“Strange Dreams” by Paul Street

Paul Street is the author of many books, articles, speeches, blogs, reviews, and book chapters. The opening excerpt from his most recent ZNet commentary: 

I keep having the same two crazy dreams. I’m just not sure what they mean. In the first dream, George W. Bush becomes obsessed with disproving the charge that he’s a “chicken hawk” – a military hawk who has never seen or experienced military action and its terrible consequences. He has a vision from God. It comes to him in prayer. He orders his staff to call up the Pentagon and arrange for him to be flown to Iraq to participate in a night patrol. “Make it a dangerous one,” he says. He reaches into his bottom desk drawer for a bottle of whiskey.

“This will show the world I’m not a wimp like they said my Dad was,” Bush thinks to himself. “Hell, I’m going to lead this SURGE myself.”

The Army sets him up with a unit three miles outside the U.S. base in the Iraqi town of Ramadi. He climbs into a moderately well-armored Humvee. Ten minutes into his adventure, with sweat pouring down from under his helmet and the smell of bourbon on his breath, the Decider hears a loud explosion.

Everything goes quiet and numb. His head is swimming. There’s a bright shining light. Soldiers and medical staff are yelling, but he can’t hear a word they’re saying. Everyone around him is staring at him in horror. Some are looking down to where his legs used to be. Bush looks down himself and sees two bloody stumps. “It’s so unreal,” he thinks, “why don’t I feel anything?”

He starts to lose consciousness but is jolted back awake by a sharper pain than he ever knew existed. He looks over to see a badly injured soldier. The soldier couldn’t be more than 18 years old. He’s lost half of his face.

…

A Review Of “Beasts of No Nation” by Uzodinma Iweala

by Nathaniel Jonet 

Beasts of No Nation is the first book by Uzodinma Iweala, a 23 year-old Nigerian born in America and raised in Washington, DC, England, and Nigeria. Iweala is a sub-Saharan Upton Sinclair, whose Jungle is not about dead rats and poison in your meat, but about dead families and poisoned dreams in your world. The beauty of this piece is that it takes a story we would glance past as it scrolled along the bottom of CNN news or change the channel when it broke in a short bulletin on the BBC and brings it up close and personal. Far too personal to be safe.

Civil disobedience a must in class

Following Convictions

by Craig Crosby 

(also see Five Who Remade American Culture, by Victoria A. Brownworth)

“The most I had ever done was very conventional actions toward change, like writing letters,” said McGarvey, a senior environmental policy major. “I had not done any kind of social protest. I was a little dubious about what would happen. It was a lot more than I had hoped for. I was very surprised.”

EFFECTING CHANGE

McGarvey’s experience is exactly what Unity College associate professor Kathryn Miles had in mind when she first developed the focus for the fall semester’s American literature class. From Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau through speeches by Martin Luther King Jr. and Edward Abbey’s “The Monkey Wrench Gang,” the students read the best-known literature of social protest and civil disobedience ever written in this country.

More than just reading, however, the 18 students in Miles’ class had to identify an issue, develop plans to effect change through an act of protest and then carry it out. Some chose well-traveled roads, such as the war in Iraq, while others were moved by the more obscure, such as a Maine law that prohibits owning exotic reptiles.

The project was designed to let the students put into practice the philosophies they read in the books, Miles said. McGarvey, for example, based much of her protest on Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” in which King writes, “one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust law.”

“Now, more than ever, we can’t have higher education in a high tower,” Miles said. “I really wanted them to do something to make a difference. I feel like we don’t have the luxury of keeping academia abstract. I feel like we have to apply it and do something. I think that, by and large, we as a culture, and this age group, tends to be fairly politically apathetic. Sitting back and complaining is just not an option.”

The Appeal of Star Trek

Where No One’s Gone Since
by John O’Brien 

“But my point is, what is it about Star Trek that generates its appeal?”

There are two main factors, Gerrold says, and they both concern the original series which Boarding the Enterprise focuses on.

“First, we had such a remarkable cast in (William) Shatner and (Leonard) Nimoy and DeForest Kelly. You couldn’t design a better cast, it was an accident of casting. In this case (Star Trek creator) Gene Roddenberry picked three very, very good actors and they fit together so beautifully,” he says.

“And then the second thing is, the context of Star Trek is that here’s a world where everybody is respected and everybody has a place in this world and people are all big enough to handle their problems, and so they focus on problems of a much larger scale and challenges of a much larger scale.”

He says this is a formula the spin-off series have failed to replicate.

“The original series is about ‘let’s boldly go out and seek out new worlds, let’s explore new planets, let’s meet new civilisations’ and so on.

“And they would come up against new people and new planets that would challenge their definition of themselves, it would make them ask the question ‘what does it mean to be a human being? What are we up to here?’ And I think that was part of the appeal of the show: we’re discovering not only what’s out there but what’s inside ourselves, and that the final frontier is really the human soul, not space – space is just where we’re gonna meet the challenge,” Gerrold says.

Juan Santos on Apocalypto

 On Apocalypto

Juan Santos

Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto is not a mere adventure tale, it’s not just another excruciatingly brutal portrayal of apocalyptic violence for its own sake, and the Village Voice is dead wrong when it says that unlike Braveheart and The Passion of the Christ, Apocalypto is “unburdened by nationalist or religious piety,”— that it’s “pure, amoral sensationalism.”

Despite its extreme brutality Apocalypto isn’t just Gibson’s latest snuff film with a religious theme. The film is a morality play, and there are only two things one needs to remember to get a hint of the ugly moral intent behind Mel Gibson’s depiction of the Maya.

The first is that, despite Gibson’s vile portrayal of the Maya as a macabre cult of deranged killers straight out of Apocalypse Now!, there is no evidence that the Mayan people ever practiced widespread human sacrifice, and they certainly didn’t target the innocent hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists Gibson chooses to portray as the victims of a Mayan death cult.

Gibson knows better. He studied the terrain in depth and had no practical limit to the funds he could expend on research. His portrayal is a conscious lie, one he uses to justify the premise that the Mayan city states collapsed because they deserved to collapse, and that they deserved to be replaced by a “superior” culture in the genocide known as the Conquest.

Interview with Tom Engelhardt

by Julian Brookes at Mother Jones

This past year the site spawned two books—one, “Mission Unaccomplished”, a collection of interviews Engelhardt did with an assortment of writers (and not only lefties) whose thought he admired, the other, written by former federal prosecutor and Tomdispatch star Elizabeth de la Vega, building a legal case that Bush & co. engaged in a conspiracy to “deceive the American public and Congress into supporting the war.” In his introduction to the collected interviews, “Mission Unaccomplished,” Engelhardt writes, “I saw my mission, modestly accomplished, as connecting some of the “dots” not being connected by our largely demobilized media, while recording as best I could the “mission unaccomplished” moments I felt certain would come,” and this statement stands as a pretty good summary of what Tomdispatch has achieved over these past five years.

Recent Review of Oliver Stone’s Salvador

Review by Howard Dratch: 

What if Oliver Stone directed a movie about the El Salvador war (which some called “civil”) back in the ’80s? What if it was a terrific movie that was lost in the blockbuster successes of some of his other films? What if, more than twenty years later, that same film can still both entertain and describe a time and a war that was important to Latin America and to the United States back 25 years — one that could happen around here again and can be compared to the Iraq conflict?

Continue reading Recent Review of Oliver Stone’s Salvador

Literature Emerging Out of Conflict

Interview with Marie Virolle and Aïssa Khelladi

World Literature Today

July/August 2006 issue

 by Michael Toler

Though it sounds almost obscene to say that the violence tearing Algeria apart in the 1990s could be a source of inspiration or trigger for creative writing, in a certain sense it was. Once again, a generation of great writers would emerge out of conflict to create a powerful, evocative body of literature that alternately served as a primal screen denouncing terror and barbarism, a means of grappling and coming to terms with the situation, and a vehicle for imagining a better world. This was not only the case with literature but with other forms of art as well. For example, it was during this period that raï and other forms of Algerian popular music exploded onto the world stage. Perhaps one of the most productive incubators of this new literary talent was a tiny publishing house (an apartment, really) in Paris called Marsa Éditions and the cultural review it publishes: Algérie Littérature/Action. Two people, with a modest budget and a passionate commitment to the task, marked out a space to which writers and artists flocked to raise their voices in favor of a free and pluralistic Algeria. The efforts quickly attracted positive attention, and the publication has since become a journal of record for Algerian literature and art. Many of the artists they were first to publish have seen their work find its way into major publishing houses, and AL /A’s founders are now working to revitalize the Algerian literary scene back in Algeria. In this interview, the editor and director of the journal, Marie Virolle and Aïssa Khelladi, tell the story in their own words.

Where is the Iraqi War Literature?

Where is the Iraqi War Literature?

By Nazim Muhanna


Damascus, Asharq Al Awsat – With a few exceptions of Iraqi writers and artists, the continuous bloodshed in Iraq has failed to elicit any poetry or prose from the Arab men of letters. While political writers expounded and analyzed, the literary writers and artists did not channel this harrowing Arab tragedy into creativity, and neither did they attempt to engage with it. Some attribute this absence to the obscurity of the events taking place, while others fear that their expression might be misconstrued as advocating or commemorating the dictator’s bygone era [by writing against the occupation]. So many different reasons all converge into one question: Where is the Iraqi war literature? What is the cause behind this indifference and when will the pens start to actively recount all that is taking place? How is it that the 33-day war in Lebanon acted as a catalyst that inspired artists to express themselves staging plays, setting up exhibitions and publishing books, whereas Iraq has endured three years of seemingly endless suffering and yet has nothing to show for it? Throughout the centuries, writers, artists and intellectuals have played a major role during times of war. Some glorify heroes and leaders, some express their suffering and outrage while others try to make sense of the events taking place.

Crichton and Crowley — Fiction in the Public Arena

by Felicia R. Lee 

In a “Washington Diarist” feature that was to be posted last night on The New Republic’s Web site, tnr.com, and published in the magazine’s Dec. 25 issue, Mr. Crowley says he is the victim of “a literary hit-and-run” because of a 3,700-word article in The New Republic in March.

In that article he accused Mr. Crichton of being “a menacing figure” because he uses his “potboiler prose” to advance causes now dear to Republicans. Mr. Crowley is a senior editor at The New Republic and writes primarily about politics.

Witness: the inward testimony

Witness: the inward testimony

by Nadine Gordimer

The horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was part of the unspeakable horrors of a past war. It is now 2006: the world has come to coexist in, witness the horrors of Twin Towers New York, Madrid bombings, London underground train explosions, the dead in Afghanistan, Rwanda, Darfur, Sri Lanka…the list does not close.

What place, task, meaning will literature have in witness to disasters without precedence in the manner in which these destroy deliberately and pitilessly; the entire world become the front line of any and every conflict?

On Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation and Film

Film Gives New Meaning to “Watch What You Eat” 

by Trevor Owens Hornet:

Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” is now 100 years old. Published in 1906, the novel upset so many in Washington, that President Roosevelt helped enact the Food and Drugs Act that year.

“Fast Food Nation” stands a chance of creating a similar fervor, but America is a lot bigger than it was in 1906, and corporations much more powerful; the battle is definitely uphill.