“Over the last four years I’ve put over 4,000 signs against the war on the freeways of California and the western United States.” …

The Republic of Poetry

by Martin Espada

from ZNet 

To the graduates, their families, the faculty and staff of Hampshire College: Congratulations. I would particularly like to salute the Baldwin Scholars graduating today. James Baldwin delivered the commencement address here at Hampshire twenty-one years ago. That day, he said: “The reality in which we live is a reality we have made, and it’s time, my children, to begin the act of creation all over again.”

In that spirit, I welcome you to the Republic of Poetry. The Republic of Poetry is a state of mind. It is a place where creativity meets community, where the imagination serves humanity. The Republic of Poetry is a republic of justice, because the practice of justice is the highest form of human expression. This goes beyond the tired idea of  “poetic justice,” because all justice is poetic.

In the words of Walter Lowenfels, “everyone is a poet, a creator, somewhere, somehow…It’s in the sense of helping to create a new society that we are poets in whatever we do. And it is our gesture against death. We know we are immortal because we know the society we are helping to build is our singing tomorrow.” …

The Crime of Silence

by Ron Jacobs

from Counterpunch 

Sara Paretsky is known for her crime fiction. One of the first writers in this genre to feature a female protagonist, Paretsky’s tales exist in the netherworld of murder, corruption and general venality that often crosses into that part of the human soul where power, lust and greed combine to produce sheer evil. It is this familiarity with that juncture that makes Paretsky’s recently released collection of essays on our current condition so interesting. The book, titled Writing In An Age of Silence, is a heartfelt expression of the age of fear we live in. It is also much more than that.

Paretsky discusses her childhood and how that part of her life played into the origins of her fictional characters. She writes about her parents’ struggle as immigrants to understand the United States and the meaning of the almost total destruction of her family by the Nazis. She describes a childhood that was not easy but also quite typical of her times and circumstances. In another part of the book, her description of her experience as a foot soldier in the civil rights movement in Chicago when Martin Luther King came to that town to protest housing discrimination leads into a discussion of the realities of US class, and race and the way the two phenomenon are manipulated. “That summer,” she writes, “changed my life forever.” Besides opening her eyes to the aforementioned realities of race and class and the inferno the mix could create when manipulated by those whose interests such manipulation served, Paretsky tells the reader that the summer of 1966 made her aware of the issues of voice and voicelessness–issues that helped her decide what to write and continue to dominate her writing.

I have been working in libraries for twenty years and writing for even longer. Therefore it was with great interest that I read Ms. Paretsky’s final essay in this book. It is a discussion of the publishing business in the world of global capital, the fate of libraries as democratic institutions, the fear to write what one truly believes in the wake of the 9-11 and the so-called PATRIOT Act and the fear to borrow certain books from the library. It is also about the fear to read and discuss such books for fear that someone might be listening who might then report you. I know that when I plan what I will read on an airplane trip, I am always certain to not carry a book whose title might cause some TSA worker to pull me off to the side and question me. It doesn’t even have to be the government that watches us. It can be a fellow citizen who has allowed their fears to overcome their reason..

Over the course of Writing In An Age of Silence, Paretsky addresses religion in the US, American exceptionalism and its influences on how Washington frames its imperial adventures, her experiences as a woman in capitalist America, and even Dashiell Hammett and his inspiration in her writing. This book is light in its weight, but not in its content. It is a concise, compellingly written discussion of everything mentioned here which, despite the darkness of the authoritarian night within which this discussion resides, there is a ray of light. That light is Paretsky’s writing. It is learned without being aloof, and accessible yet not condescending. One hopes that those who like Paretsky’s crime fiction (and that is a good number of today’s readers) will take the time to read Writing In An Age of Silence, and then do something about what they have read. Yet this book should not only be confined to those familiar with Paretsky’s fiction It is for anyone concerned about living in the times Ms. Paretsky so aptly describes as an age of silence.

Ron Jacobs is author of The Way the Wind Blew: a history of the Weather Underground, which is just republished by Verso. Jacobs’ essay on Big Bill Broonzy is featured in CounterPunch’s collection on music, art and sex, Serpents in the Garden. His first novel, Short Order Frame Up, is forthcoming from Mainstay Press. He can be reached at: rjacobs3625@charter.net

It’s interesting to think of Ayn Rand in the socio-political context: her work is reactionary to the progressive movements of the 1920s and 1930s, much like the immense rise of right wing think tanks was and is a reaction to the liberatory movements of the civil rights movement and the progressive movements of the “1960s” that have continued and grown. Rand was largely pre-identity politics, so her focus is more strictly economic.

Some of her early works were written in the ‘30s, and The Fountainhead, the first of her two main novels, was planned and partly written in the mid and late ‘30s, and published in the early ‘40s. Its working title was Second-Hand Lives. About 1944, ‘45, she started journaling about Atlas Shrugged (according to her associate Leonard Peikoff). It carried the title, The Strike, apparently until 1956, before its 1957 publication.

Much of her style is a sort of mix or modeling of Hemingway (and thus some Stein) mixed with Victor Hugo – much exposition of ideas and substantial amounts of what is called romanticism, or idealism, and thus something of a precursor to Heinlein. A good bit of the theme is Huckleberry Finnish – in Rand’s case, a sort of dogged and noble youth spirit manifest in a few select idealized adults ranged against an implacably corrupt society. Her novels are often very appealing to youth, for much the same reason Huck Finn appeals to youth. Huck takes his stand, as do Rand’s figures, refusing to be guilt-tripped or incriminated in various “adult” abominations.

The difference: the conniving, morally questionable Huck took his admirable stand against slavery, for his runaway friend. Rand’s irreproachable characters take their principled stands against adult corruptions of various sorts too, but also ultimately on behalf of the anti-democratic rule of wealth – entirely reminiscent of the first Supreme Court Chief Justice, John Jay: “Those who own the country, ought to govern it.”

So Rand’s false either-or choice is this: choose life or death; righteousness or immorality: an ideal benevolent dictatorship of wealth or an inevitably fatally corrupt democracy. She attacks an indefensibly corrupt elite on behalf of a nonexistent elite whose closest manifestation in reality is another version of an indefensibly corrupt elite. Totalitarian ostensibly benevolent corporate elite rule versus totalitarian malign governmental elite rule. The choice is as false as could be, of course, but Rand presents the former as freedom and goodness, and the latter as slavery and rot by way of psychological comparisons that often resonate strongly with youth sick of being governed by often highly imperfect, and in fact highly unprincipled, school and family and religious structures, and who also may see big corporate money as a key to freedom.

Rand is symptomatic and emblematic of the current diseased socio-political structure.

Her prose has its scratch your head moments, often, but even some of the worst of these moments are remarkably similar to the opening two pages of Jonathan Franzen’s lauded opening, and novel, The Corrections. The sentences do not to a large extent hold up upon close inspection but have a sort of aura of power about them, due to a certain technique, and the cumulative power of the prose, if not much of the rest of the work(s), is often mistakenly, I think, underestimated.

(My comments here about Franzen’s prose refer to the opening couple of pages only, of The Corrections. They are sort of an impressive, I suppose, disaster—and are in their own way peculiarly much inferior to most of the rest of the prose in the novel (if not much of the story) which is often quite well done.)

See Joe Emersberger’s thorough analysis of Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged: Ayn Rand’s Deranged Elitism For Everyone.

Cross-posted from a discussion at the Valve:

If the world goes against the truth, then I will go against the world – the decision expressed in Huck’s great Damn it then I’ll go to hell moment. Huck, at least in the moment, takes a “stand,” the root word of “resist,” a great moment of “resistance.” When I first read it as a young person, I saw and felt of course what he was referring to literally but I also referred it to my own life and my own decisions I had made, and had seen made, and had failed to make, and decided and reaffirmed to make then in the moment, and how I wished to proceed generally in the future. The text moment facilitated my own thinking, meditation really, in the vein of Huck’s thinking, about my own testing situations I was facing, had faced, and might face. I couldn’t mentally join Huck shoulder to shoulder about chattel slavery in the US thanks to abolition but I could feel in solidarity with his spirit and stand, his spirited stand, about, say, the wage slavery of today and many other such injustices I was aware of. Moments of reading and thought like that can put steel in your blood and spring in your step. A real experience. Real effect. Reading books (and experiences of all sorts) change some people’s lives, in various ways, at least in that they can have this real affirming or strengthening or committing or otherwise galvanizing effect. Can many people who have devoted their professional lives to literature really not come up with a variety of examples of this well-documented fact or phenomena off the top of their heads? I’ve taught Huck at the college level as part of Intro to American lit, but it never occurred to me to teach it solely or even primarily in reference to race (even though we also read critical articles of it that critiqued race and other aspects, aesthetic aspects and so on, at my choosing). You can take Jim and nearly all the moments of race out of the novel and still have the story of Huckleberry Finn that primarily accounts for the form of the work – which is in my view, the drama of a perspective of “youth” engaging a corrupt and villainous adult world, society. That’s the key to the form of the novel: the struggle of youth (in society). Take that away, restore Jim and moments of racial intersection, and you’re left with little more than one of the great aesthetic flaws of the novel—the crude novella that is the last third of the novel, plus some preceding stretches. (The last third of the novel actually works better on its own, if it were a separate novella/story, than it does as an aesthetic and thematic part of the novel.) When Hemingway famously (over)said, “all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn,” he wasn’t referring to race, of course. Lionel Trilling claims that much of what he was referring to is that the novel “reinforces the colloquial tradition with the literary tradition. Indeed, it may be said that almost every contemporary American writer who deals conscientiously with the problems and possibilities of prose must feel, directly or indirectly, the influence of Mark Twain. He is the master of the style that escapes the fixity of the printed page, that sounds in our ears with the immediacy of the heard voice, the very voice of unpretentious truth.”

I think one could go farther and add: the voice of youth. (Which may be a clarification of what is perhaps unconsciously implied.) The voice of youth struggling to survive and live in face of a very often corrupt society. Huck Finn is not primarily a bildungsroman, nor comedy, nor satire, nor caricature, nor tragedy, nor romance, nor polemic, nor melodrama, nor lit, nor pop, nor nature writing, nor essay, nor colloquial catalogue – though it is all of these things and more at various times. It’s primarily the voice of the struggle of “youth” (in society) (as lit/pop feast, at its best).

This fundamental form of Huck Finn—young Huck like a pinball through adult pins and paddles while desperately avoiding terminal holes—is so often used today, we many not see the significance it may have marked in American literature: the ascendancy of a worldly youth perspective. We can scarcely get away from some version of it today, but I would guess (I’m MFA degreed, no Victorian scholar) that the novel HF was the first great American instantiation of this form-creating-perspective or perspective-creating-form. Dickens in England before Twain. The Anglo-American child hero. (I think it’s Sylvia Hewitt’s studies that have shown that continental Europe has much better general child care provisions and child well being outcomes than does Anglo-America. Maybe there’s a real link between lit and life there, maybe longstanding, maybe mutually feeding. Been studied?) Race is one element in this form in Huck Finn, arguably a primary element, but still only one element of many. Jim’s situation as “runaway slave” seems to me to function more as a device to drive the plot so that Twain could ever further explore the great theme of the book: youth perspective on society. That theme exploded post WWII (socio-political reasons pop to mind), perhaps post Catcher in the Rye so that today maybe we almost don’t see it as a perhaps “peculiar” formal device. If I think of a Henry James novel in relation to Huckleberry Finn, I think of What Maisie Knew.

I’m curious about who is, and who can, assert that HF be taught mainly in reference to race. Of course it can be examined well and good for any number of reasons, race critique not least, even as the novel is built and directed more in other ways.

Reading (and writing) is an experience that can help people think about all sorts of things – including the moral, the psychological, the political, even simply the factual, you name it. It can help us make up our minds about so much. The evidence for this is overwhelming. And when we really make up our minds about certain things, really set our minds to something, the effects can be, sort of, limitless. Hiroshimic. Or otherwise. Literature/art has played extraordinarily oppressive and libratory roles. It’s important to have some idea how. And which. And why, what, when, where, and to what degree. Some of this has been studied and determined. And more such important studies, including experiments, are badly needed.

For example, does “advocacy pedagogy” work? Done effectively, of course. That’s what teach-ins are. That aside, simply on the basis of regular literature classes, parents complain all the time, for example, that after their children read The Jungle in school they become vegans, or vegetarians. We need to know, what books prompt how many people to become, say, pacifists, or anti-militancy activists – etc.

Doing so may cause us to seriously revise our notions of what fully civilized literature is, and what it isn’t—(erudite and sophisticated, as sufficient criteria? – or more fully vital and humane, in its time, or in any time? libratory and expanding of other valued normative qualities, and understandings, as criteria?)

And when employing one of the most classic teaching methods – of comparing one set of facts/ideas/books to another opposing set of facts/ideas/books – while trying not to at all let on your own views as teacher—then it is useful, necessary, to have literature of all sorts, including novels, from all poles, that so thoroughly explore, say, opposition to a war of aggression that they will be known as much for their antiwar stand as for any, even high, literary quality. Put that up against some hotshot soldier’s memoir or novel that is generally ultimately not fundamentally critical of the basis of a war of aggression – a status quo war book. Or even something like Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday, with its limited Iraq War exploration. Similarly, teach different combinations of books: all antiwar books in some classes and all much less antiwar books in another, or all status quo supportive books (consciously or implicitly). And use mixed percentages of these types of books in other classes. And different teaching “philosophies”. After the courses, as scientifically as possible, sample students’ views, knowledge and attitudes – later on track them and record what they go on to do. (Of course, control for or account for the nature of the students initially, to the extent possible.) Also sample parents’ subsequent complaint level! Or compliment level. The results may be surprising, or they may not. They may be highly determinate or totally indeterminate. One problem is, such worthy experiments cannot even be carried out in literary realms (not even anecdotally, piecemeal) if there is no diversity of literary books – no or few literary (or popular) antiwar novels, for example.I think we might be forced to revise some of our notions of what great literature really is, and be led to create anew. I think we can run through some of these thought processes simply in our heads of course, that’s what thinking and discussing are all about. In fact, given the interest and lacking some such experiments, we have to, based on what is already known.But then these concerns may apply only if you agree with Calverton that “granted the craftsmanship, our aim should be to make art serve man as a thing of action and not man serve art as a thing of escape.”

___________________

See also:

by  Tony Christini

The thing about living in democracy is that it forces you to choose – more so now that voting has been made compulsory.The new law has not gone unchallenged and in fact has breathed fresh life into the National Resistance Movement, a decades old network determined to further “freedom, dignity, and justice for all.” A noble aim, who could be against it? The Corporate State has labeled the NRM, terrorist.

Blocked from promoting its own candidates for office, the NRM has pursued a “sabotage and educate” electoral strategy. The main tactic this past electoral cycle was to break into the computerized voting system to create a random array of “truth booths” at polling places across the country.

Nowadays, of course, equipped with invisible flesh-searing lasers voting booths trap voters inside until they perform all required electoral duties, such as drawing their own blood for the DNA scan that seals the electronic ballot.

Given the self-censorship of the corporate media in avoiding useful and compelling news for regular people, I was thankful, this past electoral cycle, to find I had lucked in to a truth booth, where I viewed the troubling NRM-supplied social facts and analyses flashing across the voting screen. It was like learning in advance the details of a horrific train wreck, and finding that though the disaster could be avoided if people were determined to act to change things, relatively little toward that end would be accomplished by selecting from the possible candidates, who all were determined (some consciously, some not) to continue to drive the train directly into wreck after wreck-either by ignorance or stupendous rationale. Virtually without exception, if a candidate were not corporate-backed, he or she could not financially compete on the campaign trail, so all the candidates were supported and sponsored directly and indirectly by corporate money. Floods of it. And though corporate-backed-candidate A might crash the train at a somewhat higher speed than corporate-backed-candidate B, and a number of lives might be spared one way or the other (which way was sometimes difficult to figure out), the major candidates were all intent, wittingly or not, on engineering the larger catastrophe. It seemed there was always a profit to be made, even in disaster, perhaps especially in disaster. Millions of children with no health insurance living in inadequate housing with impoverished educations, suffering from fatal pollution…this was the sort of system a person must vote for time and time again.

The government immediately counterattacked the truth booth guerrilla action, and though the state was able to block most truth-booth downloads by the end of the voting day, apparently about five percent of all voters encountered a bit of truth at the polls this year. Subsequently, both the Corporate State and the NRM declared victory-the NRM for getting its message through to a significant number of citizens; the Corporate State for not having suffered a single defeat in any major race.

Of course to complete the voting process, I drew and scanned my blood to seal the ballot. Then there was no getting around the final act of citizenship required of all voters in order to be released from the voting booth. I put one foot in the reinforced metal box on the floor, leaned over and grabbed the handle of the pistol that is fixed into position pointing down into the box, then pulled the trigger. After I shot myself in the foot, the steel doors swung open, and I reclaimed my crutches, ready, thus, to confront the world.

At least the choice of foot we get to shoot is our own. I guess that’s democracy. It just seems that there ought to be more to it than that.

—————–

Footnotes:

In fact there is less to it than that, for even among the corporate backed candidates not all are created equal, as journalist Greg Palast has studied in extensive detail (see gregpalast.com): “An embarrassing little fact of American democracy is that, typically, two million votes are spoiled in national elections, registering no vote or invalidated. Based on studies by the U.S. Civil Rights Commission and the Harvard Law School Civil Rights project, about 54 percent of those ballots are cast by African Americans. One million black votes vanished-phffft!” [African Americans vote about 9 to 1 Democratic.] -Greg Palast, “An Election Spoiled Rotten”

In “Winning the Election-The Republican Way: Racism, Theft, and Fraud in Florida,” Palast shows convincingly that Democrat Al Gore won both the popular and electoral vote in the 2000 Presidential contest. A mere part of the problem was that: “Five months before the [2000] election, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris ordered the removal of 57,700 names from Florida’s voter rolls on grounds that they were felons. Voter rolls contain the names of all eligible, registered voters. If you’re not on the list, you don’t get to vote. If you commit a felony in Florida, you lose your right to vote there, and you’re “scrubbed” from the rolls. You become a non-citizen, like in the old Soviet Union. This is not the case in most other states; it’s an uncivilized vestige of the Deep South. My office carefully went through the scrub list and discovered that at minimum, 90.2 percent of the people were completely innocent of any crime – except for being African American. We didn’t have to guess about that, because next to each voter’s name was their race….”

Most recently, Palast argues that Democrat John Kerry won the 2004 presidential election: “Kerry won. Here’s the facts. I know you don’t want to hear it. You can’t face one more hung chad. But I don’t have a choice. As a journalist examining that messy sausage called American democracy, it’s my job to tell you who got the most votes in the deciding states. Tuesday, in Ohio and New Mexico, it was John Kerry. Most voters in Ohio thought they were voting for Kerry. CNN’s exit poll showed Kerry beating Bush among Ohio women by 53 percent to 47 percent. Kerry also defeated Bush among Ohio’s male voters 51 percent to 49 percent. Unless a third gender voted in Ohio, Kerry took the state. So what’s going on here? Answer: the exit polls are accurate. Pollsters ask, “Who did you vote for?” Unfortunately, they don’t ask the crucial, question, “Was your vote counted?” The voters don’t know. Here’s why. Although the exit polls show that most voters in Ohio punched cards for Kerry-Edwards, thousands of these votes were simply not recorded. This was predictable and it was predicted. [See TomPaine.com, “An Election Spoiled Rotten,” November 1.] Once again, at the heart of the Ohio uncounted vote game are, I’m sorry to report, hanging chads and pregnant chads, plus some other ballot tricks old and new.” -Greg Palast, “Kerry Won”  

1st: Found al-Qaeda.

2nd: Bomb America.

3nd: Use the US invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan to recruit new members.

4th: Trust the US invaders to guard the oil ministry but not the ammunition dumps during the invasion of Iraq.

5th: Loot the ammo dumps at will.

 6th: Trust the US invaders to destroy the security and civilian infrastructure of Iraq and Afghanistan.

7rd: Attack US forces “over there.”

8th: In the meantime, train the many new recruits to attack the US “over here.”

9th: Silently applaud the DemReps as their occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan provides a steady stream of new recruits to “the cause.”

10th: Marvel at the recruiters paradise provided by the DemReps.

In the meantime, people all across America ask, Who is the US Administration and Congress actually working for – bin Laden or us? That laughter – it’s bin Laden and al-Qaeda.

The US leaders are not working for bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Just doing much of their work by destroying Iraq and Afghanistan and thus providing fertile grounds for recruitment – as even some parts of the CIA agree.

Meanwhile the public relations industry in the US sells precisely the opposite notion to the people of the US. Or tries to – as can be seen in The PR Plan to Abolish America.

In his great novel of the people, Les Misérables, Victor Hugo wrote of convents:

“Their prosperity and corpulence are the impoverishment of the country.”

And world. Hugo added that the “persistence” of these “institutions in striving to perpetuate themselves is like…the tenderness of corpses which return to embrace the living.”

He may as well have been speaking of the US Administration and Congress during the invasion and occupation of Iraq: 

“To dream of the indefinite prolongation of defunct things, and of the government of men by embalming, to restore dogmas in a bad condition…to refurnish superstitions, to revictual fanaticisms, to put new handles on holy water brushes and militarism, to reconstitute monasticism and militarism, to believe in the salvation of society by the multiplication of parasites, to force the past on the present – this seems strange. Still, there are theorists who hold such theories. These theorists, who are in other respects people of intelligence, have a very simple process; they apply to the past a glazing which they call social order, divine right, morality, family, the respect of elders, antique authority, sacred tradition, legitimacy, religion; and they go about shouting, ‘Look! take this, honest people.’ This logic was known to the ancients. The soothsayers practice it. They rubbed a black heifer over with chalk, and said, ‘She is white, Bos Cretatus’.” [Chalked white cow.] 

In this vein today, we have the US Senate voting on how to treat the US occupation of Iraq, a plan that is at best a Chalked White Cow, but in actuality, much worse. Most hideous. Most lethal. And as much a plan to abolish America and the world, as anything.

In fact the US Senate itself is a chalked white cow: giving equal weight to the votes of a few hundred thousand people in Wyoming as it gives to tens of millions of people in California. Thus, in its very structure, and in many other ways, the US Senate is an anti-democracy institution. While claiming the exact opposite. The US Senate is a club of mainly rich white men who are primarily the hand puppets of wealth, and wealth themselves.

Thus, in the spirit of its very structure, the Senate has devised a simple plan to abolish America:

1st: Lie through gold-plated teeth that US policy in Iraq is derived by the needs of “the troops,” which, if true, means that the Senate has abdicated its power to foot soldiers. Thus the US has technically overthrown itself – an auto coup d’état – totally phony, in fact criminal.

2nd: Abdicate whatever power has not been abdicated to the mythical notion of “the troops” to the new War Czar. He will rule with a Czar-like fist.

3rd: Continue to insulate the American Green Zone, that is the US Senate, et al, from the rest of the country.

4th: Continue to seek cover in platitudes to Patriotism and Religion, Family and Nationalism that have long since become the first and last refuge of the scoundrels.

5th: Just lie. Chalk white that cow – the US Senate.

    

  

The national “newspaper of record,” The New York Times – trailing in circulation only USA Today and The Wall Street Journal among US dailies – has today announced a change for the first time in 110 years to its official slogan, which will no longer be “All The News That’s Fit To Print” but instead the more fitting “All The News That’s Unfit To Print.”

Of course they don’t mean it, except in how they do.

The Times has at last recognized what media watch groups and others have been pointing out for years:

“…by selection of topics, by distribution of concerns, by emphasis and framing of issues, by filtering of information, by bounding of debate within certain limits. They determine, they select, they shape, they control, they restrict — in order to serve the interests of dominant, elite groups in the society.”

In other words, the Times lies. They falsify. They spin.

But now, either in long overdue recognition of its own sordid reality, or to protect themselves from being tried for constant contributions to countless Crimes Against Humanity, the Times has decided to change their venerable slogan by the addition of a single pronoun.

By this brilliant stratagem, to the best we are able to determine, the Times hopes to be able to claim that any deceitful accounts it may be brought to trial for can be recontextualized in the eyes of a criminal tribunal as being ironic. Or nuanced. The Times hopes to argue that not only are they the national paper of record but that they are also the national paper of irony, and satiric artifice – and thus truthful by way of literal inversion, and other ironic forms of play.

Iraq wasn’t really armed to the teeth with weapons of mass destruction, and Iraq wasn’t really any great threat to the US, contrary to what the paper reported in relentless detail, thus helping lead the US into its criminal invasion and occupation of Iraq. The Times was only joking – or so it hopes to be able to argue should the legal need arise. The Times was only poking fun at the ludicrous claims coming from the US administration and Congress and every major corporate media outlet. The Times was being satiric, or simply ironic at least – printing all the news that’s unfit to print – which the Times is now helpfully clarifying by changing its slogan for the first time in over a century.  

Some observers have suggested that the Times would do better to keep the old slogan and, instead, change the bulk of its news reporting. The Times dismissed this notion out of hand as “Unthinkable. We are in no way set up for that.”

Which is in fact accurate. As with other corporate media, the majority of the New York Times funding comes not from subscribers or viewers but from corporate advertisers, who would flee in an instant if the Times changed anything but their slogan.

Thus, all in all, the Times’ decision to change its slogan to “All The News That’s Unfit To Print” is irreproachable. The Times’ decision is being hailed in numerous circles of wealth and power as “the latest indicator of what a highly advanced society we are.”

Now if those stubborn Iraqis would just stop setting off those depressingly literal car bombs – they might come to think and act in a far more civilized and nuanced manner, like us. 

———————————————-

Also see the New York Times’ role in proclaiming antiwar novels to be “belligerent”: Antiwar novels are “belligerent”?

Below in its entirety is the letter to the editor I wrote to the New York Times in response to reviewer Eder’s comment. I waited to post it here because they state they don’t allow its prior publication elsewhere. Their stated 7 day contact period has expired so surely they’ve decided not to use it. If one sees a certain vitality missing in contemporary literature, it’s not unlikely that it’s in part related to the fact that such a sweeping and crucial statement as, antiwar novels are belligerent, can not only be categorically asserted with no sense of a need for support, but also cannot be challenged by a letter to the editor as a matter of course, especially in the time of a highly controversial war.

—

Antiwar novels are “belligerent”?

Richard Eder writes, “‘The Welsh Girl’ is a distinguished, beautifully written example of a small but enduring genre. Call it the counterwar novel. Not antiwar, exactly; it lacks the belligerence.” Antiwar like, say, “Homefront”? I wonder what a pro-war novel, or a status quo war novel, could then be called? “Compassionate,” I suppose.

There is scarcely an explicit antiwar novel about the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. Why is that? Might it be that the US has a culture a lot like that of Germany of the 1930s and 1940s? Too many “good Germans” and “good Americans”? Too many critics and others who think antiwar novels are “belligerent”?

As Tony Kushner notes (in “Theater”): “I do not believe that a steadfast refusal to be partisan is, finally, a particularly brave or a moral or even interesting choice. Les Murray, an Australian poet, wrote a short poem called ‘Politics and Art.’ In its entirety: ‘Brutal policy / like inferior art, knows / whose fault it all is.’ This is as invaluable an admonishment as it is ultimately untrue.”

Thundora Dimslow Speaks

Rather than speak of me, my dear beloved son asked if I would be interested in speaking for myself, this fine, so-called, Mother’s Day. Now, why a mother has got to have a day all to herself is beyond me. Hell, to me, everyday is mother’s day, just like before I became a mother, everyday to me was simply woman’s day.

And hell, before I was a woman, every day was child’s day, and double hell, everyday before I knew what in the hell I was, I’m sure, I thought of as simply a damn day of days, a great day to be alive, an all days day of what the hellever. You see, this whole day of days business has always seemed a bit suspicious, a bit phony to me.

Not only have these supposed celebrations largely become sick capitalist days–and most are state sanctioned–they are just flat annoying, and well, a bit dull. I mean, if you’ve got to have some sort of indicator on a stick to tell you when to celebrate a certain whatnot or whatever, a certain special someone, then, boy o’man and girl o’woman, that may be showing that you ain’t got too much heart and mind in the supposed special someone or whatnot in the first place. So one token feelgood day is supposed to make up for all that lacks?

I would take one good law providing affordable daycare over a thousand mother’s days, any day…and that’s just for starters.

What suspiciously routine and infrequent days of exceptions these are: birthdays, this person’s days, that person’s days, death days, and so on. I mean are we only supposed to appreciate workers, laborers, father, mothers (and not children, ever notice?), this occupation, that race, this the one and that the other, only once per year? How cheap is that? And what brilliant PR–just the sort of thing that serves to prop up much of the unequal mess in the first place.

Well goodbye to all that, my friends. This momma, this worker, this woman, this human, this creature for one has come up in the world to appreciate and embrace every day as her day, and not hers alone. I will be tokenized no more.

 Another Mother for Peace and The Anti-War Origins of Mother’s Day: “Each year the president issues a Mother’s Day Proclamation. The original Mother’s Day Proclamation was made in 1870. Written by Julia Ward Howe, perhaps best known today for having written the words to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” in 1862 when she was an antislavery activist, the original Proclamation was an impassioned call for peace and disarmament. In the years following the Civil War her political activism increased, as did her condemnation of war.”

If mother and father get an official day, why not children? See Children’s Day, June 1st. A children’s story: Dissent.

Maybe we should just run through the America and world conquering slogans on this one:

CNN:

from “The Most Trusted Name in News” to “The Most Busted Name in News”

from “The CNN effect” to “The CNN defect”

from “The Situation Room” to “The Capitulation Room” (capitulation to big money, that is)

from “This is CNN” to “We’ve got ADD”

Updated CNN Slogans and Program Titles:

“We Outfox Fox!”

“Half the Size of the BBC But an Empire Just the Same”

“If Our Advertisers Can’t Live with It, Neither Can We”

“Wolf Blitzer! Even the Name is Absurd”

“Anderson Cooper – I Owe My Job to My Oft Endeering Dear in the Headlights Views of News”

“Nobody Stomps Immigrants Like Lou Dobbs Tonight” (Maybe Not Even the Fox News corporation’s “O’Thuggery Factor”)

“‘Lou Dobbs Tonight’ – That Foul-Mouthed Imus Has Nothing on Me”

“‘This Week at War’ – What We Are Programmed For”

“‘American Morning’ – Corporate Dawn”

“‘Paula Zahn Now’ – Eviscerating Vacuity”

“‘The Capitol Gang’ – We Satirize Ourselves”

“‘Crossfire’ – Caught in Our Own”

“CNN – Corporate America at Its Brightest Best”

“CNN – The Triumph of PR”

“CNN – Crucifying the News 24/7”

“CNN – Willful Ignorance Incorporated”

“CNN – Willful Distortion and Deceit Incorporated”

“CNN – Carefully Neutered News”

“CNN – Craven News Network”

“CNN – Crap Nicely Nuanced”

“CNN – Crucified News Network”

“This Is CNN”

1st: Agree with the New York Times that antiwar novels are categorically “belligerent”:

“‘The Welsh Girl’ is a distinguished, beautifully written example of a small but enduring genre. Call it the counterwar novel. Not antiwar, exactly; it lacks the belligerence.”

2nd: Understand that pro-war and status quo war novels are, apparently, compassionate.

3rd: Write zero detailed and overt anti Iraq War novels.

4th: Or if any are written, publish none.

5th: Or if any are published, bury them with utter and absolute silence.

6th: Repeat steps one through five, for years and decades.

7th: Ignore the views of playwright Tony Kushner, writing in Theater:

“I do not believe that a steadfast refusal to be partisan is, finally, a particularly brave or a moral or even interesting choice. Les Murray, an Australian poet, wrote a short poem called ‘Politics and Art.’ In its entirety: ‘Brutal policy / like inferior art, knows / whose fault it all is.’ This is as invaluable an admonishment as it is ultimately untrue.”

8th: Ignore the views of V. F. Calverton writing in The Liberation of American Literature:

“Most of the literature of the world has been propagandistic in one way or another…. In a word, the revolutionary critic does not believe that we can have art without craftsmanship; what he does believe is that, granted the craftsmanship, our aim should be to make art serve man as a thing of action and not man serve art as a thing of escape.

“That the attempt to be above the battle is evidence of a defense mechanism can scarcely be doubted. Only those who belong to the ruling class, in other words, only those who had already won the battle and acquired the spoils, could afford to be above the battle. Fiction which was propagandistic, that is, fiction which continued to participate in the battle, it naturally cultivated a distaste for, and eschewed. Fiction which was above the battle, that is fiction which concerned only the so-called absolutes and eternals, with the ultimate emotions and the perennial tragedies, but which offered no solutions, no panaceas — it was such fiction that won its adoration.”

9th: Ignore Barbara Harlow writing in Resistance Literature:

“Resistance narratives…contribute to a larger narrative, that of the passage from genealogical or hereditary ties of filiation to the collective bonds of affiliation…. The connection between knowledge and power, the awareness of the exploitation of knowledge by the interests of power to create a distorted historical record, is central to resistance narratives.”

10th: Do not read Homefront.

And so, the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and much other abomination, is now safe from literature, just as literature has been saved from it.

Thanks to this novel plan of abolition, The Great American Anti Iraq War Novel must officially be declared dead. What else should we expect? There’s a war on.

Rest in peace, antiwar novels, and novelists, R. I. P.

It’s good to be a fictitious character. Who better to run for President of the United States in these unreal times? There’s a big difference between being fictitious and being phony.  

Being fictitious means using imagination to reach toward truth. Being phony means pretending to be one thing while actually being another.

Being fictitious means using the imagination to come alive. Being phony means being fake and a lie.

Being fictitious means creating Dimslows to shine light quick and bright. Being phony means posing as enlightened but turning the day into night.

Being fictitious means the Dimslows’ good day has come. Being phony means the good day will be shunned.

Thug nations reign and the earth slouches toward implosion.

The Dimslows fight back against the horrible erosion.

Thug nations reign and the masters bomb.

The Dimslows fight back with fiction and aplomb.

Thug nations reign and the powerless are destroyed.

The Dimslows fight back, their skills full employed.

Thug nations reign and people are denied, misled.

The Dimslows fight back until injustice is dead.

Thug nations arraigned, the Dimslows insist.

Vote Dimslow – 2008.

The candidates for death – they won’t be missed.

——————————–

Had Enough?

Vote Dimslow.

Dimslow — ’08

Not so long ago, President George Bush the Second did Senate and House leaders Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi the biggest favor of their Congressional lives by vetoing the Democrat Iraq War funding proposal – Continue reading The Pelosi-Reid Plan to Abolish Iraq

[satire]

Fox News is known by a lot of great slogans it includes in daily TV broadcasts, as well as by the meaning of those slogans made bare:

from “America’s Newsroom” to “America’s Spewroom”

from “The Most Powerful Name in News” to “The Most Pungent Name in Lying”

from “Fox Means Business” to “Fox Means Big Business “

from “Fair and Balanced” to “UnFair and UnBalanced”

from “Fox is Where the News Is” to “Fox is Where The Lies Are”

from “We Report, You Decide” to “We Distort, You Jeer”

and most recently

from “We Put the World in Context” to “We Put the Odious in the News”

Despite recent losses in viewers, Fox News, the BBC reports, has seen its profits double during the Iraq War, of which Fox is the main official co-sponsor – while CNN, the three traditional networks, and right wing talk radio, among others, do their cheerleading best to compete for that distinguished honor.

War profits have reportedly encouraged Fox creator, funder, and media king Rupert Murdoch and Fox CEO, Chairman, and President Roger Ailes to consider advocating (if not outright orchestrating) subsequent wars, such as a possible WMD obliteration of Iran, perhaps coupled with a new African holocaust, to go along with the current holocaust imposed by Fox-friendly pharmaceutical companies who refuse to give up patent “rights” that prevent the continent from affording to fully treat for AIDS and other diseases.

In addition, Fox News is reportedly investigating whether or not tiny countries and regions like China, India, Venezuela and most of the rest of Latin America (with the exception of the Cuban expatriate section of south Florida) would be susceptible to a cleansing Biblical plague of locusts that might be hatched in Rupert Murdoch’s deep pockets. Popular British geopolitical novelist John le Carré thought he might write a novel based on such inside information but finally gave up the effort as being “too hopelessly factual and depressingly non-novelistic.” Word has it though that pop CEO novelist Michael Crichton is determined to pen “a big story” about “an evil United Nations cabal” that tries to force Murdoch, Ailes, and Fox News to pay taxes directly to the UN, the global organization that represents the countries Crichton believes Murdoch, Ailes, and Fox News have every right to own and obliterate however they and their financial advisors see fit.

Meanwhile, the media analysts at Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) ask – “How are Murdoch, Ailes, and Fox News different from Jean Valjean, the ‘wretched’ character in Victor Hugo’s great novel of the people, Les Misérables? Answer: In every possible way. Jean Valjean was forced to flee by the establishment into the sewers to survive and got out as quick as he could; whereas, Fox News is the sewer – competing successfully with a number of other sewers for sufficient toxic sludge to spew each day – those sewers of course being the corporate media — CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS (not to mention right wing radio and the rest) — who prove day in and day out what studies reveal and what the title of journalist Danny Schechter’s media book make clear, ‘The More You Watch the Less You Know’.”

Fox News – The Great Corporate Nightmare.

(With much close competition.)

“Fox News: We Do Goebbels Proud”

“Who Says Lying Doesn’t Pay?”

“Leading Mouthpiece of the Establishment”

“Those Nazis Got Nothin’ On Us”

“Those Who Own the News Control the News”

“The Official Version of Reality”

“Fox News: The First Refuge of the Scoundrels”

“All the Crap You Need Each and Every Day”

“Fox News: Your Source for Sewage”

“Raising Stench to an Art Form”

“Fox News: We Announce – The Supreme Court Obeys”

“Fox News: We Announce – Congress Sings Along”

“Fox News: We Announce – The President Confirms”

“Fox News: We Lead – CNN Follows”

“Fox News: In Praise of The Status Quo”

“Fox News: Rich Views”

“Fox News: The Bright Shiny Face of Big Money”

“Fox News: Establishment Culture, Official Culture”

“Fox News: Brought to You By Corporate America”

“Fox News: We Make a Killing for a Living” 

“Fox News: The Pride of Corporate America”

“Fox News: Ghenghis Views”

“Fox News: Corporate to the Hilt”

“Fox News: Democracy Who?”

“Fox News: Eat the Poor, Feed the Rich”

“Fox News: Pro-War and Proud”

“Fox News: To Hell With The World – America Too”

—————————

The Upside of Climate Change  |  Warhawk Guns For Hire Killing Private Aaron  |  A Practical Policy  |  Torture Hawks  Oila: the 51st State  |  The Bush Plan to Abolish America

The General Petraeus Plan to Abolish America and Iraq

Homefront

[satire] 

General David Petraeus, current commander of the US occupation of Iraq, reported today, in what he terms a “nuanced” account, that exactly one half of Iraq is “shot to hell” but that the other half is “just fine and dandy” — give or take a few disagreeable conditions which Iraqis will just have to get used to, like massive truck bombs, car bombs, Air Force assaults, general firefights, and other slaughter.

Continue reading The Petraeus Plan to Abolish America

Poor old John Doe Dimslow once wrote a poem about May Day – you know, the worker’s day, the worker’s struggle, one of those many special days, everyday, that should be known as a true blue democracy day – one of those days of course that our glorious noble leaders scorn. May Day (history):

In the 1860’s, they campaigned for shorter working hours in many countries. On May 1st, 1886, workers in Canada and the United States, held peaceful strikes and rallies to demand an eight hour work day. Two days later, Chicago police killed several demonstrators at a clash between workers and scabs in that city. A rally was held in Haymarket Square to protest the killings, and when police tried to forcibly disperse the crowd a bomb was thrown. Seven police were killed; dozens in the crowd were injured. Eight leaders of the Chicago workers’ movement were charged with the police deaths although none had thrown the bomb. They were all convicted. Four were executed, one died in custody, and three were given life in prison, but were eventually pardoned. In memory of this struggle, and the struggle of all workers for better conditions, May 1st was declared an eight-hour holiday in 1889, by the International Workers’ Congress in Paris. In many countries, May 1st is a workers’ holiday celebrated every year.

Maybe they should rename the day, Dimslow Day, in recognition of all us John and Jane Doe Dimslows out their laboring to uphold our lives and our country, which really isn’t ours, since it really isn’t a democracy in many ways.

So, anyway, I once wrote a poem about May Day, only it was about a different sort of May Day – as in Mayday, Mayday, Mayday, America, Earth, we have a problem here.

And so I’ll say it again: Mayday to Earth, Mayday to America, come in, America! Mayday, America! Come in, America! Mayday! Mayday, America. May Day. Should be every day.

Our overview of the John Doe Dimslow ’08 presidential platform brings us to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights article 5:

“No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”

Continue reading Torture Hawks

Well, old John Doe Dimslow may have to modify his 2008 campaign platform a bit. You see, I had always heard good things about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights but had never actually read it. Now as the campaign begins to swing into operation I see that the first Article may present something of a problem:

“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”

 

Whoa, Nelly! Hold the juice! You see, I have to compete with the Dems and the Reps who in their grand wisdom have long since understood that “free and equal in dignity and rights” is just a foolish pipedream. I mean, doesn’t everyone understand that the poor will always be with us? and the uninsured? and the unemployed? — many, many of them — who else will harvest our food? — in fact more every day, and so of course we are going to have to ditch this first Article as being utterly unreasonable. I mean, without the poor, who will do the dangerous, unhealthy jobs at miserable wages that sustain a republic and world as grand as ours?

 

And as far as everyone being “endowed with reason and conscience” – well, the Dems and Reps are living proof of the foolishness of that notion. So I propose that the first Article be modified to read as follows:

 

“All human beings are born free to sleep under the bridge at the edge of town at night if they cannot afford housing, and all are equal in their opportunity to be prosecuted to the full extent of the laws that are made to protect the minority of the wealthy from the majority of those of modest income. And all people are endowed with reason enough to know that they are expected to be obedient loyal wage-slaves for life with the good conscience that they are to expect no better and demand no more. And all people of modest income — the owned — should act toward the system of, by, and for those of more fortunate means — the owners — as convicts should act toward police, in a spirit of submission.”

 

Yes, I believe the admirable philosophies expressed in this new modified plank suit my campaign much more to a T and should enable me to compete on more equal footing with the Dems and Reps in my underdog attempt to gain media exposure for the long campaign that lies ahead.

 

Freedom, equality, dignity, reason, and conscience are nice when you can get them, but, please understand, dear supporters, that we are up against the state-corporate machine and so we must put aside any such notions of utopia until the days of wage-slavery incorporated are successfully re-routed, demoted, dismantled and fully bypassed.

 

In the meantime, perhaps we will find some consolation in Article 2, whatever it may be.