NO TERRORISTS ALLOWED!

Mr. Obama Amabo--that's a two-faced name--has signed a law banning anyone who has committed a terrorist act against the United States from representing his or her country at the United Nations.

Why not broaden that restriction, and ban anyone from any country who has committed terrorist acts against any nation from representing his or her country at the United Nations?

The answer is simple.  Such a ban would mean that Mr. Obama Amabo would be banned, as would most of the high-level members of his administration--because so many of this U. S. administration's acts of aggression against other states--like Syria--are terrorist acts.

Using drones to invade other nations are either acts of war or terrorist acts.  The U.S. government has not declared war on Syria, so drone invasions are terrorist acts.  And all those CIA "renditions"--brutal kidnappings and torturings--are also terrorist acts.

And terrorists--including the granddaddy of all modern terrorists--should not be allowed at the U.N.   The Secretary General should make that clear to Mr. Obama Amabo.

Cast out the hypocrites.  They are the world's number one terrorists.

THOUGHTS IN RESPONSE TO A LETTER FROM A VERY BRIGHT YOUNG FRIEND

I made a trip to India. The least I can do is say something about what I learned from being there. India is literally, graphically, honestly amazing. In every way. The crowds, the noise, the pollution, the seeming carelessness of human life. The beauty of the land, and of the people. The kindness. The food. The traditions. The quiet, out in the mountains.

Modern motor-driven rickshaws by the thousands, everywhere. They are open, noisy, unmuffled, two-stroke three-wheelers painted black and bright yellow. Taxis, everywhere--for practically nothing. Ten US cents for a ride--fifty cents is it's more than a mile or two. In cities driving is a free-for-all; there aren't sides of the road, really—everybody drives in any direction anywhere.

Driving through a park bigger than Yellowstone, with a single winding road--104 hairpin turns in a 45 km. stretch, up a mountain. Signs: "Respect the Monkeys. The live here." And hundreds of them, sitting beside the road, or on a parked car, chattering. "Remember: Elephants have the Right of Way." "Stay in your Car. Lions and Tigers don't like to be Petted." Two tigers playing on the road. Elephants crossing it. A lion standing on a big rock, posing.

Eating with your hands. Eating the first meal in anybody's house off a banana tree leaf instead of a plate.

Mostly no alcohol.

A wonderful place, literally. In every way wonderful. And wonder is overwhelming when it is so relentless. By the end of ten days I was in some way used to India: numbed by it, in some ways—or numbed to it. But also able to see that the rest of the world—even successfully civilised Germany—is India, but not so densely, intensely, unremittingly so.

You mention graduate school. Study something worth studying, intellectually (for you) and substantial (for society). Something that will let you use your mind in a personally rich and socially valuable way. Thought isn't a fad. And we certainly haven't exhausted any of the important things to think about. (Does Homer still have value? A hell of a lot more than James Bond. And people who think otherwise should maybe read enough Homer to be able to help students read Homer--and see which they prefer. I would bet my life's earnings on Homer.)

We have had no winter this year. Usually winter has come in late November, and lasted though mid-March. This year it was cold--in the 20s--overnight twice. Otherwise, above 32.

Enjoy Washington State. Thank God for the Space Noodle: a monument (de pluribus unum) to care-less-ness in a world where people starve. And it's not even new--or so very extravagant. How about the Seattle Coliseum? It must have several of them, like every city does.

In New Orleans somebody who goes to the Superdome (now the Mercedes Superdome) spends more in an afternoon than a black family in the city spends in two weeks. There will be 70,000 in the Superdome every Saturday or Sunday. Once a week. The really poor number maybe 100,000, and they are there every day of the week.

I find it more and more difficult to travel. I went to India, to see an Indian student friend and his family. I was on my way to Korea, where I teach English for free for three weeks every spring. I can almost justify, in my mind, the Korean trip. I didn't do anything to justify the Indian trip, except to learn something about the way one sixth of the world's population lives. Now I have to so something with that bit of learning.

Sometimes the whole of existence--which is so utterly wonderful--seems overwhelmingly oppressive. The Pulitzer was a wee beam of bright light. Maybe the Norwegians will give Snowden the Peace Prize. (They should ask for Obomba's Peace Prize back--he isn't moral enough to give it back--and give it to Snowden.)

Turn off the electricity in all the world's (i.e., the US's) football and baseball arenas. That would be a big start toward cleaning up our planet. And then turn off all the advertising lights. And the burn-all-night lights in skyscrapers.

Blackouts at night. Close the shopping malls when it gets dark. And for those of us who want to read at night? Well, maybe we should talk--or think--instead.

Why not?

I have to quit. A neighbor—not really a neighbor, but a nearby noise-maker—is playing his stereo loudly. My windows are closed, but from somewhere up the street—in what I usually think of as civilised Saarbruecken—somebody is abusing himself and me with the mindless thump-thump of his expensive machine.

Love,

                                      Bert

SOCRATES' CHILD

     "I am the son of Socrates," the boy said. "Socrates' child."

    

     He was a serious-faced, beautiful young man. His spoke with conviction, but his voice also registered   the wary insecurity of wise youth. He was seventeen, maybe, or a bit older: eighteen, or nineteen.

     "I am his child. Not in the ordinary way--and not because of some god, either. The children born of gods are most often like the gods. The wisdom of the gods is not sympathetic. Human wisdom understands, but the wisdom of the gods is knowledge. And knowledge is a dangerous wisdom, if it is wisdom at all."

   

     He paused, and looked at me carefully. Then he continued.

    "Athena and Apollo are great and powerful gods; but they are like their father, and not to be trusted by mortals. Since they do not die, they cannot understand our life.

     "I do not think it blasphemy to say this. The gods know I speak the truth about them—and they do not care. They do not live lives. They exist—and nothing they do or know has meaning.

     "But I am Socrates' child: a human child. And like my father, I glory in my humanity, which I learned from him.

     

     "If the gods were truly wise—and not just gods—they would envy Socrates, and they would envy me."

     He stopped—proudly, it seemed, as though to give the gods their chance to respond. But nothing happened.

    

     He put his hand upon my arm, and smiled at me.

     "I was born to Socrates just as Athena was born to her father: out of his mind. His mind. And even Apollo knew what Socrates' mind was. Apollo said that Socrates was wise—that he was the wisest of all men.

     "A later god had a son—out of his mind—and that son was wise. He taught love: human love, and human understanding.

   

     "But though that man was a god's son, he was not a god. He was human, like my father."

     He stopped again. He took my hand, and put it to his breast. Then he put our hands to my breast.

     "I am not a god's son. I was conceived out of the small voice that spoke to my father, from his heart. She was my mother. I was nourished at my father's old and fallen paps, given life by the wine-rich breath of his mouth. His words raised me, taught me up: human.

     "I had never kissed a man—did not know what kissing was. But just before he died, Socrates motioned to me where I stood frozen, watching. He reached up, and drew my head down to him. He placed his lips to mine, and breathed his last breath into my mouth."

     The boy’s eyes brightened. This was his story. It was heretical, of course, like the gospel of Thomas.

     "Plato says otherwise. I know. He tells a different story. That is because he rejected my father's words. He was not a true disciple. He was not my father's son. Plato was never satisfied with being human. He longed--like Judas--for a god who could make gods of us all.

     "Socrates understood the difference between gods and humans. He respected the gods, and gave them what they required. He respected their divinity. But he did not want to be a god.

     "My father accepted death because he was human, and humans die. He accepted his death because he wanted to teach us how to live, as humans, and how humans should die.

     "Plato could not accept that. He thought perfection was divine, and immortal. He would have been happier being Apollo than Plato--though of course Apollo, being a god, is neither happy nor unhappy. Plato could not forgive Socrates for wanting to be Socrates: to be perfectly Socrates.

     "If you would study human perfection, study Socrates--not Plato. If you would live a life—a human life, a life of human meaning—become Socrates' son. He will breathe life—the fullness of human life—into your soul, if you will kiss him.

     "Poor rich Alcibiades wanted to kiss Socrates, wanted to make Socrates desire his young body. Socrates refused, though he loved Alcibiades. Socrates loved the possibility of human life. And that possibility is a kind of immortality, a selfless immortality, which neither the wisdom of the gods nor the desire of Alciabides nor the unhappiness of Plato can ever understand."

     He paused again, and released me.

     "I do not understand—do not understand fully, of course. But I am my father's son, and I will not betray the life he gave me."

     He stopped now. Stopped speaking. He smiled at me, and then dropped his eyes.

     The boy did not leave. Rather, he disappeared.

     I don't know where he went.

     I don't know. But though I have never heard inside myself the voice that Socrates heard, I hear that boy's voice—Socrates' son's voice—inside me all the time.

ONE AND A HALF CHEERS FOR ACADEMIC ACCOMPLISHMENT

  E. M. Forster, the twentieth-century English novelist, wrote a little book called Two Cheers for Democracy.  He called it that, he said, because democracy wasn't worth more.

  So let me give a very generous one and a half cheers for academic accomplishment:  for what we have accomplished, building  the academic edifice.

I was trying, recently, to write some exercises for my university students, to help them learn to hear language.  Not phonemes and other linguistic gedangera, but words.  Words have been around in our language--as "words"--for well more than a thousand years.  And until recently we used them pretty well:  usefully, precisely, meaningfully, even beautifully.  I was thinking mostly about poems and poetry, and about teaching poems and poetry in the university where I now do my teaching.  Before I could finish what I was writing , ny computer (acting like a department chairman) deleted my work.

So I'll go at it another way.  A more direct way.  How about a frontal attack on the nomenalistic nonsense that is practised on students?  Is all that nonsense a way of subverting students' interest in that dangerous thing called poetry?  Or is it simply because "English teachers" don't know how to read--or teach--poems?

  Read is a good word.  It has to do with understanding--which is why fortune-tellers read palms or tea-leaves.

  It is not just poems that get abused by teachers who don’t or can’t read, who have no respect for works of art: for things made, or maybe for something so serious as meaning, for things asking to be understood.

But understanding is hard work. So instead of talking about Dickens’s representation of the Industrial Revolution in Dombey and Son—to readers who knew it but wanted to ignore it—professors will note how good Dickens was in representing the rhythm of a steam engine. Instead of paying critical attention to John Jasper in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, scholars try to solve “The Mystery,” or speculate about who Dick Datchery is (which is obvious, surely), or write essays about opium dens in nineteenth century London, or identify—oh, busy busy busy!—the items in the China shepherdess’s cupboards.

Instead of reading Keats’s “When I Have Fears,” we identify it as a Shakespearian sonnet. Instead of reading Hardy’s “Hap,” we notice that it almost a sonnet. Instead of reading Hopkins, we talk about “sprung rhythm.” We can spend a whole term teaching Yeats, identifying Maud Gonne and Lady Gregory, Connelly and Pearse, Parnell Mistress Mary Moore, Harry Clifden—and never even try help anyone understand and appreciate a poem. That is academic achievement.

How many generations of students have been taught to count iambs and trochees, anapests and dactyle (watch out for the spondee, and the phyrric foot!) instead of being asked to understand poems? How many students know they have read a Shakespearian sonnet—but haven’t had the opportunity to appreciate a Shakespearian sonnet?

In Thomas Hardy’s “During Wind and Rain,” the old poem looks at age-worn, rain-riven tombstones in a cemetery, and recreates simple scenes from the lives of “he, she, all of them.” But he knows they are gone. Even their names are gone: “Down their carved names the raindrop ploughs.” Those people didn’t do “great things,” but they lived lives—and Hardy appreciates their lives with a tender and true

and unsentimental care that is moving, immensely and importantly touching, and honest. The rhyme scheme is an odd one, however. And there is a lot of formal repetition.

Will what we teach students help them to understand—to get inside the sense or feeling of a poem? Is being able to recognise its form worth anything?

As a student, I was blessed by deafness to some of that stuff. The rest of it I learned, but in learning it figured out what its insignificance was. I was blessed, too, by having several really good teachers—well, two—as an undergraduate, and then by having Arthur Carr as a senior colleague when I started out as a young assistant professor at the University of Michigan. And by Having Donald Hall as colleague, friend, and mentor, starting two weeks before my first term there.

Don and I met in August of 1964, standing among the “H” baggage, waiting to be ferried out to the SS Mauretania for a week’s voyage back from Europe to the United States. We celebrate fifty years of friendship this year—and fifty years, for me, of learning so very much from him and being so very thankful for everything he taught me.

I had just finished my doctoral degree, and was about to start my career as a professor. I knew a good poem when I read one—but I hadn’t learned that, let alone how to appreciate a poem—from any of my teachers. I had learned what I knew from the poems I had read. Don and I spent about four hours a day on the Mauretania, reading Hardy poems. Not many: twelve or so. But Don and Hardy—and me, too: we taught me to read poetry. And to love it.

Now—fifty good years on from that class on the Mauretania—I am still teaching poetry. And teaching other literature the same way. But whereas I used to teach for or toward understanding, now I find that more and more I teach to undo nonsense my students have been taught and are full of. And then I try to help them to read and understand and enjoy and appreciate and even learn from what they read.

The first year I taught at Saarland University—my academic roost for six years now—I had eight senior or graduate students for an informal weekly poetry session. The group were very bright. One of them, a young German woman, introduced herself the first day in a perfect accent from Co. Antrim in the North of Ireland. She still has her accent—and I call her Aoife instead of Eva.

One day we read a small, beautiful poem by Jane Kenyon.

Biscuit

The dog has cleaned his bowl

and his reward is a biscuit,

which I put in his mouth

like a priest offering the host.

I can’t bear that trusting face!

He asks for bread, expects

bread, and I in my power

might have given him a stone.

Another student, also very bright but victimised by her education, made a quick cry of triumphant critical insight: “An anti-Christian, anti-religious poem. The priest tricks the dog. The eucharist is a stone.” There were three exclamation points in the air.

So I explained. Deconstruction is neither a nice nor a sensible thing to do to a work of art. Art, after all, is something made: which is to say constructed. Deconstruction is an act of violence.

For more than twenty-five years, Seamus Heaney generously met with the twelve summer study students I took to Ireland for ten weeks every summer. He was wonderful with them. One winter he came to visit where I was teaching, then, in the United States. At a session with about twenty students he began by chatting about things, and then started to read. And he stopped himself.

“There is something you need to know before we go on. Poems are not

written for university students to talk about and deconstruct in classes. Poems

have a much larger purpose than that. They are written for something far more

important than that.”

Then he read.

What I was trying to write when my computer interrupted me, administratively—was related to what I have been talking about, but a few giant steps back into the immediate and practical world trying to teach the English language. I wanted to create a set of exercises that would help students learn to use language well.

If the only language our students learn is the language of the marketplace—and academia is a big, big marketplace. And as the marketplace is dedicated (for profit reasons) to the new, academic develops new languages constantly, to fit marketplace requirements.

Shorthand was developed as a way of recording speech, verbatim. When the young Charles Dickens was a court reporter in London, he devised his own shorthand. But what he wrote for the Morning Chronicle was written—and printed—in English.

He wrote his novels—as long as they were, and as fast as he wrote them—in what we call longhand. And he wrote, word by chosen word.

He wrote letters, and spoke, with the same care. Language was his care, his medium, his gift. And as he was gifted, he gave us great gifts.

Our modern media –our mediums of communication—are neither precise nor particularly communicative, and they certainly aren’t elegant. (And what they say is paid for by sponsors, who—commerce is better than communication--get to hawk their wares as part of the show.)

The written word is bad, but the spoken word—and more and more our world is viva voce—is much, much worse. Whether you listen to Charley Rose, the banalissimo of television intelligence, or watch Wolf Blitzer, a tongue-tied idiot trapped in a phony “situation room,” you are worse off than we were in the days of ticker-tape communication. At least the ticker-tape and its operator didn’t pretend to intelligance.

(I was interviewed once, years ago, by Charley Rose. He was known to the crew of his late-evening talk show as “Charley Dumb.” And he lived up to his name.)

So we should try to teach our students how to use language well, and how to make serious use of good language. Which is to say we should teach our students how to speak and how to write, meaningfully, reliably, and even beautifully. And we should teach them how to read—and listen to—good language.

But we don’t. Which is what this brief essay is about. In the beginning I thought I was writing about the teaching of literature, but then I became distracted by “that other world.” If the marketplace—and “marketplace mentality”—can’t be

countered, then being able to read a poem well maybe won’t mean much.

But I won’t believe that. Those of us who know—understand—the things that art teaches will be able to live and die as humans. And the rest of our modern achievers, when the time comes, will not “cash in their chips” but will simply forfeit them to the current god, the Great Banker in the Sky.

One and a half cheers? No. That was a self-defeating act of generosity. Why any cheers for them at all? And why not three cheers for us who stand against them, in academe or elsewhere?

WAR

WAR

Question.  What's the most peaceful decade in US history since WWII?  We had five years of no-war after 1945, till the start of the Korean War in the summer of 1950. Harry Truman the Korean War a "Police Action"--carried out by the world's self-designated policemen. Though the freeing of South Korea was a good and justifiable action, what it led to has been murderous disaster.

After Korea the US thought of itself as the world’s policeman   Though we still had what was called the “Cold War” with the USSR, after Korea we had--very briefly-- a bit of something like peace. We almost managed to have a shooting war in Czechoslovakia in 1956, and we tried again in Lebanon (that's when I was part of the invasion--with 20,000 other soldiers and marines) in 1958.  The invasion of Cuba in 1962 was followed by acts of state terrorism, murder attempts—in the 1990s the CIA admitted to 28 attempts to murder President Castro--embargoes, and since 2001 illegal US occupation of the northwestern end of the island.

Then Vietnam and Cambodia from 1965 nonstop until 1974.  Then-- still in the 1970s--Gerry Ford's brief gun-boat excursion into North Korea, and Carter's attempt to start World War III by invading Iran to rescue those 50-odd CIA men held in the US embassy in Teheran.  They were all spies, of course; because they all had multiple passports, we couldn’t even “identify” them—and we didn’t know exactly how many of them there were. American technology saved the world from that attempt at invasion of a sovereign state: all the US helicopters ate too much sand flying low over the desert, and crashed.

In the 1980s, Reagan's bombed Lybia—violating French airspace to do so—and invaded Greneda. And he had his brutal war against Nicaragua.  Then George the First gave the world the Gulf Oil War. 

First thing in office, in 1993, Clinton bombed Basra—because an Iraqi in Kuwait had been accused of trying to assassinate George Bush. Justice! And then Somalia, and our courageous bombings of things like passenger trains crossing bridges in Bosnia to get us through to 2000. 

Since then, continuous war and terrorism and torture. Don’t forget the torture. Don’t forget Guantanamo—which presidential candidate Obama promised to close, seven years ago. But didn’t. Hasn’t. Won’t.

There is no end in sight.  Nobody even expects it.  Few of us even ask for it. 

So the only peace we have had in the nearly seventy years since we firebombed civilians in Dresden and dropped atomic bombs on civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was from 1945-1950--when we had the "Cold War."

Everybody was pretty much exhausted by war in 1945--and we had "won."  And the US military was "occupying" Japan, and Germany.  But the US wasn't actually out fighting and bombing anywhere. 

Still, Harry Truman’s two horrible bombs on cities--on everyday people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki--continued kill and maim Japanese people for generations, into the 1970s.  But only Japan had been irradiated.  And Harry Truman had given the rest of us five years of  breathing space that we could sort of call peace.

Maybe we should celebrate those years, the "Cold War" years, when we were rebuilding the world.  And when Americans were feeding the world.  We were putting our ships and planes in "mothballs"--and hoping for a long, long summer of peace.

It didn't last, of course.  And now we have had sixty-four years of war, and wars.  Since the end of World War II we have had wars or attempted wars or military "incursions" in Korea, Lebanon, Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, North Korea, Nicaragua, Iran, Lybia, Greneda, Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and now (by proxy and with our weapons) Syria. 

There aren't many of us alive who remember 1945 to 1950.  We had peace then, or something close to peace, in most of the world.  At least--in most of the world--we weren't killing each other, and torturing each other.

Could we have a Peace Monument?  And--all over the world--get rid of our monuments to war? 

Maybe we could keep just a small piece of one of them, as a memorial:  to remind us of what, in our stupidity, we have celebrated for thousands of years of what we call human "civilisation." 

I will submit a nomination for that reminder, that memorial. It’s not a US monument, though.  It's a piece of a monument at London's Hyde Park Corner, dedicated to the British machine-gunners of World War I.  But in its stupidity, it can stand for all monuments to all wars. The inscription reads, "For Goliath has killed his thousands, but David has killed his tens of thousands."

That sums it all up.

How can one quarter of Americans be wrong?  If a full twenty-five percent of Americans believe the sun revolves around the earth, the sun must revolve around the earth.  That's simple democracy.  Twenty-five percent of Americans outweigh seventy-five percent any day.  That's simple math.

Americans are never wrong.  Greed is good, and stealing from the poor is not a crime. "White-collar" crime is just good business.  Murder isn't murder unless the poor guy kills the rich one.  And twenty-five percent is better than seventy-five percent, because the twenty-five are on top, and they come first, and they are right:  constitutionally right.  As constitutionally right as Guantanamo--or the trial of Bradley Manning.

The truth will make you free.  We believe that.  And truth is a word for what I believe; it has nothing to do  with fact.  Americans are above fact. 

(And Barack Obama isn't black.  No self-respecting black person would ever let him be black.  Anyway, he was born on the good old North American mainland, in Hawaii, USA.)

RACISM? HUMAN RIGHTS? IN THE USA?

RACISM?  HUMAN RIGHTS?

The U.S. has generously agreed to let some Native Americans have some justice.

In ordinary White Man's justice, in the United States, white men can commit crimes on Indian Reservations without fear of prosecution.  Thus crimes against Native American women committed by white males on Reservations are not crimes.

Now the U.S. judicial system has decided that for a few tribes--on a few reservations--Native Americans can have "equal protection."

Americans should be proud.  White America is giving up just a little bit more of its legal racism.  Not all, yet, but a little bit.

Maybe sometime soon  it will no longer be legal for horny white males to rape Native American women on reservations.

(And maybe someday the United States will close its illegal concentration camp and torture facility at Guantanamo, in Cuba.

And maybe someday the United States will quit its illegal occupation of Guantanamo, and get out of Cuba.  The U.S. lease on Guantanamo ran out more than ten years ago--but being a great freedom-loving, law-abiding nation, the U.S. refused to leave.)