Ana Marie Cox Bitchslaps Press Control Cretins on "Don't Ask, Don't Tell"

It's amazing that, here in Freedom's Land, most of our mainstream journalistic establishment doesn't question, not even mildly, our most blatantly insane and counter-productive policies, like Don't Ask/Don't Tell.

This has been happening for several years now, but: Another group of skilled Arabic translators, West Point graduates, recently got thrown out of the military for being gay. Happened several times in this first hideous decade of the 21st century. Since I happen to think that militant Islamic terrorism (and all terrorism, pretty much) is a law enforcement problem and not a military problem, I think it's reasonable to rely on intelligence like, I don't know, ARABIC TRANSLATIONS, to combat such stuff. Even people who think of terrorism as mainly a military problem would agree, I think.

Whatever your approach to fighting terrorism, I don't see how any thinking person could be in favor of sacking skilled Arabic translators for being gay. But we do, we do.

And the witless White House Press Corps rarely questions these things. But you know who DOES? Wonkette founder and Arch-Mistress of Wicked Internet Snark Ana Marie Cox! Watch her subtle take-down, uh, here:

Some Noteworthy Things

Yes, I know, I've been neglecting the Skies. But no worries, non-existent reader, for your blogger is hard at work with a dear friend of his at creating a serious online magazine. It'll be like Clear Expensive Skies, but better. Much better.

Anyway, just thought I'd share a few things I've discovered in the news:

- George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia being made into a film! Colin Firth, apparently, is playing Orwell. Crazy.

- Orhan Pamuk--author of wonderful books like My Name is Red, Snow, and Istanbul--is in trouble with the Turkish nationalist press again.

- NATO air strike killed at least 8 today. This comes hot on the heels of a US air strike in Farah province that killed more than 140 people, 95 of them children.

- Obama's plan for Middle East Peace is becoming clear:

The matter of borders would be solved with territorial exchanges between Israel and the Palestinians, and the Old City of Jerusalem would be established as an international zone.

The initiative would require the Palestinians to give up their claim of a "right of return," according to Yediot, and Europe and the US would arrange compensation for refugees, including foreign passports for those residing abroad.

Obama's plan would also promote holding simultaneous talks between Israel and the Palestinians, and Syria and Lebanon. Yediot said that when such talks come to an agreement on Palestinian statehood, diplomatic and economic relations would be established between Israel and Arab states.

The report added that in his Cairo address, Obama would reiterate calls for Israel to cease all settlement construction.

Empire, Confidence, Culture

Earlier today I was reading Bryan Appleyard's always-interesting blog, and I came across this:

There is a future danger that America may lose its distinct identity and become just another nation that believes nothing, though I don't think Obama embodies this danger. Relative decline may turn out to be the real culprit. It will be a sad day when - if - it happens.

Appleyard makes this point by way of contrast with his native Britain, where the Prime Minister never speaks with "a certain high solemnity and grandiloquence when addressing national issues," a country that no longer has a "destiny-laden sense of self."

It's indisputably true that America has a (to put it mildly) confident image of itself, and the most fervent of our nationalists make a fetish of outright America-worship. The US has always had a messianic self-image, and it's only inflated in the last few decades due to our economic and military pre-eminence. It does offer quite a contrast to post-imperial Britain, the culture of which has been marked by a sense of diminishment and depression ever since the end of the Empire in 1945. Britain's lack of self-belief permeates, probably excessively, quite a lot of the culture it's produced in the postwar period: Appleyard himself has written a great attack on Philip Larkin, a talented but imaginatively provincial poet that Appleyard thinks was grossly monumentalized to suit Britain's morose self-image. I tend to agree with this assessment, by the way. The best poets of Britain's post-imperial phase have, so far, kept faith with the best of British artistic traditions (the long march of English poetry, the painting of Constable and Turner, the visionary element in Blake, the Brontes, and Dickens) while cultivating an outward-looking, expansive aesthetic and attitude the polar opposite of Larkin and co.'s petty insularity. Examples: Charles Tomlinson, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Kathleen Raine, Hugh MaDiarmid, Edwin Muir, Lawrence Durrell...

It's strange, though, that Brits and others associate the loss of empire with a loss of confidence and vision. This has been the case with Britian (though periods of cultural effervescence like the 60s contradict this self-image, and it's more or less fallen apart lately in the more open and cosmopolitan years under New Labour), but it hasn't been the case with every country that's lost its empire.

Spain, for instance. After a couple of centuries of relative cultural stagnation, the final blow to their empire in 1898 (delivered, of course, by the United States in its inauguration of its own empire) coincided with an explosion of great poets, painters, essayists, novelists, and film-makers that lasted up until Franco closed the lid in the late 1930s. There is even a group of poets, essayists, and novelists known as the Generation of '98; it includes classics like Antonio Machado, José Ortega y Gasset, and Miguel de Unamuno.

They were followed by the talented of the first Spanish generation to grow up without an empire: Pablo Picasso, Federico Garcia Lorca (born in 1898), Luis Cernuda, Juan Ramon Jimenez, Rafael Alberti, Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí, and many others.

This level of greatness shouldn't be cause for national self-flagellation along the lines of postwar/post-imperial Britain. No one knows how America will respond when its empire dissolves, with a Spanish-style explosion of creativity or with British mortification. At least history shows us that a total breakdown in cultural confidence isn't inevitable. This is especially heartening to someone like me, who opposes America's ruinous and criminal imperial projects but worries about a possible loss of creative power in American culture.

Not that empire = cultural confidence. The migration of the collective creative impulse is a mysterious thing; who would have thought that tortured, powerless, downtrodden Poland--stuck between two murderous totalitarian systems--would produce many of the best writers of the 20th century?

Even the colossal stagnation that occurred on the Italian peninsula after the fall of the Roman Empire was pretty much made up for--very much so--a thousand years later by the imaginative genius and visionary hope of the Renaissance. I look forward to America's disintegration into dozens of distinct city-states...

Poem of the Day

I know I said I'd post some late Milosz, and I will soon, but today I've been daydreaming about the sea and its shore.

As upon seacoasts when the gods
Begin to build and the work of the waves
Ships in unstoppably wave
After wave, in splendour, and the earth
Attires itself and then comes joy
A supreme, tuneful joy, setting the work to rights.
So upon the poem
When the wine-god points and promises
And with the darling of Greece,
Seaborn, veiling her looks,
The waves beach their abundance.
-Friedrich Holderlin

To See

A couple of Poles today: one a splendid and haunting painter of Parisian life, the other one of the finest writers of poetry AND prose alive today.



To See

Oh my mute city, honey-gold,
buried in ravines, where wolves
loped softly down the cold meridian;
if I had to tell you, city
asleep beneath a heap of lifeless leaves,
if I needed to describe the ocean’s skin, on which
ships etch the lines of shining poems,
and yachts like peacocks flaunt their lofty sails
and the Mediterranean, rapt in salty concentration,
and cities with sharp turrets gleaming
in the keen morning sun,
and the savage strength of jets piercing the clouds,
the bureaucrats’ undying scorn for us, people,
Umbria’s narrow streets like cisterns
that stop up ancient time tasting of sweet wine,
and a certain hill, where the stillest tree is growing,
gray Paris, threaded by the river of salvation,
Krakow, on Sunday, when even the chestnut leaves
seem pressed by an unseen iron,
vineyards raided by the greedy fall
and by highways full of fear;
if I had to describe the sobriety of the night
when it happened,
and the clatter of the train running into nothingness
and the blade flaring on a makeshift skating rink;
I’m writing from the road, I had to see,
and not just know, to see clearly
the sights and fires of a single world,
but you unmoving city turned to stone,
my brethren in the shallow sand;
the earth still turns above you
and the Roman legions march
and a polar fox attends the wind
in a white wasteland where sounds perish.

Painting: Józef Czapski
Poem: Adam Zagajewski

I've been reading the great Polish poets lately: Czeslaw Milosz, Zbigniew Herbert, Zagajewski. I think Zagajewski might be my favorite living writer--his prose books are as good as his poetry--and I love Herbert's poetry, though I need to become more acquainted with his essays on art. 

Milosz is a titanic figure, more akin to Goethe or Victor Hugo than to any 20th-century-writer, except perhaps Octavio Paz. His many-faceted corpus of essays--on politics, religion, philosophy, literature, his own life and those of people he knew--are unspeakably rich, and his poetic talent never wavered or "fell off" at any point during his career. In fact, I think some of the poems included in his final volume, "Second Space," are among his greatest. Perhaps I'll post one of his late poems tomorrow.

Poem for the Day

I'll get around to music, painting, and sensible words a bit later. For now let us continue with the springtime theme of the long majestic Paz poem. As a contrast and companion, let's listen to John Milton's brief, enchanting lute music.

Song on May Morning
John Milton

NOW the bright morning Star, Dayes harbinger,
Comes dancing from the East, and leads with her
The Flowry May, who from her green lap throws
The yellow Cowslip, and the pale Primrose.
      Hail bounteous May that dost inspire
      Mirth and youth, and warm desire,
      Woods and Groves, are of thy dressing,
      Hill and Dale, doth boast thy blessing.
Thus we salute thee with our early Song,
And welcome thee, and wish thee long. 

Sudden Spring...Tree of Noon...

I've been lazy about updating these here Expensive Skies, I realize, but ne'er you fear. For the time being I'm more or less treating this weblog as an online notebook: thoughts, observations on politics and current events (like Killer Swine!), and hopefully much more about art, literature, cinema, music, and culture generally.

From now on there's also going to be a new feature on this blog: the Poem of the Day. It'll be an exacting task, but I like the challenge of finding and sharing a poem that, in some way or another, reflects my sense of each day. It gives me an opportunity to act out Goethe's famous line from Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship: "every single day one should listen to a little song, read a good poem, look at a fine painting and, if possible, say a few sensible words." That's the challenge I'm trying to meet with this blog. And now to the good poem of the day; I thought I'd begin with a great poem that's at once a meditation on mortality and a luxuriant song to welcome spring.


Response and Reconciliation
Octavio Paz
Translated from the Spanish by Eliot Weinberger


I.

Ah life! Does no one answer?
His words rolled, bolts of lightning etched
in years that were boulders and now are mist.
Life never answers.
It has no ears and doesn't hear us;
it doesn't speak, it has no tongue.
It neither goes nor stays;
we are the ones who speak,
the ones who go,
while we hear from echo to echo, year to year,
our words rolling through a tunnel with no end.

That which we call life
hears itself within us, speaks with our tongues,
and through us, knows itself.
As we portray it, we become its mirror, we invent it.
An invention of an invention: it creates us
without knowing what it has created,
we are an accident that thinks.
It is a creature of reflections
we create by thinking,
and it hurls into fictitious abysses.
The depths, the transparencies
where it floats or sinks: not life, its idea.
It is always on the other side and is always other,
has a thousand bodies and none,
never moves and never stops,
it is born to die, and is born at death.

Is life immortal? Don't ask life,
for it doesn't even know what life is.
We are the ones who know
that one day it too must die and return
to the beginning, the inertia of the origin.
The end of yesterday, today, and tomorrow,
the dissipation of time
and of nothing, its opposite.
Then will there be a then?
will the primigenious spark light
the matrix of the worlds,
a perpetual re-beginning of a senseless whirling?
No one answers, no one knows.
We only know that to live is to live for.

II.

Sudden spring, a girl who wakes
on a green bed guarded by thorns;
tree of noon, heavy with oranges:
your tiny suns, fruits of cool fire,
summer gathers them in transparent baskets;
the fall is severe, its cold light
sharpens its knife against the red maples;
Januaries and Februaries: their beards are ice,
and their eyes sapphires that April liquefies;
the wave that rises, the wave that stretches out,
appearances-disappearances
on the circular road of the year.

All that we see, all that we forget,
the harp of the rain, the inscription of the lightning,
the hurried thoughts, reflections turned to birds,
the doubts of the path as it meanders,
the wailing of the wind
as it carves the faces of the mountains,
the moon on tiptoe over the lake,
the breezes in gardens, the throbbing of night,
the camps of stars on the burnt field,
the battle of reflections on the white salt flats,
the fountain and its monologue,
the held breath of outstretched night
and the river that entwines it, the pine under the evening star
and the waves, instant statues, on the sea,
the flock of clouds that the wind herds
through drowsy valleys, the peaks, the chasms,
time turned to rock, frozen eras,
time maker of roses and plutonium,
time that makes as it razes.

The ant, the elephant, the spider, and the sheep,
our strange world of terrestrial creatures
that are born, eat, kill, sleep, play, couple,
and somehow know that they die;
our world of humanity, far and near,
the animal with eyes in its hands
that tunnels through the past and examines the future,
with its histories and uncertainties,
the ecstasy of the saint, the sophisms of the evil,
the elation of lovers, their meetings, their contentions,
the insomnia of the old man counting his mistakes,
the criminal and the just: a double enigma,
the Father of the People, his crematory parks,
his forests of gallows and obelisks of skulls,
the victorious and the defeated,
the long sufferings and the one happy moment,
the builder of houses and the one who destroys them,
this paper where I write, letter by letter,
which you glance at with distracted eyes,
all of them and all of it, all
is the work of time that begins and ends,

III.

From birth to death time surrounds us
with its intangible walls.
We fall with the centuries, the years, the minutes.
Is time only a falling, only a wall?
For a moment, sometimes, we see
not with our eyes but with our thoughts
time resting in a pause.
The world half-opens and we glimpse
the immaculate kingdom,
the pure forms, presences
unmoving, floating
on the hour, a river stopped:
truth, beauty, numbers, ideas
and goodness, a word buried
in our century.
A moment without weight or duration,
a moment outside the moment:
thought sees, our eyes think.

Triangles, cubes, the sphere, the pyramid
and the other geometrical figures
thought and drawn by mortal eyes
but which have been here since the beginning,
are, still legible, the world, its secret writing,
the reason and the origin of the turning of things,
the axis of the changes, the unsupported pivot
that rests on itself, a reality without a shadow.
The poem, the piece of music, the theorem,
unpolluted presences born from the void,
are delicate structures
built over an abyss:
infinities fit into their finite forms,
and chaos too is ruled by their hidden symmetry.

Because we know it, we are not an accident:
chance, redeemed, returns to order.
Tied to the earth and to time,
a light and weightless ether,
thought supports the worlds and their weight,
whirlwinds of suns turned
into a handful of signs
on a random piece of paper.
Wheeling swarms
of transparent evidence
where the eyes of understanding
drink a water simple as water.
The universe rhymes with itself,
it unfolds and is two and is many
without ceasing to be one.
Motion, a river that runs endlessly
with open eyes through the countries of vertigo
there is no above nor below, what is near is far
returns to itself
without returning, now turned
into a fountain of stillness.
Tree of blood, man feels, thinks, flowers,
and bears strange fruits: words.
What is thought and what is felt entwine,
we touch ideas, they are bodies and they are numbers.

And while I say what I say
time and space fall dizzyingly,
restlessly. They fall in themselves.
Man and the galaxy return to silence.
Does it matter? Yes but it doesn't matter:
we know that silence is music and that
we are a chord in this concert.

This poem is available in Eliot Weinberger's anthology World Beat: International Poetry Now from New Directions. 

And On a Cheerier Note...

Sleek sexy high speed trains yes pllz!

Oh how I long for fast, comfortable train service à la France or Switzerland to ferry me to and from the oaks and graveyards of Savannah. Not to mention New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Las Vegas, Miami, Key West, and New Orleans. Hell yeah.

Also: Can we go the whole hog and make it a North America-wide rail network, so I go see hockey games in Canada and wake up the next morning in Oaxaca?

Torture

Barack Obama deserves credit for releasing four Bush-era memos that detail--in generalized, clinical, and bureaucratic language--just what the CIA has been doing to prisoners in their "interrogation" sessions for the last 8 years. He's facing all manner of wrath from CIA and other military-industrial elites who don't care much for open government , not to mention the standard bile from the usual right-wing pundits, bloggers, and rank-and-file. This was a courageous move, and he deserves praise for it.

On the other hand, I have to admit I'm dismayed that Obama has already given up on the idea of prosecuting the people responsible for these war crimes. All the prattle about moving forward and not backward, a time for reflection and not retribution, is, well, just that: prattle. Prosecuting the torturers wouldn't be about "retribution"; it would be an act of reflection and consideration, bringing shameful crimes perpetrated in all our names to light and working through the consequences. "Reflection" is meaningless if it doesn't lead to action.

It's worth looking at all of these memos. Several commentators have already noted the unavoidable specter of Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil" thesis, her vision of Adolf Eichmann and other Nazi war criminals as not slavering diabolical fiends but as unimaginative, unreflective bureaucrats who murdered people from their desks because they couldn't imagine the concrete moral consequences of their document-typing and number-crunching. To them, mass murder was an abstract thing; they saw themselves as working with pens and paper, not with instruments of death. The bureaucratic jargon of the Bush-era torture memos just released are a thing to behold: atrocities recounted in the language of a corporate lawyer.

Via Glenn Greenwald, some excerpts from the memos:







One wonders just what has been redacted.

For a description of torture in living language, non-bureaucratic language, language that instead of being empty and mendacious and designed to sanitize or simplify or outright deny reality is meant to illuminate, evoke, and describe reality, let us turn to John Donne, speaking out against "stress positions" in a 1625 Easter sermon:

They therefore oppose God in his purpose of dignifying the body of man, first who violate, and mangle this body, which is the organ in which God breathes, and they also which pollute and defile this body, in which Christ Jesus is apparelled; and they likewise who prophane this body, which is the Holy Ghost, and the high Priest, inhabits, and consecrates.

Transgressors that put God’s organ out of tune, that discompose and tear the body of man with violence, are those inhuman persecutors who with racks and tortures and prisons and fires and exquisite inquisitions throw down the bodies of the true God’s servants to the idolatrous worship of their imaginary gods, that torture men into Hell and carry them through the inquisition into damnation. St Augustine moves a question, and institutes a disputation, and carries it somewhat problematically, whether torture be to be admitted at all, or no. That presents a fair probability which he says against it. We presume, says he, that an innocent man should accuse himself, by confession, in torture. And if an innocent man be able to do so, why should we not think that a guilty man, who shall save his life by holding his tongue in torture, should be able to do so?

And then, where is the use of torture? It is a slippery trial and uncertain (says Ulpian) to convince by torture. For many says (says St Augustine again) he that is yet but questioned, whether he be guilty or no, before that be known, is, without all question, miserably tortured. And whereas, many time, the passion of the Judge, and the covetousness of the Judge, and the ambition of the Judge, are calamities heavy enough upon a man that is accused. If the Judge knew that he were innocent, he should suffer nothing. If he knew he were guilty, he should not suffer torture. But because the Judge is ignorant and knows nothing.


Donne is speaking here as a believing Christian, of course. I'm not a believing Christian, but I think this is language far more attuned to the absolute degradation and destructiveness that torture always entails--and the practical absurdity of it--than these bureaucrats' memos. This sermon was dug up a few years ago by Scott Horton of Harper's; his essay on it is well worth reading:

It was delivered as his Easter Sunday sermon, which is important. Then as now, the Easter service drew the biggest crowd of the year. The Easter sermon was the minister’s minute in the spotlight—the moment when he would reach his greatest audience and make his reputation. And we know from John Donne’s correspondence, he was concerned about another audience: the king, his entourage and the courts. When Donne rose to deliver this sermon, torture was a heated “political” issue in England. Under the Stuart monarchs, the use of torture was viewed as a royal prerogative (how little things change). It was administered by judges, particularly by the national security court of seventeenth century England, the so-called Court of Star Chamber. John H. Langbein’s important book, Torture and the Law of Proof gives us very clear guidance into how torture was prescribed and used.

Over a series of centuries, the genius of the English law had been steadily to restrict and limit the use of torture, until at this point, under King James, it was controlled by the king’s judges and limited in practice through a series of special writs. Which is to say, legally it was far more constrained than it is today under an Executive Order issued by King James’s understudy in allegedly Divine Right governance, George W. Bush.

How little things change.

And Now for Some Local Bitching

From Creative Loafing:

We all know that Senate Bill 120, the legislation that would’ve allowed MARTA to exercise control over its own finances and possibly prevent the transit agency from making drastic service cuts, failed on the final night of the legislative session. But why?
In a candid email to his constituents, State Rep. Ralph Long, III, D-Atlanta, says Georgia House Republicans used the bill as a “political football” and threatened to punt the measure if the Fulton and DeKalb delegations didn’t vote for a GOP-endorsed piece of legislation involving freezes on property values.

Long writes in the email:

I will always stay true to my commitment to keep my constituents educated about the pressing issues concerning us today.
On Wednesday, April 1st, two days before the end of the General Assembly’s 2009 session, the Fulton and DeKalb County delegations called a special meeting for the sole purpose of discussing MARTA. At that meeting, the Republican leadership approached the two counties with what they said was a deal. According to the Republican leader, they needed 20 votes to pass S.R. 1, an unpopular bill related to property valuation freezes.
We were told that we must support S.R. 1 in order to give the Republicans the votes they needed. In return, the MARTA bill would pass. If S.R 1 did not pass, we were told that the MARTA bill would die in committee and not be brought up for consideration before the end of sine die. The Republican leader said that he lives closer to Disney World than any MARTA train station, and that he only occasionally rides MARTA to ball games.

Fabulous. A bill that would have drastically improved Atlanta's transit system--and thereby might have helped Atlanta along its way of trying to become a truly world class city--gets voted down by Republicans who don't even live in Atlanta. That don't live in Atlanta and snicker about making life difficult for people who do live in Atlanta.

Mind-Forged Manacles

This item in the New York Times really ought to tip off anyone who remains unconvinced to the fact that our society is every bit as beset with usurious evil--the poor and sick shackled to rich insurance salesmen, bloated city bureaucracies, and landlords--as that described by William Blake and Charles Dickens or Baudelaire and Balzac. Or even the one described by Dante. 

Edwina Nowlin, a poor Michigan resident, was ordered to reimburse a juvenile detention center $104 a month for holding her 16-year-old son. When she explained to the court that she could not afford to pay, Ms. Nowlin was sent to prison.

I wander through each chartered street,
Near where the chartered Thames does flow,
A mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every man,
In every infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear:

How the chimney-sweeper's cry
Every blackening church appals,
And the hapless soldier's sigh
Runs in blood down palace-walls.

But most, through midnight streets I hear
How the youthful harlot's curse
Blasts the new-born infant's tear,
And blights with plagues the marriage hearse.

-Blake, "London" (Songs of Innocence and of Experience)

A Few Words of Encouragement

Now then. After criticizing Barry on a few things, the time has come for me to be an Obamabot/Muslin and defend/praise him on a few things.

- The Teleprompter Issue. The new wingnut meme is "ZOMG Nobama uses teleprompterz!!!!1!!11!!" These people seem unaware that 1) every President reads prepared speeches at press conferences, 2) making a joke about the Special Olympics doesn't somehow "prove" that Obama is hopeless and "inarticulate" away from his teleprompter machine (surely the problem was that he was too articulate for people's delicate PC sensibilities?), and 3) EVERY POLITICIAN IN AMERICA USES A TELEPROMPTER FROM TIME TO TIME. Christ.

- Good on Barry for calling on minority publications (geared towards blacks and Latinos, along with the military newspaper the Stars and Stripes) instead of the silly New York Times and Washington Post in his press conference last night. The reaction of the big media outlets was that of Failed spurned lovers. It was Teh Funny.

Weinberger With a New Batch of Essays on the Way

Eliot Weinberger is my favorite living writer. It appears he has a new book of essays coming out this summer via the great publishing house New Directions; now I know what I'll be reading on beaches and under trees this summer. That and Jacques Barzun's biography of Berlioz, possibly...

Anyway, if you don't know about Eliot Weinberger, head over to Amazon and order some of his books of essays: Outside Stories and Karmic Traces might be the best places to start, though all of his output is worth reading. His last book, An Elemental Thing, was probably his most imagistic and "poetic" book so far, full of strange and marvelous tales and hypnotic prose poems. Weinberger's writing has always had a poetic/dreamy strain, but his other collections combine those kinds of essays (many of them historical or mythological reveries written with no stage-setting context, with no hint of an authorial first-person essayist speaking) with more straightforward, recognizable essays about literature, history, culture, and politics. His book What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles is probably the best polemic (really a selection of articles he'd written for foreign newspapers throughout the Bush-Cheney years) about this decade's high crimes: Weinberger throughout is lucid and sharp, and he often writes with a grim gallows humor. 

He's excellent in both of these areas, a 21st century century cross between William Hazlitt and Jorge Luis Borges in the "non-fictions" that Weinberger has so beautifully translated. 

At any rate, can't wait for Oranges and Peanuts for Sale. If you're interested, here's a link to Weinberger introducing and then interviewing the great poet Gary Snyder at the New York Public Library. It's one of those great wandering digressive talks, with Weinberger offering a coruscating introduction, and Snyder radiating warmth, intellect, and good humor and giving excellent readings from Kenneth Rexroth, Jack Spicer, John Keats's "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer," and his own work. Watch if you have time. 

Two Months In, Hopey's Hands Are Hardly Clean

Barack Obama is a cool guy. Barack Obama is a smart guy. He got elected largely thanks to these qualities, and thanks to many people's sound sense that there was no way a McCain-Palin administration would have turned out well.

Alas, he's an American politician, and what's more, an American President, so Obama also happens to be vaguely duplicitous (his handling of Afghanistan and the financial crisis) and conformist (his caving in to corporate America on certain environmental issues, and to AIPAC and its Christian zealot supporters on Charles Freeman). 

The Geitner stimulus plan is retarded, for a few reasons, and several of the decisions Obama has made on civil liberties are mirror images of Bush administration policies. The economic "dream team" he's assembled are mostly well-paid, process-minded technocrats who will achieve nothing in the way of serious reform. Many of his signals on Iran and Israel-Palestine have been very encouraging, but it remains to be seen just what his actual policies will be.

Meanwhile, he appears to be serious about doubling down on the Afghan War, which strikes me as a futile endeavor. 

I didn't expect Obama to be some kind of Black Jesus, but I did think at least some of his policies would implement meaningful change. His performance in certain areas--ordering the closure of Gitmo, appointing someone like George Mitchell, offering a holiday video greeting to the Iranian people and thereby appealing to them over the heads of their theocratic government--has been good, but his handling of the economic crisis is just more of the same technocratic tinkering that will do nothing but postpone the next financial disaster, not prevent it. 

The Richardson Version

One of the greatest theatre actresses of our time dies in a freak accident far too young, and someone like Dick Cheney gets to live out a long life. The universe can be a pretty wretched place, can't it?

I'll never forget, late one night in London, catching Ken Russell's insane film Gothic, about the Byron-Shelley circle and the writing of Frankenstein. Natasha Richardson was an excellent Mary Shelley, a young Gabriel Byrne was a randy Lord Byron, can't remember who played Percy Shelley. Not that that was anywhere near her finest achievement.

It's impossible to forget watching a DVD of her Ophelia at the National Theatre, and another of her Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Her most recent films, I think, were The White Countess and Asylum, both excellent and both featuring a fine performance from her in particular. In some ways, it seemed like she was just coming into her own. It's a bummer I'll never see her onstage; I'd always hoped to, especially since I've seen two members of the Redgrave-Richardson theatrical dynasty in the flesh: Corin Redgrave as King Lear, and Vanessa Redgrave as Hecuba.

It's a shame we'll never get to see her as Cleopatra, or Hecuba, or Lady Bracknell.

From what we've all heard, it sounds like fiery radical ultra-bohemian Vanessa Redgrave raised a pair of extremely grounded, sane, and sensible daughters in Natasha and Joely. Amazingly, Natasha Richardson seemed to have a quality marriage with Liam Neeson.

Again, the unfairness of it. Natasha Richardson, probably our greatest theatrical actress, dies in a freak accident at the age of 45. People who contribute nothing to the enrichment of the world, people who in fact do nothing but destroy things and preside over the deaths of thousands, get to live out a full life.

The Guardian's theatre critic Michael Billington with a remembrance here.

And here's a photo retrospective from the Daily Beast.

Best Western

Just finished watching John Ford's great film My Darling Clementine, about the Earp Brothers and Doc Holliday in Tombstone. You know the story, right? There have been countless movies, including the exuberant and colorful 1993 romp Tombstone, in which Val Kilmer gives a knock-out brilliant performance as Doc Holliday.

I've loved Tombstone since I was a tyke, and I've always been fascinated by the Earp/Holliday/Gunfight at the O.K. Corral story, and by the legends of the American West in general. I can't think of any other artist--filmmaker, writer, anyone--who has a greater and more senstive feel for the West than John Ford. He might well be the greatest American director; in any event he's certainly up there with Howard Hawks and Orson Welles. My Darling Clementine might be his greatest movie.

Obviously I won't give anything away here (go rent it now); I just wanted to note the film's grace and artistry. At times the film seems like Expressionism turned loose in the American West: strange shadows, crooked angles, crowded low-lit saloons, desolate lonely landscapes across which the occasional horse-drawn carriage or mysterious rider will pass...



Henry Fonda plays Wyatt Earp not as a tough-guy sword of justice but as a mild-mannered lawman concerned trying to build some modicum of civilization and order in a violent town. His relationship with the dying, cultivated scoundrel Doc Holliday (Victor Mature) is the most interesting and touching thing in the movie. What separates My Darling Clementine from all other Westerns more than anything, aside from its aesthetic beauty, might be its focus on the feminine principle, captured in the very title. In some ways it's the most "feminine" of Westerns.

The character of Clementine, an old love from back East that Doc left behind and that Wyatt develops feelings for, represents the grace, elegance, and civilization that might alleviate some of the blood and fire. The final shot of the movie tells you all you need to know about her purpose in this rough landscape, and whether or not she succeeds.

Really don't want to say much else; I just wanted to express, I don't know, my gratitude to John Ford. Just watch it. Here's a great scene:



After you watch the film read Roger Ebert's wonderful essay on it (it's a favorite of his too).

I think it's safe to conclude...

that President Change (who I voted for) isn't going to offer much in the way of serious reform, or even serious discussion, on the Israeli-Palestinian problem.

Charles Freeman, who seemed to be qualified for a post on the National Intelligence Council if you evaluate these things by, you know, actual ACHIEVEMENTS, has been run out of town because He Does Not Love Israel. Or more accurately, he's been hounded, harassed, and character-assassinated out of viability for this position because he doesn't believe in unquestioning, unthinking, slavering, blind, self-destructive (and in my opinion, Israel-destructive) loyalty towards Israel's systematic mass murder and robbery.

These are truly degraded times.

From Freeman's statement:

I am saddened by what the controversy and the manner in which the public vitriol of those who devoted themselves to sustaining it have revealed about the state of our civil society. It is apparent that we Americans cannot any longer conduct a serious public discussion or exercise independent judgment about matters of great importance to our country as well as to our allies and friends.

The libels on me and their easily traceable email trails show conclusively that there is a powerful lobby determined to prevent any view other than its own from being aired, still less to factor in American understanding of trends and events in the Middle East. The tactics of the Israel Lobby plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency and include character assassination, selective misquotation, the willful distortion of the record, the fabrication of falsehoods, and an utter disregard for the truth. The aim of this Lobby is control of the policy process through the exercise of a veto over the appointment of people who dispute the wisdom of its views, the substitution of political correctness for analysis, and the exclusion of any and all options for decision by Americans and our government other than those that it favors.

This is especially appalling after all the recent signs that American discussion of Israel and the Palestinians was finally opening up. The visit by several congressmen to destroyed Gaza, Hillary Clinton's demand that Israel let in humanitarian aid, Roger Cohen's recent columns in the New York Times about the Iranian Jewish community and his "shame" over Israel's incineration of Gaza, the fact of President Obama himself: remember, once upon a time he was friends with Rashid Khalidi, a thoughful and humane spokesman for Palestinian dignity if there ever was one. All of these things looked to be breaking the stranglehold of militarist, expansionist "Israel can do wrong even whe she does wrong" Zionism on the public conversation in the United States. It looked like we were beginning to have the same freedom of discussion on this issue that they have in Israel itself.

Unfortunately, it looks like it's not to be. Charles Freeman holds forbidden ideas. He's failed the Blind Loyalty Test. He has to go.

Spoke Too Soon

About the stem cell thing, that is.

Appears a substantial group in my home state's legislature want to keep restrictions on stem cell research. Good job on keeping Georgia a mindless, backwards laughing stock, asshats.

The Labyrinth of Multitudes

So both the TV media and the President are finally acknowledging the chaos in Mexico. And why not?

Thousands of murders (often in the most imaginatively gruesome ways: beheading, killing a man and then cutting him into pieces with a chainsaw from Wal Mart, injecting a 5-year-old boy with acid), kidnappings, and all-around violence and havoc disrupting people's lives across the social spectrum. Rich and poor are both dying in droves.

Most reports on the current drug war take the "Will it spill over into the US?" angle, which is fair enough and very much worth thinking about, but very few (a notable exception being an Anderson Cooper CNN report) acknowledge what's fueling it. What IS fueling it? Do I even need to say it?

1) The violent drug cartels make their profits by selling to American customers.

2) Their assault weapons come from America, where it's legal to buy, sell, and own such things. The assault weapons ban was a ten-year "sunset law;" it expired in 2004under Bush-Cheney and no one since has been interested in renewing it.

3) The US "War on Drugs" as inaugurated and designed by the Reagan Administration, and never questioned since, makes the drug cartels far more popular and profitable (and armed) than they need to be. All reasonable people know that if drugs were legal and regulated, or at least if the War on Drugs (which is, in my opinion, the most insane and destructive policy this country has ever followed, including the wars in Indochina and Iraq and the Cuban embargo) was called off in favor of a saner program, the drug cartels would lose most, if not all, of their power.

If President Change* (who I voted for) is serious about trying to alleviate the suffering to our south, he should think about finally starting to treat drugs as a medical problem and not as a damnable offense to society. Some gradual decriminalization would help to take drugs out of the hands of the murderers and kidnappers.

Another thing that might help, a long-term and far-sighted thing, might be--at long last--the creation of a North American Union. I'm not keen to 100% imitate the European Union, which has been a mixed bag as far as I can tell (great success in some areas, futility and pointlessness in others), but that would be impossible anyway given the cultural differences between the Old World and the New. I'd favor a loose confederation: total economic union (with the top priority being investment in Mexico and any Central American states that wanted to join), first-class transportation links between the three big countries, loose travel regulations, and a parliament that meets, say, once a year to discuss continent-wide issues like pollution, military defense, and crime. No power to interfere with the constitutions of the sovereign individual nation-states.

I could see the involved countries being Canada, the US (including Alaska and Hawaii, of course), Mexico, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, and the Central American states if they're inclined.

None of this is going to happen anytime soon, of course. The opposition in these United States would be too virulent, and the far-right nativists would probably begin a campaign of terrorism. But wouldn't you enjoy easy travel and job access from Edmonton to the Panama Canal?

*Nice work on the stem cell thing, by the way!

Item! Dumb Frat Boy Yells at Iraqis!

It's important to note, as Dennis Perrin does (yes, I found the video at his blog), that this guy is a first-class asshat.

But I think what's most interesting about this video is that the dumb American frat boy soldier is totally out of his depth and probably knows it. His calling the Iraqi policemen "pussies" and "women" and his imploring them to go "kick some ass" and "go fuck someone up" just sound like the words of someone who's hiding their confusion and bewilderment under the facade of a macho, profane, bellowing tough-guy. This poor idiot has no idea what he's doing: it seems like he has no idea how to undestand the people among which he finds himself, no idea about the divisions and loyalties and antipathies in Iraq, no idea what his current objectives are, and no idea why he's there in the first place.

It's obvious the guy is completely ignorant about the country and its people. It's as obvious that he doesn't know what the larger purpose of Americans dying in Iraq might be (hence his railing at the policemen who "love to see Americans die for you") beyond "fucking people up." The whole clip offers a concrete example of how insane the whole operation in Iraq has been and continues to be: ill-defined, uncomprehending, inflexible, and most of all, mindless and criminal.