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.
zaterdag 22 januari 2011
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
dinsdag 28 december 2010
ON THE CUTTING EDGE.
You might say, “My work is on the cutting edge.” Or maybe you would boast, “I like to be on the cutting edge," or "I live on the cutting edge.”
Sorry about the first: your work’s being shredded? And the second? OUCH!
That must hurt! I hope you aren’t sitting on that cutting edge.
My point is a simple one. The people who created the idiom, “the cutting edge,” may have had something in mind, a metaphor perhaps about getting things done? It’s easier to cut the cheese with the cutting edge instead of the flat edge.” But the people who use the idiom to describe their work or thinking or research are not to be trusted: they don’t make sense. And those who “live on the cutting edge” must be (a) in great pain, and (b) utter idiots.
You might say, “My work is on the cutting edge.” Or maybe you would boast, “I like to be on the cutting edge," or "I live on the cutting edge.”
Sorry about the first: your work’s being shredded? And the second? OUCH!
That must hurt! I hope you aren’t sitting on that cutting edge.
My point is a simple one. The people who created the idiom, “the cutting edge,” may have had something in mind, a metaphor perhaps about getting things done? It’s easier to cut the cheese with the cutting edge instead of the flat edge.” But the people who use the idiom to describe their work or thinking or research are not to be trusted: they don’t make sense. And those who “live on the cutting edge” must be (a) in great pain, and (b) utter idiots.
SOMETHING GOOD
For a change, something to be happy to report.
Four students at the Universität des Saarlandes where I teach—two undergraduates, two doctoral students—decided in early December to collect Christmas presents for poor children in Ireland.
Our English department is in the midst of an “Irish Semester,” and we have received generous support from the European Government, Irish embassy in Berlin, Volkswagen Ireland, the Irish Tourist Board, and Guinness. They decided that we should give something back.
The Saint Vincent de Paul Society in Ireland agreed to accept and distribute presents for us. DHL volunteered free shipping and delivery to Ireland for our packages. And Wordsworth Publishers in England gave them 48 free books, ranging from “Gulliver’s Travels” to “The Little Prince,” from Jane Austen to John Steinbeck, from a big book of Irish fairy tales to the collected tales of Edgar Allan Poe.
Starting the 10th of December, they asked students and staff to leave presents in our departmental library: €10 to €15 presents, of a size to fit in a shoebox, for girls or boys, age groups up to three, 4 to 8, 8 to 12, and teenagers. Five days later, DHL picked up 141 boxes. And the boxes arrived at St. Vincent De Paul in Dublin on Tuesday, 21 December, in time to be delivered for Christmas.
Michael Tighe, their contact at St. Vincent de Paul, wrote to thank them:
I think this is a great story of European brotherhood and goodwill. A lot of
people here feel quite conflicted about Ireland having to ask for support from
the IMF and the EU so something like this, in my opinion, adds a lovely sense
of European community and society instead of it all being about European
economy. Maybe I’m just a romantic, but you have really brightened my sense of
being not just Irish but a European too.
Eva Michely, Heike Missler, Klaus Schappert, and Sebastian Zimmer are already planning for next year. Maybe 141 boxes will turn into 500 then.
Bert Hornback
Four students at the Universität des Saarlandes where I teach—two undergraduates, two doctoral students—decided in early December to collect Christmas presents for poor children in Ireland.
Our English department is in the midst of an “Irish Semester,” and we have received generous support from the European Government, Irish embassy in Berlin, Volkswagen Ireland, the Irish Tourist Board, and Guinness. They decided that we should give something back.
The Saint Vincent de Paul Society in Ireland agreed to accept and distribute presents for us. DHL volunteered free shipping and delivery to Ireland for our packages. And Wordsworth Publishers in England gave them 48 free books, ranging from “Gulliver’s Travels” to “The Little Prince,” from Jane Austen to John Steinbeck, from a big book of Irish fairy tales to the collected tales of Edgar Allan Poe.
Starting the 10th of December, they asked students and staff to leave presents in our departmental library: €10 to €15 presents, of a size to fit in a shoebox, for girls or boys, age groups up to three, 4 to 8, 8 to 12, and teenagers. Five days later, DHL picked up 141 boxes. And the boxes arrived at St. Vincent De Paul in Dublin on Tuesday, 21 December, in time to be delivered for Christmas.
Michael Tighe, their contact at St. Vincent de Paul, wrote to thank them:
I think this is a great story of European brotherhood and goodwill. A lot of
people here feel quite conflicted about Ireland having to ask for support from
the IMF and the EU so something like this, in my opinion, adds a lovely sense
of European community and society instead of it all being about European
economy. Maybe I’m just a romantic, but you have really brightened my sense of
being not just Irish but a European too.
Eva Michely, Heike Missler, Klaus Schappert, and Sebastian Zimmer are already planning for next year. Maybe 141 boxes will turn into 500 then.
Bert Hornback
THE COMMUNITY OF THE DYI NG
Thinking, lately, about death. If there is no afterlife, then once I am dead that’s it. What follows is nothing. Why should I want to be remembered as a good man? I won’t be around to appreciate that. And if I have been an evil man, that won’t matter to me either. Since everything that exists in time will be, for me, non-existent, once I am dead, everything is utterly and absolutely meaningless.
I might accumulate happiness and pleasures and good memories and friends, but in the end they are like the material things—property, money, titles—that I must leave behind when I die.
The belief in death makes everything meaningless—unless I also believe in community. And community proposes, or perhaps more simply is a kind of afterlife: but an afterlife about us, not me. And if I can believe in community, then I don’t need the kind of personal afterlife that religions help us to fabricate.
To believe in community means that I have to be good enough to want to make better and happier the lives of those who follow me.
Of course, I will first have to believe in the good. Unless I believe in the good—absolutely—as the highest value—everything moral is absurd.
This is not a new thought, and it doesn’t belong to me. Our languages have been teaching this for several millennia. Community, good, and moral are all together words: words that teach togetherness. Thus my afterlife is our afterlife.
If there is what is usually called an afterlife—a continuance of personal existence beyond death—that will be a happy bonus. But more important and more urgent is the life that goes on in this world after my death and beyond my personal existence. I have to be good in this life—good enough to make better the lives of those who follow me.
If I believe in the good, I have no choice but to try to live in this way. A life dedicated to the good has no room for our usual greed.
Bert Hornback
I might accumulate happiness and pleasures and good memories and friends, but in the end they are like the material things—property, money, titles—that I must leave behind when I die.
The belief in death makes everything meaningless—unless I also believe in community. And community proposes, or perhaps more simply is a kind of afterlife: but an afterlife about us, not me. And if I can believe in community, then I don’t need the kind of personal afterlife that religions help us to fabricate.
To believe in community means that I have to be good enough to want to make better and happier the lives of those who follow me.
Of course, I will first have to believe in the good. Unless I believe in the good—absolutely—as the highest value—everything moral is absurd.
This is not a new thought, and it doesn’t belong to me. Our languages have been teaching this for several millennia. Community, good, and moral are all together words: words that teach togetherness. Thus my afterlife is our afterlife.
If there is what is usually called an afterlife—a continuance of personal existence beyond death—that will be a happy bonus. But more important and more urgent is the life that goes on in this world after my death and beyond my personal existence. I have to be good in this life—good enough to make better the lives of those who follow me.
If I believe in the good, I have no choice but to try to live in this way. A life dedicated to the good has no room for our usual greed.
Bert Hornback
maandag 29 november 2010
HONOR BRADLEY MANNING
Brave people are often abused.
Honor is something that recent (and present) American governments have not been known for. Indeed, our governments since John Kennedy's "Bay of Pigs" invasion have regularly been criminal in their disregard of our Constitution and United States law. Our current and on-going violations of international law make us a rogue state.
WikiLeaks is providing a valuable service to the world--and to us, as Americans. We should be glad to have the crimes and dishonesties of our government published. Only by knowing them can we correct them.
Are there any Americans who are proud of what the WikiLeaks documents expose? Shouldn't we all thank WikiLeaks, and then demand that those responsible for illegal. immoral, and unethical policies and actions be charged and prosecuted.
If we don't do that, we are as guilty as our governmental thugs are.
If our government thinks that Private Bradley Manning is ultimately responsible for these damning documents being released, then congress should award him the Congressional Medal of Honor, and we should all celebrate his heroism. Right now, however, our government has Bradley Manning in prison, in solitary confinement, at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia. He has been so held for nearly seven months.
Bradley Manning has not yet been charged with a crime. He has committed no crime. In fact, under both United States civil law and the Uniform Code of Military Justice had he not made public the evidence of the serious felony crimes which he discovered, he would be guilty of misprision of multiple felonies, of being an accessory after the fact to the commission of those felonies.
Bradley Manning has committed no crime. And our government can't charge him with having committed a crime, because his defense will be that he was doing what our law requires him to do. So, since George W. Bush suspended our Constitutional right of Habeas Corpus by executive order, and Barack Obama has not undone that illegal order, Bradley Manning might just spend the rest of his life in solitary confinement at Quantico. He is now twenty-two years old.
But maybe, someday, he will be released. Maybe someday we will have an honest, honorable, law-abiding president again. But someday is a long, long time for a young man to wait for justice. Must we make him wait? Must we cooperate in violating his rights? Must we support governmental oppression? Must we be toads and toadies? Cowards?
Honor is something that recent (and present) American governments have not been known for. Indeed, our governments since John Kennedy's "Bay of Pigs" invasion have regularly been criminal in their disregard of our Constitution and United States law. Our current and on-going violations of international law make us a rogue state.
WikiLeaks is providing a valuable service to the world--and to us, as Americans. We should be glad to have the crimes and dishonesties of our government published. Only by knowing them can we correct them.
Are there any Americans who are proud of what the WikiLeaks documents expose? Shouldn't we all thank WikiLeaks, and then demand that those responsible for illegal. immoral, and unethical policies and actions be charged and prosecuted.
If we don't do that, we are as guilty as our governmental thugs are.
If our government thinks that Private Bradley Manning is ultimately responsible for these damning documents being released, then congress should award him the Congressional Medal of Honor, and we should all celebrate his heroism. Right now, however, our government has Bradley Manning in prison, in solitary confinement, at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia. He has been so held for nearly seven months.
Bradley Manning has not yet been charged with a crime. He has committed no crime. In fact, under both United States civil law and the Uniform Code of Military Justice had he not made public the evidence of the serious felony crimes which he discovered, he would be guilty of misprision of multiple felonies, of being an accessory after the fact to the commission of those felonies.
Bradley Manning has committed no crime. And our government can't charge him with having committed a crime, because his defense will be that he was doing what our law requires him to do. So, since George W. Bush suspended our Constitutional right of Habeas Corpus by executive order, and Barack Obama has not undone that illegal order, Bradley Manning might just spend the rest of his life in solitary confinement at Quantico. He is now twenty-two years old.
But maybe, someday, he will be released. Maybe someday we will have an honest, honorable, law-abiding president again. But someday is a long, long time for a young man to wait for justice. Must we make him wait? Must we cooperate in violating his rights? Must we support governmental oppression? Must we be toads and toadies? Cowards?
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