You are currently browsing the monthly archive for December 2007.
I can’t help laughing at this contradictory and ultimately pointless economic article at the BBC, “Unexpected Rise in Consumer Confidence.” It features this wonderful nugget
“While consumers were more optimistic about the future, their perception of the current situation deteriorated.”
while at the same time (and this is what is so wonderful about the BBC News website) providing contextually related links to the side, like:
US prices jump most in two yearsUS factory prices at 34-year highNew US jobs slow in NovemberDollar up on hopes for economyProductivity lift for US economyUS reduces 2008 growth forecastUS house prices continue to slideThanksgiving dinner cost ‘up 11%’US figures point to slowdown
WTF!?
It’s about time. The Iraq Veterans Against the War will be holding public hearings in 2008. Check it out here. The Wikipedia page on the first Winter Soldier hearings from 1971 has some nice links near the bottom of the page (external links).
Another 106 link, but anyone who is interested should check it out. I am still planning a unit in 106 on privacy rights, thought this would be useful. You can view it and download load it here.
I’m still working on what units to have in my 106 course this spring, and I just found this BoingBoing post with a plethora of great links on the NSA/telecom spying problem. Might be useful. I’d also cover issue like the placement of cameras all around our cities and intersections, satellite technology, and maybe something else I can’t think of right now.
That’s right. An anthology of poetry was published this summer by the University of Iowa Press called Poems From Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak. Dan Chiasson at The New York Times wrote this skeptical review (“Notes on Prison Camp“) in August of this year. Here’s an excerpt:
[R]eading “Poems From Guantánamo” is a bizarre experience. “The Detainees Speak” is this book’s subtitle: but putting aside the real question of whether lyric poets ever “speak” through their art [...], in what sense could these poems, heavily vetted by official censors, translated by “linguists with secret-level security clearance” but no literary training, released by the Pentagon according to its own strict, but unarticulated, rationale — “speak”?
Given these constraints, a better subtitle might have been “The Detainees Do Not Speak” or perhaps “The Detainees Are Not Allowed to Speak.” But the best subtitle, I fear, would have been “The Pentagon Speaks.” To be sure, it’s hard to imagine a straightforward propagandistic use for the lines “America sucks, America chills, / While d’ blood of d’ Muslims is forever getting spilled”; but you can’t help suspecting that this entire production is some kind of public relations psych-out, “proof” that dissent thrives even in the cells of Guantánamo. (Does that sound paranoid? Can you think of another good reason the Pentagon would have selected these lines out of thousands for publication?)
So the battleground in the war for “hearts and minds” has been extended even into the world of poetry, too often a place of distance from and neutral avoidance of issues that are of immediate social concern. As a poet, this incursion bothers me almost as much as Blackwater’s recent construction of a training facility only an hour or so from my hometown in Northwestern Illinois. What I naively saw as safe, as far from the evil that has set so much of the rest the world on fire, has been invaded. Dan Chiasson had this response to the book’s overall effect:
The effect of this volume is therefore curiously to make Guantánamo and our abuses there unfold on an abstract “literary” plane rather than in real life and real time. That’s too bad, since Falkoff and the other lawyers behind this project have acted in enormous good faith and some day will be recognized for their legal work as national heroes. But imagine a volume of Osip Mandelstam’s poetry released by the Soviet government in 1938, or an anthology of poems by Japanese internment prisoners released by our government during the Second World War. The government’s disingenuous resistance to this book’s publication aside (a wooden official statement denounces the book as “another tool in their battle of ideas against Western democracies”), the Pentagon ought to get an editor’s credit on “Poems From Guantánamo.”
It’s too bad that the “‘literary’ plane” is currently a place so separate from “real life and real time” that the military would see it so fit for these uses. After 9/11, many writers and commentators spoke of poetry as a place to find solace and comfort in times of trouble and tragedy. Though this is true, it also excludes the other ways poetry may be an art form relevant beyond the close-knit audience of ambitious, craft-aware writers seeking the formula to future publication. But now poetry’s role as a place distant from and above the problems of the day has been taken advantage of in the hopes of disguising illegal and unconscionable acts of torture and abuse. Poetry feels unclean to me now. I feel unclean.
More than 50 years ago, Kenneth Koch asked where the “poets of our time” were, and concluded that they were hiding out, making themselves cozy and irrelevant in institutions:
Where are the young poets in America, they are trembling in publishing houses and universities,
Above all they are trembling in universities, they are bathing the library steps with their spit,
They are gargling out innocuous (to whom?) poems about maple trees and their children,
[...]
Oh what worms they are! They wish to perfect their form.
[...]
The young poets from the universities are staring anxiously at the skies,
Oh they are remembering their days on the campus when they looked up to watch birds excrete,
They are remembering the days they spent making their elegant poems.)
(“Fresh Air,” sec. 2)
Koch can hardly be called a political poet, though it was not beyond him at times to be so. But his poetry was alive, was vibrantly present and aware. I am not arguing that all poetry must take on politics explicitly, I simply see no reason why it cannot become more involved with and critical of “real life” in “real time,” so that maybe the government might not use poetry for such purposes anymore. The Pentagon has taken advantage of poetry’s neutrality and complacency, and this deserves thoughtful consideration (and even a concerned reaction) from any poet who would prefer to not be associated with anything that defends such crimes against humanity.
I have been increasingly worried about the economy, as so many others are becoming now that it is more obviously on the way down. When everyone but the rich are working harder and still not making enough to get by as they were even a year ago, it is hard to trust what the economic cheerleaders and spin doctors are saying on the TV. A crisis is looming that our media and gov’t are simply not preparing anybody for (unless it is homelessness and famine that they are preparing).
Analysts and economists–those few rational ones that can be heard above the din–have been warning America about its suicidal economic behaviors for years now: out of control use of credit by consumers pressured to buy buy buy for the good of the economy, the sub-prime housing scam, the rocketing US deficit due to war spending. And now that inflation confronts you every time you go to the grocery store or to the mall, it is probably far too late for anything to be done for screwed over consumers.
I was not very clear about the international impacts of a crashing US dollar until I read this article in Der Spiegel, titled “The Dollar Nosedive: Why America’s Currency Is the World’s Problem” (thanks to Cannonfire for pointing this out). It goes over all major aspects of the current economic fears comprehensively, so I won’t even try to summarize the article. Here’s a small quote about America’s situation:
What America has lost is nothing less than a substantial share of its production base. The industrial economy left the country’s shores and the service economy arrived, but it is incapable of filling the gap.
The impressive growth figures the US economy has been achieving for years offer nothing but the illusion of a prospering economy. This growth is based primarily on Americans’ rising consumer spending, which in turn is paid for in large part with credit or the sale of assets. To put it simply, the Americans are eating their past for breakfast and devouring their future for dinner.
The savings rate is practically nonexistent. US foreign debt grew by about $1 billion a day in 2006, and it now exceeds $2.5 trillion. Private American households now owe about $13 trillion to lenders at home and abroad. Thirty-six percent of this debt was created within the last five years. Americans can no longer afford much of the present.
The only thing that has doubled in the seven years of the Bush administration is the country’s military budget. By comparison, the average US family income has stagnated in the last decade or so.
You should read the whole article. I’m going to go sulk over the wrongness of a system that measures prosperity solely in terms corporate profits, and encourages greed and throat-slicing over human rights and the concerns of communities and the society in general.
More than a month gone by, but I notice now.
Jacket 34 features a selection of Canadian poetry from 1976 to the present, as well as a few dozen reviews, a 2001 interview with Jackson Mac Low, and poems by Louis Armand, Scott Glassman and Sheila E. Murphy, Vincent Katz, Spencer Shelby, etc.
