Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, and Franklin D. Roosevelt's First Inaugural Address

Lincoln's Gettysburg Address 

Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, November 19, 1863

 

President Abraham Lincoln, November 8, 1863, eleven days before he gave his Gettysburg Address. Compare this photo with the last photograph of Lincoln, taken only 1½ years later, included below. The costs of those months of service to the nation in wartime are evident on his face in the later photo. At any time, the presidency is a stressful job; in wartime or crisis especially so, particularly if one is as deeply ethical, as profoundly feeling and as devoted to the lives of others as was Abraham Lincoln.

 

Lincoln's address at Gettysburg is probably the most famous American speech — short, eloquent, modest, not near enough to the end of America's costliest war, on our own soil. A scholar said correctly that it's harder to write a short speech than a long one. Lincoln prepared his with care. Legend has it that he thought it a failure, as his audience at the end was silent. It was a sober occasion, November 19, 1863, 150 years ago today. President Lincoln had come to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to dedicate Soldiers National Cemetery, where those who fell at the Battle of Gettysburg were buried, and more were to be buried still.

"In the summer of 1863, General Robert E. Lee pushed northward into Pennsylvania. The Union army met him at Gettysburg, and from July 1 to July 3, the bloodiest battle of the Civil War ensued. By the time it was over, the Confederates were in retreat, and the battlefield was strewn with more than 50,000 dead and wounded." — Sage Sossel in The Atlantic 

When Lincoln spoke in Gettysburg, the air was still thick with the smell of death.

His address, in its entirety, is carved on a wall of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington.

I memorized it as a child, and I remember it still. Two hundred and sixty eight words, two or three minutes to say.

 

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract.

The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

I still shiver when I read or say Lincoln's words.

 

November 19, 2013

Abraham Lincoln, the last portrait, only days before his assassination

 

Lincoln at Gettysburg Long Ago

By The Editorial Board, The New York Times

Garry Wills once wrote that “all modern political prose descends from the Gettysburg Address,” which was read aloud by a bareheaded man, exhausted and ill, before a black-suited crowd 150 years ago. Mr. Wills chose the right word: “descends.” Lincoln’s speech is the pinnacle of American civic utterance. His words honoring the dead at Gettysburg on Nov. 19, 1863, do what words are only rarely able to do. They invoke an eloquent silence.

Most of us recall the momentous phrases in this short, simple speech. But other words and phrases are doing work that is nearly as important. “Now,” Lincoln says, “we are engaged in a great civil war.” It is “now” that resonates. So does the word “here.” Lincoln uses it eight times, seven in the last paragraph: the brave men “who struggled here,” the living crowd that is “dedicated here” to finishing the work of the honored dead, and we who “here highly resolve” that this nation shall not perish from the earth.

There is an overpowering immediacy in these plain words. They root Lincoln’s more expansive rhythms to the moment, insisting, as we listen, on where we are as much as why we have gathered. All these years later, those words, “now” and “here,” work to place us on that field that November afternoon. So much of what we feel about Lincoln still arises from this speech. There is no false modesty in his sense of insufficiency, only respect for the dead on both sides of that battle. He embodies the very premise of his speech — that only the dead can consecrate the ground at Gettysburg — by making his speech so short.

For many of us, almost everything we think about the Civil War, about the “new birth of freedom” it was meant to bring, is merely an extension of Lincoln’s words. That, perhaps, is what Lincoln understood best as he began to talk that afternoon. He was there not only to speak our thoughts aloud but to give them language so moving that they could continue to resound all these years later. And so they still do.

______________________

Walt Whitman on Lincoln's life and death

Walt Whitman wrote most memorably of Lincoln in his Leaves of Grass. I cannot resist his feeling for Lincoln, his response to Lincoln's death and vision of the slow train bearing the body, the sheer beauty of Whitman's words, of which those below are a few. Whitman himself served as a nurse during the Civil War. He knew war, its terrible wounds and its dealing of death.

When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,

And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,

I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.

 

Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,

Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,

And thought of him I love.

 

 

In the dooryard fronting an old farm-house near the white-wash’d palings,

Stands the lilac-bush tall-growing with heart-shaped leaves of rich green,

With many a pointed blossom rising delicate, with the perfume strong I love,

With every leaf a miracle—and from this bush in the dooryard,

With delicate-color’d blossoms and heart-shaped leaves of rich green,

A sprig with its flower I break.

 

................

 

In the swamp in secluded recesses,

A shy and hidden bird is warbling a song.

Solitary the thrush,

The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements,

Sings by himself a song.

 

 

Coffin that passes through lanes and streets,

Through day and night with the great cloud darkening the land,

With the pomp of the inloop’d flags with the cities draped in black,

With the show of the States themselves as of crape-veil’d women standing,

With processions long and winding and the flambeaus of the night,

With the countless torches lit, with the silent sea of faces and the unbared heads,

With the waiting depot, the arriving coffin, and the sombre faces,

With dirges through the night, with the thousand voices rising strong and solemn,

With all the mournful voices of the dirges pour’d around the coffin,

The dim-lit churches and the shuddering organs—where amid these you journey,

With the tolling tolling bells’ perpetual clang,

Here, coffin that slowly passes,

I give you my sprig of lilac.

 

.........................

 

From deep secluded recesses,

From the fragrant cedars and the ghostly pines so still,

Came the carol of the bird.

 

And the charm of the carol rapt me,

As I held as if by their hands my comrades in the night,

And the voice of my spirit tallied the song of the bird.

 

Come lovely and soothing death,

Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,

In the day, in the night, to all, to each,

Sooner or later delicate death.

 

Prais’d be the fathomless universe,

For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious,

And for love, sweet love—but praise! praise! praise!

For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death.

 

Dark mother always gliding near with soft feet,

Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome?

Then I chant it for thee, I glorify thee above all,

I bring thee a song that when thou must indeed come, come unfalteringly.

 

Approach strong deliveress,

When it is so, when thou hast taken them I joyously sing the dead,

Lost in the loving floating ocean of thee,

Laved in the flood of thy bliss O death.

 

From me to thee glad serenades,

Dances for thee I propose saluting thee, adornments and feastings for thee,

And the sights of the open landscape and the high-spread sky are fitting,

And life and the fields, and the huge and thoughtful night.

 

The night in silence under many a star,

The ocean shore and the husky whispering wave whose voice I know,

And the soul turning to thee O vast and well-veil’d death,

And the body gratefully nestling close to thee.

 

Over the tree-tops I float thee a song,

Over the rising and sinking waves, over the myriad fields and the prairies wide,

Over the dense-pack’d cities all and the teeming wharves and ways,

I float this carol with joy, with joy to thee O death.

 

To the tally of my soul,

Loud and strong kept up the gray-brown bird,

With pure deliberate notes spreading filling the night.

 

Loud in the pines and cedars dim,

Clear in the freshness moist and the swamp-perfume,

And I with my comrades there in the night.

 

While my sight that was bound in my eyes unclosed,

As to long panoramas of visions.

 

And I saw askant the armies,

I saw as in noiseless dreams hundreds of battle-flags,

Borne through the smoke of the battles and pierc’d with missiles I saw them,

And carried hither and yon through the smoke, and torn and bloody,

And at last but a few shreds left on the staffs, (and all in silence,)

And the staffs all splinter’d and broken.

 

I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them,

And the white skeletons of young men, I saw them,

I saw the debris and debris of all the slain soldiers of the war,

But I saw they were not as was thought,

They themselves were fully at rest, they suffer’d not,

The living remain’d and suffer’d, the mother suffer’d,

And the wife and the child and the musing comrade suffer’d,

And the armies that remain’d suffer’d.

 

Passing the visions, passing the night,

Passing, unloosing the hold of my comrades’ hands,

Passing the song of the hermit bird and the tallying song of my soul,

Victorious song, death’s outlet song, yet varying ever-altering song,

As low and wailing, yet clear the notes, rising and falling, flooding the night,

Sadly sinking and fainting, as warning and warning, and yet again bursting with joy,

Covering the earth and filling the spread of the heaven,

As that powerful psalm in the night I heard from recesses,

Passing, I leave thee lilac with heart-shaped leaves,

I leave thee there in the door-yard, blooming, returning with spring.

 ......................

 

Yet each to keep and all, retrievements out of the night,

The song, the wondrous chant of the gray-brown bird,

And the tallying chant, the echo arous’d in my soul,

With the lustrous and drooping star with the countenance full of woe,

With the holders holding my hand nearing the call of the bird,

Comrades mine and I in the midst, and their memory ever to keep, for the dead I loved so well,

For the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands—and this for his dear sake,

Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul,

There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim.

 ________________________________

 

 

One day I'll write about these moving lines of Whitman. Not today.

Let the story be told for now in this iconic photograph of a black man weeping for Franklin D. Roosevelt as Roosevelt's body traveled like Lincoln's, by slow car and then train toward his final resting place. My grandmother sat in silence with my mother.

 

Navy CPO Graham Jackson playing his accordian as Franklin D. Roosevelt's body is carried away from Warm Springs. Many Americans on that day had known no other president. As the cortege drew into the drive and halted, the sad strains of Jackson's accordion played "Going Home." Graham Jackson had played many times for FDR.  Today, with tears running down both sides of his face, he stood in front of the group and paid his last homage. And as the cars started again slowly, driving around the semicircular drive and on toward the station, Jackson played one of the President's favorite hymns, "Nearer, My God, To Thee."

 

Franklin D. Roosevelt's First Inaugural Address

 on the Capitol steps, March 4, 1933

 

The only presidential speech that stands with Lincoln's at Gettysburg is Franklin D. Roosevelt's first inaugural address in March of 1933, reassuring a deeply troubled nation in the throes of Depression, an address in which he gave birth to the phrase "a New Deal" for the American people.

Revolution was in the air, Depression a grim reality for a great many Americans. They badly needed reassurance. As James Tobin writes in his new book, The Man He Became: How FDR Defied Polio to Win the Presidency, 

"The preceding week had been the worst in the history of the American economy. People felt a collective desperation unknown in the United States since the Civil War. The banking system was collapsing... One in four Americans was out of work, and the prospect of many more losing their livelihoods loomed over everyone.  Two million people or more were riding freight trains in search of a chance to work. Dairy farmers in Iowa, Nebraska and Wisconsin had blockaded roads and dumped thousands of gallons of milk on the pavement in an effort to drive up starvation prices of two cents a quart. On the left there was dead-serious talk of the need for social revolution; on the right, of the need for a dictator."

Gathering around their radios, standing in the Capitol plaza, up the steps of the Supreme Court and the Library of Congress, some in the branches of trees, they heard his voice, strong and confident as I remember it. This speech was recorded; we can hear his voice, judge its quality, but realize he spoke in a day when speeches still needed to be heard — microphones and PA systems were in their early stages of development. He may sound strident. He was not. He was confident, ready to assume the presidency in a time of crisis unequaled in American history.

Franklin Roosevelt did not disappoint. He had, in a sense, been preparing for this moment most of his life. When he contracted polio and lost the use of his legs in 1921, he suffered a setback that became a source of renewal, strength, and moral courage. As he walked slowly to the podium now, supported by his steel braces, a cane and the arm of his son Jimmy, everyone knew that he was crippled, and no one imagined that fact a deterrent to his capacity to lead the nation. A hundred thousand people watched. As Tobin writes, "It was not an act of deception; he was not trying to fool anyone into thinking he was not crippled. Anyone who read the newspapers knew that. Rather, it was a deliberate show of strength, a silent, symbolic assertion that he could bear the burden of the presidency."

He said,

"This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.... In such a spirit on my part and on yours we face our common difficulties.

"They concern, thank God, only material things. Values have shrunken to fantastic levels; taxes have risen; our ability to pay has fallen; government of all kinds is faced by serious curtailment of income; the means of exchange are frozen in the currents of trade; the withered leaves of industrial enterprise lie on every side; farmers find no markets for their produce; the savings of many years in thousands of families are gone. More important, a host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence, and an equally great number toil with little return. Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.

"Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.... True they have tried, but their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.

"The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.

"For the trust reposed in me I will return the courage and the devotion that befit the time. I can do no less ... We do not distrust the future of democracy. The people of the United States have not failed. In their need they have registered a mandate that they want direct, vigorous action."

__________________________

 

He did just that, the first hundred days of his presidency filled with legislation as none other before or after. The first steps on the long road of recovery were taken. World War II did not end the Great Depression, nor did Roosevelt's leadership. Ordinary people did. But his principled leadership was critical. Re-elected an unprecedented four times, the last in 1944, near the end of a long and costly war, as was Lincoln at Gettysburg.

Neither Roosevelt nor Lincoln lived to see their wars end. Both were casulties of the war they endured, as much as those who died in the fields and trenches, the cities and hamlets of America and Europe. FDR died of a cerebral hemmhorage on April 12, 1945, at his Little White House in Warm Springs, Georgia. Lincoln was shot in the head by John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theatre on April 14, 1865. When Lincoln was pronounced dead the next morning, his Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, said, "Now he belongs to the ages." The same could have been said of these two remarkable men, reckognized by American historians as our greatest presidents.

The proximity of the two dates is remarkable. After being shot by John Wilkes Booth, the fatally wounded president was carried across the street to the Petersen House, where he died the next morning, April 15, 1865. Ford's Theatre is now the centerpiece of a National Historic Site. FDR's Little White House is now part of Georgia's state park system. The Roosevelt family held its reunion there this year. My grandfather departed on his last trip to the Little White House on March 30, 1945, my sixth birthday. He said to my mother, "Give my love to Johnny." My mother and I were living with him in The White House. He was exhausted from his wartime responsibilities, and felt, after his long journey — seven thousand miles home by sea and air from Yalta in the Crimea — he did not rest enough at the family's Hyde Park home. According to some observers at Warm Springs, Roosevelt looked "ghastly."

When he reported to a joint session of Congress on the Yalta trip on March 1, 1945, he sat for the first time before the legislators, and said for the first time, as he had never spoken in public about his disability, “I hope that you will pardon me for this unusual posture of sitting down…but I know that you will realize that it makes it a lot easier for me not to have to carry about ten pounds of steel around the bottom of my legs.” 

FDR's braces, now in the museum of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Libary, Hyde Park, New York.

Wikipedia reports correctly that "his usual cordial waves to the residents of Warm Springs were weak." Unlike his previous visits, he avoided the swimming pool he used to seek recovery from polio and then comfort himself in previous trips; he had been a strong swimmer. I swam with him in The White House pool; he liked to give me a friendly dunk, but made sure I resurfaced.

On April 12, 1945, he was sitting for a portrait at the Little White House when he put his hand to his temple and said, "I have a terrible headache." He had suffered a stroke, a cerebral hemorrhage. He died two hours later. I was hospitalized with a staph infection at the Bethesda Naval Hospital. The family was more worried about me than about him, who had always recovered his legendary energy at Warm Springs. My mother and grandmother did not accompany him to Warm Springs, in order to remain closer to me. He called every day to ask my mother how I was.

I remember a nurse ran into my room to turn off the radio. I had already heard the news of his death, but at 6 years old I had a hard time associating the announcement with my PaPa, my glorious grandfather, so proud of his grandchildren, all of whom gathered at The White House for his last inauguration on January 20th. Perhaps he had a premonition of his death.

In that family photograph I sit on the floor in front, he is in a chair on the right, his face radiant, just days before he left for Warm Springs. That day he did not feel his exhaustion. Look at his face. 

Family portrait — all his grandchildren, his wife (my grandmother) Eleanor, gathered for his fourth inauguration as president. I sit in the middle, a little bewildered at the number of other kids — I was the only grandchild then living in The White House. I am holding a small music box, with a Currier & Ives winter scene on the front. I am dressed in a dark suit and tie and short pants for the occasion. My grandmother rests her hand on my brother's arm (he's wearing his uniform of a military academy where he studied). My sister is beside him, the eldest grandchild. They had lived in The White House with our mother when they were younger and known to the country as Sistie and Buzzie. White House staff can be glimpsed in the background, ready to take command of their charge — mostly me. The others returned to their mothers. My mother was present in those war years, but more with her father than with me, her young bewildered son. I did have close companions:  the White House guards, my omnipresent Secret Service agents, who drove me to pre-school through the fords in Rock Creek, and an array of nannies.

 

Exhausted, he struggled to finish his job of leading the United States, first in Depression then at war, here meeting with Churchill and Stalin at Yalta. Like almost everyone in those days, he smoked a lot, up to three packs of Camels a day, often in a cigarette holder. My mother was with him, a joy for her to be at his side. 

FDR's Little White House in Warm Springs, Georgia, where he died on April 12, 1945.

The Roosevelt family recently had a reunion at Warm Springs, in the autumn of 2013 (no longer observing the quadrennial presidential calendar as when I began to organize those reunions in 1980 and 1984, years of presidential elections — albeit not happy ones, the first when Ronald Reagan defeated the incumbant Jimmy Carter, and in 1984 when Reagan was decisively re-elected. Since 1984 was also the centennial of my grandmother's birth in 1884, President Reagan invited the Roosevelts to join him for a luncheon at The White House. I shall not forget his drawing me aside to convey a conviction of his, "You know," he said, "if your grandfather was president today, he would be doing exactly what I am doing."

I held my tongue. It was his House, after all, and as my grandmother dryly said at all of our family gatherings at Hyde Park, when she offered the initial toast "to the President of the United States," "that means the office of the president, not necessarily the present incumbant." Nonetheless, I found President Reagan's remark appallingly ill-informed and self-serving, and I inwardly fumed. During the soup course, at our table filled with Roosevelt scholars who shared my view of the president's remark, I dropped one of the lenses of my eyeglasses into my cream of cauliflower soup. Since I could not remove cream of cauliflower from the errant lens with a fancy White House linen napkin, I said goodbye to President and Mrs. Reagen with one lens in and the other out. 

 

The last photograph of Franklin D. Roosevelt, taken at Warm Springs on April 11, 1945, the day before he died. He was 63 years old on January 30, 1945. Compare it with Lincoln's last photograph above, when he was 56.

 

Elizabeth Shoumatoff's romanticized unfinished portrait, seeing him as she remembered him, not as the terribly tired and ill man he was, April 12, 1945. He sat at his desk as Shoumatoff painted, two good women who admired him and made no demands beside him — Daisy Suckley and Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd. He said to Madame Shoumatoff that he had only 10 minutes more to sit for her painting. Suddenly he put his hand to his temple, and complained of a terrible pain in the back of his head,  His journey was done, his job, like his portrait, unfinished, but the United Nations in prospect, the peace he tirelessly sought. Hitler was beaten. Japan's surrender would follow. I loved him as PaPa. My grandmother told Vice-President Truman in her characteristic quiet voice, "Harry, the president is dead." He asked if there was anything he could do for her, to which she replied, "Is there anything we can do for you? For you are the one in trouble now." 

 

 

______________________________

 

Of course the unscrupulous moneychangers — like JP Morgan Chase, fined an unprecedented $13 billion yesterday, — have returned, as they always have. Chase will not pay $13 billion; much of the fine is tax deductible, and Chase reliably will pass it on to us, the American public. No one speaks today with the force and clarity of FDR about moneychangers in their temple of acquisitiveness. Their place is secure; too secure.

 

 

Related articles

"Inspiration," "I don't know," and "astonishing"

Gettysburg Address established the bar for future leaders

Gettysburg Address Is a Sacred, but Elusive Text

How tech preserves the Gettysburg Address

Editorial: Lincoln at Gettysburg Long Ago

Thousands expected for Gettysburg Address event

Lincoln's Gettysburg Address a powerful second act to Everett's lengthy speech

US paper retracts 1863 editorial calling Gettysburg Address 'silly'

Newspaper retracts editorial dismissing 'silly' Gettysburg address

Related articles

Ghosts of The New Deal: Time to Summon FDR

 

This day 18 years ago — in memory

Yitzhak Rabin, Prime Minister of Israel, was co-recipient of the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize with Yasser Arafat and Shimon Peres, "for their efforts to create peace in the Middle East." Rabin was assassinated in Jerusalem exactly a year later, on November 4, 1995, by an Israeli Jewish separatist who regarded Rabin as a traitor to the cause of a Jewish state of Israel.

When he traveled to Oslo to receive the Nobel Prize a year earlier, Rabin asked his friend, the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai (1924-2000), to accompany him and read from his poems at the Nobel ceremony.

Later Amichai himself was repeatedly nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature. In 1982 he received the Israel Prize for Poetry for effecting “a revolutionary change in poetry’s language.” 

Amichai knew war intimately, having survived World War II as a Jew in Germany, and the Arab-Israeli wars of 1948-49, 1956, 1967, 1973-74 and 1982.

(The Israel-Palestine Conflict: A Hundred Years of War, by James L. Gelvin. Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005)

Amichai read his poem "God has pity on kindergarten children" at the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo. The poem is inscribed on a wall at the Rabin Museum in Tel-Aviv. 

 

God has pity on kindergarten children,
He pities school children — less.
But adults he pities not at all.

He abandons them,
And sometimes they have to crawl on all fours
In the scorching sand
To reach the dressing station,
Streaming with blood.

But perhaps
He will have pity on those who love truly
And take care of them
And shade them
Like a tree over the sleeper on the public bench.

Perhaps even we will spend on them
Our last pennies of kindness
Inherited from mother,

So that their own happiness will protect us
Now and on other days. 

Amichai wrote "Wildpeace" later, in memory of his friend Rabin.

Wildpeace

 
 
Not the peace of a cease-fire 
not even the vision of the wolf and the lamb, 
but rather 
as in the heart when the excitement is over 
and you can talk only about a great weariness. 
I know that I know how to kill, that makes me an adult. 
And my son plays with a toy gun that knows 
how to open and close its eyes and say Mama. 
A peace 
without the big noise of beating swords into ploughshares,
without words, without 
the thud of the heavy rubber stamp: let it be 
light, floating, like lazy white foam. 
A little rest for the wounds - who speaks of healing? 
(And the howl of the orphans is passed from one generation 
to the next, as in a relay race: 
the baton never falls.) 
 
Let it come 
like wildflowers, 
suddenly, because the field 
must have it: wildpeace. 

 

The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, translated by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell.

Here is one more poem from that volume, expressive of the manifold experience of resurrection:

 

Resurrection

Afterward they will get up
all together, and with a sound of chairs scraping
they will face the narrow exit.

And their clothes are crumpled
and covered with dust and cigarette ashes
and their hand discovers in the inside pocket
a ticket stub from a very previous season.

And their faces are still crisscrossed
with God’s will.
And their eyes are red from so much sleeplessness
under the ground.

And right away, questions:
What time is it?
Where did you put mine?
When? When?

And one of them can be seen in an ancient
scanning of the sky, to see if rain.
Or a woman,
with an age-old gesture, wipes her eyes
and lifts the heavy hair
at the back of her neck.

Poetry and Blogging

Paul Krugman wrote a short piece yesterday, October 28, that he called "Poetry and Blogging."

Since I love poetry and write and edit a blog (although I dislike the word), Krugman caught my attention. He's been reading a fascinating book about both pursuits, considered in historical perspective: Tom Standage’s Writing on the Wall: Social Media — The First 2,000 Years. A great
title. Standage is an editor at The Economist and author of five well-received history books,
including An Edible History of Humanity (2009), A History of the World in Six Glasses (2005), and The Victorian Internet (1998). He also is a regular commentator on BBC radio, and has written for other publications including the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, the New York Times and Wired. He has a degree in engineering and computer science from Oxford, and says he is the least musical member of a musical family. 

He begins Writing on the Wall by quoting Cicero:

"Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to be always a child. If no use is made of the labors of past ages, the world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge."

Paul Krugman's question, "[W]hen and why did we stop reading poetry? Educated people used to read it all the time, or at least pretend to; that’s no longer the case. Frankly, I don’t read poetry except on very rare occasions. What happened?" — is worth a response.

My own thought is too simple, so I can share it briefly. I haven't stopped reading poetry. It's central to my life, as any passing reader of Reckonings knows. I didn't know others had stopped, but Krugman knows far more others than I do, so I imagine by and large he's correct. If so, that worries me, and becomes of a piece with my worry about the decline of literacy in our culture. The costs of that decline are not up there with those of American warmaking, but I suspect not as far from it as might appear, nor unrelated to it. I do recall someone reporting that Mitt Romney had never heard of One Hundred Years of Solitude. A sobering thought. Perhaps now that he has more leisure... but I imagine not. Current and recent American politicians, by and large, with some notable exceptions, and despite the sheer volume of their speech, are not particularly literate. They haven't the time. I gather the same is true of too many journalists and purveyors of other media. More's the pity, for them, their families, and for their country. Given the awful weight of American influence abroad, the whole earth suffers as well.

Here's a contextual note: Humanities in American colleges and universities are suffering seriously declining enrollments compared to a more vocational focus on science and technology. “College is increasingly being defined narrowly as job preparation, not as something designed to educate the whole person,” said Pauline Yu, president of the American Council of Learned Societies. 

 

 October 28, 2013

Poetry and Blogging

I just want to give a shoutout to a book I’m reading and really enjoying: Tom Standage’s Writing on the Wall: Social Media — The First 2,000 Years. I’ve been a big fan of Standage’s ever since his book The Victorian Internet, about the rise of the telegraph, which shed a lot of light on network technologies while also being great fun. Now he’s done it again.

Standage’s argument is that the essential aspects of social media — exchange of information that runs horizontally, among people who are affiliated in some way, rather than top-down from centralized sources — have been pervasive through history, with the industrial age’s news media only a temporary episode of disruption. As he shows, Cicero didn’t get his news from Rome Today or Rupertus Murdochus — he got it through constant exchanges of letters with people he knew, letters that were often both passed on to multiple readers and copied, much like tweets being retweeted.

Even more interesting is his discussion of the Tudor court, where a lot of the communication among insiders took place through the exchange of … poetry, which allowed people both to discuss sensitive topics elliptically and to demonstrate their cleverness. You could even build a career through poetry, not by selling it, but by using your poems to build a reputation, which could translate into royal favor and high office — sort of the way some people use their blogs to build influence that eventually leads to paying gigs of one kind or another. The tale of John Harington — of the famous “treason never prospers” line — is fascinating.

[I had to - was pleased to - look up John Harington. Wilipedia says that Harington "(4 August 1561 – 20 November 1612), of Kelston, was an [Elizabethan] courtier, author and master of art, popularly known as the inventor of the flush toilet." His famous line that Krugman mentions was, "Treason doth never prosper: what's the reason? Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason." Well said. A wise comment worthy of the inventor of the flush toilet, an extraordinarily important gift to us all. Some of our most important reading...]

 Incidentally, when and why did we stop reading poetry? Educated people used to read it all the time, or at least pretend to; that’s no longer the case. Frankly, I don’t read poetry except on very rare occasions. What happened?

Anyway, interesting stuff. And since I don’t think Standage is likely to get favors showered on him by our latter-day Queen Elizabeth, buy his book!

[I did.]

The World without US

John Feffer has written a valuable and unusual assessment of the U.S.'s challenges and responsibilities, to our own people and those of the world. If the American imperium is in decline — a by no means sure thing — the United States still possesses enormous resources to do good or ill at home and abroad. That balance, given the current crazy tilt of our politics, is also far from clear. Economic inequality continues to increase, the symbolic 1% of two or three years ago has become the 0.1%, an obscene disproportionality of wealth and economic growth. Poverty and its manifold costs continue to grow, along with the plutocracy that hollows our democracy and our pretense to equality. 

 

The United States has supported plenty of dictators in the interests of stability. We have generated considerable instability – in Afghanistan, in Iraq – when it has served our interests. Our stability is often unjust; our instability is devastating....

[T]here are still things we can do, as humans, to develop a more cooperative relationship with nature and prevent apocalypse. Similarly, the United States can take positive steps to avoid [a] global Balkans scenario....

We are in the world, there’s no escaping that. Just as humans must reconfigure their relationship with nature, the United States must reconfigure its relationship with the world. In both worst-case scenarios, the only winners will be the cockroaches....

The World Without US

Saturday, 26 October 2013

By John Feffer, Inter Press Service | Op-Ed

John Feffer is co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. His latest book is Crusade 2.0: The West's Resurgent War on Islam (2012).

 

In his 2007 bestseller The World Without Us, journalist Alan Weisman describes a planet that regenerates itself after the disappearance of human beings. Skyscrapers crumble and bridges collapse into rivers,... the primeval forests take over and the buffalo return to roam.

It’s an optimistic vision of the future – if you’re a buffalo or a dolphin or a cockroach. No more ranchers. No more huge trawling nets or D-Con.

But it’s not such a great future if you’re a human being. In its dispassionate, non-human-centred perspective, Weisman’s book is designed to shake humans out of our naïve assumption that we will always be around, regardless of the existential threats that drape our shoulders like the cloak of Nessus.

Evolution has, for some reason, made us incapable of facing our own demise. It’s almost as if we wouldn’t be able to balance our checkbook or plan our vacations unless we treated nuclear weapons and climate change and pandemics as just another set of vaporous bogeymen that scare the bejesus out of us but always disappear at morning’s light.

Now let’s turn from the existential to the geopolitical. What would the world be like without the United States?

The recent government shutdown has prompted many to contemplate a world in which the United States hasn’t so much disappeared but collapsed in on itself. Focused on domestic issues, Washington would cancel Pax Americana (or Pox Americana, as anti-imperialists like to say) and step down from its role as the world’s policeman and the world’s financier.

Would the world be better off? As in Weisman’s hypothetical universe, how one answers this question depends a great deal on who one is. Americans certainly profit from our country’s economic and military hegemony: our carbon footprint, our per capita GDP, our mighty dollar, our reliance on English as the world’s default language.

We take these entitlements for granted. Non-Americans, however, might feel a bit differently. Like the buffalo and the dolphins and the cockroaches in a human-free world, everyone outside the United States might very well applaud the end of American superpowerdom.

At the height of the recent political crisis in Washington, an English-language opinion piece from the Chinese news agency Xinhua called “for the befuddled world to start considering building a de-Americanised world.”

It repeated many familiar arguments. The United States “has abused its superpower status and introduced even more chaos into the world by shifting financial risks overseas, instigating regional tensions amid territorial disputes, and fighting unwarranted wars under the cover of outright lies.”

The solution, according to the widely read piece, is to strengthen the U.N., create a replacement for the dollar as the global currency, and give more power to emerging economies in international financial institutions. These all seem like sensible suggestions.

But as several U.S. commentators have pointed out, this provocative essay doesn’t necessarily reflect Chinese government opinion. Beijing remains dependent on U.S. economic power, whether in the form of American consumers or Wall Street liquidity.

And, to the extent that the United States fights terrorism, polices the world’s sea lanes, and continues to more or less constrain the ambitions of its key allies in the Asia-Pacific, China is also dependent on U.S. military power.

Chinese leadership values domestic, regional, and international stability. It wants, in other words, to preserve an environment in which it can pursue its primary objective: domestic economic growth. If it can hitch a free ride on the gas-guzzling, armour-plated American Hummer, China will gladly get on board.

But if the Hummer starts to mess with its economic growth, political stability, and regional interests, China will bail. For now, after a congressional deal has averted default and ended the government shutdown, Chinese calls for “de-Americanisation” have subsided. But political deadlock in Washington is by no means over. And the structural issues that underlie the relative decline of the United States over the last decade remain in place.

Most observers of U.S. decline, from Paul Kennedy to Fareed Zakaria, have generally shared the same ambivalence as China. They see U.S. decline as relative, as gradual, and as something to be mourned in the absence of a viable alternative.

The same could be said of the Latin American nations that have long decried U.S. imperialism. The latest salvos in this conflict have concerned the Snowden affair and revelations of the NSA’s overseas surveillance. But like China, Latin America is heavily dependent on trade with the United States and thus also ambivalent about U.S. economic decline.

Some participants in this debate, of course, have no ambivalence at all. The 2008 documentary “The World Without U.S.” describes the state of anarchy that would result if a future progressive president trimmed the military budget and withdrew troops from around the world.

The film relies heavily on British historian Niall Ferguson’s rosy descriptions of American hegemony. At one point, Ferguson suggests that U.S. military withdrawal would likely send the world down the same path of destruction that Yugoslavia experienced in the 1990s.

The European Union was feckless back then, and continues to be so today. No other guarantor of peace has stepped forward. Only China looms on the horizon, and the film ends with images of nuclear blasts hitting Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, presumably from Chinese missiles launched in the wake of the U.S. military’s departure from the region.

In Alan Weisman’s book, the primeval forest takes over the once-civilised world. In "The World Without U.S.," the primeval forces of anarchy take over a world once made stable by U.S. military presence.

It is, in so many ways, a dangerously silly movie. The United States has supported plenty of dictators in the interests of stability. We have generated considerable instability – in Afghanistan, in Iraq – when it has served our interests. Our stability is often unjust; our instability is devastating.

Moreover, we have cut back on our military involvement in Latin America and the region has prospered. We’ve reduced our troop presence in South Korea, including the legendary “trip wire,” and no anarchy has been loosed upon the peninsula. We are finally closing down many Cold War-era bases in Europe, and Europe remains calm.

Remember, the real message of Weisman’s book is that there are still things we can do, as humans, to develop a more cooperative relationship with nature and prevent apocalypse. Similarly, the United States can take positive steps to avoid the global Balkans scenario.

It’s not a matter of appointing a successor as global guardian or duking it out with China to prevent Beijing from stepping into our shoes. It’s not about crawling into our shell and pouting because the world no longer wants to follow our orders.

We are in the world, there’s no escaping that. Just as humans must reconfigure their relationship with nature, the United States must reconfigure its relationship with the world. In both worst-case scenarios, the only winners will be the cockroaches.

Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and Barack Obama: A friend's reflections

I reprint below some thoughts of a close and thoughtful friend and fine poet, Richard O. Moore, replying to a Reckonings post I offered some time ago. My brief reply to his questions follows his remarks.

Reading your recent posting raised a number of questions, as follows:

1. You refer to Eleanor as your “greatest mentor” which, for me, opens up the question as to your grandmother’s influence on your view of your grandfather. Is this worth exploring? At the risk of over simplification, it strikes me that the President was the grand politician (the art of the possible) in contrast with his wife’s views which were moral rather than political, although not without political consequences. Whereas the President never lost his vision of America as first among nations, Eleanor moved on to think of the world and it problems in global rather than national states and “spheres of influence.”  To what extent were you aware of this difference?

2. Are there circumstances in common with the 1930’s and today which in any way limit what a President can and cannot do? The title of the Brands biography [H.W. Brands, Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt] gave me a clue. FDR was a symbol of the ruing class who responded to the collapse of an economic system from the position of a supreme insider. Regardless of his radical policies, his credentials as an oligarch

remained intact. In sharp contrast, Obama enjoys no such advantage. At the time of the Great Depression his mere existence as a Harvard educated lawyer and successful politician would have prompted an image of the Anti-Christ incarnate. To say that then and now America is a racist society is to state the obvious. The obvious, however, is frequently the most ignored element in our daily life. To be black in America still means that inherently a black man has no legitimate power. This view is visceral and mostly unconscious in today’s political discourse.

Obama, who thinks and acts as if in a post-racist world, commands legally mandated lip service. FDR, although a “traitor,” retained his authority as “one of us.” Fortunately societies sometimes change. The Republican strategies from the “birthers” to the Tea Party purists are doomed because the changing demographics in the  U.S. will eventually produce a different society with its own problems.

In some respects the Thirties and today, instead of sharing similarities, are the opposite of each other. While reading your post  I remembered visits to the local A & P. The shelves in many parts of the store were bare. The Depression was an economy of scarcity. Today, regardless of the collapse of the housing market and other financial losses, there does not seem to have been a corresponding drop in commodity production [or consumption]. The shelves are full. We have an economy of surplus, which is no less of an economy in crisis but for different reasons.

There were and are other forces at work in these two periods.  For example: the Depression saw the rise of a powerful union movement. Today, unions can be said to qualify for an endangered species list. The same holds true for heavy manufacturing. It was manufacturing related to WWII that brought us out of the Depression. Today those jobs are for the most part gone and will not return. A new and highly skilled work force is needed to meet the needs of the new industries of the information age, but that work force will be much smaller. A substantial portion of today’s unemployed is in danger of becoming unemployable and the core of a permanent underclass. Two of the the challenges of the near future are how to pay for the rising demands of the welfare state and how to develop new social organizations and practices that contribute to the health and sustainability of the planet.   

Richard, I am grateful for your thoughts, and substantially in accord with them. The challenges you identify in the near future are critical, interactive and daunting: the danger of a permanent and restive underclass, the rising demands of a welfare state, and the development of organization and practice to save and nourish the planet. There is revolutionary potential in the first: it is hard to imagine the voting public or the Congress supporting adequate welfare for a large and permanent underclass.  

As my greatest mentor, my grandmother spoke of the United Nations, the Democratic and Republican parties circa 1956-62, my own writing at Amherst College and Columbia University, and for the Collegiate Council for the United Nations, which I served as president between 1959 and 1961, but not of her husband, my grandfather. I wrote later, in A Love in Shadow (NY: Norton, 1978), about them both.

Still, from her own writing and that of her biographers — Joe Lash and Blanche Wiesen Cook, primarily — and my listening to her speak with Adlai Stevenson, JFK and others at Hyde Park and in New York, I agree with your sense of their basic differences. Of course she had the advantage of not having or choosing to serve as president of the United States; FDR would surely have been different in a less constraining political role.

But even given that, they were clearly of different temperament and inclination, he more the political strategist and tactician who like his admired cousin Theodore, loved the bully pulpit, she not without canniness — witness her taking Cardinal Spellman to the cleaners, and her influential support of Stevenson's candidacy in 1952 and 1956 — but more the moralist with strong political views and unwavering commitment to social justice. 

Stevenson, inscribing to her a book about himself titled Adlai Stevenson: Conscience in Politics, wrote "To Eleanor Roosevelt, my conscience."

So yes, I was more influenced by my grandmother than by my grandfather. I admired them both inordinately, but I knew him as a child knows his grandfather. I knew my grandmother as I was at least coming into my own adult life. I'm convinced that she loved him, but as is widely known if not often well represented, theirs was not a close marriage. 

Is the war on terror turning against the lives of those whose governments pursue it?

I've had an increasingly troubled sense in the last few years that the War on Terror was itself becoming a war of terror, not only in Afghanistan and Pakistan but with global reach, including the citizens of those whose governments avidly pursue it. So it was with interest that I came upon the short essay I attach below by the English journalist and playwright Victoria Brittain, who used to edit the Guardian and whose most recent book, just out, is Shadow Lives: The Forgotten Women of the War on Terror. 

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175657/tomgram%3A_victoria_brittain%2C_fighting_a_global_war_of_terror/#more

Wislawa Szymborska, poet, 1923-2012

Well-known in her native Poland, Wisława Szymborska received

international recognition when she won the Nobel Prize for Literature 

in 1996. 

In awarding the prize, the Academy praised her “poetry that with 

ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come 

to light in fragments of human reality.” 

— From a biographical note on the website of the Poetry Foundation.

Collections of her poems and prose that have been translated into English:

Sounds, Feelings, Thoughts (1981)

People on a Bridge: Poems (1990)

View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems (1995)

Poems New and Collected (2000)

Miracle Fair: Selected Poems of Wislawa Szymborska (2002)

Non-Required Reading: Prose Pieces (2002)

Monologue of a Dog (2005)

Here (2012)

The same short note of the Poetry Foundation includes these two sentences: 

Readers of Szymborska's poetry have often noted its wit, irony, 
and deceptive simplicity. Her poetry examines domestic details 
and occasions, playing these against the backdrop of history.




Szymborska has taught me especially about the potential and realizable intimacy of 
poetry and politics, a theme to which I return in my life and writing again and again.


In her memory, here are six of her poems that have moved me:

Life While-You-Wait

 
Life While-You-Wait.
Performance without rehearsal.
Body without alterations.
Head without premeditation.
 
I know nothing of the role I play.
I only know it's mine. I can't exchange it.
 
I have to guess on the spot
just what this play's all about.
 
Ill-prepared for the privilege of living,
I can barely keep up with the pace that the action demands.
I improvise, although I loathe improvisation.
I trip at every step over my own ignorance.
I can't conceal my hayseed manners.
My instincts are for happy histrionics.
Stage fright makes excuses for me, which humiliate me more.
Extenuating circumstances strike me as cruel.
 
Words and impulses you can't take back,
stars you'll never get counted,
your character like a raincoat you button on the run?
the pitiful results of all this unexpectedness.
 
If only I could just rehearse one Wednesday in advance,
or repeat a single Thursday that has passed!
But here comes Friday with a script I haven't seen.
Is it fair, I ask
(my voice a little hoarse,
since I couldn't even clear my throat offstage).
 
You'd be wrong to think that it's just a slapdash quiz
taken in makeshift accommodations. Oh no.
I'm standing on the set and I see how strong it is.
The props are surprisingly precise.
The machine rotating the stage has been around even longer.
The farthest galaxies have been turned on.
Oh no, there's no question, this must be the premiere.
And whatever I do
will become forever what I've done.

Consolation

Darwin.
They say he read novels to relax,
But only certain kinds:
nothing that ended unhappily.
If anything like that turned up,
enraged, he flung the book into the fire.   


True or not,
I’m ready to believe it.
Scanning in his mind so many times and places,
he’d had enough of dying species,
the triumphs of the strong over the weak,
the endless struggles to survive,
all doomed sooner or later.
He’d earned the right to happy endings,
at least in fiction
with its diminutions.


Hence the indispensable
silver lining,
the lovers reunited, the families reconciled,
the doubts dispelled, fidelity rewarded,
fortunes regained, treasures uncovered,
stiff-necked neighbors mending their ways,
good names restored, greed daunted,
old maids married off to worthy parsons,
troublemakers banished to other hemispheres,
forgers of documents tossed down the stairs,   
seducers scurrying to the altar,
orphans sheltered, widows comforted,
pride humbled, wounds healed over,
prodigal sons summoned home,
cups of sorrow thrown into the ocean,   
hankies drenched with tears of reconciliation,
general merriment and celebration,
and the dog Fido,
gone astray in the first chapter,
turns up barking gladly
in the last.

 
Children of Our Age


We are children of our age,
it's a political age.

All day long, all through the night,
all affairs--yours, ours, theirs--
are political affairs.

Whether you like it or not,
your genes have a political past,
your skin, a political cast,
your eyes, a political slant.

Whatever you say reverberates,
whatever you don't say speaks for itself.
So either way you're talking politics.

Even when you take to the woods,
you're taking political steps
on political grounds.

Apolitical poems are also political,
and above us shines a moon
no longer purely lunar.
To be or not to be, that is the question.
And though it troubles the digestion
it's a question, as always, of politics.

To acquire a political meaning
you don't even have to be human.
Raw material will do,
or protein feed, or crude oil,

or a conference table whose shape
was quarreled over for months;
Should we arbitrate life and death
at a round table or a square one?

Meanwhile, people perished,
animals died,
houses burned,
and the fields ran wild
just as in times immemorial
and less political.




The End and the Beginning


After every war
someone has to tidy up.
Things won't pick
themselves up, after all.

Someone has to shove
the rubble to the roadsides
so the carts loaded with corpses
can get by.

Someone has to trudge
through sludge and ashes,
through the sofa springs,
the shards of glass,
the bloody rags.

Someone has to lug the post 
to prop the wall,
someone has to glaze the window,
set the door in its frame.

No sound bites, no photo opportunities,
and it takes years.
All the cameras have gone
to other wars.

The bridges need to be rebuilt,
the railroad stations, too.
Shirtsleeves will be rolled
to shreds.

Someone, broom in hand,
still remembers how it was.
Someone else listens, nodding
his unshattered head.

But others are bound to be bustling nearby
who'll find all that
a little boring.

From time to time someone still must
dig up a rusted argument
from underneath a bush
and haul it off to the dump.

Those who knew
what this was all about
must make way for those
who know little.
And less than that.
And at last nothing less than nothing.

Someone has to lie there
in the grass that covers up
the causes and effects
with a cornstalk in his teeth,
gawking at clouds.

 

Hitler's First Photograph


And who's this little fellow in his itty-bitty robe?
That's tiny baby Adolf, the Hitlers' little boy!
Will he grow up to be an LL.D?
Or a tenor in Vienna's Opera House?
Whose teensy hand is this, whose little ear and eye and nose?
Whose tummy full of milk, we just don't know:
printer's, doctor's, merchant's, priest's?
Where will those tootsy-wootsies finally wander?
To a garden, to a school, to an office, to a bride?
Maybe to the Burgermeister's daughter?

Precious little angel, mommy's sunshine, honey bun.
While he was being born, a year ago,
there was no dearth of signs on the earth and in the sky:
spring sun, geraniums in windows,
the organ-grinder's music in the yard,
a lucky fortune wrapped in rosy paper.
Then just before the labor his mother's fateful dream.
A dove seen in a dream means joyful news--
if it is caught, a long-awaited guest will come.
Knock knock, who's there, it's Adolf's heartchen knocking.

A little pacifier, diaper, rattle, bib,
our bouncing boy, thank God and knock on wood, is well,
looks just like his folks, like a kitten in a basket,
like the tots in every other family album.
Sh-h-h, let's not start crying, sugar.
The camera will click from under that black hood.

The Klinger Atelier, Grabenstrasse, Braunau.
And Braunau is a small, but worthy town--
honest businesses, obliging neighbors,
smell of yeast dough, of gray soap.
No one hears howling dogs, or fate's footsteps.
A history teacher loosens his collar
and yawns over homework.


A Few Words on the Soul
We have a soul at times.
No one’s got it non-stop,
for keeps.

Day after day,
year after year
may pass without it.

Sometimes
it will settle for awhile
only in childhood’s fears and raptures.
Sometimes only in astonishment
that we are old.

It rarely lends a hand
in uphill tasks,
like moving furniture,
or lifting luggage,
or going miles in shoes that pinch.

It usually steps out
whenever meat needs chopping
or forms have to be filled.

For every thousand conversations
it participates in one,
if even that,
since it prefers silence.

Just when our body goes from ache to pain,
it slips off-duty.

It’s picky:
it doesn’t like seeing us in crowds,
our hustling for a dubious advantage
and creaky machinations make it sick.

Joy and sorrow
aren’t two different feelings for it.
It attends us
only when the two are joined.

We can count on it
when we’re sure of nothing
and curious about everything.

Among the material objects
it favors clocks with pendulums
and mirrors, which keep on working
even when no one is looking.

It won’t say where it comes from
or when it’s taking off again,
though it’s clearly expecting such questions.

We need it
but apparently
it needs us
for some reason too.







 



 

Joanna Macy and Rebecca Solnit, two of my heros

I want simply to introduce two of my heros. Both, not accidentally, are women. I grew up with strong, thoughtful, compassionate women, survivors and straight shooters all, and all had a great sense of humor: my mother Anna Roosevelt, my grandmother Eleanor Roosevelt, and my older sister, Ellie Seagraves. (All, by the way, bore the same family name, still being passed from generation to generation in the Roosevelt family — Anna Eleanor. They were, and remain, my intimate heros. 

But one has heros in the wider world as well. My grandmother Eleanor bridged the two for me. Here, in their own words, are two women I have never met, but I have been deeply influenced by their writing and their character, which shines through in their writing. They are Joanna Macy and Rebecca Solnit. Please meet them.

Joanna Macy

Joanna still travels the earth, if less often and closer to home. Her wisdom still shines. She still makes me weep, laugh, hope, love and work. Here are some of her current and stunning comments:

 

 

For peace, justice, and life on Earth, fresh ways of seeing arise, and ancient ways return....I share....in service to the revolution of our time: the "Great Turning" from the industrial growth society to a life-sustaining civilization.

The most remarkable feature of this historical moment on Earth is not that we are on the way todestroying the world — we've actually been on the way for quite a while. It is that we are beginning to wake up, as from a millennia-long sleep, to a whole new relationship to our world, to ourselves and each other.

 

The key: overcoming denial

We need to recognize that denial itself is the greatest danger we face. We have the technology to make sweeping and fairly effective changes. But not much can be done until we’re ready to acknowledge the situation we’re in, to let it sink in.

That kind of acknowledgement isn’t easy. Our fear of despair functions to filter out painful information, and furthermore it’s not in the interest of our economic system, as it is presently structured, for us to get alarmed. It’s in the perceived self-interest of the state, the corporations, and the media which serve them for us to imagine that everything is just fine and that we are happy – or that we’re just about to be happy if we buy this product or that product. So to break through this protective screen we’ve erected, it’s very helpful to see it as a spell, like in the old fairy tales.

It’s like the spell that grips the courtiers in the castle of the Fisher King in the legend of the Holy Grail: They’re in the middle of the Wasteland where nothing grows anymore, and both the land and the rulers have lost their powers of regeneration. But they’re mesmerized, so they maintain the status quo. They all move around on automatic, like smiling robots. We are under a comparable spell, and we can break out of it the way the Fisher King and his courtiers did. Thanks to Parsifal’s caring questions – "What aileth thee?" – they encountered what they already knew beneath the denial and the repressed despair, and that smack of reality woke them up. That direct connection – the great erotic connection of telling the truth – was like the kiss that woke up Sleeping Beauty.

So we break the spell by loving ourselves and each other enough to tell the truth. Our own experience, as inhabitants of an endangered planet, gives us the authority and the authenticity to tell the truth about what we see and feel and know is happening to our world. That profound inner movement of acknowledgement brings a great release of intelligence and creativity, because repressing what we know is a tremendous energy drain. It’s not so much a question of incorporating new information – sitting down at the desk and learning a new lesson – but rather relaxing our defenses and saying, "Okay, yeah, I know this is going on." There is a level on which this awareness is already present.

Obviously, we still need to transmit critically important information, but let’s do it in a way that respects the fact that on some deep level, people know they are living on an endangered planet. And indeed, it is that inner knowledge which produces what we mistakenly take for apathy or indifference. The work that I have been doing over the last ten years convinces me that so-called "public apathy" does not stem from indifference or callousness or even ignorance so much as from fear of pain. And that pain itself stems from an innate capacity to suffer with our world.

We make the mistake of thinking that we are essentially separate and fragile, and that if we acknowledge this terrifying information we’ll break. It’s a mistake that is fostered by our culture and our political-economic system. So we need to respect ourselves and realize how tough we are – tough enough to be fully present to our world and not break.

 

Rebecca Solnit

Rebecca Solnit is a marvel of perspicacious generosity and determined hope. A Californian like Joanna, I would be very surprised if they are not good friends. Here she is, in her own words. See how they echo Joanna's intelligence and graceful, passionate expression, how their fundamental values are very similar. She writes prolifically, and travels widely. I draw almost arbitrarily from a very recent essay on TomDispatch. She calls it "The Rain on my Parade: A Letter to my Dismal Allies":

Dear Allies,

Forgive me if briefly I take my eyes away from the prize to brush away some flies, but the buzzing has gone on for some time. I have a grand goal and it is to counter the Republican right with its deep desire to annihilate everything I love, and to move toward far more radical goals than the Democrats ever truly support. In the course of pursuing that, however, I’ve come up against the habits of my presumed allies again and again.

O rancid sector of the far left, please stop your grousing! Compared to you, Eeyore sounds like a Teletubby. If I gave you a pony, you would not only be furious that not everyone has a pony, but you would pick on the pony for not being radical enough until it wept big, sad, hot pony tears. Because what we’re talking about here is not an analysis, a strategy, or a cosmology, but an attitude, and one that is poisoning us. Not just me, but you, us, and our possibilities.

The poison often emerges around electoral politics. Look, Obama does bad things and I deplore them, though not with a lot of fuss, since they’re hardly a surprise. He sometimes also does not-bad things, and I sometimes mention them in passing, and mentioning them does not negate the reality of the bad things.

.....................

So here I want to lay out an insanely obvious principle that apparently needs clarification. There are bad things and they are bad. There are good things and they are good, even though the bad things are bad. The mentioning of something good does not require the automatic assertion of a bad thing. The good thing might be an interesting avenue to pursue in itself if you want to get anywhere. In that context, the bad thing has all the safety of a dead end. And yes, much in the realm of electoral politics is hideous, but since it also shapes quite a bit of the world, if you want to be political or even informed you have to pay attention to it and maybe even work with it. 

..........................

When you’re a hammer everything looks like a nail, but that’s not a good reason to continue to pound down anything in the vicinity. Consider what needs to be raised up as well.  Consider our powers, our victories, our possibilities; ask yourself just what you’re contributing, what kind of story you’re telling, and what kind you want to be telling.

........................

We are facing a radical right that has abandoned all interest in truth and fact. We face not only their specific policies, but a kind of cultural decay that comes from not valuing truth, not trying to understand the complexities and nuances of our situation, and not making empathy a force with which to act. To oppose them requires us to be different from them, and that begins with both empathy and intelligence, which are not as separate as we have often been told.

......................

Nine years ago I began writing about hope, and I eventually began to refer to my project as “snatching the teddy bear of despair from the loving arms of the left." All that complaining is a form of defeatism, a premature surrender, or an excuse for not really doing much. Despair is also a form of dismissiveness, a way of saying that you already know what will happen and nothing can be done, or that the differences don’t matter, or that nothing but the impossibly perfect is acceptable. If you’re privileged you can then go home and watch bad TV or reinforce your grumpiness with equally grumpy friends.

...........................

There are really only two questions for activists: What do you want to achieve?  And who do you want to be?  And those two questions are deeply entwined. Every minute of every hour of every day you are making the world, just as you are making yourself, and you might as well do it with generosity and kindness and style.

That is the small ongoing victory on which great victories can be built, and you do want victories, don’t you? Make sure you’re clear on the answer to that, and think about what they would look like.

Love,

Rebecca

________________________

 

In the voices of Rebecca Solnit and Joanna Macy -— two generations of women activists — I hear the voices of my sister, my mother and my grandmother, and I feel pride and gratitude for them all.

Volunteer, get out the vote

https://dashboard.barackobama.com/

I'm aboard. The stakes are enormous. Anything we can do to register, recruit others, knock on doors, make calls, write letters, give a little more, get neighbors to watch the debates and talk with each other, get to the polls, vote.

Volunteers are the foundation of this campaign — people reaching out to one another, building the organization we need to win from the ground up.

The importance of mobilizing for Obama's re-election

The more we hear of the wretched voices from Tampa, the clearer and more compelling becomes the need to take every step we can to re-elect President Barack Obama.

http://www.barackobama.com/

The mental health of American veterans

A few days ago I drew attention to Nicholas Kristof's story in the New York Times describing the number of suicides among American veterans returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Veterans Administration has decided to increase its mental health staff by 10 percent. That may not be sufficient.

A report released two days ago by the VA's inspector general revealed that veterans "are waiting far longer for mental health care than the department has been willing to admit. A new applicant for mental health services is supposed to receive an evaluation within two weeks, a standard the department says it meets more than 95 percent of the time. But the inspector general said that fewer than half of veterans received evaluations within 14 days. The rest waited an average of 50 days."

That's a terribly long time to wait if one's suffering is acute.

The smog of war

Tom Engelhardt is an astute critic of American warmaking, and this is his latest dispatch. He reminds his readers that we have no evidence that the Vietnam War taught us anything. I use "us" with common looseness, but it grieves me to have even that association with the warmaking policies of U.S. governments from John Kennedy to Barack Obama.

Would Kennedy have taken U.S. troops into Vietnam as his successor did? Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. thought not, and he knew Kennedy far better than I did. I remember asking the same question when I published my book, Vietnam and American Foreign Policy (Boston: D.C. Heath, 1968). It is one of history's "might-have-beens." I would like to believe Schlesinger is right. But I'm not so sure. In 1961 - the year of the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion -  Kennedy sent in an additional 3000 military "advisors" to join the 900 who had already been sent to Vietnam during the Eisenhower years.

I count John Kennedy among the three greatest American statesmen of the post-World War II era, all three of them assassinated in 1963 and 1968. (No, I do not regard that as a conspiracy; it was indisputably a tragedy.) But foreign and military policy were not JFK's strong suit, or at least they had not become so by the time of his death, any more than they appear to be for his gifted successor Barack Obama.

"The lessons of Vietnam" were often articulated, but never learned. The short American century may be over, as Andrew Bacevich writes in his current book of that title, but no one seems to have told the White House or the Pentagon. 

"The 'lessons of Vietnam,' fruitlessly discussed for five decades, taught Washington so little that it remains trapped in a hopeless war on the Eurasian mainland, continues to pursue a military-first policy globally that might even surprise American leaders of the Vietnam era, has turned the planet into a 'free fire zone,' and considers military power its major asset, a first not a last resort, and the Pentagon the appropriate place to burn its national treasure."

The Obama administration has done many things of which we can be decidedly proud, but its continued pursuit of warmaking and the imposition of its terrible costs in human lives and treasure that could have been otherwise used is surely not among them.

Tomgram: Engelhardt, The Smog of War | TomDispatch

www.tomdispatch.com

Obama as a credible foreign policy candidate for re-election?

I like John Feffer, author of the weekly Institute for Policy Studies "World Beat" essay. He's consistently well informed and, for me, on the mark.

He argues this week that while Americans pay little attention to foreign policy compared to domestic issues, Obama has a chance to more clearly distinguish his candidacy from Mitt Romney by making the following points:

"Let’s pretend for a moment that the United States is a different country where foreign policy indeed matters to the electorate. Let’s make another, perhaps more far-fetched assumption that Obama will bill himself in 2012 as a successful, globally minded progressive candidate. Here are the five things Obama could say to confound his right-wing critics and his liberal debunkers to prove that he has effectively promoted progressive causes at a global level."

 

• I promised to engage willing authoritarian regimes. The government of Burma was willing, we engaged them, and now opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi will soon take her place in the Burmese parliament.
• I promised global abolition and, now that my arch-enemy Jon Kyl is retiring, we will finally be able to make some concrete steps toward nuclear disarmament.
• I promised to steer clear of dangerous military interventions, and I have pushed hard for a diplomatic solution to the crisis in Syria.
• I inherited the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I have completed the U.S. troop withdrawal from the former and pursued the negotiations necessary to remove U.S. forces from the latter.
• The global economy was in a sinkhole when I entered office, and now it has stabilized, in large part through the stimulus policies that I supported along with my counterparts in other major countries.

"None of these efforts has been a clear political win. None could be called an unmitigated progressive victory. But the administration’s policies on Burma, nuclear weapons, negotiated settlements, and the global economy should go a long way toward refuting the canards of Rove and Gillespie and injecting foreign policy in a positive way into the 2012 presidential campaign. It’s not exactly the agenda of the Progressive Caucus. But it’s a far cry from RomneyWorld."

 

John F. Kennedy revisited: an exploration of his interest in rapprochment with Fidel Castro

My good friend Michael and I became interested today in finding an article we had read years ago about John F. Kennedy and his interest in a rapprochment with Fidel Castro.  

 

Michael thought the conservative first generation of Cuban-Americans in Miami might have been behind Kennedy's assassination by Lee Harvey Oswald. Other conspiracy theorists, as I recall, lay the responsibility upon Chicago crime syndicates whose privileges in pre-revolutionary Cuba were considerable, and at least in some measure, upon the Dallas police force, who managed to allow Jack Ruby with a loaded pistol into the locale of their transporting Oswald to another location. Despite a host of inquiries going back to the Warren Commission, no such theory has acquired evidence to sustain its plausibility. The consensus appears to be, however unsatisfactory, that Oswald acted alone, convinced that Kennedy was anti-Castro. A terrible irony in the context of my current investigation.

 

I hadn't thought of Kennedy or his assassination for many years. In searching for that article, in the improbable magazine Cigar Aficionado, and in the reading and thought that followed, I recalled today what a huge and awful experience of loss I felt with so many of the American people. We all remember just where we were that day when we heard the news of Kennedy’s death, and we all spent the next days in a kind of trance, glued to our television screens, still somehow unwilling to believe. I was in a taxi on Amsterdam Avenue in New York.

I imagine it was very like the experience so many felt in learning of the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt. I learned that news on the bedside radio in my room in Bethesda Naval Hospital. I was ill with a staphylococcus infection, and just six years old, so could not absorb the impact. I do remember a nurse running in to turn off my radio, not knowing I had already heard. My mother came later to help me understand that my grandfather — PaPa — had died.

The day Kennedy was elected in November 1960 I was fresh out of college, starting graduate studies for a Ph.D. at Columbia University. I was filled with hope and pride in our capacity to elect him as our president. I went to Washington in the summer of 1963, only months before his assassination, to serve briefly as a desk officer in the State Department.

I realize in retrospect that in losing both Kennedys — John and his brother Robert in their candidacy for president, JFK's tragically short service in the presidency, Robert Kennedy's assassination while trying to overtake Senator Eugene McCarthy for the Democratic nomination in 1968 — and in the terrible death by a third assassin of Martin Luther King, Jr., we lost the three finest public leaders of this nation since Franklin Roosevelt.

 It was the last time — a half-century ago — I felt unalloyed pride and optimism about American civic leadership. Yes, I’ve been saddened by a few things I’ve since come to know about both Kennedys and even about Martin Luther King. But they still stand in my mind as I knew them then. No one since them has evoked the same admiration. Youthful it may have been — youthful it was — but it remains a passion I remember with pleasure and sorrow. The might-have-beens of history are tantalizing and ephemeral.

I’m happy that I cast my first presidential ballot for John Kennedy. I have voted for every Democratic candidate since then, with a clear realization that the alternative would have been worse. I admire Barack Obama and much of what he has done during his first term. I also believe it is critically important that he be re-elected. I am not confident of that outcome. David Javerbaum wrote an amusing column in last Sunday’s New York Times, saying that we have entered the age of quantum politics; and Mitt Romney is the first quantum politician. “Frustrating as it may be, the rules of quantum campaigning dictate that no human being can ever simultaneously know both what Mitt Romney’s current position is and where that position will be at some future date. This is known as the ‘principle uncertainty principle.’” I would be more sanguine if I did not harbor the fear that we also have a quantum electorate.

I wrote earlier today and offer here in a letter to my friend Michael, the fruits of a day of research, reading and reflection for which I've been thankful.

 

 Dear Michael,

I found the Peter Kornbluth article, which appeared in the Cigar Aficionado issue of September/October 1999. You may click on it below. It makes fascinating reading today. Kennedy indeed was actively contemplating a rapprochement with Castro, and efforts, while interrupted by the assassination of Kennedy, were continued under Johnson, then ended, only to be reinstituted under Jimmy Carter. Bill Clinton finally set them aside. There was always much sensitivity about the US being identified as soft on communism, little reference to the Cuban-American community before the 1990s. Lisa Howard, an ABC journalist living in New York, facilitated much of the dialogue, so was probably the "beautiful woman spy" you remembered. Gordon Chase was McGeorge Bundy's assistant.

The only thing specifically about the Kennedy assassination Kornbluth writes, however, was his understanding that Oswald was reputed to have killed Kennedy because he suspected Kennedy of being anti-Castro. Oswald himself was strongly pro-Castro. And indeed there was enough evidence from the public record  — Bay of Pigs, Operation Mongoose, Cuban Missile Crisis, all could easily suggest that Kennedy, like Eisenhower before him, was anti-Castro; regarded as a synonym for anti-communist. Kornbluth makes no suggestion of a conspiracy or involvement of Cuban-Americans.

Here is Kornbluth's wistful conclusion in the fall of 1999:

"To be sure, the 'what ifs' of history are speculative. But the lesson of the aborted Kennedy-Castro initiative toward a rapprochement is clear: at the apex of the Cold War, and the height of tensions between Washington and Havana, diplomacy and dialogue were still possible. Amidst the charged international conflicts of the early 1960s, a U.S. president appeared willing, as one National Security Council memo put it, to 'live with Castro personally and to assist Cuba'--albeit only 'under certain circumstances.'   Those circumstances--an end to Cuba's ties to the Soviet Union and support for Third World revolution--now exist due to the extraordinary changes in the international environment over the past decade. And recent events have created considerable opportunity for reevaluating a policy stuck in the time warp of the Cold War."

Alas, the U.S. still has that thoroughly irrational policy, still stuck thirteen years after Kornbluth wrote. It will surely remain so at least through this election cycle and perhaps beyond. After all, it costs Americans very little; it costs Cubans a lot. Since the Kennedys so briefly led us — indeed even then — we have been a warrior nation built upon the profits of war.

 http://www.cigaraficionado.com/webfeatures/show/id/7300

There is an earlier and even more fascinating - and of course heartbreaking - companion essay by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. in the November/December 1998 issue of Cigar Aficionado, "JFK Revisited." He has no comment on the assassination, except to demonstrate the terrible loss of a fine man and a fine president. In his article, Schlesinger writes, "There are those who claim that the Kennedys had an "obsession" with Castro and Cuba. They cite the assassination plots, though they were inherited from the Eisenhower administration, and they cite the Kennedy administration's own Operation Mongoose. But there is no direct evidence that either Eisenhower or Kennedy authorized or knew of the assassination plots....

http://www.cigaraficionado.com/webfeatures/show/id/6018/p/7

 "What is far more likely is that the CIA, like intelligence agencies in other countries, believed that it knew the requirements of national security better than transient elected officials, like presidents, and invoked the excuse of "plausible deniability" to act as it deemed best without telling those to whom the agency was nominally accountable. As John Le Carre, who should know, has said, "Scrutiny of intelligence services is largely an illusory concept. If they're good, they fool the outsiders--and if they're bad they fool themselves."

 "As for Operation Mongoose, which Robert Kennedy kept trying to spur on—not his finest hour—this was not an assassination project but a foolish, futile and costly intelligence-gathering and sabotage effort. As Richard Helms of the CIA testified before the Senate committee investigating assassination plots in 1975, "Mongoose was not intended to apply to assassination activity." [Personally I'm not sure why we should trust the testimony of Richard Helms.]

 "Those who are themselves obsessed with the theory of the Kennedys' alleged anti-Castro obsession must deal with the stubborn fact that, given by the Soviet missiles the best possible excuse for invading Cuba and smashing Castro forever, an excuse that would have been accepted around the world, it was Robert Kennedy who led the fight against military action and John Kennedy who made the decision against it. A year after the missile crisis, Kennedy was exploring through Ambassador William Attwood (United States) and Ambassador Carlos Lechuga (Cuba) and through the French journalist Jean Daniel the possibility of normalizing relations with Cuba. Some anti-Castro obsession!

...................................................................

 "JFK touched and remolded lives and gave young people the faith that individuals can make a difference to history. Inspired by his words, they dedicated themselves thereafter to public service, whether in government, in civil rights and human rights movements, in nonprofit sectors, in community organization, in their own hearts and souls. His irreverence toward conventional ideas and institutions provoked a discharge of critical energy throughout American society. He gave the country back to its own best self and taught the world that the process of rediscovering America was not over.

 "One is bound to speculate how America and the world would have been different if Kennedy had lived. For individuals do indeed make a difference to history. In December 1931, a British politician crossing Fifth Avenue in New York City was struck by an automobile and nearly killed. In February 1933, an American politician sitting in an open car in Miami was fired upon by an assassin; the mayor of Chicago, sitting beside him, was killed. Would the history of the twentieth century have been the same if the New York automobile had killed Winston Churchill and the Miami assassin had killed Franklin Roosevelt?

 "Had John F. Kennedy lived, his New Frontier program would have been enacted, he would have pressed the attack on poverty and racism in America, would have pursued détente in Europe, would most probably have withdrawn from Vietnam,and would have urged on the global crusade against nuclear proliferation. The republic would have been spared much of the trauma, disorder and violence that disfigured the raging 1960s.

 "And there remain memories of the private man. He was not, as some claim, a bearer of grudges--the "don't get mad, get even" idea. He made Lyndon Johnson his vice president after Johnson had said unforgivable things about his father. He took most of the Stevenson-for-President crowd--George Ball, Willard Wirtz, Thomas K. Finletter, William Blair, Newton Minow, J. Edward Day, William Attwood, Clayton Fritchey--into his administration though the Stevenson campaign had seemed for a moment to imperil his nomination.

 "Nor was he, as claimed, a spoiled rich man who used and discarded people and treated his associates as if they were indentured servants. He was one of the most unfailingly courteous and considerate men I have ever known. I did my share of creating trouble for his administration; and a couple of times, after one scrape or another made headlines, I told him that maybe the time had come for me to resign. He would laugh and dismiss the idea: "Better that you're the target than me."

 "He was easy, accessible, witty, candid, enjoying the clash of ideas and the ripples of gossip, never more relaxed than when sitting in his rocking chair and puffing away on a fine Havana cigar. He was, in his self-description, an "idealist without illusions." He was the best of my generation. It is good for the country that he remains so vivid a presence in our minds and hearts."

Floyd Beaver's poem, "You Taunting Sea"

Floyd Beaver is a good friend and neighbor. He has written several books I have admired, including particularly his memoir of service in the U.S. Navy from 1939 to 1945, before and during World War II, Sailor from Oklahoma (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2009).  Over the course of that war he served in fifteen ships, saw combat in the Mediterranean, Atlantic and Pacific. He barely escaped with his life when Japanese aircraft sank his ship near the Solomon Islands in April 1943. He was discharged in September 1945 as a Chief Signalman, having been promoted for meritorious conduct in action.

 

 

 

 

I asked Floyd if I could publish in Rekonings a poem that had struck me. He graciously agreed, and added the following brief introduction:

 

"Everywhere, in all lands and in all times, there are men serving
through the hard and narrowing ending years of their lives. Some lucky few
of these men will have the comforting and still glowing memories of youthful
times spent beyond the sea's horizons, no matter how long before, to ease
their ways from the world of living men. It is for these men that this
little poem is written."

 

You Taunting Sea

Relent, you cruel and taunting sea,

    And lift from me your blighting curse.

Just let me be content to live

    Away from wars and storms and worse.

 

Oh, close my eyes to flaunted lures

    Of trade wind clouds in foreign skies,

Of weaving masts among the stars,

    And heaven's fires where pack ice lies.

 

And dull my ears to siren songs

    Of buoy bells in foggy nights,

Of cry of gull and crash of surf

    And lookouts' call for harbor lights.

 

And cleanse my heart of pagan thrill

    At thrust of decks against my feet

And wipe away remembered years

    That chain my mind in cold defeat.

 

Oh, let me lose this haunting urge

    To sail again in dripping dawns.

Please, let me find the quiet and rest

    That others know on peaceful lawns.

 

               - Floyd Beaver              

 

 

Moving beyond war: A new vision for America's global role, with Andrew Bacevich and Bill Moyers

Deeply worthy of a careful, leisurely, attentive viewing and listening.

Andrew Bacevich is retired Army, smart, knowledgable, articulate, committed to ending American imperialism. I have not yet read his new book, The Short American Century, but there's a first chapter on the Bill Moyers website, as well as reprinted below.

I reprint here a related Bill Moyers essay.

 

The Real Costs of War

March 23, 2012

Most discussion about the “costs of war” focuses on two numbers: dollars spent and American troops who gave their lives. A decade into the war on terror, those official costs are over a trillion dollars and more than 6,000 dead. But as overwhelming as those numbers are, they don’t tell the full story.

In one of the most comprehensive studies available, researchers in the Eisenhower Study Group at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies looked at the human, economic, social and political costs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as our military actions in Pakistan. Their complete findings are available at costofwar.org. The numbers below are all from their report, which is dated June 2011. When the study sites both conservative and moderate estimates, we’ve chosen the conservative numbers. It is difficult to find more recent tallies for most of these numbers, but up-to-date totals of U.S. military deaths, along with photos and biographical information, can be found in The Washington Post’s Faces of the Fallen collection.


Army Nurse supervisor Patrick McAndrew tries to save the life of an American soldier wounded in a Baghdad firefight with insurgents Tuesday, Nov. 9, 2004. The soldier died. This photograph is one in a portfolio of Associated Press that won a Pulitzer Prize in breaking news photography. (AP/John Moore)





The Dead

6051 U.S. service members
2,300 U.S. contractors
9,922 Iraqi security forces
8,756 Afghan security forces
3,520 Pakistani security forces
1,192 Other allied troops
11,700 Afghan civilians
125,000 Iraqi civilians
35,600 Pakistanis (civilians and insurgents)
10,000 Afghan insurgents
10,000 Members of Saddam Hussein’s army
168 Journalists
266 Humanitarian workers

Total:  224,475 lives lost

The Wounded

99,065 U.S. soldiers
51,031 U.S. contractors
29,766 Iraq security forces
26,268 Afghan security forces
12,332 Other allied troops
17,544 Afghan civilians
109,558 Iraqi civilians
19,819 Pakistani civilians

Total: 365,383 wounded

The Displaced

3,315,000 Afghan civilians
3,500,000 Iraqi civilians
1,000,000 Pakistani civilians

Total: 7,815,000 refugees and internally displaced people

Costs to the American Taxpayer

$1.3 trillion in Congressional War Appropriations to the Pentagon — the official budget for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

$3.7-4.4 trillion estimated total costs to American taxpayers. This includes the official Pentagon budget (above), veterans’ medical and disability costs, homeland security expenses, war-related international aid and the Pentagon’s projected expenditures to 2020.

$1 trillion more in interest payments through 2020 on money the U.S. borrowed for war.

Social, Political and Environmental Cost

Hundreds of thousands of people have been detained in the ten years since 9/11; the unjust treatment some endured has led to mistrust towards the United States across the entire region. Here in the U.S., Muslims endure racial profiling, hate crimes and workplace discrimination.

The so-called military-industrial complex has been bolstered by increased military spending, with hundreds of billions of dollars going to private companies. One company, Lockheed Martin, received $29 billion in Pentagon contracts in 2008 alone — more than the Environmental Protection Agency ($7.5 billion), the Department of Labor ($11.4 billion) or the Department of Transportation ($15.5 billion).

War-related pollution has affected the health of Iraqis — a study showed significantly higher rates of cancer and infant mortality in Iraq than in neighboring countries. Depleted uranium used in ammunition is thought to be a culprit. Toxic dust on military bases has contributed to a 251 percent increase in rate of neurological disorders, 47 percent increase in rate of respiratory problems and 34 percent increase in rates of cardiovascular disease in military service members since 2001.

FROM THE SHOW
Full Show: Moving Beyond War
YOU MAY ALSO LIKE...
Andrew Bacevich on Changing Our Military Mindset
Scrutinizing the Threat from Iran
2007: ‘Buying the War’

 

Excerpt: “The Short American Century”

March 22, 2012

by Andrew Bacevich

Excerpted from the final chapter of The Short American Century: A Postmortem

The problem for the United States today is that sanitizing history no longer serves U.S. interests. Instead, it blinds Americans to the challenges that they confront. Self-serving mendacities — that the attacks of September 11, 2001, reprising those of December 7, 1941, “came out of nowhere” to strike an innocent nation — don’t enhance the safety and well-being of the American people. If anything, the reverse is true. The Disneyfication of the Iraq War — now well advanced by those depicting “the surge” in Iraq as an epic feat of arms and keen to enshrine General David Petraeus as one of history’s Great Captains — might discreetly camouflage, but cannot conceal, the irreversible collapse of George W. Bush’s “Freedom Agenda,” predicated on expectations that the concerted application of American military power will democratize or at least pacify the Islamic world. The conviction that “the remoralization of America at home ultimately requires the remoralization of American foreign policy”— wars waged to incorporate dark quarters of the Islamic world into the American Century fostering renewal and revitalization at home — has likewise proven baseless and even fanciful. Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, the revival of waterboarding and other forms of torture, and the policy of so-called extraordinary rendition have left the “incandescent moral clarity” that some observers attributed to U.S. policy after 9/11 more than a little worse for wear.

The argument here is not to invert the American Century, fingering the United States with responsibility for every recurrence of war, famine, pestilence, and persecution that crops up on our deeply troubled planet. Nor is the argument that the United States, no longer the “almighty superpower” of yore, has entered a period of irreversible “decline,” pointing ineluctably to retreat, withdrawal, passivity, and irrelevance. Rather, the argument, amply sustained by the essays collected in this volume, is this: To further indulge old illusions of the United States presiding over and directing the course of history will not only impede the ability of Americans to understand the world and themselves but may well pose a positive danger to both. Faced with a reality that includes, within the last decade alone,

• an inability to anticipate, whether the events of 9/11, the consequences of invading Iraq, or revolutionary upheaval in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world;

• an inability to control, with wars begun in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, along with various and sundry financial scandals, economic crises, and natural disasters, exposing the limits of American influence, power, and perspicacity;

• an inability to afford, as manifested by a badly overstretched military, trillion dollar annual deficits, increasingly unaffordable entitlement programs, and rapidly escalating foreign debt;

• an inability to respond, demonstrated by the dysfunction pervading the American political system, especially at the national level, whether in Congress, at senior levels of the executive branch, or in the bureaucracy; and

• an inability to comprehend what God intends or the human heart desires, with little to indicate that the wonders of the information age, however dazzling, the impact of globalization, however far reaching, or the forces of corporate capitalism, however relentless, will provide answers to such elusive questions, Americans today would do well to temper any claims or expectations of completing the world’s redemption. In light of such sobering facts, which Americans ignore at their peril, it no longer makes sense to pretend that the United States is promoting a special message in pursuit of a special mission. Like every other country that confronts circumstances of vast complexity and pervasive uncertainty, the United States is merely attempting to cope. Prudence and common sense should oblige Americans to admit as much.

Electronically reproduced by permission of the publisher from The Short American Century: A Postmortem, edited by Andrew Bacevich. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright © 2012 The President and Fellows of Harvard College.

 

An often lonely job - and always extraordinarily hard

 

He needs our help in 2012.

And thereafter.

 

Portrait of a Healer in Syria

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/13/world/europe/french-surgeon-jacques-beres-recalls-slipping-into-syria-last-month.html?hp

 A moving portrait of a man, not unlike me in appearance and close to my age, with similar personal and political values, but Dr. Jacques Bérès chose and pursued a much more directly activist life as a surgeon, repeatedly putting himself and his skills of healing into the midst of war — Vietnam, Liberia, Sudan, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Chechnya, Iraq —

and this February in Syria, where he operated on 89 people in Homs, the Syrian city whose people have suffered most in recent months. Of those he treated, all but nine survived.

Dr. Bérès was a co-founder of Doctors Without Borders 40 years ago. Read, watch and weep.

 

Bill Moyers is back

It is heartening to see and listen to Bill Moyers' return to public radio and television this January. His new program, Moyers & Company, includes this week "Decoding political misinformation," a discussion with Kathleen Hall Jamieson, and a conversation and readings with the poet Rita Dove. It's Moyers at his best, joining politics and poetry in thoughtful conjunction. As one determined to remain without a TV set, I'm grateful that Moyers sees fit to make the program available online as soon as it is broadcast. For any who missed the first weeks, they are available at www.billmoyers.com.

Rita Dove has recently completed editing The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Her reading from that collection - and video portraits of readings by Stanley Kunitz and Lucille Clifton - offer dramatic - I wish I could say redemptive - counterpoint to Moyers' attention to the deterioration of American democracy. The experience of watching and listening to Stanley Kunitz saying his late poem "Touch Me" still echoes -

Summer is late, my heart 

In addition to the audio podcast and television program, Moyers offers an ongoing series of weekly essays. “On Democracy” is co-written by Moyers and Michael Winship. They focus "much of their attention on money and its corrosive influence on government and politics: who’s spending the big bucks on contributions and lobbying — and to whom it’s going, as well as the monster impact of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision that unleashed vast — and often anonymous — corporate and special interest dollars."

The current essay is datelined February 13 and entitled "Money Throws Democracy Overboard," a fit companion piece to Moyers' discussion of this ghastly primary season with Kathleen Hall Jamieson. If any of us are left imagining that the electoral process remains as a residual bastion of democratic life relatively free from the oligarchic dominance of big money, that essay and discussion places such delusion in sober perspective. We are enduring "government of, by and for the one percent." 

"We are drowning here, with gaping holes torn into the hull of the ship of state from charges detonated by the owners and manipulators of capital. Their wealth has become a demonic force in politics. Nothing can stop them. Not the law, which has been written to accommodate them. Not scrutiny — they have no shame. Not a decent respect for the welfare of others — the people without means, their safety net shredded, left helpless before events beyond their control."

See www.factcheck.org and www.flackcheck.org.

Two of Adrienne Rich's poems and the Occupy movement

Dear [poet friend],

I enjoy listening each week to Curtis Fox's short (15-minute) public radio program, "Poetry off the shelf." You very likely know it, both as part of your history and because it's produced by the Poetry Foundation, which does Poetry magazine. Fox usually has a bright younger guest poet join him in looking at a little of the work of another poet. This week the question was something like "Should Adrienne Rich be the poet laureate of the Occupy movement?" 

Not a promising query — the Occupy movement needs a poet laureate about as much as it needs a president and a first and 2nd vice president. Even Adrienne Rich.

Fox may be off the mark in this instance, but he's not dumb. And his guest thankfully spent little time dispatching the question.

But they also read and talked intelligently about two Rich poems, neither of which I knew, and both of them are fine, brilliant in the very English and Scottish senses of the word. One, the shorter of the two poems, is called simply "Wait," written just as the 2nd American invasion of Iraq was getting underway. It appears addressed to an American soldier sent by his anonymous elders to fight and risk inflicting and enduring injury and death in that war. "They never told you." I think it the more difficult of the two poems to the tin ear, and your audience must be assumed to have such disabled ears. What little you said of your editor's first response suggests it.

I'm inclined to incorporate this note into a current Reckonings post, but I won't identify you other than as "a poet friend," and of course won't use your address. [Our own home grown editor of our monthly newsletter in the community that is my home] advises us well not to take our friends' names into our ventures on the web without their permission.

I have no idea if Reckonings has more than a half-dozen readers, most of whom are surely my children. There is ample encouraging provision for online response to Reckonings posts, but the last one I had was probably in aught2. I gave the journal up while in Norway, but am happy to return to it now in a blessedly peaceful place and time. Roosevelt grandchildren and great-grandchildren should always put fame where it belongs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wait

by Adrienne Rich

In paradise every

the desert wind is rising

third thought

in hell there are no thoughts

is of earth

sand screams against your government

issued tent    

hell’s noise     in your nostrils      crawl

into your ear-shell

wrap yourself in no-thought

wait    no place for the little lyric

wedding-ring glint the reason why   

on earth

they never told you

“Wait,” from The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000-2004 by Adrienne Rich. Copyright © 2006 by Adrienne Rich. 

The second of Rich's poems is "What kinds of times are these," and it's that question and Rich's response that put me in mind of your wishing to expand upon your writing about the Occupy movement. I thought yes, her times are ours, and to add some brief discussion of that poem might expand your writing. See what you think.

 
I drew from my listening that Rich took the title from Bertold Brecht, and Curtis Fox's guest poet spoke of Rich's themes of "poetry of witness" and empathic sensibility, our lack of memory and community, and the notion that Zucotti Park is not a physical place, nor is the true academy, the grove of trees, the meeting place. "It's necessary to talk about trees." 

I'll try to find the poem, though you may have it.

 
That poem seems suitably short and apropos of your own current theme, and I think it lovely. Not prosiac language of course, but lovely.

Cheers and good hunting,

John

PS: I noted that Rich, like you, is 10 years my senior. I have at least a decade of good learning ahead of me! (Joan Rivers is closer to my age.)

What Kind of Times Are These [I include a link to Adrienne Rich reading "What Kind of Times Are These," but I must warn you, dear reader, not to look at the subtitles, for they are wildly inaccurate renderings of her reading. Listen to her voice.]

by  Adrienne Rich

There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill

and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows

near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted

who disappeared into those shadows.

I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled

this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,

our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,

its own ways of making people disappear.

I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods

meeting the unmarked strip of light—ghost-ridden crossroads, leaf

mold paradise:I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you

anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these

to have you listen at all, it's necessary

to talk about trees.

“What Kind of Times Are These”. © 2002, 1995 by Adrienne Rich, from The Fact of a Doorframe: Selected Poems 1950-2001 by Adrienne Rich. 

Adrienne Rich, 1929 —

Vocation: Poet

Executive summary: An atlas of the difficult world

University: Radcliffe College (1951)   

Visiting professor, Brandeis University (1972-73)   

Visiting professor, Scripps College (1983-84)   

Visiting professor, Stanford University (1984-86)   

Professor of English, Stanford University (1986-93)

National Book Award for Poetry 1974 for Diving into the Wreck   

Bollingen Prize in Poetry 2003   

MacArthur Fellowship 1994-99   

Guggenheim Fellowship 1952   

Guggenheim Fellowship 1961   

Phi Beta Kappa Society    

American Academy of Arts and Letters    

American Academy of Arts and Sciences    

Women Against Pornography

 
Books:

A Change of World (1951, poetry)

Necessities of Life: Poems 1962-1965 (1966, poetry)

Diving into the Wreck (1973, poetry)

The Dream of a Common Language (1978, poetry)

The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New 1950-1984 (1984, poetry)

Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1986)

Time's Power: Poems 1985-1988 (1989, poetry)

An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988-1991 (1991, poetry)

Collected Early Poems: 1950-1970 (1993, poetry)

What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (1993, essays)

Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991-1995 (1995, poetry)

Midnight Salvage: Poems 1995-1998 (1999, poetry)

Fox: Poems 1998-2000 (2001, poetry)

Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations (2001, essays)