BLOOD ON THE MOON

History, with its terrible crimes, prods us into an awareness of responsibility. Looking at current events, some pundits think that our attention is diverted from contemporary war crimes, if Congress acknowledges an Armenian Genocide that took place in Turkey, beginning in April of 1915. Comedian, Jon Stewart, gets big laughs at the expense of spineless democratic leaders in the US House and their “stern rebuke to the Ottoman Empire.” And it is really funny because these same leaders genuflect in the direction of our nation's crazy autocrat, republican President/Decider George Bush.

But whatever else is at stake, there are reasons to think about the 1915 genocide. It's important to acknowledge extreme crime when it is written so large in history. Realistic estimates put the Armenian dead at 1.5 million.

The clockwork agenda behind the war and occupation of Iraq really exploits public hysteria and superstition. How else does one explain the hands-off policy of the so-called congressional opposition? They are really afraid of the White House, fearful of the most impeachable administration that ever was. But they are also beholden to the imposition of fear that churns around them, that has been built up after 2001, from the ashes of the Twin Towers and the guile of Bush and Cheney.

The despotic unitary executive, the blueprint for domestic surveillance, the aspiration for total state secrecy, and Vice President Cheney's co-executive powers,-- all these things were in place-- before the disaster on September 11th. Over a million Iraqis have been killed in the last four-and-a-half years; four million have sought shelter in other countries or live on the run. Iraq's professional classes have fled; and a humiliated people have watched helplessly while their country's cultural artifacts were looted. And right now, mercenary soldiers of the Blackwater Company run amok in the country, getting drunk and crawling around the streets of Baghdad after dark, dressed in camouflage gear and lugging their weapons, after a hard day of shooting civilians who get jammed up with them in traffic.

Turkey's eccentric governments have fallen to the occasional military coup in the period after World War II; and US presidents have looked the other way as their Turkish ally cracked down on dissent and stifled democracy. I seem to remember that the last time a resolution about the Armenian Genocide had a chance of passing in Congress, it was scuttled at the eleventh hour by President Clinton. It's no surprise that President Bush holds the same convictions, the same institutional attitude. Past experience shows that where administration policy is concerned, “now” will never be a good time to ruffle the sensitivities of the Turks.

It is a scandal that Turkey cannot face its own history. The country has persecuted its own writers for “insulting Turkishness”--even when those artists try to deal with this history in works of fiction.

Armenians served in the Ottoman Army, loyal to the Empire, when it was an ally of Kaiser Wilhelm's Germany in World War I; but there was an outbreak of Turkish hysteria which played into the hands of the Young Turk regime, the architects of the genocide. There was a blood red moon, which thousands of Turks took as an omen to unleash hell on earth upon next-door neighbors. The ensuing hysteria fanned the flames of the genocide. Armenian families were slaughtered, root and branch. Entire families were killed and beheaded, and the severed heads were pinned up on clotheslines as a public display. Then, the Armenian population that survived the initial slaughter was driven across the Turkish border into an inhospitable desert, without provisions, where they stood little or no chance of survival.

There is some duty we bear as we claim this kind of memory. And Armenian suffering is held cheap if we don't publicly accept their history as victims of genocide. We ought to reflect as well on the fact that American troops occupy a foreign country against the wishes of its people. Soon the grim side of our own history will pursue us through the years.

Our nation's salvation is linked to breaking the power of popular superstitions, like "the clash of civilizations." America's civilization is real; but it belongs to a world community of laws, treaties, and norms of behavior. On the other hand, the American leaders who most desperately deserve impeachment, go on about their business, as they feed the dogs of war and make methodical preparations to hand us over to the Furies.

An Impromptu Debate By Email With Benny The Firecracker Salesman

Well, here is a discussion on religion which broke out between me and my pal, Benny, via e-mail. Benny is in his mid-sixties and operates a jim-dandy fire-cracker stand right square in the middle of redneck country, west of Fort Worth, open New Years and 4th of July. He has a somewhat checkered past, which I won't go into here, but suffice to say he has been down the road way too many times to remember and has somehow come back alive every time, though bruised and bloodied on a few occasions. Nowadays, he's taking life a little slower. He's a back-sliding Unitarian and a far left Democrat who thinks the time to adopt some of Thomas Jefferson's more radical theories may be at hand.

Our conversation began with him asking me if I planned to attend a meeting between local citizens and the gas drilling companies who want to poke holes all over our city to retrieve the natural gas. It's an issue that has sparked some controversy. But somehow this fairly innocuous exchange lead to a big “debate” over religion. After reading over our exchanges, I thought it might be worth replaying here.

Benny knows I have some trouble accepting the notion of a benevolent “Creator.” For my part, I tend to overplay my agnosticism in order to draw him out. Here's what resulted:

I intend to try and be there. (Referring to the gas well drillers meeting.) Let me know.
Ben H.

It would be my intention, as well. Course, I think that's what that so-called road is paved with, if I remember rightly.
G.

Well, being as you have absolutely zero items on your "TO DO" list, I thought it safe to delegate this chore and only naturally assumed you'd be delighted to discover one measly responsibility to grasp and discharge. You're pathetic, boy. Anyway, I have no concern a'tall because if I simply let go and let God, EVERYTHING WILL TURN OUT JUST AS IT'S SUPPOSED TO. NOTHING WILL BE MY FAULT. All I can reasonably do is lead you to the water. "Thy will, not mine, be done. Amen."
Ben H.

My cousin, Jasper, who is a Bahai, and therefore far wiser in these matters than I, maintains that everything--EVERYTHING--all good, all evil--is the work of God; therefore, there's absolutely nothing you can do about anything, and therefore, there's no use to lift a finger; might as well sit home and pray over it with Oprah. I believe you'll find that our Democrats in Congress have all universally embraced this strategy, from Nancy Pelosi on down. And if it's good enough for them, by God, it's good enough for me.
G.

He's half right. Everything that exists, has existed, and potentially begins to exist, is God. You need to find some way to learn about Masonic and other fraternal philosophy. Our nation was begun in the Enlightenment based on these principles. If it pans out, the Universe is a smidgen different. If it doesn't, maybe France can carry on without us. They had the insight and got along just fine prior to our existence. Jefferson and those guys, G. Washington and the bigger of the big shots, were Deists and many were Masons. Their religious beliefs are compatible. The catch word is WORK as in "work of''. Freud and Jung's insight is not incompatible with Jefferson's Unitarianism. There is only 1 GOD, and it is everything that is, was, and will be. "Let go and let God." Calvinists believe in predestination (whether you're going to Heaven or Hell is pre-determined before your birth, you can't change it). As you know, mostly what you can change is yourself. You know that. If you change yourself for the right and the kind and the good, well then, you've changed the Universe. And what you've done changing yourself has changed many others who will, in turn, change still others. If you live your life helping instead of hurting, one spoonful at a time, you and your Brothers and Sisters will get the mountains moved. God is time and always was and always will be. It looks a little like he's in no hurry. However, by striving for a loving and forgiving soul, you will absolutely live a happier life. And I love Bahais, but your cousin is a slacker. Those Unity people are wonderful too. Just a bit childish, but compared to what? Both good and evil are as real as laying on a nude beach at Cancun, sipping on Old Grandad and listening to Willie Nelson sing Red-Headed Stranger on the radio, or sitting home Sunday morning with those miserable Baptists down on Seminary Drive figuring out how to smite some more gays or Democrats. Anyone devoted to dogma has to close their mind. They just think they will be happier sitting on their closed-minded dead ass. Live and let live, sport. I won't charge you anything for today's sharing. Thank you, Jesus. Amen. . . .
Ben H.

Look, you talk about "getting the mountains moved," and so on. I hear the Repugs have been successfully getting entire mountains moved in West Virginia every other day! And they don't even have to pray over it to get it done. I believe it's clear which side God is on. I don't see how it could be any clearer. A blind man can see it. God is kicking some ass every single day, and if you'll look real close, I think you'll see the asses he's been kicking do not belong to the Repugs. In fact, go back into your history as far as you want, God has consistently favored the rich and powerful. The day he invented money, he jumped up in the air, clicked his heels together, and said, "Hot damn! Now, I know whose side I'm on!"
G.

See, in His wisdom, he didn't make stuff easy. Easy is for individuals with little heart and less cohones. Piss-ants. Nit-wits. Walk into First Jefferson Unitarian Church any Sunday morning and look around. You will see a handful of world class heroes and extraordinary human beings. Living Saints for real. But most of the people there are showing up to relieve their selfish non fulfillment. They are hoping for some magic. Maybe some decency and self respect will ease into their lotion soaked bodies by osmosis. But it just doesn't work like that. There ain't no free lunch. "Love is the doctrine of this church". . .that's the real deal. "Service is our prayer." When I read that on the front of !st Jefferson the evening I found the place, I'd never heard anything that made so much sense. But the Service that changes people is not easy. It's something that costs you something. Check out Linda Foley and Cindy Sheehan and that sweet Saint that slept in front of the Carswell Gate, and Father Daniel Berrigan and Molly Ivins. They are living examples (except Molly, who just passed on), who have lived a life of prayer; and of necessity, evil and pain and despair had to have the upper hand in this world or they could not have obtained the quiet peace of heart that they posses. The reason those people do the things they do is for what they get out of it. And they work with what life and God (same thing) deals them, while the rich get richer and Limbaugh's cyst gets bigger. And that is just the way things is. See?
Ben H.

"In his wisdom," it seems to me this "benevolent" Old Man knew from the get-go that the arrogant assholes would win out over the rest. Some wisdom. If you're a rational being and you're going to go on the evidence rather than your emotional bullshit, then clearly it would appear that the God we're dealing with has totally fucked up this human project of his, almost from the beginning, and maybe even did it in full knowledge and awareness that he was doing it; so it seems to me the only rational way to look at this is to conclude that the few who happen to have a little more sense than the vast majority are put here to struggle and fight and do their damnedest against impossible odds to clean up the mess that God made, but that, in all likelihood, what they're mostly going to get for their efforts is a kick in the head or merely vilified and spit on by the O'Reillys and Limbaughs, and the rest of the subhuman ignorant masses. So keep on praying, but if you're expecting some kind of fixit from the old reprobate in the attic, then, by all means, hop in line. But you best take plenty to read while you're waiting.
G.

Clearly, the universe that created that infant with it's twin sister's head growing out its abdomen pictured on Yahoo.com for almost a week created you. Therefore, you and I and the majority of people have much to be thankful for. Luck is the deal. What everyone needs is luck. It's better to be lucky than smart. You get more mileage hitting the Lotto than working like a goddam burro your whole life. I am uncertain that my prayers are heard by anything outside myself, but I do know that I can't trick or bullshit whatever is hearing them. My intuition or something in my psyche or 'soul' hears my prayers and judges my behavior. Conscience is a part of it and some people's conscience doesn't work right or was shot to start with. For myself, I think there's only one Diety, and it remains pretty mysterious to me. Prayer helps me stay in reality, keeping my priorities straight. I get way too big for my britches when left to my own devices. Peace,
Ben H.

Deja Vu

"There have been lies; yes, but they were told in a good cause. We have been treacherous; but that was only in order that real good might come out of apparent evil. True, we have crushed a deceived and confiding people; we have turned against the weak and the friendless who trusted us; we have stamped out a just and intelligent and well-ordered republic; we have stabbed an ally in the back and slapped the face of a guest; we have bought a Shadow from an enemy that hadn't it to sell; we have robbed a trusting friend of his land and his liberty, we have invited our clean young men to shoulder a discredited musket and do a bandit's work under a flag which bandits have been accustomed to fear, not to follow; we have debauched America's honor and blackened her face before the world; but each detail was for the best. We know this. The Head of every State and Sovereignty in Christendom and ninety percent of every legislative body in Christendom, including our Congress and our fifty state legislatures, are members not only of the church, but also of the Blessings- of-Civilization Trust. This world-girdling accumulation of trained morals, high principles, and justice, cannot do an unright thing, an unfair thing, an ungenerous thing, an unclean thing. It knows what it is about. Give yourself no uneasiness; it is all right."

--To The Person Sitting In Darkness, by Mark Twain.
New York: Anti-Imperialist League of New York, 1901.

copeland morris POEM FOR STARS

Examine a rift in the darkness. Question the opposites;
For instance, the stars, and the dark night in which they dwell.
The tree that cradled the house could not protect it;

And the night is embracing the rafters and smoothing the stones.
The naked face is almost speckled with starlight
And meteors and shooting stars are the last enchantments,

The frenzy of desire alongside the irrelevance of it
Spinning and spinning and spinning the constellations.
Intelligence, emotion swept clean with a broom:

A ride in the car at night, the smell of alfalfa,
The rain-drenched aroma, the song of a meadowlark
Shot down by a boy with a pellet gun, as it sang

To its mate from a mulberry tree, and the tree cut down.
How late it becomes. The stars can vibrate and twinkle.
And the boy can remember the words on his father's lips

And see but darkly a tilted head against the night.

copeland morris DOVE SEASON

Between shadow and my twelfth year
The boys are face down in the grass,
September's pint-sized insurgents
Under dove season's gray sky.
Dying instead of shooting.
A report of their amusement
Is breaking: "Let's play like
We're shot by a firing squad
Back there in Benny's yard."
This game is not exactly ended
When grandma ladles out doves
And the supper table grows so solemn
And the boys are beset with warnings
To watch out for buckshot.

copeland morris RAIN

Distance is not endearing; but aren't the voices
Sublime, a violin her uncle played on the porch?
The rain begins with tenderness. Huge drops pause
And rush together with brief disquiet, sighing;
Green and delicate catkins of old pecan trees
Drifting like caterpillars down to the ground.
She picks her mottled skin, picks up a catkin.
How daunting, dear hand, a touch so exquisite
Cool to the touch, discreet and quick, and wise.

No other clemency or verdict is certain: only
That rain adorns her and she remembers rain,
The blink of summer lightning, the pale new moon,
The strength of the dead, the sky with its turmoil,
The desperate stillness of air so near to storm.

CONGRESS KNUCKLES UNDER, GIVES WHITE HOUSE MORE SURVEILLANCE POWERS

"I do not blame those determined to control, but those so eager to submit" --Thucydides

George Orwell's novel, 1984, describes a world run by an elite who dominates the hubs of information and keeps the population under total surveillance. Authority consolidates its control by weakening the citizen's sense of stability, and more, by demanding submission to a world that is not real.

Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, addresses not only public acceptance of Nazi authority in her native Germany, but more generally, the acceptance of unreality by ordinary people under totalitarian systems. The public is worn down by psychological war, a perpetual war waged against them; they become aware of those ever-present "minders", and all of that watching seems like nothing out of the ordinary.

totalitarian movements conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself; in which, through sheer imagination, uprooted masses can feel at home and are spared the never-ending shocks which real life and real experiences deal to human beings and their expectations.

Members of Congress are aware now of long-standing domestic surveillance programs. The Bush/Cheney executive has been running illegal operations that bypass the FISA courts, finding ways to elude both judicial and legislative oversight. Both the president and vice president have broken laws by evading statutory restraints.

Crimes like these, spanning six years of the Bush administration, have led to an enormous collapse of public support. Nonetheless, in this summer of 2007, Congress was ready to answer Bush's urgent demands for more surveillance powers.

But again we are left with the bitter reality of Democrats caving in, the majority party, bearing the sacrifice of their avowed principles the minute Republicans start talking the scary talk about terrorists.

What happened to this opposition party?--to their passionate intention to curb a criminal White House? They have poured more fuel on a wildfire; and what they have agreed to, in reality, is unrestrained data mining for six months. Oversight is abandoned while this surveillance machinery operates in secret.

Fred Hiatt of the Washington Post calls the Democratic failure of nerve a Warrantless Surrender:

This is as reckless as it was unnecessary. Democrats had presented a compromise plan that would have permitted surveillance to proceed, but with court review and an audit by the Justice Department's inspector general, to be provided to Congress, about how many Americans had been surveilled. Democrats could have stuck to their guns and insisted on their version. Instead, nervous about being blamed for any terrorist attack and eager to get out of town, they accepted the unacceptable. Most Democrats opposed the measure, but enough (16 in the Senate, 41 in the House) went with Republicans to allow it to pass, and the leadership enabled that result.

Republicans are opening a franchise for Moloch, the Beast . They are the party of fear and coercion, a party that lives and dies on cruelty, mafia-like loyalty; and they stink of creeping fascism.

Law professor Jack M. Balkin offers a frightening glimpse of our future:

...the new bill shows that the Republican Party can get the Democrats to surrender almost any civil liberty-- indeed, to give the President just as much unchecked power as he might obtain under a Republican controlled Congress-- simply by playing the fear card repeatedly and without shame...

...we are slowly inching, through each act of fear mongering and fecklessness, pandering and political compromise, toward a world in which Americans have increasingly little say over how they are actually governed, and increasingly little control over how the government collects information on them to regulate and control them. Slowly, secretly and imperceptibly, the mechanisms of government surveillance are being freed from methods of political control and accountability...

We need to pull our camera back. We need the wide angle lens. Our country is slipping away. We have lost a war. We are living in a Surveillance State. We have used up our credit. We are governed at the highest level by criminals. We live with the open secret of torture. Our Treasury has been looted by corporations, helped along by their stooges and well-paid confidence men. Wikipedia reports that we have 2.2 million people behind bars; and since 1980, US prison population has quadrupled. "The United States has 5% of the world's population and 25% of the world's incarcerated population."

It's time for a dose of reality now, before we wake up in a make believe world, where we are in a never-ending war on terror, surrounded by a teeming mass of enemies.

CHICAGO POLICE FORCE POETS TO LEAVE LOCAL GALLERY

For the moment, I think I am in a poetry paradise. The party is only beginning.

And then a swarm of police wearing bulletproof vests with badges on ropes around their necks like characters from The Shield illegally storm into this private art gallery. Without so much as a search warrant or even an explanation, five of them surround the DJ and demand he turn off Mark Morrison's "Return of the Mack." Issuing uncompromising threats, they force the DJ to announce over the microphone that without so much as a discussion EVERYONE MUST LEAVE THE PREMISES.

Like a scene out of Robocop, a small army, in ominous black jumpsuits with CHICAGO POLICE in big white letters across their chests, arm the exits as hundreds of literate citizens file out into the night. --CJ Laity, ChicagoPoetry.com

A local publisher organizes to host Chicago poets at a privately owned gallery; and out of nowhere a mass of police enter, rudely shouting and intimidating those who were about to enjoy some music and a free meal.

Laity goes on to add, "This is America, not Afghanistan; and your taxes shouldn't fund the Taliban tactics that succeed in censoring the culture in this city. I wish I had my camera so that I could show you just how knuckle-headed these armed thugs looked barking threats at the peaceful publishers of Chicago literature."

In one of our famous, cultured cities, cops are roundly driving poets and publishers out the exits of an art gallery.

Can you believe it?

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.