The “Obama-Vegetative State”

Darren Hutchinson tries to rouse the Liberal Left from its “Obama-Vegetative State” (oh dood I love that!):

First, an election is not a social movement. Although many diverse people united to support Obama and to oppose the GOP, this does not mean that they shared a leftist political ideology. The invalidation of same-sex marriage in California — where Obama won by more than 20% of the vote — demonstrates this patently obvious point.

Second, progressives were so unnerved by Bush and the Clintons that many of them projected radicalism upon a moderate (or undefined) Obama in order to frame voting for him as a dramatic break from the past. Although “change” supports many meanings, for progressives, it symbolized liberal transformation of U.S. political life and policy.

Third, many liberals wanted so desperately to believe in the myth of a post-racial America that they treated Obama’s electoral success as the ultimate triumph of progressive race politics. Despite the fact that strong racial cleavages shaped the vote for both Obama and McCain, many commentators, nevertheless, argued that Obama’s victory would allow the country to move beyond race altogether.

Fourth, many self-described liberals are actually political moderates. They passionately support a set of symbolic liberal causes, but they do not favor more substantive societal transformation. Beating up Don Imus or Republicans who sing about a “Magic Negro” is a lot easier to do than creating good public schools that do not deprive poor children and children of color of a quality education. And passing the much-needed Ledbetter legislation does not resolve the substantive legal difficulties that civil rights plaintiffs encounter if they manage to overcome tough procedural hurdles. Yet, liberals cheered loudly for Ledbetter without even discussing (minus a few exceptions) the need for more progressive measures.

[...]

Progressives cannot blame Obama for his effort to straddle the ideological center. Instead, they must look inward and discover why they chose to treat a politician (as skillful in that role as he might be) as someone who is mythological or larger than life.

They should also canvass history, as [John] Judis has done* to learn about the critical role of passionate collective activism in the evolution of U.S. politics and policy. Moderate presidents have presided over great changes in the U.S., but they did so with the backing and agitation of engaged social movements.  True social change does not result from effusive adoration and acquiescence; instead, it arises from criticism, collective activism, strategic compromise and political opportunity.

Read the whole thing (From the ‘Duh’ Files: Effusive Political Adoration Does Not Lead to Social Change) at Dissenting Justice

“Suicide Psalms”

Part of an interview with Tracy Hamon and Mari-Lou Rowley, author of Suicide Psalms:

I imagine Suicide Psalms was a difficult book to write, given the nature of the poems. The subject of suicide and its consequences are topics we tend to shy away from, or whisper about in quiet voices. I found that the poems challenge society’s perception of suicide through their written and audible prayer. How did you find yourself writing about suicide? Was it a healing process?

The book came very quickly, but the emotional aftermath lingered—is still lingering. At first I was concerned about “putting it out there,” partly because of the content, and also because it is so different from my previous book, Viral Suite. I was compelled to write the book because my father committed suicide when I was two months old, yet it was never talked about, and I didn’t even know how he died until my late 20s. The book is, in part, an empathetic homage to suicidal friends and strangers—those who succeeded and those who didn’t.
The reason I decided to submit and publish Suicide Psalms is that I believe suicide is the last taboo—the only topic we don’t openly discuss. Support groups aside, you won’t find a TV series on the subject, although we have shows about serial killers, sex addicts, gay morticians, mafia analysands, etc. Yet, in western society it has become an epidemic, particularly among the young and in Aboriginal communities. In Japan, the spectre of suicide clubs is particularly haunting. Young people link up online and then go out and collectively off themselves; and this happens with such frequency that it no longer makes the news. It is also a primarily a first world phenomenon. People in third world counties starve to death before they kill themselves.
And this rash of suicides is not motivated out of any kind of romantic notions of death, in the way that Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther had young men all over Europe wearing yellow waistcoats and killing themselves—ostensibly out of unrequited love. Today’s suicides are motivated by an utter despair and hopelessness with life per se. Existential, psychological, environmental angst. Mixed with some chemical imbalances, yes. But we have to ask, why are so many people on SSRIs? What’s wrong with this picture?
I believe our disconnectedness with nature and our environment is fuelling the disconnection with self and disaffection with others. And I believe the environmental crisis is a form of collective suicide. I hope that these poems help to pay homage to those who have suicided, and help those who have survived to talk about it.
So to the second part of your question: how I came to write the book? In the winter of 2006, while attending the Writers/Artists colony at St. Peters Abby in Muenster, Saskatchewan, I had an incredible and haunting experience. I was staying in a hermitage on the outskirts of the Abby grounds, which was rather daunting as the weather was in the minus twenties, and there was no running water in the cabin, so I had to haul it by sled. The trek back to the Abby for meals and showers was fifteen minutes on snowshoes each way. One night, just as I was drifting off to sleep, a coyote began to howl right outside the thin walls of the cabin. When it finally stopped, the silence was so complete and eerie that it took ages before I managed to fall asleep. And then I had the most horrific dream, which became the poem “God’s Dog Boy.”
A year later, Suicide Psalms began to emerge—a howl that had been building since my father’s suicide. The poems literally insinuated themselves—the first when I was in the middle of writing an article on binary pulsars. The rest of the book came with such speed and ferocity that the writing process was actually euphoric. So yes, writing Suicide Psalms was cathartic, exhilarating, and terrifying. And it took me to a new level of emotional resonance in my work that will be difficult to get back to, I think. Writing the cerebral, sensual, science-based work of Viral Suite felt much safer.

More here at Manageable Imaginations

Versions

Parable of the Fictionist

He wanted to own his own past,

be able to manage it

more than it managed him.

He wanted all the unfair

advantages of the charmed.

He selected his childhood,

told only those stories

that mixed loneliness with

rebellion, a boy’s locked heart

with the wildness

allowed inside a playing field.

And after he invented himself

and those he wished to know him

knew him as he wished to be known,

he turned toward the world

with the world that was within him

and shapes resulted, versions,

enlargements.

In his leisure he invented women,

then spoke to them about

his inventions, the wish just

slightly ahead of the truth,

making it possible.

All around him he heard

the unforgivable stories

of the sincere, the boring,

and knew his way was righteous,

though in the evenings, alone

with the world he’d created,

he sometimes longed

for what he’d dare not alter,

or couldn’t, something immutable

or so lovely he might be changed

by it, nameless but with a name

he feared waits until you’re worthy,

then chooses you.

Stephen Dunn

… there are refuges that are just watering holes on the way to nowhere. The refuge of the habitual-the comfort of it, the stasis. The refuge of wishing to please-those little forays into hackdom that injure the soul. The refuge of the lie, how it buys time, lets you ride for a while in its big white car.

I tell my students the public wants excitement without danger, wants the artist to be considerate enough to stop before his bones show, to please not be so tacky as to disturb. I talk about the refuge of the neatly wrapped package. The refuge of the melodious. The refuge of entertainment and distraction that all of us except those artists who go all the way seem to need.

Politics & The Writer

From Carolyn Forché:

The word politics presents more serious difficulties, particularly in the literary culture of the United States, where the word is most often applied pejoratively, and where politics is regarded as a contaminant of serious literary work. Our poets, most especially, are relegated to the hermetic sphere of lyric expressivity and linguistic art, where they are expected to remain unsullied by historical, political, and social forces. I speak to you today as a rather contaminated poet, but my understanding of the political is in accord with Hannah Arendt’s: “To be political, to live in a polis [means] that everything [is] decided through words and persuasion and not through force and violence. In Greek self-understanding) to force people by violence, to command rather than persuade, were pre-political ways to deal with people characteristic of life outside the polis.” Finally, we are discussing the writer with a politics—and of this I can only say that it would be difficult for me to imagine a writer or intellectual who would profess to be without one. I live and write, however, in the administered world of a Western industrial state, where communicative thought and action are inhibited; where money circulates more fluently than verbal forms; where democracy does not extend beyond the scope of its institutions; where “total communication yields endless debate in stead of change” (Otto Karl Werckmeister); in an economy so deeply dependent on military production that the national consciousness has been colonized by war; where armament and disarmament are simultaneously professed; where intellectuals find themselves “aesthetically oversensitized and politically numbed” (Werckmeister); and where the enlightened powerless occasionally produce works that are serendipitously drawn into debates beyond the literary sphere.

I Got Lost

Beach Walk

I found a baby shark on the beach.
Seagulls had eaten his eyes. His throat was bleeding.
Lying on shell and sand, he looked smaller than he was.
The ocean had scraped his insides clean.
When I poked his stomach, darkness rose up in him,
like black water. Later, I saw a boy,
aroused and elated, beckoning from a dune.
Like me, he was alone. Something tumbled between us–
not quite emotion. I could see the pink
interior flesh of his eyes. “I got lost. Where am I?”
he asked, like a debt owed to death.
I was pressing my face to its spear-hafts.
We fall, we fell, we are falling. Nothing mitigates it.
The dark embryo bares its teeth and we move on.

Henri Cole

Henri Cole’s Blackbird and Wolf won this year’s Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize recognizing the most outstanding book of poetry published in the United States in the previous year.

Henri Cole at poets.org

Henri Cole at poemhunter

What We Save When We Save Capitalism

From the editors at Monthly Review:

… “stagnation theory, in short,”  [Harry] Magdoff and [Paul] Sweezy wrote in closing their introduction to Stagnation and the Financial Explosion,

teaches us that what we need is not the reform of monopoly capitalism but its replacement by a system that organizes economic activity not for the greater glory of capital but to meet the needs of people to lead decent, secure, and, to the extent possible, creative lives. Once this lesson has been well and truly learned, we can give up the absurd fantasy of making a rotten system work for us, and buckle down to the increasingly urgent tasks of directly fighting for what ought to be the birthright of every member of a society that has any claim to consider itself free and democratic—a job, a steady income, a home, health care, and security in old age. If our ruling class and the government it controls cannot meet these elementary human demands, they should be thrown out and make way for another system that can and will. It is of course bound to be a long and difficult struggle, but it is the only one that makes sense.

Read Notes From the Editors here

Afghanistan’s Wars

On Afghanistan’s recent wars and their effects from Barnett R. Rubin at Boston Review:

Under the more open conditions that have prevailed since the fall of the Taliban, I have seen clearly more of what I had only sensed on visits in previous decades. The human effect of decades of war: how the collapse of even a relatively weak state authority forced people back to their kin, clan, or tribal groups; how violence, which could erupt at any moment, from any direction, quickly rekindled memories of earlier traumas. Over the years, with violence and its legacy a constant presence, the trust that institutional cooperation demands had been blown to bits as surely as the Buddhas of Bamiyan. Afghans returning from prolonged exile found a society they did not recognize; they often commented that there was no trust between people. Against that corrosive background, every effort to reconnect the scattered fragments of the former national elites—or to reconnect returning elites with those who had remained—could be undermined with a careless word, a careless dollar, or a careless bomb.

A brief and personal modern history of war in Afghanistan.  Read the whole thing here

Republican Hardball

So I’ve been wondering why the Democrats in the US don’t seem to have been able to take advantage of the landslide election of  Barack Obama.  Here’s one man’s answer:

When Republicans held less than 60 seats in the Senate and wanted to push through legislation, right-wing judges, etc., we never heard about how they lacked the 60 seats to pass whatever they wanted.

They played hardball, telling Democrats that if they dared to even consider a filibuster they would use the “nuclear option,” and Democrats curled up in the fetal position and waited until the Republicans had so badly damaged the country that the American people simply couldn’t vote for them anymore, and said, “We want the other guys.” Well, the other guys are in now, and they seem to have convinced themselves that they have neither the power nor the mandate to do the people’s business the way the people asked them to do. For those Americans who thought they might see things like comprehensive health care reform come out of this Congress and this Presidency, good luck. Unless the Democrats dramatically change course or the new President puts his foot down and reminds the American people who they voted for, any new legislation will have to pass muster with co-presidents Collins, Specter, and Snowe, and their shadow cabinet of Cornyn, Boehner, Shelby, and McConnell. The new co-presidents will not be able to do the kind of damage their party did over the last eight years, but they will be able to prevent the Democrats from fixing it—and to allow the radical conservatives to say “I told you so” in two years and take back large swaths of the House and Senate.

Drew Westen

Light the Night

Attic Windows

Oliver Gagliani

I love this so much that I stole it from wood s lot

RIP Dr. Alison des Forges

One of the victims of the air crash near Buffalo yesterday was Alison L. des Forges.  A senior advisor to Human Rights Watch, Des Forges documented the Rwandan genocide.  From NYT:

Alison L. Des Forges, a historian who documented the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and was an authority on human rights abuses in Central Africa, was a passenger on Continental Airlines Flight 3407 when it crashed near Buffalo on Feb. 12, 2009, killing all 49 people on board. She was 66.

The MacArthur Foundation recognized Dr. Des Forges’s work with a $375,000 “genius” grant in 1999. Her book “Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda,” published that year, was considered one of the most authoritative accounts of the genocide.

Before the genocide, Dr. des Forges was part of a group convened by Human Rights Watch and other organizations that examined rights abuses, including killings and attacks and kidnappings of civilians, in Rwanda from 1990 to 1993.

Alison B. Liebhafsky was born in August 1942. She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1964, and received a master’s degree in 1966 and a doctorate in 1972, both in history, from Yale. Her master’s thesis focused on the impact of European colonization on Rwanda’s social system, and her doctoral dissertation was about Yuhi Musinga, the mwami, or ruler, of Rwanda from 1896 to 1931, during which Rwanda became a colony of Belgium. She was fluent in French. – Sewell Chan, Feb. 13, 2009

You can read her book online here

Dr. des Forges also served as an expert witness for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda

Interview with Alison des Forges in 2004 at PBS

Alison des Forges tribute page at Human Rights Watch