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Recent
Stories
May
23, 2003
Standard
Schaefer
Lifting the Sanctions: Who Benefits?
Ron
Jacobs
Long Live People's Park!
Michael
Greger, MD
Return of Mad Cow: US Beef Supply
at Risk
Elaine
Cassel
Tigar to Ashcroft: "Secrecy is the Enemy of Democratic Govt."
Sam
Hamod
The Shi'a of Iraq
Christopher
Greeder
After the Layoffs
Alexander
Cockburn
Derrida's Double Life (poem)
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Weblog 5/23
May
22, 2003
Mark
Gaffney
Christian in Name Only
Carl
Estabrook
Republic of Fear
Carl
Camacho, Jr.
Reason for Hope
Ben
Granby
What Rates a Headline from the Middle
East?
Vanessa
Jones
Terror Alerts in Australia
Mickey
Z.
Instant Understanding
Don
Monkerud
Snowballs in a Soggy Economy
Barry Lando
The Nether-Nether World of G.W. Bush
Steve
Perry
Total Information
Awareness: Secret Shadow Program?
May
21, 2003
Dave
Lindorff
Ari Fleischer Quits the Scene: The
Liar's Gone, the Enablers Remain
Chris
Floyd
How Blood Money Becomes Business Opportunity
Dr. Gerry
Lower
Graham's God and Bush's Pathology
Patrick
Cockburn
In Post War Iraq, the Signs of Breakdown
are Everywhere
Brian Cloughley
The Fatuous Braintrust: Newt, Rummy and Wolfowitz
Saul
Landau
Shopping, the End of the World and the Politics of Bush
Larry Kearney
Two Morning Poems, May 2003
Steve
Perry
Chaos in Iraq: Just What the US Wanted?
Elaine
Cassel
Ashcroft Justice Comes to Iraq
May
20, 2003
Tariq
Ali
The Empire Advances
Ahmad
Faruqui
Whither American Nationalism?
Ben Tripp
Dialysis with Osama
Linda
Heard
The Cage of Occupation
Cynthia
McKinney
Toward a Just and Peaceful World
Edward
Said
The Arab Condition
Mokhiber
and Weissman
Why Ari Should Have Resigned in Protest Long Ago
Stew
Albert
Yale Men
Steve Perry
The New Face of Al-Qaeda
May
19, 2003
Veteran
Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
A Letter to Kofi Annan on Powell's Missing
Evidence
CounterPunch
Wire
"Terror" Slut Steve Emerson
Eats Crow
John
Chuckman
Blair's Awkward Lies
Matt
Vidal
Corporate Media and the Myth of the Free Market
Michael
S. Ladah
The Fine Print to Bush's Road Map
Robert
Fisk
Bush's Eternal War Backfires
Elaine
Cassel
Clarence Thomas, Still Whining After All These Years
Jonathan
Freedland
Ann Coulter's Appalling Magic
Steve Perry
Play It Again, O-Sam-a
May
17 / 18, 2003
Uri
Avnery
The Children's Teeth
Peter
Linebaugh
An American Tribute to Christopher
Hill
Gary
Leupp
Nepal Today
Rock and
Rap Confidential
The Republican Plot Against the Dixie Chicks
Walter
Sommerfeld
Plundering Baghdad's Museums
Ron Jacobs
Condy Rice's Yipping Tirades
Thomas
P. Healy
Dubya Does Indy
Tarif Abboushi
Bush, Sharon and the Roadmap
Francis
Boyle
Debating US War Crimes in Iraq
Mark Davis
An Interview with Richard Butler
Richard
Lichtman
American Mourning
Michael
Ortiz Hill
Overcoming Terrorism
Adam
Engel
Uncle Sam is YOU!
Alan Maas
The Best News Show on TV
Poets'
Basement
Reiss, Guthrie, Albert
Elaine
Cassel
Good Enough for an Alien
Website
of the Weekend
The 37 Americans Who Run Iraq
Song of
the Weekend
Talkin' Sounds Just Like Joe McCarthy Blues
May
16, 2003
Leah
Wells
In Iraq Water and Oil Do Mix
Ben Tripp
Fear Itself
Sharon
Smith
The Resegregation of US Schools
Ramzy Baroud
Does Defeat Have to be So Humiliating?
Sam
Hamod
A Nation of Fear
Phil Reeves
Baghdad Pays the Price
Robert
McChesney
The FCC's Big Grab
Mark Engler
Those Who Don't Count
Steve
Perry
We're All
Extras in Bush's Movie
Website
of the Day
Iraq and Our
Energy Future
May
15, 2003
Ayesha
Iman and Sindi Medar-Gould
How
Not to Help Amina Lawal: The Hidden Dangers of Letter
Writing Campaigns
Julie
Hilden
Moussaoui and the Camp X-Ray Detainees:
Can He Get a Fair Trial?
Tanya
Reinhart
Bush's Roadmap: a Ticket to Failure
Laura Carlsen
Here We Go Again: NAFTA Plus or Minus?
Kenneth
Rapoza
The New Fakers: State Dept. Undercuts
New Yorker's Goldberg
Stew Albert
A Story I Will Tell
Steve
Perry
Bush's Little
Nukes
Website
of the Day
Strip-o-Rama
May
14, 2003
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Jason
Leopold
The Pentagon and Hallburton: a Secret
November Deal for Iraq's Oil
David
Lindorff
Fighting the Patriot Act: Now It's
Alaska
John
Chuckman
Giggling into Chaos
Jack
McCarthy
Twin Towers of Journalism: Racism
and Double Standards
Wayne
Madsen
Assassinating JFK Again
M.
Junaid Alam
The Longer View
Paul
de Rooij
The New Hydra's Head:
Propagandists and the Selling of the US/Iraq War
James
Reiss
What? Me Worry?
Steve Perry
More on Saudi Arabia Bombings
Website
of the Day
A Tribute to Ted Joans
May
13, 2003
Saul
Landau
Clear Channel Fogs the Airwaves
Michael
Neumann
Has Islam Failed? Not by Western
Standards
Uri
Avnery
My Meeting with Arafat
Steve Perry
The Saudi Arabia Bombing
Jacob
Levich
Democracy Comes to Iraq: Kick Their Ass and Grab Their Gas
William
Lind
The Hippo and the Mongoose: a Question of Military Theory
The
Black Commentator
Fraud at the Times: Blaming Blacks for White Folks' Mistakes
Stew Albert
Asylum
Hammond
Guthrie
An Illogical Reign
Website
of the Day
Sy Hersh: War and Intelligence
May
12, 2003
Chris
Floyd
Bush, Bin Laden, Bechtel, and Baghdad
Dave
Lindorff
America's Dirty Bombs
Sam
Hamod and Elaine Cassel
Resisting the Bush Administration's War on Liberty
Uzi
Benziman
Sharon and Sons, Inc.
Jason
Leopold
The Decline and Fall of Thomas White
Rich Procter
George Jumps the Shark
Federico
Moscogiuri
Going to Israel? Sign or Else
Steve
Perry
Bush's War Web Log 5/12
Book
of the Day
Fooling
Marty Peretz
Website
of the Day
T-Shirts to Protest In
Hot Stories
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Elaine
Cassel
Civil Liberties
Watch
Michel
Guerrin
Embedded Photographer Says: "I
Saw Marines Kill Civilians"
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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for More Stories.
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May
24, 2003
Towers of Babel
Woodstock
and the Word
By ADAM ENGEL
"The plant must spring again from
it's seed, or it will bear no flower--and this is the burthen
of the curse of Babel."
--Percy Bysshe Shelley, "A Defense
of Poetry."
"Sez who?"
--Laura Bush
In the beginning was the Word and it was good
but not as good as free trade so they built Twin Towers and that
nasty Ossama Bin Gone-So-Long-It-Looks-Like-Lies-To-Me knocked
them down and there was no investigation because it was better
to be poisoned by the smoke and debris burped from Ground Zero
and the toxic babble burbled by leaning (right) towers of Media
Babel so we can rest easy in our Xanax Xanadu. Make sense? No?
Thank god. I thought for a minute THEY finally took my tongue
(and other anatomical parts) as I lay dying. Not quite. Not quite
yet, at any rate...
Who said that thing about poetry being
irrelevant after Auschwitz and Hiroshima--Adorno, Horkeimer?
Some smart talkin' hot dog from the Frankfurt School. Oh, there
was poetry alright. But it was a poetry however, that recognized
that it was being written in a post-Auschwitz, post-Hiroshima
world. One thinks of Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, John Ashbery,
Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and the thousands who came after
them, influenced, in one way or another, by their political and
aesthetic visions of post-nuclear poetry. Also, rap, country
and rock n'roll. Dylan, the Beatles, Bob Marley. Public Enemy.
Grandmaster Flash. Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Jill Sobule. Ani
DiFranco. Talking Heads. X, etc.
Sure Shelley would be bummed out were
he to come back (is he dead? or just hiding out like Jim Morrison?)
to find that poets in the 21st century are not "the unacknowledged
legislators of the world," but merely unacknowledged, but
he might be heartened to know that poets still have the WORD;
that poetry is still the mysterious art that can spring from
anyone--with or without a PhD--at anytime, whenever there is
no "rational explanation" for our human condition of
pain, love, hate, sorrow, madness, terror, ecstasy, despair and
all the rest, only expression, the word, from the head and heart.
I was up in Woodstock, NY doing poetry
readings and promotional stuff about this time of year, May-June,
2001 (I know, I know: the music festival was actually held in
Bethel; but the old trust-fund hippies still believed, in 2001,
and the vibe was there in Woodstock proper) and the television
commercials in the bars I read in hyped Timothy McVeigh's coming
execution with neat-o graphics: McVeigh's I-Know-Something-You-Don't-Know
face morphing into a Roman frieze; not one but three of those
crucifix-shaped lethal injection tables rising flat to vertical,
one slightly higher than the other, like the crosses at Calvary.
Flashing text. Upbeat music. Gushing commentary by experts (experts
in WHAT, pray tell?). True, it wasn't real exciting TV like WTC,
the war against double-secret hidden terrorists in Afghanistan
and the war against double-triple super secret Weapons of Mass
Destruction and Mass Civilization in Iraq. But still, how could
a poet compete?
The Woodstock Poetry Festival, held during
three days of clear skies and balmy temperatures during August
23-25, 2001, was a celebration of the WORD. Poets, from the world
renowned (Robert Creeley, Robert Bly), to the relatively known,
to the unknown open-mike readers, offered words, and audiences
from several states of place and mind accepted them. No celebrities
(note: world renowned poets are renowned by a coupla thousand
people, if they're lucky; they're not really celebrities), no
special effects, no particular agenda. Poets and listeners. Portraits
of minds painted in free-verse, rhyme, sonnets, blues poetry,
confessional poetry and all forms in between.
Dithyrambs, rap, and iambic pentameter.
Folk tales and personal reminiscences. Each poet's language was
his/her DNA, essence, chemistry, or whatever that made him/her
unique and worth listening to. The Woodstock Festival was a celebration
of the collective as individual. Various voices, rhythms, imageries
and styles reinforced the common strain: we exist, we are, we
live, love and suffer; most of all, we remember (both the great
events and the minutia) and we speak, and these things make poetry
great, for it makes us, both poet and listener, great. In retrospect,
it was particularly interesting to hear Robert Bly read poems
from a forthcoming book styled after a difficult, beautiful form
of Islamic poetry. Like he could read THAT in public, in America,
or what's left of it, today.
Two weeks later the words of a pre-Auschwitz/Hiroshima
poet reverberated in my head when my father-in-law called to
report that he'd just seen a plane smack into the World Trade
Center from his office-window at New York University while Il
Dubya, surrounded by photogenic tykes, tried to recall the phonetic
reading skills they taught him at Yale.
"...things fall apart, the center
cannot hold..."
And as the news reports blew by and the
dreadful images were played over and over and over and over,
it was Yeats again who whose word was the WORD:
"All changed, changed utterly: a
terrible beauty is born."
So much for the three days of "peace,
love and poetry" at Woodstock, August 2001.
Yet a new beauty, greater than the Rough
Beast, waits to be born, as different from the poetry in Woodstock
as Ginsberg, Jello Biafra, and Queen Latifah were to the pre-Auschwitz/Hiroshima
world. The strength of poetry is to change with our thinking;
for it is our thinking, and our feeling. All the Rough Beast
can do is kill us. True, that's no small thing. But I remember
listening to a guy read in a bar in June, 1989, just after the
Chinese pulled their Tianneman Square massacre: "They can
shoot us/But they can never touch us." I took that to mean
that while soothsaying could get you killed, shit-slinging was
a fate worse than death. Shit-slingers are zombies. The walking
dead. The New York Times. Skulls and bones. Ari Fleischer and
his monitored corps of scribbling, camera clicking ghouls.
Can't do a damn thing for the WTC victims
(victims of WHOM? we do not know, do we?), and verily (there;
I said it: VERILY) I doubt my power to effect the machinery set
in motion on 9/11 (again, by WHOM?) that is claiming victims
in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine and will continue to claim victims
by the thousands, if not millions, worldwide, for we do not know
what "Rough Beast, slouched toward Bethlehem, waits to be
born," primarily because our "(un)elected representatives"
won't tell us, which should raise even the most botoxed eye-brows
across this...uh...great land.
I am not powerless however--well, not
YET at least -- to write and to read, to speak and to listen.
The Woodstock Festival was fun; the words we write/speak/sing
today are essential. Essential to give voice to our fear, courage,
love, hate, outrage. Our human voice to express our human dignity.
To stop, or at least recognize, the gears of the Death Machine
grinding life and sanity and sweeping across television screens
throughout the land.
Most of us are neither legislators, nor
acknowledged. But all of us have language and a voice to mark
us as unique, worthwhile beings and recognize others as such.
Some of us read and write poetry (and by this I include sincere
music lyrics of all kinds, though less and less are sneaking
through the corporate media filters). Perhaps it is time for
more of us to do one or both. For poetry is as important now
as it has ever been. In a world of Big Media, Big Images, Big
Terror, our words are all we have to identify ourselves as individuals,
and communicate with other individuals, to rip the images from
the screens and personalize them, each adding his/her own identity
to the symbols and icons that threaten to filch our Being, depersonalize
us and hammer our voices into slogans, keep us marching in lock-step.
We don't need a Shakespeare, or a Whitman, or a Yeats, no Big
Voices, only millions if not billions of little voices, each
one singing, in his/her own rhythm, "I am."
Adam Engel
can be reached at bartleby.samsa@verizon.net
Today's
Features
Standard
Schaefer
Lifting the Sanctions: Who Benefits?
Ron
Jacobs
Long Live People's Park!
Michael
Greger, MD
Return of Mad Cow: US Beef Supply
at Risk
Elaine
Cassel
Tigar to Ashcroft: "Secrecy is the Enemy of Democratic Govt."
Sam
Hamod
The Shi'a of Iraq
Christopher
Greeder
After the Layoffs
Alexander
Cockburn
Derrida's Double Life (poem)
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Weblog 5/23
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