Monthly Archives: September 2007

The Future of Iraq

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Texts & subtexts sketch a pallid nightmare in this NY Times story: Grozny is the Baghdad of the future. Hasn’t this been the real plan all along?

Three years after a wave of guerrilla and terrorist attacks caused many analysts to say that Russia’s war against Chechen separatists could not be won, the republic has fallen almost fully under the control of the Kremlin and its indigenous proxies, led by Ramzan A. Kadyrov, the Chechen president.

Mr. Kadyrov’s human rights record is chilling, and allegations of his government’s patterns of brutality and impunity are widespread. Yet even his most severe critics say he has developed significant popular support, in part because of the clear changes that have accompanied his firm and fearsome rule.

American neoconservatives’ greatest fear must be that our fascists won’t be as competent as the Russian fascists.

Burma

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I’ve been thinking about Thich Quang Duc in Saigon in 1963 when Diem’s thugs attacked the monasteries & about the ongoing situation in Burma. James Wimberly catches the moral & political issues clearly in this post at the RBC. I’d go further than Wimberly in my defense of the Vietnamese revolution, but that’s not really the subject of his post . . .

Can Mere Language (Without Pictures) Be Obscene?

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An American court will decide. It is apparently an unsettled legal question. In any case, bluenose Pennsylvania prosecutor Mary Beth Buchanan, employing the awesome power of the federal government, has indicted dangerous porno queen Karen Fletcher, “a 56-year-old recluse living on disability payments . . .  for writings distributed on the Internet to about two dozen subscribers.” There is certainly an obscenity here, but it is not the writings of Karen Fletcher.

Literature as Handbook for the Genteel Warrior

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That is what Elizabeth D. Samet appears to have written in her forthcoming book, excerpted here in the NY Times Magazine. I find her her eerie coolness about the Iraq War deeply unsettling. I suppose it is a good thing that the young officers she describes carry Wallace Stevens or Andrew Marvell into the gibbering moral idiocy of Baghdad with them. A tolerance for ambiguity of the sort one learns from poetry might also serve as a kind of restraint against the military culture of certitude, I suppose. Samet’s accounts are full of budding noblesse oblige, but all the Stevens & Marvell in the world doesn’t change the truth, as Tim O’Brien (an infantryman) put it in “How to Tell a True War Story” — “Send young men to war and they come home talking dirty.”

Best Name of a Place to Work

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Donald Lamb is the fortunate soul who gets to print on his business card that he is the director of the Center for Astrophysical Thermonuclear Flashes at the University of Chicago. I actually wrote a poem once about a cosmic gamma ray burst, though apparently this is a different phenomenon from the one described in the article. The poem is called “Seeing Stars: The New Cosmology” & it’s in my book Magical Thinking.