3/23: Peace Protesters Stage Dramatic Die-in to Oppose Iraq War at City's Most Prominent Catholic Parish

I have very mixed feelings about this protest, because of how it does not actively invite its audience, but rather shocks and shames them.

However, it hearkens back to the dramatic protests in the late Sixties and early Seventies by Philip Berrigan, Daniel Berrigan, and many others of the Catholic Left (the Baltimore Four, Catonsville Nine, the Camden 28, etc.). Such protests could be read alongside the prankish, but no less serious, symbolic actions of the Situationists and others (see Lipstick Traces, for one source).

3/23: Peace Protesters Stage Dramatic Die-in to Oppose Iraq War at City's Most Prominent Catholic Parish

CHICAGO, March 23 – Six members of the anti-war group “Catholic Schoolgirls Against The War” staged a dramatic die-in during the 11AM Easter mass at Holy Name Cathedral, Chicago’s most prominent Catholic parish – and the home of one of the nation’s most conservative church leaders, Cardinal George. The action included a denunciation of Cardinal George’s January 7 meeting with Mayor Daley and President Bush, the ‘chief architect’ of the ongoing carnage in Iraq. Four people were arrested at Bush's January 7 visit, one of whom was slapped with bogus felony charges.

The three men and three women activists timed the action to reach both Holy Name’s large easter audience -- including some of Chicago’s most prominent citizens, who commonly attend Easter mass at the church -- and the many more viewers and readers of the local press, which usually extensively covers the services.

The action was staged in the Gold Coast cathedral’s parish center, an auditorium where mass is being said while the main cathedral undergoes renovation. Easter services at Holy Name are traditionally one of the most heavily attended masses of the year, and this mass was no exception, with people packed wall to wall for today’s Easter morning holiday service.

The group of young men and women, dressed in their Easter best, sat through the 11AM mass until George reached the homily. George had just uttered the words, "Often, we hear people say 'love is blind," when the protesters rose from their seats to address George and the hundreds of parishioners in the auditorium. "The sixth commandment says 'Thou shall not kill'" said one protester. "Yet more than a million Iraqis have been killed since the invasion of Iraq," said a second. Many members of the audience audibly gasped and murmered at these words. "On January 7, Cardinal George met for lunch with George W. Bush," said a third protester, saying that Bush was responsible for the ongoing carnage in Iraq. That statement referred to a January 7 meetng Cardinal George and Chicago mayor Richard Daley had with George W. Bush during a presidential visit to Chicago that was capped by the arrest of four peace protesters.

In the wake of the Bush visit in January, peace activists vigorously criticized the Cardinal and mayor Daley for failing to publicly raise the issue of the war -- and the need to end it -- with Bush, and the Holy Name action was staged in part to remind George of his resonsibility to press for the issue of an end to the war with public officials, particularly leading war boosters like Bush.

At this point during the church service, ushers had rushed around the protesters, who then squirted themselves with stage blood and collapsed to the floor in the aisle. Some stage blood spattered on non-protesters in the vicinity.

The protesters voluntarily got to their feet at the ushers' urging and walked out of the auditorium, chanting "Even the Pope calls for peace!" "And so should we all call for peace," said George from the alter as the last protester was led out.

The protesters were arrested outside by Chicago police, and conducted a series of media interviews with local television outlets, which had packed the auditorium to film George's service, while cops waited for a police wagon to take them to lockup.

The six peace activists -- Angela Haban, 20 years old, female; Regan Maher, 25 years old, female; Mercedes Phinaih, 18 years old, female; Ephran Ramirez, Jr., 22 years old, male; Donte D. Smith, 21 years old, male; and Ryane J. Ziemba, 25 years old, male -- chose Holy Name as a way to ratchet up a sense of urgency about the war with the cardinal and many of the city's elite who attend services there.

The protesters' sense of urgency seems to be well placed -- four more U.S. soldiers were killed today in Iraq, bringing the total number of soldiers killed there to over 4,000 since the war began just over five years ago. Estimates of Iraqi dead total in the hundreds of thousands, and perhaps as high as a million or more. The U.S. government has chosen not to keep track of the number of civilian casualties in this conflict.

"On a day when we're celebrating the resurrection of the Prince of Peace -- a man whose ministry was deeply tied to comfort and relief for the most oppressed among us -- it's critical that we remind ourselves and others everywhere of the need to reject business as usual and demand peace in Iraq from our own government and its supporter," said Kevin Clark, a supporter of today's protesters. "The fact is that many in attendance today at Holy Name Cathedral are among the city's most powerful people, and it's incumbent on them to endure a little discomfort to be reminded that unless they're working tirelessly to end this war immediately, then their presence in this church on Easter Sunday is an act of hypocrisy."

This afternoon, the Chicago police announced that the six young people arrested at the Holy Name Cathedral die-in have been charged with one count of felony criminal damage to property and two counts of simple battery. They are currently being held at Cook County jail at 26th and California, and are expected to be arraigned on the felony charge some time Monday morning, possibly as early as 9AM. Police denied one arrestee who is hypoglycemic access to his medication. Police have also repoortedly been telling concerned callers that supporters of the peace protesters could be investigated for terrorism by Homeland Security -- a tactic supporters says underscores the repressive political nature of the police response to the protest.

Supporters are working to arrange jail solidarity and legal support. For more info, call Kevin Clark at 312-259-4380 or email him at solitaryleftist (at) aol.com. Supporters have also set up a paypal account to raise bail funds. The contact email for that effort is holyname6 (at) riseup.net. Paypal donations can also be sent via the following url: www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr

Obama and Israel: Abunimah's Analysis

The senator, his pastor and the Israel lobby

By Ali Abunimah

The Electronic Intifada
31 March 2008

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9427.shtml

US senator Barack Obama was widely hailed for his 18 March speech calming the media furor about the sermons of his pastor for twenty years Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Wright's remarks, Obama said, "expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country -- a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam."

It might seem odd for Obama to mention Israel and "radical Islam" in a speech focused on US race relations, especially since Wright's most widely reported comments were about America's historic and ongoing oppression of its black citizens.

But for months, even before most Americans had heard of Wright, prominent pro-Israel activists were hounding Obama over Wright's views on Israel and ties to Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. In January, Abraham Foxman, National Director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), demanded that Obama denounce Farrakhan as an anti-Semite.

The senator duly did so, but that was not enough. "[Obama has] distanced himself from his pastor's decision to honor Farrakhan," Foxman said, but "He has not distanced himself from his pastor. I think that's the next step." Foxman labeled Wright "a black racist," adding in the same breath, "Certainly he has very strong anti-Israel views" (Larry Cohler-Esses, "ADL Chief To Obama: 'Confront Your Pastor' On Minister Farrakhan," The Jewish Week, 16 January 2008). Criticism of Israel, one suspects, is Wright's truly unforgivable crime and Foxman's vitriol has echoed through dozens of pro-Israel blogs.

Since his early political life in Chicago, Barack Obama was well-informed about the Middle East and had expressed nuanced views conveying an understanding that justice and fairness, not blinkered support for Israel, are the keys to peace and the right way to combat extremism. Yet for months he has been fighting the charge that he is less rabidly pro-Israel than other candidates -- which means now adhering to the same simplistic formulas and unconditional support for Israeli policies that have
helped to escalate conflict and worsen America's standing in the Middle East. Hence Obama's assertion at his 26 February debate with Senator Hillary Clinton that he is "a stalwart friend of Israel."

But Obama stressed that his appeal to Jewish voters also stems from his desire "to rebuild what I consider to be a historic relationship between the African American community and the Jewish community."

Obama has not addressed to a national audience why that relationship might have frayed. He was much more candid when speaking to Jewish leaders in Cleveland just one day before the debate. In a little-noticed comment, reported on 25 February by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Obama tried to contextualize Wright's critical views of Israel.

Wright, Obama explained, "was very active in the South Africa divestment movement and you will recall that there was a tension that arose between the African American and the Jewish communities during that period when we were dealing with apartheid in South Africa, because Israel and South Africa had a relationship at that time. And that cause -- that was a source of tension."

Obama implicitly admitted that Wright's views were rooted in opposition to Israel's deep ties to apartheid South Africa, and thus entirely reasonable even if Obama himself did "not necessarily," as he put it, share them. Israel supplied South Africa with hundreds of millions of dollars of weaponry despite an international embargo. Even the water cannons that South African forces used to attack anti-apartheid demonstrators in the townships were manufactured at Kibbutz Beit Alfa, a "socialist" settlement in northern Israel. Until the late 1980s, South Africa often relied on Israel to lobby Western governments not to impose sanctions.

And the relationship was durable. As The Washington Post reported in 1987, "When it comes to Israel and South Africa, breaking up is hard to do." Israeli officials, the newspaper said, "face conflicting imperatives: their desire to get in line with the West, which has adopted a policy of mild but symbolic sanctions, versus Israel's longstanding friendship with the Pretoria government, a relationship that has been important for strategic, economic and, at times, sentimental reasons" ("An Israeli Dilemma: S. African Ties; Moves to Cut Links Are Slowed by Economic Pressures, Sentiment," The Washington Post, 20 September 1987).

In 1987, Jesse Jackson, then the world's most prominent African American politician, angered some Jewish American leaders for insisting that "Whoever is doing business with South Africa is wrong, but Israel is ... subsidized by America, which includes black Americans' tax money, and then it subsidizes South Africa" ("Jackson Draws New
Criticism From Jewish Leaders Over Interview," Associated Press, 16 October 1987).

As a presidential candidate, Jackson raised the same concerns in a high profile meeting with the Israeli ambassador, as did a delegation of black civil rights and religious leaders, including the nephew of Martin Luther King Jr, on a visit to Israel. For many African Americans, it was intolerable hypocrisy that so many Jewish leaders who staunchly supported Civil Rights and the anti-apartheid movement would be tolerant of Israel's complicity.

Thus, Reverend Wright, who has sought a broader understanding of the Middle East than one that blames Islam and Arabs for all the region's problems or endorses
unconditional support for Israel, stood in the mainstream of African American opinion, not on some extremist fringe.

That is not to say that Jewish concerns about anti-Semitic sentiments among some African Americans should simply be dismissed. Racism in any community should be confronted. But as they have done with other communities, hard-line pro-Israel activists like Foxman have too often tried to tar any African American critic of Israel with the brush of anti-Semitism. Why must every black candidate to a major office go through the ritual of denouncing Farrakhan, a marginal figure in national politics who likely gets most of his notoriety from the ADL? Surely if anti-Semitism were such an endemic problem among African Americans, there would be someone other than Farrakhan for the ADL to have focused its ire on all these decades.

By contrast, neither Senator Joe Lieberman (Al Gore's running mate in 2000 and the first Jewish candidate on a major party presidential ticket), nor Senator John McCain
have been required so publicly and so repeatedly to repudiate extremist and racist comments by Israeli leaders or some well-known radical Christian leaders supporting the Republican party. Foxman, whose organization devotes enormous resources to burnishing Israel's image, has rarely spoken out about the escalating anti-Arab racism and incitement to violence by prominent Israeli politicians and rabbis.

That is no surprise. African Americans, Arab Americans and Muslims all share some things in common: individuals are held collectively responsible for the words and actions of others in their community whether they had anything to do with them or not. And the price of admission to the political mainstream is to abandon any foreign policy goals that diverge from those of the pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian lobby.

Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah is author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse (Metropolitan Books,2006).

Mark Doty Reading Walt Whitman's "Over the Carnage Rose Prophetic a Voice"

This is Mark Doty's reading of Whitman at Split This Rock...

"Over the Carnage Rose Prophetic a Voice" by Walt Whitman

OVER the carnage rose prophetic a voice,
Be not dishearten'd, affection shall solve the problems of freedom yet,
Those who love each other shall become invincible,
They shall yet make Columbia victorious.

Sons of the Mother of All, you shall yet be victorious,
You shall yet laugh to scorn the attacks of all the remainder of the earth.

No danger shall balk Columbia's lovers,
If need be a thousand shall sternly immolate themselves for one.

One from Massachusetts shall be a Missourian's comrade,
From Maine and from hot Carolina, and another an Oregonese, shall be friends triune,
More precious to each other than all the riches of the earth.

To Michigan, Florida perfumes shall tenderly come,
Not the perfumes of flowers, but sweeter, and waited beyond death.

It shall be customary in the houses and streets to see manly affection,
The most dauntless and rude shall touch face to face lightly,
The dependence of Liberty shall be lovers,
The continuance of Equality shall be comrades.

These shall tie you and band you stronger than hoops of iron,
I, ecstatic, O partners! O lands! with the love of lovers tie you.

(Were you looking to be held together by lawyers?
Or by an agreement on a paper? or by arms?
Nay, nor the world, nor any living thing, will so cohere.)

To See the Earth review in Jacket

Check out the first official review of To See the Earth, appearing in Jacket (35), Spring 2008.

A blurb from it:

Implicit in this “seeing” is the conscious act of witnessing that informs much of the book, be it witness to the hardships of poverty in Russia during the post-Soviet period, the Israeli occupation of Palestine, or the often-overlooked American protests against the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. More than simply “political poetry,” however, Metres explores the extent to which language itself is bound up in the struggle to articulate an adequate response to the world around us. The problems of language are two-fold, he seems to suggest, arising not only from its inherent incommensurability but also from its reliance on and origins in the very authoritarian systems his poetry testifies against

.

Jay Hopler and Cate Marvin reading, a postmortem

Jay Hopler and Cate Marvin came into town to give a reading at Cleveland State last night, and I was struck by their collective "comic macabre," a legacy, perhaps of the masterful confessionals like Berryman and Plath.

Hopler was a hell of a lot funnier than his poems sounded on the page on my first readings of his book Green Squall, and much of that humor is directed at himself, a la Berryman, when he even talks to himself in the third person in "The Frustrated Angel."

Marvin hews closer to Plath than Hopler to Berryman in terms of technique and style, though she also ranges into the fabular and postmodern manques more fully. I was particularly struck by this poem, "Landscape with Hungry Girls," from her latest book, Fragment of the Head of a Queen, for its directness and anger about patriarchy and what happens to young women who succumb to its vampirisms. It made me think of my short list of poems on anorexia, which would include Frank Bidart's "Ellen West," and Ted Leo's "Me and Mia."

"Landscape with Hungry Girls"

There’s blood here. The skyline teethes the clouds
raw, and rain’s course streams a million umbilical
cords down windows and walls. Every things gnaws,
and the pink polish on their girl-nails chips, flakes
off as they continue to dig through towering heaps
of refuse. It's a story, as usual. As usual, a phone
and dead silence. Or the phone: a lobster to the ear.
Girls resigned to being girls. The softer faces they
find in the mirrors. The limp shake, a hand placed,
a flower wilting moist on the man's palm. Or hard
handshakes deemed "aggressive": snakes. O, girls.
All of them carefully watching carefully the faces
of their sleeping men, even when their own faces are
more beautiful in their watching, and if only they'd
watch their own faces beneath the revolving lights
sliding between the blinds: they are blinded from
watching their men sleep so dumbly. The headaches,
the insistent grip of a gnawing stomach, eating itself.
Thinking hunger is strength, how hurt they are, girls
picking at food on their plates. I like a girl who eats.
Careful, what you say you want. The moon is distant,
yet cousin to her face: our genders worse than alien.
Bleeding is something everyone does. You don't call.
Girls snack on skyscrapers, girls gut their teddy bears,
and girls saw their own faces off. What is it to lack
compassion? When you walk through a zoo do you
not thinkg the animals it houses could have been you?
Who would you be, how hungry, if you were a girl
feeding only on the meek sleep of male countenance?
Would you stand vigil, would you starve if they do?

The Sidewalk Blogger in Hawai'i Marks the 4,000th U.S. Death in Iraq

Thanks to the Sidewalk Blogger for marking this latest tragic milestone in the Iraq debacle.


Meanwhile, let's also remember that the Iraq Body Count nears 90,000...
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/

"Charlie Don't Surf"/From Apocalypse Now to Sandinista Back Then, and Now to Iraq

In the process of uncovering anti-war or dissenting songs that get co-opted (and yes, I have yet to post on Credence Clearwater Revival's "Fortunate Son" or Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A.", though at least the former is mentioned in the book, Behind the Lines), I found an instance where a vaguely pro-war statement & representation comes to be made into a song against war: The Clash's "Charlie Don't Surf," from the endless three-album Sandinista (1981). In Apocalypse Now, one of those movies that first looks pro-war, then looks anti-war, then looks pro-war again, the following interchange occurs:

Kilgore: You either surf or you fight.
Willard: Are you crazy God damnit? Don't you think its a little risky for some R&R?
Kilgore: If I say its safe to surf this beach Captain, then its safe to surf this beach. I mean I'm not afraid to surf this place, I'll surf this whole fucking place!
Kilgore: Charlie don't surf!

You can watch The Ride of the Valkyries scene in case you missed the movie.

The Clash then recorded their song, a version of which they play here:




CHORUS
Charlie don't surf and we think he should
Charlie don't surf and you know that it ain't no good
Charlie don't surf for his hamburger Momma
Charlie's gonna be a napalm star

Everybody wants to rule the world
Must be something we get from birth
One truth is we never learn
Satellites will make space burn

We've been told to keep the strangers out
We don't like them starting to hang around
We don't like them all over town
Across the world we are going to blow them down

CHORUS

The reign of the super powers must be over
So many armies can't free the earth
Soon the rock will roll over
Africa is choking on their Coca Cola

It's a one a way street in a one horse town
One way people starting to brag around
You can laugh, put them down
These one way people gonna blow us down

CHORUS

Charlie don't surf he'll never learn
Charlie don't surf though he's got a gun
Charlie don't surf think that he should
Charlie don't surf we really think he should
Charlie don't surf

Charlie don't surf and we think he should
Charlie don't surf and you know that it ain't no good
Charlie don't surf for his hamburger Momma
Charlie don't surf

But, as is the rule, "Charlie Don't Surf" also has become something of a gaming title as well. In the following youtubed clip, you too can become a soldier, defined by the weapons that you hold in front of you, like a pair of ideological goggles into which you squint, trying to make out who to kill and who not to.

Outkast's "B.O.B." (Bombs Over Baghdad)/Another Case of Musical Cooptation

Jim Doppke got me to (nearly) the 21st Century by relaying that Outkast's "B.O.B. (Bombs Over Baghdad)," from 1999, a quasi-political song which seems to be about the political state of the union, life in the ghetto, and bombing Baghdad, had also been coopted by the military for its own ends. Here's a link to the video of Outkast's "B.O.B.".

It's intriguing to think that this song came out in 1999, on the heels of President Clinton's bombing of Iraq in 1998's Operation Desert Fox (the ill-named campaign that echoes the Nazi Rommel's nickname), as a result of Iraq's alleged failure to allow weapons inspectors into its facilities. (Never mind that no weapons of note were ever found.) Meanwhile, other smaller wars, over the souls of men and women in the ghettos of this country, continued to rage.

Here are the lyrics:

"B.O.B. (Bombs Over Baghdad)"

[Dre]
1, 2.. 1, 2, 3; yeah!
In-slum-national, underground
Thunder pounds when I stomp the ground (Woo!)
Like a million elephants and silverback orangutans
You can't stop a train
Who want some? Don't come un-pre-pared
I'll be there, but when I leave there
Better be a household name
Weather man tellin' us it ain't gon' rain
So now we sittin' in a drop-top, soaking wet
In a silk suit, tryin' not to sweat
Hits somersaults without the net
But this'll be the year that we won't forget
One-Nine-Nine-Nine, Anno Domini anything goes, be whatchu wanna be
Long as you know consequences, to give and for livin'
The fence is too high to jump in jail
Too low to dig, I might just touch hell
HOT! Get a life, now they on sale
Then I might cast you a spell, look at what came in the mail
A scale and some Arm and Hammer, soul gold grill and some baby mama
Black Cadillac and a pack of pampers
Stack of question with no answers
Cure for cancer, cure for AIDS
Make a nigga wanna stay on tour for days
Get back home, things are wrong
Well not really it was bad all along
before he left adds up, to a ball of power
Thoughts at a thousands miles per hour
Hello, ghetto, let your brain breathe,
believe there's always more, ahhhhh!

[Chorus: 2X]
[Dre] Don't pull the thang out, unless you plan to bang
[Choir] Bombs over Baghdad!
[Dre] Yeah! Ha ha yeah!
Don't even bang unless you plan to hit something
[Choir] Bombs over Baghdad!
[Dre] Yeah! Uhh-huh

[Big Boi]
Uno, dos, tres, it's on
Did you ever think a pimp rock a microphone?
Like that there boy and we still stay street
Big things happen every time we meet
Like a track team, crack fiend, dying to geek
Outkast bumpin' up and down the street
Slant back, Cadillac, 'bout five nigga deep
Seventy-five MC's freestylin' to the beat
Cause we get crunk, stay crunk, at the club
Should have bought an ounce, but you copped a dub
Should have held back, but you throwed the punch
'Spose to meet your girl but you packed a lunch
No D to-the U to-the G for you
Got a son on the way by the name of Bamboo
Got a little baby girl four year, Jordan
Never turn my back on my kids for them
Should have hit it (hit it) quit it (quit it) rag (rag) top (top)
Before you RE up, get a laptop
Make a business for yourself, boy, set some goals
Make a fat diamond out of dusty coals
Record number four, but we on the road
Hold up, slow up, stop, control
Like Janet, Planets, Stankonia is on ya
A movin' like Floyd commin' straight to Florida
Lock all your windows then block the corridors
Pullin' off on bell 'cause a whippings in order
I like a three piece fish before I cut your daughter
Yo quiero Taco Bell, then I hit the border
Pity PAT rappers tryin' to get the five
I'm a microphone fiend tryin' to stay alive
When you come to ATL boi you better not hide
cause the Dungeon Family gon' ride, hah!

[Chorus: 2X]
[Dre] Don't pull the thang out, unless you plan to bang
[Choir] Bombs over Baghdad!
[Dre] Yeah! Ha ha yeah!
Don't even bang unless you plan to hit something
[Choir] Bombs over Baghdad!
[Dre] Yeah! Uhh-huh

[Choir]
Bombs over Baghdad! Yeah
Bombs over Baghdad! Yeah
Bombs over Baghdad! Yeah
Bombs over Baghdad! Yeah

[Dre]
B-I-G, B-O-I
An-An-Andre
To the T-O-P

[Dre and Big Boi: 15X]
Bob your head. Rag top.

(1, 2.. 1, 2, 3, 4) (Gimme some)

From Softpedia News:

OutKast member Andre 3000 was shocked to know that one of his songs became the morning wake-up call for the troops in Iraq.

Andre, 30, the one half of the successful and avant-garde hip-hop duo OutKast, revealed that he found out from a neighbor, who has a son in Iraq, that the solders are using his song, Bombs Over Baghdad, as their morning wake-up call and it is considered to be helpful for the troops morale.

He says: "My dad's next-door-neighbor’s son sent a letter home saying how Bombs Over Baghdad was the song that they wake up to. It gets them hyped. I don't know if I want it to be a rally song for troops, but if it helps morale and keeps them going, I guess it's a good thing."

Split This Rock conference notes...

Check out Joseph Ross' posts on the Split This Rock festival of poets and activists from this past weekend. Wish I could have been there.

The Clash's "Rock the Casbah"/This Music Converts Fundamentalists

The Clash's "Rock the Casbah" has the sort of history that suggests how difficult it is to make an art that is truly socially transformative, and how easy any art can be manipulated to other ends.

My first memories of music videos, watched as a pre-teen in the early 1980s, were largely of lingerie-clad hussies, but these scrawny, unwashed, snaggle-toothed clan also drew my attention. Who can forget the enigmatic armadillo hustling across the ground, throughout the video, like some vague reference to Elizabeth Bishop's "The Armadillo" (also an anti-war poem), some self-armored image of our creaturely survivalism?

According to some accounts, "Rock the Casbah" may have been inspired by Iran's banning of secular music during the Islamic Revolution of 1979. The video, however, with its kitschy and even mildly offensive caricatures of an Arab sheikh and an Hasidic Jew, places the song in an Arab/Israeli context (which replicates the lyrical references to minarets and temples). Its most basic argument is that fundamentalists don't like this music because it moves people, it makes them forget the singularity of their creeds, it makes them disobedy, it makes them forget their war-making.

Yet, according to Wikipedia, the song was then employed for martial ends (in a blatant misreading of the lyrics):

The song became an unofficial anthem for U.S. forces during the first Gulf War, largely on the basis of the line about dropping "bombs between the minarets".[2] It was the first song played by Armed Forces Radio at the start of the war. This is ironic given the band's well established left-wing stance. The song can also be understood as a message that western rock and roll will help defeat radical Islamist regimes by winning over the people of the Middle East, especially the young.[citation needed]

In 2006, the conservative National Review released their list of the top 50 "Conservative Rock Songs", with "Rock the Casbah" at #20, noting its frequent requests during the Iraq War.[8] Despite, or perhaps because of, its popularity with soldiers during the Gulf War, "Rock the Casbah" was one of the songs deemed inappropriate by Clear Channel following the September 11, 2001 attacks.[9]

The lyrics to "Rock the Casbah":

Now the king told the boogie men
You have to let that raga drop
The oil down the desert way
Has been shakin to the top
The sheik he drove his cadillac
He went a cruisin down the ville
The muezzin was a standing
On the radiator grille

Chorus
The shareef dont like it
Rockin the casbah
Rock the casbah
The shareef dont like it
Rockin the casbah
Rock the casbah

By order of the prophet
We ban that boogie sound
Degenerate the faithful
With that crazy casbah sound
But the bedouin they brought out
The electric camel drum
The local guitar picker
Got his guitar picking thumb
As soon as the shareef
Had cleared the square
They began to wail

Chorus

Now over at the temple
Oh! they really pack em in
The in crowd say its cool
To dig this chanting thing
But as the wind changed direction
The temple band took five
The crowd caught a wiff
Of that crazy casbah jive

Chorus

The king called up his jet fighters
He said you better earn your pay
Drop your bombs between the minarets
Down the casbah way

As soon as the shareef was
Chauffeured outta there
The jet pilots tuned to
The cockpit radio blare

As soon as the shareef was
Outta their hair
The jet pilots wailed

Chorus

He thinks it's not kosher
Fundamentally he can't take it.
You know he really hates it.

Poems on/about the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial

My father just returned from a trip to Vietnam, some forty years after his initial service to our country, as a Naval Advisor on a South Vietnamese patrol gunboat. The day after his return, he was rushed to the hospital because of edema in his legs, which had swelled frighteningly during the trip. Unknown causes. Almost no one in contemporary Vietnam wanted to talk about the war, and he was both relieved and saddened by this. Where did it go? What wounds were--and are--just below the surface of languages, of faces, of skin?

Who knows how we will remember and memorialize this current war? It's difficult to imagine a memorial as moving and provocative as Maya Lin's Vietnam Veteran's Memorial in Washington, D.C.--that black scar of mirroring granite half-sunk in the earth. If there's a limit to its representativity, it's that there are no Vietnamese names, names of the 2.5 million dead. Yet, despite this framing, it's still a testament to how art can act both as elegy and as outcry.

Here is a video rendering of Yusef Komunyakaa's famous "Facing It":



And here's George Bilgere's "At the Vietnam Memorial":

At the Vietnam Memorial

The last time I saw Paul Castle
it was printed in gold on the wall
above the showers in the boys’
locker room, next to the school
record for the mile. I don’t recall
his time, but the year was 1968
and I can look across the infield
of memory to see him on the track,
legs flashing, body bending slightly
beyond the pack of runners at his back.

He couldn’t spare a word for me,
two years younger, junior varsity,
and hardly worth the waste of breath.
He owned the hallways, a cool blonde
at his side, and aimed his interests
further down the line than we could guess.

Now, reading the name again,
I see us standing in the showers,
naked kids beneath his larger,
comprehensive force—-the ones who trail
obscurely, in the wake of the swift,
like my shadow on this gleaming wall.

I want to add "My Letter to the Wall--November 1989," by Vietnamese poet Nguyen Ngoc Xuan, when I find it in my files.

The Status of Narrative and the Avant-Garde/Arab on Radar by Angele Ellis

In an oft-quoted paragraph from his essay, "Poetry and the Politics of the Subject," published in the Socialist Review (1988), Silliman made visible what occasionally had fallen from view of the recent avant-garde--the cultural work of narrating subjectivities, whose collective stories had not yet been fully or complexly articulated in poetry (or for that matter, in any media arena):

Progressive poets who identify as members of groups that have been the subject of history – many white male heterosexuals, for example – are apt to challenge all that is supposedly "natural" about the formation of their own subjectivity. That their writing today is apt to call into question, if not actually explode, such conventions as narrative, persona and even reference can hardly be surprising. At the other end of the spectrum are poets who do not identity as members of groups that have been the subject of history, for they instead have been its objects. The narrative of history has led not to their self-actualization, but to their exclusion and domination. These writers and readers – women, people of color, sexual minorities, the entire spectrum of the "marginal" – have a manifest political need to have their stories told. That their writing should often appear much more conventional, with the notable difference as to who is the subject of these conventions, illuminates the relationship between form and audience.

It goes without saying that Silliman himself has revised the framing of this tentative space for identity poetry, and has concerned himself more with how poets have continued to work the interstitial spaces between identity and socius, between experiment and tradition, between avant and post-avant, between innovation and homage, etc. Yet, even today, I want to reassert that claim for this asserted space, however minor or residual it might be in our national poetics. How else, but to begin with a story?

Once, climbing the back staircase of the Seelbach Hilton in Louisville with my friend, the poet Michael Magee, I caught a distinct pungent aroma almost hovering in the walls that reminded me of my grandmother's kitchen; that kind of smell that makes the whole space a large deliciously uncleaned pot. I said to Mike: "This is why I can never be avant-garde: because I smell my grandmother's kitchen in the back stairwells of the Seelbach."

What I think I meant was that there is something fundamental and inescapable about my longing to reach back into and through my language toward my ancestors, and that this pull seems incommensurate with the whole orientation of the avant-garde, the advance guard of the revolution, heralding the future in the new.

I may yet change my mind, but that pull of the ancestors, that sense of myself as the ligature between the ancestors and the future, a kind of knot I have refused to cut, is what I share with other writers of recent immigrant or strongly ethnic connections.

Reading Arab on Radar (2007), by Angele Ellis, feels like talking with a recently discovered sibling I never knew I had; a common elegy for (Arabic) language and the world that it created (the Lebanon of the mind), a piquant thirst for peace and justice, living in a society that demonizes and actively wars against the peoples and lands from which our ancestors come, and a hope that language might function not only as ligature between us and where we come from, but as resource for those who work for a better world.

There are plenty of narrative poems, poems that function in just the way that Silliman posed. Having worked as an educator, community organizer and political activist in Pittsburgh since the 1980s, Ellis adds to the tradition of dissenting activist and prison narratives with poems like "The Blue State Ghazals," "Federal Building" and "Allegheny County Jail."

In "Federal Building," Ellis notes the narrowing spaces allowed for dissenting voices, and how the heaven of our democracy is increasingly difficult to pass through, in our security-obsessed State:

I enter through security as a taxpayer,
the needle's eye of citizenship. Bag on the table,
keys in a plastic container that could hold mail
and explosives. The only way in and out.
I remember with strained nostalgia
the protests of the eighties--
South Africa, Nicaragua, El Salvador,
the sit-ins at congressional offices,
the time we rode up and down the elevators
with our leaflets until the guards nabbed us
and threw us out. And that last time,
the sit-in during Desert Storm,
suspended between freedom and arrest,
swimming in ether like exotic fish
while our freinds pressed against the aquarium glass
with hopeful signs
as if we could change history, levitate the building
like Abbie Hoffman tried with the Pentagon.
Now we are lucky to stand unmolested
on the public sidewalk,
the thin edge of the wedge of democracy.

It's "April Ghazals," however, that is suggestive of Ellis' attempts to move into a fragmented form that both tells a story and resists that story at the same time. Here are the second and third sections of "The April Ghazals":

II. I have shored

She sold the ring for a wilderness.
Removed, it made a hole in the universe.

Diorama behind suffocating glass.
A small mammal among predators.

Nostrils filled with the fetor of formaldehyde.
The specimen revolted at dissection.

Human ashes scattered like seed.
Not even hope left in the box.

Hell an absence without flames.
All fire within--lye of lies, of liars.

III. against my ruins

They said she refused to follow instructions.
Words were muffled from behind their masks.

They often spoke of her duty to God.
This is why Whitman preferred to sit with animals.

They mapped her brain with colored Rohrschachs.
Mourning became electric, red and blue.

The slain can speak under enchantment.
Why were they surprised when she contradicted them?

The magician's powers are all in distraction.
Sometimes the object never reappears.

We never quite know the identity of this woman, or the catalogue of her losses. Yet it becomes emblematic of the total losses that the book explores--of languages, of stories, of the older generation, of belief in a future because of a narrated past. Ellis' debut is suffused with the right kinds of questions, engaging and often scintillating language, and in poems like "The April Ghazals," shows how the old stories might be the humus to new ones.

Rachel Loden's Hotel Imperium/One Upon Whom Nothing Is Lost

I recently came across a quotation from James Baldwin: "Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed unless it is faced." The importance of "facing"--of paying attention to something, of witnessing, suggests the way in which art can play a fundamental role in social change. If the principal duty of every writer is, in Henry James' words, to be one upon whom nothing is lost, then Rachel Loden's poetic dialogue with our times in Hotel Imperium and The Richard Nixon Snow Globe offers us a vital poetic model. Her work engages the cultural/political/historical moment in ways that move beyond both the antinomianism of 1960s oppositionality and the uncritical, quietistic, or unwitting embrace of it by so many of our contemporary poetries.

A panoramic subjective history of the Cold War, Hotel Imperium (1999) oscillates between the American scene (rife with Nixons, Gulf Wars, pop cultural oddities, and the products of capitalism--Clairol, corporate memos, Cruella De Villes, Elvises, lingerie ads, etc.), and the Soviet one, with its own insanities (Lenin's corpse, Beria, the Chechen leader Dudayev and his marvelous fleet of cars, etc.).

Loden's poetry is wisecracking in two senses of that term--it demonstrates a tough, youthful, whipsmart talking-back to authority, as well as a hardbitten wisdom of someone who's been around the block, and out of the Hotel and Snow Globes of our United States.

Written in a taut, musical language that bridges formalist and experimental modes, Loden's poetry is alternately funny and terrifying, as in "Reconstructed Face":

Surely this face—generic, blank—
betrays no terror. But her other face
is lost and floating on the river,
upturned like a lily in the air.

The police artist has slapped the flesh
back on her, wants us to know her,
makes her smile in that special way
a reconstructed woman smiles

after she's found without her face on
in a river, as though she tried
but failed to save us from the trouble
of her being there, our having to admit

that yes, we know her, smiling in the clay
the way we know the face of our own mother,
the reconstructed face that never
fooled us, built as crudely as it was

upon the scaffold of the other.

Such a poem, though not explicitly political as many others in the collection, could be read merely as a kind of exploration of the mysterious and frightening opacity of one's mother. And yet, in light of the feminist discourse around masks that emerged in the late 1960s (typified in the line by Muriel Rukeyser that became the title to an early feminist poetry anthology, "No More Masks!"), this poem bears an uncanny critique of the ways in which generations of women, particularly under Cold War containment culture, found themselves masking themselves. Such masking, for the speaker, suddenly seems as disturbing as a corpse's remade face (herself, perhaps, a victim of a more explicit violence).

In "Clueless in Paradise," Loden moves to the explicit, beginning with the snow globe image that she has returned to--that canned space of televisual reality--and then breaks it, metaphorically. Outside the snow globe, outside the quaint and seemingly honorable language employed by the Head of State--we are fighting for freedom, to save an invaded country, to topple a dictator, etc.--is a seething violence.

"Clueless in Paradise"


"Kenneth, what is the frequency?"
--query to Dan Rather from
unidentified assailants


Sometimes, when you shake your head,
it is like snow settling
on the little village in the paperweight.

Other times, it's not--and that's why
God made the Bradley Fighting Vehicle.
He can't always put a plaque up

on the spot. Sometimes even He
is forced to settle for a souvenir. Perhaps
Flopsy the Bunny isn't what you want,

and yet you won her at the fair. Like we won
a great victory against Iraq (applause).
Tie a yellow ribbon 'round my eyes,

whirl me in circles, send me careering
toward the map. I love humanity. I'll stick
a pushpin into any random dot, and smile

endearingly. I'm a consultant. And nude
--I mean, naked--aggression, is what this thing
is all about, plus Bernie Shaw

quavering beneath a table when the smart
bombs start coming in, and Dan Rather
looking itchy in his sweater. Kenneth,

what -is- the frequency? Men on CNN
are weeping and surrendering, kneeling
while they kiss their captors' hands.

I wish there were more poets as secretly angry as Loden at the state of things, whose rage is shaped in kewpie doll phrases, kewpies that are voodoo dolls full of pins.

Her chapbook, The Richard Nixon Snow Globe (2005) continues the work of Hotel Imperium, and moves us into the post-Soviet, post-Cold War moment, with the characteristic black humor that occasionally terrifies:

NINEVEH FALLEN

Kuyunjik, palace mound


Nineveh fallen. My
Ghostly battalion
Silver-bell ankle rings
Tatterdemalion

Babylon Cadillac. Black
Candle guttering
Nettle-leav'd bellflowers
Sweet-faced American

Elvis in Cuneiform
Black-winged deity
Fifteen-gate city of
Mooncalf & talisman

Nineveh fallen. My
Ghostly battalion
Daughters of Sargon
Be carried away

In light of the decline of women's rights in the post-Saddam, post-Iraq "liberation" era of U.S. occupation, these last lines of this vigorously formal poem have a kind of keening that will keep me up late at night, wondering whether I could have done anything more to have stopped this war.

Four Poets at Visible Voice, March 19, 2008

Last night, despite yet another Cleveland snowstorm, four horsemen of the word apocalypse, Philip Metres, George Bilgere, Roger Craik, and Michael Dumanis read poems at Visible Voice Books in Tremont. Thanks to Virginia Konchan for organizing the event and Dave at Visible Voice for providing the intimate space. And for the crazy people who came out on such a hibernatory evening, to complete the circle of our words. On the way over, while listening to the Grifters and sliding through the abandoned snowy streets of midtown, a parody of Basho came to me:

Even in Cleveland
driving under another snowstorm
I long for Cleveland.

On the 5th Year Anniversary of This Unnecessary War

"Five Years Later"
by Rebecca Solnit
Read on March 19, 2008 at Montgomery and Market Streets in San Francisco as part of the Words Against War, a City Lights Books and Direct Action to Stop the War sponsored read-out of poets and writers on the fifth anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq (actagainstwar.net).

Five years ago and more, many of us vehemently, passionately opposed the war in Iraq. We opposed it by marching in the streets on February 16, 2003, in one of the biggest marches in this city’s history, part of the biggest demonstration in world history with people standing up on February 15, 2003, against war on every continent-including the scientists in Antarctica, small towns in Inuit Canada, South Africa, New Mexico, Turkey, Bolivia…. We were right, and now sheepishly, fudging their change of heart, everyone from Hillary Clinton on is busy erasing the memory of being for the war, of buying lies, of dismissing deaths, terrible deaths, the deaths of so many children, so many mothers, so many brothers, the deaths long ago of far more Americans than died on September 11, 2001, the unrelated event used to justify these five long years of slaughter and destruction, the destruction of the fragile psyches of the young, the ancient landscape of Iraq, the bodies that survived this war mutilated and disabled and shaken to need our care for decades to come. Five years ago we opposed this war, and we were right that it would be ugly, a quagmire, an international disaster, that it would make nothing safer, that it was about oil and geopolitics and never ever about justice and utterly unrelated to September 11, 2001. Five years ago here in San Francisco we shut down this business district to show how passionately against the war we were as it began. The war has been terrible, begetting the atrocities of Abu Ghraib, the deaths of hundreds of thousands and a new generation of veterans saved by modern medicine from death–but for what life with their shattered bodies and minds?

We the international movement against this perfiditous war were right. And our actions reshaped the war-delayed its start, created dialogue, dissuaded potential allies from joining up or convinced them-like Spain, like Australia after progressives won power-to quit the coalition of the coerced, gave comfort to Iraqis and others in the middle east that we were not all clamoring for blood and indifferent to their deaths. The United States has begun in part to awaken from the long bad dream of its romance with conservatism and belligerence, was woken up by the savage catastrophe that was Hurricane Katrina, by the endless grinding sorrow of casualty lists of US soldiers and estimates of Iraqi dead, by the increasingly obvious inadequacy of the far right to do anything but destroy. We stand at a moment of rich uncertainty. Ten years ago, the ideology called neoliberalism promised to privatize the planet. Since the Seattle WTO in 1999, the countering ideologies-of what could be called democracy, localism, populism, anticorporate activism-have remade the world, so much so that nearly all Latin America has undergone an amazing liberation not only from political tyranny but from neoliberal domination by institutions like the World Bank and the IMF. This year the sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein wondered in print whether neoliberalism was dead.

We are at the end of a long hard road, the road out of the era of Ronald Reagan, of the post-Soviet romance with the free market, of the belief in American military invincibility even though that belief should have died in the jungles of Vietnam. When the war broke out, so many of the people in the streets with me here believed that somehow Bush had won. Had won everything, forever, that we had lost, that because we had failed to stop the war, we had failed to achieve anything, had never achieved anything, had no power at all. Dismayed by that despair and the amnesia and confusion behind it, I began writing about hope, speaking more directly to the hearts and imaginations of readers than I ever thought I could, to talk about the strange, unlikely routes that change takes, the unpredictable timelines on which it unfolds, the examples that shine like stars in the dark night of history, of for example of the amazing development in the twentieth century of nonviolence as a powerful tool for social change, one that has toppled world powers and dictatorships from the Philippines to Poland, that is at work in Burma and Tibet today. For guns and bombs destroy, but they don’t convert or conquer; the people of Iraq are not conquered, the war is not winnable, and truth is not the property of the strong but of the fearlessly honest.

In the struggle against this war, I saw extraordinary things at Camp Casey on Bush’s front door in 2005, I made new friends through the antiwar movement, I learned about sorrow and about the destruction of the human soul by torture-destruction of the torturers as well as the tortured, I rethought the relationship between the environment and human rights, between belief and action. I wrote, and I want to end by reading you a little of what the outbreak of war prompted me to write five years ago, the opening passage of my book Hope in the Dark:

On January 18, 1915, six months into the first world war, as all Europe was convulsed by killing and dying, Virginia Woolf wrote in her journal, “The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be, I think.” Dark, she seems to say, as in inscrutable, not as in terrible. We often mistake the one for the other. Or we transform the future’s unknowability into something certain, the fulfillment of all our dread, the place beyond which there is no way forward. But again and again, far stranger things happen than the end of the world.

Who two decades ago could have imagined a world in which the Soviet Union had vanished and the Internet had arrived? Who then dreamed that the political prisoner Nelson Mandela would become president of a transformed South Africa? Who foresaw the resurgence of the indigenous world of which the Zapatista uprising in Southern Mexico is only the most visible face? There are times when it seems as though not only the future but the present is dark: few recognize what a radically transformed world we live in, one that has been transformed not only by such nightmares as global warming and global capital, but by dreams of freedom, of justice, and transformed by things we could not have dreamed of. We adjust to changes without measuring them, we forget how much the culture changed. The US Supreme Court ruled in favor of gay rights on a grand scale in the summer of 2002, a ruling inconceivable a few decades ago. What accretion of incremental, imperceptible changes made that possible, and how did they come about? And so we need to hope for the realization of our own dreams, but also to recognize a world that will remain wilder than our imaginations.

It’s always too soon to go home. And it’s always too soon to calculate effect. Cause and effect assumes history marches forward, but history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension. Sometimes one person inspires a movement, or her words do decades later; sometimes a few passionate people change the world; sometimes they start a mass movement and millions do; sometimes those millions are stirred by the same outrage or the same ideal and change comes upon us like a change of weather. All that these transformations have in common is that they begin in the imagination, in hope. To hope is to gamble. It’s to bet on the future, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than gloom and safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet it’s is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk.

I say all this to you because hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. I say this because hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency; because hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you havee to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal. Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope. Anything could happen, and whether we act or not has everything to do with it. Though there is no lottery ticket for the lazy and the detached, for the engaged there is a tremendous gamble for the highest stakes right now. I say this to you not because I haven’t noticed that this country has strayed close to destroying itself and everything it once stood for, in pursuit of empire in the world and the eradication of democracy at home, that our civilization is close to destroying the very nature on which we depend-the oceans, the atmosphere, the uncounted species of plant and insect and bird. I say it because I have noticed: wars will break out, the planet will heat up, species will die out, but how many, how hot, and what survives depends on whether we act. The future is dark, with a darkness as much of the womb as the grave.

The war is not over. War is not over. Peace is not over either, nor is truth, or justice, or solidarity, or hope. There are terrible forces at work in the world today, and beautiful ones. And there is no neutral position. We are all taking sides every day in every act we choose. It’s not over. This terrible war will end someday, but our work will never be done as long as there are human beings on earth. Our work as activists, as dreamers, as makers, as noncooperating resistance matters; it is one force that shaped the world the last five years, and it will continue shaping this world long after the war is over. What you do still matters, so don’t stop now.

Rebecca Solnit, a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award, is the author of twelve books, most recently Storming the Gates of Paradise, and lives in San Francisco.

Send Your Poems about James Brown

Say it Loud: Poems about James Brown. Edited by: Mary E. Weems, and Michael Oatman.

We grew up on James Brown’s Hit Me! When he danced every young Black man wanted to move, groove and look like him. Mr. Brown wasn’t called the hardest workingman in show business because he wasn’t. Experiencing a James Brown show was like getting your favourite soul food twice, plus dessert. His songs, like black power fists you could be proud of and move to at the same time. When Mr. Brown sang make it funky we sweated even in the wintertime. Losing him was like losing somebody in our family. This is a shout out for poems about the impact James Brown had on our lives. Poems that will help people remember, honour, and celebrate his legacy. Don’t be left in a cold sweat, send us your old and new James Brown poems today.

Submission Guidelines: 3-5 Unpublished and/or published poems with acknowledgement included. No longer than 73 lines Deadline: April 30, 2008 (Receipt not postmark) Send hard copies along with a Word Document and short bio on a CD to: Dr. Mary E. Weems / Education Department / John Carroll University / 20700 North Park Blvd. / University Hts., Ohio 44118 / Send via e-mail attachment (Word Documents Only) to: mweems45@sbcglobal.net, and mikeoatman@hotmail.com

Wafaa Bilal's "Virtual Jihadi"/We Tolerate Video Games Only If They Murder Others

Wafaa Bilal's "Virtual Jihadi" was recently shut down at Rennselaer Polytechnical Institute because of its controversial gaming scenario--you are a suicide bomber whose mission is to kill President Bush.

The article explains:

The origin of his work is a video game called "Quest for Saddam." The game, where players target the ex-Iraqi leader, prompted what RPI's Web site describes as an al-Qaida spin-off called "The Night of Bush Capturing."

Bilal hacked into that game and created a work that puts "his own more nuanced spin on this epic conflict," according to the arts department. In Bilal's version, unveiled at RPI Wednesday, the Iraqi-born artist casts himself as a suicide bomber who gets sent on a mission to assassinate President Bush.

You can kill the President in his game, Bilal said.

Bilal said his brother was killed in the conflict. His exhibit's stated intention is to highlight vulnerability to recruitment by groups like al-Qaida "because of the U.S.'s failed strategy in securing Iraq." It also criticizes "racist generalizations and stereotypes as exhibited in games such as 'Quest for Saddam."'

Bilal's overall work is actually quite remarkable, and deserves further consideration. Check out "Domestic Tension," which was not shut down, which invited participants to shoot (paintballs) at Bilal in a closed room, while being videotaped.

The Daily Show Makes Anti-War Protestors Look Silly/How Original!?

What, no interview with Medea Benjamin? Selectively quoting enthusiasts can lead to endlessly ridiculous language. But is this really the argument? While it is disturbing that the protesters don't address the problem that their protest has a "nimby" quality (i.e. not in my backyard) (will they also go to Oakland?) (will they also go to the University of California, with its millions in Defense contracts?), it is also the case that people have a responsibility to confronting and acting on the local level.

Amiri Baraka's "Political Poem"/What is Luxury?

Political Poem


(for Basil)


Luxury, then, is a way of
being ignorant, comfortably
An approach to the open market
of least information. Where theories
can thrive, under heavy tarpaulins
without being cracked by ideas.

(I have not seen the earth for years
and think now possibly "dirt" is
negative, positive, but clearly
social. I cannot plant a seed, cannot
recognize the root with clearer dent
than indifference. Though I eat
and shit as a natural man. (Getting up
from the desk to secure a turkey sandwich
and answer the phone: the poem undone
undone by my station, by my station,
and the bad words of Newark.) Raised up
to the breech, we seek to fill for this
crumbling century. The darkness of love,
in whose sweating memory all error is forced.

Undone by the logic of any specific death. (Old gentlemen
who still follow fires, tho are quieter
and less punctual. It is a polite truth
we are left with. Who are you? What are you
saying? Something to be dealt with, as easily.
The noxious game of reason, saying, "No, No,
you cannot feel," like my dead lecturer
lamenting thru gipsies his fast suicide.


--Amiri Baraka (1964)

This is the Film My Library Wouldn't Show/"Searching For Peace in the Middle East"

This is the Film My Library Wouldn't Show/"Searching For Peace in the Middle East": the title pretty much says it all. Watch it, and tell me whether you think it is unbalanced, unfair, etc.

"The Torturer's Top Tunes" thanks to David Chirot

In a blog where I occasionally talk music, and occasionally talk about torture, I found a recent email from David Baptiste-Chirot to the Buffalo poetics listserve worth posting here, in which music itself gets employed as a torture technique.

THE TORTURERS TOP TUNES SONG LISTS

Mother Jones has published in their last issue (Feb '08) a list of songs used during torture sessions. I've also included some older "playlists" back to the "oldies" used against the trapped American Ally suddenly turned enemy "voodoo practicing dope fiend" General Manuel Noreiga. (Hence "Voodoo Chile" by Hendrix among others played for him.) Similar mind shattering blasts were directed at the Koresh Compound at Waco.

So far the only two countries I've found who officially use this technique are USA and Israel.

THE TORTURERS TOP TUNES SONG LISTS

The songs choices, besides the Heavy Metal/Black Satanic Metal and Gansta Rap mega-decibel level also include the "heavily Patriotic" songs like "Born in the USA" and "American Pie" along with "Barney" and a lot of other "infantile" songs, the infantile-regressed stage one that the torturers hope to send the victims back to increase the levels of fear and helplessness.

HERE'S THE MOST RECENT LISTING, FROM THE FEBRUARY ISSUE OF MOTHER JONES:
"The tracks have all been played by guards and interrogators in inducing sleep deprivation, "prolonging capture shock," disorienting detainees during interrogations, and/or drowning out screams. The "Torture Playlist" is based on a leaked interrogation log, news reports, and on info from soldiers and detainees.

Here's the list (in no particular order):
"Born in the USA" - Bruce Springsteen
"Shoot to Thrill" - AC/DC
"Die MF Die" - Dope
"Take Your Best Shot" - Dope
"White America" - Eminem
"Kim" - Eminem
"Barney Theme Song" - Barney
"Bodies" - Drowning Pool
"Enter Sandman" - Metallica
Meow Mix TV commercial
Sesame Street theme song
"Babylon" - David Gray
"Stayin' Alive" - Bee Gees
"All Eyes on Me" - Tupac
"Dirrty" - Christina Aguilera
"America" - Neil Diamond
"Bulls on Parade" - Rage Against the Machine
"American Pie" - Don McLean
"Click Click Boom" - Saliva
"Cold" - Matchbox Twenty
"Swan Dive" - Hed PE
"Raspberry Beret" - Prince**

* *

*EXAMPLES AND INFO FROM WIKIPEDIA:


- Bombardment with loud music has been known to have been used in other occasions

Manuel Noriega

"When the United States invaded Panama in December 1989, Noriega took refuge in the Holy See's embassy which was immediately surrounded by U.S. troops. After being continually bombarded by *hard rock music* and "The Howard Stern Show" for several days, Noriega surrendered on Jan. 3, 1990.[4] [5] "

Guantanamo

According to the FBI[6] [7]:
"W[itness] observed sleep deprivation interviews w/strobe lights and *loud music*. Interrogator said it would take 4 days to break someone doing an interrogation 16 hrs w/lights and music on and 4 hrs off. Handwritten note next to typed synopsis says *"ok under DoD policy"*.

"Rumors that interrogator bragged about doing lap dance on d[etainee],
another about making d[etainee] listen to *satanic black metal music* for hours then dressing as a Priest and baptizing d[etainee] to save him - handwritten note says 'yes'."

"W[itness] saw d[etainee] in interview room sitting on floor w/Israeli flag draped around him, *loud music* and strobe lights. W suspects this practice is used by DOD DHS based on who he saw in the hallway."

The *Washington Post*, quoting a leaked Red Cross report, wrote:[8]

"The physical tactics noted by the Red Cross included placing detainees in extremely cold rooms with *loud music* blaring, and forcing them to kneel for long periods of time, the source familiar with the report said."

Iraq

According to Amnesty International [9] :

"Detainees have reported being routinely subjected to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment during arrest and detention. Many have told Amnesty International that they were tortured and ill-treated by US and UK troops during interrogation. Methods often reported include prolonged sleep deprivation; beatings; prolonged restraint in painful positions, sometimes combined with *exposure to loud music*; prolonged hooding; and exposure to bright lights. Virtually none of the allegations of torture or ill-treatment has been adequately investigated by the authorities."

The Harassment of Professor Thomas Abowd at Wayne State

At Wayne State, of all places, where 20% of the student body is Arab American, another professor gets harassed and accused of anti-semitism.

From friends and colleagues of Professor Thomas Abowd at Wayne State University


Dear colleagues,

I need to write to you about a set of very serious racist and discriminatory attacks against Professor Thomas Abowd in his dispute with the Wayne State University administration and right-wing Zionist elements on campus. These circumstances are but a few of several offensive, anti-Arab and anti-Muslim happenings on this campus over the last few years, coming both before and after the attacks against Law Professor Wadie Said who applied for a job at WSU. The specific attacks against Professor Abowd are particularly troubling because, in this case, a WSU official has used racist and offensive language against Professor Abowd in the course of an official university investigation.

Included below is a short description of the line of questioning engaged in by officials of Wayne State University, particularly one Ms. Amy Stirling during her December 2007 investigation of Professor Thomas Abowd for several baseless and fabricated charges of "anti-semitism." (charges eventually all dropped for lack of evidence). A Union representative was present during this meeting with Ms. Stirling, and witnessed the racist language directed at Abowd. The Union representative took notes during the more than 2 hour conversation. It is clear to many that Stirling's line of questioning (as well as her generally hostile demeanor) was extremely inappropriate and had anti-Arab implications.

Ms. Stirling began her questioning of Abowd in a ridiculous set of false accusations made against him by avowed supporters of the well-known anti-Arab and anit-Mulism racist, Daniel Pipes. Members of this organization have been following Abowd around to talks on this and other campuses for the last few years. Pipes was speaking at Wayne State in October, 2007 and Professor Abowd took part in a non-violent demonstration against the founder of "Campus Watch" one hour before his event. After this demonstration, two right-wing Pipes-apologists who had been video taping and taking pictures of Abowd and who later attended the Pipes lecture, accosted Thomas after his speech and demanded to know why he said "slaughter the Jews." Such words were never uttered, by Abowd or anyone else at the demonstration. Abowd told these individuals that this claim was completely slanderous and to get away from him.

Perhaps anticipating Abowd filing a complaint against them for harassment, the two individuals who accosted him then went and filed bogus charges of "anti-Semitism" against Professor Abowd with the Wayne State Office of Equal Opportunity. The University then decided to launch an investigation into these false accusations, without a shred of evidence that Thomas had engaged in any wrongdoing. The investigation, many on campus believe, was done as part of a disturbing pattern at Wayne State of silencing criticism of Israel and those who fight for Palestinian rights. The university official who investigated these charges (who many familiar with the case believe is anti-Palestinian) questioned Abowd for a few hours and eventually concluded, a few weeks later, that the charges made against Thomas were totally baseless and unsubstantiated.

But, in the course of questioning him, the investigator, Amy Stirling, engaged in hostile and racist language toward Abowd, an Arab-American. Again, this was witnessed by a Union representative who Abowd insisted be present and who took notes during the entire conversation.

Most disturbing were her efforts to badger Professor Abowd to "discover" his ethnic/racial/religious identity and to inject race, ethnicity, and the subject of Islam into her investigation. Stirling repeatedly asked Abowd and demanded answers, on at least 5 occasions, to questions about Thomas' race, ethnicity, and religion. Here are some of the more troubling exchanges during what was at times more a hostile interrogation than a professionally conducted interview.

Stirling began her line of questioning by repeatedly and pointedly demanding an answer to the question: "What is your ethnic or racial identity." This was, in fact, the first question she directed at him. Abowd objected to the query, citing its non-relevance and racist implications. Abowd told Stirling twice that he would not answer the question because it was wholly inappropriate but she persisted in an aggressive way, remarking that the question was relevant, that she did have a right to ask it, that she wanted an answer to it, and then proceeded to ask him the same question two more times. He still refused to answer and told her to move on.

About 45 minutes later, in the course of her questioning, Stirling asked Abowd, very directly 2 or 3 times and in an antagonistic manner: "Are you a Muslim?" Once again, she was told that this was completely inappropriate, as offensive as it was irrelevant to the discussion. Professor Abowd mentioned that he was not only disgusted by this line of questioning but that he considered it a violation of his privacy and the principle of non-discrimination. He and many others familiar with the case believe that this line of questioning was part of an effort to build the case that Abowd was more likely to harass the Jewish individuals in question because he might be a Muslim or Arab: a truly bigoted idea.

In trying to explain why he and the Union representative thought this was an inappropriate set of questions, Abowd began by stating that "If I were white and the person who I was accused of making race-based comments to was white…" Stirling interrupted him and forcefully stated: "You are white." Abowd then responded that she did not have the right to tell him what he was or declare his ethnic or racial assignment, which she could not possibly know and which was none of her business.

Stirling's line of questioning was clearly troubling for a number of reasons. If a member of another community, say a Jew or an African-American, were asked such a question in this context it would, quite rightly, be regarded as being totally inappropriate. How, after all, could anyone make a determination about whether anyone did or did not engage in intimidation based on whether she/he was Arab or Muslim or Jewish or atheist? One can only imagine if the tables were turned, what the response would be if an administrator repeatedly demanded an answer to the question "Are you a Jew? Are you a Jew?" Even after an individual had made clear that she/he would not answer such a question.

As with the problems made for law professor Wadie Said during his job search at Wayne State in 2006 and other Arab faculty and would-be faculty and students on campus by the administration in recent years, Abowd's case is connected to a disturbing sentiment among the Wayne State administration that has become deeply hostile to criticisms of Israeli human rights abuses and military occupation among faculty and students. There are several administrators and Board of Governors on WSU's campus that are avowed apologists for Israeli military occupation and human rights abuses. When you combine these realities with the fact that Wayne State (where 15-20% of the student body is Arab) has done a horrible job of hiring and retaining Arab faculty, one sees a troubling pattern in the abuse leveled at Professor Abowd, an Arab-American, an award-winning teacher, and one of the few Arab/Arab-American faculty in WSU's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

In addition to these acts of racism directed at Abowd, Wayne State University has also violated Thomas' constitutional and contractual rights on several occasions during his four years at the university, most recently around this latest incident of racism. In the case of this investigation, he was told three times in writing by Amy Stirling that he was not permitted to have a Union witness present at the investigation, in direct violation of the law and Supreme Court rulings (in fact, a judge ruled in Abowd and the Union's favor several weeks ago stating clearly that WSU could not deny union members representation in such a context). Despite their violations of the law and the union contract, the University has reprimanded Abowd, as well, without due process. Abowd has also had his lecture on Jimmy Carter's recent book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid that he was to give to the WSU Alumni Association, cancelled for unexplained reasons and not rescheduled. This decision also came directly from the administration.

Please send emails, letters, and phone calls immediately to the following persons responsible for this campaign against award-winning teacher and community activist, Professor Thomas Abowd. Many of his colleagues and fellow activists are concerned that Wayne State University may try to terminate him for political reasons!


Ms. Amy Stirling, Acting Director of Wayne State University's Office of Equal Opportunity

Email: ak6239@wayne.edu
Phone Number: (313) 577-2280
Address: Attn. Ms. Amy Sirling Office of Equal Opportunity
5700 Cass Ave, Suite 3660 AA Bldg.
Detroit, Michigan 48202


Robert Thomas, Dean of College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Email: robert_thomas@wayne.edu
Phone Number: (313) 577-2519
Address: Attn: Dean Robert Thomas
COLLEGE OF LIBERAL ARTS AND SCIENCES
Wayne State University
4841 Cass Ave.
2155 Old Main
Detroit, MI 48201

Nancy Barrett, Provost
Email: nancy.barrett@wayne.edu
Phone Number: (313) 577-2200/ 313-577-2433(Diane)
Address: 656 W. Kirby Room #4092, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI 48202

Andrea Dickson, Executive Vice President
Email: bb4792@wayne.edu
Phone Number: (313) 577-2389
Address:
656 W. Kirby, Room #4165 FAB Bldg, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI 48202

Professor Andrea Sankar, Chair of the Anthropology Department,
Email: asankar@wayne.edu
Phone Number: (313) 577-6961
Address: Professor Andrea Sankar
147 Manoogian Hall
906 W. Warren
Detroit, MI 48202

Campaign of Solidarity with Women Resisting U.S. Wars and Occupation

Though I disagree with the premise that U.S. feminists consistently fail to link the critique of patriarchy with the critique of empire, I think this statement is an important one to sign.

Given that International Women's Day coincided with the catastrophic events in Gaza, please show your solidarity by signing the statement below from the Campaign of Solidarity with Women Resisting U.S. Wars and Occupation. You can send your name, affiliation, and place of residence to: solidaritywomen@yahoo.com.

Piya Chatterjee & Sunaina Maira


An Open Letter to All Feminists: Statement of Solidarity with Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim Women Facing War and Occupation

As feminists and people of conscience, we call for solidarity with Palestinian women in Gaza suffering due to the escalating military attacks that Israel turned into an open war on civilians. This war has targeted women and children, and all those who live under Israeli occupation in the West Bank, and are also denied the right to freedom of movement, health, and education.

We stand in solidarity with Iraqi women whose daughters, sisters, brothers, or sons have been abused, tortured, and raped in U.S. prisons such as Abu Ghraib. Women in Iraq continue to live under a U.S. occupation that has devastated families and homes, and are experiencing a rise in religious extremism and restrictions on their freedom that were unheard of before the U.S. invasion, "Operation Iraqi Freedom," in 2003.

At this moment in Afghanistan, women are living with the return of the Taliban and other misogynistic groups such as the Northern Alliance, a U.S. ally, and with the violence of continuing U.S. and NATO attacks on civilians, despite the U.S. war to "liberate" Afghan women in 2001.

As of March 6, 2008, over 120 Palestinians, including 39 children and 6 women (more than a third of the victims), in Gaza were killed by Israeli air strikes and escalated attacks on civilians over a period of five days, according to human rights groups.[1] Hospitals have been struggling to treat 370 injured children, as reported by medical officials. Homes have been destroyed as well as civilian facilities including the headquarters of the General Federation of Palestinian Trade Unions.[2] On February 29, 2008, Israel's Deputy Defense Minister, Matan Valnai, threatened Palestinians in Gaza with a "bigger Shoah," the Hebrew word usually used only for the Holocaust.[3] What does it mean that the international community is standing by while this is happening?

Valnai's threat of a Holocaust against Palestinians was not just a slip of the tongue, for the war on Gaza is a continuation of genocidal activities against the indigenous population. Israel has controlled the land and sea borders and airspace of Gaza for more than a year and a half, confining 1.5 million Palestinians to a giant prison. Supported by the U.S., Israel has imposed a near total blockade on Gaza since June 2007 which has led to a breakdown in basic services, including water and sanitation, lack of electricity, fuel, and medical supplies. As a result of these sanctions, 30% of children under 5 years suffer from stunted growth and malnutrition. Over 80% of the population cannot afford a balanced meal.[4]

Is this humanitarian crisis going to approach a situation similar to that of the sanctions against Iraq from 1991-2003, when an estimated 500,000 Iraqi children died to lack of nutrition and medical supplies, and the woman who was then Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, proclaimed that the death of a half million Iraqi children was worth the price of U.S. national security?

As feminists and anti-imperialist people of conscience, we oppose direct and indirect policies of ethnic cleansing and decimation of native populations by all nation-states.

In the current climate of U.S.-initiated or U.S.-backed assaults on women in Palestine, Iraq, and Afghanistan, we are deeply troubled by one kind of hypocritical Western feminist discourse that continues to be preoccupied with particular kinds of violence against Muslim or Middle Eastern women, while choosing to remain silent on the lethal violence inflicted on women and families by military occupation, F-16s, Apache helicopters, and missiles paid for by U.S. tax payers. This is a moment when U.S. imperialism brazenly uses direct colonial occupation, masked in a civilizational discourse of bringing Western "freedom" and "democracy." Such acts echo the language of Manifest Destiny that was used to justify U.S. colonization of the Philippines and Pacific territories in the 19th century, not to mention the genocide of Native Americans. U.S. covert, and not so covert, interventions in Central, South America, Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean have devastated the lives of countless indigenous peoples, and other civilians, in this region throughout the 20th century. The U.S., as well its proxy militias or client regimes, has inflicted violence on women and girls from Vietnam, Okinawa, and Pakistan to Chile, El Salvador, and Somalia and has avenged the deaths of its soldiers by its own "honor killings" that lay siege to entire towns, such as Fallujah in Iraq.

It is appalling that in these catastrophic times, many U.S. liberal feminists are focused only on misogynistic practices associated with particular local cultures, as if these exist in capsules, far from the arena of imperial occupation. Indeed, imperial violence has given fuel to some of these patriarchal practices of misogyny and sexism. They should also know that such a narrow vision furthers a much older tradition of feminist mobilizing in the service of colonialism—"saving brown, or black women, from brown men," as observed by Gayatri Spivak.

While we too oppose abuses including domestic violence, "honor killings," forced marriage, and brutal punishment, we are disturbed that some U.S. feminists—as well as Muslim or Middle Eastern women who claim to be "authorities" on Islam and are employed by right-wing think tanks—are participating in a selective discourse of universal women's rights that ignores U.S. war crimes and abuses of human rights.

While some progressive U.S. feminists claim to oppose the hijacking of women's rights to justify U.S. invasions, they simultaneously evade any mention about the plight of women in Palestine, Iraq, or Afghanistan. Their statements continue to focus only on female genital mutilation or dowry deaths under the guise of breaking the "politically correct" silence on abuses of women in the "Muslim world" that the Right disingenuously laments.[5]

Some progressives may support such statements with good intentions, but these critiques ignore the fact that Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim feminists have been working on these issues for generations, focusing on the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, class, and nationalism. Their work is ignored by North American feminists who claim to advocate for a "global sisterhood" but are disillusioned to discover that women in the U.S. military participated in the acts of torture at Abu Ghraib.

We are concerned about these silences and selective condemnations given that the U.S. mainstream media bolsters this imperialist feminism by using an (often liberal) Orientalist approach to covering the Middle East or South Asia. For example, on March 5, 2008, as the death toll due to Israeli attacks in Gaza was mounting, the New York Times chose to publish an article just below its report on the Israeli military incursions that focused on the sentencing of a Palestinian man in Israel for an honor killing; the report was deemed worthy of international coverage because the Palestinian women had broken "the code of silence" by resorting to Israeli courts.[6]

The implications of this juxtaposition of two unrelated events are that Palestinians belong to a backward, patriarchal culture that, rightly or wrongly, is under attack by a modern, "democratic" state with a legal apparatus that supports women's rights. Others have shown that the New York Times gave disproportionate attention to the Human Rights Watch report in 2006 on domestic violence against Palestinian women relative to its scant mention of the 76 reports of Israeli abuses of Palestinian rights by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the Israeli organization, B'Tselem.[7]

Similar coverage exists of women from other countries outside the U.S. that are portrayed as victims only of their own cultural traditions, rather than also of the ravages of Western imperialism and predatory global capitalism. No attention is paid in the mainstream U.S. media to reports such as that in Haaretz documenting that Palestinian women citizens of Israel are the most exploited group in the Israeli workforce, making only 47% of the wages earned by their Jewish counterparts in Israel, and with double the rate of unemployment of Jewish women.[8] Little is known in the U.S. about what the lives of Iraqi women are really like now that they are pressured to cover themselves in public or not work outside the house, nor of Afghani women whose homes are still being bombed in a war that was supposed to have liberated them many years ago.

We stand in solidarity with feminist and liberatory movements that are opposing U.S. imperialism, U.S.-backed occupation, militarism, and economic exploitation as well as resisting religious and secular fundamentalisms.

We also support the struggles of those within the U.S. opposing the War on Terror and racist practices of detention, deportation, surveillance, and torture linked to the military-industrial-prison complex that selectively targets immigrants, minorities, and youth of color. We are grateful for the courageous scholarship of academics who are at risk of not getting tenure or employment because they do research related to settler colonialism or taboo topics such as Palestinian rights and expose controversial aspects of U.S. policies here and abroad.

At a moment when U.S. military interventions have made "democracy" a dirty word in much of the world, we strive for true democracy and for freedom and justice for all our sisters and brothers.


Piya Chatterjee, University of California-Riverside

Sunaina Maira, University of California-Davis

Campaign of Solidarity with Women Resisting U.S. Wars and Occupation

South Asians for the Liberation of Falastin


[1] "The Tragedy in Gaza," Kinder USA, www.kinderusa.org. March 5, 2008.

[2] Weekly Report on Israeli Human Rights Violations in the Occupied Palestinian Territory: "Wide-Scale Israeli Military Operations Against the Gaza Strip." Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, http://www.pchrgaza.org. March 6, 2008.

[3] Rory McCarthy, "Israeli Minister Warns of Holocaust for Gaza if Violence Continues." The Guardian, March 1, 2008. www.guardian.co.uk.

[4] "The Tragedy in Gaza."

[5] For example, Katha Pollitt's petition, "An Open Letter from American Feminists," posted at: http://www.motherjones.com/mojoblog/archives/2008/01/6901_an_open_letter.html.

See also: Debra Dickerson, "What NOW? Feminist Fatigue and the Global Quest for Women's Rights," Mother Jones. www.MotherJones_com.News.mht

[6] "16-Year Sentence in Honor Killing," The New York Times, March 5, 2008. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/05/world/middleeast/05honor.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Honor+Killing+March+5%2C+2008&st=nyt&oref=slogin.

[7] Patrick O'Connor and Rachel Roberts, "The New York Times Marginalizes Palestinian Women and Palestinian Rights." November 7, 2006.

[8] Ruth Sinai, "Arab Women – the Most Exploited Group in Israeli Workforce." Haaretz, January 2, 2008. www.haaretz.com.

Israel/Palestine Comes to Cleveland Heights: The Conflict over the Film of the Conflict

One of those involved in bringing the film "Searching for Peace in the Middle East" to Cleveland is David Berenson, a friend of mine who is trying to engage in dialogue and peacebuilding around the conflict in Israel/Palestine, so I fully support his efforts and the efforts of anyone who attempts to have a discussion about these issues. The library, MY LIBRARY, has crumpled under the slightest pressure and failed to perform one of its civic duties--to be a site where conversation happens, even if it might challenge or unsettle someone's prevailing view.

From the Plain Dealer website:

ACLU accuses library of censorship for canceling Israeli-Palestinian film
Posted by Jesse Tinsley March 13, 2008 00:36AM
Categories: Breaking News
The American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio is charging the Cleveland-Heights-University Heights Public Library with censorship for canceling a film on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict scheduled for Wednesday night.

Some critics of the film said it was biased against the Jewish state and recommended a more balanced program in the library's three-part series on the Middle East conflict.

"The cancellation of this event is blatant and shameful censorship of particular views," ACLU legal director Jeffrey Gamso said in a letter to the library. "Libraries should be a place where members of the public congregate and exchange ideas with one another."

Library director Stephen Wood disputed censorship allegations.

"My commitment to the community is not to have censorship and is to be bastion of free speech," Wood said. "It is incumbent upon us that presentations that the library makes are balanced and that we show all points of view."


However, Wood said it was called to the staff's attention that the 30-minute film was "controversial and biased work."

The film, "Searching for Peace in the Middle East," was to be followed by a panel discussion by members of the Arab, Christian, Jewish and Muslim communities at the library's Lee Road branch.

Julia Shearson, executive director of the Cleveland chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said the film could have sparked dialogue among both sides here.

"I did watch the film, and I could see certain things that would make the Jewish community concerned," said Shearson, who was to moderate the event. "But the most moving part about the film was Israeli bereaved parents talking about their dead teenage daughter, and I thought that would help the Palestinian community see the wounds on the other side."

Wood said the library is forming a committee to get input on how to put the program together with all viewpoints. The library would then sponsor and reschedule the series, he said.

"Searching for Peace in the Middle East" was aired nonetheless Wednesday night at Christ the Redeemer Church in Cleveland Heights.

Kenneth Rexroth's "Thou Shalt Not Kill"

Ken Knabb sent me a link to the "Bureau of Public Secrets," which includes a hefty archive of writing about and by Kenneth Rexroth, a poet whose cultural and literary work make him a central figure in war resistance during the Second World War (and beyond), in political anarchism, the San Francisco Renaissance, and in bringing Asian literary traditions into American poetry.

Rexroth was, in some ways, the Pound of his generation, advocating for, nurturing, and bringing together poets such as Robert Duncan, William Everson, Muriel Rukeyser, Gary Snyder, and others. There's something in his autobiography and his poetic style that occasionally feels outsized, self-aggrandizing, which was probably why I did not feel compelled to write much about him in Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront. Still, simply by virtue of what he instigated (not least of which was the Gallery Six reading at which Allen Ginsberg debuted "Howl"), Rexroth certainly deserves our attention.

In this poem, "Thou Shalt Not Kill," Rexroth anticipates some of the Beat critique of American society in "Howl," grounding it in his anarchopacifist worldview. The poem has its moments of bloated bloviation, but it also has a kind of prophetic windiness that perhaps too few of us feel the freedom to find in our own poetic voices these days.

"Thou Shalt Not Kill "
by Kenneth Rexroth

A Memorial for Dylan Thomas


I
They are murdering all the young men.
For half a century now, every day,
They have hunted them down and killed them.
They are killing them now.
At this minute, all over the world,
They are killing the young men.
They know ten thousand ways to kill them.
Every year they invent new ones.
In the jungles of Africa,
In the marshes of Asia,
In the deserts of Asia,
In the slave pens of Siberia,
In the slums of Europe,
In the nightclubs of America,
The murderers are at work.


They are stoning Stephen,
They are casting him forth from every city in the world.
Under the Welcome sign,
Under the Rotary emblem,
On the highway in the suburbs,
His body lies under the hurling stones.
He was full of faith and power.
He did great wonders among the people.
They could not stand against his wisdom.
They could not bear the spirit with which he spoke.
He cried out in the name
Of the tabernacle of witness in the wilderness.
They were cut to the heart.
They gnashed against him with their teeth.
They cried out with a loud voice.
They stopped their ears.
They ran on him with one accord.
They cast him out of the city and stoned him.
The witnesses laid down their clothes
At the feet of a man whose name was your name—
You.


You are the murderer.
You are killing the young men.
You are broiling Lawrence on his gridiron.
When you demanded he divulge
The hidden treasures of the spirit,
He showed you the poor.
You set your heart against him.
You seized him and bound him with rage.
You roasted him on a slow fire.
His fat dripped and spurted in the flame.
The smell was sweet to your nose.
He cried out,
“I am cooked on this side,
Turn me over and eat,
You
Eat of my flesh.”


You are murdering the young men.
You are shooting Sebastian with arrows.
He kept the faithful steadfast under persecution.
First you shot him with arrows.
Then you beat him with rods.
Then you threw him in a sewer.
You fear nothing more than courage.
You who turn away your eyes
At the bravery of the young men.


You,
The hyena with polished face and bow tie,
In the office of a billion dollar
Corporation devoted to service;
The vulture dripping with carrion,
Carefully and carelessly robed in imported tweeds,
Lecturing on the Age of Abundance;
The jackal in double-breasted gabardine,
Barking by remote control,
In the United Nations;
The vampire bat seated at the couch head,
Notebook in hand, toying with his decerebrator;
The autonomous, ambulatory cancer,
The Superego in a thousand uniforms;
You, the finger man of behemoth,
The murderer of the young men.



II
What happened to Robinson,
Who used to stagger down Eighth Street,
Dizzy with solitary gin?
Where is Masters, who crouched in
His law office for ruinous decades?
Where is Leonard who thought he was
A locomotive? And Lindsay,
Wise as a dove, innocent
As a serpent, where is he?
Timor mortis conturbat me.


What became of Jim Oppenheim?
Lola Ridge alone in an
Icy furnished room? Orrick Johns,
Hopping into the surf on his
One leg? Elinor Wylie
Who leaped like Kierkegaard?
Sara Teasdale, where is she?
Timor mortis conturbat me.


Where is George Sterling, that tame fawn?
Phelps Putnam who stole away?
Jack Wheelwright who couldn’t cross the bridge?
Donald Evans with his cane and
Monocle, where is he?
Timor mortis conturbat me.


John Gould Fletcher who could not
Unbreak his powerful heart?
Bodenheim butchered in stinking
Squalor? Edna Millav who took
Her last straight whiskey? Genevieve
Who loved so much; where is she?
Timor mortis conturbat me.


Harry who didn’t care at all?
Hart who went back to the sea?
Timor mortis conturbat me.


Where is Sol Funaroff?
What happened to Potamkin?
Isidor Schneider? Claude McKay?
Countee Cullen? Clarence Weinstock?
Who animates their corpses today?
Timor mortis conturbat me.


Where is Ezra, that noisy man?
Where is Larsson whose poems were prayers?
Where is Charles Snider, that gentle
Bitter boy? Carnevali,
What became of him?
Carol who was so beautiful, where is she?
Timor mortis conturbat me.



III
Was their end noble and tragic,
Like the mask of a tyrant?
Like Agamemnon’s secret golden face?
Indeed it was not. Up all night
In the fo’c’sle, bemused and beaten,
Bleeding at the rectum, in his
Pocket a review by the one
Colleague he respected, “If he
Really means what these poems
Pretend to say, he has only
One way out—.” Into the
Hot acrid Caribbean sun,
Into the acrid, transparent,
Smoky sea. Or another, lice in his
Armpits and crotch, garbage littered
On the floor, gray greasy rags on
The bed. “I killed them because they
Were dirty, stinking Communists.
I should get a medal.” Again,
Another, Simenon foretold,
His end at a glance. “I dare you
To pull the trigger.” She shut her eyes
And spilled gin over her dress.
The pistol wobbled in his hand.
It took them hours to die.
Another threw herself downstairs,
And broke her back. It took her years.
Two put their heads under water
In the bath and filled their lungs.
Another threw himself under
The traffic of a crowded bridge.
Another, drunk, jumped from a
Balcony and broke her neck.
Another soaked herself in
Gasoline and ran blazing
Into the street and lived on
In custody. One made love
Only once with a beggar woman.
He died years later of syphilis
Of the brain and spine. Fifteen
Years of pain and poverty,
While his mind leaked away.
One tried three times in twenty years
To drown himself. The last time
He succeeded. One turned on the gas
When she had no more food, no more
Money, and only half a lung.
One went up to Harlem, took on
Thirty men, came home and
Cut her throat. One sat up all night
Talking to H. L. Mencken and
Drowned himself in the morning.
How many stopped writing at thirty?
How many went to work for Time?
How many died of prefrontal
Lobotomies in the Communist Party?
How many arc lost in the back wards
Of provincial madhouses?
How many on the advice of
Their psychoanalysts, decided
A business career was best after all?
How many are hopeless alcoholics?
RenàCrevel!
Jacques Rigaud!
Antonin Artaud!
Mayakofsky!
Essenin!
Robert Desnos!
Saint Pol Roux!
Max Jacob!
All over the world
The same disembodied hand
Strikes us down.
Here is a mountain of death.
A hill of heads like the Khans piled up.
The first-born of a century
Slaughtered by Herod.
Three generations of infants
Stuffed down the maw of Moloch.



IV
He is dead.
The bird of Rhiannon.
He is dead.
In the winter of the heart.
He is Dead.
In the canyons of death,
They found him dumb at last,
In the blizzard of lies.
He never spoke again.
He died.
He is dead.
In their antiseptic hands,
He is dead.
The little spellbinder of Cader Idris.
He is dead.
The sparrow of Cardiff.
He is dead.
The canary of Swansea.
Who killed him?
Who killed the bright-headed bird?
You did, you son of a bitch.
You drowned him in your cocktail brain.
He fell down and died in your synthetic heart.
You killed him,
Oppenheimer the Million-Killer,
You killed him,
Einstein the Gray Eminence.
You killed him,
Havanahavana, with your Nobel Prize.
You killed him, General,
Through the proper channels.
You strangled him, Le Mouton,
With your mains ôendues.
He confessed in open court to a pince-nezed skull.
You shot him in the back of the head
As he stumbled in the last cellar.
You killed him,
Benign Lady on the postage stamp.
He was found dead at a Liberal Weekly luncheon.
He was found dead on the cutting room floor.
He was found dead at a Time policy conference.
Henry Luce killed him with a telegram to the Pope.
Mademoiselle strangled him with a padded brassiere.
Old Possum sprinkled him with a tea ball.
After the wolves were done, the vaticides
Crawled off with his bowels to their classrooms and quarterlies.
When the news came over the radio
You personally rose up shouting, “Give us Barabbas!”
In your lonely crowd you swept over him.
Your custom-built brogans and your ballet slippers
Pummeled him to death in the gritty street.
You hit him with an album of Hindemith.
You stabbed him with stainless steel by Isamu Noguchi,
He is dead.
He is Dead.
Like Ignacio the bullfighter,
At four o’clock in the afternoon.
At precisely four o’clock.
I too do not want to hear it.
I too do not want to know it.
I want to run into the street,
Shouting, “Remember Vanzetti!”
I want to pour gasoline down your chimneys.
I want to blow up your galleries.
I want to burn down your editorial offices.
I want to slit the bellies of your frigid women.
I want to sink your sailboats and launches.
I want to strangle your children at their finger paintings.
I want to poison your Afghans and poodles.
He is dead, the little drunken cherub.
He is dead,
The effulgent tub thumper.
He is Dead.
The ever living birds are not singing
To the head of Bran.
The sea birds are still
Over Bardsey of Ten Thousand Saints.
The underground men are not singing
On their way to work.
There is a smell of blood
In the smell of the turf smoke.
They have struck him down,
The son of David ap Gwilym.
They have murdered him,
The Baby of Taliessin.
There he lies dead,
By the Iceberg of the United Nations.
There he lies sandbagged,
At the foot of the Statue of Liberty.
The Gulf Stream smells of blood
As it breaks on the sand of Iona
And the blue rocks of Canarvon.
And all the birds of the deep sea rise up
Over the luxury liners and scream,
“You killed him! You killed him.
In your God damned Brooks Brothers suit,
You son of a bitch.”

The Beautiful Chaos of Ash Bowie, Helium Bassist and Polvo Mastermind

All hail to Mary Timony, of course, but Ash Bowie's fuzzed-out baseline provides the right counterpoint to Timony's breathy and erotic guitar & lyrics for Helium's "Pat's Trick."

And what to say about Polvo's "Vibracobra", Ash Bowie's original and "difficult" band's early song? It was said that people would listen to Polvo records and think that it was all studio tricks; then you went to see them live, and play the songs' noise note for note. If only contemporary poetry approached this kind of lovely-scary.

Bill Howe's "Words Change"

Looking up Bill Howe, a poet and scholar who works on concrete poetry, I found a little film of this flip book concrete poem, "Words Change." A sweet confection.

Get Lit 2008: A Postmortem

Every year, I organize a faculty creative writing showcase reading called Get Lit. It is a good time, because it brings all of us together to share with each other and the students what we are working on, and to celebrate new publications, etc.

At the Get Lit 2008 reading a few nights ago, a bunch of my students were there, one of whom is in my Israeli and Palestinian literatures class. Today, he said, surprised, "I thought you were a Jew." Same-difference, I said. In my heart, though, I was glad. It made me feel as if I were really teaching the students well, that they couldn't "guess" my identity or perspectives (and thus, try to appeal to me with imitating my points of view). On the final day, I always talk about the conflict from my personal experiences, but I believe I make them work harder if they can't guess how to please me. The only thing that pleases me is to see them struggle to understand, to go beyond the limits.

Here was one of my student's impromptu reports on the reading:

“Get Lit”

Attending “Get Lit” on Thursday, March 6, 2008 was such a wonderful experience for me. I did not intend on laughing and be entertained as much as I was. Not once did I want any of the speakers to stop reading their work nor was I ever bored. I feel honored and privileged to go to an institution that has such successful professors. The respect that I have developed for the professors at John Carroll has increased significantly and I was very impressed by the professors’ work at “Get Lit.” Being able to see professors outside of class in a more relaxed environment, helped to get to know them, even if it wasn’t in a direct manner. This was another thing I enjoyed about “Get Lit.” I feel as though the work they presented was a way of letting the audience know what kind of person they are, especially if the work was personal.

Steve Hayward was the first to speak for the night. His work was very funny which kept me entertained and on my feet. I also enjoyed how some of his references were of some people that I know of (i.e. Jim Morrison). I don’t think that the main character meant to be funny but it came out that way because his family was “unique.” Also, it was interesting and creative how he managed to find out about many other Jim Morrisons – I don’t think there are that many Sammar Sharbeks, if any others at all.

Having a piece of writing made into a movie is a very high honor and I was very impressed that Sarah Willis achieved this. Her story was very interesting because I’m sure there are a lot of teenagers that are in the position the main character, Janie, was in. The story was sort of emotional because you begin to feel bad for the characters and the position they have been put in, especially when Ray would yell, “I’m sorry.” I also found it interesting how Ray continued to call the car his brothers only for the reason of not jinxing him – that was clever.

George Bilgere was next to present his poetry. He also had a good sense of humor and it was definitely visible in his poems. I especially liked the poem about his ex-wife, I don’t know why, but it was just entertaining. When he read that poem it made me feel like I could imagine everything that he was talking about in my mind. Even though it was a poem, it still seemed like a story.

Following George Bilgere was Paula McLain. Here book was also entertaining because I could imagine my friends and me doing some of the things that her main character was doing (i.e. lay in the sun with baby oil). While she was reading, it seemed like she put herself into that character – her tone of voice, body language, etc. This made her reading very interesting because it seemed like the main character of the story was standing right in front of me.

Lastly, Dr. Philip Metres read some of his poems. Before he started to read his poetry, Paula McLain mentioned how high of an honor it is to have a book of poems published but when I heard some of his poems, it wasn’t hard to figure out why they were published. The first poem that he read was in the alphabet format. I can’t imagine how hard that must have been to come up with a poem in that way. What was even more impressive about it was that it was funny as well. I liked how he gave an introduction to his poems because it gave the audience some background before listening to it. The poem that told the story about his last name was also interesting. People think that my mother is of another ethnicity as well and I found it a coincidence how I could relate her experience to his experience. The ending of Dr. Metres’ reading was something that I have never witnessed in my life and I am glad that I did tonight. I realized that I had to concentrate on each individual person to find out what they were saying. The way that this poem was presented was so unique and added such a different style to poetry from what I’m normally familiar with.

Overall, I am very glad that I attended “Get Lit.” I saw JCU professors in a whole different light and I enjoyed what I heard. The amount of respect that I have for their accomplishments has been doubled. Also, the amount of laughing that I did within that hour time span was a perk as well.

David-Baptiste Chirot on the New House Bill to End Waterboarding That Bush Will Veto

Paul Lauritzen recently remarked, regarding his blogging at COMMONWEAL, that some posts receive very few comments. In particular, posts about torture seem to elicit few responses from the readers. I second that observation here; I almost never receive feedback for posts about torture. Why is that? Is it so self-evidently bad that there's really nothing to talk about, or that the very subject causes us to pause, to gape in silence. (Thus, I dare you to respond.)

Here is David-Baptiste Chirot:

None of the Presidential Candidates will makes this [House Resolution Bill to end waterboarding] much of an issue, except perhaps McCain, who was tortured and has spoken about before. All three vociferously support the US position taken in the resolution linked above, which as always ignores the War crimes of the Israeli Occupation as well as continuing let go unpunished those the US commits in Iraq and Afghanistan. There are so many tortures being used that banning waterboarding seems almost absurd for the President to be bothering to take a stand on.

An outspoken activist during the Algerian War pointed out that the demos and petition against torture missed the central point: colonialism and occupations as a system in themselves bring nothing but violence and torture, subjection and dehumanization of the occupied peoples. Torture is just a part of the package, not apart from it. The only way for these inhumanities to end is to stop the war crimes of occupations. The US and Israel have become the world's two most hated governments due to their acing continually above all international laws while demanding with self righteous authority and overwhelming violence and threats that all other nations should comply.

The US's own history of genocide, slavery, Jim Crow, anti-immigration waves of hatred periodically revived are not so very far in the past for them all to be in operation against others --almost anyone--deemed "terrorist," "enemy combattants," and "Islamo -Fascists." or "sympathizers."

The US was one of four countries that refused to sign the International Declaration of the Rights of the Indigenous Peoples, which made it possible for Evo Morales to become President to Bolivia.

To this day American Indians are third class citizens in the areas they are allowed to live as "reservations" in a huge "occupied territory."

With such a successful example here in the "Homeland," why should one think that our leaders will change their polices regarding our actions abroad or any of those of our allies?

Palestinian protestors carried sings when Bush was on his Middle east Peace trip saying "You will not do to us what you did to the Red Indians." Right after he left, 108 Palestinians were killed the rest of that month of January. 5 children died in hospitals whose electricities were cut off. "The only good Indian is a dead Indian."

The longer that these things go on by the US and its allies that the US floods with money in many countries around the world, the more this will eat into and has eaten into the American psyche.

The "monster" is not just Bush and a few of his cronies--it is slowly or swiftly becoming everyone.

Ali Abunimah on the recent events in Israel/Palestine

Ali Abunimah's attempt to put the recent horrific attack on the Mercaz HaRav Yeshiva in the context of what is happening in Gaza. It goes without saying that all of these deaths are horrific, terrible events, where our common humanity is violated, and that even the process of bringing analysis to such events always feels mistimed. Still, I think that this represents a thoughtful Palestinian point of view on how the conflict is perpetuating itself, and how Palestinians continue to feel as if they being threatened as a people, and that despite this threat, that they are not being heard by the international community--that their deaths don't matter.

A DEFEATED POLICY, NOT A DEFEATED PEOPLE

By Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 7 March 2008
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9381.shtml

Compared with the international silence that surrounded
Israel's recent massacres of Palestinian civilians in the
Occupied Gaza Strip, condemnation and condolences for the
victims of the shooting attack that killed eight students
at the Mercaz HaRav Yeshiva in Jerusalem has been swift.

"I have just spoken with [Israeli] Prime Minister [Ehud]
Olmert to extend my deepest condolences to the victims,
their families, and to the people of Israel," US President
George W. Bush said. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon
added his "condemnation" and "condolences," as did EU High
Representative Javier Solana.

The day before the Jerusalem attack, Amira Abu 'Aser was
buried in Gaza. She had lived just 20 days on this earth
before being shot in the head by Israeli occupation forces
who attacked the house of friends she and her family were
visiting. Needless to say, she had not been firing rockets
at Sderot when she was killed. One of the house's
inhabitants was found the next day, shot dead and his head
crushed by an army jeep, an apparent victim of an
extrajudicial murder by Israeli forces.
(http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9375.shtml)

But confirming their status in the eyes of the
"international community" as less than complete human
beings, neither Amira's killing, nor any of the dozens of
Palestinian civilian victims of Israel's onslaught in Gaza
have merited condemnation or condolences.

The fallacy that lies behind the differential concern for
the lives of innocent Israelis and Palestinians is that
the massacre in Jerusalem and the massacres in Gaza can be
separated. Israeli deaths are "terrorism," while
Palestinian deaths are merely an unfortunate consequence
of the fight against "terrorism." But the two are
intricately linked, and what happened in Jerusalem is a
direct consequence of what Israel has been doing to the
Palestinians for decades.

Let me be clear that the killing of civilians, Israeli or
Palestinian, is wrong, repugnant, and cannot bring this
one-hundred-year war caused by the Zionist colonization of
Palestine to an end. There will be an Israeli propaganda
effort -- as always -- to present Palestinian violence as
being simply motivated by hatred, and divorced from the
context of brutal occupation that Palestinians live under.
What greater proof could you need than an attack on
religious students, devoting their life to the study of
the Torah?

We cannot expect much analysis in the media of why the
Mercaz HaRav yeshiva might have been chosen as a target.
Was it mere coincidence that the school, named for Rabbi
Abraham Isaac Kook, and led after his death by his son
Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, is the ideological cradle of the
militant, Jewish supremacist settler movement Gush Emunim?

Unlike other sects in Israel which sought exemption of
their students from military service, Gush Emunim
encouraged its followers to join the army and become the
armed wing of religious nationalist Zionism. Gush Emunim
settlers, many of them, like Moshe Levinger, graduates of
Mercaz HaRav, founded the most extreme and racist
settlements in the Occupied West Bank, including the
notorious colonies in and near Hebron whose inhabitants
have made life miserable for Palestinians in the city and
forced many of them out of their homes. It is the militant
settlers of Gush Emunim who still honor Baruch Goldstein
who murdered 29 Palestinians in Hebron in February 1994.
It is in Hebron that the Gush Emunim settlers spray "Arabs
to the gas chambers" on Palestinian houses.

It is possible that the Mercaz HaRav gunman did not know
or care about any of this, that any target he could
identify as Israeli would have satisfied his desire to
exact revenge.

In 2002, Israeli army chief Moshe Yaalon declared that
"the Palestinians must be made to understand in the
deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a
defeated people." This would be achieved by the massive
and constant application of force until they got the
message. The same philosophy was elaborated in 2004 by
Professor Arnon Soffer, one of the architects, with former
Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, of the 2005 Gaza
"disengagement."

Soffer, an avid supporter of turning Gaza into a
hermetically-sealed pen for unwanted Palestinians,
explained that if Palestinians fire a single rocket over
the fence into Israel, "we will fire 10 in response. And
women and children will be killed, and houses will be
destroyed. After the fifth such incident, Palestinian
mothers won't allow their husbands to shoot Qassams
[rockets], because they will know what's waiting for
them."

Soffer predicted that in a few years' time, "when 2.5
million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it's going to be
a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger
animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane
fundamentalist Islam." With Palestinians closed in, "The
pressure at the border will be awful," Soffer predicted.
"It's going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain
alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day,
every day."

To be fair, Soffer did display a human side: "The only
thing that concerns me is how to ensure that the boys and
men who are going to have to do the killing will be able
to return home to their families and be normal human
beings" ("It's the demography, stupid," The Jerusalem
Post, 21 May 2004).

For decades Israel has been exercizing with
ever-escalating brutality this deliberate strategy to
crush through force and starvation a civilian population
in rebellion against colonial rule. To Israel's vexation,
the Palestinians are not playing their part. After sixty
years of expulsions, massacres, assassinations of their
leaders, colonization, torture, and mass imprisonment, the
Palestinians have utterly failed to understand that they
are a "defeated people."

The vast majority of Palestinians in Gaza and the West
Bank endure unprecedented oppression by the Israeli army
and settlers without resorting to violence in response,
but they maintain an inextinguishable determination to
endure until they regain their rights. If the methods the
Palestinian resistance has sometimes used are
reprehensible, they have also been typical for
anti-colonial resistance movements throughout time, as
William Polk shows in his book Violent Politics: A History
of Insurgency, Terrorism and Guerilla War from the
American Revolution to Iraq, and Robert Pape demonstrated
through his study of suicide bombing in Dying to Win.

Is it not time for the rest of the world to step in and
force Israel at last to understand the same thing, so that
the senseless bloodshed can finally stop and all the
people of the country -- Israelis and Palestinians -- can
begin to imagine a future other than an endless parade of
funerals?

--
Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah is
author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the
Israeli-Palestinian Impasse (Metropolitan Books, 2006).

"The Gaza Bombshell"/The Bush Administration's Bay of Pigs

My daughter Leila has vomited about twenty times in the past forty-eight hours, we're in the middle of a Cleveland blizzard, but I have to send off this link (sent to me by the Jewish Voice for Peace) to a Vanity Fair piece detailing the Bush Administration's attempt to foment civil war among the Palestinians in Gaza.

I'd be reading pieces like it from Ali Abunimah for a number of months, but I was mostly aghast that he seemed to be taking a stridently pro-Hamas standpoint, given his secular political point-of-view, so I couldn't completely take in all the information.

In a way, it shouldn't be surprising that the Bush's Administration is getting its hands dirty in the Israel/Palestine conflict, but funding and arming a Palestinian warlord (who is using torture to attempt to wrest control from Hamas) is either flagrantly naive about its potential consequences, or just another attempt to end any hope for a Palestinian state, and thus any hope for ending the conflict.

In the words of the JVP newsletter:

As long as the United States continues to support Israel's decades-long practice of illegally appropriating land, destroying homes, and using disproportionate force--a policy which has proven to be both morally bankrupt and self-destructive for Israel--neither Palestinians nor Israelis will ever know peace.

The Disposable Heroes of Hipoprisy's "Television, The Drug of the Nation"

Two versions. Is television still the problem, given the proliferation of the new technologies where people can get their infotainment, or are we?

Here are the lyrics:

One nation under god has turned into
one nation under the influence of one drug

(chorus)
Television, the drug of the nation
Breeding ignorance and feeding radiation

T.V., it satellite links
our united states of unconsciousness
apathetic therapeutic and extremely addictive
the methadone metronome pumping out
150 channels 24 hours a day
you can flip through all of them
and still there's nothing worth watching
T.V. is the reason why less than ten percent
of our nation reads books daily
why most people think Central America means Kansas
socialism means unamerican
and apartheid is a new headache remedy
absorbed in its world it's so hard to find us
it shapes our mind the most
maybe the mother of our nation
should remind us that we're sitting too close to...

(chorus)
Television, the drug of the nation
Breeding ignorance and feeding radiation

T.V. is the stomping ground
for political candidates
where bears in the woods
are chased by grecian formula'd bald eagles
T.V. is mechanized politic's
remote control over the masses
co-sponsored by enironmentally safe gases
watch for the PBS special
it's the perpetuation of the two-party system
where image takes precedence over wisdom
where sound bite politics are served
to the fastfood culture
where straight teeth in your mouth
are more important than the words
that come out of it
race baiting is the way to get elected
Willie Horton or will he not get elected on...

(chorus)
Televison, the drug of the nation
Breeding ignorance and feeding radiation

T.V., is it the reflector or the director
does it imitate us or do we imitate it
because a child watches 1500 murders
before he's twelve years old
and we wonder how we've created
a Jason generation that learns to laugh
rather than abhor the horror
T.V. is the place where armchair generals
and quarterbacks can experience first hand
the excitement of video warfare
as the themesong is sung in the background
sugar sweet sitcoms that leave us with
a bad actor taste while pop stars metamorphosize
into soda pop stars you saw the video
you heard the soundtrack
well now go buy the soft drink
well, the only cola that I support
is a union C.O.L.A. (cost of living allowance) on...

(chorus)
Television, the drug of the nation
Breeding ignorance and feeding radiation

Back again, "new and improved"
we return to our irregularly programmed schedule
hidden cleverly between heavy breasted
beer and car commmercials
CNNESPNABCTNT but mostly B.S.
where oxymoronic language like
"virtually spotless" "fresh frozen"
light yet filling" and
"military intelligence" have become standard
T.V. is the place where phrases are redefined
like "recession" to "necessary downturn"
"crude oil" on a beach to "mousse"
"civilian death" to "collateral damages"
and being killed by your own army
is now called "friendly fire"
T.V. is the place where the pursuit of
happiness has become the pursuit of trivia
where toothpaste and cars
have become sex objects
where imagination is sucked out of children
by a cathode ray nipple
T.V. is the only wet nurse
that would create a cripple
on...

(chorus)
Television, the drug of the nation
Breeding ignorance and feeding radiation

The Moe Green Radio Hour Featuring Harvey Shapiro, Philip Metres, and Larry Gavin

Last night, I phoned in a poetry talk/reading to Rafael Alvarado (& Corrie Greathouse), the brains behind The Moe Green Poetry Hour on Blog Talk Radio. A good time, though somewhat uncanny as an experience of reading, since Rafael quietly listens on the other end. It was something like poetry psychoanalysis, and I was fully engaged in trying to elicit some sign from the analyst...

Sheryl Crow's "Shine Over Babylon"/Ripped Out of the News

"Shine Over Babylon"

Buying bread and paying for none
Creatures of a waning sun
Teacher's hands are overrun
Clowns and gypsies have all but gone

You make me wanna
Shine over Babylon
You make me wanna
Shine over Babylon

Freedoms etched on Sacred pillars
Hollow stones of mindless filler
Can lead to madman oil drillers
Won't be long before we all are killers

Little boy lost way up the mountains
Cities drowning under boiling fountains
I dreamed of chilly, sunlit days
I was trembling in a golden haze

You make me wanna
Shine over Babylon
You make me wanna
Shine over Babylon

Celebrate the golden cow
Praise the bloated bank account
If there's a god where is he now
The precipice is slipping further out

Sanskrit message from the mounts
Leave your possession, hope abounds
There's nothing here for you to cry about
We're all just followers from here on out

I take the stage, I walk the planks
I sing these songs with little thanks
I wait for shouts from crazy cranks
I stand amidst the brown shirt ranks

I found my way to alexandria
Where gurus bubble up on gangea
Scavengers, they run up and hand ya
All the junk that should have damned ya

You make me wanna
Shine over Babylon
You make me wanna
Shine over Babylon

If everything in life was free
You'd float in your own reverie
The things that you could never see
Seal the gap between you and me

You make me wanna
Shine over Babylon
You make me wanna
Shine over Babylon

Public Enemy's "Fight the Power" video(s) + "Son of a Bush"

Public Enemy's "Fight the Power" (here's the long version) aptly demonstrates why P.E. is still widely considered one of the most important hip hop acts, for their stylistic innovations and postmodern walls of sound (recycling music, sound bytes, noise, tape loops, etc.), their rap styles, and, of course, their message.

One of the most intriguing elements is how they employ the symbols and images of an earlier cultural era--the late 1960s and early 1970s of the Black Panther Party, who influenced a very young Chuck D. with their breakfast program. In a sense, one might see their employment of such images and language as nostalgia, commodifications, or even as kitsch--but as a young person, I saw them as absolutely real. And, actually, so did plenty of people seeing them for the first time. (To wit, I've never seen a critique of P.E. as commodifiers of Black Power)...

Was I merely fooled? I don't think so. They are performances of a certain kind of political subjectivity, situated twenty years after their initial appearance on the scene. Having seen the movements destroyed from without (and sometimes from within), Public Enemy saw in music a way to resurrect the spirit of Black Power, recycled just as the music would recycle their heroes and enemies. Hip-hop, for P.E. and for so many other rappers, was a way to kickstart a new consciousness, if not a fully outfitted movement.

To prove their ongoing relevance, and their continued contribution to docupoetic musicality, check out their "Son of a Bush":

Public Enemy's "911 is a Joke"/Somebody Call an Ambulance!

Public Enemy, who once called rap "the CNN of the ghetto," did a little reporting here in "911 is a Joke" (1989)--that 911 emergency responders weren't coming to inner city neighborhoods. For this suburban off-white kid, this was indeed news. (Is this still true?!) This is black humor in both senses of the term, and the video, which shows somebody either having a seizure or doing some breaking of some sort, makes it even scarier.

About this song, which I chose for my list of docupoems for a Poetry Foundation piece, I wrote:

Chuck D, the mastermind and principal lyricist of Public Enemy, once called rap “the CNN of the ghetto.” The acclaimed rap group stormed onto the popular music scene in the late 1980s with Fear of a Black Planet. One of many topical songs on this album, “911” decries the failure of emergency services to respond swiftly to calls made from black neighborhoods. Sung by Flava Flav, the comic sidekick of Chuck D, the song is nonetheless a blistering indictment of the broken social contract. What is remarkable about “911” is that this news was, of course, not news for the ghetto (whose denizens were well aware of the problems of getting medical help) but news about the ghetto (for the group’s suburban white listeners).

Yet despite its grim subject the song contains plenty of poetry in its relentless allusions, both musical and linguistic; when Flav compares the loss of limbs to “compilation,” for instance, he uses the metaphors of the music industry to lay bare the brute economics of emergency medical treatment. I can’t help but think of Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” in which the poet juxtaposes the selling of a quadroon girl with the amputation of a diseased limb that “drops horribly in a pail.” For Whitman, as for Flav, black people have been reduced to expendable appendages.

I was thinking of Whitman's section 15:

The malform'd limbs are tied to the surgeon's table,
What is removed drops horribly in a pail;
The quadroon girl is sold at the auction-stand, the drunkard nods by
the bar-room stove...

"911 is a Joke"

Hit me
Going, going, gone
Now I dialed 911 a long time ago
Don't you see how late they're reactin'
They only come and they come when they wanna
So get the morgue embalm the goner
They don't care 'cause they stay paid anyway
They teach ya like an ace they can't be betrayed
I know you stumble with no use people
If your life is on the line they you're dead today
Late comings with the late comin' stretcher
That's a body bag in disguise y'all betcha
I call 'em body snatchers quick they come to fetch ya?
With an autopsy ambulance just to dissect ya
They are the kings 'cause they swing amputation
Lose your arms, your legs to them it's compilation
I can prove it to you watch the rotation
It all adds up to a funky situation
So get up get, get get down
911 is a joke in yo town
Get up, get, get, get down
Late 911 wears the late crown

911 is a joke

Everyday they don't never come correct
You can ask my man right here with the broken neck
He's a witness to the job never bein' done
He would've been in full in 8 9-11
Was a joke 'cause they always jokin'
They the token to your life when it's croakin'
They need to be in a pawn shop on a
911 is a joke we don't want 'em
I call a cab 'cause a cab will come quicker
The doctors huddle up and call a flea flicker
The reason that I say that 'cause they
Flick you off like fleas
They be laughin' at ya while you're crawlin' on your knees
And to the strength so go the length
Thinkin' you are first when you really are tenth
You better wake up and smell the real flavor
Cause 911 is a fake life saver

So get up, get, get get down
911 is a joke in yo town
Get up, get, get, get down
Late 911 wears the late crown

Big Bridge 2008 is out/Check out The War Papers (2)!

The new Big Bridge (2008) is out. As usual, there is a cornucopia of stuff to read, poetry, poetics, criticism, etc.

Check out my essay on the poetics of poetry in public spaces, called "Lang/scapes: Further Explorations of War Resistance Poetry in Public Spaces."

BIG BRIDGE
is pleased to announce its 2008 issue.

It includes:
CHAPBOOK

Up By The Maritime Museum
Poem by Nathaniel Tarn; Drawings by Nancy Victoria Davis
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FEATURES

BERKELEY DAZE
Exhaustive anthology and commentary on the Berkeley Poetry Scene of the 1960s; some writers went on to become major figures; others set up a unique dispensarion of their own
Edited with Commentery by Rychard Denner

BOLINAS DREAMING
Book-length study of community of poets just north of San Francisco from the mid 60s to mid 80s, many of whom went on to play major roles in the literary modes that followed throughout the century
by Kevin Opstedal

AN ANTHOLOGY OF BAY AREA WOMEN WRITERS
Spritely and diverse anthology of women living in the San Francisco Bay area today
edited by Katherine Hastings

On The Publication of Philip Whalen's COLLECTED POEMS
Celebration of the Collected poems of one of the most important American poets to emerge at mid century. One of the original Beats, his poems do not age or become dated, as this ample selection of commentary, poems, and appreciations makes clear.
Commentary and poems by: Dale Smith, David Schneider, Karl Young, Neeli Cherkovski, Brian Howlett, Ron Silliman, John Tarrant, Tom Clark, Anne Waldman, and David Meltzer.
Edited by Dale Smith

THE CHILDREN
Poems by Philip Whalen; Photographs by Aram Saroyan:
Saroyan took photos of children more or less his own age while travelling in Europe with his father. He sent them to Whalen who wrote poems based on them.

WAR PAPERS (2)
Poems, essays, comments, and hyper-text art against war.

First Impressions of
OCEANS BEYOND MONOTONOUS SPACE:
Selected Poems of Kitasono Katue
For most readers in the west, Japanese poetry of the 20th Century remains almost if not completely unknown. Yet it had its Avant Gardists comparable to Ezra Pound, Kenneth Rexroth, and Kenneth Patchen (to mention three who saw Kitasono as a peer. Kitasono foreshadowed most concerns and methods of western poets, from Concrete to Language Poetry to the PhotoPoetry emerging today decades before his western counterparts. This gathering respresents initial responses to the first large and easily available selection of his work.
Comments by: Aysegül Tözeren, Anny Ballardini, Susan Smith Nash, Carlos M. Luis, and Dan Waber

NOW, AS YOU AWAKEN
Poems of Mahmoud Darwish; Translated by Omnia Amin and Rick London
Generally considered the most important contemporary Palestinian Poet, this selection of poems shows a poet steeped in a great tradition dealing with contemporary issues, and doing so outside of stereotypes and predictable misconceptions

a d.a.levy satellite
Still controversial 39 years after his death, levy is finally emerging as a major American poet, inovator, publisher, and influence. This widly diverse collection of responses gives a sense of his range and his appeal to audiences of all sorts.
Comments by T.L.Kryss, Joel Lipman, Ingrid Swanberg, Karl Young, Dan Waber, Stephen Nelson, Joshua Gage, jon beacham, John Oliver Simon, Richard Krech, Geoffrey Cook, and Charles Potts.
Edited by Ingrid Swanberg and Karl Young

Nathaniel Tarn: quatre poèmes; traduction : Auxéméry
French translations of some of Tarn's best-known poems

A California Trip: Salutations from Ira Cohen —
Two Spontaneous Odes and a Photo of Terri Carrion

CORNUCOPION BOSEGSZARU
Ira Cohen in Hungarian


A Retrospective of the Publication Work of Karl Young, Part 3

Freshen' Up Your Drink, Guv'nor?/Paul Kramer's "The Water Cure"

Thinking too much about torture these days, and yet I came across an astonishing article by Paul Kramer about an earlier debate regarding water torture, from the beginning of the 20th century, in the recent New Yorker magazine, called "The Water Cure." It begins like this:

Many Americans were puzzled by the news, in 1902, that United States soldiers were torturing Filipinos with water. The United States, throughout its emergence as a world power, had spoken the language of liberation, rescue, and freedom. This was the language that, when coupled with expanding military and commercial ambitions, had helped launch two very different wars. The first had been in 1898, against Spain, whose remaining empire was crumbling in the face of popular revolts in two of its colonies, Cuba and the Philippines. The brief campaign was pitched to the American public in terms of freedom and national honor (the U.S.S. Maine had blown up mysteriously in Havana Harbor), rather than of sugar and naval bases, and resulted in a formally independent Cuba....The Americans were not done liberating...