There’s an eerie quality of historical deja vu about this. For much of the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries young Westerners were engaged in militaristic colonial exploitation of the Southern Hemisphere. Young Americans, for example, slaughtered Native Americans to seize their land and resources. Young American seamen, brokers and planters involved themselves in the wicked slave trade.

No one in his right mind would defend the murderous Taliban and Al Qaeda and their simpleminded fiendishness, but at the same time can we defend  Europe’s exploitation of the Third World or its exploitation of pre-Columbian Americans? The West was not so much simpleminded as it was greedy and racist.

The young Arabs, Central Asians and others who are gathering in Waziristan to fight the infidels will a thousand years from now bear a striking historical resemblance to the young Christians who bore arms against East Indians, South Americans and Asians in the name of Western religion and civilization. Historians of that future time will marvel at both eurocentric and Islamocentric hypocrisy, two sides of the same coin.

Yes, there will be plenty of room and time, too, to marvel at the hypocrisy of the Muslims, for their forebears also colonized and exploited at lance-point in the name of their allegedly superior religion and civilization.

And so it has always been throughout history: cycle after cycle of murderous exploitation and hypocritical justification. There are no good guys, just us flawed humans, Christian and Muslim alike. Waziristan today, London yesterday. We must get off it, all of us, this towering self-righteousness and ravening greed.

The idea of killing for God is the nth obscenity.—DM

FactCheck.org ferrets out and corrects the lies, distortions, half-truths, spin, exaggeration, misinterpretation and disinformation that characterize American politics.

A project of The Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania in a time of squalid media triviality and bias, Fact Check is a glory of 21st Century communications and a pure delight to read and watch.

But as it uncloaks the mendacity and ill will of American office-seekers it suggests a tantalizing question: what if politicians told the truth? What if they risked the consequences of telling the truth? What if they trusted us enough to tell the truth? What if they trusted the system upon which they lavish so much lip service?

What kind of a country would we be then?

Americans like terms like straight shooter; how then have we become so jaded as to expect politicians to spin and lie? Who are we voting for? The best liars, the most imaginative spinners, the most virulent haters, the most simple-minded?

Yes and no. Yes, we do vote for phonies and boobs. No, we don’t like what we get. We don’t like or trust the press, the Congress or politicians in general. Poll after poll shows that. FactCheck.org confirms our worst suspicions. We are regularly bamboozled.

We should all watch the networks and cable news with our laptops in front of us, checking FactCheck. org whenever our alarms go off. But even then there is no antidote for the shallowness of anchors and the willfull distortion of what people say for the purposes of ginning up yet another stupid flapdoodle while the real new flows like an underground river beneath our feet. —DM

How much of such news as theater can we take?

Perhaps our traumatized soldiers are coming home to a society unprepared to care for them because the homeland too is traumatized by the sheer weight of importunate news. It’s true that the homeland can switch off the bombardment, but it seems also true that we are addicted to our celebrities and their fecklessness, our lying, money-grubbing politicians, our smiley air-head anchors, and all the disturbing imagery and dissembling that is called the news.

We are bombarded by reminders of our inhumanity, indifference, greed, and failure to rise to principle, and yet we ourselves struggle to be principled, to be decent, to treat each other respectfully, but the media are not interested in this daily heroism of ours, however much they may occasionally toss it a bone. We are a mass to them and individuals only when we behave badly.

It’s not unlike Iraq. Our men and women know there are places not as
terrifying and dangerous, but they are over there, for better or worse, bombarded, bombed, ambushed and sniped at. And so are we. Different kinds of trauma, to be sure, but traumatizing nonetheless.

Child experts will tell you that verbal abuse is as damaging as physical abuse, if not more so. Verbal abuse is slow poison. The child never gets it out of his system. It deforms and dements his life. Why should it not be so, then, that our steady diet of trivia, ugliness, mendacity and pettiness also gets into our systems and poisons us? If it is true in medicine, as the medical community is now saying, that attitude plays a profound role in recovery, why should it not be true that our emotional and even physical state is not affected by the news?

If this is so, then we should question how we define the news. What passes for news is the result of corporate greed. It is trivial, condescending and shallow because to do a better job would cost more money. To intelligently explain issues, to expose malfeasance, to explore complex issues is costly. It cuts into cheap, quick profit. You need smart people and time for good reportage, for real edification, and that translates into money, money shareholders and CEOs would have to forfeit for the public good, which they don’t give a damn about. So we get what we get, and I have a feeling it is traumatizing us in ways we don’t understand, just as our returning heroes don’t understand how they can look healthy and yet be so emotionally battered.

The so-called news frustrates us because, lacking in depth, intelligence, respectfulness and vision, it provides us with no ways out of our common condition. It gives us no tools to build a better society. This is its real failure, and it is not merely a failure, an omission; it is a betrayal, and like all betrayals it wears the face of helpfulness and concern and honesty.—DM

The late Democratic primary had plenty of misogyny and racism to go around. It arose among the pundits, the voters and the candidates. But there were triumphs. As Senator Hillary Clinton said in graciously conceding the fight to Senator Barack Obama, there are now eighteen million cracks in the glass ceiling, and none of us will forget it. Bless you, Senator.

There is talk in the press of examining misogyny in the coverage of Senator Clinton’s historic run, but the truth is the misogyny stood out in all its squalor in talk shows, late night entertainment and coverage as starkly as racism stood out in West Virginia. Self-examination is good, repentance is better. But, as we all know, the press repents of little.

This election offers us many opportunities to mend our ways. New York voters had already put aside misogyny in the interest of granting themselves a competent and caring senator. There have been thirty-five women senators in our history. The time has long since passed to put a woman in the White House. And an African-American. And a Hispanic. And a Native American. Well, you get the picture.

The more we succeed in raising the level of discourse, the less agism, sexism and racism will matter. Smear of any kind poisons the political atmosphere.  The press is like the rest of us: the majority try to be fair, but we fail, we tell ugly jokes, we mock, and we sneak our prejudices into our efforts at humor.

We can do better, and the wonderful truth about the now ended primaries is that for all their disheartenments they have elevated public discourse and struck telling blows against our worst prejudices, and we have Republicans and Democrats alike to thank for that.—DM

I’ve been dreaming about these banners. In my dreams the oceanic
Arabic script takes off and fills the sky with crystal ships and the carriers of the banners on the ground cheer and wave to the ships.

Why don’t we do something like that in Central Park— a vast poetry festival with banners from all the neighborhoods and their poets? Or in Prospect Park. Or both. Perhaps neighborhood associations could sponsor their poets. Or art galleries could participate. After all, New York’s art galleries have traditionally shown an interest in poetry. Tibor de Nagy Gallery, for example, was the first publisher of Frank O’Hara’s poems, and artists such as Donna Marxer regularly combine art and poetry in their work.

Let’s do this not only in the New York parks so familiar to me, but across the land and the world. Let’s remember that many of the people, including ourselves, who appear in today’s headlines of conflict have also marvelously contributed to the enlightenment and beauty of the planet. Let’s celebrate that in poetry. It will be an easy thing to do: poems in Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, Sanskrit—all the beautiful scripts of the earth.

Poetry is alive and well. And not just in academia. Readings and slams are popular, and many art forms, such as rap and rai, which are not usually associated with poetry, do in fact embody poetry. So let’s bring poetry to the beautiful fields of our parks, as the ancient and medieval Arabs did.
————————
Note: Speaking of poetry, Kent State University Press has posted a link where you can order my book, Far From Algiers. And yesterday my wife Marilyn sent out e-mails making friends and acquaintances aware of this link. The response has been lighting up our Inbox, renewing old friendships and encouraging new ones.         —DM

How much truth there is in this, if any, remains to be seen. But considering the sheer amount of inconsequential BS fed to us by the media—Barack Obama’s elitism, Hillary Clinton’s abrasiveness, etc—isn’t it a wee bit strange that nobody in the mainstream media even pretends to examine Palast’s contention? Reminds you of how they sat on their hands while the White House lied us into a catastrophic war, doesn’t it?

After all, media gasbags are perfectly willing to waste their time and ours entertaining stupid notions like the McCain-Clinton gas tax holiday or some ditzy celeb’s boringly bad behavior, so what’s their problem giving Palast’s theory a toss? Oh, that would be irresponsible journalism, right? Like yakking about John Edwards’ hair?

And why hasn’t Congress asked him to testify. After all, he was once a congressional investigator.

I don’t always know what to make of Palast. His hopped-up language worries his most serious reports. But we know Enron manipulated California’s power supply, so why is Palast’s notion so unworthy of inquiry? Is it unimaginable that Big Oil would con us? Or is it because the Big Media yakkers, while telling us what a great job they are doing, are doing a job on us? —DM

The Nazis convinced the German masses that worldwide Jewry was a threat to the German state, just as Islamophobes today would have us believe that Muslims, rather than a minority of extremists, are a threat to us. The Holocaust began with curtailments of the civil liberties of Jewish citizens. It progressed to Kristallnacht, the 1938 rampage against Jewish businesses, and from there to mass roundups of Jews and their eventual torture and extermination. Every time an American with a Muslim-sounding name is singled out because of that name we should remember the seemingly innocuous injustices that paved the way to Kristallnacht.

There is no comparison between the wrongs we are committing at the Navy base in Cuba and the Holocaust, but sculptor Harriet Feigenbaum’s compelling 1990 warning at the New York State Court of Appeals should remind us that injustice always seems plausible in the context in which it arises. It seems justified by the exigencies of its moment. The German people, for the most part, were persuaded that some sort of Jewish conspiracy threatened them, just as we let ourselves be persuaded that a secular state in Iraq that actually opposed Al Qaeda and was hated by Al Qaeda had something to do with Al Qaeda’s attacks on us.

We were fooled, as were the Germans. Reichsmarshal Hermann Goering remarked at his Nuremberg trial that it was a piece of cake to trick a population into war, just as the Germans had been tricked into surrendering their civil liberties in response to phony threats. No doubt the German people had enemies. No doubt they needed to be vigilant. And no doubt we have enemies and need to be vigilant. But as Auschwitz was not the answer, neither is Guantanamo. We either stand for human decency and the rights of all or we stand for abridging rights whenever we feel like it. There is no middle ground in spite of what waffling politicians say on the campaign trail.

That, I think, is the immediacy of the message on that courthouse in Manhattan, and we should not lose sight of the fact that it is a memorandum to ourselves.

—DM

I prefer the Monong-ga-heela behave itself
and CNN improve its literacy, but I’ll settle
for a little less weather and uncommon sense,
or is that too much for a buyer-bot to ask?

I don’t know what ta tell ya, the clerk says.
There’s a man I’d like to elect to something—
he honest-to-god doesn’t know what to say.
Quick, get that man on the Sunday talk shows.

                                                                          —DM

Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

So much happened—and didn’t happen—since then, and somehow over the years I was separated from my precious find. And yet my reunion with Seven Pillars is sweet and at the same time bittersweet. The sweet part first: the book is a monument to the state of English rhetoric at the time. Lawrence’s use of language is at once elegant and bold. To boot, Lawrence (inset), an archaeologist by trade, was a considerable grammarian. These matters alone are enough to warrant revisiting the book and savoring its place in the canon.

Here is an example of Lawrence’s prose:

“The Arabs, who usually lived in heaps, suspected some ulterior reason for any too careful privacy. To remember this, and to foreswear all selfish peace and quiet while wandering with them, was one of the least pleasant lessons of the desert war: and humiliating, too, for it was part of pride with Englishmen to hug solitude; ourselves finding ourselves to be remarkable, when there was no competition present.”

No writer today, except a pedant, would consider using a colon and a semicolon in the same extended sentence, and very few could carry it off, if they did. But Lawrence carries it off with grace and wit, the complex grammar suiting his equally complex observations of people and events.

What is bittersweet about Seven Pillars also justifies its being in the canon. No one reading Lawrence’s description of the Arabs’ tribal culture would have barged into Iraq the way we have. The British, with Lawrence as a tool of their policy, used their knowledge of Arab tribalism for their own ends. We simply ignored it, choosing to see the Arabs as ripe for Western democracy when in fact they’re hardly committed to nationhood.

Seven Pillars never speaks of democracy. It does speak of self-determination. We seem to think that inevitably means choosing democracy. What if it means choosing a caliphate? Would we still be so hot for democratizing the Arabs?

When Lawrence stirred them into revolt against the Turks he genuinely, if naively, hoped the best for them, but in the end , being duped by the Allies, they traded one kind of imperialism for another. The victorious British and French did not allow them to determine their own destiny. Instead, they carved up the former Ottoman provinces between themselves, creating phony nations, like Iraq. And now we have bungled matters even more.

We would do well to read the instant pundits and hired ideologues of the think tanks less and read such classics as The Seven Pillars of Wisdom more. We’ve had far too much fast-food expertise and it has gotten us into a mess we don’t even begin to understand. But worse than that, our ignorance has given a free pass to war profiteers. The profits they make will not, as the politicians of the right would have you believe, trickle down to the rest of us. They will trickle down to accounts in the Caymans and Zurich, and they will facilitate the exportation of our jobs and our dreams.

—DM

In many ways we are the children of the great American story, and that is why our behavior immediately after World War II was so astounding and blessed. We stayed and rebuilt what we had been forced to destroy.

Don’t think I’m making a sly case for George Bush and his anything-for-a-buck ethos. I’m not. The great American story has a despicably immoral aspect at its heart, the refusal to take responsibility for bum decisions. The husband sauntering out of the house for his pack of cigarettes is leaving behind a pack of lies and irresponsibilities. The wife whose night out with the girls turns out to be forever has abandoned not just her family but her own soul. They both need to stay and say, I made a mistake, I want to renegotiate the deal.

The argument that the Iraqis need now to take responsibility for their own destiny only goes so far. It’s handy and true in a pathetically obvious way, but it is we who need to take responsibility for a tragic mistake. We can do so by saying, We’re leaving now, but we’re not abandoning you. You take over your lives and we will help you rebuild, not by feeding the piggish business cronies of Dick Cheney and George Bush but by emulating what once so honorably we did in the Marshall Plan.

We need to leave, yes, but with self-respect, not like Saigon. We need to lay it all out as a matter of policy and integrity. We need to say we know that the British carved Iraq out of Mesopotamia in a way that guaranteed oppression of the Shias. We need to say we acted on phony intelligence. We need to say our business dealings in Iraq have been haywire and corrupt. We need to leave with the whole sordid mess on the table.

If we did that, if we could bring ourselves to do it, we would have the everlasting respect even of our murderous enemies. I don’t expect them to stop trying to murder us, but I do know they would have a much harder time doing it if we could bring ourselves to the point of such honesty. It’s not as if we have no precedent. Ask Germany and Japan. We can do it, but we must break with the great American story in which the heroes have no decency.

—DM