copeland morris THE CANTOS OF WAR

"We used to wonder where war lived;....it is in this terrible loneliness of the combatants and the noncombatants, in this humiliated despair which we all feel, in the baseness that we feel growing in our faces as the days go by. The reign of beasts has begun." --Albert Camus

I.

A curbside bomb. Your very own Book of the Junta.
You were fourteen, then nineteen, in someone's
Recollection, before lakes of crude oil had burst
Into scarlet and magenta. With her little jots
Of music at night, the mockingbird comforts me
With her twittering. I still remember the Picture
Book of War: Collier's Photographic History.

THE GROWING CALL FOR IMPEACHMENT

The public pressure for impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney has increased, and is focused at present, on ways in which these leaders operate as a law unto themselves. By throwing caution aside, these men have abandoned normal restraint, through criminality, stealth and deception, brutality and violence. More than anything else, the public seems to have grasped the administration's contempt for justice. A White House without any sense of shame, run with irresponsible authority, is something most Americans had never dreamed was possible. The Constitution provides for Congress to enact the laws and for a President to faithfully execute the laws of the land. But when any president or vice president acts upon their belief that they can break laws, pass along illegal orders to their subordinates, and perpetuate criminality through their chain of command, they must be impeached.

By the terms of our Constitution no one is above the law. Justice is necessary; we cannot aspire to be "a nation of laws, not men" unless we begin impeachment. We cannot explain these times outside of justice and the need to establish justice. The Republic will die if our representatives ask us to go on living without justice, just clinging, hanging on as prisoners in isolation do, counting up our days by making scratch marks on the wall. Just waiting out Bush and Cheney until their terms of office expire will not do.

They have to go.

If we fail to respect our Constitution; our own liberties may fail, like those of the Roman Republic. There is no justice without full disclosure, not after these last six years of crimes in high office. Treason moves like a shadow behind a curtain of silence and secrecy; and we have seen with our own eyes how Mr. Libby has had his silence purchased by the President's commutation of his sentence.

Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney have spoken endlessly of freedom; but they meant, to be sure, a freedom to take advantage of the guileless, the poor, and the unprepared. They quickly discarded people who acted in good faith, or any others who ever believed in their lies. It's been a real bash for their bagmen, henchmen, mercenaries and war profiteers, for the assorted torturers, wiretappers, kidnappers, freebooting lobbyists and murderers. It's a pity we can't impeach them all and point out their contemptible mugs on TV.

Bush and Cheney have now instructed their employees and former employees to ignore congressional subpoenas and invest themselves in contempt of Congress. The two Mr. Bigs should be made to answer articles of impeachment; and if they are obstinate, they can prepare for their trial in the Senate. To have the option of resigning is a much better thing than either of them deserves. But let them resign if they want to
be saved the embarrassment.

THE YOUNG DEAD SOLDIERS DO NOT SPEAK by Archibald MacLeish

The young dead soldiers do not speak.
Nevertheless, they are heard in the still houses:
who has not heard them?
They have a silence that speaks for them at night
and when the clock counts.
They say: We were young. We have died.
Remember us.
They say: We have done what we could
but until it is finished it is not done.
They say: We have given our lives but until it is finished
no one can know what our lives gave.
They say: Our deaths are not ours: they are yours,
they will mean what you make them.
They say: Whether our lives and our deaths were for
peace and a new hope or for nothing we cannot say;
it is you who must say this.
We leave you our deaths. Give them their meaning.
We were young, they say. We have died; remember us.

else lasker-schüler MY BLUE PIANO

At home I have a blue piano.
But I can't play a note.

It's been in the shadow of the cellar door
Ever since the world went rotten.

Four starry hands play harmonies.
The Woman in the Moon sang in her boat.
Now only rats dance to the clanks.

The keyboard is in bits.
I weep for what is blue. Is dead.

Sweet angels, I have eaten
Such bitter bread. Push open
The door of heaven. For me, for now--

Although I am still alive--
Although it is not allowed.

THE DISPOSITION TOWARD EVIL

Artwork by Fernando Botero

In the twentieth century, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran minister and author of an important work of philosophy raised again Aristotle's question of a disposition toward evil. It was not so much a single evil act that concerned Bonhoeffer, a German, as it was the disposition toward evil. His concern led him to leave a safe position in the United States and return to Germany to oppose Hitler. He was implicated in the plot to kill the Fuhrer, and Bonhoeffer was sent to prison and then to Flossenburg concentration camp. Shortly before the liberation of the camp he was stripped, marched through the corridors to the gallows, and hanged. His legacy is that an ordinary man, not a hero, may raise the hero's question about a government. Do the actions of the Bush Administration and its supporters in the Congress result from a disposition toward evil? And if that is not the disposition of all of them, it cannot be denied in the case of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove, Wolfowitz, and even Bush himself.

--Earl Shorris, "The National Character", Harper's Magazine, June 2007

Historians are bound to look on early 21st Century America with a harsh eye.

Even Andrew Sullivan, a noted conservative writer and former supporter of the Bush/Cheney policies, is now disturbed that the administration has recycled many of the same techniques, and similar language used by the Nazis. Sullivan does not equate 1937 Germany with 2007 America, but does warn his readers of the administration's fondness for Gestapo technique.

The phrase "Verschärfte Vernehmung" is German for "enhanced interrogation". Other translations include "intensified interrogation" or "sharpened interrogation". It's a phrase that appears to have been concocted in 1937, to describe a form of torture that would leave no marks, and hence save the embarrassment pre-war Nazi officials were experiencing as their wounded torture victims ended up in court.

Also: the use of hypothermia, authorized by Bush and Rumsfeld, was initially forbidden. 'Waterboarding" was forbidden too, unlike that authorized by Bush. As time went on, historians have found that all the bureaucratic restrictions were eventually broken or abridged. Once you start torturing, it has a life of its own.

What I am reporting is a simple empirical fact: the interrogation methods approved and defended by this president are not new. Many have been used in the past. The very phrase used by the president to describe torture-that-isn't-somehow-torture - "enhanced interrogation techniques" - is a term originally coined by the Nazis. The techniques are indistinguishable.

The Republic that generations have passed down to us is in real danger; and what is required is for the new majority in Congress to do what voters have entrusted them to do. The public wants American troops to be withdrawn from Iraq. But Congress instead capitulated to the president; and the majority democrats removed the timelines for troop withdrawal, which they had previously touted and included in a bill they had presented a few weeks before.

On Memorial Day, Cindy Sheehan announced that she was physically, emotionally, and financially exhausted, and said that she had finished with the Camp Casey campaign and was returning home.

I have come to some heartbreaking conclusions this Memorial Day Morning. These are not spur of the moment reflections, but things I have been meditating on for about a year now. The conclusions that I have slowly and very reluctantly come to are very heartbreaking to me.

The first conclusion is that I was the darling of the so-called left as long as I limited my protests to George Bush and the Republican Party. Of course, I was slandered and libeled by the right as a "tool" of the Democratic Party. This label was to marginalize me and my message. How could a woman have an original thought, or be working outside of our "two-party" system?

However, when I started to hold the Democratic Party to the same standards that I held the Republican Party, support for my cause started to erode and the "left" started labeling me with the same slurs that the right used. I guess no one paid attention to me when I said that the issue of peace and people dying for no reason is not a matter of "right or left", but "right and wrong."

What was heartbreaking in her statement was her conclusion that her son Casey had died for nothing, and also her belief that she had failed him by her inability to carry on as she has.

The democrats in Congress cannot be forgiven for what they did, as they enabled the president's endless war. It doesn't matter whether you call them cowards or not. The so-called opposition party can no longer excuse themselves with promises to do the right thing next time. They have made that excuse one too many times.

Of what use are democrats in Congress if they won't stand their ground against an out-of-control president? One of the most banal excuses floated about, is the idea that these democrats were thrown into panic by the approach of the Memorial Day holiday. It is presumed that their guts surged with fright as they watched the latest glamor-packed Army recruitment ad on television, or when they heard the patriotic humming of Lockeed and Boeing commercials.

We should mark this down as complicity; and perhaps the democrats are not so much afraid as they are bound, deep down, to many of the same illusions and false duties that compel the republicans.

The disposition toward evil can express itself in the doing of evil, or in the enabling of those who do evil. This disposition can also manifest in the national myth, the collective illusions, the false mirror in which a nation sees itself.

Consider these cautionary words, written by Simone Weil during the Second World War:

That which is essentially different from evil is virtue accompanied by a clear perception of the possibility of evil, and of evil appearing as something good. The presence of illusions which we have abandoned, but which are still present in the mind, is perhaps the criterion of truth.

"THIS ADMINISTRATION"..."THE WORST IN HISTORY", SAYS JIMMY CARTER

An Associated Press article quotes former president, Jimmy Carter, who has broken from the tradition of ex-presidents withholding criticism of a sitting president. Carter, who aimed his harshest words at Bush's Iraq war policy, also condemned Prime Minister Tony Blair. In a BBC radio interview, Carter described "the almost undeviating support" of the President's British ally as "a major tragedy for the world". The former president had strong words to describe Blair's support of Bush: "Abominable. Loyal. Blind. Apparently subservient".

Carter emphasized that a break of political continuity basically separates the Current Occupant of the White House from past administrations:

The overt reversal of America's basic values as expressed by previous administrations, including George H. W. Bush and Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon and others, has been the most disturbing to me.

We now have endorsed the concept of pre-emptive war where we go to war with another nation militarily, even though our own security is not directly threatened, if we want to change the regime there or if we fear that sometime in the future our security might be endangered...But that's been a radical departure from all previous administration policies.

The AP article continued:

Carter, who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, criticized Bush for having "zero peace talks" in Israel. Carter also said the administration "abandoned or directly refuted" every negotiated nuclear arms agreement, as well as environmental efforts by other presidents.

Carter also offered a harsh assessment for the White House's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, which helped religious charities receive $2.15 billion in federal grants in fiscal year 2005 alone.

"The policy from the White House has been to allocate funds to religious institutions, even those that channel those funds exclusively to their own particular group of believers in a particular religion," Carter said. "As a traditional Baptist, I've always believed in separation of church and state and honored that promise when I was president, and so have other presidents, I might say, except this one."

Though Jimmy Carter's declaration comes belatedly against the White House and its Current Occupant, it does dramatize the building political crisis. This decision can be seen as requiring courage, and has already put former President Carter and First Lady Rosalyn Carter at the receiving end of threats, coming from American right-wing extremists.

UPDATE: Monday, May 21, 2007

Jimmy Carter today chose to modify his previous commentary that appeared in an Arkansas newspaper. Carter did not retract any of his sharp attack on Prime Minister Blair, but revised his remarks with respect to Bush, saying he intended no personal sort of criticism of the president.

Following a White House denunciation of Carter's original remarks, the Democratic former leader said he had intended to describe Bush as the worst president since scandal-plagued Richard Nixon.

"My remarks were maybe careless or misinterpreted. But I wasn't comparing the overall administration and certainly not talking personally about any president," Carter told NBC.

"I have been very careful and still am not to criticize any president personally," he said, while restating his opposition to Bush's policies on Iraq and the Middle East.

In a weekend commentary published by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Carter had written: "I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history."

--David Edwards, Raw Story

WE CELEBRATE THE 4TH BIRTHDAY OF THOLOS OF ATHENA

Jason, who is still alive, is vomited up by the dragon that protects the Golden Fleece. Nearby stands Athena, poised to rescue the hero.

"Homer meant by Athena mind and intelligence. And the maker of names appears to have had a singular notion about her, and indeed calls her by a still higher title, divine intelligence, as though he would say, This is she who had the mind of God." --Plato, Cratylus, p. 147

Let us imagine American life before and after the Revolution, or life before and after Harper's Ferry, or again, before and after Martin Luther King Jr.'s march on Selma, Alabama. The nation has survived bloody internal convulsions, as well as foreign wars; and up to this point we have survived to contemplate the "before and after". Nonetheless, our birthday today at Tholos seems to be the most solemn one so far; and we have to wonder whether "mind and intelligence" or some other aspect of God will light our way beyond the present chapter of history.

As citizens of an American nation (or as citizens of any nation) we recognize that--like the naked man in the mouth of a dragon--we are not in the usual kind of trouble.

Christian and Islamic absolutists are convinced they won't die themselves, as they bring the "before and after" to a crashing end.

How shall we frame the end of history? Clearly a species that will continue to slow cook its habitat rather than change lifestyles is not in line for "natural selection". Creationists can't figure out how mass extinction takes place. It won't be so biblical when no one's around to enjoy the end of history, and witness the harsh judgment of those they always hated, feeling liberated enough to clap and cheer and howl, as folks do at a football game. We give God more credit than that; we think God is more subtle.

Most people don't know that God was put on trial at Auschwitz by a small group of learned Jewish men who were imprisoned there. Elie Wiesel had lost his mother and little sister in the camp by that time, and it broke his heart to witness that trial. He was only a boy himself; but he understood the finding that God was wrong.

There was a "before Auschwitz" and an "after Auschwitz" and it is our responsibility to remember what happened. Keeping the "before and after" is a sacred obligation. And Elie Wiesel has said that "the opposite of love is not hatred, but indifference". Believing what he said, we cannot be indifferent to Israelis bottling up Palestinians in a ghetto. We cannot be indifferent to an American-led jihad for oil. We cannot be indifferent to Sunni and Shia pinning notes on the bodies of each other's Iraqi relatives, which read "this is what happens to unbelievers".

"There is so much to be done, there is so much that can be done. One person--a Raoul Wallenberg, an Albert Schweitzer, a Martin Luther King Jr.--one person of integrity can make a difference, a difference of life and death. As long as one dissident is in prison, our freedom will not be true. As long as one child is hungry, our life will be filled with anguish and shame. What all these victims need above all is to know that they are not alone; that we are not forgetting them, that when their voices are stifled we shall lend them ours, that while their freedom depends on ours, the quality of our freedom depends on theirs."
--Elie Wiesel, Night, p. 120

Look at the Golden Fleece! How beautiful! How near at hand and elusively out of reach! It is the venerated object that bestows blessings and healing upon the community that possesses it. Now is the moment when it should belong to the whole world.

wislawa szymborska TORTURES

Nothing has changed.
The body is a reservoir of pain;
it has to eat and breathe the air, and sleep;
it has thin skin and the blood is just beneath it;
it has a good supply of teeth and fingernails;
its bones can be broken; its joints can be stretched.
In tortures all of this is considered.

Nothing has changed.
The body still trembles as it trembled
before Rome was founded and after,
in the twentieth century before and after Christ.
Tortures are just what they were, only the earth has shrunk
and whatever goes on sounds as if it's just a room away.

Nothing has changed.
Except there are more people,
and new offenses have sprung up beside the old ones--
real, make-believe, short-lived, and non-existent.
But the cry with which the body answers for them
was, is, and will be a cry of innocence
in keeping with the age-old scale and pitch.

Nothing has changed.
Except perhaps the manners, ceremonies, dances.
The gesture of the hands shielding the head
has nonetheless remained the same.
The body writhes, jerks, tugs,
falls to the ground when shoved, pulls up its knees,
bruises, swells, drools, and bleeds.

Nothing has changed.
Except the run of rivers,
the shapes of forests, shores, deserts, and glaciers.
The little soul roams among those landscapes,
disappears, returns, draws near, moves away,
evasive and a stranger to itself,
now sure, now uncertain of its own existence,
whereas the body is and is and is
and has nowhere to go.

KURT VONNEGUT WAS BEAUTIFUL

"Many years ago I was so innocent I still considered it possible that we could become the humane and responsible America so many members of my generation used to dream of. We dreamed of such an America during the Great Depression, when there were no jobs. And then we fought and often died for that dream during the Second World War, when there was no peace.

But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts us absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many lifeless bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas."

--Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without A Country, p. 71-2


"Where are Mark Twain and Abraham Lincoln now when we need them? They were country boys from Middle America, and both of them made the American people laugh at themselves and appreciate really important, really moral jokes. Imagine what they would have to say today.

One of the most humiliated and heartbroken pieces Mark Twain ever wrote was about the slaughter of six hundred Moro men, women, and children by our soldiers during our liberation of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War. Our brave commander was Leonard Wood, who now has a fort named after him. Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri.

What did Abraham Lincoln have to say about America's imperialist wars, the ones that, on one noble pretext or another, aim to increase the natural resources and pools of tame labor available to the richest Americans who have the best political connections?

It is almost always a mistake to mention Abraham Lincoln. He always steals the show. I am about to quote him again.

More than a decade before his Gettysburg Address, back in 1848, when Lincoln was only a Congressman, he was heartbroken and humiliated by our war on Mexico, which had never attacked us. James Polk was the person Representative Lincoln had in mind when he said what he said. Abraham Lincoln said of Polk, his president, his armed forces' commander-in-chief:

Trusting to escape scrutiny, by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory--that attractive rainbow, that rises in showers of blood--that serpent's eye, that charms to destroy--he plunged into war.

Holy shit! And I thought I was a writer!

Do you know we actually captured Mexico City during the Mexican War? Why isn't that a national holiday? And why isn't the face of James Polk, then our president, up on Mount Rushmore along with Ronald Reagan's? What made Mexico so evil back in the 1840s, well before our Civil War, is that slavery was illegal there. Remember the Alamo? With that war we were making California our own, and a lot of other people and properties, and doing it as though butchering Mexican soldiers who were only defending their homeland against invaders wasn't murder. What other stuff besides California? Well, Texas, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and parts of New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming.

Speaking of plunging into war, do you know why I think George W. Bush is so pissed off at Arabs? They brought us algebra. Also the numbers we use, including a symbol for nothing, which Europeans had never used before. You think Arabs are dumb? Try doing long division with Roman Numerals."

--ibid, pp. 75-7
AP Photo/Buzz Orr

jean chilner morris: PIECES OF CHESS

The cruelty of men
(Disguised as gallantry)
Pushes to the precipice
This dazed, beleaguered
Seeker...
Who leans staring
Into space or death.

Men have hurled you
Into the abyss;
They seek themselves,
And leave you staring
Back in horror, pity.

Possessed by feeling...
You are alone...alone
Beyond the shallow
Rim of the unfeeling.

SWEET JESUS

The innovative artist, Cosimo Cavallaro should have known that a six foot, genital inclusive, standing sculpture of Christ, made of 200 lbs. of dark chocolate, would land him in a world of trouble. And I guess it didn't help that he entitled the exhibit My Sweet Lord.

The religious right moved with dispatch, when it was announced that a mid-town Manhattan exhibition of the huge confection was in the planning stages. The ultra-conservative Catholic League was quickly on the case and Guardian reporter, Ed Pilkington, describes a campaign in which “the league sent emails to 500 other religious groups—including Protestant, Jewish, Muslim and Buddhist with a combined reach of millions—calling on them to boycott the Roger Smith hotel in which the gallery, The Lab, is based.”

Pilkington writes that “Within 24 hours the hotel was so inundated with calls and visiting protesters that it pulled the exhibit.”

As Catholic League president and right-wing mouth-organ, Bill Donahue, put it...”All those involved are lucky that angry Christians don't react the way extremist Muslims do when they're offended.”

A counter-demonstration of sorts, roughly a dozen local anarchists, were gathered outside the lobby of the hotel, chanting “Eat the Chocolate Christ.”

The 45 year old sculptor, Cavallaro, explained that he just liked to do art with foodstuffs. One of his most famous projects involved the 1999 interior decoration of a house in Wyoming with ten thousand pounds of spray-on cheese.

President Bush and Vice-President Cheney are informed of the existence of a Chocolate Christ