"Notes toward an Interrogation of Staged Violence" by Jeff Gundy

I had the good fortune of spending time with Jeff Gundy at the William Stafford Peace Symposium about a month ago, and have since devoured three of his books of poems, including his most recent, Spoken Among the Trees (University of Akron, 2007). I admire Gundy's admixture of impish wit and dogged humility, as he explores the restlessness of being human and longing for a better world in a plainspoken style that secludes a complexity of thought. Here's one of the poems, which reflects, at least in part, his Mennonite tradition's quarrel with violence.
"Notes toward an Interrogation of Staged Violence" by Jeff Gundy

Here’s your challenge: write a verse play in which nonviolence triumphs.
—ESR, 1/27/2006

Prelude:
Please be seated in this comfortable armchair. All questions will be asked in a calm and measured tone.
Would you prefer not to answer? Would you like a cup of tea, or a glass of whiskey, or a week in Cancun? Would you prefer that I punch you in the chops, or bomb an aspirin factory, or send the cruise missiles humming across the border like angry wasps ahead of the tanks and Humvees? I am only asking.

Propositions:
A story is not a war, but a creative alternative to stabbing your brother with a kitchen knife.
Time travel is indeed possible in the magic space of the stage.Violence is available for deconstruction and assimilation.
Nothing is inevitable, even after it happens.
We must learn the power of powerless bodies.

Historical Note:
The martyrs eschewed all force except that which they elicited from their enemies, thereby a) heaping coals of fire or b) glowing in the fiery furnace or c) both creating and transcending the Bloody Theatre or d) . . .

Additional Propositions:
In stage combat, the victim controls the action.Sound effects contribute verisimilitude.
The nonviolent spectator takes no pleasure in a whack or a stab.
The nonviolent spectator envisions glorious transformations and scenes of pastoral harmony way up and down the line.

Illustrations:
Her soul floats above the horrifying scene, almost free.
The crowd obscures the audience’s view.
Hector drops the knife and weeps.
Angela achieves such sublime heights of serenity that she ascends to heaven in a narrow band of light.
Marilyn suddenly vanishes and there’s a maple tree in her place, or a raccoon, or the attorney general with his blue curtain gone and the bare-breasted Spirit of Justice in glorious view.

Dialogue (suppressed):
All right, we’ve had it. You are neither natural nor inevitable. The restraints are for your own protection. We have assurances from our legal advisers. Those fingernails . . . One more opening in that tender flesh . . .

Proposed Approaches:
Abuse the puppet, and let Naomi put on something comfortable and sit down with a magazine.
The lead couple makes love onstage in such dazzling fashion that the alien cyborgs do a total makeover on their cubical spaceship and beg us to assimilate them.
Instead of letting the bastard cut out Philomel’s tongue, change the whole crew into birds before anybody rapes anybody.
Everybody pauses at the crucial moment, exchanges glances fraught with significance, then goes out for Thai food or puts on the Beatles.
Hell, the Doobie Brothers.

A Question for You Bloggers Out There: Do You Save Your Words?

This is a second try, which seems like an ominous warning, given what I had written.

It's the second anniversary of this blog, which I've thought about quitting until I realized that every time I try to quit, someone says they read it and it's important to them, and I keep on.

My question of the day: do you bloggers out there save your posts as word files? or do you trust the Blogger Gods? Or consider your blogtastic words simply home on the blog and nowhere else?

Thoughts?

Thanks, Phil

"Send me some impressionists."
--Vincent Van Gogh.

Consider the Frame

As [Jesus] came near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, "If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes."

- Luke 19:41-42

Alice Walker in Gaza

“Going to Gaza was our opportunity to remind the people of Gaza and ourselves that we belong to the same world: the world where grief is not only acknowledged, but shared; where we see injustice and call it by its name; where we see suffering and know the one who stands and sees is also harmed, but not nearly so much as the one who stands and sees and says and does nothing.” —Alice Walker
Marcy Newman's recent post shares a number of interesting things, among them these videos, about which she writes that Walker "compares the treatment of palestinians to african americans under legal jim crow segregation, which she fought against in the civil rights movement. the problem with this interview is that walker at once refuses to acknowledge palestinians’ right to armed resistance and is patronizing when she talks about the need for palestinians to take up non-violent resistance and at the same time when she is asked directly about the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement she does not commit to supporting that non-violent resistance strategy either."

I found her story of arguing with her husband--an increasingly ardent Zionist--to be poignant, and her desire to make connections between what she was seeing (despite this being her first trip to the region) and other historical oppressions (pre-Civil Rights South, Liberia, etc.).

If you see only one part, watch the final part, in which Walker gets revved up. Juxtapose that to the tone of the first part; notice, too, in the last part, the sound of birds, and childrens' voices in the distance.

Rachel Loden's "The Pure of Heart, Those Murderers"/from Dick of the Dead

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"Muslims are People"!

I got this email from David Axelrod. I can't believe even the Democrats have to say shit like "Majority-Muslim countries around the world are filled with extraordinary people who simply want to live their lives and see their children live better lives, just as in America. Indeed, part of what makes America great is having nearly seven million Muslim Americans living here today and enriching our culture and communities." Are we that crazily xenophobic that this needs to be said? How incredibly sad for us.

Hello -

As a Senior Advisor to the President, I'm here in Cairo, Egypt where I watched President Obama deliver an unprecedented speech calling for a new beginning for the United States and Muslim communities around the world.

We all know that there has been tension between the United States and some Muslim communities. But, as the President said this morning, if all sides face the sources of tension squarely and focus on mutual interests, we can find a new way forward.

The President outlined some big goals for this new beginning in his speech -- including disrupting, dismantling, and defeating violent extremism. It was a historic speech, and since many Americans were asleep at the time it was given we wanted to make sure you had a chance to see it...

Majority-Muslim countries around the world are filled with extraordinary people who simply want to live their lives and see their children live better lives, just as in America. Indeed, part of what makes America great is having nearly seven million Muslim Americans living here today and enriching our culture and communities.

We can extend that kind of relationship abroad. It won't always be easy, but if we make an effort to bridge our differences rather than resigning ourselves to animosity, we can move toward a more peaceful world over time.

Thank you,
David Axelrod
Senior Advisor to the President

Dick Cheney, It's Time to Return to Your Undisclosed Location

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Fred Marchant's "The Phoenix Program"/A Response to Levertov's "What Were They Like?"

I had the opportunity to meet Fred Marchant while at the "Another World Instead: William Stafford Peace Symposium" a few weeks ago, and have since read all three of his books of poetry, including the recently released Looking House. I am grateful that Marchant exists, one of the landmarks of peace and conscience in our scattered and often tortuous landscape of war. Marchant, while in the Marine Corps, became a conscientious objector in 1970, during the Vietnam War, and has written a poetry that dramatizes the violence at home and abroad, and our human attempts to survive and sing other ways out.

Here is his poem, "The Phoenix Program," the name of the CIA's counterinsurgency program ("Operation Phoenix") in Vietnam which, according to Howard Zinn in A People's History of the United States, "secretly, without trial, executed at least twenty thousand civilians in South Vietnam who were suspected of being members of the Communist underground."

"The Phoenix Program"

by Fred Marchant

Afterwards, the children stood outside
the house of their birth
to witness how it too had to be punished.

When they came of age, they fled to the capital,
lost themselves in the study of history and great works of art,
graduated in swirling carmine robes.

Burdened with a knowledge that murderers
name their deeds after winged deities,
they dream for awhile of claws on the back,

but later they become certain there was
nothing they could have done.
And they are not alone.

It is like this throughout the city.
On each corner you can see them—
leaning as if the vanishing point on their horizon

were other than ours.
They speak quietly only to one another.
They play no instruments, and do not sing.

(originally appeared in Harvard Review, and Full Moon Boat (2000).

This poem, it appears, echoes in its conclusion Denise Levertov's higher-pitched protest poem from the Vietname era, "What Were They Like?", a poem constructed as a question and answer between an ethnographer/historian and an intermediary, something like but not quite a native informant. Still, Marchant's poem skirts the self-righteousness of Levertov's poem, and in a sense, in the broadness of description, the victims of this collective punishment could be all the civilians who have found themselves in the crosshairs of mass violence, whose silence echoes to us, to this day.

Bernard Avishai and Sam Bahour on Economic Development in Palestine

Thanks to Fred Marchant for sending along this fascinating dialogue on economic development as part of the peace process. Chris Vecchio, check this out!

On the Anniversary of the Tulsa Race Riot: Wars on the Homefront

Nick Demske sent along an email commemorating the anniversary of the Tulsa Race Riot. According to Nick, who references Loewen's authoritative text, Sundown Towns, the riot is part of a larger phenomenon of American racism, the "sundown towns" excluded African Americans from a community (as well as other racial minorities).

Demske: "Staggeringly prominent throughout the United States, a number of them are still in practice today. What makes the Tulsca riot unique was how large it was. Loewen's book does not mention this but, according to other sources I've consulted online, the area was the epitome of a thriving, self-sufficient black community, now commonally referred to as "Black Wall Street." During the riot, deputized white men raided a munitions dump, commandeered airplanes (5 or 6), and dynamited the community, leveling houses and businesses. This makes it, according to Loewen's book, published in 2005, "the only place in the contiguous United States ever to undergo aerial bombardment."

From Wikipedia:
One of the nation's worst acts of racial violence—the Tulsa Race Riot—occurred there [in Greenwood, a black neighborhood of Tulsa, OK] on June 1, 1921, when 35 square blocks of homes and businesses were torched by mobs of angry whites.

The riot began because of an alleged assault of a white woman, Sarah Page, by an African American man, Dick Rowland. This incident produced even more hatred between the whites and the blacks even though there was no proof of the assault. The case was simply a white woman’s word against a black man’s word. The Tulsa Tribune got word of the incident and published the story in the paper on May 31, 1921. Shortly after the newspaper article surfaced, there was news that a white lynch mob was going to take matters into its own hands and kill Dick Rowland. [5]

African American men began to arm themselves and join forces in order to protect Dick Rowland; however, this action prompted white men to arm themselves and confront the group of African American men. There was an argument in which a white man tried to take a gun from a black man, and the gun fired a bullet up into the sky. This incident promoted many others to fire their guns, and the violence erupted on the evening of May 31, 1921. Whites flooded into the Greenwood district and destroyed the businesses and homes of African American residents. No one was exempt to the violence of the white mobs; men, women, and even children were killed by the mobs.

Troops were deployed on the afternoon of June 1st, but by that time there was not much left of the once thriving Greenwood district. Over 600 successful businesses were lost. Among these were 21 churches, 21 restaurants, 30 grocery stores and two movie theaters, plus a hospital, a bank, a post office, libraries, schools, law offices, a half-dozen private airplanes and even a bus system.[7] Property damage totaled $1.5 million.[7] Although the official death toll claimed that 26 blacks and 13 whites died during the fighting, most estimates are considerably higher. At the time of the riot, the American Red Cross listed 8,624 persons in need of assistance, in excess of 1,000 homes and businesses destroyed, and the delivery of several stillborn infants.[5]