This is a transcript of my weekly podcast for The Student Operated Press. These podcasts can be downloaded from their site.

United States foreign policy is predicated on promoting democratic institutions. When you consider such institutions, the right to vote and a free press are paramount among them. But do we have a free press or do we have a free-er press, and if it is a free-er press, then free-er than what?

I believe we do not have an incontestably free press, but we do have a press free-er than almost any other world power has ever had. More important, we have a constitution that guarantees a free press—guarantees but is unable to deliver it.

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I suppose some diehards are carrying on literary correspondences that arrive with postal stamps on them. I suppose a subspecies of diehard might even be handwriting their literary correspondences. I write almost everything longhand and then turn to the computer for refiner’s fire. I don’t deplore the passing of a noble tradition. I suspect Pharoah’s scribes would have loved computers. I’ll ask the little plaster scribe who sits on my library bookshelf.

Just as moveable type influenced the way writers write, so must the computer and Internet. We can now exchange our thoughts so speedily that it has become a little dicey to hit the send button without some forethought, to say nothing of the dangers of sending our thoughts to the wrong person by some address-line misadventure. And all those multiple addresses with their blind copies are bound to lead some fine miscarriages of propriety, to say nothing of law suits.

There is now an excitement and spontaneity in our correspondence that has replaced a more formal and considered manner of communicating. Some would say e-mail carries a plague of semi-literacy. I myself think it simply carries the thought and effort we put into it.

That said, I suspect, while confessing I know little about neuroscience, that our brains are being rewired. In short, it seems to me likely the computer, which so often mimicks the human brain that created it, is changing the way we think. Surgeons, following the example of the pilots who flew in the Gulf War, are performing virtual surgeries before entering the operating theater. By the time they actually enter the brain they have rehearsed the scheduled operation several times.

I remember newsrooms stacked with piles of newspapers, spikes piled high with stories, notes and phone messages, and floors awash with yards and yards of teletype copy. There was a separation between the words that in their birth throes killed so many trees and the brain that created them, but that separation is now being transgressed by computers which so much resemble the brain. There is a new and exciting intimacy between the human mind and the words it employs to express itself. Watching the computer screen begins to resemble the synaptic circuitry of the brain itself, and this is bound to change the nature of writing.

I think e-mail is more disposed to reveal the “tell” in the sender’s demeanor than longhand or typewriter correspondence, to use a poker term. It has its own broad array of tics and micro-expressions. It’s more vulnerable, sometimes even naked. Its own facility can betray it. This is not to say it’s inherently more honest. It is, after all, as honest or dishonest as its sender. But just as handwriting reveals the writer, so e-mail has a way of revealing him, too. It’s a bit like handling quicksilver. What I mean is that I think we’ve all by now had the experience of sending an e-mail and then sitting there muttering, Oh God, did I do that?

—DM

There are an awful lot of guys who look like FBI agents. Most of them are character actors on TV. I think this proves that Hollywood and the Washington establishment aren’t at the opposite ends of the spectrum, as they claim. And I guess the voters are pretty much in sync with Hollywood and Washington, because the voters cast the politicians the same way Hollywood casts FBI agents.

These guys don’t look like America. They look like America a hundred years ago. We aren’t a WASP nation anymore. So why doesn’t Washington resemble the country? Why does it keep on resembling only the most homogenous parts of the country?

I take a certain amount of comfort when I watch the TV series Without a Trace. I note with pleasure that the actor who plays the boss has an Italian name, and two of the other actors have Hispanic names. That’s progress. And it’s always reassuring to see Italian-American, African-American and other “ethnic” actors playing the good guys. But the thing is, they’re not ethnic anymore. They’re us. They’re who we look like.

So why is Hollywood just barely getting it and the rest of us are still not getting it? This is not a subtle argument for nominating Barack Obama. It’s just a polite suggestion that America ought to start looking like its demographics. It ought to start looking like its enlisted army.

I’ve never met an FBI agent, but obviously Hollywood casting agents have, and they all seem to be lantern-jawed North European types. Some people might call that racial profiling. I call it uninspired. I’ve never met a CIA agent either. I’m not supposed to, am I? But I did meet a guy on the Washington, DC, waterfront years ago who claimed to be a CIA bomb expert. I didn’t believe him because he had such a big mouth. I hope I was right.

Television and movies are beginning to look like the numbers, but when you look at the first estate in Washington and on Wall Street, that would be the nobility, and the fourth estate, that would be journalists, they look like the numbers circa 1880. There have been a few Darwinian fillips: the mouths are a bit more agile, if at the same time less eloquent, for example.

When pictures of our military in Iraq began appearing I said to my wife, Look, our army looks like the whole world. But as days passed and things went from bad to worse I compared these pictures to those of the old men who had sent our army to Iraq and there was that most stark of disparities: these old men don’t look like America, but the men and women they sent to fight for us do.

Perhaps the most significant constant is that we still celebrate people who look like the roles they play, and as long as we insist on doing that we’re bound to end up with empty suits. So perhaps we don’t look like the numbers because they’ve changed faster than we’re ready for. It’s often said Hollywood typecasts. I think voters far outdo Hollywood in this respect. We’d all benefit from more casting against type. In fact, we’d benefit even more by forgetting about type entirely, because typecasting has lost us at least one war and a lot of self-respect.

—DM

One of the more exquisite aspects of writing poetry is that it is always leading the poet to pretty passes. I’m fond of pretty passes, having been born into one. But the triangle into which I was born is a matter for another day. My pretty pass du jour leads me to consider the word supernatural.

I’m no longer sure of the authenticity of this word. I recognize its usefulness, but I suspect its usefulness has beguiled us. What is supernatural? Can we rest assured something is beyond natural when we are really not sure just what is natural?

The American Heritage Dictionary has this to say about this suspect word: “Attributed to a power that seems to violate or go beyond natural forces; of or relating to a deity; of or relating to the immediate exercise of divine power.”

That’s just a bit too handy-dandy for me. Is there a scientific consensus about what constitutes “natural forces”? Aren’t we always redefining what we know about these forces?

And then there’s the matter of deity. How to define it? I happen to believe in divinity, so I wonder if its operations ought to be called supernatural. Why not natural?

This is how some poets tickle their minds into contemplations that expand their reach. Sometimes of course their music exceeds their intellect, but that too is a matter for another day. Poets, musicians and artists do not explore like scientists, but they do explore, and all of them are adventurers. I have always been drawn to the medieval Arab disinclination to distinguish between chemistry and alchemy. I think that rigid categorizations, while helpful in ordering our collective intelligence, can also limit our inquiries. The work of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart are not that different, and the same could be said of Hans Hofmann and Jonas Salk or any other combination of leaders of the human march.

My guess is that we are going to find that much of what we now call supernatural is merely what we did not yet understand. That is certainly what a life of poetic exploration teaches me.

—DM

Note: Conversation by Lamplight (inset) is a 40×30 oil-on-canvas painting by my mother, Juanita Guccione (1904-1999).

“I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”

—Thomas Jefferson

So now we’re arming sectarian strife in Iraq, and the commercially censored press titters over how risky it is to arm Sunni insurgents against al Qaeda extremists—but no one focuses on the money trail.

Who profits? The arms makers and dealers, of course. They are and have been all along the victors in this squalid business. That some Americans (thankfully, no longer a majority) still believe the Bush-Cheney-McCain line that we’re taking the war to the terrorists is as much an aspect of the cravenness of the press as it is of our all-too-human preference for facile lies.

The fact is that the much vaunted strategist Gen. David H. Petraeus has now sanctioned arming former Sunni insurgents who have killed our soldiers simply because the Sunnis are soured on al Qaeda’s suicide tactics. Is this the surge we’re asked to indulge, a surge to fuel a religious war? These Sunnis are not our friends. Ask them. But they probably hate Shias more than they hate us. None of this was discussed as the neoconservatives built their case for war, but it was well known.

In many ways media coverage of the war amounts to a vast and shameless cover story, the real story being profiteering at the cost of 3,500 American dead, 29,000 wounded, and much greater and uncounted losses among the Iraqis.

If we must now arm Sunnis who hate us, the surge has already failed, but once more the press is atwitter with the day’s developments instead of pursuing the real story, which is that this disgrace is in the service of the military-industrial complex against which President Eisenhower so memorably warned us.

This is not a war against al Qaeda. It is a war in behalf of the military-industrial complex, a war from which the al Qaeda death cult benefits measurably. It is a war, moreover, that has benefited Iran, the enemy Dick Cheney and Joseph Lieberman are now talking about bombing, because it has handed Iran virtual control of Iraq.

Who in his right mind can now justify this war other than the most amoral shareholders of the military-industrial machine?

—DM

A pundit recently wrote that the baby boomers, Americans who grew up between 1946 and 1964, have had their day, for better or worse. I don’t subscribe to such categorical notions because I’ve observed that children and the very old can and do make great art and certainly make a difference in the quality of everybody else’s life.

But it does occur to me that the boomers are wired differently from my generation, which is often called the silent generation. The boomers are children of the disco effect created by the advent of television in the 1950s. They grew up in a world of flickering images and sound effects, a world manipulated, heightened in somewhat the same way certain drugs heighten our experience of life. They grew up with pretty and/or handsome faces yakking at them, with sound bites drumming in their ears. And they grew up in a world reduced to visual flashes, B-rolls and dumbed-down language.

I grew up in a world where book covers and titles were heightened invitations to a vastly expanding world of words and whatever they could paint or convey. For information, for knowledge, I turned to books, not wired boxes. I couldn’t imagine a world in which knowledge could be conveyed in any other way.

Now of course television is giving way to the Internet, richer and more capable in language but not yet as rich in imagery.

Neuroscientists are vitally concerned with how all this affects the human brain. Social scientists are taking advantage of neuroscience to study how the rewiring of our brains impinges on our ability to make informed decisions. And then of course there is the chasm between individual and collective decision-making.

And yet, with this historically unprecedented plethora of information and scholarship in books and on the web, the boomers allowed a don’t-bother-me-with-the-facts leadership to take us into a lunatic war that had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks on us until they themselves made it have everything to do with the attacks. The facts were regarded as treacherous and the people who insisted on them were painted as traitors. And this in a world where people who grew up in the radio era still remembered Josef Goebbels and Adolph Hitler.

How could it have happened? I don’t know, but as a poet and an art lover I suspect the disco effect had something to do with it. I imagine myself a little bit high (pick your poison) standing in the middle of a disco. Everything is in motion. Tiny mirrors and big mirrors reflect thousands of images. The music is too loud. Everything is too bright. Strobes blind me. All I can do is dance. But to whose tune am I dancing?

—DM

What do you make of people who are always telling you how busy they are? I think they’re hardly worth your time. They’re boors.

I came by this prejudice innocently enough. I worked for a famous admiral when I was in the Navy. I wrote speeches for him. He was always threatening to shoot me if I used three-syllable words and wrote anything he didn’t understand. One of his most endearing traits was to answer his own phone. He refused to explain this (forgive me) admirable habit, but it was clear he liked knowing what was going on and disliked spin.

People who are committed to persuading you how busy they are are spinning. Nobody’s too busy to answer his own phone. Nobody’s too busy to give you the time of day. But I’ll bet most of those CEOs who are paid millions while their corporations circle the drain don’t answer their own phones.

I didn’t really want to leave the Navy after my enlistment, but my first wife wouldn’t hear of staying. My exit interview with the admiral was characteristically brief. “Remember, Marbrook,” he said, “don’t be full of it.” I’ve tried not to be all these years, but it has made me somewhat intolerant.

—DM