The glory of Christianity is its gospel of love, charity and compassion, so why do condemnatory histrionics from the pulpit about family values, abortion and homosexuality dominate news of Christendom while the pulpit’s deafening silence about a church-going society that allows insurance adjusters to make a mockery of its dearest tenets is met with complimentary silence in the media? (more…)

(This is the latest transcript of Hot Copy my regular podcast for The Student Operated Press)

One of the reasons I cherish The New York Times is its institutional eye for the easy-to-overlook and profound. The March 27th front page features a story by Brian Stelter called Finding Political News Online, Young Viewers Pass It Along. It may prove to be the most significant story of the first fifty years of the century, and to its credit The Times put it on the front page.

The story is about the socialization of news and imagery, not in the political sense, but in the sense that sharing news and imagery has become part of the way we socialize with each other. We like a blog post, a news story, an essay, an image, a poem, a quotation, and next thing you know it’s whizzing around the world to friends and family. What we’re accustomed to calling news is becoming as personal and intimate as a jewel box or a pack of baseball cards. (more…)

With Hillary Clinton having recently made like a schoolyard bully, maybe this isn’t the right moment to bring up the issue of misogyny. Or maybe it is.

Anybody who thinks this is a dead-letter issue should take a look at those e-mailed erectile dysfunction advertisements bubbling up from the cesspools of humanity. Their revolting language is full of references to the male member as a weapon. They talk of overpowering, exploding and nailing women. They assure men “their” women will be delighted by this weaponization of sexuality. (more…)

America is haunted by The Other, by otherness. The fastest approach to an understanding of this is to consider the photographs of the people we send to Washington. They don’t look like our demographics. They look northern European.

We look for The Other to determine who we don’t want in our churches, our neighborhoods, our schools. Worse yet, we look for The Other to determine who should not be helped by our hard-earned tax money. Much of our historic resentment of taxes is actually an unwillingness to provide public help to people unlike us.

In our quest for The Other we have at times considered Asians as well as Italians, Jews, Greeks and other Mediterranean people as non-whites, and today we are inclined to consider Arabs and Hispanics in the same light, whereas at least 47 percent of our Hispanic population identifies itself as white. (more…)

The next time a politician or pundit says anything about Iraq, anything at all, ask yourself if you have ever heard him say that Iranians have historically regarded Shi’ism as a deterrent to Arabization?

If you haven’t heard anybody who sounds knowledgeable talking about this, then you have no reason to think him knowledgeable.

We may not have liked Saddam Hussein, but unless we intended to hand over most of Iraq to Iranian influence, we should have thought twice before invading. Iran’s quarrels with the Arabs far outweigh its quarrels with us. (more…)

The squalls of hypocrisy accompanying disclosure that Barack Obama’s pastor of some twenty years has been inveighing against our cultural doubleness, one society for people of color and another for whites, is something like a national case of reflux.

Is it big news we live in two societies—black and white, rich and poor, powerful and powerless, big-mouthed and voiceless? Sure, it’s big news when the White House is within the reach of someone of color. But that’s the only time it’s big news, when we’re actually in danger of proving ourselves a democracy. (more…)

The less Americans read the more BS they’re likely to believe. So when I hear of someone referring to the Qu’ran as an evil book, a fascist book, a license to murder, I take him to be someone who takes his reading in small doses prescribed by quacks.

I’ve read the Qu’ran in translation many times. Its heavenly language is mesmerizing in its sonority. Like the Old Testament it contains passages that trouble the enlightened modern ear, passages open to many interpretations. But whoever takes it for license to do evil is a cheap propagandist. (more…)

When I first encountered The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1919)  by T.S. Eliot I was in high school. I had heard stories of college students exchanging lines of Eliot over tennis nets as they batted their balls. I found this image strangely reassuring. I live in a world, I said to myself, where college students recite poetry to each other on tennis courts. What a wonderful life this is going to be.

But I was disquieted by the pervasive mood of estrangement in one’s own skin in Prufrock. I could not foresee that it foreshadowed my own college experience. But later at Columbia I had reason to remember Prufrock:

Shall I part my hair behind (Shall I join a fraternity?)
Do I dare to eat a peach? (Do I dare to suppose everything will be okay?)
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
(I’ll try to act like everybody else, even though I know I don’t belong here).
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me…
(No, I never dared to think they would sing to me).

Now, in my seventies, daring to publish some of my own poems, I wonder how the man who expressed the quintessential sense of alienation in his century could at the same time indulge an ugly anti-Semitism, knowing full well the pain of exile and estrangement in one’s own skin, that sense of not being welcome in the very society in which one is constrained to live.

How did Eliot manage this emotional and intellectual acrobatic in which part of him could so well express the very malady of which he was, in part, the cause? I don’t think it was hypocrisy, although it is easy enough to make the case for that. I think it was a divorce of his poetic sensibility and his cultural ambitions. It would have been one thing for him as a banker and later an editor in the British establishment to harbor anti-semitic sentiments, but Eliot associated himself with them. Social climbing and anti-Semitism are certainly not strange bedfellows.

But, much as I admire Eliot’s poetry and continue to study it, I cannot help but feel that Prufrock, at least, is compromised by what we know about Eliot. We can say it is a disengenuous poem, or we can say it is an important poem that expresses the very estrangement that pagans and Christians alike have inflicted upon the Jews for more than 2,000 years, and we can afix the footnote that Eliot, for whatever reason, was willing to live with the irony that he had given voice to the very pain he was himself causing.

—DM

Hand-wringing in literary circles about poetry’s lack of readers is familiar. But in two important ways the plaint is bogus:

1) The magnificent poetry of the Bible and Qu’ran, to mention only two great religious works among many sacred texts, continues to top best-seller lists all over the world;

2) rap music in America and rai in North Africa and European, both forms of poetry, are astonishingly popular.
What the hand-wringing is about is the poetry of the academy and the literary establishment. Not that there is anything lamentable about it, but simply that it is only one kind of poetry, which is mistaken for being more inclusive than it is.

That said, there is poetry of the literary establishment that rises to the level of the great religious works, but the vehicles by which it is conveyed to the public are inadequate to the task. And there is outsider poetry that will eventually find its way into the canon.

When we read Revelations it has the authority of a world religion, of ecstatic utterance and vision. It has an historic following just as it had a certain predisposition when it was received. And it has going for it the human thirst for divine intervention, for heaven. Those are unbeatable market conditions.

The Qu’ran is the very word of God conveyed by His angel. Its tidal sonority and grandeur bring to us the word of the divinity for whom we hunger. None of the publishing houses can touch this for market potential.

But it is poetry—the Qu’ran, The Bible, the Zohar of the Qaballah—all poetry of the highest order, and so we can’t really say that the market for poetry is poor or small. It is in fact immense and enraptured.

When you read the wide strophes of the Book of Revelation concerning the appearance of the new Jerusalem (inset, Gustave Dore’s New Jerusalem) it’s not hard to understand why the apocalypse has played such a large role in our foreign policy, beholden as the present administration is to fundamentalists. The vision is compelling and gorgeous. And it’s pure poetry, poetry moving the policies of a superpower.

The Qu’ran is equally moving and compelling. Christian and Muslim literalists can read these monumental poetic works and find God’s writ for war, for jihad. Others can read the same lines as moral instruction. But literalists and liberals alike read the same lines for their glorious poetry. There is no disagreement between them about that.

So here we have Qu’ranic and Biblical poetry moving world events, rap and rai enthralling cultures, and yet we accept as inarguable the idea that there is only a tiny market for poetry. We need to re-examine how we think about poetry. Poetry is far more than what we find on the shelves at Barnes and Noble marked poetry. That’s not even half of it.

—DM

Movies and monotheism are strange bedfellows. It takes big-time hypocrisy to make their shotgun marriage work. As for advertising and monotheism, the word hypocrisy doesn’t cover that stretch.

Thou shalt have no other gods before me, except your favorite actors, most gorgeous models and boorish celebs. And as for graven images, well, I guess the models are a bit more graven than the actors, and plastic hadn’t been invented when the Ten Commandments were written.

Muslim fundamentalists have probably savored this conundrum more than their Christian counterparts. Hell, they don’t even want you to notice the girl in the street, much less worship her.

I’m not worried about the shotgun marriage of movies and monotheism. You can divorce a bad idea. It’s the hypocrisy it takes to insist no one concealed any guns at the wedding that worries me.

Paganism has always been such a compelling idea that monotheists have to commit periodic genocide to keep it under control, so it’s pretty clever of the film industry to have smuggled it in the back door on celluloid reels.

I don’t want to give the fundamentalists any ideas. But I’m not too worried about that either, because ideas and fundamentalism are fundamentally inimical. But if they care to get het up about something besides gay marriage, family values and the beauty of women, I recommend alcohol. It’s a helluva big killer, and I suspect it lurks between the lines of many of our laws, especially the ones that never stood a chance of working.

Look at any pagan culture’s pantheon and you’ll find updated versions in our media. How many Dianas and Artemises, how many Apollos and Hercules have you enjoyed while munching popcorn? How many nymphs, dryads and muses on the slick pages of magazines?

We’re as pagan as we’ve ever been, and at least some of the fiery breath we feel from the Muslim world derives from Muslims having always taken idolatry more seriously than Christians. They have their own bio-hazardous brands of hypocrisy, but savoring ours might help us understand theirs better.

A more desirable cultural ambience would be one in which we enjoy celebrities without idolizing them and ideas without canonizing them.

—DM