Mr. Sarkozy says multi-culturalism is a failure. French Muslims praying in the street is proof. Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu est MON dieu! So the Christian dictator of France has spoken.
There is no room in Mr. Sarkozy's world, I suppose, for a united Ireland. Or a united Cyprus. Or civilised existence within and among the Balkan states. Can black people and white people live together? What if Jews took to praying on Mr. Sarkozy's streets? Should China and India throw out their Christians?
Mr. Sarkozy probably wants Germany and France to go back to fighting. Maybe he wants to have another Thursday afternoon war on the hillside at Spicheren, and kill 10,000 German boys and 12,000 French kids in six bloody hours.
At Spicheren, overlooking the river Saar, there are two late nineteenth-century monuments: one to the 10,000 Germans who died that day in that place, the other--forty meters away--to the 12,000 French soldiers killed there. In between these two is a third monument: a modern one, erected by the European Union. Its plaque says, simply, "Never Again."
Europe should budget generously for the building of a wall around Mr. Sarkozy's version of France. All of Europe's unemployed--including those in Mr. Sarkozy's France--can be put to work on the job. That will solve two problems: our European unemployment problem--which is economic--and our problem with Mr. Sarkozy's France--which is moral.
zaterdag 12 februari 2011
EGYPT
Our dear ally in the struggle to prevent democracy in the Middle East has fallen. Repression, U.S. style detention, torture: these have been the trademarks of Hosni Mubarak's long dictatorship. But he has been America's ally: as in earlier days were Generalissimo Franco in Spain, President Salazar in Portugal, President Batista in Cuba, the Shah of Iran, President Marcos in the Philippines. With Mubarak gone, maybe the only American-supported dictatorship left is that in Saudi Arabia: which has never even pretended to be "democratic."
The Obama government's response to the crisis in Egypt proves once again the absolute bankruptcy of United States foreign policy. Through its constant abuse of the word "democracy" the United States has made of it an obscene joke: even at home. Disregard for "democracy" at home gave the United States the presidency of George W. Bush. Mr. Obama was actually elected, democratically. But his use of the word is so badly tainted, so corrupt, that in terms of foreign policy we really are no better off: the United States is still trying to impose its will on other countries--by force.
Mr. Obama's outgoing press secretary, Robert Gibbs, says "Iran's government fears the will of the people." Mr. Gibbs never said that about Hosni Babarak's government.
And no American president or press secretary has ever said such about any of the dictatorships that the United States has supported. Democracy? The United States is no friend to democracy anywhere: even at home. The United States is run for and by the rich.
The Obama government's response to the crisis in Egypt proves once again the absolute bankruptcy of United States foreign policy. Through its constant abuse of the word "democracy" the United States has made of it an obscene joke: even at home. Disregard for "democracy" at home gave the United States the presidency of George W. Bush. Mr. Obama was actually elected, democratically. But his use of the word is so badly tainted, so corrupt, that in terms of foreign policy we really are no better off: the United States is still trying to impose its will on other countries--by force.
Mr. Obama's outgoing press secretary, Robert Gibbs, says "Iran's government fears the will of the people." Mr. Gibbs never said that about Hosni Babarak's government.
And no American president or press secretary has ever said such about any of the dictatorships that the United States has supported. Democracy? The United States is no friend to democracy anywhere: even at home. The United States is run for and by the rich.
donderdag 3 februari 2011
BLESSED ARE THE. . . .
President Obama has attended the Christian prayer breakfast. And he says that his faith is part of his strength, or something like that.
No doubt he prays "Blessed are the Peacemakers" every morning as he spends another billion dollars bombing people in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Is there a special prayer for people who run concentration camps? Is there a special prayer he says to absolve himself of guilt for the imprisonment and torture of Bradley Manning?
Does he have a biblical reference to justify his acceptance of American greed as a way of life?
There is so much about our way of life that is absolutely opposed to what Jesus taught. And Jesus condemned hypocrites twenty times for every time he mentioned any other sin. But Christianity in the United States is utterly hypocritical.
I wonder if any of the Christians at the prayer breakfast thought about giving the food that was served to the hungry and the poor? Or as the left, maybe giving their coats to some poor people who don't have coats? Or . . . .
Bert Hornback
No doubt he prays "Blessed are the Peacemakers" every morning as he spends another billion dollars bombing people in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Is there a special prayer for people who run concentration camps? Is there a special prayer he says to absolve himself of guilt for the imprisonment and torture of Bradley Manning?
Does he have a biblical reference to justify his acceptance of American greed as a way of life?
There is so much about our way of life that is absolutely opposed to what Jesus taught. And Jesus condemned hypocrites twenty times for every time he mentioned any other sin. But Christianity in the United States is utterly hypocritical.
I wonder if any of the Christians at the prayer breakfast thought about giving the food that was served to the hungry and the poor? Or as the left, maybe giving their coats to some poor people who don't have coats? Or . . . .
Bert Hornback
dinsdag 1 februari 2011
FACING UP TO NICENESS
I have been noticing, of late, all the snarling, glowering, tough-guy faces on cars--especually on American cars. On some of the big European cars,too. Waiting at traffic lights, they seem to say CHALLENGE and AGGRESSION.
Wouldn't the world be better off--maybe just a little, but better, still--if our cars didn't seem to want to be violent?
I suspect that a man who drove a car with big pink and white rabbit's ears might might find it harder to be a competitive driver. A car whose grill smiled might not try to squeeze other drivers changing lanes. A driver whose car looked like it was wearing big round classes might feel meek or shy even. A golden retriever? A happy young collie? Maybe a goose?
Why not?
Wouldn't the world be better off--maybe just a little, but better, still--if our cars didn't seem to want to be violent?
I suspect that a man who drove a car with big pink and white rabbit's ears might might find it harder to be a competitive driver. A car whose grill smiled might not try to squeeze other drivers changing lanes. A driver whose car looked like it was wearing big round classes might feel meek or shy even. A golden retriever? A happy young collie? Maybe a goose?
Why not?
zaterdag 22 januari 2011
The State of the Onion
President Obama is about to give his second "State of the Union" address. Suppose he tells us the truth. These truths:
1. We are impossibly far in debt, and can't even pay the interest on that debt. And yet we keep spending a billion dollars a day, not on our people's health and education, not on feeding our hungry and housing our homeless, not on our crumbling infrastructure, not on renewable energy, but on three wars.
2. Our wars are all three illegal and immoral wars, in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Pakistan.
3. We are still running an illegal concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay.
4. We are still torturing prisoners, including Bradley Manning, a U. S. citizen held illegally in solitary confinement for seven months, tortured--sleep deprivation, manacles, nakedness--and as yet uncharged with any offense.
5. We are still running an illegal kidnapping--"rendition"--program all over the world.
6. We no longer have our constitutionally guaranteed right of Habeas Corpus.
7. We are a terribly violent society, in which guns and gunfire murders are rife throughout the land.
8. Our prisons are overflowing, but millions of criminals--white collar thieves for the most part--are still free.
9. We are obsessed with greed, and while millions and millions of us exist in grinding, inhuman poverty, millions of filthy-rich anti-social anti-citizens sit on millions and millions, billions and tens of billions of dollars.
10. We are a rogue state, a failed society, and a danger to the whole world.
Mr. Obama could recite this "Bill of Wrongs" to begin his State of the Union speech, and then tell us how he would like to address these problems.
If he does, I will support him: with all my patriotic, America-loving heart.
1. We are impossibly far in debt, and can't even pay the interest on that debt. And yet we keep spending a billion dollars a day, not on our people's health and education, not on feeding our hungry and housing our homeless, not on our crumbling infrastructure, not on renewable energy, but on three wars.
2. Our wars are all three illegal and immoral wars, in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Pakistan.
3. We are still running an illegal concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay.
4. We are still torturing prisoners, including Bradley Manning, a U. S. citizen held illegally in solitary confinement for seven months, tortured--sleep deprivation, manacles, nakedness--and as yet uncharged with any offense.
5. We are still running an illegal kidnapping--"rendition"--program all over the world.
6. We no longer have our constitutionally guaranteed right of Habeas Corpus.
7. We are a terribly violent society, in which guns and gunfire murders are rife throughout the land.
8. Our prisons are overflowing, but millions of criminals--white collar thieves for the most part--are still free.
9. We are obsessed with greed, and while millions and millions of us exist in grinding, inhuman poverty, millions of filthy-rich anti-social anti-citizens sit on millions and millions, billions and tens of billions of dollars.
10. We are a rogue state, a failed society, and a danger to the whole world.
Mr. Obama could recite this "Bill of Wrongs" to begin his State of the Union speech, and then tell us how he would like to address these problems.
If he does, I will support him: with all my patriotic, America-loving heart.
dinsdag 11 januari 2011
Oh, say can you see. . .
Back in the 1970s, when U.S. foreign policy was the inanely unsophisticated mix of bullying and trying to bankrupt the Soviet Union with the arms race--the legacy of John Foster Dulles--Europeans figured that the Soviet Union would only bluff, but never call a bluff, and that if it went bankrupt, it would give in. But they figured that the United States was too macho adolescent ever to back down, and that if it found itself on the edge of bankruptcy, it would blow the world up.
The Soviet Union--thanks to the leadership of Michail Gorbechev--accepted their loss of the arms race. Mr. Gorbachev was willing to dissolve the Soviet Union. But he didn't want to abandon communism. America had never understood communism, popularly: it was supposed to be the opposite of democracy. Communism, of course, was the opposite of capitalism, and totalitarianism the opposite of democracy. And by the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States was a capitalist state more than it was a democracy. And capitalism was afraif of communism.
Today, capitalism sees socialism as its main adversary. Greed versus social or communal existence. Me versus us. And as capitalism fails, it becomes more and more dangerous to the whole world.
Europe is a socialist union. Even with all the current difficulties, everybody is agreed that the solution to the problems the Union faces must be achieved socially.
In America, chaos is rampant. Crimes against society range from simple everyday rich folks' greed to Madoff-style greed and BP irresponsibility and cover-ups, from multi-billion dollar bank theft to everyday cheating. "Liars in public places" are a dime a dozen.
At present it seems that the explosion of the aggressive Bush Warrior years may be giving way to more self-destructive behavior, nationally. The Obama presidency is only symbolic: and shamefully, disgracefully so.
The nuclear fear years were years of fearing that the United States would blow up everything: universal explosion. What we are facing now is American implosion. The rest of the world will be much better off, of course, if the United States implodes.
And maybe the United States will be better off if it implodes, too. And disappears.
Maybe a few benign, civilised Native Americans will survive the impolsion, and build--rebuild--a decent civilisation upon this blighted continent.
The Soviet Union--thanks to the leadership of Michail Gorbechev--accepted their loss of the arms race. Mr. Gorbachev was willing to dissolve the Soviet Union. But he didn't want to abandon communism. America had never understood communism, popularly: it was supposed to be the opposite of democracy. Communism, of course, was the opposite of capitalism, and totalitarianism the opposite of democracy. And by the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States was a capitalist state more than it was a democracy. And capitalism was afraif of communism.
Today, capitalism sees socialism as its main adversary. Greed versus social or communal existence. Me versus us. And as capitalism fails, it becomes more and more dangerous to the whole world.
Europe is a socialist union. Even with all the current difficulties, everybody is agreed that the solution to the problems the Union faces must be achieved socially.
In America, chaos is rampant. Crimes against society range from simple everyday rich folks' greed to Madoff-style greed and BP irresponsibility and cover-ups, from multi-billion dollar bank theft to everyday cheating. "Liars in public places" are a dime a dozen.
At present it seems that the explosion of the aggressive Bush Warrior years may be giving way to more self-destructive behavior, nationally. The Obama presidency is only symbolic: and shamefully, disgracefully so.
The nuclear fear years were years of fearing that the United States would blow up everything: universal explosion. What we are facing now is American implosion. The rest of the world will be much better off, of course, if the United States implodes.
And maybe the United States will be better off if it implodes, too. And disappears.
Maybe a few benign, civilised Native Americans will survive the impolsion, and build--rebuild--a decent civilisation upon this blighted continent.
donderdag 6 januari 2011
Seventy-five
I'm seventy-five. The last time I checked I was seventeen, going off to college. Then nineteen, going to work at a Children's Home and meeting a wonderful kid named Larry Lawson. Then twenty-one, graduating: and becoming somehow a Marine lieutenant. Twenty-four, starting graduate school, and teaching freshmen--and wanting to be older than I was, wanting to be thirty. A year in Ireland. Off to Ann Arbor to teach at twenty-eight. How much life, how much energy, how much hope for the future--and no limits to anything.
Twenty-eight years there, in Ann Arbor. Wonderful years, in many ways. Hearing from old students now, I remember how lovely those years were. Teaching, doing plays, protesting against the war--that war--poetry readings, writing books, wonderful ten-week hard-work summer study trips. Our softball team. Honors basketball. Students, friends. Sunday dinners. Bremen Scholars, every Monday night for ten years! But bad things, too: the selling of the university to greedy men, the betrayal of education, junk.
Leaving Michigan. Resigning, in protest. After twenty-eight years. Half my life. I'm suddenly fifty-six years old!
Taking care of my parents. Teaching in Louisville. An old childhood friend, Morty: we were five! Doing Greek--Homer, Sophocles, Euripides--with Ben every night. "A city where the main intellectual occasion of the year is a horse-race."
Years and years of letters, daily, with Don Hall. Wendell Berry just down the road while I am in Louisville. To Stockholm in 1995 for Seamus's Nobelling.
Amsterdam, after Mom's death. For five years. New Orleans. Then by a wonderful accident, to Saarbruecken. Living with the Schapperts in Sulzbach, teaching at the Universitaet des Saarlandes. Wonderful, wonderful. A Dickens Seminar, an Irish Semester. Waiting for Godot, Sebastian and Aoife and others.
But how did I get to be seventy-five? I have old students who write to tell me they have retired. Students who turn their children over to me for questions. A friend who asks me to write to his grandson!
My legs get tired climbing all the hills and steps here in the Saarland. It's beautiful--but I have trouble climbing. This March I will take thirteen students to Ireland for two weeks. I don't think I will drive; they are twenty-four to twenty-seven; I will turn the driving over to them, even though we'll be driving on the wrong side of the road. And though I will ask them to climb Ben Bulben, I don't think I will try. I've done it twenty-six times, the last when I was sixty-seven.
Not seventeen, off to Notre Dame for freshman year. Never having said the word "tragedy" out loud--never having had occasion to say it out loud. And now, thinking--at seventy-five--that someday I will have to say the words "death" and "good-bye" out loud.
That will be okay. I am confident--perversely so, perhaps--that things will get better in this crazy world, that the greedy and the violent and the cowardly and the
selfish among us won't always prevail, and that maybe the wonderful people I have known--all the lovely people who have been my students--will create a better world for their children and their children's children.
And maybe I won't be so angry, as I often am, at my generation: for our stupid selfishness, for our craven cowardice, for our irresponsibility to the good.
6 January 2011
Twenty-eight years there, in Ann Arbor. Wonderful years, in many ways. Hearing from old students now, I remember how lovely those years were. Teaching, doing plays, protesting against the war--that war--poetry readings, writing books, wonderful ten-week hard-work summer study trips. Our softball team. Honors basketball. Students, friends. Sunday dinners. Bremen Scholars, every Monday night for ten years! But bad things, too: the selling of the university to greedy men, the betrayal of education, junk.
Leaving Michigan. Resigning, in protest. After twenty-eight years. Half my life. I'm suddenly fifty-six years old!
Taking care of my parents. Teaching in Louisville. An old childhood friend, Morty: we were five! Doing Greek--Homer, Sophocles, Euripides--with Ben every night. "A city where the main intellectual occasion of the year is a horse-race."
Years and years of letters, daily, with Don Hall. Wendell Berry just down the road while I am in Louisville. To Stockholm in 1995 for Seamus's Nobelling.
Amsterdam, after Mom's death. For five years. New Orleans. Then by a wonderful accident, to Saarbruecken. Living with the Schapperts in Sulzbach, teaching at the Universitaet des Saarlandes. Wonderful, wonderful. A Dickens Seminar, an Irish Semester. Waiting for Godot, Sebastian and Aoife and others.
But how did I get to be seventy-five? I have old students who write to tell me they have retired. Students who turn their children over to me for questions. A friend who asks me to write to his grandson!
My legs get tired climbing all the hills and steps here in the Saarland. It's beautiful--but I have trouble climbing. This March I will take thirteen students to Ireland for two weeks. I don't think I will drive; they are twenty-four to twenty-seven; I will turn the driving over to them, even though we'll be driving on the wrong side of the road. And though I will ask them to climb Ben Bulben, I don't think I will try. I've done it twenty-six times, the last when I was sixty-seven.
Not seventeen, off to Notre Dame for freshman year. Never having said the word "tragedy" out loud--never having had occasion to say it out loud. And now, thinking--at seventy-five--that someday I will have to say the words "death" and "good-bye" out loud.
That will be okay. I am confident--perversely so, perhaps--that things will get better in this crazy world, that the greedy and the violent and the cowardly and the
selfish among us won't always prevail, and that maybe the wonderful people I have known--all the lovely people who have been my students--will create a better world for their children and their children's children.
And maybe I won't be so angry, as I often am, at my generation: for our stupid selfishness, for our craven cowardice, for our irresponsibility to the good.
6 January 2011
Abonneren op:
Posts (Atom)