The daily online Writer’s Almanac of the American Public Media Organization is a national gem. Last Saturday, observing the poet John Ashbery’s birthday, it quoted him saying something that pickets ought to brandish on placards outside every MFA program in the land:

“To create a work of art that the critic cannot even begin to talk about ought to be the artist’s chief concern.”

The dirty little lie of the popular media is that the critical apparatus serves the culture, whereas in fact it serves the marketers and elevates them to the stature of cultural arbiters, a position for which they are eminently unsuited. What sells is not necessarily what is good, witness the vast amounts of crap we buy from China.

Somewhere along the line in the history of literary tastemaking the ideas of egalitarianism, clarity and terseness merged with the marketing imperative. The works of Ernest Hemingway, that great purifier of the language, were seized upon as exemplifying this ideal, while writers like William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov and Marcel Proust were said to represent a wordy pretentiousness that ill represented the Zeitgeist.

Hemingway was put to the harness of the dumb-down machine. Writers who were said to be difficult, like the underrated futurist poet Hart Crane (inset), were disparaged. Writers who insisted that ambiguity reflects our own lives were sent to the guillotine in favor of writers who tied everything up in bows. Anything that couldn’t be understood at an eleventh grade level was said to be grandiose, overdone.

In poetry, The New York School, and the structuralists, poets who were concerned about how poems looked on a page, how they sounded, how their sounds conveyed experience, were pooh-poohed as precious and elitist.

To become a successful critic one had to learn how to disguise one’s Luddite inclinations in literary smirks. After all, one had to make a living, even if the damn-fool poets were willing to starve for art. None of this has been any good for the culture, because a glory-bound culture will always have an alchemy of popular art and art that demands more of its audience.

To say, for example, that so-called referential literature, writing that asks a certain amount of knowledge in a reader, is for this reason bad is fatheaded.

I, for one, know as much as I do know, which is an iota of what I would like to know, because I accept the challenge of such writers and bother to go to references and to the source literature. How else do we rise to challenges? What else is learning about? Ah, but now we stumble on another silly notion: the idea that literature is entertainment, implying of course that learning is not entertaining. In other words, don’t bother us with having to learn anything. Such a culture is bound to be obese and dull, which of course suits the marketers just fine.

I mentioned Hart Crane because when I was in college in the 1950s there was a notion afoot that he was not merely a difficult poet but in fact an obscurantist, and therefore did not warrant our attention. Gerard Manley Hopkins suffered the same rap for a while, and yet today when we read him he seems not half so difficult or demanding.

There were complaints about Crane’s hopelessly impenetrable lines. The complaints about those lines have now generally given way to admiration, even from those who still can’t decipher him. I used to recite him out loud, much the same way I listen to North African rai. I can’t understand the words, but I appreciate everything else about the music. And that’s just it, a poem is not just its words. What the critical apparatchiks have been telling us in the popular media is that we shouldn’t have to try to understand something, it should offer instant gratification, like a good massage. Fast-food criticism. Buy now, pay later, pay in the usurious terms of having sold our culture for a song.

This may, however, amount to tilting at windmills, because it’s quite possible critics are about to go the way of calligraphers. We used to rely on them to open doors to marvels (they often abused the privilege by indulging their nastiness), but now we have the Internet, and I’m not sure critics will ever establish in cyberspace the footholds they enjoyed in print.

—DM

Do you remember the know-it-all, condescending tones with which Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and Kenneth Pollack explained why it was imperative we invade Iraq? Well, keep those tones in mind now that the White House is voicing frustration with its erstwhile ally, Saudi Arabia. The complaint is that the Saudis are supplying Iraq’s beleaguered Sunni minority with arms and money.

Did anybody in his or her right mind expect the neighboring Sunni Arabs to stand by and watch Iraq’s newly empowered Shia government deliver an Arab country to their Shia pals in Iran, a non-Arab country and traditional enemy of the Gulf and Saudi Arabs? Apparently the condescenders in Washington did.

The Sunnis have watched in consternation as a ham-handed Uncle Sam barged into Iraq and turned it over to Iran, our enemy and the ancient enemy of the Sunnis. How could the United States have been so stupid? they have been asking themselves. And the White House’s answer has been, Oh, it was easy.

No one with even a modest knowledge of Islamic and Arab history can view what has happened with anything but a gasping incredulity.

To stomp our feet and petulantly complain about Saudi interference now is either dumb show or the latest installment in neoconservative hypocrisy. It’s almost as mind-boggling as supposing in the first place that when Iraq’s Shia majority came to power it would not ally itself with Iran.

When will this parade of bungles end?

—DM

This is the transcript of another of my weekly Hot Copy podcasts for The Student Operated Press. You can also listen to earlier podcasts.

Whenever you read the lead or off-lead story in a newspaper, whenever a TV anchor interrupts a newscast to bring you breaking news, you can be pretty sure the real story is living its secret life unnoticed.

Now that’s not a bad a lead for a story, is it? Your professor might approve of it. But, like most leads, it’s only a whiff of the story—and a bit misleading to boot. (Leads are almost always a bit misleading, but that’s another matter.) I said the real story is unraveling unnoticed. I meant it’s probably unnoticed by you, but it’s not unnoticed by the people to whom it means most, and it’s probably not unnoticed by news editors either. It’s like selective hearing; they’ve just chosen to ignore it. And the chances are it’s about money, about somebody making money in ways that are not good for society. But the media don’t serve society, much as they might like you to think they do, they serve corporate masters, CEOs who answer to shareholders.

I’m not going to argue that the media are at fault for giving you a day of burning buildings and forest fires while many of our cherished liberties are burning to the ground around us, but while we’re hearing all about the latest polls in Iowa and the obscene amounts of money people are paying to get elected one of the most momentous struggles of our time, a struggle that will determine just how free we’re going to be, is going on under the media’s’ noses and it’s hardly being covered at all. There’s a good reason it’s not being covered. It’s because the media are themselves vitally concerned and hopelessly burdened by the agendas of their Big Business bosses.

What I’m talking about is control of the Internet. The subject has been dubbed net neutrality, but that’s an entirely too bland term for what is going on. What is at stake is whether you and I can have the same kind of high-speed, equal-service access to the Internet that Big Business has, or whether giant telecommunications companies like Time Warner, AT&T, Comcast and Verizon will get away with creating a tiered, or multilevel system of Internet speeds so that certain providers can buy a fast lane ahead of you and me. It would be like a rich guy having a lane all to himself on a six-lane highway because he paid for it. You would get the lane you could afford. Net neutrality, on the other hand, would mean no special privileges for Big Money. It would mean equal access and equal service. It would reflect the democratic principles expressed in our Bill of Rights. A tiered system would give the corporations exactly what Thomas Jefferson feared they would acquire, power to corrupt democracy. There would be the corporations’ democracy, and then there would be yours. Yours would consist largely of the right to be hornswoggled. Controlling access to higher speeds and better service would be a form of censorship, just as our voting power is now being censored by Big Money. We don’t have the best candidates, we have the candidates who are best at selling themselves to monied interests. The best people in every community can’t afford to run for office, and so, rather than having the best government we can give ourselves, we have the worst government money can buy. (more…)

Every once in a while there is talk of some home-grown jihadi. Well, I’ve got news for Homeland Security. I know exactly where the home-grown jihadis hang out. Check out the swish computer stores in malls. You’ll find all manner of terrorists there who believe with all their metallic little hearts that you should be tortured in the interests of humanity.

I recently savored the sour-smile-cum-smirk on the face of one of these jihadis when he told me that recovering my e-mail might cost $1,200 if he and his co-conspirators couldn’t clone my e-mail onto my new hard drive. You would have thought he’d won the lottery, so pleased he was to deliver this bad news. Why any company interested in selling anything would hire people whose chief pleasure is saying no is beyond me.

Well, when do you think you might have my computer? I asked. You have to be a glutton for punishment to feed one of these terrorists such an opportunity to inflict pain. We’re pretty busy, it could be a week or so, he said smugly. Can you imagine somebody actually pays these snots to be exactly the sort of men you hope your grandson won’t grow up to be?

I’ve always told myself that the people who are obviously pleased to give you bad news and to stonewall your every effort to politely obtain help do so because they are underpaid and unappreciated. I renounce this politically correct line here and now. I worked in a lot of menial jobs and I usually managed to be a decent guy. These schadenfreudists are regressives. They do humanity no good, even if they do repair your computer, and they reflect the contempt for us of the companies that hire them as surely as murderous jihadis reflect the contempt of the madrassas that poisoned their dimly lit minds.

—DM

Americans have never liked bullies. So why do we always get suckered by them when it comes to waging war in behalf of a capitalist elite? I mean the kind of schoolyard punk who cries, He started it first! and then walks away smirking. You know who I mean.

Richard Sanders, coordinator of the Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade, has written a short, cogent indictment of American wars started on a pretext, such as the Spanish-American War and today’s Iraq war.

Mark Twain (inset), whose humor and common sense delight and comfort us, died brokenhearted because he believed he had seen his country contract the disease of imperialism. What would he say of the current debacle?

The men who cook up pretexts for war—whether it be the so-called Tonkin Gulf incident, the sinking of the battleship Maine or Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction—are not only bullies but stooges of the people who stand to profit from war. The servile press day after day reports the bloody result but never the underlying cause—profiteering at the cost of human life.

We stood more than two hundred years ago to be the nation that would no longer do this, no longer do the bidding of the few, a nation that would stand up to imperialism. But by Twain’s time we had clearly betrayed this noble hope, and in our own time we are wallowing in disgrace.

What has the war in Iraq done for us but break our army, beggar our treasury, stuff the coffers of a favored few corporations who for the most part didn’t even have to bid for contracts, bring down on ourselves worldwide opprobrium, and feed lines to Al Qaeda like feckless straight men? An administration blathering about tax relief has siphoned billions of dollars in tax money to enrich its buddies.

Now we have candidates, like John McCain and Rudy Giuliani, who want to be our president to protect us from the bogeyman, hoping to distract us from the plain fact their minds, so short on ideas, are scarier than our enemies. We need protection from their fear-mongering and their phony obsessions. But nothing will protect us from them, or from Osama ben Laden and his stupid, murdering ilk, but our own common sense and decency. We must ask ourselves why his beautiful country broke Mark Twain ‘s heart, why this man who gives us so much pleasure and makes such sense, believed we had gone astray. It is our country; we do not have to give it to corporados. We do not have to abandon capitalism, but we must insist it be decent and compassionate.

—DM

Al Gore’s number one concern is that the earth is getting too hot. The Greens’ number one concern is that we torture the earth. George Bush’s number one concern is finding al-Qaeda under rugs. My number one concern is the sheer amount of bloodyminded energy men spend oppressing women.

Men make mountains of religions and ideologies with which to stone and imprison women. They make bestiaries of isms in which to cage and exhibit women. I believe violence and terrorism are rooted in this tragic history. I believe thousands of nihilists would rather die than reunite the human race by lifting this ancient siege on women (Athena, inset). They fear a world ruled by all of us, not half of us.

I believe we are never addressing the right thing—whether it is free trade, terrorism or democracy—if we are not redressing injustices against women, and therefore injustices against ourselves. There is no game if the pitcher throws half a ball, and there is no game or use that does not restore humankind to wholeness. Everything else is bilious blather if we cannot find decency in ourselves to heal this horrific wound.

What is it men fear in women that they invent religions and wars to evade their inability to love, that they turn the idea of deity into an old bearded fart who hands them a permit to beleaguer women? Freudians might answer: performance fear. God knows men have not performed well. But I think this is too express and narrow a view. I think men are riding the tiger. They fear that the creative impulse in women might reorder our priorities. Living in harmony with the earth might seem more inevitable than letting developers buy us off to rape it. Perhaps women would prove, as men have always feared, insatiable, but what if that insatiability were for sensibilities seemingly now beyond our reach?

The Taliban says they desire a theocratic state: should they be believed in their obscene hurry to beat and imprison women and assure the ignorance of children? What can be theocratic about denying half of humankind dignity and enlightenment? But lest the West too quickly gloat about the arrant hypocrisy of Muslim fundamentalists, shouldn’t it ask itself why curbing stem-cell research and the right to choose is more important than justice for half of God’s people? Shouldn’t it ask itself why the issues it chooses to argue so hotly are more important than the continued denial of women’s most elementary rights?

I believe religion and ideology are evasions. They distract men from their fear of a world of which women might make greater sense. I believe divinity is insulted by these patriarchal systems for relegating women to chattel. I believe the hotter the debate, the more heightened the fear-mongering, the more we may suspect the underlying reason is a dark, self-destructive fear of women. I believe mindless terrorism and mindless response are two sides of the same coin, a coin of the male realm: do anything, bring on the Apocalypse, but don’t give justice to women. In brief, I believe terrorism is about the oppression of women.

Muslim fundamentalists think Western women are more empowered than in fact they are; I believe women to them are as much the Great Satan as the Western society they mistakenly think has empowered women.

Cast the great concerns of Osama bin Laden, Al Gore, Hugo Chavez, Achmed Ahmadinejad, the Greens, the President, the candidates, the dictators, the economists, the fat cats, et al, in this despised light, and I believe it would be as if a beam from heaven were to shine on earth and lead us out of this morass of conflicting ideologies leading nowhere but to further disgrace.

(Also of interest: Women and the Jewish right).

—DM

Some people are troublesomely gifted. Their gifts get them in trouble and cause trouble for others. I’ve been thinking about this ever since I put down Malcolm Gladwell’s endlessly fascinating Blink. The book talks about that critical moment when the right brain, having formed an impression, hands it over to the left brain for exegesis. For example, a person acutely adept at reading microexpressions allows the left brain to overrule the initial interpretation.

This is one of my few fields of expertise. My childhood, like many others, was passed allowing adults to convince me that the way I saw things was imaginary: the adult left brain overriding the childishly innocent right brain. Aside from the fact that it eventually drove me around the bend, several bends in fact, it had the salutary effect of convincing me that anybody trying really hard to convince or dissuade me was pursuing an agenda that might not be in my own best interest.

I was sent to boarding school at age five. At that age, in those circumstances, you either get very good at reading microexpressions or you get worked over. In my case, I got very good at reading them and was worked over anyway. But I probably would have been abused a lot more if I had not gotten so good at reading people. But therein was another cause for going around the bend, for finding bends to go around. I was good at reading people but for one reason or another I had no filters. An impression socked my right brain like a wet mackerel, and before I could even contemplate turning it over to the ministrations of left brain, another wet mackerel socked me, and another.

It got so that church socials, hymn sings, parties, dances, mixes, as they used to be called, were simply invitations to go bonkers. I could not handle that many impressions coming at me at one time. You could argue that all I had to do was deal with one person at a time, but I simply couldn’t handle the traffic my exquisite antennae were rerouting to the various parts of my craziness. It was like somebody throwing a toaster in my bath. I didn’t feel there was a chance of getting out of such occasions alive.

How can I live like this? I wondered. My answer was to pretend I was okay. It reminded me of being a sailor on liberty overseas and seeing an Australian sailor wallowing in a storm drain. I offered him a hand, but he waved me off, saying, I’m okay, mate. That’s how I lived most of my life, like the Aussie in the drain. Until, that is, in my old age, I said to myself, You don’t have the filters to handle more than two or three people at a time, so give yourself a break and don’t try.

Cops and spies and artists are often gifted this way, and I have no doubt it has helped me write stories and poems. But having no filters isn’t like needing sunglasses or a better prescription. It’s more like having no skin or having your pants fall down in the middle of a speech. And what may be even worse—as Doris Lessing suggested in her Briefing for a Descent Into Hell—is knowing too much about someone else. Stuff you don’t need to know, or stuff that’s just too hurtful to bear, or stuff that perhaps could enable you to help the other person if only you liked him more. You get the idea, right?

I’ve always suspected we apprehend much more about each other than we cop to. Sometimes I suspect this would be a better world if we admitted it.

—DM

Reporters are not about dotting i’s and crossing t’s, not in this age of McJournalism. They are about burying bodies. So this is going to be a little midnight exhumation.

The New York Times started the week reporting that inside the White House there is talk of getting the drop on critics by starting to redeploy troops. The White House quickly denied it. Meanwhile the BBC was quoting Gen. David H. Petraeus, our commander in Iraq, as saying American troops will be needed there for years, not a year, not months, but years. Then, on Tuesday, our ambassador to Iraq, Ryan C. Crocker, rephrased General Petraeus.

So here we are, waiting for the general’s much anticipated report in September, acting as if September had any significance at all now that he has just given us a preview.

Who is jerking us around most? Official Washington, still pretending September matters, or the press, failing miserably to mention the elephant in the room. Ahem, ladies and gentlemen, if you will kindly remove your hands from your ears, the general has cleared his throat.

Sure you could split hairs, noting that he did not say we should stay, not exactly. He said we would be needed. And you could argue, as some feckless politicians do, that the situation will have improved by September. But did anybody notice the contradiction between the BBC report and the blather-as-usual pols of the left, right and middle in Washington?

Now if anybody really wants to examine this particular Looney Tune they will start writing stories about who loses money when we redeploy. And who makes money for that matter. But that would be dotting i’s and crossing t’s. The pols would rather lose lives than money any day, and the press would rather cover anything but Big Money and greed.

—DM

Something eerie is up with our military. President Bush, the decider, the commander-in-chief, the most monarchical executive we ever didn’t elect, was fond of saying he’s just doing what our generals on the ground ask him to do. He’s not saying that much anymore. Instead some of our generals are doing his political bidding, trying to influence domestic politics by saying we need to prolong the surge long beyond September.

How eerie is that? First, their commander-in-chief makes scapegoats out of them, saying they’re calling the shots and he’s just trying to give them what they need. Then they reward him for this outrageous politicization of the military by politicizing themselves, making his argument for him. They liked being scapegoated so much they decided they’d just relieve the boss of the onerous task of doing it.

This is not the kind of politically neutral military in which we used to take fierce pride. We have educated and trained them to protect us, not fight our political wars, not do the bidding of this president or that president, not try to influence an ongoing debate in Congress, as some of our generals are now doing. We need to rescue our military from this squalid corruption of its traditional role. We need to remember what happened to generals like Gen. Eric K. Shinseki and Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba when they insisted on being the officers they were meant to be, instead of political stooges. General Shinseki, remember, had the temerity to tell Lord Donald Rumsfeld that we needed more troops in Iraq. General Taguba incurred royal wrath by doing his job well, investigating the Abu Ghraib disgrace.

Let’s ask the candidates how we’re going to undo this sabotage of history’s greatest military?

—DM

(Note: I try to keep these weekly podcasts for The Student Operated Press conversational to make them easy listening for journalism students, so you’ll notice the language isn’t sanded and varnished.)

You’re more than students, much more, and I’d like to tell you why. I’ve read a lot of job applications from journalism school graduates. They’re always well written. It would be a deal-breaker if they weren’t, because the professors and instructors have edited them. I never made a single decision to hire anybody on the basis of a handful of stories. I never saw a story that really stood out from the others. Think about that. Here you have a veteran reporter and editor getting applications over the transom almost every day, and the best stories the applicants can come up with aren’t very impressive.

Back before the worldwide web, this miserable fact wasn’t so shocking, but today it ought to shock us. (more…)