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Hey, Mr. Rooster, don't bring me no new day without a job to go with it

2011-10-12T07:28:00.000-07:00

Some yearnings never go out of style. The cock crows and it can only mean one of two things: time to milk the cows or pretend you don't know this man. We'd much prefer the first meaning, but, alas, work has gone overseas or out of style. And what's replaced it is mostly time misspent in virtual places where saving the world is about as productive as masturbation. Notice I didn't use the word "satisfying." If the "sin" of taking things into your own hands didn't satisfy, no one would spend their time and dimes on simulacrum.

Personally (as well as impersonally), I agree with Ed Dorn when he wrote about "escorting" the chairmen and presidents out of the building or locking them there in quarantine until the power that plagues them passes. Showing them the door or forcing them to sleep on the floor could be done peacefully but addicts, as we have seen, will sell anything to be able to buy. They have gun racks in the back of their eyes. Addiction is addictive--as much so as alienation.

In the mean time, a poem so good by Ed Dorn it will make giving attention of lesser degree or deviant quality to anything outside it a mistake you will regret for the rest of your life. This is a true

SONG

Again, I am made the occurrence
Of one of her charms. Let me
Explain. An occupier
Of one of the waves of her intensity.

One meeting

Behind the back
of the world
Brief and fresh
And then
Nothing.
Winter nights
The crush of fine snow
A brilliancy of buildings around us
Brief warmth
In the cold air, the cold temperament
Of a place I can't name

Now what is it. Turning into
A shadowed corridor half the earth away
And deep inside an alien winter
I remember her laugh
The strange half step she took

And I would not believe it
If Europe or England
Could in any sense evoke her without me,
The guitar of her presence the bearer of her scent
Upon my wrist
The banding of her slightsmiling lassitude . . .

--Ed Dorn, Way More West: New and Selected Poems, Penguin Books, 2007, p. 67

The Place Rumored to be Sodom was a Corn Field

2011-10-08T07:54:00.000-07:00

The year is 1943. Waiting for someone to come home is as common, to quote Jack Spicer, "as rats and seaweed." The only things that know close holding are sweet, yearbook dreams put on hold by the war.

Of course, the real bedrock and undercurrent of those dreams was more drear and dry. But there is a kind of collective forbearance, bred and left by the Great Depression, that is almost rhapsodic in its pervasiveness throughout America. Ed Dorn, then (c. 1963) in his 30s, remembers a rural America far less lyrical than Wendell Berry's in this extraordinary poem, "On The Debt My Mother Owed to Sears Roebuck." It is hard for anyone born into land-of-largess America to remember a time when the Sears Roebuck catalog mailed to millions was as close to Amazon as the world got before WWII. It came once a year and it was a major event that cast a lifeline to America's mighty Mississippi of manufacture, especially to farm folk. I can only, or barely, imagine the sensuality of leafing through that giant tome of commerce and feeling the thrill of necessity and pangs of occasional frivolity as people with plenty of nothing planned to fill their households with products shown on those pages.

Credit was out of its infancy by then, made more right and reasonable by the closed loop of thriving American industrial capitalism. After all, how bad could it be to long for the output of one's neighbors and countrymen? No commandment could be broken by such desire or the goods that were its object. The debt, or karma, of a system based on consumption of one's own labor was more purely spiritual--a matter for Sabbath concern: not the right to want what one could pay for but its rightful, proportionate place. Ah, the glorious self-fulfilling prophecy of pre-global America where everyone baked the wafers they were fed in their churches. Imports to those in Kansas were from a not-so-distant Cathay called Detroit. So when the war Dorn invokes at the end of this poem enters, desire deferred has an autonomic presumption of fulfillment. One of the first and tastiest spoils of war will be resumption of domestic production and consumption.

For readers of this magnificent poem today, Dorn, writing in the early 1960s, is an almost enviable throwback to a classic, now-vanished commonplace of Marxist-style worker alienation. His concerns seem almost luxurious in their pure American self-containment. The debt, like all the things it buys, is still made in the USA. The alienation has nothing yet to do with massive deprivation of a role in production (forget ownership of its means). That sadness is yet to come. Jobs still come back in 1945 and continue to do so until globalization takes ferocious, irreversible grip in the 1970s. Workers of the world unite! will no longer be an option for Americans by 1980. Being will be replaced by the pseudo-occupation of isolated consumption and a nothingness of brands. Consumption will have no relationship to labor. And, fittingly, the debt will be owed to banks not stores. The final stage of alienation is complete loss of its detection or even a need for vigilance against it. But Dorn is as much Wobbly as wobbler.

So by remembering when a locust plague took a measure of desolation that was so profound and confounding that its symbolism was tearful, Dorn reminds me of awakenings through poetry that seem to have no counterpart. It hurts to imagine the feudal farm existence that led Dorn to write this about his mother: "...the dust of the fields / in her eyes, the only title she ever had to lands..." And oh that opening with its dry, remorseless heat. I have never seen the dustbowl life of the 1930s summarized better than the brittleness of an existence likened to crackling of a locust body under foot. Dorn says the sound is "like the breaking of / a mechanical bare heart which collapses / from an unkind an incessant word whispered..." This is one of the most unrelentingly powerful poems I have ever read. I have carried it with me since college and I have thought about it as much as any Christian thinks of a talismanic psalm. How, I wonder, do our hearts re-leaven with exuberant purpose? Is not praise simply devout compassionate affection?

More than anything else these days, I fear achieving nothing more than a truce with my melancholy. I fear I will die less than the man I owe this poem the duty to become: Bodhisattva on the loose and sometimes on the run. My mantra: "Scared sacred," as someone (maybe me) wrote years and years ago. Only now its not jolting into a higher state. It's just a way of notating the close ground proximity and co-terminousness of both states. My prayer: that it not be a photo finish between the two states, but a clear runaway triumph of the One, a higher debt paid in full.

ON THE DEBT MY MOTHER OWED TO SEARS ROEBUCK

Summer was dry, dry the garden
our beating hearts, on that farm, dry
with the rows of corn the grasshoppers
came happily to strip, in hordes, the first
thing I knew about locust was they came
dry under the foot like the breaking of
a mechanical bare heart which collapses
from an unkind an incessant word whispered
in the house of the major farmer
and the catalogue company,
from no fault of anyone
my father coming home tired
and grinning down the road, turning in
is the tank full? thinking of the horse
and my lazy arms thinking of the water
so far below the well platform.

On the debt my mother owed to sears roebuck
we brooded, she in the house, a little heavy
from too much corn meal, she
a little melancholy from the dust of the fields
in her eye, the only title she ever had to lands--
and man's ways winged their way through the mail
saying so much per month
so many months, this is yours, take it
take it, take it, take it
and in the corncrib, like her lives in that house

the mouse nibbled away at the cob's yellow grain
until six o'clock when her sorrow grew less
and my father came home

On the debt my mother owed to sears roebuck?
I have nothing to say, it gave me clothes to
wear to school,
and my mother brooded

in the rooms of the house, the kitchen, waiting
for the men she knew, her husband, her son
from work, from school, from the air of locusts
and dust making the hedges of field she knew
in her eye as a vague land where she lived,
boundaries, whose tractors chugged pulling harrows
pulling discs, pulling great yields from the earth
pulse for the armies in two hemispheres, 1943
and she was part of that stay at home army to keep
things going, owing that debt.

--Ed Dorn, Way More West; New and Selected Poems, Penguin Books, 2007, pages 25-6

Pacem On The Terrace

2011-09-11T06:52:00.000-07:00

Where were you that miserable morning, everyone wants to know but, more honestly, to recall as part of the national wallowing. I was where I am today, bending events to the will and need of the moment and sometimes calling it prayer. Only maybe that day it was alright to fear and feel sorry for yourself.

Han Shan's Ardmore pen pal says this: The memorials are to found among the living and built where living is hardest--say in Gaza, Haiti or Somalia.

Shit, I'm beginning to sound like the quenchless spectre of Phil Ochs. Please forgive me for sounding like I am making recriminations.

At midnight, the gateway to this wretched day, I was watching "Judgment at Nuremberg" with my girlfriend Mo, and we both felt those trials were the best memorial to what 9-11 made America become. Only when Bush & Cheney stand in the docket accused of war crimes will the ghosts of 9-11 find peace (if they have not already done so).

This morning, for reasons unknown or maybe unknowable, I took refuge in the last poems of Robert Creeley, written in the months and weeks before his death in March 2005, the same bereaved week as Terry Sciavo and a Pope. He is remembered as furnishing undying companionship. He speaks to the One of shared consciousness, of which I am trying to remain a stubborn part.

My lesson for this day, as I watched Obama reading from the Bible on TV this morning, was this: "With God on our side" is the ultimate expression of atheism because it bars God from taking his fullest residence and resonance in our Hearts where His Oneness and Humanity's are fully proclaimed.

Creeley knew this oneness of consciousness and therefore I find these poems appropriate for true remembrance:

WHICH WAY

Which one are you
and who would know.
Which way
would you have come this way.

And what's behind,
beside, before.
If there are more,
why are there more.

ON EARTH

One's here
and there is still elsewhere
along some road to hell
where all is well--

or heaven
even
where all the saints still wait
and guard the golden gate.

SAYING SOMETHING

If, as one says, one says
something to another,
does it go on and on then
without apparent end?

Or does it only become talk,
balked by occasion, stopped
because it never got started,
was said to no one?

--Robert Creeley, On Earth: Last Poems, New Directions, 2006, pages 40-42

A Pound of Cure

2011-08-29T05:53:00.000-07:00

Some of Ezra Pound's greatest poems are his translations--especially of Chinese and Latin poets. In defense and proof of this assertion, I give you:

This monument will outlast metal and I made it
More durable than the king's seat, higher than pyramids.
Gnaw of the wind and rain?
Impotent
The flow of years to break it, however many.

Bits of me, many bits, will dodge all funeral,
O Libitina-Persephone and, after that,
Sprout new praise. As long as
Pontifex and the quiet girl pace the Capitol
I shall be spoken where the wild flood Aufidus
Lashes, and Daunus ruled the parched farmland:

Power from lowliness: "first brought Aeolic song to Italian fashion"--
Wear pride, work's gain. O Muse Melpomene,
By your will bind the laurel.
My hair, Delphic laurel.

Horace, Odes, Book III

--Ezra Pound, New Selected Poems & Translations, New Directions, 2010, page 280

Some notes: This ode by Horace is a powerful reminder that the word music is derived from "muse" (Melpomene), whom the poet invokes for inspiration to his song by which he "binds the laurel" (i.e., coheres the world). I love the last line ("My hair, Delphic laurel"), which signifies full oracular power granted and active in the poet. The ode is a kind of ascent during which the power most manifest in poetry confers indestructible beauty and immortality: "Bits of me, many bits, will dodge all funeral, / O Libitina-Persephone (Libitina is the Greek goddess of death and Persephone a Greek goddess of the underworld]..." "I shall be spoken where the wild flood Aufidus [a long, winding Roman River whose name was taken from the Greek word for snake) / Lashes, and Daunus [one of three mythical Greek brothers who conquered eastern Italy and named a portion of it after himself] ruled the parched farmland."

Speech After Long Silence

2011-08-28T16:46:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends,

And so another Ramadan has come and almost gone and NATO, Assad, the latest Al Kalifa, Netanyahu, et. al, have forced Muslims to find and worship in the mosque within, and the rest of us to offer the lame, symbolic shelter of our knotty prayers and feeble protest. As I write, Irene has bid a fond, gusty farewell--a reminder that aberrant man and nature work in consort.

This August, I've been reading George Herbert, possibly the greatest metaphysical poet England ever produced (forgive me Blake and Donne fans). But in this year of personal deconstruction and dissent, Herbert has helped me make my private assault on religion a reclamation. So have modern sojourners into a more bereft beyond--where icons hide in ruins like buried cans of pineapple found during a famine. Making do with less is still to have an All/Ah! At its most empty, post-Dover Beach life is still an extension of gnosis and thus never less than FULL.

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY AND AFTER

Though the great song return no more
There's keen delight in what we have:
The rattle of pebbles on the shore
Under the receding wave

--William Butler Yeats, 1932

Hence I have added Beckett to my backpack for the first time in years. He is adroit at the metaphysics of exhaustion. And he keeps me laughing at my own pilgrim pretensions:

"Do you feel like singing? said Camier
Not to my knowledge, said Mercier.
The rain was beginning again. But had it ever ceased?
Let us make haste, said Camier.
Why do you ask me that? said Mercier.
Camier seemed in no hurry to reply. Finally he said:
I hear singing.
They halted, the better to listen.
I hear nothing, said Mercier.
And yet you have good ears, said Camier, as far as I know.
Very fair, said Mercier.
Strange, said Camier.
Do you hear it still? said Mercier.
For all the world a mixed choir, said Camier.
Perhaps it's a delusion, said Mercier.
Possibly, said Camier."

--Samuel Beckett, Mercier and Camier, Grove Press, p. 16

Because Beckett-ian deconstruction has become such a necessary part of my life, it tempts all sorts of mockery of the constructs by which I have lived for decades. It works during Ramadan because it enjoins a fasting from conventional expectation.

"There are days, said Mercier, one is born every moment. Then the world is full of shitty little Merciers. It's hell. Oh but to cease!
Enough, said Camier. You look like a capital S. Ninety if a day.
Would I were, said Mercier. He wiped his hand on the seat of his trousers. He said, I'll start crawling any minute.
I'm off, said Camier.
Leaving me to my fate, said Mercier. I knew it.
You know my little ways, said Camier.
No, said Mercier, but I was counting on your affection to help me serve my time.
I can help you, said Camier, I can't resurrect you."

--Samuel Beckett, Mercier and Camier, Grove Press, p. 22

Into and out of this diminution comes a new grace, a refusal to give up on this tattered here and now as a land of opportunity:

Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

--William Butler Yeats, from "Among School Children," 1927

THE FOIL

If we could see below
The sphere of virtue, and each shining grace
As plainly as that above doth show;
This were the better sky, the brighter place.

God hath made stars the foil
To set off virtue; grief to set off sinning:
Yet in this wretched world we toil,
As if grief were not foul, nor virtue winning.

Hence, as Bawa once told me, "Despair was your way. If not for despair, worse would have happened to you. Now it is time to find a better way." Via despair, I practiced a stubborn intactness. The job was to always make the world from which we looked upward and outward a correlative of the original platform/departure point with "the better sky" of a "brighter place." Despite the current, sustained end-of-days tenor to earthly and human affairs, this birth/place still seems designed for maturity and the intransigence of my belief that "grief [sets] off sinning" and that "virtue [ought to be] winning." In other words, faith reduced to a naked hum of dis-content is still tropism and this a forward motion of faith. No wonder I take refuge in the rugged terrain of Japanese and Chinese poetry and these days the monastic disciplines of Herbert and other English metaphysicals.

For those of you who have been fasting this Ramadan, or wish you had done so, here is a poem about the accumulation of both fatigue and fathoming that usually occurs. This poem has a rugged, rigorous serenity. In other poems Herbert talks about everything that we experience or own being God's--even the nothingness we feel. As "His" property it is ordained--thus, Herbert says over and over, the highest extension of God and part of never-ending replenishment. I have found a more sinewy, non-sentimental splendor. At the end of this poem, we have the "gentle path" God of Christos--no more withered lands ("Throw away thy rod") and desolate cities ("Throw away thy wrath"). Pay no attention to that man on the cross ("Then let wrath remove; Love will do the deed: For with love, Stony hearts will bleed"). If nothing else, Ramadan tires us from and for wars. Drinks are on me!

DISCIPLINE

Throw away thy rod,
Throw away thy wrath:
O my God,
Take the gentle path.

For my heart's desire
Unto thine is bent:
I aspire
To a full consent.

Not a word or look
I affect to own,
But by book,
And thy book alone.

Though I fail, I weep:
Though I halt in pace,
Yet I creep
To the throne of grace.

Then let wrath remove;
Love will do the deed:
For with love
Stony hearts will bleed.

Love is swift of foot;
Love's a man of war,
And can shoot,
And can hit from far.

Who can scape his bow?
That which wrought on thee,
Brought thee low,
Needs must work on me.

Throw away thy rod;
Though man frailties hath,
Thou art God:
Throw away thy wrath.

--George Herbert (1593-1633)

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A Poem: "Citizenship"

2011-03-08T07:04:00.000-08:00

CITIZENSHIP
for Muhaiyaddeen Michael Green

1
--Don't I know you from somewhere, Sensi says.
--"The birds are still in flight," I answer
with Jack Spicer koan carried since college.
--Is that what you learned at Dover Beach?
--Yes, Sensi, first sighting after I lost my faith.
--How curious, grasshopper, faith that can be lost.
--I am always losing things.
--Thank Buddha, they are things you can find again
like car keys and birth certificates.
--You mean things left lying around the house, Sensi?
--Nothing is lost, just more or less salient
given the moment. What does Basho say?
"The ultimate jackpot:
Firefly breathes light on temple bell
to ring it."

2
--Grasshopper, what did you lose your faith in this time?
--My faith in a God whose name comes to mind
like the name of a prescription drug.
--A prescription for what?
--Memory loss.

3
--Is there any God other
than the one who can disappear
like a flock of birds headed south, Sensi asks.
--You mean the God that always returns?
--Ah, grasshopper, but does he have to go
for even a second?
--Not lately, Sensi.
--What is the name for this God?
--The Restorer, Sensi.
--I suppose one alias is as good as another.
Tell me another name this God goes by.
--The Beholder and Beholden, Sensi,
twins lost in the intransitive gaze
of all-consuming remembrance.

4
--Grasshopper, will we still meet like this
once the flames beckon to my bones
and you must find my original likeness?
--Your staff is always at hand, Sensi,
bringing the moon and mountains closer.
--You won't need a souvenir cup of ashes?
--The cup is for tea, Sensi, to drink to one another
to remind us the war is over.
--Some say it never started, grasshopper.
--Then they must be having a very good day.

5
--When you strike me gently with your staff, Sensi,
I feel like a fish nestled in the pelican's mouth
being carried in a candidacy for heaven.
--'You always hurt the one you love.'
--They say the Buddha presents the sword
that will kill him to his assassin.
--Remember to bow before using it, he says.
--Is that what your Buddha told you, Sensi?
--Mine took back the sword and asked,
'Don't you have a train to catch?'

6
--Grasshopper, what is the song the fish sings to the pelican?
--"Take My Heart With You Wherever You Go."
--Ah, the old songs. None like them.
Off with you now, no need to say goodbye.
--Sometimes when I'm walking, Sensi,
the mountain quotes you to me.
--Mountains are the last to go, grasshopper.
What words does the mountain attribute to me?
--"The birds are still in flight."

--David Federman, Ardmore, March 8, 2011

From Freedom to Free-dumb of Speech

2011-03-03T06:57:00.000-08:00

Yeah, I know I should be paying rapt attention to the latest developments in Egypt, Bahrain and Yemen. And I know I should be praying against any Franco-like defeat of the nascent republic in Libya by the same crushing force of mercenary thuggery as in Spain 1937. And, wait, let's not forget our daily bread of consternation for continuing Israeli war crimes in Gaza. Boy, if God put us here to find and drain aquifers of compassion, we're fulfilling our mission on earth and slowly turning our Earthen dessicated tear ducts into Martian deserts.

Nevertheless, the biggest fret on my mind this morning is landslide loss of reason and compassion manifest in Supreme Court's 8-to-1 landslide decision against Albert Snyder in his fight to stop criminal harassment by Christian zealots at GI funerals. If Baptists can wave "God hates fags!" signs with impunity across the street from churches where funeral services are being held for Iraq and Afghanistan war dead, why can professors be fired for calling Gaza bombings war crimes and genocide? When did the First Amendment cease to protect warranted outrage and intelligent dissent? When did it become thinly veiled, Supreme Court-guaranteed Second Amendment remedy used by hate groups to demonize foes and allow them to fire into dignified assemblies of those foes. Make no mistake. Westboro Baptist not only cried "Fire!" in a crowded theater; they set fire to it. Their hate speech was a form of open sniper fire. Albert Snyder was entitled to First Amendment protection more than Westboro Baptist Church because he was the victim of its harassment and rights abridgment. Hell, the church phoned the media and invited it to its hate fest.

I am disturbed by the inexorable encroachments of religious extremism and fundamentalism in our society. Bill O'Reilly called slain abortion doctor George Tiller "Tiller the Baby Killer" on 28 telecasts before someone took the hint and murdered him in his church. Of course, O'Reilly was quick to deplore the act and distance himself from any responsibility for it. But we all know in our heart of hearts that he is an accessory to the crime. My question remains: Was the unchecked use of incendiary language by a leading media figure a legal exercise of his First Amendment rights? If so, what does this say about freedom of speech? Is it only irrational hate-speech which enjoys this protection? I've seen Nobel Prize winners shamed into apologies for their angry condemnations of Gaza and West Bank indignities. Yet lawmakers openly hate-bait electorate to crimes against abortion clinics. They even legalize ostracism and hatred through the legislative process. When do words become bullets? When does slow, steady drip of contextualization for purposes of fear and prejudice further goals of demonization and incited hatred? When did the First Amendment become heavily-greased sliding board by which words are quickly converted into weapons used against the people and concepts they define?

We all feel an involuntary Pavlovian twinge of dread when we see or hear the words "Negro," "Jew" or "Communist." Call it historical conditioning. Now the twinges come with mere mention of "Muslim," "Gay," even "Zionist." I believe words that define ethnic groups or controversial philosophical concepts require semantic neutrality to function in rational discourse. The method of fascism is to deprive these essential classifying words of that neutrality by give them high hate-charges which magically desensitize users to the moral consequences of the demonization process.

Once weaponized, words for ethnic groups or key economic and philosophical concepts are put on a defensive from which they can never escape. How do we restore the near-sacred right of rational discourse to words once they are converted into highly charged units--either as epithets or euphemisms--of hate speech? Ideas like Medicare that on their own have vast majority support lose credibility once demonized with adjective of "Socialist," or "Marxist." So do those who espouse such ideas once they are labeled as "Socialists" or "Marxists."

To me, the Supreme Court has knowingly contributed to the weaponization of words that is being used to convert them from free to hate speech. What's a Jew being pursued by Nazis or a Palestinian pursued by Israelis going to call himself to merit re-humanization and the safety it brings? Demonization deprives the hated of rights to the refuge of synonyms such as "one of you," "humankind," "average Joes" to which most other groups have access. Fear-and-loathing semantics put groups and concepts into gulags that makes escape back to the mainland of rational discourse impossible.

The First Amendment was one of the fruits of the Enlightenment. Now it is being used as a cover for darkness.

NATION
One Family's Fight Against the Westboro Baptist Church
Mar 2, 2011 – 4:01 PM
AOL

Theunis Bates
Contributor
On March 10, 2006, more than 1,200 people gathered at St. John's Catholic Church in Westminster, Md., to say their farewells to Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder. The 20-year-old Marine had died a week earlier, when his Humvee rolled over in western Iraq while he was manning the gun turret.

His father, Albert Snyder, later told the Marine Corps Times how beautiful it was to see strangers come out on the streets of Westminster and salute the funeral procession as it drove to a nearby veterans cemetery. "I've never seen a funeral like this in my life," Snyder said. "It was just amazing to see."

Amy Davis, Baltimore Sun / MCT
Albert Snyder, center, supported by his attorney, Sean Summers, left, and Kansas City Attorney General Steve Six, speaks to the media after opening arguments in Snyder v. Phelps were made at the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 6.
But the presence of seven uninvited guests from Kansas meant that his memories of that day are forever tarnished and led to a long legal battle that ended with defeat today in the U.S. Supreme Court for Snyder and his family.

A small group of religious extremists from the Westboro Baptist Church traveled 1,100 miles from their home in Topeka to stage a shocking celebration outside St. John's. The group of adults and children waved signs declaring "Thank God for dead soldiers" and "God hates fags" and shouted offensive slogans -- part of their bizarre gospel, which states that soldiers will continue to die so long as America tolerates gays, Jews and Catholics.

Snyder didn't see those hate-spewing protesters that day. The church windows had been blocked out and the Patriot Guard Riders -- a team of motorcyclists who attend military funerals around the country and separate the Westboro mob from mourners -- shielded the cemetery. But he saw their crude signs later during television news reports. And two weeks after the funeral, he read a rant titled "The Burden of Marine Lance Cpl. Matthew A. Snyder" posted on the Westboro website.

The essay accused Matthew's parents of raising their son "for the devil" and teaching him about adultery and divorce. (His parents are separated.) It also said they supported "the largest pedophile machine in the history of the entire world, the Roman Catholic monstrosity." Snyder told CNN that he felt physically sick after read that online tirade.

The 55-year-old father of three has described himself in interviews as a quiet man who attempted to avoid confrontation all his life. But he wasn't prepared to stand by and allow the Phelps clan, who run the Westboro church, to slander his family. "They are very sick individuals," Snyder said to CNN. "It comes down to dignity. No one should be buried with what the Phelps did. Everyone deserves to be buried with dignity."

His fight back started straight away. On June 5, 2006, he sued the Westboro church for defamation, invasion of privacy and intentional infliction of distress. The suit didn't ask for money, but stated that the Phelps should pay emotional damages, Snyder's court costs as well as punitive damages for "reprehensible actions." Albert's plan was to cripple the church financially and put an end to its campaign of hate and bigotry.

A jury accepted Snyder's claim, and in 2007 his family was awarded $2.9 million in compensatory damages, plus $8 million in punitive damages for intentional infliction of emotional distress and intrusion upon seclusion. A year after that verdict, a federal judge in Baltimore reduced the total damages to $5 million.

But in 2009, that judgment was overturned by an appeals court in Richmond, Va., which ruled that Snyder would have to pay $16,000 toward the Phelps' legal costs. (Fox News' Bill O'Reilly offered to cover those costs.) Despite those massive setbacks, Albert refused to back down. His lawyers petitioned the Supreme Court, and in March 2010, it agreed to hear his case.

"[Albert] knows what Matt went through in Iraq, and he feels like he can't back down just because this is getting tough, because Matt didn't back down," Craig Trebilcock, one of two lawyers representing Snyder pro bono, told The Baltimore Sun last year. "He's tougher than when we started out. Kind of like something that's been hit so many times, it's become tougher."

Snyder hasn't yet commented on today's Supreme Court ruling -- his attorney Sean Summers said, "It's not the decision [Snyder] wanted -- he realized there was a fair risk that he might lose the case. Albert said last year that the tireless support he received from people across the country, and from his two daughters, inspired him to keep fighting." His legal bills have been covered thanks to donations from thousands of people, meaning that the battle against Westboro won't bankrupt the electronics salesman, who earns $43,000 a year.

"It kind of restores your faith in mankind after dealing with this wacko church," Snyder told The Baltimore Sun last March. "Win or lose, I'll know that I did everything I could for Matt, and for all the soldiers and Marines who are still coming home dying."

A Day in the Teaching Life

2011-03-02T07:20:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I struggled all day with how to make my English reading and writing class at the Community College of Philadelphia both technically instructive and intellectually inspiring. And I had to arrive at what I'll call a "two-state solution" to my problem. Henceforth, I decided, the writing portion would be very basic, focused on mastery of simple structure and technical proficiency. The reading portion, however, would be far more adventuresome, intended to goad long, hard thought about one's life and times.

Today, I will begin to take my new two-pronged approach. The first half of the 3-hour class will be a back-to-basics writing workshop; the second half will be a reading and discussion workshop in which they explore notions about heroism by studying people unknown to them whose bravery made them stand against their society.

On Monday, we studied Martin Niemoller (1892 - 1982), a highly-decorated German U-boat captain during WWI who became a clergyman in the 1930s and ended his life as a pacifist and passionate advocate of nuclear disarmament. In between, he was thrown in Dachau for differences of opinion with Hitler over Third Reich infringement on religious freedoms. Yet his fights with the Nazis never rose above theological disputes. Indeed, in 1939, while in a concentration camp, he volunteered for duty in the German Navy and encouraged his three sons to join the armed forces. It was only in 1946 when he attended the Nuremberg War Trials that he realized the full horror of the Hitler regime and denounced his personal failure to fully condemn his government for its racial policies. From then on, his "radicalization" was steady and inexorable. During the Vietnam War, he visited Hanoi and praised Ho Chi Minh. He protested America's bombings throughout all of Southeast Asia. He died, calling himself a socialist on the road to becoming an "anarchist."

Niemoller came to my attention for a poem about the need for political resistance attributed to him that is really just an assemblage of lines from speeches and lectures he gave after WWII:

First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out

because I was not a Communist.

Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out

because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out

because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out

because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.

Given Labor's struggles in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana and Michigan, plus the domino-like spread of uprisings in the Middle East, I thought the poem would speak to, if not for, my students.

Today, the instigation will continue.

English 098 - 099

Mr. Federman

March 2, 2011

Reading/Discussion Assignment

Profiles in Courage #2, William Stafford's "The Mob Scene at McNeil"

If someone asked me to name the bravest group of people, I would not answer soldiers, police, or fire fighters. Yes, these are all men of courage who face danger every day. But these are men who are seen as heroes and applauded for their bravery.

No, I would have to say the bravest group of people for me are pacifists. Also known as conscientious objectors (COs), these men refuse to serve in armies and fight in wars--no matter how noble or just these wars may appear to be. So they are rarely applauded for their bravery.

To the contrary, COs are often seen as cowards and traitors. Sometimes they are subjected to the kind of violence which they themselves vow to resist. Imagine being so committed to the idea of non-violence that you refuse to serve in your country's military, even in the midst of a war like World War II that most men think was necessary. Imagine being so sworn to non-violence that you will not resort to violence (except, perhaps, minimal self-defense) if you are attacked for your beliefs.

Meet pacifist and poet William Stafford (1914 - 1993). From 1942 to 1946, he was interned in CO camps across America--fighting fires, planting trees, helping with irrigation and soil conservation projects. After the war, he wrote a book about his experiences as a pacifist, and submitted it as his master's thesis to the University of Kansas, in his home state. Called "Down in the Heart: Peace Witness in War Time," the book was published by the Brethren Publishing House in 1947. The title refers to an old spiritual, "I Know God Down in My Heart." In other words, the principles by which Stafford lives come from deep down in his heart.

The book's first chapter, "The Mob Scene at McNeil," describes a Sunday afternoon where a small group of COs are allowed a day off in a small Arkansas town to pursue private pleasures such as painting, writing and reading. While engaged in these activities, a small group of towns people gather who know they are COs and ask them about what they're doing. Within a matter of minutes, all cordiality disappears and the situation escalates into a confrontation between locals and COs. Greatly outnumbered and faced with physical violence, Stafford and his friends try to pacify the crowd and escape harm.

Read this chapter and try to put yourself in Stafford's shoes. What would you be feeling? How would you behave? Do you see why I think he belongs to the bravest group of people I know? Or do you think he is wrong for refusing to serve his country in a war that is universally seen as honorable and necessary?

If you feel the later, know you're not alone. I've had passionate debates with friends who think COs are the equivalent of "spiritual freeloaders," safely removed from the battlefield while their neighbors are dying to protect their freedom to refuse to bear arms. While I think Stafford was the ultimate patriot, I have had friends tell me he was a coward. What do you think? More importantly, if you put Christ's teachings of forgiveness and pacifism above all other beliefs, what would you do if asked to fight another Hitler?

After reading this excerpt from "Down in the Heart," we'll hold a class discussion and exchange views about Stafford's views and actions on their behalf. As you read, try to recall any situations in your own life where your deepest beliefs pitted you against common belief and public opinion. What did you do? Did you remain steadfast? Did you find a way to compromise that still left you with your dignity?

Poem: "THE BASHO VARIATIONS"

2011-02-12T14:46:00.001-08:00

Every death occurs on Easter.

So do not think

your life didn't matter.

Every birth occurs on Christmas.

So never say

you have nothing to live for.

Just three numbers count:

zero, one and two.

One in the center like a throne.

Zero the womb and tomb.

Two God and grail sought.

One father and son reunion.

One is neither right nor left

east or west.

One is all there is.

Christmas in the east.

Easter in the west.

One long day in between.

You will not live to see

everything you hoped for.

Soon hope will be reason enough.

Stop pacing to and fro for the purpose

that only comes to you

while resting.

When all else fails

the rain stops

to dry your eyes.

Even if you succeed

in killing yourself

your life will have mattered.

Just when you think

you have nothing more to say

you will want to write that down, too.

The emptiness is not empty pocket.

The emptiness is giving away

your last dime.

In this building

the number 13 is like every other:

a floor with friends living on it.

Just the thought of carolers

trudging through the thick snow

steeps tea and ages wine.

Tahrir Square lends a glow to everything.

Even the partying students at Villanova TV pep rally

are celebrating liberation.

There is still a chance to save Jesus

for an Easter

befitting his Christmas.

Every day brings the chance

to save Jesus from house arrest

in scripture and tormented worship.

Jesus is having a bad day

Mark and Matthew both wrote

hearing Jesus cry, "Why me?"

Luke swore his teacher

was having a good Friday

sharing heaven even in his last breath.

Love for each other

ends grief and rolls away the stone

stuck stubbornly at the mouth of the tomb.

Suddenly seeing the cardinal erupt in red

and snapping out of deep depression

is the same as seeing Christ risen.

--David Federman, Ardmore, February 12, 2011

Matthew Arnold's Cry from the Cross

2011-02-05T06:11:00.000-08:00

Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach," written in 1867, is generally felt to be the opening of the door to modern poetry--in theme, in tone, in tension. Certainly, Spicer's poetry--with its long, restless, coast watches and undercurrent of surf sounds--is unthinkable without this incredible lyric poem. In 1993, poet Ed Dorn, who wrote about the affliction of distance and wander-lust as ways, means and ends in themselves, talked about this poem with the deepest understanding I have ever found. I thought I'd share his remarks and let you use them as a lens or prism to guide your own reading of this most bravely beautiful poem of the 19th century and, possibly, all time. Before doing say, let me share some thoughts about "Dover Beach."

For me, the poem is Christ's cry from the cross, "O God, why hast Thou forsaken me?" sounded as a necessarily unanswered, unanswerable question by each man who seeks to end a perpetual sense of solitary confinement in what Alan watts called "the skin-encapsulated ego." Other gospels have sweeter, more reconciled cries from Christ. But for most men, this is the most resonance and relevant cry. Arnold ends his poem with that tragic sense of estrangement from purpose of meaning--other than an existential one. Is there peace? Is there comfort?

To find it, I have had to go forward past the consolations of religion.

Waiting for Godot on a New Jersey beach

As I re-read "Dover Beach" through Dorn's eyes, I sense how the Zen idea of no-mind is the only cure or relief for this very modern sense of being stranded; this existential gulag-ization of self that makes Rumi, Yunnes Emre, Han Shan, Kabir and our own local manifestation Walt Whitman such medicinal marijuana. God has become for me the peaceful, practiced gaze into all this distance where, as the Zen poets say, "mountains walk and talk with us." "By now the clouds know me," writes a Chinese poet. These clouds are not found in a Golgotha sky.

Any other God but the pantheist God merged with his creation is dead for me--certainly the God of religion who sends sons to die on crosses or summons them on stallions to the 7th heaven (this world, then, of necessity, becoming the 8th heaven of return).

The Dis-consolations of Religion

Religion, I have decided, has about as much to do with God as guns do peace. The temptation is to make religion a means of deliverance, of Logos-delivery, a necessary evil (disguised as good). So we put "In God We Trust" on the coinage and "one nation under God" in the oath sworn to nation. We imprison God in our money, in our patriotism. We abrogate him to greed, to hatred. Our founding fathers were right to want separation between church and state. We need to protect that separation now more than ever before. We need to see that separation as a courtesy of freedom and a rule of the road.

In short: Atheism is no longer disbelief for me. It is a blessed exhaustion. It is a required commutation from solitary confinement and self-inflicted, self-perpetuated duality. It is a necessary remedy for religion. Religion, to me, creates an unbridgeable distance where we wander like Forrest Gumps on a pointless pilgrimage that never ends or reaches any destination (unless the ground under our own feet). Atheism is a letting go of God grasped with any but empty hands and grateful open hearts. God is the emergence of the soul (which when exercised is the fullest faculty of comprehension) in daily life. Otherwise we live in alienation between source and its solace of the here and now. Indeed, our despoliation of the here and now is tantamount to sacrilege.

The Mercy of failure

Ultimately, of course, atheism is provisional, as much a means and therefore illusion as the father-god it seeks to deny. True atheism is severance from deity, from God-conceptualization, from abridgment of consciousness through enslavement to scripture, doctrine and creed. We should, it seems to me, see "Dover Beach" as an early lesson in sheer looking and listening--learning, as Thoreau wrote, from sojourning and as sojourners. It is no accident that all of Christ's sermons and parables are preached on the open road. The teaching is itinerant and portable--a movable feast. Travel is implied by the Way. We still have much to learn on this quickly dwindling planet.

Is Egypt today's Zion?

How ironic that Egypt, the place of so-called bondage and captivity, is now Zion and, as such, freer than the Judeas founded by its displaced slaves. Those Judeas are Judases to the Christ found here and now. Pharaoh, my flat screen taught me yesterday, must be deposed by his own people not defeated in war. If there is a battle to be waged, it is, as my teacher said, a private, inner jihad which no one with any sense or decency would want to wage in public. The freedom-hungry crowds in Tahrir Square have learned more from America than any Americans have for generations. And it has done so without guns or any appendix to free speech that would think speech needed gun guardianship.

Last night, Mo and I watched Arthur Penn's "Little Big Man"--an artful apology and first tiny act of restitution for the de-Zion-ization of America. During one of the slaughter scenes, Mo covered her eyes and asked, "Did this actually happen?" "It's factual," I said. "How can men do this to one another?" she asked. The movie later answered by reminding her (and me) that among the Cheyennes the term "human being" was reserved for natives.

Now to the inspiring matter at hand:

ED: Oh well, sure, maybe that is Romantic, then. I don't know. But if anybody's using the term Romantic, and they don't mean Sheets and Kelly [both laughing], Byron, Whitman, Coleridge, actually I'm not sure what they mean, really, when it comes down to it. I'm not sure I do. I think that's a term that was probably dead by Browning's time, but it stays around. Browning was the last manifestation, if you want to buy, say, Eliot's idea that what that actually produced was a fractionalization of the consciousness and a discontinuity of rational morality and all of that stuff. And you know, you're passing by one of the great poets in the language, of course, who apparently was not infected by the virus of mental dislocation, and I'm talking about Tennyson. But then you finally get to Browning, who somehow managed to build out of this wrecked edifice these long, utterly incomprehensible narratives, that nobody ever figured out--in some sense they never have been figured out--but were compelling enough to read because of the power of the language, and a few crazies still read them. But that's it. That's the end of it. And to me, the poem that puts the nail in the whole thing, and relieves us from ever having to deal with it any more, is "Dover Beach." That, I think, is the tract. And I don't know how it works. I don't know whether Arnold said to himself he was doing this, or whether he said to himself, "I'm just going to write the most beautiful poem ever written, and that's going to be it." Finished. That's it. And then we get into culture as the stuff of poetic concern and procedure. And that's Pound and Eliot, really. I mean, in my simple mind, in my head that's how I hang this all on the graph; that's how I keep it straight.

JW: But what he's putting the nail in is the notion of dislocation?

ED: Well, it's like discontinuity, dislocation, and fragmentation, and the idea that not to know can be a solace and can actually be permitted. And then after that, of course, it's encouraged.

JW: Required.

ED: Of course. And I just think "Dover Beach" summarizes the heart and the flow of feeling of the great tragedy of having lost track and having been set adrift, in its burning beauties. It's like a low flame, but intensely hot, of being lost for good. But nevertheless, take heart if it's possible, if you can find a way. It's lonely out there, the universe is dead, we're all that's left. And that's it, you know. I mean it's so conscious in what it's doing. To me that's the ultimate poem that knows. That poem knows, absolutely knows.

JW: Do you think he's putting his finger on causes and sources?

ED: I don't think he cares, no. It's not like that because, you see, he never wrote another poem of anywhere near that power. And it's not a poem you would have thought he would have written. It's strange. I mean, it's like one of those things, you know--"Matthew Arnold wrote this?"

DOVER BEACH

By Matthew Arnold

The sea is calm tonight,
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night air!

Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Agean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

1867

Is Arizona the Mississippi of the New Millennium?

2011-01-09T07:39:00.000-08:00

I'm back after long silence to grasp at some straws from the cyclone-jostled hay rick of American democracy. But it is hardly coincidental that on the same Saturday Rep. Gabrielle Giffords is shot, headlines blare about an Arizona Latino Studies class in Tucson being declared illegal under a new law that bans ethnic studies and classes stressing minority group (read: Hispanics) empowerment. Is Arizona the Mississippi of the New Millennium? I think so. Only this time the Negroes are Hispanics and, if any can be rustled up, Muslims.

Further compounding the perfect storm of strong circumstantial evidence of race war is the fact that the slain federal judge, a Bush appointee no less, had ruled against provisions of Arizona's notorious anti-immigration law. Throw the You Tube entries by the white supremacist shooter which deplored local Chicano illiteracy into the mix and you've got a Category 5 storm of racial hatred blowing through Tucson.

So I want all my bothersome Zionist friends to stop pestering me with paranoid rants about imagined anti-Semitic plots against Jews here and in Europe and focus on the many very real, provable plots against Hispanics and Arabs. Jews are part of those plots--both here in America and in Israel--with their Islamiphobia. Face it, my 'Hymie' brothers and sisters, 'Spics' and 'Towel Heads' are the new 'kikes' in America. If you're Hispanic or Arab, every day holds the threat of a Kristalnacht for you. Jewish paranoia is simply nostalgia for a past in no immediate danger of replay.

P.S., Our own sordid history of hate is the final and most compelling reason for our immediate exit from Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen. We have no right to pretend to bring freedoms to people when we threaten the freedoms of those very same people within our own borders. Of course, human rights is not what all our wars are about, are they?

Arizona Latino Studies Class Declared Illegal Under New State Law

Posted on January 8, 2011 by Moral Low Ground| Leave a comment

by Brett Wilkins

Classes taught in the Tucson Unified School District’s Mexican-American program have been declared illegal under a new state law that took effect January 1st. HB 2281 bans public schools from offering courses that advocate ethnic solidarity, promote the overthrow of the US government, or cater to specific ethnic groups. Proponents of the new law say it is necessary to check a program that promotes divisions based on ethnicity and advocates separatism and racial preferences. But critics counter that the ethnic studies program is intended to make students aware of their roots and proud of who they are, thus making them better members of American society.

Tucson High School teacher Maria Federico Brummer, center, teaches American government from a Mexican-American perspective at Tucson High Magnet School. (Photo: David Sanders/Education Week)

Arizona is more infamous for its harsh anti-immigration law, SB 1070, that gives police broad and intrusive powers to demand proof of citizenship from people they believe may be in the country illegally. That controversial 2010 law has been attacked as discriminatory, since it is highly unlikely that an undocumented immigrant from, say, Sweden would be targeted but extremely likely that Latinos– whether here illegally or not– would be harassed.

Critics of all colors say SB 1070 is a racist law.

Less known but equally insidious is HB 2281, the ethnic studies ban signed into law by Republican governor Jan Brewer last year, just weeks after SB 1070.

Whereas SB 1070 was designed to harass and expel human beings deemed “undesirable” by the state of Arizona, HB 2281 is about controlling people’s minds. It denies students the freedom to learn about their history, their culture– their very identities. Dr. Randall Amster writes:

“There’s a word for what Arizona is attempting to do here: ethnocide. It is similar to genocide in its scope, but it reflects the notion that it is an ethnic and/or cultural identity under assault more so than physical bodies themselves. By imposing a curriculum that forbids the exploration of divergent cultures while propping up the dominant one, there’s another process at work here, what we might call ethnonormativity. This takes the teachings of one culture – the colonizer’s – and makes it the standard version of history while literally banning other accounts, turning the master narrative into the “normal” one, and further denigrating marginalized perspectives. America’s racialized past abounds with such examples of oppressed people being denied their languages, histories and cultures, including through enforced indoctrination in school systems.”

No holiday in Arizona until the 1990s.

Arizona, a notoriously conservative state that didn’t even observe the Martin Luther King Jr holiday until after being shamed by worldwide condemnation and boycott in the early 1990s, favors the rugged individualist frontiersman narrative that is at odds with the more communitarian, decidedly leftist worldview espoused in the “illegal” Mexican-American classes. Again, Dr. Amster:

“The libertarian and individualistic foundations of Western culture are viewed as iconic in Arizona, and it is no coincidence that the more communitarian impulses of Raza [Latino] peoples are denigrated as politically dangerous and pedagogically bereft. Again, the worldview of the oppressor is normalized in its rugged individualism and attempts to break down any movement toward solidarity and unified action among people of the disfavored class. This also expresses contemptuous judgment toward solidarity-based movements grown in the Western world, including the rise of union organizing, anti-globalization and antiwar activism and the mobilizations of people against totalitarianism in the Eastern bloc nations. What the Arizona legislature completely fails to grasp is that individual identity arises out of cultural consciousness – in other words, that it is ethnic solidarity in itself that provides people with the grounding necessary to know who they are as individuals.”

Scary stuff for reactionaries.

The progressive, humanist values of many of the Mexican-American classes threaten the reactionary, conservative mores that Arizona’s leaders wish to instill in students. John Huppenthal, the state’s new schools chief, sat in on one of Tucson’s Mexican-American classes and was appalled to see Benjamin Franklin vilified as a racist and a photo of Che Guevara, regarded by tens of millions of Latinos as a hero of liberation but hated by reactionaries as a communist subversive, hanging on the wall. Assigned reading such as “The Pedagogy of the Oppressed” and “Occupied America” is loathed for fostering a sense of oppression and mistreatment among Latino youths.

But it doesn’t take a book to teach Arizona Latinos they’re being oppressed. With laws like SB 1070 and HB 2281 on the books, the oppression is right in front of their faces. Banning ethnic studies classes will only increase resentment against the very people that claim they’re trying to avoid inter-ethnic tensions. And by denying students the right to learn about their heritage, Arizona makes a mockery of the American freedoms it is so keen to promote at the expense of alternative narratives. “Who are the true Americans here– those embracing our inalienable rights or those trying to diminish them?” asked Augustine Romero, director of student equity for Tuscon schools. “There’s a fierce anti-Latino sentiment in this state,” he told the New York Times. “These courses are about justice and equity, and what is happening is that the Legislature is trying to narrow the reality of those things.”

THE MAXIMS OF MEDIOCRITY

2010-11-19T08:47:00.000-08:00

THE MAXIMS OF MEDIOCRITY: Glimpses of Post-Lapsarian Life

It is morning. The sky is a powdery white.

Days no longer loom with prospects

that deserve a deeper pigment or pang.

The blues of night and day

no longer creep beyond the whispered wavelengths

of the creaks and sighs of a fond familiar.

Summoned by the poppied aroma of fresh-brewed coffee

you trip over conga drum and African face mask

strewn in your path like thorns

as if their only use now is dishevelment.

Once or twice there was a magic in the air

as you thumped on the drum

or stared at yourself in the bathroom mirror

through the mask now showing signs

of dog-chew distraction and cat-scratch curiosity.

Plundering by pets is the most common fate

of objects left in attics and garages

that were once souvenirs of a sacredness

that made you list "Brahman"

before you started drawing blanks

as your most fervent career choice.

Yes, I am my brother's keeper

as long as he acts like a brother

and not one more mutha that I know

who votes Republican.

There are days you hardly think of God at all

or any of the latest correlatives like Ramana Maharshi

by which he is known. His calling card

with you name on it as partner

is issued to every member of the firm

ament

he founded for days like this when it is

all or nothing

less

--David Federman, Ardmore, September 19, 2010

Coming to HBO--the new post-apocalypse series for women, "Mad Maxine"

2010-10-17T09:26:00.000-07:00

The soccer moms and cheerleader assassins are about to inherit high office throughout America, writes Maureen Dowd in today's NY Times. Wait until you see these Bella Abzugs of the Right strut their stuff. Bronx bravado is nothing compared to Reno rage. Now we get to be cowed by the wives of all those orange grove owners like those in "Grapes of Wrath." What did you think these women did all day? Read their bibles and preach tolerance and compassion to their menfolk? They're going to show those simpering husbands of theirs what real wives do to rule the unruly. Get ready for a new post-apocalypse HBO series called "Mad Maxine" and watch her take to the open road in her hoverchair armed with magnum to mow down all opposition. How good, the satanist in me says, to watch the final distinctions between men and women disappear in the false equality of ignorance and harmony of hate.

OP-ED COLUMNIST

Playing All the Angles

By MAUREEN DOWD

Published: October 16, 2010

LAS VEGAS

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

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As I sat above the Hoover Dam under the broiling sun, I was getting jittery.

There was Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona, speaking at the dedication of a bridge linking Arizona and Nevada 890 feet above the Colorado River.

As the politicians droned on and my Irish skin turned toasty brown, I worried that Governor Brewer might make a citizen’s arrest and I would have to run for my life across the desert. She has, after all, declared open season on anyone with a suspicious skin tone in her state.

We are in the era of Republican Mean Girls, grown-up versions of those teenage tormentors who would steal your boyfriend, spray-paint your locker and, just for good measure, spread rumors that you were pregnant.

These women — Jan, Meg, Carly, Sharron, Linda, Michele, Queen Bee Sarah and sweet wannabe Christine — have co-opted and ratcheted up the disgust with the status quo that originally buoyed Barack Obama. Whether they’re mistreating the help or belittling the president’s manhood, making snide comments about a rival’s hair or ripping an opponent for spending money on a men’s fashion show, the Mean Girls have replaced Hope with Spite and Cool with Cold. They are the ideal nihilistic cheerleaders for an angry electorate.

Seated next to Brewer at the bridge dedication was Harry Reid, the slight, mild-mannered, 70-year-old Senate majority leader who has wandered into the surprise fight of his career — a race where the fur is flying.

“Man up, Harry Reid,” Sharron Angle taunted him at their Las Vegas debate here Thursday night. That’s not an idle insult, coming from a woman who campaigns at times with a .44 Magnum revolver in her 1989 GMC pickup.

With casino red suit and lipstick, Angle played the Red Queen of the Mad Hatter tea party, denouncing career politicians and ordering “Off with your head!” and “Down with government benefits!” Even sober and smiling beneath her girlish bangs, the 61-year-old Angle had the slightly threatening air of the inebriated lady in a country club bar, tossing off outrageous statements and daring anyone to call her on them.

The debate between the former boxer and the former competitive weight lifter, the soft-spoken Mormon and the outspoken Christian, was a source of fascination because the rivals perfectly represent the two caricatures of the midterms: The Washington incumbent and master of back-room deals who’s been around forever and lost touch with people versus the wacky new-breed Tea Party challenger who’s hiding from and hating on the press, spouting a lot of weird stuff and vowing to do what Barack Obama didn’t: Shake up Washington.

The senator began the debate with a gentle reminiscence about his mother, who took in wash from the brothels in scruffy Searchlight, Nev.

Angle could have told the poignant story of her German immigrant great-grandmother who died trying to save laundry hanging on the clothesline in a South Dakota prairie fire, which Angle wrote about in her self-published book, “Prairie Fire.” But instead the former teacher and assemblywoman began hurling cafeteria insults. “I live in a middle-class neighborhood in Reno, Nevada,” she said. “Senator Reid lives in the Ritz-Carlton in Washington, D.C.”

Reid did not man up enough to mock Angle’s nutty assertion that Shariah law exists in Dearborn, Mich., and Frankford, Tex. (a town that hasn’t existed since 1975). But he did rebut Angle’s inane contention that health insurers should not have to cover anything, talking about how important it was to be covered on mammograms and colonoscopies.

“If you do colonoscopies,” he said, “colon cancer does not come ’cause you snip off the things they find when they go up and — no more.”

“Well,” Angle replied tartly, “pink ribbons are not going to make people have a better insurance plan.”

Angle has been pressing the case, underwritten by Karl Rove’s operation and other conservative groups that have made the majority leader their No. 1 target, that Reid must be punished for being in a socialist triumvirate with Nancy Pelosi and President Obama. In the debate, she went for the jugular, asking him how he became “one of the richest men in the Senate” after coming from Searchlight “with very little.”

Reid, who cloaks his ambition and brass knuckles under a mousy facade, looked as if she had slapped him. He called her “my friend,” but clearly did not think of her as his “pet,” as he unfortunately dubbed Chris Coons, the Delaware opponent of the bewitching Christine O’Donnell.

He said that was “really kind of a low blow,” adding that he had been a successful lawyer before becoming a pol, and “did a very good job in investing.”

After the debate was over, Angle scurried away and so did I — in a different direction. I was feeling jittery again. If she saw me, she might take away my health insurance and spray-paint my locker.

Before saving the world I like to save myself from and for it

2010-10-11T06:08:00.000-07:00

Dear Aha,

I'll stay short and (bitter)sweet.

Last night, I ended my day by reading front-page Sunday NY Times account of a Bronx gang-battering of gays so brutal that I found myself running out of cheeks to turn and wanting to famish sudden blood-thirst with steely-eyed, in-your-face broom-handle sodomies of macho straights.

This morning, I begin, or long to begin, for a return to the golden, or hearts-of-gold, standard. We are about to need the capital of compassion, forbearance and love. That is what I mean by the hearts-of-gold standard: the stubborn, ineradicable residuum of virtue. Adopt this standard--even if you are the only one you know who does so. Nothing, a Buddhist I listened to the other morning, feels and does as much good as ungovernable faith in mankind. Goodness is the flesh and bone of such being and beings. That was his working definition of hope. Mine is to return to CCP class on Wednesday against all odds of succeeding.

What was it I was thinking when I awoke the other morning? "The heart is the only chakra you will need from this point on." That's a central bank with God-backed unlimited funds from which you can draw night and day. No foreclosure signs on that earth overlooked by its cloudless blue-sky horizon.

The daily commute is this--from zero to One. As zeroes, we swig oil and anti-depressants, keep the Metamucil handy to soften our bowels, worry about being down to our last $5 million and scratch in the hard earth for soft touches and present ease. There is no present tense as long as we are tense. As Ones, we are taken by giving, given into taking pause, and able to laugh every time Kinky the Parrot interrupts our latest fetishistic appeasement of god or guilt with squawks of "Schmuck!"

Back to the daily transport from lost-in-hate to lost-in-love with greeting from Han Shan:

Cartographers of body, heart, mind and soul: Get thy bearings straight!

Love,

David

For Mr. Lennon

2010-10-10T10:25:00.000-07:00

ABSENCE NOTES

some hallmarks for John Lennon's 70th birthday 10/09/10

You could get used to love

with or without desire.

Soul stem or cock root

your choice of pivots for

the one-trick pony of the needy heart.

Guess who I saw in my dream last night?

Nikita Khruschev.

He came to borrow a book

circumstances implied only I had.

"Glad I had the last copy," I told him.

"It's the first copy," he corrected.

The earth needs to haunt our dreams

to unfurl through all of space like a parachute

that lands us softly

in a life on earth.

John Lennon went 5 years without writing 1 song

then 15 of them in 3 weeks

sitting on a Bermuda beach

talking to Yoko every day on the phone

back in the later days of sky-high long distance rates.

You could get used to beauty.

Global warming

that stops at room temperature

and leaves any boiling points

to be reached by teas

served to stop wars.

This body is a haunted house

filled with ghosts of ambitions

for riches, women and

Buddhahood.

You could get used to splendor

standing still as trees

on windless days.

You could get used to splendor

stopped still as breath

the morning borrows

in reciprocal awe.

If the best of you is birthless

then deathward is not exactly

where you are headed

as you retrace your steps

back to the owning light.

Full moon matches full sun

in less glandular eruptions

and less grandiose efflorescence

of light to read by.

God is man-sized salience

on the surface of the brain

sharing all he knows

in continued perceptual prowess.

Praise is whatever is seen

once desire becomes wisdom

in no need of causation

or in any danger of cessation.

Night is an intimacy of day

passion focused to a single fruited flame

bursting with sweetness

from the sugars of sentience.

Guess who I saw in a dream tonight.

Nikita Kruschev come to return a book

of prayers common to moments

beyond hot pursuit of joy or despair.

"I liked the part where heroism is hearing

and hell cools to a heaven of cliffless heights," he says.

"I liked also the part where the drowning man rises

and bobs like a cork

on the surface of a sea with towless depths."

"You always were a sucker for happy endings," I tell him.

"What ends well must have begun well," he says.

"Thanks for reminding me."

--David Federman, Ardmore, October 10, 2010

CPAP SAMADHIS

2010-09-24T06:49:00.000-07:00

for Sal and all the other sleep technicians at Bryn Mawr Hospital

The heart is the place where the soul sings.

A good night's sleep should be added to the Bill of Rights

The retina is the highest-order light receptor in the great chain of being. Bright, burning sands on Mars, shimmering vapors on Venus, luminous gases on Mercury, frozen mists on Saturn all delight to tales of human light reception.

Have you served the Gnosis lately? Did you keep its light burning for all who seek it?

There is nothing to fear. Every shadow in Plato's cave is dancing.

The light at the end of the tunnel is that of a Motel 6, kept on through darkest night and deepest fog for your heaven-on-earth landing.

When the heart rate reduces to 25 beats per minute, the bifurcated self can no longer function. All then and there is REMS of indivisible contentment, the human-equivalent of cat purring. Do not make any decisions pertaining to life or death, war or peace, without being in this state or the ability to restore it.

True sleep is your first lesson in death without, or other than, dying.

Welcome to immortality. Deed it to your children through love.

The Northern Lights are to space what the Beatles were to rock and roll.

The bullying 'I am' gives way to humble awe which, in turn, reveals the All. If you learn to truly sleep while living, awakening will be a daily occurrence. Where could one go other than that shared heaven of REMS? Learning to sleep is learning to die. Learning to die is learning to wake.

I dreamt of LSD buddies from college and assured them we could live drug-free of the burdens of duality. Clear-gaze sobriety is a form of samadhi. Don't be fooled by its unprepossessing air; The red wheel barrow is at worst a symbol of and at the very least an invitation to ecstasy.

13.

Go from ruins to runes and count your blessings.

14.

The new math: Two minus one = One. One plus one = One. One times one = One. One divided by one = One

15.

Keep warm by the light of dreams. Listen to the deep-REMS tales of the elders gathered by the campfires and under the canopy of merged sun, star and moonlight. Each beam of light strums an invisible guitar.

The Gnosis is a work in progress. Nothing can stop its spread. Nothing would want to.

If you must pray to a God other than or outside the expansive, all-encompassing Self, ask that Deity for a good night's sleep. The universe is the issue from the greatest night's sleep ever known.

--David Federman, Ardmore, September 24, 2010

My First Day As Messiah

2010-08-10T07:11:00.000-07:00

Yes, Virginia, Jesus drank some of the wine he provided for those weddings. And you haven't lived until you try his tuna salad. In the mean time, a poem about the self I seem to be these days.

MY FIRST DAY AS MESSIAH

My feet can't seem to touch the ground.

Even in Gucci loafers

I feel barefoot and bidden to love. However,

I could use a pedicure.

The store-bought cucumber shines like a mint Double eagle.

I'm living in a Vemeer painting.

As my mother once said, and only once,

"Today even I feel beautiful."

I am given a choice of forebodings

and guaranteed a clairvoyant's absolute certainty

with either of them. I can predict

the worst down day in Wall Street history

or that my girl friend's urgent surgery

will be completely successful.

Once I have chosen

I notice there is no news

of a wedding massacre in Pakistan

or any roadside bombings in Afghanistan.

I keep waiting for a mood-mangling headline,

then my girlfriend says,

"I feel no pain today.

Let's fill the void with pleasure."

The whole world feels like pleasure.

There is no before and after.

There's no beginning or end.

We are waving to one another

in perpetual deja vu.

I know everybody from some place

and they know me. I feel like a photograph

kept on everybody's person--

you know the one:

that bemused guru's picture pasted on the fare meter

of every Hindu taxi in Mumbai,

or folded 100 times into a Muslim's billfold

to present a simulacrum of the formless.

In any case, the bent savior's semblance now serves

to simulate an insect's honeycombed view

of the incarnation.

God is speaking. Something in bird language

only cats can discern. Something the wind scratches

on the dried summer parchment of a thousand leaves.

All this talk about grails gets on his nerves

I imagine my wise old aunt Sophie saying.

A grail is a water glass

her husband says sounding like Jean Cocteau.

I take it from there by thinking

If you live long enough

you can leave your dentures in it overnight

then chew on your dreams the next morning.

When you put them back in your mouth

they leave no sign they spent the night shining in water

and lighting the world. Hell,

it's what any self-respecting object would do

given half a chance

to live up to its name.

Time to disembark heaven.

Time to quit hell.

Time to be moored to earth

which is the main land in between.

Driving on the isthmus bridge

with bright bay waters on both sides

as blinding as a sherif's badge,

I am summoned by blaze and brilliance

to ubiquitous second chances

in the first, filial world.

Squint gives way to scan.

I am deputized in the name of

sight, sound and smell.

Some dashboard voice tells me

to pay back blue to the heavens

where God is said to be hiding

(if you think him silly enough

to stand separate from the scenes he imagines).

Some radio announcer

commands me to pay back green to the earth

where I will be buried

(when the soul has drained this cup).

Somewhere in the same world I am enjoying

a bulldozer is prowling an orchard grove

looking for walls that are no match for brute force.

After the demolition its engine purrs

uprooted trees an offering of sorts

mice to be ridden for the men of these parts.

It just wouldn't be an opportune day on earth

without an eviction of a family

whose scripture must be proven wrong

so that others reciting from a competing compendium

of myth, madcap and hearsay

may be entitled to thank god for the hillside view.

The haves and the have-nots long

for a seventh-day world

where their children can meander safely

no way on earth that leads to loss.

But for now midnight comes two hours early

called curfew as long as any olives picked

are the spoils of war.

Each cardiogram, each x-ray

is a small craft warning

in no need of heeding.

Not today anyway.

Today is your lucky day.

Same as yesterday.

Only now you know

what every Father's son is supposed to know

each consecutive day since inception

of life in a land promised to men

that has no taint of forfeit from other men.

The dish shards you sweep up this morning

come from the plate you threw last night

at the invisible wall

between the I and thou

whose most familiar pairing is husband and wife.

The names you screamed this morning

are twinned to the ones you whispered last night

to a comely, obliging goddess.

All this loving and hating

keep you busy

in an endless mercy of

on-the-job training.

--David Federman, Ardmore, August 7-10, 2010

A Narrative: "Dreaming Aloud"

2010-07-17T05:15:00.000-07:00

He was a Nazi, serenely vile, inviting us to kill him, not caring whether we did so or not. "Which of you will pull the trigger?" he inquired. "It is a great honor, even in dreams, to kill one as consummately cruel as me. It is an open-and-shut case. The question here is not whether I should be shot, but which of you two will do it."

The two of us were me and my girl friend, both members of an underground easily conjured, or continued, after watching a movie together earlier that evening about the Nazi occupation of Poland. The film was Ernst Lubitsch's "To Be Or Not To Be," about a Jewish Warsaw theater troupe that must pretend to be S.S. officers and later a Nazi entourage with the crowning presence, a la Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds," of Hitler in it.

"Well," the Nazi said, "which one of you is to pull the trigger. This is taking forever and dreams like this aren't supposed to last longer than a few moments."

He was as Nazi as they come, as exact a stereotype as my subconscious could construct, and deserving of death. "It isn't often you get the chance to be the instrument of your own deliverance," he said, tied to a chair which he could position to face either of us. "All one of you has to do is pull the trigger."

He was a Nazi, "Eichmann-grade" as a friend used to say whenever we talked about latter-day embodiments of evil such as Pol Pot and Augusto Pinochet. He knew he was on loan to my dream as some lifelike verisimilitude of villainy. "Men wish to kill me as often as they wish to sleep with Helen of Troy," he said with pitying pride. "Personally, I would prefer a night with Cleopatra, but then I know what it is to kill as fulfillment of a lifelong ambition. Date rape of a goddess is a pleasure I have not known and, if one of you fulfills this dream, shall never know."

He was a Nazi, worth killing just to keep his hands off Marilyn Monroe or any other archetype of universally agreed upon beauty.

I wanted my girlfriend who held him at gunpoint and who had lost her father in WWII to do the honors. Vengeance was rightfully hers, especially since she didn't believe in God, and so was not usurping a divine right. But I knew it was for her to decide.

She handed me the gun. "Here, Shylock," she said, "You've got 6 million reasons. I've only got one."

He was a Nazi, strangely venerable in his commitment to evil, exquisitely comfortable in his willingness to represent glint-free darkness. He asked us for a cigarette. Mo pulled a pack of Merit's from a yellow faux-leather handbag. She proffered one to him. "As you can see," the Nazi said, "my hands are tied. Can you do me the favor of placing it between my lips and lighting it?'

She did as she was told.

He was a Nazi, both rigorous and relaxed at his occupation. He inhaled deeply and let out a filigree of smoke that would have impressed anyone who saw it. "I suppose you think I am dreading the moment of my execution," he said. "Or maybe you think I shall have the reward of making one of you become like me. Neither is true because neither would change the fact that I have done everything in my life that I set out to do. There is no unfinished business. None whatsoever."

He was a Nazi, as practiced and proficient in embodying evil as time and circumstance would allow. "Did you hate each Jew you killed?" I asked him, wanting to scratch my suddenly itching nose with the nozzle of the gun.

"David," he said, "I am no white dog German shepherd trained to kill on sight. If anything, I am a dog catcher, sending unwanted strays to the pound. I pride myself on the distinct lack of pleasure or reward I take from my job. It is a duty. I am not stupid enough to suppose we could not, by some caprice of karma, trade places. That is what I hate and love most about this job: the sheer interchangeability of victim and victimizer. This time I get the luck of the draw. Why be boastful about one winning hand?"

He was a Nazi, and he was annoyed with his dualistic world where all flesh could not be his own. "If it is any consolation," he told me, "you can flip a coin to see which one of you will kill me. Heads it's you, David; tails it's your girlfriend."

"I have a name," Mo interjected.

"In circumstances such as this," he reminded, "everyone is an alias for the dreamer, even me."

"I no longer fear that I harbor your depths or its needs," I said.

"Then why am I here?" he asked. "So you can kill the part of you I symbolize."

"Bullshit," my girlfriend hissed, grabbing the gun from my hand. "You are here to be forgiven."

"But I don't wish to be forgiven," the Nazi said, his face enwreathed in cigarette smoke.

"What do your wishes have to do with this?"

He was a Nazi, a fact which no longer seemed to bother me or interest him. "Shoot at his feet, shoot the heels off his boots," my girlfriend ordered. "The God I don't believe in and the God you do both need to have fun."

"Give me back the gun, Mo," I commanded. She did as I requested. "Your time is up," I told the Nazi, loosening the ropes so they fell to the floor.

I took aim, slowly pressed the trigger, and asked, as I prepared to fire, "Care to dance, mien commandant?"

--David Federman, Ardmore, July 17, 2010

A Manifestness: "Say Something"

2010-07-12T06:45:00.000-07:00

SAY SOMETHING: A Manifestness

"Say something," Eve requested.

I love you, came to mind. So Adam said that.

"I love you," the man obeyed.

"No," the woman quickly qualified, "say something I don't know."

"Every river comes from some place not itself," he said, hesitating just slightly before adding, "not itself."

"Does that place have a name?" she asked.

'God', he thought. So he said that.

"That place is called 'God'," he submitted.

"Is that its place name on a map?" she asked.

"The cartographers use names of 'Eternity' and 'Heaven'," he said, as if remembering facts that had served as correct answers on a TV quiz show.'

"So even if there is not a God by name," she reasoned, "there are places named after him. God is the mouth of the river."

He propped himself on his elbow, looking down at her with tender admiration.

"So to speak, yes, God is the mouth of a river," he suggested. "

"Is the world a proof of God? Is it that tautological?" she persisted.

"Proofs are for people out of practice at what they once excelled," he qualified. "A piano player sits down to prove he could once play."

"The history of God is never kind to the world," she added. "No history of God has ever left the world as good a reason for itself as it seemed on that first storied shiny Sunday after a week of inarticulate molten Mondays."

"If we ever have kids, I will show them this meadow as proof the world was God's best idea," he promised, squeezing his hand.

"If they have to take someone else's word for it, if the world is already bereft of self-evidence, God will become the property of religion," she warned. "We will be priests not parents and they will hate us for telling them we know more than they do."

"Yes, Eve, it will seem a punishment to swear to something no longer apparent to them," he prophesied. "Prayer will cease to be praise of the obvious. But not to preach faith as full mindfulness of the world will be even worse. Words must never fall from our lips like cups from a hand."

"What do you think we should do to prevent that fall?" Eve asked.

"Bathe them in the river of song. Drown them in the flow before we teach them to drink from it," Adam outlined. "Then we must hope they come back of their own accord as adults for a second swim."

"Say anything," she pleaded after long silence.

Fuck you, he thought instantly with unexpectedly gratuitous malice from a place inside he never knew existed. Until then. I'm having a lapse, he thought. They will be tempted to remember this moment forever.

"Do I have to say the first thing that comes to mind?" he stalled, thunderstruck by the thought he needed time. He had never before had such a thought or a need.

"You don't think I already know the rumors that you're the son of Lucifer?" she said her features wrinkling with deadpan scorn.

He laughed. "What if it was worse than that?" he qualified.

"As long as we imagine a God who could get it wrong before He got it right there must be Satanic Verses," she explained. "Fortunately, they, too, are inspired by him. This God contains multitudes."

"Say something worth saying," she amended a moment later. "Say anything that would make 'speech after long silence' worthwhile."

"'In the beginning was the word,'" he quoted an ancient silence-breaker. "In the beginning was something to get the conversation going."

"So on the eight day, at the start of the second cycle of days, the world became a story worth telling," she calibrated.

"Yes," he agreed, "on the eighth day God joined his vocabulary. God became a name for the world."

"Which of the names he spoke was distinctly his?" she asked. "G-O-D?"

"To take such a name proves there was a devil not that there was a deity," he argued. "Once God agrees to be a name among the many, he can be offered a throne to further set himself apart. Does he need to signify ownership? Does he need a distance greater than that between any two words that can be spoken? Does he need to make a sound greater than the silence the river's roar makes louder?"

"Doesn't every painter like to sign his painting?" she tried to justify.

"Some use an icon instead," he reminded.

"Give me an icon for God," she challenged.

"A red wheelbarrow," he suggested.

"'A red wheel / barrow / glazed with rain / water / beside the white / chickens','' she quoted with rapturous rapidity from scripture.

"Now we're on the same page," he assured her delightedly.

"If the world as a Creation story begins with a red wheelbarrow, how does it end?" he asked as if posing a philosophical problem.

"Like this," she said, pausing for a long time, then repeating, "Like this . . . ."

"So there is no ending we can speak of," he said after a long while.

"'The birds do not disappear. The birds are still in flight'," she again quoted from scripture.

"Is there a beginning?" Adam asked Eve.

"There is no beginning other than resumption of the story," she answered. "A rider and a horse by the river. The horse drinks directly from the flow. The rider scoops from it with a 10-gallon hat. Both drink. Both are quenched."

They listened to the birds in the meadow as if their shrill sheet of song were an authorized substitute for river flow.

"Listen, darling," she invited, "the birds are making a meadow the way the river makes a shore."

"Do you think they see us standing here like horses drinking their fill?"

"That's as good a reason for a river as any ever given," she calibrated.

His face darkened. "But what if August drains the river bone-dry?" he asked. "What if there are only diamond-shining, diamond-sharp sands that cut like scalpels and make men think the river wants to thirst them?"

"Are you reading from the Satanic Verses again?"

"What if the red wheel barrow becomes an empty bird feeder of no use to the birds or their song?" he panicked.

"Our psalm will always promise seed," she assured him, "in accordance with the deep, deepest need out of which the Father creates. Anything less than deep need is not worth his while or our wiles. Just one drop of rain will suffice to make the seed explode into life. Just one drop of moisture from your mouth will remind them that the essence is song mingled with existence."

"Huh?" he asked, "I don't catch your drift.

"The human part of the story begins with need--deep, sacred need that coheres all things by decreeing them. The birds are summoned. And Adam tells them, 'So much depends . . .'"

"On what?" Adam asks Eve.

"Silly boy," she kids him, jostling his hair, "why, on a red wheel barrow, of course."

"To the birds, a red wheelbarrow is an empty bird feeder unless it becomes of use to them," she repeated, as if hinting at something he should do.

"Do you want me to fill it with seed so they can feed?" he paraphrased.

"That isn't necessary," she said. "Some things are better sung than said. Let them hear about the famous red wheel barrow of song and story. Let those who sing the sun up into the sky know that everything seen is lit from within. Words bring light from a matching fund of sacredness."

"Say something," she whispers, sensing she has been here before.

"'The river comes from some place other than itself' is a false proposition about God," he says with certainty, also sensing he has been here before.

"'No river wants to thirst men," she descants, "even if dry from drought or choked at its mouth by men who seek to prove water's scarcity."

"The river flows forever, always keeping the promise of an ocean," he ratifies.

"Even in times of famine," Eve says to her husband, "the river gives itself as eternal word and keeps its word by being so."

--David Federman, Ardmore, July 10-12, 2010

A Fifth for the 4th

2010-07-04T08:18:00.000-07:00

I love a good fable. This is a good fable about the BP oil spill.sent by Anne Hochberg.

Like it or not, we are being politicized by events. On this 4th of July, I propose the following global definition of patriotism: Defense of earth. This is no longer an abstract moral imperative but a social necessity on which a future worth living for and in depends.

Tomorrow, consult your Communist Manifestos and read the prognosis for capitalism published the same year and place as the "Origin of the Species," in London 1849, then wonder why both books are well on their way to becoming banned reading in the U.S. of A. Marx rang as loud a death knell for Capitalism as Darwin did for its cultural proxy, organized Christianity. The crucified that has died because of, not for, our sins is Planet earth itself. There is no resurrrection in sight--hence belief in a distant realm called heaven where we remain beyond the reach of noose or cross. Salvation has, I have glimpsed, as much to do with embodiment (em-bodhi-ment) as transcendence. To save the soul is to save our common Self and sole being: Mother Earth. That's what Merlin thinks this transfigured day, mumbling within the tree where he is imprisoned. Even when he bangs on the Grail Cup locked in there with him to serve as drinking glass and midnight denture holder, few hear and no one comes near. Would you, if the voice you heard kept quoting Jack Spicer, "Nothing deserves to live"? Could the magi be having a bad day? Pray without ceasing he, and we, change our tune--soon.

Stories Change The World
BP or Not BP?
Posted: 01 Jul 2010 08:26 AM PDT

New Zealand farm

This is a wonderful, well-written blog post by my business collaborator Ian Waddelow. Ian is a European consultant who works with successful businesses around the world. He is a white knight crusading for a better world.

There are four types of people in the world:

Landowners: who control the world’s assets

Farmers: who are appointed by landowners to tend and maximize their assets
Sheepdogs: the trusted and loyal adjutant of farmers that tear around with tireless energy snapping at the sheep, keeping them under control and bending them to the will of the farmer.

Sheep: who bleat a lot but usually end up following the crowd and doing as they are told.

You can see this play out perfectly in the recent BP oil spill off the coast of America.

The Landowners – for BP: the shareholders -
for USA Inc: voters who own assets affected by spill -
for GB PLC: the voters with assets tied to BP (pension funds etc.)

According to Christopher Helman, a Houston-based editor with Forbes, the Gulf Oil Spill will cost BP more than $60 billion: $20 billion into the BP Trust Fund (recently set up after a lot of arm twisting from the Obama administration) $22bn in clean-up costs (two years at $30.6 million a day) and $20bn in penalties (and lawsuits)

It is clear to any financial analyst that such numbers seriously call into question BP’s ability to remain solvent. Were the company to liquidate, the shareholder – our landowners – would stand to lose $236bn in assets.

Naturally, they will fight to stop this from happening. US asset owners don’t want this to happen either unless it gives them the best chance of the biggest payout in restitution. GB PLC cannot afford for this revenue stream to disappear as it receive $5.6bn a year from BP in income tax, national insurance contributions, fuel duty and VAT.

To see BP go under has long-term far reaching consequences for all the landowners.

The Farmers – for BP: Chairman, Carl-Henric Svanberg and CEO, Tony Hayward
for USA Inc: President Barak Obama

for GB PLC: Prime Minister David Cameron

Whenever there is trouble on the farm, the farmer has to take the flak and all four are under immense pressure from their lords and masters it makes sense to come up with a deal between them.

The additional problem for Obama and Cameron is they are the appointed farmer for many landowners, some with conflicting requirements. Both heads of state are starting to realize they cannot please all their masters all the time. For Obama, he has the local population hit by the disaster desperate for restitution and punishment.

They want to see the company brought to its knees and yet 40% of BP shareholders are members of USA Inc. Pensions, investment funds, and personal savings would all be dramatically hit. Meanwhile, ExxonMobil would love to get their hands on those $236bn in BP assets for a knockdown price.

Cameron, meanwhile, was on the campaign trail when the disaster struck and has to get up to speed quickly and defend his revenue stream and one of the few remaining UK global corporations.

The Sheepdogs – The PR men

This is trial by media and so any good farmer will have some loyal and efficient sheepdogs rounding up the press and controlling public opinion. Obama’s team were the first to coral them, demanding summits and capturing the green moral high ground.

They positioned BP as ‘the evil baddy’ in the story, negligent and uncaring and put a white Stetson firmly onto Obama’s head.

Cameron was yet to walk through the door of Number 10 so could do little without a clear mandate to act.

Unfortunately, Tony Hayward’s sheepdogs watched the sheep wander all over the place and in irritation started snapping at the heels of the flock leaders. Despite spending $50m on PR, his team made a series of gaffes, including:

initially saying the impact would be ‘very modest’(enraging Gulf coast landowners and US politicians).

going sailing while the disaster was at its height

pledging on a nationally broadcast TV advertisement that “We will make this right.”

posting a public apology for the oil spill on the BP website and promising to clean up every drop of oil and “restore the shoreline to its original state”.

telling the people in Louisiana, where oil had begun to reach parts of the state’s south-eastern marshes,. “We’re sorry for the massive disruption it’s caused their lives. There’s no one who wants this over more than I do. I would like my life back.” The statement was particularly criticized given that eleven people died in the drilling platform explosion that caused the spill.
stating in an interview with Sky News that he was not overly concerned by the amount of oil flowing into the Gulf of Mexico. “I think the environmental impact of this disaster is likely to be very, very modest.”

insisting to a Guardian reporter that the leaked oil and the dispersant being released into the sea should be put in context: “The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume.”

telling NBC that BP was not at fault for the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon or the subsequent oil spill. “The drilling rig was a Transocean drilling rig. It was their rig and their equipment that failed, run by their people and their processes

advertising on the web for any ideas on how to stop the oil leak

spending the $50m on these statements – allowing Obama to cry “What I don’t wanna hear is when they’re spending that kind of money on their shareholders and spending that kind of money on TV advertising that they’re nickel and diming fishermen.” It also allowed Obama’s chief of White House staff and loyal right-hand sheep dog to chime in and say Mr. Hayward “wouldn’t be working for me after any of those statements”.

A sheepdog that doesn’t round up sheep is not a sheepdog.

The Sheep – all the stakeholders living on the farm

Life as a sheep is ultimately one of powerless frustration. Their world is filled with death, suffering and devastation but what to do? The sheep have every right to be incredulous. They are suffering but they are also just playing the game.

The solution is also not simple. You try just tightening a nut with a robot, with no purchase, 1,500 metres below the surface of the ocean. While the sheep make suggestions to stop the leak (ranging from ice plugs to nuclear weapons) they are powerless to act.

The sad thing in all of this is that had BP cut the riser during the first week and installed a second blowout preventer, a massively heavy stack the size of a five story building, then we may have been applauding Hayward for averting an horrific natural disaster.

What pains the sheep the most is it is their lives that are ruined and can do little to avert the problem. Big problems are generated by big entities and in many cases these corporate entities are bigger and more powerful than governments.

They, therefore, are the only ones capable of solving the problems that they make.

The suspicion is that the BP landowners and farmers are in a collusion of greed. They ignored the signs that their golden goose was sick and, instead of paying for a vet, decided to simply shoved their arm inside the bird to pull out whatever gold they could lay their hands on.

Modern day landowners are short term. They want their jam and bread today. They are not interested in handing over the assets to future generations but surely global companies are one day going to realize – no globe, no company.

It is time for shareholders to think bigger and longer and appoint farmers who think the same rather than maximizing their exit after three years of starving the golden goose.

So if you are a landowner or farmer, be wary for being too judgmental of Mr. Hayward. Everyone from railway companies to airlines, from pharmaceutical companies to utilities are cutting corners and the farmers that are appointed are the ones who turn a blind eye.

If you are a head of state like GB Inc you will see that selling off all your land leaves you at their beck and call. You will never be more than their hired hand.

As for the rest of us, the sheep, what to do? We appoint farmers who have sold all our assets to wealthy corporate landowners and plunged us deep into debt. Shall we just bleat?.

Are we just going meekly like lambs to the slaughter or is it time to ensure that the meek truly inherit the earth and build some new assets for us all?

The World Must Tell President Obama it is tired of America's Wars. How best to do so? Please sign the NØbel For Obama petition

2010-06-28T05:05:00.000-07:00

Last October, after President Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, he showed ingratitude by refusing to sign the Land Mines Treaty and then committing 30,000 troops to General Stanley McChrystal's unwinnable war in Afghanistan. Fellow peace activist Monique Frugier and myself decided to begin a campaign to force the Danish Parliament, which gives this august honor, to reconsider and cancel its decision. We both feel to wisdom and urgency of this campaign is now greater than ever--and we urge all who feel as we do to engage in peaceful protest by signing the petition we drafted at that time. Afghanistan is now in its ninth year and our victory in Iraq is a Pyrrhic victory that accomplished nothing but the enrichment of arms merchants and the further impoverishment of America's taxpayers.

We feel compelled to renew our call for some form of high-minded, deep-meaning symbolic act of global non-violent protest against President Obama's failure to make significant steps toward peace in our 9-year war of occupation in Afghanistan.

The best symbolism remains to rescind the Nobel Peace Prize given to Barack Obama last October. With one signature, each signer protests the warfare state of America and pleads for it to return to being (in the truest, noblest sense) a welfare state.

It was an understandably hopeful but ultimately naive gesture of good will for Denmark's parliament to award America's commander in chief the world's highest honor in human affairs and international conflict resolution. Obama responded to that invitation to begin laying down arms--and begin entry into the plowshare phase of American life--by lecturing the world on the nature and necessity of Just War. He used his speech to spurn the award and the spirit in which it was given. By so doing, he telegraphed his intention to continue America's hegemonistic foreign policy and betrayed the hopes behind his selection as recipient of the award.

Now confiscation of the Nobel Prize takes on deeper meaning and urgency in light of President Obama's failure to stop the war on nature being waged by global capitalism. The latest theater of that war is the Gulf of Mexico. But if Obama doesn't force BP to suspend planned Arctic drilling, the world will soon have a new theater of operations--and be fighting a two-front war. For his own misguided sake, we need a Caine mutiny in which President Obama is stripped of his standing as the acting Nobel Peace Laureate. To do so is tantamount to stripping him of his Nobel commission (for peace-making) just as Gen. Stanley McChrystal was stripped of his (for war-making).

Please consider signing the NObel for Obama petition. A copy and link are below:

http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/nogoodwarforpeace/index.html

The Petition

When on October 9, 2009, Barack Obama became the fourth U.S. president to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the world's most prestigious human affairs honor, it was viewed both by giver and recipient as an act of faith that would be justified by future actions. President Obama himself said it was more "a call to action" than a recognition of any specific accomplishment. In explaining its bold faith-based gesture, the Norwegian Nobel Committee said its unanimous decision was based on Obama's "extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation among peoples." The Committee took special note of the president's restoration of "dialogue and negotiation" as the cornerstones of American foreign policy, lauding his leadership "on the basis of values and attitudes shared by the majority of the world's population" as well as "renewed US commitment to international organizations." We the undersigned believe that in the two months following this stirring announcement, President Obama has undermined the trust on which this award was made and by so doing sacrificed his eligibility for it. We cite two major violations of this trust: 1- the refusal to join the international Landmines Treaty five years after its ratification 2- the decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan by sending an additional 30,000 US troops to that embattled nation. In light of President Obama's failure to accept the Nobel Committee's implicit invitation to be a peacemaker, we the undersigned ask this august body to revoke this award and, instead, give it to someone who has shown by actions not just rhetoric repeated commitment to the principles on which this award is based. In asking the Committee to take this unprecedented action, we believe that this body will be acknowledging its premature and mistaken judgment and also defending the integrity of this momentous honor. Last, we believe that such a revocation will send a message to all future recipients that their most inspired words must be followed by significant deeds. Note: The following petition to cancel awarding the Nobel Peace Price to Barack Obama will be sent to Dag Terje Anderson, the current president of the Norwegian Parliament, to forward to Thorbjorn Jagland, head of the Norwegian Nobel Committee which is part of the parliament.

Veterans' Banner Tags Abandoned Detroit Building: "How's The War Economy Working For You?"

Submitted by Chip on Sat, 2010-06-26 14:33

DETROIT -- On June 26, at 2pm, a group of U.S. military veterans will hang a large banner on the abandoned Eddystone Hotel, on Sproat St., between Cass and Park, to protest and reveal the effect of war spending on American cities.

Members of Veterans For Peace (VFP), attending the U.S. Social Forum, a gathering of over 8,000 activists from across the U.S., created and erected the 10 x 15-foot sign that reads, "HOW IS THE WAR ECONOMY WORKING FOR YOU?" Detroit has an unemployment rate of 15 percent and 10,000 abandoned homes on the mayor's demolition list.

Taxpayers in Detroit have sent a total of nearly two billion dollars to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The city's 2011 general fund budget of 1.3 billion dollars contains an estimated deficit of 300 million dollars, even after years of cutbacks in services once assumed to be part of urban life. The budget for Detroit schools has a deficit in the same range.

"Detroit, like so many of our cities, is in crisis," said Mike Ferner, National President of VFP. "This crisis is no different than a five-alarm fire and we should respond the same way. Instead, we watch America's cities literally crumble while we pour thousands of lives and trillions of dollars into wars abroad."

John Amidon, President of VFP Chapter 10, added, "It's absolutely criminal that the people who built the U.S. auto industry have to watch their city collapse around them while they send $2,000,000,000 to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. This is indeed the purest form of madness and it's coming to a city near you."

###

VFP, with over 100 chapters, is beginning a campaign to work with local government officials to place “war counters” on city halls stating the amount of money each community has sent to the wars. Veterans For Peace members fought in World War II, the Korean, Vietnam, Gulf, Iraq and Afghanistan wars and have served in all eras in between conflicts. VFP is an official Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) represented at the UN.

My Night With Beethoven: Building an Arc/Ark of Triumph

2010-06-28T04:29:00.000-07:00

Notes after a night spent listening to Dame Myra Hess play Beethoven's 30th and 31st Piano Sonatas, Opus 109 and 110, EMI CDH7 63787 2, released as part of the "Great Recordings of the Century" series in 1990:

The last three piano sonatas (Op. 109/10/11) of Ludwig Von Beethoven are perhaps the most private and intimate works of beauty in his life and require extraordinary interpretative skill to play. Only musicians with the same meditative depths as the composer--ones, in his case, forced upon him by circumstance of his deafness--can free this music from the page where the notes are otherwise indecipherable diary entries in what might be the most profound privacy in all musical history. To me, each note is gnostic--an incandescence emerging out of a silence so great it is the primal emptiness from which all comes and to which all returns. Ex nihilo is no longer a point of embarkation for creation but something even more extraordinary: the mouth of God. Beethoven shared a space beyond and before those inhabited by angels and spirits: the very place and possibility of immanence itself. In this music, the beauty that is the deepest reason for creation is experienced. God has no deeper or more selfless reason for Manifestation/Many-fest-ation than the beauty of doing so. Many-fest-ation is, as the word suggests at its most connotative, the festival of the many God's breath will inhabit. Beethoven finds within himself and the instinctive great chain (efflorescence?) of being that extends to his performers and listeners alike (if they accept the open invitation) the beauty that is itself the reason for their existence.

I'm inviting you this morning to listen to what I think is the greatest performance of the Fuga from Sonata No 31, Op. 110, that has ever been committed to record: Dame Myra Hess's peerless performance, recorded on October 1-2, 1953. If I could master the intricacies of uploading, there would be a link to this and the preceding Adagio which serves as prelude to the miracle that takes place in the Fuga (thankfully, its main theme is reprised in the middle of this fourth and final movement as recapitulation and re-enactment of the Genesis taking place).

Before I leave you to find Madame Hess's recording (try Amazon), let me tell you how I came to have my pre-dawn encounter with Beethoven. I have been spending the last week packing for a move from my much-too-expensive Narberth apartment to a far more affordable house in Ardmore. Because my CD collection numbers in the thousands, I find fugitive discs in corners, under papers and all sorts of other recesses. Yesterday afternoon, I found a CD with Myra's Beethoven recordings. Thanks to the fact that I have an iPod docking station next to my bed, I knew that if, as has been happening with regularity these past few expectant weeks, I couldn't sleep I would have the solace of music. Beethoven became my instant choice for solace should it be needed. It was. At 3 AM, I got into my diving bell and plunged into the deep seas of Beethoven's Op. 109 and 110 (Hess never recorded the Op. 111). The music instantly took me into depths that I rarely reach, except when listening to Bach's Well-Tempered Klavier, lots of Renaissance choral music and madrigals and some ragas. These are zazen depths gifted by the concentration this music requires as price of admission into its heartlands. I felt born to hear what I was hearing. I felt this was my particular key to an understanding that can only come through experience of complete absorption in it. I was at the place where the very prompting to be born, to be created, was found. This place is suffused in and circumscribed by what the mystics call "divinity." I felt afterwards that I had watched and even pitched in to help the building of what my inner punster much, much later called, after France's Arch of Triumph, "the arc of triumph, the ark of triumph." I invite you to share the wide opened spaces into which Beethoven was ushered by his divinity-drenched genius in late 1821. To complete and continue the astonishment, I discovered this morning that the completion date marked on the autograph score by the composer is Christmas Day of that year. What a gift of joy Beethoven brought to the world, the Christ(os) singing its way into being. Enjoy! And Merry Christmas!

Strike while the iron and irony is hot to rethink Afghanistan

2010-06-27T04:19:00.000-07:00

Good morning, Afghanistan!

The Rolling Stone article about Gen. Stanley McChrystal, "The Runaway General," is a great and rare blessing for the anti-war movement. It allows Americans to learn first-hand what the men charged with planning this war really think about their chances of victory. They have little or no hope of doing so--yet with sociopathic devotion and drudgery continue to wage it. This is what happens when the military usurps diplomacy and is allowed to think of itself as peace makers.

I am linking you to a spectacularly effective short video of highlights from it called "Rethink Afghanistan" which I urge you to watch and pass on chain-mail style to everyone you know--urging them to do the same. The only victory is to withdraw--and do so now.

http://www.facebook.com/rethinkafghanistan?akid=1150.1101779.9rBK7O&rd=1&t=3&v=app_10531514314

By the way, you should know that Michael Hastings, the author of the Rolling Stone article, is drawing heavy fire from other so-called war correspondents for not having "protected" his sources--and endangering the cosy candor the press corps has long enjoyed. This is what happens when the media is "embedded" in the army it covers and no longer free, or even cares, to report the truth of what it sees.

The truth--namely, that America can't do what the British and the Russians failed to do--has been known for nine years and rarely told because journalists were too afraid to lose their privileged eavesdropper positions. McChrystal clearly expected Hastings to censor himself--just as all the other reporters did--and that's why he felt so free to be on his worst behavior. Evidently Hastings wasn't the first to see the general so contemptuously at ease. Evidently he wasn't the first to be admitted to the general's inner sanctum of cynicism--and be expected to bring, and later use, his own gag and blind fold. He was just the first to refuse self-censorship and to report the general and his aides behaving badly--in all its shocking detail.

The real story that Rolling Stone told was about the implicit conspiracy of silence by the media. Hastings told that story by betraying the conspiracy. While that silence is still shattered, we can and must act to share the truth that was revealed with our fellow citizens. Please watch "Rethink Afghanistan" then act by helping this video go viral.

That link, again:

http://www.facebook.com/rethinkafghanistan?akid=1150.1101779.9rBK7O&rd=1&t=3&v=app_10531514314

The War Correspondent as Hero: How Rolling Stone's Expose of General Stanley McChrystal Redeems the Disgraced Profession of Journalism

2010-06-26T05:59:00.000-07:00

"The Runaway General" by Michael Hastings reads like a chapter in Denis Johnson's novel "Tree of Smoke" (the best Vietnam war fiction ever penned) and conveys by sheer grit and gist the absolute corruption and cynicism of America's latest Asian adventure in Afghanistan. Besides serving as Gen. Stanley McChrystal's suicide note in terms of future assignments, it is, perhaps, the best expose of the whole sordid Bush-Obama period of American hegemony in the Arab world. As it has done more bravely and clearly than any other English-speaking publication with the Wall Street crisis, Rolling Stone has revealed Afghanistan to be a monstrous fraud and ripoff of the American taxpayer who contributes life, limb and liquidity to its perpetuation (now in its ninth year). The Pentagon is shown to be as criminal and derelict as Wall Street. The war is a scam and we are told this unflinchingly at the very opening of the article when McChrystal is complaining about having to attend a Paris dinner to placate the increasingly restive French by telling the same failed lies he has told the deserting Germans, Dutch and, soon, British.

Who did McChrystal think was sitting there with that notebook for nearly a month, embedded in his naive, trusting midst the way Trotsky's assassin was embedded in his? Did he think Hastings was a Stephen Colbert clowning around? If so, it shows you in what contempt our generals hold the media and how McChrystal and his team must have assumed that the Rolling Stone reporter, like every other reporter, was a belled cat or, worse, a gelded mare. By secretly belonging to an older order of courage and candor, Hastings redeemed the profession of journalism. He also ensured swift retaliation against it via Supreme Court decision and Executive Order.

In the mean time, Hastings showed the war in the full glare of its folly, ineptitude and criminality. He took us into the boardrooms (headquarters) where it is planned and botched and, ultimately, lost. Everyone who believes that the mainstream media must show pluck and principle in reporting on American Empire Games owes it to themselves to buy a copy of the magazine and read Hasting's article. Here's the opening for your enlightenment and--because it is superbly written--entertainment. If Hastings doesn't get a Pulitzer Prize for this piece, something is as rotten in America as it was in Denmark last October when they gave my country's war-thirsty Commander-in-chief, Barack Obama, a Nobel Peace Price. (By the way, you can still sign my Prize rescission petition by linking to: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/nogoodwarforpeace/index.html)

For those who want an immediate link to the full article, go here: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/119236#

The Runaway General

Stanley McChrystal, Obama's top commander in Afghanistan, has seized control of the war by never taking his eye off the real enemy: The wimps in the White House

The Runaway General
Stanley McChrystal, Obama's top commander in Afghanistan, has seized control of the war by never taking his eye off the real enemy: The wimps in the White House
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Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, commander of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force and U.S. Forces-Afghanistan, works on board a Lockheed C-130 Hercules aircraft between Battlefield Circulation missions.

U.S. Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Mark O’Donald/NATO

By Michael Hastings

Jun 22, 2010 10:00 AM EDT

This article appears in RS 1108/1109 from July 8-22, 2010, on newsstands Friday, June 25.

'How'd I get screwed into going to this dinner?" demands Gen. Stanley McChrystal. It's a Thursday night in mid-April, and the commander of all U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan is sitting in a four-star suite at the Hôtel Westminster in Paris. He's in France to sell his new war strategy to our NATO allies – to keep up the fiction, in essence, that we actually have allies. Since McChrystal took over a year ago, the Afghan war has become the exclusive property of the United States. Opposition to the war has already toppled the Dutch government, forced the resignation of Germany's president and sparked both Canada and the Netherlands to announce the withdrawal of their 4,500 troops. McChrystal is in Paris to keep the French, who have lost more than 40 soldiers in Afghanistan, from going all wobbly on him.

"The dinner comes with the position, sir," says his chief of staff, Col. Charlie Flynn.

McChrystal turns sharply in his chair.

"Hey, Charlie," he asks, "does this come with the position?"

McChrystal gives him the middle finger.

More on General McChrystal

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The general stands and looks around the suite that his traveling staff of 10 has converted into a full-scale operations center. The tables are crowded with silver Panasonic Toughbooks, and blue cables crisscross the hotel's thick carpet, hooked up to satellite dishes to provide encrypted phone and e-mail communications. Dressed in off-the-rack civilian casual – blue tie, button-down shirt, dress slacks – McChrystal is way out of his comfort zone. Paris, as one of his advisers says, is the "most anti-McChrystal city you can imagine." The general hates fancy restaurants, rejecting any place with candles on the tables as too "Gucci." He prefers Bud Light Lime (his favorite beer) to Bordeaux, Talladega Nights (his favorite movie) to Jean-Luc Godard. Besides, the public eye has never been a place where McChrystal felt comfortable: Before President Obama put him in charge of the war in Afghanistan, he spent five years running the Pentagon's most secretive black ops.

"What's the update on the Kandahar bombing?" McChrystal asks Flynn. The city has been rocked by two massive car bombs in the past day alone, calling into question the general's assurances that he can wrest it from the Taliban.

"We have two KIAs, but that hasn't been confirmed," Flynn says.

McChrystal takes a final look around the suite. At 55, he is gaunt and lean, not unlike an older version of Christian Bale in Rescue Dawn. His slate-blue eyes have the unsettling ability to drill down when they lock on you. If you've fucked up or disappointed him, they can destroy your soul without the need for him to raise his voice.

"I'd rather have my ass kicked by a roomful of people than go out to this dinner," McChrystal says.

He pauses a beat.

"Unfortunately," he adds, "no one in this room could do it."

With that, he's out the door.

"Who's he going to dinner with?" I ask one of his aides.

"Some French minister," the aide tells me. "It's fucking gay."

The next morning, McChrystal and his team gather to prepare for a speech he is giving at the École Militaire, a French military academy. The general prides himself on being sharper and ballsier than anyone else, but his brashness comes with a price: Although McChrystal has been in charge of the war for only a year, in that short time he has managed to piss off almost everyone with a stake in the conflict. Last fall, during the question-and-answer session following a speech he gave in London, McChrystal dismissed the counterterrorism strategy being advocated by Vice President Joe Biden as "shortsighted," saying it would lead to a state of "Chaos-istan." The remarks earned him a smackdown from the president himself, who summoned the general to a terse private meeting aboard Air Force One. The message to McChrystal seemed clear: Shut the fuck up, and keep a lower profile

Now, flipping through printout cards of his speech in Paris, McChrystal wonders aloud what Biden question he might get today, and how he should respond. "I never know what's going to pop out until I'm up there, that's the problem," he says. Then, unable to help themselves, he and his staff imagine the general dismissing the vice president with a good one-liner.

"Are you asking about Vice President Biden?" McChrystal says with a laugh. "Who's that?"

"Biden?" suggests a top adviser. "Did you say: Bite Me?"

When Barack Obama entered the Oval Office, he immediately set out to deliver on his most important campaign promise on foreign policy: to refocus the war in Afghanistan on what led us to invade in the first place. "I want the American people to understand," he announced in March 2009. "We have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat Al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan." He ordered another 21,000 troops to Kabul, the largest increase since the war began in 2001. Taking the advice of both the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he also fired Gen. David McKiernan – then the U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan – and replaced him with a man he didn't know and had met only briefly: Gen. Stanley McChrystal. It was the first time a top general had been relieved from duty during wartime in more than 50 years, since Harry Truman fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur at the height of the Korean War.

Even though he had voted for Obama, McChrystal and his new commander in chief failed from the outset to connect. The general first encountered Obama a week after he took office, when the president met with a dozen senior military officials in a room at the Pentagon known as the Tank. According to sources familiar with the meeting, McChrystal thought Obama looked "uncomfortable and intimidated" by the roomful of military brass. Their first one-on-one meeting took place in the Oval Office four months later, after McChrystal got the Afghanistan job, and it didn't go much better. "It was a 10-minute photo op," says an adviser to McChrystal. "Obama clearly didn't know anything about him, who he was. Here's the guy who's going to run his fucking war, but he didn't seem very engaged. The Boss was pretty disappointed."

The Persisting Residue of Grace

2010-06-24T11:51:00.000-07:00

I was walking down the street today and thinking of my hero Rene Descartes, famous for "I think therefore I am." Suddenly the 'I am' seemed a constant electric hum rising to a ringing in the ears. It seemed to grow uncontrollably louder and louder. How do I turn down the volume of my bifurcation? I asked Rene the way Mrs. Regan used to query Christ. "Try a variation on the theme," he suggested, "try: I think therefore I love." The following poem is the result of that moment. I added Peggy Lee's incredible version of "Cloudy Morning" from her 1963 masterpiece, "Mink Jazz."

THE PERSISTING RESIDUE OF GRACE

I have done plenty of perfectly awful things in dreams

but I never threw

a plate at you

or laid a hand on anyone

or trashed an apartment

Nor was there any reciprocity

of vandalism

on "your" part

since, in dreams, you are me

and I am you

and

we are all together

for the umpteenth

last time

What was I thinking?

Shouting your name at you

walking far ahead of me

on a hazy California beach

where you seemed intent on dis

appearance

Even in dreams

people go missing

or are abducted unwillingly

from a promiscuous vastness

mobbed by shimmering shapes

too vague to be promised to anything

but freedom or escape

from the dreamer

I promised not to see you in my dreams

except by chance and not as chalice

I could drink from

for deep forever

I promised you safe passage

across a beach so public

you could trespass

without capture or even fear of it

"You can be Greta Garbo, if you like,

recognizable only from a distance

and mis-

taken for someone else

if I get too close."

Such are the rules of dis

engagement

letting hearts embark

in the chastity of friendship

Such are the rules of re

membrance

in a world that is haven

for souls lifted and loose

but never lost

The earth was then a second skin

of surf seizing our feet

or sand breading

our bodies

We sank to swim

in deeper meanings

of oceanic contentment

that had nothing to do with wombs

or any embrace less permanent

than heaven's

Your breath on cold evenings

was smoke from fires

gently contained and stoked

within us

The moon taught us to rub

two gazes together

to make one light

of love

We must practice walking on an earth

whose shine is never faint

and beyond the reduction of its glare

to embers

We must practice remaining on an earth

so hot and inviting to the touch

we become carriers of lower light

as bright and warming as winter coals

We must practice revealing an earth

that is first and foremost a birthplace

where we are still so welcome

when the final trumpet sounds

there is no where else to go

Everything

even the most jagged shards

and coarsened shreds

of bad dreams

are harbingers of the life

I never had

before you.

--David Federman, Narberth, June 24, 2010

Have You Thanked a Peace Activist Today?

2010-06-24T09:32:00.001-07:00

A bumper sticker on a neighbor's car reads, "Have you thanked a Vet today?"

I don't mean to be ungrateful, but I seriously wondered, What for?

For keeping these shores safe from the phony menace of communism in Korea and Vietnam? For keeping at bay the equally illusory threat to domestic tranquility from Muslim fundamentalism in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Listen, former and present comrades in arms, forget creeping socialism and terrorism. Did your service to your country keep me, or you, safe from the real enemy within: predatory corporate capitalism? Was it al-Qaeda who plundered our savings and pensions, destroyed our industrial and agricultural infrastructure, and despoiled the planet beneath our feet starting here at home on hundreds of beaches and wetlands? Was it the Taliban who caused our present unemployment? Who are the most dangerous foes of American life and liberty? I say it is the militarists, industrialists, corporations and bankers who spend trillions of our tax dollars on war and make vast sums profiteering from mass destruction and expropriation of other peoples' resources--all the while bankrupting their country. I say it is the government that needlessly does their bidding and puts its citizens in harm's way.

So let me ask you: Should I thank our Vets for their failure to save our country from its own worst enemies? Should I thank them for the fact that we are less free and more frightened today than at any time since the rise of McCarthyism from the depths of the Cold War?

Maybe Vets and their supporters should thank me and others like me who protested each new war fought on the behalf of bankers, oil magnates and arms merchants? Maybe Vets should thank me and others like me who took to the streets of their hometowns and traveled to Washington to save them from the possibility of senseless death in Asia? Maybe Vets should thank me and others like me who were gassed, beaten and arrested by their reservist and police brothers sent to protect the status quo of greed, ignorance, indifference and violence?

Okay, Vets, let's strike a truce. I'll support your bravery and sacrifice if you'll support mine. I'll honor your patriotism if you'll honor mine.

In the spirit of reciprocity and brotherhood, here's my suggestion for a bumper sticker to be glued to the rear or front of every American Vet's vehicle:

"Have You Thanked a

Peace Activist

Today?"

The Exterminating Angel

2010-06-23T03:48:00.000-07:00

I've had better nights. But I know enough by now to share hours I could spend tossing with, as I did between 2 and 4 this morning, lull-bringers like first Aaron Copland and Virgil Thompson then Frederick Chopin. Just in case you are bothered tonight by apocalypse or toothache or lightning-fears or love, may I suggest putting Chopin's Nocturnes, as transcendently played by Maria Joao Pires or Ivan Moravec, on your iPod docking station.

In the mean time, for your reading pleasure or perhaps pain, here's a poem finished yesterday that I intend to post at my blog after I send this to all of you. My friend Monique sent me a YouTube link of a video in which we see "miraculous" sightings of the name Allah written on every conceivable surface that could host such glorious graffiti. It made me wonder about sightings of the home-team God's name in a world grown much too small for religion. In such a world, every Paris is someone else's Sodom; Jerusalem is a baby Solomon is asked to cut in half. Cities are set on fire always in the name of one of God's multitudinous names. We ought to retire some of those names. God could be deemed Number 23, and put behind glass like Michael Jordan's tank top; Yahweh could be considered one of God's longest-lasting brand names and perched like Hank Aaron's final signed home run ball atop a pedestal in some Religion Hall of Fame in Las Vegas. Then we could find and celebrate the God we have and hold in common who has as many names as there are in Kingdom Earth's latest census--plus One. It is that All and Entirety--the complete Humanity of all living things--whose name I cite and recite, vowing their combined sacredness. So if I am meant to see Allah's or Yahweh's name braided in corn tassels today at a farmer's market, pardon me if I plead illiteracy and continue reading into all things some greater visual, visible summons and summation.

THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL

God's been skywriting again.

Bedouins report seeing His Allah-alias

scrawled repeatedly on a blackboard sky

by Arabic-speaking lightning

several times after a Sahara sand storm.

One eye witness described it as such:

"Each time His name hovered like a flare,

throbbing with brightness

accompanied by what sounded like

a sizzle of fireworks

mixed with the crackle

of gunfire."

God's been leaving signs again.

A busload of Kansas penitents

report seeing a torn Bible page

blown against the windshield

fastened by wind and wiper blades,

the only thing visible

in a driving, drumming rain.

"Agnes, look, at the bottom corner.

It's just as foretold in John 7:

out of the belly of a cloud

will flow rivers of living water."

The deluge was cut short

when the bus skidded off a bridge

into the icy river below.

Only one of the 12 occupants survived.

When asked why her, she answered,

"I was hand picked by awe to save my skin."

God's been text messaging again.

At least 200 encryptors at a conference in Beijing

report seeing code on a giant wall screen

resembling the Chinese characters

for what is best described as "No Growth."

Once the shock and awe subsided

the speaker commanded the portent

be saved for one's grandchildren

"living in a world that will prove it wrong."

God's been speaking in tongues again.

A middle-aged Saskatchewan bed wetter

reports she was cured of "wayward drainage"

when dry drought winds unhinged

her front and back screen doors

and started them banging in unison.

As of this doleful moment, the doors continue

their eerie random tandem

and may do so for the rest of time.

What is the wind trying to tell you?

a TV reporter asked her

pointing a microphone at the commotion.

"Piss in a pot like everybody else,"

the former bed wetter explained.

That's all, the pestering reporter asked.

"Well, it just isn't mannerly for the Lord

to be so public about private things."

God's been having hissy fits again.

Jews and Palestinians alike

are locked in aghastness

at seeing a Tel Aviv TV weather map

refuse to predict any future behavior of the elements.

The clouds in the satellite photos tighten

and roll backwards to a primordial thickness

obscuring all sight of land and sea.

"This is the kind of impenetrable sky

you would expect after a volcano," a forecaster says.

"Haim, you are right," his weather mate, Abdul, agrees,

"There is a gathering darkness

that could force cancellation of all flights."

Haim adds, "Except missiles

guided by flawless intelligence

to targets deserving of smithereens."

"Haim, my friend," Abdul cautions,

"prophets of both our traditions predict

days so dire with fire and rain

every desert bloom left pinned and pummeled

brings no relief to torment

and serves only as symptom,

not a sign, of survival."

The One is trafficking in symbols again.

When seen from space

every tract of earth's vast curvature

is continuous with teal-blue luminescence

and stands for the radiant, rugged intactness

of light and life begging to be commonplace.

Words sung or spoken have no meaning

apart from the visible hum and drum of light

tripping from the tongue of every thing.

Have you heard good news as far as the eye can see?

Rain beads on chrysanthemum petal

strummed with wind speaking no discernible name.

Sun spins summer heat at the edge of hydrangea

and proclaims the easy shine of substance

which is first essence and sole meaning of matter

when God becomes His favorite synonym of feast.

--David Federman, Narberth, June 21-22, 2010

Gay Rights Versus Gay Rites: The Two Faces of Philadelphia's Gay Pride Parade, June 13, 2010

2010-06-16T20:32:00.000-07:00

There was Taps and tap dancing in downtown Quaker City as LGBT groups took to the streets for their annual celebration of themselves in an event that is slowly becoming a safe haven for kindred civil and human rights causes. That new blending, however, may force a re-examination of the event's sometimes narcissistic, self-indulgent dress code and conduct.
If ever an event had a split personality, it was Philadelphia's Gay Pride Parade, Sunday, June 13, 2010.
First, there was the gala, reminiscent of the city's famous Mummer's Parade with a tad of Rose Bowl procession added for extra zest and zeal. This was the parade most of its participants marched in and most of its thousands of spectators watched. This was the parade with acrobat troupes, marching bands and even corporate sponsors. This was the parade of mainstreamed homosexuality and gay rites.
Second, there was the solemn procession, reminiscent of freedom and anti-war rallies. This was the parade that attracted a vanguard of veterans groups as well as a rear guard of Christian clergy and churches. This was the parade of proud parents, loving friends and determined activists. This was the parade of civil, human and, above all, and gay rights.
Although I enjoy the sight of small-herd multi-colored dyed poodles, andun-closeted men and women happily free to be themselves in public, I was there to see a gay rights parade that was a movable feast of causes linked to this far-from-ended quest for justice. I was there as a peace activist in the year that the United States military will most likely repeal its infamous "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy with regard to Gay and Lesbian recruits. This imminent and momentous abolition was central to the occasion. Or should have been. But it failed, as far as I was concerned, to adequately reflect it.
Gay rites trumped gay rights.
Both parades began around noon in sweltering, dehydrating heat with a bosun's pipes and taps for the fallen American soldiers in all its wars, as well as their victims in the most recent failures of empire throughout Asia. Tireless peace activist Bill Perry, who persuaded a local veterans for peace group to join the Gay Pride Parade last year, was the bugler. There wasn't one other decibel of crowd noise in the respectful hush that accompanied him. That gesture anchored the event in implicit nobility and idealism, and gave the march new marching orders as a political not just a cultural event. The parade was about transition.
The Great Koan: The Right to be Gay with the U.S. Killing Machine
Funny thing, some veterans were conflicted about their presence in the parade. No, the reluctance had nothing to do with lingering ambivalence about gay rights. It had to do with gay rights advocacy for the world's most hyperactive military force. If the dozens of former soldiers marching had their way, everyone of those troops whose right to be openly gay that they are espousing, would come home now. As one veteran told me, "We've got a dilemma. We are asking the government to abolish the last legitimate excuse to escape active duty in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and--who knows--maybe one day soon Iran."
He was only kidding--well, maybe only half-kidding. True "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" was, and is, a terrible compromise. As things stand, gays can die for their country, but they die as unknown soldiers since their identities are kept secret. So the participation of veterans peace groups in a Gay Pride Parade in support of the right to die and kill openly as gay uniformed men and women had a certain irony to it. As I mulled over this debilitating conundrum, I suddenly felt the need for less gravitas and more, pun intended, gaiety. I needed to drown in the local color of the event as a gala. But that aspect of the event posed other dilemmas.
Finally: A Marketing Niche All Their Own
Perhaps the most visible sign of the Philadelphia Gay Pride Parade's mainstream status was the presence of New York Cheers, a non-profit cheer-leader squad that lends highly skilled and drilled bodies to gay rights and related causes in the Tri-State area. Comprised of ultra-limber gays and straights, this was the group's first appearance in the parade and it lent just the right note of exuberant precision to the occasion. I hope they are asked to march in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. They project both a mainstream and Main Street wholesomeness that would be very welcome at Disneyland.
And they explain why companies like U.S. Airways and the ChipolteMexican restaurant chain sent contingents to invite gays to their friendly spaces all across and over America. Gays may not yet have civil rights but they have full spending rights as an actively, aggressively pursued marketing niche. It is a measure of acceptance in a capitalist society to see gay dollars recognized as a distinct species of lucre from a viable new demographic.
Are Gays Stepin Fetchits When They Parade in Drag?
Okay, let me pause here to get something off my chest. I admit to squeamishness with a kind of Mardi Gras costuming that attracts many parade participants who see it as an annual freedom frolic rather than a freedom march. Does dressing in drag, leather briefs or net stockings reinforce anything but alienating stereotypes of Gay Life? And, if so, doesn't such parody reinforce the separateness of Gay and Straight lifestyles? Isn't becoming the equivalent of a Gay Gargoyle a form of Gay self-bashing? Don't Gays become Stepin Fetchits when, instead of leaving the closet behind, they bring it with them?
I don't mean to preach etiquette. But can Gays have it both ways? Is the parade for outreach or outrage? It's easy to scandalize a repressed society, Alan Watts said, but much harder to be own's own solitary liberated self no longer in need to prove anything to anybody. With the government ready to mandate full integration of Gays into the Armed Services, shouldn't Gay Pride parades build bridges rather than risk burning them? If Congress were going to pass a Gay Rights bill today, would any Gay person think of attending the vote dressed in drag? With representatives from other sectors of the Civil Rights movement joining the march, should not LGBT groups dress mindful of their presence. You can guess my answer.
Like it or not, the Gay Pride Parade is now a political event. Participants should respect this fact and dress ( as well as behave) accordingly. I know that many young out-for-fun readers will see me as a prude and a spoil sport. If so, I'm sorry. But since the parade is a public-consumption event, maybe dress code discretion is now called for.
Some Matthew Moments
As could and should be expected, believers in Yahweh took to the streets in support of gay rights. There are a growing number of churches in the Delaware Valley where gays are welcome to wafers, wine, baptismal waters and every other token of expression of participation in communal Christian life (I looked in vain for similar welcome signs from synagogues and mosques). It was gratifying to see representatives from a Catholic church that believes homosexuality is no longer a sin to be confided in a confession booth.
As a recent convert to what I call "Matthew-Gospel spirituality," my most comforting, joyous and memorable moment in the parade was to see a woman pastor carrying a placard which read, "Love thy neighbor," from Matthew. If I had been walking with her, my sign would have read, "Judge not lest ye be judged."
After the march, I noticed a Quaker woman standing as still as a statue in front of the new Constitution Center. She told me that there was always a volunteer standing there making the same handwritten request: "Pray for peace." That prayer should become "the very hum of our being," I told her. "Pray without ceasing," the Bible says. So, in the end, Gay Pride has to do with much more than being gay or proud. It has to do with being a sentient being. It is a sign of what religionists calls grace that the Philadelphia Gay Pride Parade has become a magnet for all civil and human rights. Marchers in the parade would do well to honor its new stature.

Poem: "Pretty Portents"

2010-06-06T06:11:00.000-07:00

PRETTY PORTENTS

for Daniel Kasowitz

At night the moon glows

a dirty coin-silver wash of color

on the mile-wide surface of oil

leaking everywhere.

The sheer impenetrability

the utter dissociation of water from meanings of

potabilty

make the manmade beauty

inhuman.

The waves seem to lumber ashore.

Their bounce and bob is gone.

They have no appetite for destruction of galleon.

No lost fortunes of doubloons will date

from this time.

Back in the day

the shipwrecks were gentle cuffings

the hurricanes roared with comforting finitude

to excess of human vanity

Back in the day

the Mother outlived

her Medea moments

found Mary waiting in her

to harbor milk instead of murder

Now the Mother's migraine is permanent

and the ocean

turns sailors to stone

with its Medusa stare

of oil

For all their Bible reading

they still can't tell a true portent from a dud.

Now the bird-free beach air is thick with stasis.

Now the sky over Kansas

is charred with storm cloud

and truculent with wind

that crushes trailer parks like beer cans.

What's a thunderstruck Job to do

who stands no chance

of hearing the tantrum of the elements

become God-like and articulate

with disgust?

Charley's out on the beach tonight

with his metal detector. Used to hit pockets

of spare change that had it ringing like Las Vegas.

"The drinks are on me," he'd cry out,

"this luck has got to be shared."

His wife Emily is with him,

transferring the nickels and dimes

to a tackle box long ceased to have context

for fishing. "How long do you think

until the tar balls get here?" Charley asks.

"The weatherman says any minute now,"

Emily answers. "We've got to stay one beach

ahead of the oil," Charley declares,

"until we're driven inland

and back to minimum wage."

Pliny the Elder couldn't take his eyes off the lava

streaming down Pompeii's main street

in a calculable flow that killed him.

Some say he didn't feel a thing

protected by a trance of wonder.

Vesuvius is at it again

spewing oil from an underwater hole off shore

this time not even bothering

to blow off steam

not even aware of its terminator

stature as it coats all living things

in its amorphous, omnivorous path

in black amber.

So far the entombments are reserved

for fish and fowl

a vast statuary of suffocation.

But the lethal viscosity

is heading past deserted beaches

on a glacial Sherman march

that will turn every seaside town into a Pompeii

of no interest to art or science

or survival.

--David Federman, Narberth, June 6, 2010

I've Got Those Jewish Activist Flotilla Blues

2010-06-02T04:35:00.000-07:00

The only coverage worthy of the word "coverage" regarding Israel's massacre of humanitarian aid activists aboard a Turkish vessel on the open seas that I saw on American-origin TV last night was that of Amy Goodman's "Democracy Now." MSNBC, the so-called "Place for Politics," was sickeningly, conspiratorially silent. Rachel and Keith were MIA. And yet I will be called "anti-Semitic" or "paranoid" or "both" for suggesting that Zionist control of American media is a daily, humiliating fact of American life. It is weird to see so much coverage of the Great BP Oil Spill but none of the Great Israeli Blood Spill. Amy Goodman showed a clip of an American UN representative "regretting" loss of life but blaming the activists for not exercising other available means to address the nearly 4-year-old blockade of Gaza. What other means? I wondered, as I shouted the kind of epithets at my TV which would have once earned me a series of severe backhands from my father.

So now it is up to the citizenry to force our leaders to face up to their moral responsibility by facing down Israel. Well, that will not happen--for the same reason that Western colonialist fascism has experienced triumph after triumph since the falls of Spain and Ethiopia 80 years ago. For me, Palestine is the last battle of WWII--and it shows the amazing shape-shifting properties of fascism as that war's greatest victims of fascism become its greatest present-day perpetrators. For me, the Middle East is the one remaining theater of operations for that war with no V-Day or armistice in sight. As a former member of a 12-Step program, and a firm believer in this model of self-transformation, I know how much easier it is for the children of abusers to perpetuate rather than transcend the abuse that defines them. I know why Israel is a moral basket case that will never abandon the ways and means of the parents who made them what they are. The "trans-parency" needed for therapy has no chance of occurring or of being recognized as essential for treatment.

Nevertheless, I can no longer cry for or cry out against the Jewish people. I can no longer waste time in prayers for their redemption. By Israel's failure to become anything other than a fortress state and well-equipped oppressor of its neighbors (all subsidized by American taxpayers), its history stands reduced and devolved to an illegal act of land expropriation--without the moral, existential legitimacy that it requires for justification.

No one is sicker of and more sorry for his own rage against the machine/state of Israel and his many lapses of compassion for the Jewish people. But Israel represents to me a failure of last-chance opportunity and vision so profound that it has become a kind of koan that vexes and torments without relief. Yes, I will write to my president, my senators and my representative and beg them to stand up to Israel. But I know that asking them to do what's right is to invite self-destruction at the hands of the Zionist money and media machinery which owns them openly or by default. Unless we raise more money than their captors to buy "freedom" for our leaders and politicians, they can and will do nothing whatsoever to address the adamant tyranny in Palestine. The Left has got to pay to play--and it hasn't got two plugged nickels to rub together.

Last night, a deranged friend sent me a letter from one of the many Jewish right-wing delusionists who believe that Israel is actually fighting for its life against a vast amalgam of threats including Leftists, Muslims, Arabs and self-hating Jews. Incredibly, this person calls herself a "Sufi." You see, there is never an end to the lunacy that drives Zionists. Killing never makes them feel safe. Oppression never calms them. The trauma of identity is never cured or even treated.

I am tired of the person I have become. I am tired of all the time I have expended on useless anger at a situation too large and intractable for correction. I want to get on with the remainder of my life, become my own great hospital ship emerging from the mists in time to save me from myself. I want to stage a full, final recovery from my war wounds. I want to wave a successful goodbye to my own demons and see them depart as vapors on a day dripping with rainbow colors. I want my songs of exorcism to be love songs. I want all the words I henceforth say or sing to be angels sent to and from the joyous rooftop of my mouth. I want to prove earth can be heaven and man can be God; I want to be living proof those twos are Ones. I want my middle name to be Matthew.

Tell Congress and Obama NO to the siege of Gaza, no to unconditional aid.

Dear David,

When I got the news about Israel's armed attack on the Gaza Flotilla at 2:30 am on the morning of May 31, I felt sick. I immediately called a dear friend in Jerusalem, one of the most committed activists I know. Across the ocean, I could hear in her voice that she was in tears. "The worst part about it, " she said, "is that nothing will change."

"No," I replied. "I can't believe that can be true. Things have to change."

"Well," she said, "then it is up to you, the internationals."

She's right. It is up to us, the internationals both here in the United States and abroad.

That is why I want you to send a message to US President Obama if you live outside of the United States, and to Obama and the US Congress if you are a U.S. resident, demanding the immediate release of the detained human rights activists, an end to the siege on Gaza, an impartial investigation of the attack on the flotilla, and a suspension of US aid until Israel abides by international law.

We still don't know a lot about what happened to the flotilla of boats carrying some 700 human rights activists from around the world and over 10 tons of humanitarian aid to Gaza-- Israel has kept the activists under a near total media blackout while sharing only its implausible narrative of events. What we do know is that Israeli commandos boarded a ship in international waters and killed at least ten activists, injuring dozens of others.

Israel insists that highly trained commandos were forced to lethally fire on activists, creating a new definition of self-defense. In the first alternative accounts to appear, an Israeli Knesset member and an Al Jazeera cameraman who were on board the ship at the time each described something different, a scene of chaos with civilians waving white flags and commandos using stun guns, rubber bullets and tear gas. Regardless of what actually happened when armed soldiers landed, Israel's wanton killing of civilians is unacceptable.

We still don't know the names of those who were killed or injured, or where they are from. And we don't know the whereabouts or well-being of more than 400 activists still being held by Israel.

These deaths, and the attacks on the boats, have hit all of us around the world particularly hard. There were people from 40 different countries on board the ships, including Israelis and Palestinians. Israel sent armed commandos onto a civilian ship in international waters, a brazenly illegal act to enforce Israel's nearly 3-year illegal siege of Gaza - a siege that has left 1.5 million men, women and children living like prisoners on substandard diets, deprived of the simplest things like potato chips, musical instruments, and toys. The flotilla wasn't just about this one delivery of aid. It was about the right of Palestinians to have sea, land and air routes to the rest of the world and for the need to end the blockade.

I know that there comes a point in one's life when you simply have to take a stand. You cannot sit by silently and watch ongoing and wholly unjustified destruction of life, tacitly supported by governments around the world, and simply do nothing.

The flotilla was filled with people just like you and me who finally decided it was time to risk life and limb to take a stand, to break through those prison walls, and we thank them for it.

Now, as citizens of the world, we owe it to the people of Palestine, and the people of Israel who want to live in peace, and the brave people on that flotilla, to build the movement to make Israel accountable to international law and standards of simple human decency - especially because our governments have failed us.

The response of the U.S. government thus far has been wholly inadequate, with a mild statement "regretting the loss of life," without assigning any blame for the fiasco, let alone applying any sanctions for Israel's acts. Please, join me in telling President Obama and Congress enough is enough. US taxpayer dollars fund Israel's occupation, and together with wall to wall uncritical diplomatic support have sent the message that any Israeli action, no matter how foolhardy, will be backed by the full might of the United States.

It's time for that to stop.

We must also continue to build the already massive global people's movement for justice, which has undeniably found its greatest impact in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. This is about all of the ways, big and small, people can bypass their often ineffective governments to use economic pressure to make the Israeli government accountable to international law. After launching our energetic support for campus efforts to divest from the occupation, Jewish Voice for Peace will let you know soon about our own divestment campaign to help bring pressure on Israel to reach a just solution.

It is time for the United States, as Israel's closest ally and most powerful nation in the world, to stop unconditional support for the Israeli government.Doing so will protect Israelis and Palestinians, American citizens, and internationals alike.

Click here to demand that President Obama and Congress call for an immediate lifting of the siege of Gaza, an international and impartial investigation into the tragic killing of civilians in a humanitarian mission, and the suspension of military aid to Israel until he can assure the American public that our aid is not used to commit similar abuses.

Rebecca Vilkomerson,
Executive Director,
Jewish Voice for Peace

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A Poem for Memorial Day: "Taking Chances"

2010-05-31T05:47:00.000-07:00

Last night I watched HBO's movie, "Taking Chance," about escorting a dead marine home to burial in Wyoming and I couldn't sleep all night because the movie didn't have more than the most fleeting courage to question the Iraq war and the country that took this PFC's life. So this morning I tried to conduct my own memorial service. Chance Phelps was the name of the marine who died and Cindy Sheehan was, to me, the name of the mother he left behind.

TAKING CHANCES
for Chance & Cindy

1
The river was on its best behavior today.
It didn't want to thirst men
or beast. It didn't want to shoulder tide
or head for a mothering sea.
It didn't want to chase the scudding clouds
it mirrored over head.
It just wanted to run so slow
it could pretend to stand still
long enough for just
this one piercing, sheltering once
to echo once
for always.

2
Alias looked in the river.

Alias saw the man he used to be
poised forever for a drink
from his 10 gallon hat.

Alias saw a convoy of minnows
practicing zig
zag maneuvers
with a precision of survival
men could never learn to imitate.

Alias felt the ache of morning
like a soft shrapnel of song
its refrain of loves lost or found
the kindly remnant of struggles with an angel.

Alias heard the wounds of time
ringing more than hurting
somewhere inside a vast inoperable longing
everyone he had ever loved knew
and kept to himself.

3
The wind ruffled the river's surface
blurring the algae masses
and the long limber strands of grass.
Chance remembered when the river played host
to a rampage of waters
surging with ends of days
for livestock and homestead
surrendered to the mercy of mutability.
His great grandfather was famous for saying
his was the last generation
to know more men who died from flood
than war. "You could go years without
hearing of a death not due to natural causes."
It all belonged to God then, Chance thought,
a taker of life who stayed true
to a gentleness of giving.
Suddenly he felt the urge
to pray for days
when the worst inexplicable that could happen
was a saw mill accident or steam boat collision.
"Restore us to old beginnings," he requested
there in the quiet
peering into the waters
"when rivers were gods
and gods were only good
for granting things
like starting over
and over
again."

4
Peter fished in these rivers
taking weights from the Galilean's tackle box
slowly filling the floor of the row boat
with groupers and bass
for a feast the shady after
noon of that very bright morning.
Papa John was always telling the other fishermen
there was nothing to worry about
and that the very least that could happen
was never less
than enough
for a feast.

5
Never mourn the dead
the Galilean said. For better or worse
it's over for them. Pray for the living
who today marry one
to one another
in a brief embrace of water
before rising to the rest of their lives
from a containment
that wishes men
only deepest well
being.

6
Alias knew the river would betray its coldest depths
to reflect heights
that only birds could reach
as if they were thoughts of men
sent to seed clouds with the rain
no river
or ocean it flowed to
could ever dream of
praying for.

--Narberth, Memorial Day, 2010

What I've Learned About Socialism from Jack Spicer

2010-05-29T07:14:00.000-07:00

Dear Danny,

Let me start by copying out a fragment from a fragmentary Jack Spicer Perry Mason script begun (and never completed) in 1956:

"R. Hamilton Burger: Look at man basically, your honor. He is a child. He wants to grow up. As soon as he realizes he is too old to grow up, he dies. Somebody shoots him or stabs him or he dies of pneumonia or a heart attack or commits suicide. This is what we in law call the basic law. Angelism [true human embodiment] is like leprosy. It tries to thwart the basic nature of man. It cannot succeed. That is its basic treason. If it could succeed, if the leprous person by having his face eaten away could make his bones seem so beautiful that all men would kiss them, if leprosy exposed the heart and the heart only, man (and nature) would not consider leprosy a crime. If there were any secrets the broken skin could lay bare, if the broken skin could display anything else but broken skin. But, your honor, you know, I know, all men know, there is nothing broken flesh can expose but more broken flesh.

Perry Mason: Your honor, I object. My client is not accused of leprosy.

R. Hamilton Burger: I accuse him of leprosy.

Mrs. Doom {the Judge}: The attorneys will refrain from personality. . . ."

Spicer never got to launch a defense of what he called "Angelism," active dis-invention ( he called it, similar to Lew Welch, "unventing") of the lie of hard-core Christian corruption or any definition of the human being as separable from God (and therefore open to trumped-up, trumpeted charges of failure). Imagine a Philip Marlowe who reads Rumi and you've pretty much got the "persona (very much gratis)" of the poet. "Angelism," he tried to tell his friends and students at this time, was the truest (appearing in its American incarnation as tough and rugged) propensity of human spirit. The truest nature of Human Nature. Spicer fought all his life against a Catholic and Calvinist sense of us as fall-guys for the Fall. Paradise, he taught me, is as much a down staircase to Earth as an up staircase to Heaven. It's got to be two ways, bi-ways, always. Angelism was to reveal another purer, incorruptible state beyond the Fall. Call it the Full. But too many boys and burgundies got in his way. So he made THE way his poetry and made it tougher than any desire--even the desire to write it and be good at it.

The first time I read Jack (some excerpts in a Gilbert Sorrentino review of "Billy the Kid") I knew Spicer was a true poet and that all true poetry prophecies liberation. How? By practicing it. "Real toads in fake gardens." Or was it "fake toads in real gardens." Both sound right. Both are right. The establishment calls such dis-invention (of the status quo) leprosy and makes it a crime like suicide. If there must be Satans (monotheisms thrive on them), then let them be the Satans of Job and the Gospels, God's handyman, absolutely dependable in his mayhem. [Note: I just finished listening to Arthur Honegger and Paul Claudel's "Joan of Arc at the Stake," which concludes with Joan giving the flames permission to consume her by sending flesh-combusting flames of love from her own heart. I don't know what actually happened up there on the stake except someone burned alive but I am convinced Paul Claudel thought he knew and Honegger believed him.]

The socialism I groped for last night was like Spicer's poetry: a socialism of instinctive rapture and regard (sometimes seeming like, or putting on airs of, rage) for the world as a protectorate of beauty. Poetry, had of necessity, a saint's kind heart but with the kicker's foot of a Christ-like Beckham giving the boot to money changers in the parking lot. It's a tough-minded, unsentimental socialism that forces the student to grab the cat whose head the Zen master is threatening to sever from the master's hands and put it back down on the floor, saying, "I rest my case." Saving the lives of threatened beings and things is the only satisfying reason for and successful argument in defense of socialism. The redemption of life is living proof.

What we are seeing in the Gulf, I fear, is a triumph of leprosy. It may be too late for the protection that is the only practical, practicable proof of God. Thankfully, we are bi-sexual--angel and man all at once. I never fail to learn the best about myself from Spicer. "Angelism" is a code word for the most irreducible form of Socialism. "Poet be like God," Spicer commanded. Angelism is the aegis and agency by which we do so. The stewardship begins, for me, with clear, articulate perception--a husbandry of speech. To see things as they are is my Socialism. Like-wise Bawa, who contrasted hard-hearted Communism with heart-to-heart Communasm, saved his best visions for song--often bursting from free speech into freed music. The first time I saw him do so I thought he was behaving like my mother, who chose to switch from English to Yiddish just when the story started to get good. One big difference: Bawa's Yiddish was perfectly intelligible. In fact, it was true speech.

I've been allowed to save some of my past with my teacher derived from snippets of song. I realize now he was confirming a lot of what Spicer and Olson were trying to teach us--but in an ashram rather than a barroom setting. This morning I felt like I was sitting in the mosque he built, sunlight pouring in, with bonus breeze. In my last days as a church-goer, I used to call the mosque Moscow and thought the imams were all KGB members. Then I remembered a Sid Caesar skit where he plays a gangster by the name of Harry Mozart ("At lest the name of Mozart will be famous!" he exclaims at one point) who exploits a law that allows men to flee burning banks with their money. I fled that burning building with plenty of wealth intact. But it can only be spent in prayers of clear perception and understanding. This wealth cannot burn a hole in any pocket because it can't be stored there. It exists only in use--its highest and best use as, in my case, song and its subsidiaries.

Here's another of Jack's incredible Boston poems, with that wonderful survivalist Philip Marlowe voice rising from the depths in the death-defying "calmness of poetry":

A POEM WITHOUT A SINGLE BIRD IN IT

What can I say to you, darling,
When you ask me for help?
I do not even know the future
Or even what poetry
We are going to write.
Commit suicide. Go mad. Better people
Than either of us have tried it.
I loved you once but
I do not know the future.
I only know that I love strength in my friends
And greatness
And hate the way their bodies crack when they die
And are eaten by images.
The fun's over. The picnic's over.
Go mad. Commit suicide. There will be nothing left
After you die or go mad,
But the calmness of poetry.

--Jack Spicer, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry, Wesleyan, 2008, p. 73.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Daniel Kasowitz"
To: "David Federman"
Sent: Saturday, May 29, 2010 2:04:48 AM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
Subject: Stewards of the Earth

I don't know what you mean by "socialism of the rich" or "socialism of the poor", or for that matter "socialism of survival". What socialism does mean is wresting away the natural resources of this world from the corporate profiteers and entrusting them to responsible stewards of the earth. That was the gist of the article I sent you.

My Gulf Coast Blues: Jack Spicer's "The Day Five Thousand Fish Died Along the Charles River"

2010-05-28T14:00:00.000-07:00

So they sent Bill Clinton last summer to offer Rep. Joe Sestak an advisory job in the Obama Administration if he would drop out of the PA Democratic Senate Primary Race against Arlen Specter. Mr. Sestak would have won by an even more resounding majority if the news below had broken sooner. Obama never ceases to amaze me with his likeness to Herbert Hoover.

Meanwhile, I feel like I'm trapped in a planetary version of Luis Bunuel's "The Exterminating Angel," with no one able to leave the party or change the conventions that are crushing the life out of them. No food in the pantry; so eat each other.

Yesterday while driving home I listened to an oil expert worry that this oil spill might set back drilling for decades--compounding this disaster with an even worse one. Is it fair, he argued, to hold the equivalent of one Chernobyl against an entire industry?

No one seems to have asked--not even the whimpering Louisiana congressmen on TV last night whose childhood fishing ground is gone forever--whether a CHERNOBYL WAS NEEDED IN THE FIRST PLACE. What does it say about our 'standard' of living that we must drill for oil one miles below the surface of the ocean using untested technology that cannot be controlled if it fails? No one has yet asked a single question in any press conference I have watched about reforming the scale of living, or redefining the norms of individual energy consumption and resource use. The party will continue, that's the message I'm hearing. And Mr. Obama intends to host it for another seven years.

As a writer long familiar with jewelry industry despoiling of ocean bed and mine field, I see BP's escapade as the latest chapter for a book called 'Blood Oil.' Only we don't see it that way because the victims are fish and fowl, flora and fauna. Last night, as I watched footage of a bird cleanup, I had this horrible image that BP had gone on a rampage--tarring every feathered thing in its omnidirectional, omnivorous path.

There's a Jack Spicer poem written while he lived in Boston in 1955 that deserves to be read in defiant as well as elegiac conjunction with this catastrophe. It's right up there with Bessie Smith's "Back Water Blues" started in a rowboat during the 1927 New Orleans flood.

THE DAY FIVE THOUSAND FISH DIED ALONG THE CHARLES RIVER

And when the fish come in to die

They slap their heads against the rocks until they float

Downstream on one dead eye. From rocks

The Irish boys yell and throw rocks at them and

beat them with their sticks.

Gulls wheel in the fine sky. Tall as an ogre

God walks among the rocks. His angels cry,

"Yell and throw rocks at them and beat them

with sticks!"

But watch their upturned eyes

That gleam like God's own candles in the sun. Nothing

Deserves to live

--Jack Spicer, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry, Wesleyan, 2008, page 56

May 28, 2010, 10:14 AM

White House Used Bill Clinton to Ask Sestak to Drop Out of Race

By PETER BAKER

H. Rumph Jr./Associated PressPresident Bill Clinton with Joe Sestak, and his wife, Susan, in 2006, when Mr. Sestak was running for the House of Representatives.

President Obama’s chief of staff used former President Bill Clinton as an intermediary to see if Representative Joe Sestak would drop out of Pennsylvania’s Democratic Senate primary if given a prominent, but unpaid, advisory position, the White House said on Friday.

Rahm Emanuel, the chief of staff, asked Mr. Clinton last summer to explore “options of service” on a presidential or senior government advisory board with Mr. Sestak, the White House said in a statement. Mr. Sestak said no and went on to win last week’s primary against Senator Arlen Specter.

The White House disputed Republican claims that the conversations might be illegal or improper. “There was no such impropriety,” Robert F. Bauer, the White House counsel, said in a memo released to reporters. “The Democratic Party leadership had a legitimate interest in averting a divisive primary fight and a similarly legitimate concern about the congressman vacating his seat in the House.”

Mr. Bauer went on to say that such horse-trading has been commonplace through history. “There have been numerous, reported instances in the past when prior administrations – both Democratic and Republican, and motivated by the same goals – discussed alternative paths to service for qualified individuals also considering campaigns for public office,” he wrote. “Such discussions are fully consistent with the relevant law and ethical requirements.”

Representative Darrell Issa of California, the senior Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said the interactions described by the White House “represent an illegal quid pro quo,” even if the position was unpaid. “It is abundantly clear that this kind of conduct is contrary to President Obama’s pledge to change ‘business as usual’ and that his administration has engaged in the kind of political shenanigans he once campaigned to end.”

Federal law makes it a crime for anyone “who directly or indirectly, promises any employment, position, compensation, contract, appointment, or any other benefit” to someone else “as consideration, favor, or reward for any political activity or for the support of or opposition to any candidate or any political party in connection with any general or special election to any political office.” It is also illegal for a government official to use “his official authority for the purpose of interfering with, or affecting, the nomination or the election of any candidate” for Senate.

While many have speculated that the White House offered to appoint Mr. Sestak as secretary of the Navy, Mr. Bauer said that was never the case. The White House did not offer Mr. Sestak a full-time paid position because Mr. Emanuel wanted him to stay in the House rather than risk losing his seat, so he considered “uncompensated advisory board options.”

The White House did not disclose what those options were, but people briefed on the matter said one option was an appointment to the president’s Intelligence Advisory Board, a panel of prominent Americans outside government who provide independent oversight of the nation’s spy apparatus and advise the president. But White House officials discovered that it would not work because Mr. Sestak could not serve on the board while still serving in Congress.

In a statement Friday, Mr. Sestak said Mr. Clinton had conveyed Mr. Emanuel’s suggestion that he join a “presidential board” while remaining in the House, but he declined. “I told President Clinton that my only consideration in getting into the Senate race or not was whether it was the right thing to do for Pennsylvania working families and not any offer,” Mr. Sestak said. “The former president said he knew I’d say that, and the conversation moved on to other subjects.”

Mr. Sestak first mentioned publicly in February that he had been offered a job but provided no details, and the White House for three months had refused to discuss it, generating intense criticism from Republicans who accused it of trying to bribe a congressman and deep consternation among Democrats who called on the administration to answer questions.

Mr. Emanuel was eager last summer to clear the way to this year’s Democratic Senate nomination for Mr. Specter, who had just left the Republican party, and to bolster Democrats’ majority in the Senate. Mr. Sestak, a retired admiral and two-term House member, was already planning a run.

In tapping Mr. Clinton as the go-between, Mr. Emanuel picked the party’s most prominent figure other than Mr. Obama and someone Mr. Sestak had worked for on the National Security Council in the 1990s. Mr. Sestak endorsed Hillary Rodham Clinton against Mr. Obama in the 2008 presidential primaries, and Mr. Clinton was one of the first to call to congratulate him on his Senate victory last week.

Mr. Clinton was at the White House on Thursday to have lunch with Mr. Obama and join him in greeting the American men’s World Cup soccer team heading to South Africa.

As chief of staff and previously as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Mr. Emanuel has not been shy about trying to steer party nominations to those he considers the stronger candidates. The White House under Mr. Emanuel has also leaned on Gov. David Paterson of New York to drop out of this year’s gubernatorial race, which he eventually did under a cloud of scandal. Mr. Emanuel’s deputy, Jim Messina, suggested a possible administration job to Andrew Romanoff to get him to not challenge Sen. Michael Bennet in a Colorado primary, The Denver Post has reported, citing unnamed sources.

Whether that constitutes ordinary political horse-trading or crosses a legal line has been debated in Washington for months. Democrats and some Republicans have said it is hardly unusual for presidents to offer political appointments to clear the way for allies. But Republicans have suggested such actions may constitute a crime.

Mr. Issa and all seven Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee have asked the Justice Department to appoint a special prosecutor. The Justice Department wrote Mr. Issa last week that it did not need a special prosecutor to investigate if it chose to do so. Government officials, who asked not to be identified discussing legal decisions, said that neither the Justice Department nor the Office of Special Counsel, an agency that looks at violations of the Hatch Act governing the political conduct of federal employees, is investigating.

While declining to discuss what happened, Mr. Obama on Thursday said, “I can assure the public that nothing improper took place.”

An Answer to the Jewish Question

2010-05-22T08:23:00.000-07:00

Stuart Z. Perkoff wrote this small epic, "Feasts of Death, Feasts of Love," about growing up Jewish in the 1930s and coming to terms (if terms can ever be reached) with the Holocaust in the 1950s. I first encountered this poem in Don Allen's epochal "The New American Poetry: 1945-60," and sought for years afterwards to find Perkoff's complete poetry. That event didn't happen until 1998, when Allen persuaded the National Poetry Foundation to publish Perkoff's collected poems--a harrowing volume with one of the most affectionate and intelligent introductions (by Robert Creeley) to any volume of poetry I have ever found. Perkoff could only find mobility and coping skills as a poet. He could not hold a job, only a pen. Although physically functional, he was a kind of a metaphysical paraplegic, living as a drug addict in small apartments and smaller jail cells--but always writing incredible poetry in every one of these confinements--no matter how extreme and tortured. This poem will shed light on Perkoff's long, living social martyrdom and the beauty he thereby saved for us, his readers. Make the appropriate time and space for this journey into the boyhood of an American Jew living in the deep, dense swampy shadows of WWII in a way no one who fought (and even perished) in that war could have ever known. This is a poem about the weight of history. You will be rewarded with a record of a truly transcendent survival.

A personal note: It has taken a lifetime to NOT demand of, or even want, a God who must be responsible for the actions of his children. If anything, that God--a God I no longer seek--must contemplate the heinousness of his children and still keep the unshakable faith that is the preamble to Creation. Since the Creation is not a crime, to ask of God such fortune cookie wisdom is to inflict cruel ingratitude on the always-constant, meant to-be-comforting thought of Him. I live with that thought, grateful for its anchoring. All is, I realize now, subsumed in this Creation and the love it requires for its fullest expression. To even say another belabored "alhamdulillah!"--all praise is to God--in the face of our inhumanity to each other and therefore God is to cling to the old Father God who will make things right, hopefully on this side of the grave and wearing Hawaiian sackcloth with outrageous flowers printed on it. As Bawa said, God has given us everything; there is nothing else to give, not even a second thought, for that would make him separate from us. I think a courage of simple self-reliance and an adamant belief in my own recombinant possibility constitute true divinity in this workshop now.

As a coda, I have appended an excerpt from Perkoff's meditations on the Hebrew alphabet that could serve as a credo for his art and the poetry he succeeded in writing and to which I still aspire. I give his short meditation on the 7th letter of that alphabet, given for a 7th day of resplendent wholeness where all is coherence, where all is meant to make things cohere. From warship to worship is the path.

One last thing: I offer this poem as solace to my dear dear friend Ed Weiss, awaiting the surgeon's word about his 41-year-old son. Nothing, Ed, can make me regret (for longer than a forsaken instant) this birth into the life we have shared together and share forever.

David

P.S. It is an honor to be a scribe this morning.

FEASTS OF DEATH, FEASTS OF LOVE

I

1.

down the Wolf River
backs to the sun thru water shallow & flat
beautiful girls & boys
the birds wing tip to tip
swinging thru & around
calling, calling

we carried city eyes
over the rushing water
the stunned vision of scene after changing
scene
expanding & including
as our shouts & grunts & songs
wailed outward

(I had to get out, once, & push the canoe from behind, my
body from the ankles up was hot, sweaty, sun gleaming, my
feet cool in the river, lifting & pushing the heavy canoe.

I thought the others wd get too far ahead, & we wd be lost,
off in the Wisconsin woods, where there were neithers Jews nor
cities, a world hot & in winter my feet wd be like encased in
the cement of the river, & the canoe wd never be pushed over
the flat scrapey sand.)

the river movement
coiled around our eyes
the quiet sound of the breathing of work
set the beat
of our songs

2.

The next year we took a different trip, out Lake Tomahawk
& an adjacent lake, I don't remember which one. In that part
of Wisconsin the lakes lay on the land like a thousand eyes,
peering into & thru each other.

from lake to lake
between two mountains
all blue green quiet movement water
in the air & eye
the huge walls rising
a great grass field
covered the inlet
& the canoes went thru
as over land, it looked
so quiet
rustling of grass
the soft voices
hot beautiful girls & boys
hot beautiful summer day

II

1.

wake up! to a morning
sun shining thru even newspaper
headlines
sun on
men in sand wading thru
blood

"Woe
woe unto
the bloody city of Litchfield'
he cried
with his bare feet
in the gutters of blood* [*an allusion to Quaker seer George Fox's cries at a vision of a Roman mass execution of Christians conducted in England's town of Litchfield a millennium before]
naked feet
naked legs
naked eyes
into the market place howling
along the streets howling
in the living room
howling

the sun! shining shining
in our eyes

2.

at the edge of the water
the glass house eye of God
embraced us, pure
in white

clean after communal showers
& communal food

'Boruch ataw Adonai
Elohenu melech ha'olam
ha'motzi lechem
min ha'awritz'

reverberating thru the food
the eyes
the air out out into many rhythms
& tongues

sitting on the benches, bodies warm & throats filled with
joy & love

we offered worship
sitting warm to warm, eyes & skin touching, love flowing
we offered worship

we sang
& spoke languages & poems
offered worship & love
mixing the birds of passion & the swords of God
in our beautiful young eyes

It wd always be dark by the time the services were over.
& secure, in the glass house, lit by the God that shined all our
faces, the burning candles of love in our bodies, sharing the
glow outward to trees & wind. & the youngest kids went to
their cabin while the older ones had a dance, & carried on
love affairs & intrigues & political arguments until 11:30, when
the boys walked the joyous road back to their portion of the camp,
singing & shouting, clean & alive.

By the time the Saturday morning services were over, we
were so full & whole that anything was possible.

3. political song

the people circle the room
coming together

the blood circles the body
coming together

the earth circles the sun
coming together

hang on, man
as it
wobbles around

hand to hand
as it
wobbles around

o living communities
men & women who love & are loved
o living bodies
men & women who love & are loved
O loving cities
men & women who live & are lived

eat
drink
embrace
each
other
inner
face

III

1.

I see clothes piled in great heaps
against gray sky
with the smoke & sun in the air
of human flesh
& in the pockets of those beasts
who wear my name
things of value jingle & clank
in those black pockets
teeth & eyes & skulls & skin
in those black pockets

there are bodies
naked
not talking of love

in their last waters
naked
not talking of love

naked hunger
naked hatred
naked minds

howling in the crowded boxcars
howling in the dark barracks
howling in the hot showers
howling & whimpering in the final chambers

silent in the furnaces

2.

such visions
wove their shroudeyes
thru our songs
such knowledge
blackened the edge
of every flame

each kiss
bittered with the salt
of their blood

(Many summers later I hitchhiked over a thousand miles
back to the Wisconsin holy lakes, to speak anguish to a wise
man, seeking comfort, seeking peace.

& we sat outside under a fat moon, at the edge of an open
field of grass, scenes of love & myth echoing in my mind.

I asked him why the six million had died. I thought somehow,
this man, an Aronin, descendant of the first & holiest priests of
Israel, humble seekers & generous fountain of love, wd have
an insight, a knowledge, a hope.

God's plan? If there had not been such blood & terror on
his mouth, he wd have laughed. & told me he had no answer,
no peace. & told me of the many nites & days he had fasted &
prayed.

& found nothing?

found only hope that came from the realisation of the
cleansing & purification of pain.

Whose? I, so young, so bitter, so needing an answer, sd
whose? good for their sould? or ours! so bitter, so young,
such needs.)

even now
it is difficult for me to fix in my eyes
the image of
the God/Priest
lifting sin from the souls of the people
my soul, my sin

clothing these six million in my sins
& thrusting them in their foreign wrappings
into the flaming mouths of agony

IV

when the sun dies
many other suns will still flame

all things contain the seeds
of their own completion
all seeds contain the things
of their own destruction

the sun
makes a morning
bright descending on hooded eyes
the sun's morning
floods into the sands of war

wake up
hang on

coming together
coming together
coming together

--Stuart Z. Perkoff, Voices of the Lady: Collected Poems, National Poetry Foundation, 1998, pages 171-8.

ZAYEEN

the sound of a dropped
bomb, before it
hits, the long high shriek
piercing the air, opening the
air, before the earth
is erupted
is not language

the sound enormous exploding
fragmenting, the stroke of the scream
definite, given, the point of
culmination
is not language

language demands
connections, delicate structures
must be firm
at the core

its arithmetical number is 7

--Stuart Z. Perkoff, Voices of the Lady; Collected Poems, National Poetry Foundation, 1998, p. 80

The Book of Commons

2010-05-12T09:16:00.000-07:00

Dearest Mo,

I awoke from a dream that was intolerably vague and purposeless, thinking I was wasting my life because it did not lead to clear dreams--and should by now. Then I thought of Hayden Carruth's poem about men turning this world into "God's grave" and immediately felt that somehow such atheism was really devotion because God must be more than an inescapable, hounding thought--but a thought worthy of thinking once the scarecrow has a brain. My musing straw man's mind jumped in at this point and said something about how the mind has ceased to be proper housing for the thought of God (my current story line for The Fall of Man). I wondered in what sense I had meant that. Was the mind as a house for God poorly built? "You don't even have a building permit," the wise-ass part of me said. "This hovel you call a mind wouldn't even pass inspection." I then chastised myself for what I will now call "metaphoric intemperance." Still lying in bed, I decided to seriously, and with great focus, pursue the thought of God, like Descartes pursuing the "I am," as a necessary occurrence. That's when it happened--a thought unlike any other I have ever had. "What if God Himself is the last act of Creation?" I asked myself. "And what if we as human beings are sent to bring His name into the world by pronouncing it?" Impossible, I thought. Essence (God) precedes Existence (Creation). But something in me then said, "Things are their opposite in the world of matter. First is last. Last is first." I had no idea what I meant. The humbled wise-ass part of me suggested meekly, "Things are different on this, the other (Created) side of light. Things are different when the light slows to the lower frequency of song. There it seems Night until bird calls make the world worthy of Day and Light. Like the birds of morning, you are a receptacle for song--a Logos of song that slowly fills the trees with points of light that chatter and swirl like stars buried in a Rothko blackness dam-burst into a Van Gogh night. What would you have that erupting song say about God?" That's when I dragged myself to my computer and wrote what follows, perhaps as prelude to bigger (housing) project.

David (of later life)

P.S., Try to imagine the faith necessary for a God his subjects have bifurcated from His Creation to believe that His final bestowal is to be a name among names, His native flowing regained in the emergent/merging life we have been given. Try to imagine this Creation as an inseparable act of faith like "a river that runs through it." I realize now that what happened this morning is the result of watching that movie for the first time in years and re-reading the book on which it is successfully based.

THE BOOK OF COMMONS

for Mo

What if the last act of Creation

in the story we most commonly tell about it

is of a God dispensing life like seltzer

whose name is to appear like a signature

in small scrawl on a painting?

And what if the painting isn't finished

and the artist still unknown?

What if the subjects of this painting

have yet to satisfy the maker

into signing His name

at the bottom like rocks

along the floor of a river?

What if the subjects are to appear first and foremost

as sailors braving the rapids

of a wild river that moves like a deep, wide crease

through a land which stranded men

would call the Valley of Death's Shadow?

And what then if the Creator's brush is driven

to depict a river bed that is now a dry basin

representing some perplexing second thoughts

about the abilities of men to cruise those crushing waters?

What if Creation has become a subject whose original excitement

has quieted to sadder shadings?

What if the rapids of this uttered world

have become too dangerous for men to ride?

And what if the roar men hear

is no longer a matching hum?

Monkish Commentary:

Om is river rush, neutral no matter how powerful--free to become h(om)e to dwell in but just as

free to become (om)en of destruction when reduced to cascading thrill ride or wreckage-strewn flood tide

risen from unkempt, torn levies. O, men, make of this world what is best for house keeping. Let the gods

enter each perception, thought and dream as if the sentience that invites them is a national park entrance.

Do not give into fear and greed that turns each door into a fire exit. The world is made for embrace not escape.

I struggle with the world

in its defrocked complexity.

I struggle with the world

as if it is a church whose founder left it.

I struggle with the world

whose first place is a public garden

where, rumors have it, sex scandals

and oil drilling have turned it into a hiding place.

I struggle with the world

whose nights still bring a scented wind

that flows through the trees

with an estuarial grace

and a tinge of honeysuckle.

I struggle with the world

and God's discarded dreams for it

in the unworthy shrine of troubled sleep.

I struggle with the world

as a birthplace like Stratford-on-Avon

where we are permitted entrance

only as groundskeepers--

all other rights and reasons

but reverence through upkeep

revoked

for the time being.

Monkish Commentary:

The grounds need tending. They always need tending if they are to be true grounds for being.

This is not meant as a pun, although it started as such. See into the adjacency of meanings

when the same words can be used to signify birth and death and the life they share in common.

When turrets syndrome is the proper behavior

2010-05-11T03:23:00.000-07:00

No wonder Wendell Berry reveres the poetry of Hayden Carruth (1921-2008). I got beaten up by the following poem of his this morning. Called "Waterloo," and written around 1995, it is one of the most startling and powerful anti-war poems I have ever read and explains my own frequent lapses into turrets syndrome tongues in public places because of it. Carruth, who drank as much as he wrote, felt compelled to inhospitably bad behavior on the subject of war and what he sensed was unconscionably serene or at least imperturbably stolid sufferance of it. This poem is about the carousing of conscience in the face of such sufferance and I implore you to share it with every friend and acquaintance you have. Maybe such sharing will help it become the world's swiftest and most successful chain (e)mail ever. If enough people receive this poem by noon, it will reach our old-style Republican president's desk by evening. Let this be the morning of the most ferocious anti-war arousal in history. Let us all stand united as "former citizens" of this, or any, warfare state.

David

P.S. I translate the phrase "un citoyen d'autrefois" as "a former citizen," but my French is bad. Some help here, any of the faithful few passersby.

WATERLOO

Overlooking the battlefield, on that grassy
ridge where the ladies and gentlemen of Brussels
brought their servants and picnic hampers
and card tables to watch, you could smell
the exploding gunpowder and hear shrieks
in the distance, you could see the brightly
uniformed bodies of men running and firing,
clashing their swords and falling,
and he became ill. He couldn't help it. His hands
trembled, his mouth trembled, he retched
and vomited over a picnic table, he tried to drink
from a bottle of champagne and spilled it
down the front of his shirt, he soiled his trousers.
It was unbelievable, atrocious. He felt worse
than he could say. He went from table to table,
seeking comfort and reassurance, he didn't know what.
The ladies in colorful dresses and huge hats,
the gentlemen in brilliantly tailored suits
were talking and smiling, looking through their
opera glasses, pointing here and there to explain
tactics and mark the approach of fresh legions
on either side. But they paid no attention
to him, they couldn't hear or see him,
as if he were invisible, un citoyen
d'autrefois. The smell thickened,
the stench choked him, and the screams
of the dying men and horses became
piercing and unbearable. He looked closely
at the people around him, yet no one looked
at him. Perhaps he wasn't there. But he was.

--Hayden Carruth, Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey: Poems 1991-1995, Copper Canyon Press, 1996, p. 88

Starting Over Toward Faith--This Time Without Religion

2010-05-08T04:34:00.000-07:00

I was watching the movie of William Saroyan's "The Human Comedy" made during WWII when it was important that none of the multitudes dying died in vain or didn't somehow remain substantial and sanctified by memory. For the first time, it was hard for me to accept such sentimental solace for lives lost in war--or just lost for no reason, or anything reasonable. It is one of the burdens of losing your faith that things become inconceivable and inconsolable. Don't get me wrong. I have simply lost faith in the certainty that things become understandable or reasonable farther and later on. We have allowed our lives to be made destitute of any chance for meaning here and now; and faith that it will make sense seems like an insult to both life and faith because it excuses the inexcusable sufferance of a world so disincarnate and inscrutable. Only kindness practiced both individually and collectively provides a blatant and scrutable solace. The advancing mass of oil in the Gulf should loom and terrify us as much as if a colliding planet loomed unavoidably large in the sky. No, make that larger since this doom is man-made. That oil expands in a gulf of our own unconscionably meager understanding. No wonder it kicks the living day & light out of us.

I'm not saying there isn't heaven. I'm just saying it isn't as much reward as it is relief--a kind of spiritual fail-safe for the impossibility of reason (forget reasons) in the midst of the world we tolerate. I do not know what I have forfeited by my sufferance of this world. The loss is explicit in the loss of any idea or sureness of God as a function and result of daily contact with this world and its members. Atheism flourishes when we lose earth-born and borne membership. We seek to unearth what is inseparable from earth. God exists in manifestness and that manifestness, I think, must be daily and forceful--found on the surest ground of being that we have known.

Yesterday, BP dropped a container on the least dangerous of its three (known) oil spills. Supposedly, this container will enable siphoning of oil into ships and then, presumably, refinement of it. It's a good metaphor for the discomforts of religion, the inadequacy of the understanding it promotes about human affairs. If God and Man are one, and that oneness is proclaimed by the sacrifice of a son, then the resurrection of that son is sheer imbecility like making meaning of the deaths of sons and daughters in, or through, war. When Christ says that today we shall be with him in paradise he is a different Christ than the one who asks his father why he has forsaken him. The thought that even Christ can't make sense of his murder is, of course, unbearable; so we split him into two: the two cross-mate thieves, one of whom accepts his death and the other of whom doesn't. Then we betray the humanness of such ambivalence for a final miraculous consummation of full acceptance. That may be alright for people afflicted with conditions like cancer but not ones who die young and solely by dint of the human condition.

So we live with dust-to-dust despite assurances from Zen masters that there is no dust, nothing to be lost (except ignorance) or found (except ignorance). That unblemished mirror is, these masters say, unnecessary and non-existent. This Christ doesn't die on a cross, and refuses (better yet, he is unavailable) to accept a sentence to one. That Christ high tails it out of Jerusalem before his enemies can lay a glove on him or charge him with sedition. That Christ says the reader is always greater than the book that is thrown at him. That Christ says solace is the only scripture to be followed, which allows the Logos plenty of latitude among all things named.

What I mean is this: If we are all part of a greater incar-nation, then we must not merely render to Caesar what is Caesar's but make it so much less a portion of our daily rendering. Caesar's salad versus God's salud. In this way, we all earmark the major share of our apportioning for God. This God is not other-worldly or non-human. He must be manifest as ourselves, hence nearer and dearer than what Caesar gives us, reified as daily bread and the baking of that bread in our own actions. Only then can the wafers we make be the wafers we take in communion. Only then are we permitted belief in the blood and body because it is our own--and its preservation and sustenance is the most sacred measure of belief.

This is the best I can do today, except to type out a poem by Hayden Carruth about the brave, defiant inconsolability I feel daily ever since I ceased to be a Mormon/Sufi/believer:

NOT TRANSHISTORICAL DEATH, OR AT LEAST NOT QUITE

Jim Wright, who was a good poet and my friend, died two or three years ago.
I was told at the time that we did not lose him.
I was told that memories of him would keep him in the world.
I don't remember who told me this, just that it was in the air, like the usual fall-out from funerals.
I knew it was wrong.

Now I have begun to think how it was wrong.
I have begun to see that it was not only sentimental but simplistic.
I have examined Jim in my mind.
I remember him, but the memories are as dead as he is.
What is more important is how I see him now.
There, there in that extreme wide place, that emptiness.
He is near enough to be recognizable, but too far away to be reached by a cry or a gesture.
He is wearing a light-weight, brightly colored shirt.
His trousers belong to a suit, but the coat has been discarded.
His belt is narrow and sometimes stays straightly on his pot belly.
His shoes are thin and shiny.
I think he bought those shoes on his last journey to Europe.
He is walking away, slowly.
He is wandering, meandering.
Sometimes he makes a little circle.
Sometimes he pauses and looks to one side or the other.
Sometimes he looks down.
Occasionally he looks up.
He never looks back, at least not directly.
Although he recedes very gradually and becomes gradually smaller, I continue to see all the aspects of his face and figure clearly.
He is thinking about something and I know what.
It is not the place he now occupies in my life.
He cannot imagine that, only I can.
He is neither what he was (obviously), nor what he is (for I am quite sure I am inventing that).
Is he Jim Wright? Is he someone else?
Yes, he is Jim Wright. No, he is not someone else. Who else could he possibly be?
When I die, he will arrive at where he is going. And I will set out after him.

Hayden Carruth, Collected Shorter Poems 1946-1991, Copper Canyon Press, 1992, pages 349-50.

A Summons on the Mount

2010-05-05T03:30:00.000-07:00

"To buy gold is to short the dollar. To buy
gold is to conclude that Congress will eventually ruin the
currency. This means that the promises of Congress are not
reliable. Very few Americans can bring themselves to
believe this. So, they remain on the sidelines."
--Gary North, May 4th, 2010

Are we on a de facto gold standard? With gold at near $1,200 per ounce and poised, like a cat ready to leap up on a window sill, to hit $1,500, I wonder if I shouldn't be shorting the dollar, too and spending my hard-earned unemployment compensation on coins (1/4 ouncers and the like).

One thing I know for sure, as toxic tongues of oil begin to lick the shores of Louisiana and Florida, we are all participants in a vast ruination of natural wealth and the material world. Is believing in the dollar like believing in an abstract, immaterial God whose protection is best expressed and most manifest beyond His most sacred and intimate manifestation, the Creation? I think it the most abominable atheism to dematerialize God because it rationalizes our colossal failure of stewardship and confirms the cowardice of our faith in and the failure of our flesh to be incarnation. Capitalism is waging and winning a war of self-hatred against Nature--and its success at doing so poses a far greater threat than nuclear weapons. We are using weapons of economic mass destruction every day and refusing to elevate these acts above the category of misdemeanor. Why are the safety rules for oil rigs not as tough and zealously monitored as those for nuclear facilities? An exploding oil rig is tantamount to an exploding nuclear warhead. Hence it is a war crime and should be as actionable as any attempt to blow up a tourist area.

A HASTILY CONSTRUCTED CREDO OF PRESENT BELIEFS

Here's what Libertarian Dave believes: Every bank bailout decriminalizes corporate mass destruction of habitat. We should adopt a "too big to succeed" yardstick and prevent any institution from amassing the capital means to commit economic or environmental mass destruction.

Here's what Imagist Dave believes: The great glacial meltdown is only a vivid, accurate metaphor for the blind friction and terrifying heat of money changing hands in the Christ-less temple courtyard of Creation.

Here's what Sufi Dave believes: If there is one world that we live in, it is the Incar-Nation. Hence we have no choice but to be the sons of God and no chance for continued existence without sharing this fact and deciding to be so. Our birthright can only be found in preserving our birthplace.

Here's what mad-dog Dave believes: the anti-Christs like Monsanto and Haliburton (which operated BP's oil rig)--all run by God-fearing men--are on the verge of final poisoning of the planet, the only known staging area for mass salvation. Killing 10 million shrimp and every other estuarial life form is tantamount to turning an ocean into a slaughter house and concentration camp. Thus we must ask: Who is guilty of the greater genocide? BP (and its proxies) or the latest dough-faced Pakistani Taliban proxy trying to blow up an SUV in Times Square? Why didn't the FBI abort the takeoffs of every corporate jet belonging to these companies that plot against the Incar-Nation?

Here's what Left-wing, One-World Dave believes: Only when we frame the organized exploitation of nature in kindred contexts of mass destruction and eco-terrorism will we begin to address the calamity that has arrived.

Here's what defrocked atheist Dave believes: The terrifying parallels between our belief in the false infinite wealth of money, rather than the true finite physical wealth represented by gold (sorry, all you believers in "Lord of the Rings"), echos our belief in a God who rules by fiat--a disembodied corporate God with a leadership style akin to Jack Welsh not Jesus Christ. It should be considered both absurd and impossible to believe in a God beyond His creation or separate from it. That distance simply mirrors and projects our own alienation from the Creation and our adamant irresponsibility as a result.

Music, maestro, please--in this case, "The Best Things in Life are Free."

For All Rumi Camp Meeting Followers

2010-05-04T02:35:00.000-07:00

Dearest Friend and Friends,

Seasonal greetings! Thank you for your recent inquiry into possible spring and summer travel in these hereabouts. As sitting and serving trustees of the Imagi-Nation's Department of the Exterior, we want to inform and assure you that we have picture-perfect Rumi-esque days here on our eastern shores where you will arrive by ferry (we have no airports and cannot be seen from the air). We have enclosed a poem by James Schuyler that we hope will entice and suffice as proof of perfect harboring weathers in all seasons and on all surfaces in these parts. We invite further travel inquiries into contemporary American realms of fully imagined world where "God," it is said, "is shyly, slyly present" in vistas of sometimes ebullient particulars. For those who prefer deity ensconced in inseparability from its evidence, may we remind you that sightings of the Tao, declared endangered elsewhere, are common reportage here. As we like to say, "The Tao is richly resonant when keenly observed in even the tiniest detail and most reduced of circumstances. The only poverty recognized here is the easily ameliorated one of undernourished and underemployed perception."

Your humble servants,

Walt Whitman IV
Dahlia Dickinson
Chester Creeley
Jaclyn Kennedy Kerouac

P.S., The Trustees recently voted, for ceremonial purposes, to unanimously renew a never-lapsed moratorium on all off and on shore drilling for meaning that would endanger future intactness of fully endowed and observable pantheistic plurality of our common wealth. When the unseen can no longer manifest in the fully preserved and practiced purity of the seen, the obscene ensues. Come breathe in and sing out our fresh air. Come spend happy days on our open roads where eyes are free to follow the never-ending beckoning of the present. We look forward to meeting you and your needs.

[Enclosure]

LIGHT BLUE ABOVE

Light blue above, darker below, lightly roughened by the stirring air
and with smooth tracks on it. There goes Reynald Hardie's lobster
boat, taking a colorful load of pleasure-seeking shoppers to Camden.

O Air

the clear, the soot-bearer, the unseen that rips
that kills and cures, that keeps
all that is empty filled, the bright invisible

into which we move like fingers into gloves
that coats our rolling home with the sweet softness
between grape and grape skin

in silent laughter in a glass pushed down
into basin at retreating puzzled water
constrained to rising elsewhere up
the sides of the basin, of the glass
up fingers and hand and wrist

clinging to arm in mercurial bubbles
that detach and rise and join itself

the quick to heal
that wriggles up from hot
heat-wave pavement like teased hair
or has a wintry bite, or in the dog days saps
or is found at the bottom
of a mailbox on an empty house
or in a nest between twigs, among eggs

and we go on
and it within us
upon a dust speck
in bubble air

--James Schuyler, Selected Poems, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, paperback edition 2007, page 61

LIFE IN PALACE-STINE or IS NETAN THE YAHOO A TEABAGGER?

2010-03-21T05:28:00.000-07:00

I heard an NPR interview with an Israeli government spokesman about the unfortunately timed announcement of new housing projects in Jerusalem made while VP Biden was visiting Netanyahu. The official story goes likes this: some low-level underling made the announcement unaware that Biden was in town or that anything in it could be offensive; besides, the spokesman added, the decision is only at the stage 4 level of a seven-stage process and is by no means a fait accomplit. NPR asked was she fired? "Of course not," he was answered. Why? She was just some schlub doing her job. Earlier in the week, while watching C-Span to hear Dennis Kucinich announce his support of the health care bill, I watched three AIPAC lackeys get up and chastise the president for being so upset by the mistake. The third schmuck actually said that Jerusalem and the West Bank are Israeli territory and that this beloved ally of the US can do whatever it damn well pleases with and in them. He all but called them the spoils of the 1967 war.

Is it any wonder why so many on the Left are burned out? Wars, our own and those of our dearest ally in the Middle East, are just a tiresome, no-longer-worrisome, fact of life. Sorry, Palestine, your captors are instating their own novel version of a two-state solution--Palestine will henceforth be known as a Soweto-type homeland for Arabs and a crazy quilt of condominiums for Jews known collectively as Palace-stine. Israel proper will simply function as some mother ship of state, periodically sending its citizens to Palace-stine to live in luxurious apartheid supremacy in choice locations such as the Golan Heights.

In protest, I'm thinking of building an Apartheid museum next to the Holocaust museum in either Washington or New York. Maybe AIPAC will buy me out for ten times the price I paid for the building. Hey, I'm Jewish. I know a good deal when I see one. Besides, I'll have made my useless symbolic point and can retire to my own condo. Maybe I'll even exercise my right of return and live in the Golan Heights. You never know when automatic biological Jewish identity and the citizenship it confers on angel and demon alike will come in handy.

And that's really what the insult was all about--Netanyahu is a Jewish white supremacist teabagger from Cheltenham as incensed by having an African-American in the White House as Rush Limbaugh. This "accident" was simply a deliberate act of racism. And please don't call me anti-Semitic for accusing Israel's leadership of racism. The irony would make laugh so hard I may choke.

Obama Unmasked: Darth looks best in banker's blue

2010-03-10T04:38:00.000-08:00

Please watch this 11-minute clip of an interview with true media watchdog Jeff Cohen and see for yourself the final unmasking of Obama as a corporate puppet masquerading as a populist. This charade is placed in a historical context of corporatization of the Democratic Party starting with Bill Clinton and its complete capitulation to Wall Street. Mailer talked about the takeover of the Republican Party by the New Money of the West back in the 60s and 70s. Now the Democrats belong to the Old Money of the East. Obama shrewdly became--literally and figuratively--the dark horse candidate for the forces of darkness. Darth looks so much better in banker's blue. But the slight stammer is a giveaway. Do not be fooled any longer by this well-coached, earnest-seeming Macbeth. And realize why both parties are now minions of a corporate cabal so small and strong that the country has become classifiable as a full-fledged plutocracy (i.e., a government run by, not just for, the wealthy).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfLJIfRUBkU

Personally, I have reached the point of needing the great release from political obsession that Philip Whalen attained in the late Spring and early Summer of 1966 when he wrote his mighty WAR POEM FOR DIANE DIPRIMA in Japan where he had gone to study Zen. At the poem's end, drenched in zazen calmness, fortitude and primal power, he vows a return to America--but not before imagining an apocalypse of swarming invaders which is gleefully, glowingly interrupted by zazen's triumphant empowerment. I hope to find the same in Mexico (I had a foretaste in Arizona in February). Notice, too, Whalen's allusion to the great invasion of song and art from England that was sprightly succor of the time.

What Whalen didn't foresee back then is that the barbarians would enter in millions of Trojan horses of foreign-made automobiles and television sets and that they wouldn't make a blood-thirsty beeline for the homes of the bankers and factory owners. Operatives are always rewarded not punished. The spoils of war go to the spoiled. So the empty-fisted and growling-stomached mobs will be comprised of our own alienated blue and white collar workers mouthing hate slogans against the very forces that could liberate them. No one knew we would turn this dumb and dreadful. But I remember reading this poem when it was published during the last great shrieking scrimmages of the anti-war populace against the pro-war powers that be. I remember being flooded by the comfort of Whalen's meditations which he shared with his reader and then that hammer-blow ending (as thunderous as the ending of Mahler's 6th symphony). The last line of this incredible poem still rings as true as any dong from the long out-of-order Liberty Bell and will do so in timeless after echo:

Nobody wants the war only the money

fights on, alone.

If you have time AFTER WATCHING JEFF COHEN return here for Whalen and solace I believe we all need. To cope with vibrant eyes, Whalen taught me this morning, is to hope--successfully:

III.

The War. The Empire.

When the Goths went into Rome

They feared the Senators were gods

Old men, each resolutely throned at his own house door.

When they finally come to Akron, Des Moines, White Plains,

The nomads will laugh as they dismember us.

Other nations watching will applaud.

They'll be no indifferent eye, nary a disinterested ear,

We'll screech and cry.

A friend tells me I'm wrong,

"All the money, all the power's in New York."

If it were only a matter of money, I'd agree

But the power's gone somewhere else . . .

(Gone from England, the English now arise

Painters and singers and poets leap from Imperial tombs

Vast spirit powers emanate from Beatle hair)

Powerful I watch the shadow of leaves

Moving over nine varieties of moss and lichen

Multitudes of dragonflies (all colors) the celebrated

Uguisu bird, and black butterfly: wing with trailing edge of red brocade

(Under-kimono shown on purpose, as in Book of Songs)

I sail out of my head, incandescent meditations

Unknown reaches of clinical madness, I flow into crystal world

of gems, jewels

Enlightened by granite pine lake sky nowhere movies of Judy

Canova

I'll return to America one of these days

I refuse to leave it to slobs and boobies

I'll have it all back, I won't let it go

Here the locust tree its leaves

Sharp oval flat

I haven't lived with you for over twenty years

Great clusters of white blossom

Leaf perfumed also

Lovely to meet again, far away from home

(the tree-peony too elegant,

Not to be mentioned, a caress, jade flesh bloom)

My rooms are illuminated by

Oranges and lemons in a bowl,

Power of light and vision: I'll see a way . . .

Nobody wants the war only the money

fights on, alone.

31:V:66-25:viii:66

from: The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen, Wesleyan Press, 2007, pages 504-5.

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OP-ED COLUMNIST

Playing All the Angles

By MAUREEN DOWD

Published: October 16, 2010

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

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