The Campaign
Posted on September 4, 2008
Filed Under Politics | 6 Comments
I’ve given quite a bit of money to the Obama campaign this year & I’m likely to give more, but not until I see them go on the attack. I got an email this morning form David Plouffe (me & millions of other contributors) to the effect that the answer to Sarah Palin’s sneering attack on “community organizers” is to say, “Community organizing is how ordinary people respond to out-of-touch politicians and their failed policies.” sorry, the right response will be to hang Palin out to dry for her lies & radical right-wing ideas. Don’t explain, don’t complain — make the right wing culture warrior play defense. That’s when I’ll cut another check.
Later: Here is another view of the email I referred to above. I also posted the above paragraph in a discussion thread at TPM, where one person responded by saying that “getting down in the mud” with McCain & Palin was a losing strategy. I don’t think you hve to get down in the mud in order to aggressively attack the lies & distortions coming out of the Republican convention — Mitt Romney’s assertion that McCain / Palin will change “liberal Washington” doens’t meet the laugh test & ought to be mocked mercilessly. Same goes for the Republican’s claims to be “reformers.” And it is not “getting down in the mud” to point out that Sarah Palin, as a mayor, tried to get the librarian to remove Harry Potter from the library because it offended her Christianist beliefs; then, when the librarian refused to go along, that Palin tried to fire her. Palin wants to put her experience as mayor up against Obama’s Harvard law degree & public service? Great, let’s look at the quality of Palin’s experience. The Republicans have decide this election is going to be fought on cultural grounds. Bring it on.
Laura Jensen
Posted on September 2, 2008
Filed Under Poetry, Reading | 2 Comments
There is a teriffic roundtable discussion of Laura Jensen’s poems in the latest issue of Pleiades (28.2) that I highly recommend. I was particularly impressed Katie Peterson’s short essay on Jensen, which begins: “There is no poetic authority in Laura Jensen’s poems; the voice that speaks is at the mercy of everything it speaks about, in peril on an ordinary street and in quiet distress merely by virtue of being awake.” That strikes me as right. There is also a selection of poems from Jensen’s books that can serve as an introduction to the work. I’ve known Laura for more than thirty years; we studied with many of the smae masters. I hope this is just the first wave of an ocean of recognition for her work.
Soap Opera
Posted on September 2, 2008
Filed Under Politics | 2 Comments
I have to admit that I’ve been as fascinated as everyone else by John McCain’s selection of Gov. Sarah Palin as his VP. Fascinated, but also offended. No, not because Palin’s daughter is pregnant, but because McCain showed such poor judgement in naming a lightweight ideologue like Palin. Country first, my ass: this was a nakedly political selection. And I’m doubly offended by the slapdash manner in which this sop to the radical right was reviewed by the campaign. Or not reviewed. Now it turns out that McCain really wanted to put Lieberman on the ticket, but the anti-abortion radicals wouldn’t stand for it. Look, I wasn’t going to vote for McCain in any case & Joe Lieberman turns my stomach, but picking Lieberman would have demonstrated political courage whereas picking Palin attempts to produce the illusion of political courage while actually demonstrating the most craven sort of cowardice. (It’s also not going to do any good. If McCain thinks more than a handful of Clinton voters are going to switch to McCain because he picked Palin, he’s even more delusional than I imagined.) I suspect the main effect — since the hard right is rallying round the choice — will be to corrode a bit of the teflon that McCain has been coated with as far as the press is concerned. The Republicans have worked hard to put fake debates about “character” at the center of American politics & the press has gone along, moralizing like a Victorian ladies club, but here we have an actual character issue — a 72 year old presidential candidate choosing a corrupt intellectual lightweight ideologueas his VP candidate & by doing so demonstrating that he cares more about politics than about patriotism. Oh, & he has hired the guy who slimed him in 2000 to work with Palin — I guess he was looking for a liar with a lot of experience.
Vietnamese
Posted on September 1, 2008
Filed Under Poetry, Vietnam | 2 Comments
Powering up the Vietnamese software to refresh my (very modest) language skills. It now looks as if I’ll be going to VN in the spring to research & collect material for an anthology of contemporary Vietnamese poetry. I will have the able assistence, thankfully, of my friends Ly Lan & Hoang Hung. What I envision is an anthology with extensive notes, interviews and an “ethnographic” essay that treats Vietnamese poetry as a cultural text. Because of the rapid & radical social & cultural changes in Vietnam over the last thirty years, the country is itself an experiment in cultural change; and the Vietnamese have always put poetry at the center of their culture. Poetry still seems to matter in Vietnam. My working thesis is that Vietnamese poetry can be read as a sort of genetuic code.
Why?
Posted on August 28, 2008
Filed Under Politics | 1 Comment
Why isn’t the media wetting itself wondering who McCain’s VP will be? Obama’s VP choice had them in a sweat for days. How come they aren’t camped outside Joe Lieberman’s & Mitt Romney’s houses? I am praying that McCain will exhibit stupidity “of biblical proportions” & choose one of these two goobers.
It Was Only a Joke
Posted on August 28, 2008
Filed Under Politics | 1 Comment
That’s what the radical right always says when somebody actually calls them out. Classic bully behavior. But in any case, how fucking delusional can you be? These people have a pretty exalted view of their place in the world & their relationship to the divine; but then I knew that, I grew up with the creeps.
The Facts about John McCain
Posted on August 27, 2008
Filed Under Politics | 1 Comment
Kathy G. produces the facts, with sources, about John McCain’s life. It is ironic, but not at all surpriosing, that the utterly phoney McCain has to attack the authenticity of a person who has actually had to work for a living.
Dogwood
Posted on August 27, 2008
Filed Under Philosophy, Seeing | 1 Comment
When I look raise my eyes above my computer monitor & look out the window of my study I can see the branches of a dogwood tree with upright clusters of dark blue berries. (This is the tree the warbler I mentioned a couple of days ago has been hanging out.) When the a shaft of sunlight shines on the dogwood the red stems look like they are filled with pulsing blood. Again & again the world reminds me lately that I am not the only living thing or even the most important. Such human bias is inevitable, I suppose, & is a bias no doubt shared by warblers & chipmunks & crows; still, human being, dasein, carries with it the potential for imagination, for ecstasy, for seeing outside ourselves. Not many people cultivate this aspect of their nature & even those who think about such things (disreputable poets, mostly) rarely have the ability to sustain the perspective for long. I’ve long been reluctant to grant human consciousness any superiority over various other forms of consciousness — certainly we have no moral claim that reaches any higher than a crow’s or dogwood’s — but there is, I think, the difference granted us by our language: the ability to imagine others’ minds. That is, we have the ability to entertain the reality of other minds even if we cannot fully understand or enter into them. This seems to be our gift, though we may share it with the crows. In any case, the crows’ dasein would have to be different from our own: they can fly.
Two Bad Wars
Posted on August 27, 2008
Filed Under Politics | 2 Comments
Going to war in Iraq was such an obviously bad choice I’m still amazed that some otherwise rational people supported it. The choice to go to war in Afghanistan was — to me, at least — more difficult & I initially supported it, with reservations. (Based mostly on my sense of the deep tarpit of evil at the heart of the Bush administration.) I am now convinced that the decision to go to war in Afghanistan was as bad as the decision to go to war in Iraq. (In retrospect, at least, I don’t agree with Quiggin that the Afghan war was inevitable & understandable because the US needed to “lash out.”) This was all brought into sharp focus for me while reading this post by John Quiggen at Crooked Timber & the responses to it. I recommend the discussion:
Perhaps with more competent management the Taleban could have been defeated by now, and Al Qaeda put out of business in the region. But they haven’t been and it is time to admit that a military victory over the Taleban insurgency is now unlikely whether or not it might have been achieved in the past. As with the Sunni Awakening in Iraq, it’s time to look harder at offering both a part in the political process and plenty of cash to those willing to abandon the insurgency.
Quiggen begins by noting that things have been going “better than expected” in Iraq over the last year & this is the narrative that the Bush administration & the McCain campaign have carefully built around “the surge,” with the implication that they had been right all along. It’s an attractive & even natural narrative & one that is hard to counter, even though it is untrue. Things are “better” in Iraq, compared to what? Police recruits are still regularly targeted, markets are still bombed, many Iraqis still can’t return to their old neighborhoods because they have been ethnically segregated. And what do we have to show for the effort? Thousands of American dead & an unstable country that is concluding oil contracts with China & Russia even as they give us a timeline for getting out. So, even if one were to approve Dick Cheney’s realpolitik approach, we’re fucked.
This is going to be the main problem faced by the Obama campaign* over the next two months — what is the alternative narrative (and how do you advance it) in the face of such an attractive although untrue story? The “we’re fucked” narrative above does not play to the electorate’s predilection for chest-thumping self-aggrandizement & sentimental militarism.
======
*Note: Despite my various disappointments with Obama’s politics, the alternative is simply too grim to contemplate. Watching closely over the last three weeks or so, it is possible to predict that the first & most pressing foreign policy problem that a McCain administration would take up would be the question of whether to go to war first with Russia or Iran.
I Love Crows
Posted on August 26, 2008
Filed Under Birds, Language, Seeing | 1 Comment
I had read something previously about this research into the fact that crows can recognize individual humans, but this is a more extended account. A couple of months ago up at the Blue Mountain Center, I wrote three poems about crows — we had a noisy resident group who entertained me through the afternoons, congregating in the Jack Pines near my window. Reminders that we humans share the world with many other intelligences & perceivers.
« go back — keep looking »
