I’ve been trying to make time to listen to this broadcast of Gore Vidal on the intelligent radio talk show, On Point. So far, I still haven’t heard it. But, what the heck, I’m blogging it anyway in case you’re disposed to listen to a smart man made increasingly radical or possibly just crankier by his advancing years.

Here’s the show’s blurb about the interview:

Gore Vidal (AP) Lucid, insightful and razor-sharp, Gore Vidal has been taking on the American Empire for nearly half a century. As war with Iraq looms, the legendary author and essayist is in high dudgeon. A night with the prolific, ever-engaging, and right now angry, Gore Vidal.

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I’m particularly annoyed by Joe Lieberman because (1) he’s sanctimonious and (2) I feel like he’s embarrassing us Jews. Chip has found a page that lampoons him. It’s a start.

John Adams writes to tell me that MaxSpeak beat me to this link.

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Val Stevenson and Todd Swift have put together a book of peace poems, with contributions by “over 100 of the world’s leading, mid-career and emerging poets who work in the English language.” It’s available here as a PDF file that can be printed and folded into a chapbook.

The poems are, of course, pointed. The question for me is: Do I learn from them? Do they open my eyes, either intellectually or emotionally? And do they escape the pitfall of anti-war poetry of over-simplifying in unhelpful ways? For example, “Are there children” by Robert Priest begins:

are there children somewhere
waiting for wounds
eager for the hiss of napalm
in their flesh —

It ends:

does each man in his own way
plot a pogrom for the species
or are we all, always misled
to war

This appeal to the broadest impulses (“species,” “all,” “always”) leaves out the third possibility: Sometimes wars are justified for particular reasons. And since the difficulty of war is always (talk about generalizations!) the disparity between its high aims and the “hiss of napalm” in the flesh of this one child, concluding by escaping into the general is exactly the sort of evasive maneuver the first part of the poem would have us avoid. Or, as Sampurna Chattarjli writes in “Easy”

The death-dealers deserved to die, you say.
Death is easy to pronounce.
It’s the smell of burning children that’s hard.

But is this just sentimentalism? After all, the inevitable death of children is part of a war that is being fought to prevent much larger evils. Still, the particularities cannot be forgotten, and poetry is one good way to remember them.

Many of the poems dispute the justification of this war, of course. For example, in “Regime change begins at home,” Sue Littleton writes about shooting fish in a barrel, except the fish are all stacked up, helpless. The zinger is in the last verse:

The barrel holds no water…
but somewhere in its depths
there is the dark, iridescent sheen
of oil.

Aolfe Mannix allows himself ambiguity in “Taking Sides,” which begins:

There will be another war,
many people will be killed,
and I will be expected to have an opinion.
But what can you say about a man
who’d rather let thousands of children die
than give them access to medical vaccines…

and ends:

Talk about a rock and a hard place.
The fundamental difference is questionable.
Neither Jesus nor Mohammed
would have allowed themselves
to be pushed into this kind of choice.

Sounds right. But why would Jesus and Mohammed escape the choice? Because they’d see immediately who to side with? Or because they would have seen the futility of sides? But, the first part of the poem tells us that sides aren’t futile, for Saddam is an evil-doer. What is it that Jesus and Mohammed would have done that we have failed to do? I want one more line…or maybe one more poem. Or maybe this is where I’m supposed to do some thinking. (The irony to me is that both Christianity and Islam believe their religions are universal whereas the unmentioned Abraham founded a religion based on a tribal revelation.)

Here is J.R. Carpenter’s “A verse to war” in its entirety, a reflection presumably on being asked to contribute an anti-war poem to a chapbook:

I am afraid
(of what will happen
of the rhetoric
of the silence
of not knowing).
I am afraid I don’t know what to contribute.

I am afraid
(of destruction
of waiting
of doing nothing
of adding fuel to the flames).
I am afraid I don’t have any answers.

I am afraid
(of trivializing
or propagandizing
of margins
of error).
I am afraid it is but a meager thing to add
a verse adverse to war.

I began by asking if these poems opened my eyes. That’s what I’m looking for. But anti-war poems can serve another purpose. They can encourage, impassion, give us courage in our opposition. After all, “Blowing in the Wind,” the most important anti-war poem of my generation, didn’t really teach us anything. But it did let us feel the wind against our back and gave us heart as we sang along. And these poems overall did make me feel encouraged. There are many strong voices making themselves heard.

Now, 100 poems are too many to read, so I admit that I skimmed. But I found only a handful of poems that are the sort of over-written, self-consciously poetic stuff that I personally dislike…the ones that talk about a “sea-cooled face” or stuff that’s “taut against the air.” Overall, these poems are entertaining and at times moving and thought-provoking. And funny. Hell, it’s worth browsing through the anthology just for some of the titles: “Terror on Warism” (Ian Ayres), “Mickey Mouse came, Mickey Mouse saw, Mickey Mouse conquered” (Vincent Tinguely), “God decides to press the mute button on his remote control” (David Siller) and “Talking with the cat about world domination the day George W Bush almost choked on a pretzel” (Kevin Higgins).

Will these poems stop the war? No, but then nothing will.

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Dana Blankenhorn points to the most important objection to the Shock and Awe plan: how it will affect the possibility of peace.

Why was poisoning wells unthinkable according to Just Law doctrine? Surely poisoning the drinking supplies of enemy villages might shorten a war. But, it was understood that doing so would make it impossible to return to peace. And that’s the aim of war: to return to a more just peace.

So, while we will hear — and should listen to — arguments about how Shock and Awe will reduce the number of casualties, we also need to think about the effect of launching 800 missiles to make cities unliveable. If our soldiers are not greeted in the streets with cries of joy, then we will have lost the war.

From David Isenberg, in a posting to a mailing list:

Let’s call the U.S. strategy for the attack of Baghdad by its true name — it’s not “Shock and Awe,” it is Terrorism.

I know it is hard for some people, even some people who don’t like the idea of the coming war, to equate what happened in New York with what is likely to happen halfway around the world.

However, when I read about the United States’ “Shock and Awe” strategy I imagine 800 Boeing 757s, each one crashing into a New York building in a ball of fire, a new World Trade Center disaster every four minutes for two days — terrified people jumping from windows to escape certain death by fire, terrified people running from the dust clouds in panic as buildings collapse, grieving loved ones with pictures begging strangers for news, and the sickening smell afterwards. Only it will be 800 times worse, because airplanes are not *designed* to kill people, but the United States will drop weapons designed to kill. In addition to the fire and explosion, thousands of little daisy cutters will rip the flesh of office workers, janitors, restaurant workers, firemen, policemen, rescuers, people on the street.

If the U.S. “Shock and Awe” program is not Terrorism, we have lost the meaning of the word.

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Categories: Uncategorized Tagged with: politics Date: January 31st, 2003 dw

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Plans are leaking about our strategy in the war against Iraq. Called “Shock and Awe,” the aim is to spend two days bombing Iraq so intensively that life becomes unlivable there and thus the demoralized troops just don’t fight. To do this, we will send 800 cruise missiles into Iraq in the first two days, more in one day than were launched in the entire Gulf War. “There will not be a safe place in Baghdad,” a Pentagon official told America’s CBS News after a briefing on the plan. “The sheer size of this has never been seen before, never been contemplated before.”

Links:

smh.com. au
CBS News
CommonDreams

This comes from Tom Atlee via David Isenberg

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Peter Kaminski notes that Bush proposes hydrogen fuel cells, that the Dept. of Energy says that natural gas is the best source of hyrdogen, and that Dick “Dick” Cheney’s old firm, Halliburton, is developing Bangladesh’s natural gasfields. And should I add that there are those who think one of the forces behind our Afghanistan policy is the desire for a pipeline for natural gas?

But you don’t actually need a conspiracy theory to explain W’s new fascination with hydrogen fuel. Since hydrogen won’t be feasible for 15-20 years, supporting hydrogen is a way of postponing ecological responsibility. Let loose the snow mobiles! Roll back the CAFE standards! Open up the wilderness for drilling! Hell, I’m an environmentalist because I support hydrogen fuel!

Which isn’t to say that the conspiracy theory isn’t true also.

(For a commentary on a similar W feint, see here.)

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Steve Yost has set up the text of last night’s State of the Union so that people can comment on every paragraph. He’s using the “Document Review” feature of his excellent Quicktopic site. [Disclosure: I’ve done business with Steve.]

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Time remaining in the Bush administration:

[I’ve removed the applet because it apparently was significantly affecting the loading time for my blog. It’s a countdown timer.]

Pointed to by Gary Stock, taken from here.

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Peter Jung has a new blog that so far is about politics and has a sense of humor. If you love da Dubya, you will not like his site.

BTW, from this site I learned that Joe Lieberman called the commuting of all death sentences in Illinois “shockingly wrong.” He added, “It did terrible damage to the credibility of our system of justice.” Joe Orthodox maybe ought to check the rabbis’ opinion about how rarely the death penalty should be imposed because human judgment is so fallible.

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If “democracy” is government by the demos (people) and “aristocracy” is government by the aristos, then what would you call a government formed by the connections among people? That’s the question I posed, more or less, to the blogiverse’s resident Greek-Latin-Aramaic-French-German-Hebrew scholar, AKMA. He responds bravely to my question:

There’d be a form of metechein, so “metechocracy.”

Zeugnumi or synzeugnumi mean “join,” or “yoke”; what about “zeugnocracy”?

Power to the Zeugnoids!

AKMA has posted a sermon he gave on Thursday about The White Guy’s Burden. (This doesn’t do it justice; you’ll have to read it for yourself.)

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