The Bush-Obama strategy for rooting Al Qaeda from its various rat holes is analogous to tying our boots together and careening towards bankruptcy. It’s based on the simplistic notion that Al Qaeda’s mission is to kill us, whereas Al Qaeda thinks that killing us is at all times wonderful but ruining us is better and [...]
Read More...It’s a testament to the power of right-wingers to bully the press that The New York Times yesterday devoted 102 column inches to South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford’s extramarital love life without once noting that as a fledgling hypocrite and congressman he had gone hunting for Bill Clinton’s head in the aftermath of the former [...]
Read More...The Muslim Arab conquest of Persia in the first half of the Seventh Century A.D. should be priority reading in Washington, not the usual breathless news used to gift-wrap commercials. Idol-smashing anticlerical Arabs burst out of the Arabian peninsula and began scooping up the eastern Roman empire and the Sassanid empire of the Persians in [...]
Read More...How many Americans drive past car, recreational van and boat dealerships every day wondering how they’re surviving the recession, or if they’re surviving? Are they looking a little down at the mouth, a bit sad and tatty? Don’t depend on our free press to tell you how they’re doing, because—just as the free press didn’t [...]
Read More...Contemporary poetry could be compared to light pouring through an attic window. The mass of dust particles create a golden bolt, but when evening crowds in, what is remembered? I think of Michael Meyerhofer’s poetry in this way when I survey the riches I’ve amassed on my shelves, tables, floors, and even my bed. His [...]
Read More...On October 30th, 2001, with the terrorist attacks of September 11th fresh in everyone’s mind, The New York Times science section, which brightens each Tuesday of my life, carried as its lead story a survey of Islamic scientific achievements entitled “How Islam Won, and Lost, the Lead in Science.” Language is a funny thing. The [...]
Read More...I haven’t run across it, but there ought to be something in poetics called ghost rhyme— a word that gives every appearance and sense of rhyming with another but doesn’t. Not assonance, which is a resemblance or rough similarity to sound, but rather a sound that conveys such a strong sense of logic and inevitability [...]
Read More...We live in a conflatable, confabulist, myth-based society. If we can add two and two and come up with twenty-two, we’ll do it. In an age of torrential facts we regard them as a pestilence. If they get in the way of our beliefs we’ll stomp them to death. Nothing is more sacred than our [...]
Read More...Among the many issues the press characteristically dodges is its own role in making news out of whole cloth. And yet the most divisive issues can’t be understood properly without assessing the press’s role in making and perpetuating them. The press plays a polarizing role because of its mock-adversarial style, its glee in stirring things [...]
Read More...(Perhaps You Could Breathe For Me, Martina Reisz Newberry, 2009, 93pp.) Rap is about what’s happening in the hood, it’s about The Man happening to the hood. Algerian rai is similarly the voice of an underclass explaining itself to itself and to the rest of us. What if we had neighbors chanting to us about [...]
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