Bollettino

KUT, the station LI listens to, has been gamely interspersing its usual fare of music and news this month with short bursts of poetry reading. This is in honor of national poetry month. They have ranged through at least thirty contemporary American poets, and LI has grown weary of getting up and turning off the radio when the poetry starts.

One thing has been proven conclusively: contemporary American poetry is worse than you can ever imagine.

It is worse than the personal essay, which is bad enough. Mostly, it is the personal essay chopped up into lines that the readers know enough, from grade school, not to linger at the ends of -- which would be pointless, anyway, as the lines are almost uniformly alien to sound. They have abandoned the theater of the voice, these latter day puritans, and they are very righteous about it. They have even abandoned the sound of the American voice, which is a morass, generally, of vocables, a moving pudding of universal stickiness.

We wish that the station had thought to include some, well, real poems. There is, after all, a lot there -- from Chaucer to Yeats. It is interesting how detached the contemporary poems are from memory -- from offering themselves to being memorized -- in comparison to the program of songs into which they are occassionally snuck. Generally, I can sing along, if I want to, to Dylan, or Joni Mitchell, or Radiohead, or whatever, because I know those songs -- I haven't memorized them so much as they have attached themselves to my memory. The same is true for the poems of Eliot -- or for large sections of Pound, or for Wallace Stevens. The same is true for Rimbaud's prose poems. But has any reader ever memorized the lines of, say, Lisel Muller? Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1997, this is the beginning of When I am asked, which was read on KUT:

When I am asked
how I began writing poems,
I talk about the indifference of nature.
It was soon after my mother died,
a brilliant June day,
everything blooming.

And so on. Now, compare these lines to a similar use of the divine 'I" in Yeats, in one of his truly minor poems.

On being asked for a War Poem

I THINK it better that in times like these
A poet keep his mouth shut, for in truth
We have no gift to set a statesman right;
He has had enough of meddling who can please
A young girl in the indolence of her youth, 5
Or an old man upon a winter�s night.

That's all. The Yeats is all trickery, and parades a thought I disagree with in terms of a stereotype that has grown stale in the Oeuvre. He does these themes better in other poems, and the lines are not any less essayistic than Van Mussel's. Yet even as a toss off, you can't read them two or three times, just to read them, without the words settling in your mind. Compare "We have no gift to set the statesman right" to "I talk about the indifference of nature." Muller's line is not only unmemorable, it is vaguely reminiscent of some bad essay written by a mediocre student about Emerson .. or something. It has no sovereignity. Poetry that divests itself of its own power to this extent is poetry well on the way to extinction.

Bollettino

Paul Krugman makes the Quaint case that it matters when the goverment lies to get us into a war.

"We were not lying," a Bush administration official told ABC News. "But it was just a matter of emphasis." The official was referring to the way the administration hyped the threat that Saddam Hussein posed to the United States. According to the ABC report, the real reason for the war was that the administration "wanted to make a statement." And why Iraq? "Officials acknowledge that Saddam had all the requirements to make him, from their standpoint, the perfect target."

Krugman is, of course, talking about the missing WMD. Now, LI was anti-war, just as we are now anti-occupation. But we don't really care that much that the WMD haven't been unconvered. In our humble opinion, the distinction between WMD and W not soMD is bogus - a distinction that is designed to be elastic enough to allow the selling of aircraft designed to deliver nuclear missiles, but shrinks virtuously at the missiles themselves, is conceptually suspect. Krugman's major point is, of course, right: we were duped into this war. But we think the duping was self-administered as much as it was prescribed by the Bush-ites. In this country, the populace can get peculiarly roused to aggression, as long as it can convince itself that it isn't aggression. In this case, the argument moved vaguely from nerve gas and anthrax to 9/11. Of course, that's changed since the fall of Saddam. But if the moment closes in Iraq -- and incidents like Fallaju, where 15 protestors were killed by American troops yesterday , hint at the moment closing in the reddest way -- and the second phase of the war starts, the justification will shift, again, to one of 'defense.'

Bollettino

So Creative Associates International landed the big job of shipping American made schoolbooks to the schoolkids of Iraq. Just as they had previously landed the contract with Afghanistan. One wonders if Smilin' Jay Garner will be celebrated in the spirit to which Iraq's previous despots have become accustomed. But NO!!! These will be American style textbooks, so they will presumably induce the instant amnesia on all things historical and geographic so endearingly characteristic of American education.

Americans are, apparently, old hands with textbooks. In Afghanistan, in the pre-9/11 days, Americans produced textbooks that even the Taliban approved of. An old Wash Post story about this, on the Emperors-clothes site, begins like this:

"In the twilight of the Cold War, the United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings, part of covert attempts to spur resistance to the Soviet occupation.

The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system's core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books, though the radical movement scratched out human faces in keeping with its strict fundamentalist code.

As Afghan schools reopen today, the United States is back in the business of providing schoolbooks. But now it is wrestling with the unintended consequences of its successful strategy of stirring Islamic fervor to fight communism. What seemed like a good idea in the context of the Cold War is being criticized by humanitarian workers as a crude tool that steeped a generation in violence."

Being a turn on a dime nation, we have now decided that history is no good. History now has a new, friendlier face, in which we have always, always been opposed to Islamofascism, man. We wonder who contracted to ship the old, jihadist textbooks to Afghanistan. At least we know who created those books -- the University of Nebraska. Here's a description of what the US taxpayer paid for:

"Published in the dominant Afghan languages of Dari and Pashtu, the textbooks were developed in the early 1980s under an AID grant to the University of Nebraska-Omaha and its Center for Afghanistan Studies. The agency spent $51 million on the university's education programs in Afghanistan from 1984 to 1994. During that time of Soviet occupation, regional military leaders in Afghanistan helped the U.S. smuggle books into the country. They demanded that the primers contain anti-Soviet passages. Children were taught to count with illustrations showing tanks, missiles and land mines, agency officials said. They acknowledged that at the time it also suited U.S. interests to stoke hatred of foreign invaders."

Well, let's just forget that, shall we? If we forget it hard enough, we can deny it ever happened. Of course, the same group that produced textbooks that taught six year olds the adorable and enriching arts of planting land mines have moved on, and are now producing the NEW textbooks.

Apparently about four to nine million books have gone off the presses. But we do wonder -- where do those books end up? The Kabul government, by all accounts, has a difficult enough time sending soldiers out into the provinces -- so do they send school teachers? An article about the problems of reconstruction in the The WashPost today indicates that the school teachers are reading the textbooks, whatever their content, to each other in Kabul, if they are being read at all:

"Afghanistan showed the essential need for security and accountability. Administrators of AID programs in Kabul are barred from leaving their compound without high-level approval and a heavily armed military escort, the inspector general's report noted. Even then, bandits, landmines and fractured roads make travel difficult or impossible.

One consultant recently wrote in a private assessment, obtained by The Washington Post, that security issues have made it "almost impossible" for U.S.-backed education officials to work in 24 of the nation's 34 provinces. An International Red Cross worker was stopped along a roadway March 26 and shot 20 times, becoming the first foreign aid worker killed since the Taliban's fall. Continuing attacks have forced some humanitarian groups to withdraw altogether."

However, for those who worry that the printing presses in Omaha will shut down -- don't: from the point of view of ROI, there's no bad news. Since it is the government, and since the American government has every inducement to enrich its subalterns, the textbook makers will get paid, and get their over-runs paid. Everything's still good in Omaha.

Bollettino

Du cote de chez Hitchens

Et sans doute, en se rappelant ainsi leurs entretiens, en pensant ainsi a elle quand il etait seul, il faisait seulement jouer son image entre beaucoup d'autres images de femmes dans des reveries romanesques; mais si, grace a une circonstance quelconque (ou meme peut-etre sans que ce fut grace a elle, la circonstance qui sepresente au moment ou un etat, latent jusque-la, se declare, pouvantn'avoir influe en rien sur lui) l'image d'Odette de Crecy venait a absorber toutes ces reveries, si celles-ci n'etaient plus separables de son souvenir, alors l'imperfection de son corps ne garderait plus aucune importance, ni qu'il eut ete, plus ou moins qu'un autre corps,selon le gout de Swann, puisque devenu le corps de celle qu'il aimait,il serait desormais le seul qui fut capable de lui causer des joies et des tourments. -- Proust

The first volume of Proust's novel tells the story (imperfectly nested, as is Proust's habit, among other stories) of the downfall of Swann. Swann, a man of perfect, even painfully perfect taste, falls in love with an ignorant slut, Odette, and sacrifices to her his supreme things -- his social connections, his taste, and finally his honor. While he does this, he tries to enthuse his friends about Odette -- thus further distancing them from him.

The story has an irresistable bearing on the recent embrace, by Christopher Hitchens, of the most brutal and the most venal right wing groups in this country. Those groups operate, of course, under the aegis of the Bush administration. They are in direct line of descent from the groups that helped create the cold war, and directed it, in all its bloody splendor, for almost fifty years, in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and whereever a dictator was to be propped up, or a union representative was to be stuffed into the trunk of a black car and unceremoniously dumped on a garbage heap. With that history in mind, it is pretty easy to see what is happening in Iraq, from the multi-year contracts being signed with the usual crew of Republican contributors -- Bechtel, Haliburtan, Fluor -- to the sinister paramilitary group crystallizing around Ahmad Chalabi. The choice narrowed, in the Cold War, between the indigestible petit totalitarianism of kleptocratic generals and the bloodthirsty dreams of Communist party offshoots. The choice is narrowing, in Iraq, to that between the disastrous dream of theocracy, on the one side, and the openly corrupt violence of pro-American groups, on the other side. Comic overtones are supplied by the numerous Americans in Iraq who are warning that third parties -- heavens, imagine third parties -- are subverting the critical path of American-Iraqi amity.

Hitchens, having propagandized for the war from his own peculiar angle -- he simply refused to recognize Bush's war, and replaced it with his own dream of Bush's war -- is now confronted with the fruits of the war that really happened. So he has manfully taken up the task of apologizing for crony capitalists and for Chalabi's Pentagon supported stormtroopers . The defense of crony capitalism is expressed by the usual casuistry of defending the indefensible. First, you break the indefensible down into alternatives -- being careful to exclude the alternative that will upset your case. Next, you invest your analysis with a grave air of necessity -- these are the sides that try men's souls, etc. So those who oppose, for instance, the US contracting with Haliburton in a closed door process that is adjudged by an American agency, pledges an amount of money extending over three years for a project that is supposedly going to be done on foreign soil, and is rewarded to a company that just happens to have gone from a couple of bad years, under Dick Cheney, CEO, to some very good years, with a plethora of fat government contracts, under Dick Cheney, VP -- anyone who criticizes such things is an oleaginous defender of Saddam Hussein. Hitchens arguments seem themselves to be written in polyunsaturated fats, and such other fats as enlarge the liver from the breakdown of alcohol in the bloodstream. However, just when you think he can't top this particular exercize in intellectual corruption, he comes up with a weepy column on Chalabi, in the course of which he gets very mournful over criticisms heaped on Chalabi in the American press. He makes a very big deal out of Chalabi's leadership of a paramilitary group in the nineties in Northern Iraq -- which, according to Hitchens, was the greatest return of a man to his roots since Alex Hailey visited Nigeria. No, this is not a man unconnected with Iraq -- he is a patriot in the line of Napoleon II and, uh, Garibaldi. Hitchens also tells us that his man's paramilitaries were collected in response to the death threats of the Saddamites. Now, we do have to give Chalabi credit for bravery. The man has been tempered, as steel is in the furnace, by the drama of haribreadth escapes -- starting with his unwilling flight from Baghdad at twelve, and going on to the humiliation of being stuffed in the boot of a car to escape being sentenced to prison for embezzlement in Jordan in 1989. The latter incident, Chalabi's partisans have assured us, was all Saddam's fault, too.

We imagine it actually gave him cred with the tough boy D.C. crowd. Imagine, Garibaldi with the soul of a Ken Lay! By that act alone he showed that he was made of the same stuff as the CEOs of Enron, or Halliburton, of General Dynamics -- he was a man willing to go to any length to avoid the penalties attached to peculation. That, of course, is the one consistent theme that unifies our present Bush-ite order. So he does seem peculiarly matched to the hour -- an hour that is marked by the movement of corporate giants into the "humanitarian reconstruction" of Iraq, and an amour of C. Hitchens for the right.

This was not, once, selon le gout de Hitchens -- but now it is indeed capable of causing him the most extreme joys and torments.

Bollettino

Richard Reeves breathes a little hellfire in an editorial that seems to be exclusive to Yahoo News. He makes the brilliant point that the military coup d'etat, in dollar amounts, already happened in this country. 400 billion dollars is being spent by the defense department, and 25 billion is earmarked for the subversive State. Our parody of the fight between the Pentagon and the State as parallel to the fight between the US and Iraq is, actually, a real parallel in terms of amounts available to the entities sitting in the corners.

A lesser point -- and one that LI was unaware of -- the military paid for the embedded journalists. Iraq, in other words, was a big advertising junket for Bush Imperialism. The funny thing is that this was never mentioned on the radio, or in newspapers, that were very careful to point out that the Iraqi's censored newsbroadcasts from Baghdad.

Well, well. As the US News editor, Brian Duffy, says

"With embeds, you have no costs. They're traveling with military personnel, so there are no traveling costs, and they're eating MREs. We're going to be talking about embedding as a concept for a long time. The fact that costs were so much lower is probably an afterthought. But it's not unwelcome."

And as Reeve concludes: "Money talks. And what it is saying is that the military is now first among equals in the governing of both Iraq and the United States."

Bollettino

Keeping Alan around

Tom Paine's business commentator, Dean Baker, is a grouch. LI likes business grouches -- although you can always tell when the sap is rising to their heads from their shrivelled hearts -- they start calling themselves contrarians and mistake a keen sense of impending disaster for the divine gift of prophecy. Our favorite lefty grouch is Doug Henwood; our favorite bonds grouch is James Grant. Dean Baker is a different kind of grouch. For instance, he regularly punches holes in stories that grow hysterical about impending Social Security deficits -- and we think he is right, there.

At the moment, he is the sole mourner at the Greenspan fiesta. When Bush announced that Greenspan would be re-appointed, there was a general round of Huzzas from all the usual suspects on Wall Street. Baker, however, compared Bush's announcement to keeping the captain of the Titanic around for another cruise. The meet of his Greenspanophobia is that Greenspan, basically, committed himself to a big time moral hazard by helping blow up the late nineties bubble :


"If he had consistently berated the markets with "irrational exuberance" comments and supported his case with charts and graphs, it is unlikely the market would have reached the dizzying heights of 1999 and 2000. If talk proved insufficient, he could have raised the margin requirement (which restricts borrowing to buy stock), and if necessary, he could have raised interest rates. But he didn't do any of that -- and arguably, he even may have promoted expansion of the bubble with his "new economy" rhetoric. The economy will suffer for years to come as a result.

"The bad news is not all behind us. Greenspan continues to ignore a housing bubble, the collapse of which is likely to have even larger repercussions for the economy and the retirement security of millions of Americans. People are currently buying homes in the bubble-infected markets (mostly on the east and west coasts), which could lose 30 to 40 percent of their value in a drop. For most families, their home is their biggest investment. Tens of millions of baby boomers are counting on equity in their home to support them in retirement now that their 401(k) plans have suffered so drastically from the stock market retreat. Instead of warning of a housing bubble, Greenspan testified before Congress last summer that there is no such thing."

Baker is also pretty aghast at the malign neglect of America's current trade account deficit.

Now, we are not sure if we wholly buy the bubble argument. We don't believe, for sure, that Greenspan was responsible for it. We do think it could have been curbed, somewhat, by the timely raising of margin requirements. But we also think Baker neglects the good side of irrational exuberance. Why did income inequality dip for the first time in twenty years after 1996? We think, in part, it was just the big IE - promoting somewhat hazardous economic activity, promoting the irrational allocation of resources -- that did it. And that might be a good thing in a cyclical system over a specific short run. We fault Greenspan less on the bubble than on the aftershock. Surely giving away the surplus to the high end of the wealth scale was a huge mistake. It isn't just that it provided insufficient stimulus to the economy -- it blocked alternatives that would have been possible, and much more constructive. Foir instance, there was a window of opportunity for creating a really viable reform of health care. There was a structure for revamping the complex ways in which states and the federal government both raise and divvy up money. And given that it was rather obvious, by the end of 2001, that the stock market boom was over, there was at least the obvious alternative of doing minor corrective work, so that in 2003 we did not face an overhang of some 100 billion dollars in separate state debts. The reason the latter was never addressed has to do with a dirty little secret of our government -- it is way overweighted to represent less populous, poorer states. California's budget miseries are California's business precisely because California is an economic generator -- unlike, say, Mississippi. But Mississippi, you will notice, and Tennessee, and the rest of them are much more represented on the national level. In tax terms, more money flows into Mississippi from the Federal government than flows out of it -- as is the case with Texas. But the reverse is the case with New York and California. Whenever those two states have financial difficulties, however, the poorer states stick it to them.

There are a host of reasons for this -- the culture of bad faith vis a vis the government in the South being one of the most prominent. It is true that Bush's tax cuts, especially the dividend tax cut, will grossly and inordinately benefit certain citizens of California and New York -- ie, the rich. And the richest one percent tend to settle in the richer states. For every billionaire in Mississippi, there are five in Sillicon Valley.

But the reparative work of the tax cut is most likely to vanish into high yielding investments in such things as derivatives -- which have no home, and bring no benefit to the wealthy states themselves. So the median person in those states, in bad times, has to live with the collateral effects of wealth -- for instance, higher rents and housing prices -- and the skew against those states on the national level -- which has to be made up for by higher state taxes. In a sense, the cause of the income tax in New York State is the lack of one in Texas.

Well, we could go on. But do you really want us to?

Bollettino

The tree of liberty is sprinkled with the blood of bouncers -- this is what Jefferson might have said about the latest news out of NYC. LI was so riveted by the news in Iraq that we ignored the warnings: our friend, T., wrote us a bitter screed about the banning of smoking in NYC bars, but we thought that he was suffering from a mild hallucination -- nothing so uncommon among LI's friends. But it turns out that T. was simply throwing invective on a legal fact.

Here's a CBS report on the latest atrocity to hit Gotham city:

"The worst did happen just two weeks into the ban. A bouncer was killed after asking a smoker to leave a downtown club. That's one reason why Rabin [a bar owner] wants a police presence outside the city's clubs.

"We're trying to follow your law," says Rabin. "We've asked the people to step outside to smoke, now we have a noise problem that's bothering our neighbors. Help us one way or the other."

The critics say everybody knows smoking is bad for you, but aren't bars and clubs where people are supposed to drink, smoke and carry on? Is the city that never sleeps turning in early?

"This is New York, get used to it," says Michael Musto, who covers New York's nightlife.

Musto says there are too many rules.

"New York used to be a place without a lot of rules," he says. "It had a seediness to it, but it also had an edge. Suddenly, you can't smoke in a bar. What's next? You can't eat in a restaurant?"



Only one bouncer? My God, has the spirit of the minutemen, the spirit of Grant's Army, the spirit of Patrick Henry and Patton, been so extinguished that only one, out of the innumerable bouncers of the city, been forced to pay for actually enforcing that insane rule? King James I, who has been quietly retired, in the history books, as a despotic masturbator, condemned smoking and wrote against it: but even he couldn't ban it among the bravos of that time What next indeed -- the imperialism of the lungs apparently rules, with this little man, Bloomberg, triumphant. We can drill holes in our brain and put that crucial fat on our livers, but we can't put an ashy coating on our trachea, eh?

Now, LI witnessed the Disneyfication of Times Square. It was sad. But one felt that really, the plastic and the bright lights will eventually collect dust and sputter sporadically out, slowly strangled by the taxes and the costs of maintenance and the whore and the adult video place will once again take root -- yes, Minnie and Mickie will again do the beast with two backs before a paying, horny audience until four in the morning. Love will grow in the place of excrement, as Swift put it -- disapprovingly. We think, on the contrary, that this is one of the most hopeful of human traits. Times Square's spirit will definitely triumph over the hypocritical Babbitry in evidence at present. But the ban on smoking is an absolutely bad sign -- as is the current lazy custom of suing tobacco companies because they didn't warn one and all, in the past fifty years, that their products caused cancer. This is a little like suing airplane companies because they didn't warn their customers about gravity. Obviously, state governments, having exhausted the lottery gambit, are pitching for other revenue sources -- avoiding tapping the obvious, who are the rich and the undertaxed one percentile.

Now Austin, our city, is considering some insane version of NYC's law. This is the site of the do-gooders, none of whom, I would bet, go to many bars in Austin -- they are probably too busy watching tv in their big Round Rock encomienda, the jerks. . But this is... Texas. We do carry guns here. We will not go gentle into that good night of the servile state. Here's a group dedicated to fighting the poison: Go to the site, sign a petition, don't allow this to happen.

It is one thing to be herded, like sheep, into an illegal war. Or to be herded, like sheep, into accepting an illegal president. But to be herded like sheep into accepting smokeless bars?