoga drops before the void
Shivananda who touches the breast and says OM
Srimata Krishnaji of Brindaban who says take for your guru
William Blake the invisible father of English visions
Sri Ramakrishna master of ecstasy eyes
half closed who only cries for his mother
Chaitanya arms upraised singing & dancing his own praise
merciful Chango judging our bodies
Durga-Ma covered with blood
destroyer of battlefield illusions
million-faced Tathagata gone past suffering
Preserver Harekrishna returning in the age of pain
Sacred Heart my Christ acceptable
Allah the Compassionate One
Jaweh Righteous One
all Knowledge-Princes of Earth-man, all
ancient Seraphim of heavenly Desire, Devas, yogis
& holymen I chant to-
Come to my lone presence
into this Vortex named Kansas,
I lift my voice aloud,
make Mantra of American language now,
I here declare the end of the War!
Ancient days' Illusion!-
and pronounce words beginning my own millennium.
Let the States tremble,
let the Nation weep,
let Congress legislate its own delight
let the President execute his own desire-
this Act done by my own voice,
nameless Mystery-
published to my own senses,
blissfully received by my own form
approved with pleasure by my sensations
manifestation of my very thought
accomplished in my own imagination
all realms within my consciousness fulfilled
60 miles from Wichita
near El Dorado,
The Golden One,
in chill earthly mist
houseless brown farmland plains rolling heavenward
in every direction
one midwinter afternoon Sunday called the day of the Lord-
Pure Spring Water gathered in one tower
where Florence is
set on a hill,
stop for tea & gas
[As Charles W., who forwarded this link, writes to me: "i'm sure something similar is going on in this here war...though, as usual, we probably won't know all the details until all the victims are dead and buried. i mean, somebody sure has been working overtime to get 42% of americans to believe that saddam hussein was directly responsible for 9-11 (when, once upon a time, it was only 3% who were that delusional.)"]
Excerpt:
"US Congressman Jimmy Hayes of Louisiana - a conservative Democrat who supported the Gulf War - later estimated that the government of Kuwait funded as many as 20 PR, law and lobby firms in its campaign to mobilize US opinion and force against Hussein. Participating firms included the Rendon Group, which received a retainer of $100,000 per month for media work, and Neill & Co., which received $50,000 per month for lobbying Congress. Sam Zakhem, a former US ambassador to the oil-rich gulf state of Bahrain, funneled $7.7 million in advertising and lobbying dollars through two front groups, the "Coalition for Americans at Risk" and the "Freedom Task Force." The Coalition, which began in the 1980s as a front for the contras in Nicaragua, prepared and placed TV and newspaper ads, and kept a stable of fifty speakers available for pro-war rallies and publicity events.
Hill & Knowlton, then the world's largest PR firm, served as mastermind for the Kuwaiti campaign. Its activities alone would have constituted the largest foreign-funded campaign ever aimed at manipulating American public opinion. By law, the Foreign Agents Registration Act should have exposed this propaganda campaign to the American people, but the Justice Department chose not to enforce it. Nine days after Saddam's army marched into Kuwait, the Emir's government agreed to fund a contract under which Hill & Knowlton would represent "Citizens for a Free Kuwait," a classic PR front group designed to hide the real role of the Kuwaiti government and its collusion with the Bush administration. Over the next six months, the Kuwaiti government channeled $11.9 million dollars to Citizens for a Free Kuwait, whose only other funding totalled $17,861 from 78 individuals. Virtually all of CFK's budget - $10.8 million - went to Hill & Knowlton in the form of fees."
By JULIANNE BASINGER
A Florida legislator has sponsored a bill that would ban state financial aid to college students who are citizens of six nations on the U.S. State Department's list of countries that sponsor terrorism.
State Rep. Dick Kravitz, a Republican from Jacksonville, said on Sunday that in considering how Florida spends its money in a tight economy, he was disturbed by the idea of state funds being used to help educate students who are nonresident aliens from those countries.
"These people do have to go back, and whatever they learn here is going to be used for their country," Mr. Kravitz said. "I felt as though those dollars, which we needed, would be better spent on taxpayers in Florida and their children."
The bill (HB 31), which was placed last Thursday on the Florida Legislature's agenda for consideration, would bar state aid from going to college students from six countries: Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Libya, and North Korea. Cuba, which is also on the State Department's list, was removed from the bill through an amendment.
Florida has a large Cuban population. The state's colleges and universities used $308,717 to provide financial aid to students from countries on the federal list in 2001 and 2002. If passed, the measure sponsored by Mr. Kravitz would go into effect in July.
"We're going to find out if we're going to give them the money to potentially use against us, or if we're going to give it to our kids," he said. But Muslim students in Florida say that the bill unfairly discriminates against them.
"What he's saying is if you're born in Libya or Syria, you're more likely to be a terrorist than anyone else," Hadia Mubarak, president of the Muslim Students Association at Florida State University, told the Associated Press. Mr. Mubarak did not return a telephone message on Sunday seeking further comment.
http://chronicle.com/daily/2003/04/2003040703n.htm
Linguistic Reformulation:
Forthcoming Challenges in a Democratic Occupied Iraq
(Gothic News Service, 5/08) The White House today announced the formal creation of "Lang-Ops," a joint division of State and War Departments with a direct mandate to take charge of the reconstruction of the Arabic language in Occupied Democratic Iraq.
"No, this is not an ethnocentric exercise, nor one of political manipulation," Brad Stevens, the new Lang-Ops Director responded at a news conference to an Arab reporter’s question. "This is all about re-invigorating Gulf Spoken Arabic with old and sound Mediterranean values of trade, commerce and opportunity. Like Iraq’s damaged oil fields and cities, Lang-Ops' most exciting task is to restructure Arabic to take full advantage of new technologies and business models that have fueled the success of western economies. On a most simple level, Lang-Ops will introduce the Arabic version of English words and phrases that will operate as catalytic agents in the goal of integrating Iraqi national aspirations with global economic interests."
When asked if this meant bringing business and other teachers from the United States to work in Iraq’s economic institutes and universities, the Director replied, "Of course. Fortunately our country is currently abundantly filled with former business executives who are entirely advanced in introducing and using the language and tools of potentially prosperous economies. Power Point, Excel – for examples - and other computer programs are already being revamped for bilingual Arabic and English classes - both on-site in Iraq and world wide on-line. Conceptually our Lang-Ops staff members have already been very busy creating correspondent Arabic language terms to stimulate an aggressive sense and use of concepts for "brand identity", "traction", "critical mass", and other terms for multiple micro-market global domination. You have to realize Iraq is a country that’s been more or less out of it for over thirty years."
"What about the language of democracy – values of free speech, consent of the governed, public assembling, voting, honoring foreign agreements, religious freedom, those kinds of things."
"First and foremost is to introduce the English-Arab terms for purposes of Iraq economic stimulus. This process is not much different than reconstructing an oil well and instituting a new management to control its world financial and delivery operations. Without the stimulus of a rebuilt Arabic in a way that represents economic opportunity for the liberated, old-fashioned democratic values are not worth a dime. In other words an Occupied Iraq first requires linguistic reformulation in a manner forceful enough to assure integration with our world’s economic interests. Success there will permit the evolution of democratic Arabic language values. I think you will also find our linguistic success will lead to the mitigation of resistance from certain religious and other counter-democratic forces."
The Lang-Ops Director went on to say that both State and War Departments are actively recruiting its first what will be called "Business Language Mentors (BLMs)" in both Silicon Valley and its counter-part in Massachusetts. "The executive talent pool in the High-Tech sector is particularly deep right now," the Director said without explanation. "We will have no trouble filling our Iraq Mentor Sites. Lang-Ops looks forward to an aggressive Arabic language reconstruction program."
Director Stevens refused to respond to a question as nothing but "offensive" when another Arab reporter asked whether or not Lang-Ops was part of an over-all State and War Department strategy to "re-cradle Arab civilization, including the origins of the Muslim faith."
The following is a response to Bruce “Peace Bridge Chronicler” Jackson’s article, “That pissant Ralph Nader is coming to Buffalo” in Jackson’s own Buffalo Report. On the basis of the likely scenario that the war in Iraq will ultimately go well for the Bush regime, I address questions looming for the left in this country, from a “green” perspective—engaging the politics of globalization and local economies. In particular, I critique the characterization of the current administration as a “fascist” regime that only a Democratic White House in 2004 can save us from.
JS
Amidst all the fear and trembling about the new fascism in the US—of which Bruce Jackson’s recent, invidious ad hominem on Ralph Nader is a particularly low instance: “Had, in Florida, Ralph Nader behaved decently or honorably or with a modicum of concern for the fate of this nation, we would not be slaughtering Iraqis right now and American men and women would not be dying in Iraq right now” (Buffalo Report)—I can’t help but note the short-sighted (not to say US-centric and terror-driven) nature of much of the rhetoric.
At issue—and I take it to be an issue that will define the US left in the approach to November, 2004—is whether we would be facing a significantly different scenario had Gore taken the White House. At issue is Nader’s claim that there was “no difference” between Al Gore and GW Bush. At issue is whether GW Bush and September 11 really have marked a radical departure from the order of things under the Clinton administration.
One might try examining the situation from the perspective of the “developing” or “undeveloped” world (while Jackson writes from an era where these are still referred to as "Third World," I'm suggesting he update his discourse). From such a perspective—which I don’t pretend to comprehend sufficiently, only enough to know it differs substantially from that of our own “logged on” cyber-eyries—I’d postulate that the differences are hard to discern.
The indirect genocide which involves uprooting people from their lands and local economies to turn them into driftless refugees or urban ghetto squatters and which was ratified by NAFTA, GATT and a host of other free trade agreements under Clinton (remember Clinton was pushing for the same “fast track” authority our spineless Democrats finally granted Bush?) has, of course, been accelerated by the War on Terror, but it’s a difference of degree rather than kind.
I’m talking about the horrific pace of irreversible deforestation in South America or Indonesia— equivalent to systematically amputating the planet’s lungs; I’m talking about the desertification of the Sahara and the American Midwest; I’m talking about the war on and within bodies everywhere unleashed by a merciless and unaccountable chemical industry (just look at the cancer rate in Tonawanda, or breast cancer rates in general); I’m talking about “usura” lying down between the farmer and her seed, between the bridegroom and his bride* with corporate meddling in and patenting of genetic materials (“terminator” and “roundup-ready” seeds); I’m talking about AIDS decimating one quarter of Africa’s population while pharmaceutical companies sit on the vaccines; I’m talking about mountains of increasingly toxic garbage dumped on the same masses, huddled in the city and borderland slums, evicted from their lands (in order to set McDonald’s beef to pasture, for example) by the very industries producing this waste; I’m talking about the ozone chemical smog that is slowly killing urban dwellers around the world and the acid rain that is destroying boreal forests and poisoning fresh waters; I’m talking about the fossil fuel industry warming our planet until massively populated Bangladesh and other low-lying, impoverished lands are flooded out of memory; I’m talking about the privatization of what waters, arable soil and clean air is left to drink, farm and breathe; I’m talking about the enclosure of the remaining commons, the marketing of basic needs that have till now been considered a fundamental human right.
This is not to deny the further domestic woes visited on the US economy by Bush & Co., nor that Al Gore might have been softer on the environment. However, a closer analysis of Gore’s environmental politics would note that his oft-championed “sustainability” amounts in many respects to a preservation of the status quo and Foucauldian policing of boundaries between developed, developing and undeveloped nations. Dissensions within the Seattle WTO summit over the terms of “sustainability”—masked by the protests publicity—as with more recent disagreements at Doha or at the “Earth Summit” in Johannesburg, underscore tensions brought on by the co-option of environmental rhetoric by corporate interests.
Such cooption is to be expected when corporations are engaged (via “corporate education”) to produce change in environmental policy—and indeed there is much debate within the environmental movement about the extent to which these engagement should be pursued. But any policy which ignores the power and necessity of local economies and ground-up, grassroots initiatives is doomed from the start. Even a cursory read of Earth in the Balance reveals to what extent Gore was mired in top-down Cold War-era, “balance of powers” global-strategic thinking (where global warming replaces atomic weapons as the “mutually assured deterrent”). His inability to engage and adapt the issues supposedly closest to his heart in the course of his political campaign shows up the rigidity of his thinking here.
Certainly Nader in many respects lacks the qualities of a world leader. But what drew voters to this “primo egocentric evildoer” (to quote Jackson) in 2000 was the extent to which he was able and willing to articulate a complex vision, engaging environmental, labor and corporate concerns, where powers at the “bottom” count for as much as powers at the “top.” This vision, by the way, has been articulated over the years by the “anti-globalization” movement and not by Nader himself; note that Nader came to and endorsed the Green Party, not the other way around. I agree that he might have been more explicit about the “smart voting” Green voters were to practice—voting Green in the "safe" states, or “trading” votes with friends in the swing states . . . and there’s no doubt that, together with Gore’s hugely blundering campaign (devoid of any of the above vision) and with extreme right-wing corruption and meddling in the electoral and judicial processes, the Greens helped to deliver us Bush & Co.
But from the global perspective I’ve advocated, it’s easy to see why most foreign observers just laughed at the electoral breakdown of 2000, noting that it only confirmed what they’d seen (and felt the brunt of) for years: a sham Benetton democracy, whose big multicultural land-of-opportunity Wal-Mart success story has been nourished by support for dictatorships and ruthless economic and environmental exploitation around the globe.
To insinuate that Nader “misled” voters or is somehow single-handedly responsible for the current bloodbath in the Middle East is both condescending toward Green voters and viciously invidious toward Nader and the Green Party itself—not to speak of the relative blindness it betrays, with respect to a political landscape that is engendering, around the world and out of the media spotlight, slow but substantial change, in consciousness, ethics and politics. (That this is a change operating at the local, rather than state or federal levels may be what has kept it under the radar of the power-obsessed.) Most Green voters are far more savvy in politics than Jackson’s slur accomodates, and voted “smart” anyway, regardless of whether or not Nader told them to.
If anything, it’s the Democrats who’ve been misled (viz above) in a state of things where “voting” as the extent of political participation can only be considered a charade at best—ever since big money took hold of the process more than a century ago. (I don’t underestimate the important line Democrats hold on the domestic front, with regard to the precarious character of the Judicial Courts. At least they’ve been doing a modicum of their duty here.)
To be fair, one might write off Bruce Jackson’s myopia as an effect of living in the ideological backwaters of Western New York, where the Green Party put on an extremely lackluster showing in 2000 (an embarrassment and a debacle, which the Citizens’ Environmental Coalition’s laughable green hardhat theatre, in spite of this organization’s good work, doesn’t help a bit), and where endless debates about a “Signature” Peace Bridge overshadow much graver environmental concerns (of which the Peace Bridge is a part, but by no means a big part). Governor Pataki’s neglect of New York State’s depleted environmental cleanup “Superfund,” or Mayor Masiello’s shameful mismanagement of the toxic Hickory Woods development in South Buffalo, set far graver economic and health precedents for the region than whether we get a twin span or an Italian designer rainbow bridge. I’m not denying a certain connection between these issues, but I suggest local progressives train their eyes Westward, toward states like New Mexico, Colorado, Oregon or Washington where the politics are also hardly progressive, yet in spite of, or in response to, a heavy-handed Federal presence citizen initiatives have elected Green city council members and state representatives and brought a complex, globally-oriented yet locally-engaged vision to politics.
None of this is to deny the frighteningly fascist look of things on the “homeland” front. But from a wider perspective (which includes not just thinking across the equator but across Main Street as well, about the victims of economic violence within the US borders and our own city limits), one might say to those anti-war protestors who have been investigated, apprehended and detained without charges, and are nursing the bruises of police brutality—“welcome to the developing world.”
The extent to which eyes get opened once it’s one’s own ass on the line (or that of “one’s folk”) shadows these street conflicts with a certain irony not lost on foreign observers. These protests in the US, and this resistance, are necessary and good, and unlike Jackson I certainly don’t want to bring needless dissension or backbiting to an opposition that desperately needs to stay united. But it’s crucial—for this movement to continue and build, through a war that is likely to be a success for the current administration (and not the debacle the opposition vocally dreads and secretly prays for)—that reasons for resistance be articulated on the basis of contemporary complexities, through a vision that is able to make intelligent and practical connections between local and global, indigenous and cosmopolitan, human and nonhuman economies. “Empire,” a term much volleyed about lately, is one I have as many reservations about as “fascism”—as poet and thinker Robert Kocik has advocated, “biocide” is a more accurate label for the current, global corporate-military regime.
To forecast the success of Bush & Co. abroad and naysay a fascist scenario at home, is not defeatist and deluded; rather it is to recognize geopolitical continuities, retain historical memory, and prepare for the long struggle ahead. Such historical memory also tells us that fascism in the US, if it is indeed taking hold, would prognosticate an imminent demise to this tottering giant, and in fact be the best possible thing for the rest of the world: would that we could wish this nation and its sins (viz paragraph five) so swiftly away!
Jackson’s link on Buffalo Report to a recent, excellent Arundhati Roy article is indicative. Jackson writes: “But Iraq, says the Indian novelist in this important essay published the April 2 Guardian, isn't where the really important war is being fought just now. That other war is global, and George Bush brought it on.” This is a patently false representation of Roy’s more sophisticated claims. A glance at her concluding paragraphs suffices:
Arundhati Roy
Wednesday April 2, 2003
The Guardian
“Regardless of what the propaganda machine tells us, these tin-pot dictators are not the greatest threat to the world. The real and pressing danger, the greatest threat of all is the locomotive force that drives the political and economic engine of the US government, currently piloted by George Bush. Bush-bashing is fun, because he makes such an easy, sumptuous target. It's true that he is a dangerous, almost suicidal pilot, but the machine he handles is far more dangerous than the man himself.
Despite the pall of gloom that hangs over us today, I'd like to file a cautious plea for hope: in times of war, one wants one's weakest enemy at the helm of his forces. And President George W Bush is certainly that. Any other even averagely intelligent US president would have probably done the very same things, but would have managed to smoke-up the glass and confuse the opposition. Perhaps even carry the UN with him. Bush's tactless imprudence and his brazen belief that he can run the world with his riot squad, has done the opposite. He has achieved what writers, activists and scholars have striven to achieve for decades. He has exposed the ducts. He has placed on full public view the working parts, the nuts and bolts of the apocalyptic apparatus of the American empire.”
Again and again, I’m told, by this crowd of Democratic Party faithful, that it’s “too soon” for the kind of change I’m advocating. However, even the most conservative assessment of the global environmental predicament (barring that of “skeptical environmentalist” Bjorn Lomborg, our nutso statistician from Denmark) gives humanity ten to twenty years at the outside to reverse the biocidal tide, and predicts catastrophic consequences, if such reversal is not made, within fifty. (Fortunately for our own children and unfortunately for those of the developing and undeveloped world, the brunt of such catastrophe will be borne by the economic “South”). The dire moment may even now be upon us: according to most climate science, our window for reversing catastrophic change just expired. We waited through eight long years of a Democratic administration that threw nothing but fig leaves at the environmental crisis (a few “National Monuments” by Presidential Decree, lip service to the Kyoto “protocol” on global warming—go and read the accord to see what a flawed, token agreement it is, basically a vehicle for liberalizing environmental regulation). Like Roy, I’m tempted to prefer the Bush & Co. frontal assault on the environment, as it has awoken many of us from a certain complacency.
Documentarist Michael Moore, who spends most of his time speaking to and drawing inspiration from the kind of grassroots activism I’ve alluded to, having turned his back on clearly bankrupt “beltway” politics, fuels his courageous and untiring media activism with the same cynical-optimist outlook: “George Bush, your time is up!” Can we honestly expect much from the glorious old “jackass” Democratic party? Didn’t they seal their fate when, with little to no ado, many representatives and most senators delivered up Congressional oversight of civil liberties and war-powers to an all-mighty unelected Executive Branch hell (or heaven)-bent on prosecuting its limitless “War on Terror”? That’s when I was seriously tempted to stop wasting time writing letters to “my” representatives.
No one should pay the price of our awakened consciousness in blood, but the least we can do is not squander that consciousness on the kind of egotistically short-sighted, “electoral politics” rhetoric we’ll be hearing more of in the run-up to November, 2004. To “vote safe now” is to cave into the very “culture of fear” Moore so devastatingly nailed in Bowling for Columbine. When such moderates tell me it’s “too soon,” I like to ask them, bringing all of the evidence to bear: how long do we have to wait before too soon is too late?
Why wait ? Let’s continue now the exposure of corporate crime that began with the Enron scandal, and keep the pressure on; withdraw our dollars from the franchises and invest in local business and grassroots initiatives like CSA (Cooperative Society of America) farms; sign on to cyber-empowered educational cooperatives like Joel Kuzsai’s “Modern Schools” revival— www.factoryschool.org; look into www.bioneers.org for “practical and visionary” solutions ordinary citizens are cooking up to solve the world’s problems now; implement creative rituals to facilitate real dialogue and help build the positive community networks (of production as well as resistance) that are spawning change around the globe. Let’s not wait for elected officials to work miracles for us. (Sure, we can work hard to get the Democrats back into the White House in 2004, but this work should be just the tip of our political iceberg.) Such activism is a potent counter-force to the politics of fear and hate now dominant: “In the U.S. and U.K., the war against Iraq has become a convenient diversion from issues of globalization and the rise in unemployment and economic insecurity. A politics of hate is becoming the indirect support for the failed and failing project of globalization” (Vandana Shiva, ZNet Commentary, “Globalisation And Its Fall Out,” April 05, 2003).
Let me note, in closing, that calling Nader a “pissant” is either undue flattery of this human demagogue or an insult to the hymenopteric order—that diverse society of globally engaged ants which probably do more good for this planet (certainly, representing about 10% of the planet’s biomass, they outnumber humans by an order hard to imagine) than all of human activity combined. Nader at least should be grateful of the compliment.
JS
*“With Usura . . .
is thy bread dry as paper,
with no mountain wheat, no strong flour
. . .
wool comes not to market
sheep bringeth no gain with usura
. . .
It has brought palsy to bed, lyeth
Between the young bride and her bridegroom”
Ezra Pound, Canto XLV
“Without doubt it is we, the poets and thinkers, who are to blame for this bloodbath and who have to atone for it.” (Dadaist artist Hugo Ball)
I call it the OTHER FRONT UNDERFOOT.
I’d like to forgo my opinion of this possible war…to take a position relative to impossible war.
(By not having stopped war from arriving at this brink, poets have already failed. Have long failed. What recourse within ourselves and our materials does this compel?
(Now that the potential problem with stopping the war is stopping stopping war.)
At this point, to protest war is reaction and compulsory. I’d call it peace conscription. A citizen’s as distinct from a poet’s action.
To instinctively stay within an efficacy particular to the materials of poetry. The language we’d be fighting for peace for.
We don’t live in a world where the use of force is unviable. It’s chronic. It’s called the war to end war over and over. It may one day be terminal--the war that ends all. But it can’t be made acute—like a fever that breaks and takes away the sickness from then on. It’s a terminal condition kept chronic. We can’t just, as a species, get it over with.
Recovering but not cured. Getting hungry again. Back in the saddle. War is likely. It’s back in vogue. Entertainable. (If not this war then some other war.)
Is it a law of nature or just a rule of thumb?
Threat of the use of force in order to empower negotiation, is already war. Poetic failure--specifically because the language of threat is ‘language’. Once the language of threat is unleashed, no poetic operation can retroactively unengender it.
Once reactionary, it may even be tempting to react further—to subvert aversion—come out in favor of war, in the sense of sobering oneself with reality in an unbiased, disinterested sense—or exuberantly admitting war as vital, life renewing, as creation’s ritual creativity. (Not pro-war in the narrow, passionate sense of having belligerently taken one’s own side—which has nothing to do with artwork.)
As Long As The Body About To Be Blown Up Is Not YOU Or YOURS? Too late for artwork to take effect. Artwork not a viable last minute strategy.
What would poets place in the world to bring us to the point where we could even find out if it’s possible to live without force? Apparently not poetry.
What poem?
Looking as little like a poem as unlike a weapon.
As little like a poem as the language of war it would apply in order to be preemptive.
Preempt was a poet’s word (and is now a Wolfowitz word)—a word poetry could have given to the populace so that it would be unavailable for military use. Preempt is another word for portend or prophesize—to materialize, which is to poeticize.
Fighting against has never yet worked. What I fight against is (explicitly) not that which I fight for. Nor is fighting for what I fight for. It gets called ‘lose/lose’. Mutual exclusions.
To fight against is to fight for that which to fight against denies.
To fight for, in the fighting against, is to forfeit that which is fought for.
So, just let roll over me that which would deny the positive goods living without war would be a matter of?
The positive goods, if provided, would disallow war as well as its verge. THAT POEM. (How many and of what sort would it take--while conscientiously, arduously, all-out-resourcefully undertaking it—while at peace (as the Orient goes to the doctor in times of health—the crisis, calling up our total reserves, is all’s well)--to write, that poem, our rewiring?)
(The Surgeons General admits a great deal is known about sickness while very little is known about health. How many pages went into Paradise Lost, and how few could be provided for Paradise Regained? What about us necessarily dims at the brink of peace?)
Fighting against, at most, waylays the occasion (the occasion poetry has in fact forfeited) to implant the moral and vital equivalent de-necessitating that which is fought against. NOT THAT POEM.
(These words are made of my father’s death. He does not have to die on a battlefield to die in glory or fill me with courage. It would simply be misplaced, misleading, malicious and maddening to believe so in even the slightest sense.)
Should poets usurp the means for war—i.e. reason, righteousness, rage, results; knowing that each mental mode is at base a writing genre. To fight against fighting, are we repelled by warlike languages while these very languages have in fact been taken from us in order to wage war—languages which now seem nonnative to poetry and naturalized to power and aggression? All uses of the language belong to poetry because the proper object of poetry is all of the language—all of the languages within the language--because language is a property of poetry.
If not, we can no more than plant geraniums in helmets evermore. Way too post pre emptive. Swords to plowshares re-belligerent.
With our backs to the wall, what’s called Comic Warfare is viable. Comic Warfare is the appropriation of the terms of war toward contrary ends—to stand people back up. Covert, unidentifiable poetry. Conversion not coercion of materials. Overt, disarming poetry.
If poetry has never once kept us from the brink of war, why are we now concerned with conserving its identity (of conserving our identities) in the face of war? Is not the face of war occasion to be less concerned than ever over the conserving of the recognizable poem? If we keep looking strictly at what poetry has done, war remains inevitable. What it has not done, allows war to happen. If there were ever a world only poetry could put in place, war would be no more.
Get out of, not type of genre, but genre itself. Take hold of agency, office, infrastructure and construction in ways that are not redundant to or reiterative of power.
Comic Warfare doesn’t underdo or undo the controls—it outdoes them, comically. If, for example, determinism is killing us, the comic poem could extradetermine—one last loop around or lace straight through the ‘point’ and it is outdone. So overfacilitate the fraud of the ineluctability of force—that upon its next step it fall flat on its face.
(As in my opening quote by Hugo Ball) even the dastardly, reproachful language of incrimination and vindication can be applied with considerable and unexpected poetic efficacy. While blame is the blunt instrument of belligerence, Ball, by blaming himself and his kin, declares personal and total empathy with the catastrophe. He calls on blame to make a ludicrous claim real.)
I’m more than ok with that.
How? To overprovide:
how about adding an adversely active attribute to an antagonistic category? Extemporize predetermination. Alleviate axiomatics. Unbias theophanics. Experientialize expertise.
Haywire teleology. Contradictory is complimentary . Demilitarize security. Concretize Wesenschau.
Up the ample: aestheticize ascetics. sediment the transcendent. Suprasensitize empiricism. Be a munificent, bemuddled mechanist.
Maybe betray your own: actualize inexplicable. Eroticize R&D.
How about disinterested self-help? Rambunctious reductionism?
Or, delve into the extra delectation of overdoing the doubly debunked (a term discredited inside and outside its field): demonstrably vitalist. Add a negative or double debunk to a double debunk: support dead-beat behaviorism.
Although the above operations are stop-gap and not quite occlusive--- belying beatified materiality (globe: as below, so above)--they are nonetheless solid steps toward fighting neither for nor against. Anything but perversity for perversity’s sake--steps pertaining to the impending perpetual peace.
(The obvious danger in appropriating the terms of the oppressor—driving deeper behind enemy lines to directly undo an unwanted world may distance artists from ‘native’ aesthetics of a wanted world (yes, like watching the domestic budget dwindle). One example that comes to mind—the NYC-based artist collective rTmark adopts corporate and free market methodology in order to sabotage advanced global capitalism. RTmark hijacks corporate and political identities in order to snare the unaware. To cite but one instance—rTmark parodies the WTO website by using similar graphic elements as the official WTO site. The confused guest stumbles upon a directory of direct action initiatives that challenge the neo-liberal juggernaut. In another instance, rTmark channeled funds from a military veteran’s group to the Barbie Liberation Organization which used the investment to switch the voice boxes of Barbie and G.I. Joe dolls. )
How might poets, with their open identities, remain pertinent between breakaway utopia and turning into their own antithesis?
Is a poet nothing in particular? Because a poet is nothing special (last nonspecialist), something denatured, denurtured, one card not contained in the deck can be played.
Poets aren’t people. Poets may be citizens--but not necessarily people. I can’t do as a citizen what I can only do as a poet. Politicians are people—though failed people. Speaking for the people with the voice of the people is at best, approximate. Switzerland is full of people. A consensus cult. If I’m speaking, as a poet, with the voice of the people—just how cut off from my material am I--from the shift only I as non-democracy can effect. Like the first fool eukaryote that let in an organelle that we might one day breathe. As opposite elitist as democratic (the requisite agent).
The problem with the MUST of throwing one’s prosdized body before the war machine…losing limbs with which to perpetually jam up the Great Big Biocide of which war is a speck and spectacle. (I’d call it ‘getting Saddam Lewinskied’.
By means of all the possible actions of the poet of unconserved identity—or even a poem on a piece of paper or a poem read out loud (the point at which the least a poem can be becomes its most) through Comic Warfare, this time brought to a fair fight in the fantastic asymmetry of artwork vs. warworld. (Our publicity will never be as powerful as theirs). The asymmetric strike is quintessentially (quintessence, another recoverable ordure) poetic—poetic scale and odds. A line on a piece of paper up against biocide. Auspicious enough—the gross imbalance beckons ungraspable tactics. Impregnable bubble all around, with a little package delivered directly to the door by one’s own pet. Just a box cutter or the bottom of a shoe will do. As only an act from an asymmetrician can pose a serious threat to the peerlessly, imperially empowered.
And provided poets hit their stride in their fight without side, make it terminal may apply not to people but war.
Three five zero zero is numerals
Headline language poetry, nine decades after Democratic Vistas
and the Prophecy of the Good Gray Poet
Our nation "of the fabled damned"
or else . . .
Language, language
Ezra Pound the Chinese Written Character for truth
defined as man standing by his word
Word picture: forked creature
Man
standing by a box, birds flying out
representing mouth speech
Ham Steak please waitress, in the warm café.
Different from a bad guess.
The war is language,
language abused
for Advertisement,
language used
like magic for power on the planet:
Black Magic language,
formulas for reality-
Communism is a 9 letter word
used by inferior magicians with
the wrong alchemical formula for transforming earth into gold
-funky warlocks operating on guesswork,
handmedown mandrake terminology
that never worked in 1956
for gray-domed Dulles,
brooding over at State,
that never worked for Ike who knelt to take
the magic wafer in his mouth
from Dulles' hand
inside the church in Washington:
Communion of bum magicians
congress of failures from Kansas & Missouri
working with the wrong equations
Sorcerer's Apprentices who lost control
of the simplest broomstick in the world:
Language
O longhaired magician come home take care of your dumb helper
before the radiation deluge floods your livingroom,
your magic errandboy's
just made a bad guess again
that's lasted a whole decade.
N B C B S U P A P I N S L I F E
Time Mutual presents
World's Largest Camp Comedy:
Magic In Vietnam-
reality turned inside out
changing its sex in the Mass Media
for 30 days, TV den and bedroom farce
Flashing pictures Senate Foreign Relations Committee room
Generals faces flashing on and off screen
mouthing language
State Secretary speaking nothing but language
McNamara declining to speak public language
The President talking language,
Senators reinterpreting language
General Taylor Limited Objectives
Owls from Pennsylvania
Clark's Face Open Ended
Dove's Apocalypse
Morse's hairy ears
Stennis orating in Mississippi
half billion chinamen crowding into the
polling booth,
Clean shaven Gen. Gavin's image
imagining Enclaves
Tactical Bombing the magic formula for
a silver haired Symington:
Ancient Chinese apothegm:
Old in vain.
Hawks swooping thru the newspapers
talons visible
wings outspread in the giant updraft of hot air
loosing their dry screech in the skies
over the Capitol
Napalm and black clouds emerging in newsprint
Flesh soft as a Kansas girl's
ripped open by metal explosion-
three five zero zero on the other side of the planet
caught in barbed wire, fire ball
bullet shock, bayonet electricity
bomb blast terrific in skull & belly, shrapneled throbbing meat
While this American nation argues war:
conflicting language, language
proliferating in airwaves
filling the farmhouse ear, filling
the City Manager's head in his oaken office
the professor's head in his bed at midnight
the pupil's head at the movies
blond haired, his heart throbbing with desire
for the girlish image bodied on the screen:
or smoking cigarettes
and watching Captain Kangaroo
that fabled damned of nations
prophecy come true-
Though the highway's straight,
dipping downward through low hills,
rising narrow on the far horizon
black cows browse in caked fields
ponds in the hollows lie frozen
quietness.
Is this the land that started war on China?
This be the soil that thought Cold War for decades?
Are these nervous naked trees & farmhouses
the vortex
of oriental anxiety molecules
that've imagined American Foreign Policy
and magick'd up paranoia in Peking
and curtains of living blood
surrounding far Saigon?
Are these the towns where the language emerged
from the mouths here
that makes a Hell of riots in Dominica
sustains the aging tyranny of Chiang in silent Taipeh city
Paid for the lost French war in Algeria
overthrew the Guatemalan polis in '54
maintaining United Fruit's banana greed
another thirteen years
for the secret prestige of the Dulles family lawfirm?
Here's Marysville-
a black railroad engine in the children's park,
at rest-
and the Track Crossing
with Cotton Belt flatcars
carrying autos west from Dallas
Delaware & Hudson gondolas filled with power stuff-
a line of boxcars far east as the eye can see
carrying battle goods to cross the Rockies
into the hands of rich longshoremen loading
ships on the Pacific-
Oakland Army Terminal lights
blue illumined all night now-
Crash of couplings and the great American train
moves on carrying its cushioned load of metal doom
Union Pacific linked together with your Hoosier Line
followed by passive Wabash
rolling behind
all Erie carrying cargo in the rear,
Central Georgia's rust colored truck proclaiming
The Right Way, concluding
the awesome poem writ by the train
across northern Kansas,
land which gave right of way
to the massing of metal meant for explosion
in Indochina-
Passing thru Waterville,
Electronic machinery in the bus humming prophecy-
paper signs blowing in cold wind,
mid-Sunday afternoon's silence in town
under frost-gray sky
that covers the horizon-
That the rest of earth is unseen,
an outer universe invisible,
Unknown except thru
language
airprint
magic images
or prophecy of the secret
heart the same
in Waterville as Saigon one human form:
When a woman's heart bursts in Waterville
a woman screams equal in Hanoi-
On to Wichita to prophesy! O frightful Bard!
into the heart of the Vortex
where anxiety rings
the University with millionaire pressure,
lonely crank telephone voices sighing in dread,
and students waken trembling in their beds
with dreams of a new truth warm as meat,
little girls suspecting their elders of murder
committed by remote control machinery,
boys with sexual bellies aroused
chilled in the heart by the mailman
with a letter from an aging white haired General
Director of selection for service in Deathwar
all this black language
writ by machine!
O hopeless Fathers and Teachers
in Hué do you know
the same woe too?
NEAR NAJAF, Iraq - A facility near Baghdad that a US officer had said might finally be "smoking gun" evidence of Iraqi chemical weapons production turned out to contain pesticide, not sarin gas as feared.
A military intelligence officer for the US 101st Airborne Division's aviation brigade, Captain Adam Mastrianni, told AFP that comprehensive tests determined the presence of the pesticide compounds.
Initial tests had reportedly detected traces of sarin -- a powerful toxin that quickly affects the nervous system -- after US soldiers guarding the facility near Hindiyah, 100 kilometres (60 miles) south of Baghdad, fell ill.
SUMMIT COUNTY - Presidential hopeful Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, will introduce a bill today to establish a Cabinet-level Department of Peace, an agency that would be responsible for things ranging from social services to a Peace Academy.
Kucinich has the support of 38 other U.S. representatives, including Mark Udall, D-Colo. Udall represents Summit County in the 2nd Congressional District. A representative from his office will discuss the proposal from 2-3 p.m. today at the Summit County Community and Senior Center south of Frisco.
The newest Cabinet-level department was created last year, when President Bush crafted the Department of Homeland Security, designed to protect U.S. citizens from terrorism. Prior to that, President Jimmy Carter established the Veterans Administration almost 30 years ago. Today, there are 15 departments with numerous agencies under their collective umbrellas.
If approved, the Department of Peace would be dedicated to peacemaking and the study of conditions that are conducive to domestic and international peace. The department's mission would be to promote justice and democratic principles, expand human rights, strengthen nonmilitary means of peacemaking, promote human potential and work to create peace, prevent violence and develop new ways to resolve disputes.
"We have lived with war, violence and abuse for far too long," said Kucinich spokeswoman Denise Hughes. "By establishing a Cabinet level Department of Peace, we have the unique opportunity to confront the root cause of these evils and the ability as a society to build a safer world."
Methods would include mediation, nonviolent intervention and encouraging communities, religious groups and nongovernmental organizations to develop initiatives.
The department would be responsible for developing policies that address domestic violence, child abuse and mistreatment of the elderly, create new policies to reduce drug and alcohol abuse, protect animals from violence, develop new approaches to deal with gun-related violence and develop programs that address school violence, gangs and racial violence and violence against gays and lesbians.
Additionally, the department would take under its wing civil rights, labor law, community-based violence prevention and racial tolerance programs.
At the international level, the department would work with the U.S. Secretary of Defense and U.S. Secretary of State to reduce international conflict, train those who work to reconstruct war-torn societies, sponsor countrywide and regional conflict prevention and dispute resolution initiatives and encourage international sister city programs to exchange artistic, cultural, economic, educational and faith-based values.
The department also would submit recommendations to the president regarding how the sales of arms from the United States affect peace and develop strategies for the sustainability and distribution of international funds.
The secretary of the Department of Peace also would develop a peace education curriculum to include the civil rights movement in the United States, how peace agreements have worked to stop conflict and to work with teachers to help students work on peace through reflection and conflict resolutions.
A highlight of that would be a Peace Academy, which would provide a four-year course of instruction in peace education, after which graduates would be required to serve five years in public service in domestic or international nonviolent conflict resolution programs.
Rep. Dennis Kucinich To Introduce Bill for Department of Peace
I'm sure a lot of you have come across this elsewhere, but here is a quote from the blueprint drawn up by The Project for the New American Century -- Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumseld and Jeb Bush are members -- for maintaing a "pax Americana" around the world. Neil Mackay's September 2002 article about the document is all over the internet.
Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century
"In the Persian Gulf region, the presence of American forces, along with British and French units, has become a semipermanent fact of life. Though the immediate mission of those forces is to enforce the no-fly zones over northern and southern Iraq, they represent the long-term commitment of the United States and its major allies to a region of vital importance. Indeed, the United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein. In East Asia, the pattern of U.S. military operations is shifting to the south: in recent years, significant naval forces have been sent to the region around Taiwan in response to Chinese provocation, and now a contingent of U.S. troops is supporting the Australianled mission to East Timor. Across the globe, the trend is for a larger U.S. security perimeter, bringing with it new kinds of missions."
My French isn't very good, but it appears that this ad claims that "the theories of Dr. Kellog's (creator of the cereal) have influenced Adolf H."? Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Widespread Use of Cluster Bombs Sparks Outrage
A donkey lies dead near shrapnel-riddled bus in Hilla. Forty-eight civilians were killed by cluster bombs during a coalition air raid in the southern province of Babylon. (AFP/Karim Sahib)
The danger posed by the use of these weapons, designed to destroy concentrations of armour and infantry by scattering small bomblets over a wide area, was shown during the Nato bombing campaign in Kosovo in 1999 and again last year in Afghanistan.
"We are appalled, in the context of a conflict where we have been assured that civilian casualties will be minimized. It is very hard to use these weapons knowing exactly who you are going to target," said Richard Lloyd, director of Landmine Action.
The weapons are dropped or fired in such large quantities at any one time that, with a failure rate as high as one in 10, an attack leaves hundreds of unexploded bomblets scattered around a target site, creating a de facto minefield.
Al-Jazeera's Tariq Ayoub, killed on 8 April by US bombing.
Al-Jazeera correspondent Tariq Ayoub was killed on Tuesday when two US missiles struck the Baghdad offices of the Qatar-based channel. Shortly afterwards, US warplanes returned to hit the neighbouring Abu Dhabi TV offices. Five other journalists including three from the news agency Reuters were also injured when a tank fired a round at the Palestine Hotel where at least 200 international correspondents are staying in Baghdad.
Tuesday, April 8, 2003
Women likely face terms of 5-8 years
by Mike McPhee and Kieran Nicholson
A federal jury convicted three Roman Catholic nuns Monday of obstructing national defense and damaging government property after they cut through fences and sprayed their own blood on a Minuteman III missile silo last year.
While the Dominican sisters face up to 30 years in prison, federal prosecutors said they expect terms closer to five to eight years. Sentencing is scheduled for July 25 in U.S. District Court in Denver.
The three nuns enter the site of a nuclear missile silo in Weld County on Oct. 6.
(Photo Courtesy Of Jonah House)
"We knew the forces, the powers were against us," Sister Ardeth Platte, 66, said in an interview later Monday from jail. "We weren't surprised by the verdicts.
"We got back to the jail and turned on the television, which had all the pictures of children being killed in Iraq. This is all wrong. You can't drop a bomb on a city and kill children. This is exactly our defense. Those missiles are on high alert."
Sister Platte said she does not expect U.S. District Judge Robert Blackburn will show lenience at the sentencing.
Having already spent six months behind bars, Sister Platte said "it's really, really hard. It's sacred time, but difficult sacred time."
She said the three are responding to thousands of letters and are trying to "motivate people to get out into the streets, to continue our ongoing civil disobedience."
The pronouncement of the guilty verdict electrified the courtroom.
"This is a kangaroo court," shouted Susan Crane, a supporter of the nuns who quilted during last week's trial. "Shame on this court."
Two U.S. marshals hauled her out of the courtroom on orders from the judge.
Sister Platte, a former councilwoman and mayor pro-tem of Saginaw, Mich.; Sister Carol Gilbert, 55, of Baltimore; and Sister Jackie Marie Hudson, 68, of Bremerton, Wash., stood in their orange jail jumpsuits and began singing "Rejoice in the Lord above, again I say rejoice."
Sister Platte faced the jury and made the sign of the cross. She did again to the judge, to the prosecutor and to the approximately 40 spectators who packed the gallery.
Sister Gilbert shouted to the jury, "We will not be found guilty under God's law."
Jury forewoman Terrah McNellis, 25, of Denver, said the six-man, six-woman jury followed the law and not its collective heart.
"We all agree with their politics," McNellis said. "Nobody in the U.S. wants nuclear weapons, but you have to demonstrate lawfully."
The nuns were charged after entering the grounds of the N-8 Minuteman III missile silo northeast of Greeley early Oct. 6. They cut two gate chains and a fence, then symbolically tapped hammers on the rusted railroad tracks used to transport the missile. They also sprayed six crosses on the 110-ton concrete silo dome with their own blood.
Military riflemen arrived an hour after the alarm went off, training automatic weapons on the nuns, who were singing and praying. A military Humvee crashed through the fence when the nuns didn't obey an officer's orders, which they said they couldn't hear.
In court Monday, defense attorney Walter Gerash attempted to stop the reading of the verdicts by seeking a mistrial. He said McNellis had been seen in the hallway away from the rest of the jury during deliberations. Judge Blackburn refused to stop the proceedings and ordered Gerash to file a written motion within five days.
"Free speech is the first casualty of war. I'm bitterly disappointed with the people running this court," said Gerash, who clashed several times with Blackburn during the trial. "We had two Air Force colonels testify that the nuns never interfered with national defense or the operation of the Minuteman III missile."
U.S. Attorney John Suthers said he was pleased with the verdict.
"In the United States, you have the right to protest government policy in a variety of ways. But if you violate the laws, you'll face the consequences. We will continue to prosecute all acts of civil disobedience."
Near the end of deliberations, the jury asked the court to clarify whether the nuns were charged with "sabotage." Blackburn said they were not.
After they were charged in October, the nuns refused the government's offer to be released under a personal recognizance bond, so they remained in custody. On Monday, after the verdict was read, they again refused another offer to be released on bond. They are being held in the Clear Creek County Jail in Georgetown because the federal prison in Jefferson County has no facilities for women.
Lynn Butler, pastor of the United Church of Idaho Springs, called the verdicts "a travesty of justice. The sisters did not endanger the national defense. Their entire act was symbolic."
Copyright 2003 The Denver Post
Oakland PD fired wooden pellet bullets, metal-shot "beanbags", tear gas, and "concussion grenades" at a peaceful picket of American President Lines, a military cargo shipment company working out of the Oakland docks. Several injuries, including dockworkers, resulting in the ILWU sending its workers home. We arrived shortly after this went down and saw some of the wounds and rescued ammo. Several photos, reports, and a video are available at www.indybay.org - which also has photos from the student shutdown of Hwy 280 in SF today, as well as several from the march/rally in Oakland this last Sat., which featured prominent labor organizations and students-of-color groups, making links between the illegal war in Iraq (& still continuing in Afghanistan, the Philippines, etc...) and multiple social and economic issues at home and elsewhere, giving the lie to still-repeated claims that the protesters are just a bunch of old white hippies.
-- David Buuck
Pictures and links to Quicktime movies
from the SUNY at Buffalo Poetics Against the War reading
held on Wednesday, March 5th, 2003:
Charles Bernstein ("War Stories"), Sarah Campbell, Barbara Cole, David Landrey
(and others not represented here)
Well worth the clicks.
I've scanned in a few poems from this anthology, just out from Three Squares Press, edited by Mark Higgins, Stephen Pender and Darren Wershler-Henry. I tried to keep the selection very small since I don't want to traipse on their copyrights, but there's a lot of good stuff in there. As a teaser, I've only taken an excerpt from one of the longer poems, by Marion Quednau -- never heard of her before, but she's in B.C. Here's a full list of authors. Darren has already posted his contribution, a collaboration with Bill Kennedy, elsewhere on Circulars.
Daphne Marlatt
NOT IN OUR NAME
thirty-five thousand hearts
mob the streets here
throbbing
STOP
MAD COWBOY
DISEASE
two million feet beat
NO NO in London
streets/
STOP
mad love for
ammunitions this
dis-
ease unease high moral
wartalk (on our
behalf) BLU bomb DU anti-
tank weapons talk
hi-tech attack talk
no
heart for a river of refugees’
thirst hunger tiny organs
born with holes malformed
irradiated earth Iraq
a human dump
centuries from now
Wakefield Brewster
NORTH/SOUTH 49
Manifest Manifesto
My chest gets blessed yo
When I pull a test blow
Of some new herbals like verbals mix with verbalistics fix lyrical empirical intrinsic forensic ballistics
Call da P0-lice
I rob rhymed your mind blind
Brung da tongue
Twist out ya tongue now it's mine
Like nothing is belonging to one or even many does anybody have?
A second question about the mental suggestion causing social indigestion
There is something that moves us
Proves and improves us
Containing prophecy and philosophy
Silence and cacophony
You will know the sleep of soma when comes to coffin thee
There's da rippin fabric trippin find da spot commence da slippin
I took a deep dive into a shallow black whole
I carried pain like a residential school soul
And then found the key to da secret of time
Between midnight and 11:59:59
'Tis in here we bear witness to da bedlam of mad, mad dimensions
Where justice beats down truth with a gavel into gravel
And the futile defense of a true mastermind is foiled
I leave contractor's condo developments despoiled
As my own designs are tin
Foiled
In
Their
In
Timate
In
Fancy
Da matriarch
Da matriarch
Why is it dat she doan run tings?
When my goddamned fool-stupid bleeding heart sings?
For out of da blue rains sheets of murder
Death wets de earth and paints it red
And up springs a sadness both mean and green
I scorch the land wit a fiery hue
Eat da blackest seeds of a white-hot fruit
Then crouch and slouch as I sleep on da couch-again
There has to be more than this
Living in paradoxical dualities and trialities
Looking for salvation in someone
Not da one
Myself
I'm a failure as a millionaire
And a well-accomplished human
I picked out den kicked out my mental slavery shackles
I built my blast shield outta thirty snake rattles
Sticks and stones encased my bones
I became hard like a lover's face
Saw four rooms become four walls
Felt da lack of cleanliness like public bathroom stalls
I'm gonna jack-in den black-in da box
Leave it splintered and splintering
This denizen pigpen
And it's so true I so do know who
Da swine really be
Tellin us all dat we can't be free
Enslavement by pavement
They talk it
We walk it
I travel on a surface of gears and cogs
May I warp and bend the threads and spokes until they all look like hideous starfish
I'll make dem all know who I be
By fucking up their technology
I'm a flow em den show em
Dat no tech tree can wreck me
Doan try to inspec me
Goan never disec me
Stop shining your demon beacon light into my soul
Doan study me like I be in a Petrie dish fish
Bowl em down and split em like pins
Dis here is where da revolution begins
And where we start clockin wins
Like Megatron
Rejuvenate
And mediate the ones who claim to openly debate
For their language is straight ahead complicated and confusing
So they can simultaneously have your brain and pocketbook losing
The only means to make you count in this world
But on my first test blow
The truth was unfurled
To me the friendly stranger
Is like their baby in a manger
Blessed I see is da chest in me
I-
Am walking, talking danger
Cause while dey feel dey got me on my belly snake slinking
I'm hidin back in da black like my namesake-
Thinking
Steve Venright
BORDER DISSOLUTION
The guy at the customs booth on the American side of the bridge asked us where we lived.
"Turrawna," we chimed proudly
"What is the purpose of your visit?" he inquired.
"We're just comm' over to shoot a few people then going right back," I replied.
'Are you bringing over any citrus fruit or pornographic literature?"
"No sir, we just have some raw beets and a copy of the Surrealist Manifesto."
He jutted his crocodiian head a little closer and I halted my reflex to close the window using the automatic button.
"Is that the First or Second manifesto?" he demanded.
"The First," I lied, remembering the ideological rescissions Aragon and Sadoul were forced to make when Communist Parry officials objected to aspects of the Second Manifesto during their visit to Moscow
This seemed to satisfy our sombre interrogator, but it was evident he had at least one more good question for us.
"Do either of you have any narcotic substances in your possession?"
"No, indeed," asserted my companion.
"Thanks anyway-feeling kinda shitty today" he confided. "Okay you folks have a nice visit."
"Don't you want to check our trunk?" I offered.
"No, not right now"
At last we were on our way again to the symposium on consciousness and the brain. We weren't really going to shoot anyone, of course, but felt it best to conceal the true nature of our visit. Even a former president and his wife thought it was okay to have a brain-in fact they dedicated a whole decade to the thing. But the subject of consciousness, we knew, was another matter entirely
RM Vaughan
DESERT STORM II: ORIGINAL MOTION PICTURE SOUNDTRACK
1. God Bless America
Celine Dion with The Boys Choir of Harlem. Arranged by David Foster
2. Boom! There it iz! Stealthy Style
LL Cool J and Lil' Kim and Lil Bow Wow
3. 1991 (we gonna party like it's)
Prince and the New Power Generation
4. Savin' Da World Bitch at a Time
Tony Bennett and 50 Cent. Recorded live at the Aspen Music Festival
5. The Charge of the Light Brigade
The Boston Pops Orchestra. Narrated by Kevin Costner
6. Ahab The Arab (Bag-da-dad remix)
Ray Stevens. Remixed by Moby
7. Putting Out Fires With Gasoline
Kid Rock and Pamela Anderson
8. Axes To Axis
Nickleback with James Brown
9. Sultans of Schwing! (Love Theme from Desert Storm II)
Academy of St. Martin in the Fields.
10. That's What Friends Are For (USA-UK mix)
Oprab Winfrey and Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York.
Arranged by Quincy Jones.
11. 'Round Midnight At The Oasis
Mariah Carey and Winton Marsalis
12. Over There/I'll Be Seeing You/New York, New York Medley
Liza Minnelli (featuring The New York City Fire Fighters Choir)
13. God Bless America Muthaf**kah!
Celine Dion and Missy "Misdemeanor" Elliott
nasser hussain
MERICA
A merica,
BEmerica.
And whamerica,
bamerica,
thankyouma'america.
C.I.A.merica
videocamericas
Chegueveramerica.
For shamerica,
playmerica
gaymerica!
O say can you seemerica
the eternal flamerica:
for J.F.Kmerica
the kkkmerica
blamericas
saddamerica.
Such monomaniamerica-
no cure for amnesiamerica,
forevermerica and evermerica, amen.
Margaret Atwood
BACKDROP ADDRESSES COWBOY
Starspangled cowboy
sauntering out of the almost-
silly West, on your face
a porcelain grin,
tugging a papier-mache cactus
on wheels behind you with a string,
you are innocent as a bathtub
full of bullets.
Your righteous eyes, your laconic
trigger-fingers
people the streets with villains:
as you move, the air in front of you
blossoms with targets
and you leave behind you a heroic
trail of desolation:
beer bottles
slaughtered by the side
of the road, bird-
skulls bleaching in the sunset.
I ought to be watching
from behind a cliff or a cardboard storefront
when the shooting starts, hands clasped
in admiration,
but I am elsewhere.
Then what about me
what about the I
confronting you on that border
you are always trying to cross?
I am the horizon
you ride towards, the thing you can never lasso
I am also what surrounds you:
my brain
scattered with your
tincans, bones, empty shells,
the litter of your invasions.
I am the space you desecrate
as you pass through.
Marion Quednau
from THE RED HORSE MEETS THE NELSON MASS
This September just passed
a clutch of old friends dropped by, unannounced,
masquerading as limpid newscasters
out of sync with raucous foreign voices,
and I fell prey to equally moribund
habits: saw pale, pleading omens-comets' tails
and plummeted birds with red wings-
heard a slavish sound like the long-promised
gnashing of lions' teeth, woke up nights
weeping like an old woman,
lacrimosa.
Now it is Thanksgiving;
there are plainly no pilgrims
on our high plateau, and I have greater presence
of mind. The devout
are mostly on roads leading to and from
Macedonia, Uzbekistan
and that clever, shifting place
called Hell, that even the Pope
won't confess to being more likely a threat
these days than a mood already arrived.
Yes, some actually died, their paper planes
and mothers, brothers, fathers, gone to ashes,
but many more
have been frightened to death
and are still among the living,
now bombing
all manner of ancient metaphor
on the Afghan desert, where people thin
as rakes are hiding in slant tents
and honeycombed caves, the proverbial
bushes still burning as brightly
on the charred horizon as in arch parables
sworn by lean-mouthed prophets.
Nominee says 10 to 15 percent of Muslims are 'potential killers'
(WASHINGTON, D.C., 4/3/2003) - CAIR is urging President Bush to rescind his nomination of an "Islamophobe," who claims 10 to 15 percent of Muslims are "potential killers," to the board of a government institution formed to promote the peaceful resolution of international conflicts.
President Bush yesterday nominated pro-Israel commentator Daniel Pipes, who many American Muslims regard as the nation's leading Islamophobe, to join the board of the United States Institute of Peace, a federal institution created by Congress. The institute's board of directors is appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. (Pipes made the claim about Muslims being potential killers in the October 8, 2001, issue of the Philadelphia Daily News.)
SEE: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/04/20030402-10.html, http://www.usip.org/
"Pipes' nomination sends entirely the wrong message as America seeks to convince Muslims worldwide that the war on terrorism and the war against Iraq are not attacks on Islam. His bigoted views are incompatible with the mission of the United States Institute of Peace. We respectfully urge President Bush to rescind this ill-considered and poorly-timed nomination," said CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad. He called on the Senate to reject Pipes' nomination if it is not rescinded by the president.
Awad added that Pipes also lacks the credentials required for service on the institute's board. All board members are required by law to "have appropriate practical or academic experience in peace and conflict resolution." "Pipes' anti-Muslim polemics have had the opposite impact of that sought by the institute. His views promote unending conflict, not peace," said Awad.
Muslims say Pipes has a long history of advocating the political disenfranchisement and marginalization of America's Islamic community. In an October 21, 2001, speech before the convention of the American Jewish Congress, Pipes stated: "I worry very much from the Jewish point of view that the presence, and increased stature, and affluence, and enfranchisement of American Muslims...will present true dangers to American Jews."
He has decried any positive portrayal of Islamic history and beliefs in public schools and termed the PBS documentary "Muhammad: Legacy of a Prophet" an "outrage."
In the Jerusalem Post, Pipes called for increased surveillance of ordinary American Muslims. He wrote: "There is no escaping the unfortunate fact that Muslim government employees in law enforcement, the military, and the diplomatic corps need to be watched for connections to terrorism, as do Muslim chaplains in prisons and the armed forces. Muslim visitors and immigrants must undergo additional background checks. Mosques require a scrutiny beyond that applied to churches, synagogues and temples. Muslim schools require increased oversight to ascertain what is being taught to children." (1/22/03)
Last year, Pipes faced a storm of criticism when he launched Campus Watch, a web site that included "dossiers" on professors and academic institutions thought to be too critical of Israel or too sympathetic to Islam and Muslims. The web site also sought information from students about their teachers' political opinions. Pipes has been quoted as saying: "The Palestinians are a miserable people...and they deserve to be." (Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, July 2001) His personal web site is maintained by an Israeli settler. He also claims Muslims have no real religious attachments to the city of Jerusalem.
A central theme of Pipes' commentary is that American Muslims are a threat because they have the goal of "transforming [the United States] into a Moslem country." (Jewish World Review, 11/16/2000) In fact, he even claimed to have a special mental "filter" with which he can detect those who want to "create a Muslim state in America." (Salon.com, 11/9/2001) He has also compared American Muslim voter registration drives to those of the Communist Party USA.
Pipes goes so far as to recommend "vigilant application of social and political pressure to ensure that Islam is not accorded special status of any kind in this country." (Commentary, November 2001) The "special status" Pipes refers to includes ordinary religious accommodations for Muslims in the workplace and "inclusion of Muslims in affirmative-action plans."
SEE: "Who is Daniel Pipes?"
http://www.cair-net.org/misc/people/daniel_pipes.html
IMMEDIATE ACTION REQUESTED: (As always, be POLITE and RESPECTFUL.)
Contact President Bush to respectfully request that he rescind Daniel
Pipes' nomination to the board of the United States Institute of Peace.
White House Phone Numbers:
COMMENTS: 202-456-1111
SWITCHBOARD: 202-456-1414
FAX: 202-456-2461
White House E-Mail Addresses:
President George W. Bush: president@whitehouse.gov
Vice President Richard Cheney: vice.president@whitehouse.gov
COPY TO: cair@cair-net.org
Mailing Address:
President George W. Bush
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, D.C. 20500
[This site may have already appeared on Circulars but I'm posting the link again since, with the mixture of news reports coming out about what's happening over there, one might need help keeping count. But IMHO, I think these figures are much too low -- the army has employed a policy (since Vietnam, I think) of not counting the enemy war dead, and so it's left to journos to put the figures together, either through eyewitness or interviews. You can put a body count counter on your site if you want -- I opted out as this page takes long enough to load, and the Javascript might give the blog some problems.
See story below from the Red Cross about how they can't even keep count of the casualties.]
Iraq Body Count | DATABASE | Latest Updates
This is a human security project to establish an independent and comprehensive public database of media-reported civilian deaths in Iraq resulting directly from military actions by the USA and its allies in 2003. Results and totals are continually updated and made immediately available on this page and on various IBC counters which may be freely displayed on any website, where they will be automatically updated without further intervention. Casualty figures are derived solely from a comprehensive survey of online media reports. Where these sources report differing figures, the range (a minimum and a maximum) are given. All results are independently reviewed and error-checked by at least three members of the Iraq Body Count project team before publication.
GENEVA - The number of casualties in Baghdad is so high that hospitals have stopped counting the number of people treated, the International Committee of the Red Cross said Sunday.
"No one is able to keep accurate statistics of the admitted and transferred war wounded any longer as one emergency arrival follows the other in the hospitals of Baghdad," the ICRC said in a statement.
"Ambulances are picking up the wounded and running them to the triage areas and on to hospitals," it said. "Some of the wounded try to reach the nearest hospitals by foot."
The neutral Swiss-run organization - the main aid agency left in Iraq - gave no estimates on the number of deaths and did not confirm U.S. Central Command estimates that between 2,000 and 3,000 Iraqi fighters were killed in Saturday's foray into Baghdad by American armored vehicles.
"All of the hospitals are under pressure and the medical staff is working without respite," said the ICRC statement. "Despite the intense and desperate activity, hospital staff is still managing the situation."
But it said that hospitals urgently needed more water supplies. Given the general power outage in Baghdad, most hospitals and water installations are now being powered by backup generators. It said it was getting many requests for service kits, spare parts and repairs for water plants.
The ICRC said that Red Cross delegates who reached the southern city of Basra reported that the medical situation was generally under control and that there were no signs of epidemics. But it said it feared the worst for other hospitals outside Baghdad and Basra.
[Yet another site with very clever, old-timey posters for printing out, etc., but this one's becoming a book with writing by Vonnegut and Zinn. It seems that the language critique that some are suggesting poets should be engaged in has moved on to the language/image complex, and is already being done by a small army of underground photoshoppers -- something of a phenomenon.]
45 of the posters in full color, perfect for protest signs or mass photocopying. The book contains a foreword by Kurt Vonnegut, an introduction by Howard Zinn, and political commentary by the Center for Constitutional Rights. (book available in your local bookstore May 1st, 2003 from Seven Stories Press)
Guest Editor: Shirley Shor
The Leonardo Electronic Almanac (ISSN No: 1071-4391) is developing a special issue dealing with the phenomenon of war, and will explore the relationships between artists, scientists, and war in contemporary society.
The issue will investigate war from an interdisciplinary perspective, as a cultural practice of conflict that affects each and every one of us on a daily basis; a practice that is broader and deeper than armed conflict between nation states; that occurs on many levels when national, social, economical and cultural interests collide and which involves issues such as real-time media representation of facts, language and architecture, freedom of information and truth and power. We are in a midst of a global digital media war where copyright holders fight consumers over digital music, books and movies sharing and duplication. A software war where open and free systems battle closed and proprietary ones for running the world's computer systems. A Man vs. Machine war in-which the world's greatest chess players fight for the human creative edge and self dignity against the superior speed and memory of computers.
We live in a time of total screening of war as a spectacle on television and computer screens - from live war images on news cable stations, war simulation video games, reality police action shows and US Army commercials with heavy metal music soundtracks on MTV. We are moving further from asking hard questions regarding the essence of conflict and meditated reality and from being able to establish our own world-view based on cross-checked information and facts.
The issue will not present a specific unified position towards conflict but rather it aims to reveal tendencies, to surface hidden agendas and issues, to reflect on multiple points of view and to open a wide-ranging dialog. What is the role of artists and scientists in this new era? Should art be completely independent of the politics of violence? Should science? Guest Editor Shirley Shor and Leonardo Electronic Almanac seek papers discussing these and other topics that address the role and work of artists and scientists in times of war.
LEA encourages international artists / academics / researchers / students to submit their proposals for consideration. We particularly encourage authors outside north america and europe to send proposals for articles/gallery/artists statements:
Proposals should include:-
- a 150 - 300 word abstract / synopsis - a brief bio (and prior works for reference, if necessary) - names of collaborators (if work is produced by a team) - any related URLs - contact details
Deadline: 16 May 2003
Please send proposals or queries to: Shirley Shor shirleys@friskit.com
or Nisar Keshvani LEA Editor-in-Chief lea@mitpress.mit.edu
http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/LEA/
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What is LEA?
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Established in 1993, the Leonardo Electronic Almanac (ISSN No: 1071-4391) is the electronic arm of the world's most prestigious art journal, Leonardo - Journal of Art, Science & Technology.
LEA is jointly produced by Leonardo, the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology (ISAST) and published under the auspices of MIT Press. Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA), is Leonardo/ISAST and MIT Press' electronic journal dedicated to providing a forum for those who are interested in the realm of where art, science & technology converge.
Content
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This peer reviewed e-journal includes Profiles of Media Arts facilities and Projects, Profiles of artists using new media, Feature Articles comprised of theoretical and technical perspectives; the LEA Gallery exhibiting new media artwork by international artists; detailed information about new publications in various media; reviews of publications. events and exhibitions. Material is contributed by artists, scientists, educators and developers of new technological resources in the media arts.
Mission
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Since 2002, LEA formed a strategic alliance with fineArt forum - the Internet's longest running arts magazine. Through this partnership, LEA concentrates on adding new scholarship and critical commentary to the art, science and technology field, with LEA subscribers benefiting from the latest news, announcements, events, and job/educational opportunities through fAf's online news service.
LEA's mission is to maintain and consolidate its position as a leading online news and trusted information filter whilst critically examining arts/science & technological works catering to the international CAST (Community of Artists, Scientist &Technologists)
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nisar keshvani
http://www.keshvani.org nisar@keshvani.com
mail : studio 3a, 35 place du bourg-de-four,
1204 geneva, switzerland
tel: +41 (0)22 310 3413 mob: +41 (0)78 612 1687
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editor-in-chief, fineArt forum = art + technology netnews
http://www.fineartforum.org
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editor-in-chief, leonardo electronic almanac
http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/LEA
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