4&20 blackbirds

by lizard

What can anyone say about the situation in Syria after seeing bloody pictures of dead children? These are the moments where words just don’t do the job. They fail. It’s too awful to imagine. Whoever did it should face lethal justice. That’s the visceral reaction.

I read an article today by John Bradley at the Daily Mail that is worth reading about Syria: Yes, Syria is a tragedy but it would be madness for Britain to intervene. From the link:

The expressions of outrage over Houla and the consequent threats of military action all feed into the conventional Western narrative of the Syrian crisis whereby Assad is portrayed as a bloodthirsty tyrant and the rebels as heroic freedom-fighters trying to liberate the Syrian people from oppression.

It is a picture that has been sedulously cultivated by the anti-Assad opposition, who are masters of manipulative propaganda aimed at gullible Western politicians, broadcasters and protest groups.
But the truth about the violence in Syria is far more complex than Assad’s enemies would have us believe.

…
While the uprising began as a series of peaceful demonstrations by ordinary Syrians, the simplistic notion of good versus evil no longer reflects the reality.

Even on the most basic level, we do not know what actually happened at Houla. ‘Truth is the first casualty of war,’ goes the wise old dictum, and all we have at the moment are the contentions of either side.

The rebels are blaming Assad, while the President’s regime strongly disputes any responsibility for the killings at all, pointing out that most of the victims seem to have been shot at point-blank range, whereas the Government forces at the time were using heavy mortar fire against the rebels.
Self-serving propaganda? Perhaps, but in this most bitter of conflicts, tales of atrocities have often been exaggerated and exploited.

Read the whole piece. I found it to be a reasonable, cautious OpEd about an awful situation that’s getting worse…and will not be helped, IMHO, by the West’s self-serving agenda.

by lizard

The title of this post—Carrying The Darkness—comes from the title of an anthology of Vietnam War poetry edited by W. D. Ehrhart and published by the Texas Tech University Press in 1989. Here’s a quick bio of the editor from the link:

W. D. Ehrhart (b.1948) enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps in 1966 at the age of 17. He fought in Vietnam with 1st Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, receiving the Purple Heart Medal, the Navy Combat Action Ribbon, and two Presidential Unit Citations, and earned the rank of sergeant.

The poem I’ve selected is from John Balaban, titled After Our War. Continue Reading »

by lizard

When it comes to sacrifice, those who enlist represent a very small percentage of the general public. We see them in airports, making connecting flights like the rest of us. But they aren’t like the rest of us. And no matter how much national pageantry gets directed their way during holidays like Memorial Day, the 365 day-a-year need of our veterans is a sensitive subject for a country that doesn’t collectively go to war like the WWII generation did.

This Nation piece (originating from TomDispatch.com) conveys a similar sentiment, titled Why America Can’t Keep Fighting 1 Percent Wars:

America’s wars are remote. They’re remote from us geographically, remote from us emotionally (unless you’re serving in the military or have a close relative or friend who serves), and remote from our major media outlets, which have given us no compelling narrative about them, except that they’re being fought by “America’s heroes” against foreign terrorists and evil-doers. They’re even being fought, in significant part, by remote control—by robotic drones “piloted” by ground-based operators from a secret network of bases located hundreds, if not thousands, of miles from the danger of the battlefield.

Their remoteness, which breeds detachment if not complacency at home, is no accident. Indeed, it’s a product of the fact that Afghanistan and Iraq were wars of choice, not wars of necessity. It’s a product of the fact that we’ve chosen to create a “warrior” or “war fighter” caste in this country, which we send with few concerns and fewer qualms to prosecute Washington’s foreign wars of choice.

The results have been predictable, as in predictably bad. The troops suffer. Iraqi and Afghan innocents suffer even more. And yet we don’t suffer, at least not in ways that are easily noticeable, because of that very remoteness. We’ve chosen—or let others do the choosing—to remove ourselves from all the pain and horror of the wars being waged in our name. And that’s a choice we’ve made at our peril, since a state of permanent remote war has weakened our military, drained our treasury and eroded our rights and freedoms.

by Duganz

Well, it only took former congressman Pat Williams a few minutes to lose my respect. I say minutes because I re-read his quote to the New York Times roughly 30 times. And then I just felt sad.

“I’m very sorrowful one of the premier universities in the Rockies has been scandalized by a few knuckleheaded students,” said Pat Williams, a former United States congressman and a member of Montana’s Board of Regents. “The football team has been terribly hurt by this.”

That is the embodiment of all that is wrong, tragic and sad about the University of Montana rape scandal. These alleged crimes are being treated like a tragic inconvenience rather than a terrifying and awful wrong that’s left victims.

In those two sentences Williams just… Christ, what doesn’t he do?

Knuckleheads? Rape is NOT knucklehead behavior. Knuckleheads are like Larry, Moe and Curley (Shemp as well). Knuckleheads come out dancing in togas during a party and fall down comically much to everyone’s joy. Knuckleheads is also a now closed Missoula rib joint.

But knuckleheads don’t rape, sick men rape. Williams is far too smart for me to believe he confused the term “knucklehead” with “alleged rapist.”

To equate rape with knuckleheaded behavior is jaw-droppingly wrong. It’s like calling a serial killer an “overzealous playmate” or a genocidal murderer a “driven politico lacking a defined moral compass.”

And then we come to that second sentence. The poor football team.  The poor, tortured football team. Those poor players who have done no wrong but are now associated with the crime of rape… Just awful. That actually is sad. Those student athletes not implicated in any alleged rape have reason to be upset.

That reason, of course, is that UM and rape are now as closely associated as USC and recruitment violations. Personally, I’d rather the recruitment violations and I’m sure those players agree.

But the focus of Mr. Williams should be on the victims of rape and not on the fucking football team.

As a proud alum (’07) I just want to say that my pity is with those victims. I hope they find peace and can be happy, healthy people.

And, Mr. Williams, that’s what you should have said.

by lizard

Eileen Myles has a new book out, titled Snowflake / Different Streets (reviewed here by Jacob Kahn of the Indy).

An accomplished poet like Myles, who spent last spring in Missoula as the visiting Hugo writer teaching at UM, doesn’t need to fret too badly about how to get a book of poems published. This from Kahn’s review:

Myles came of age in the New York art world of the ’80s, initially as an avant-garde punk-poet who hung around the likes of Patti Smith and other art-world badasses. Since then, she’s published over 20 books (including fiction, non-fiction, plays and even a libretto, in addition to poetry), ran for president in 1992 as the first openly female and lesbian write-in candidate and shared the stage with Sonic Youth. She currently appears on the newest Japanther record, “Rock’n’Roll Ice Cream,” reading from Snowflake / different streets.

Obviously a poet with a badass pedigree like Myles has choices when it comes to publishing, and for this latest book she chose Wave Books.

I have at least a half-dozen Wave Books titles in my collection, including a signed copy of Michael Earl Craig’s Thin Kimono, so when I saw a link on Silliman’s Blog, I eagerly clicked.

What I found was a great piece written by Broc Rossell for the Los Angeles Review of books—Portrait of a Press: Wave Books.

Here’s a teaser:

If you’re getting the sense that Wave has a different idea of what constitutes a “book” or a “publication” than other publishers, you’re on to something. That aesthetic is embodied in everything from how Wave supports its poets, through and beyond the editorial process, down to the way Wave books look, and it’s a stance Wave authors buy into. The books themselves seem to be conceptualized as curiously isolated moments in a sustained lifestyle of creativity.

“The only difference between a publication and a performance is the format,” says Myles. Myles sees the book as “a trailer of the performance. When you do a reading you stand up and you read these seven poems, the event is constructed just like a book is.

“When you’re writing a poem or an essay or even a novel, it’s improvisational; you’re opening your mind up and making choices, and so the book and the performance resemble each other. The only difference is the form, the accommodation to time. When I have people in front of me in a room, I only have so much time, and I have to make choices; some of them are even predetermined. There is a downpour of language we exist in. And a writer just makes different choices for different occasions, which is what literary form is, finally: a kind of occasion.”

The personalities that make Wave Books breathe have exhibited a manic dedication to the occasion of poetry. In 2006, their Poetry Bus Tour embarked on a 50 cities in 50 days tear across the states that included a stop in Missoula (up Butler Creek).

I was lucky to be in attendance that evening as a fantastic smattering of poets bounced their amplified voices off the hills.

So in the spirit of performance, instead of text, I offer this performance by Michael Earl Craig. Enjoy!

by lizard

I have a lot of respect for Joshua Clover. He has made the choice to risk what too many American poets timidly avoid—participation:

In some ways, Clover, a California native with two volumes of poetry to his name, is reminiscent of poets like the Soviet Union’s Joseph Brodsky or Chile’s Pablo Neruda, for whom the life of the poet was inherently political. At the very least, they were not hidden away in MFA programs, but engaged with the real world and its all-too-real problems. While the American poet is often shy, poets in other parts of the world have had to be bold.

I consider any intersection between politics and poetry to be fascinating, so naturally Clover’s participation in OWS direct action got my attention.

From this Harriet piece by Mathew Timmons, I found this wonderful collaborative statement written by Joshua Clover and Juliana Spahr:

And we would like to say that we think poets have been very involved in politics this last year or three, and we believe they have been involved and committed in part because they are poets but that doesn’t mean they have been involved only as poets. And this distinction seems crucial right now. It may be that the present situation asks us to give a lot of our time to other matters, and we write less poetry in this case, and that is the answer adequate to politics. But this is still what we do as people who write poetry — we are not renouncing this desire that is poetry by recognizing that politics sometimes wants other things of us. And it may be that we feel the need to engage the present situation with poems — that, again, does not make us more or less people who write poems. Maybe we are saying something as improbable as it is simple: that being a poet, if it is to be in any way meaningful, doesn’t mean being a person who engages the world through poems. It means being a person who is in the world and for whom writing poems is one possibility in trying to figure out what is needed. It means recognizing the political as the case, as the situation, before we have been captured by the question that begins, “As poets….” We ask first: what does the situation need to help it along? Poems are neither the answer nor not.

For a sample of neither the answer nor not, this week’s poem comes from Clover’s the totality for kids (2005, University of California Press) enjoy!: Continue Reading »

by lizard

This report has some startling numbers from the absolutely racist Stop and Frisk program. Here are some quick numbers from just last year:

In 2011, 685,724 New Yorkers were stopped by the police.
605,328 were totally innocent (88 percent).
350,743 were black (53 percent).
223,740 were Latino (34 percent).
61,805 were white (9 percent).
341,581 were aged 14-24 (51 percent).

Below the fold, a poem of sorts, or more like an imagined conversation. Continue Reading »

by jhwygirl

In an ideal world writers would be ethical. Journalists would be unbiased. Bloggers would be independent.

Now that isn’t what happens all the time.

One thing that is true, and does apply specifically to the current situation is this: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

That force was put into play here in Montana a few years back. Now it is a bunch of forces just pushing of of each other.

The shame of it is that the real policy issues then fall by the wayside. Which is really what the puppet masters wanted in the first place.

Ultimately, life isn’t fair. Politics? Much less so.

For those in any of it with the best of intentions, the better thing to do – in the words of my friend who has rattled many a cage, George Ochenski – is to Keep On Keeping On.

by lizard

Although I have cringed at the titles of her pieces, Katie Baker, writing for Jezebel, has a must read follow up to her initial post titled Entire Montana Town Under Investigation for 80 Alleged Rapes.

My Weekend In America’s So-Called ‘Rape Capital’ documents a literal weekend exploration of our suddenly infamous town.

After four days, here is the gist Katie is taking away from her time spent here:

Nearly everyone I meet in Missoula — on porches, at coffee shops, in bars — agrees on three points. The first is that the city’s police force is a joke, ill-equipped to deal with the heavy interstate narcotics flow (the federal government has officially designated the area as a “high intensity drug trafficking area”), drunk driving (even the head of the student health center has a DUI under his belt), and — yes — sexual assaults that occur on a regular basis. The second point is that rape is very bad. And the third is that the girls in Missoula are the type who “make shit up for attention.” Girls “cry rape” in Missoula, say the girls of Missoula, who are often quicker to blame “sluts” for getting themselves into sketchy situations than are guys. I’m told over and over again that, thanks to the allegations that have surfaced over the past few months, more and more girls are blaming their post-hookup shame on the guys they — in the minds of so many of the Missoulians I meet — happily and carelessly took home the night before.

The picture featured at the top of her post is a highway sign that reads:

Welcome to Missoula (please keep an eye on your drink).

And what Missoula downtown bar more than likely inspired this warning? Based on this from the article, I’d say Stockman’s:

I am dying to meet some football players, and ask everyone I meet if they can help that happen. A few people try, but their Griz friends never text back once they hear there’s a reporter in town. “Go to Stockman’s” is their next best suggestion. I actually start tallying the number of people who tell me to go to Stockman’s if I want to get roofied or raped. (Also, bizarrely, most people I meet, both guys and girls, claim to have been roofied in Missoula at some point.) The one unabashed Stockman’s fan I meet tells me it’s the best late-night bar because “everyone is so wasted at Stock’s that anything can happen. Everyone is wasted, dancing, and it’s the perfect excuse to flirt with the people you’ve seen in class all semester.” But I lose count of those who call it the “creep bar,” or the “date-rape bar,” or the bar that’s impossible to leave without getting groped at least once. These are often the same people who say girls in Missoula are “well, kind of asking for it.”

I commented on an earlier post that I think Stockman’s and the Bodega are two hot spots for predatory drugging, and if this reporter considered tallying the associations with getting “roofied” and going to Stockmans after just four days of casual investigative visitation, I’d say maybe that’s a good place to start asking some questions.

I recommend reading the whole article. It’s tough, but fair.

I also suggest listening to Sally Mauk talking with sociologist Michael Kimmel.

There are some good places to focus some attention in light of this quick American biopsy of a sleepy mountain college town and its problem with its various public institutions and how they respond to allegations of sexual assault.

The prevalence of young women who eagerly participate in victim blaming is one example, as evidenced by Poor Clarissa’s letter that the Kaimin ran.

I wonder how long the Feds will take investigating. My prediction is they will announce their findings after Griz season is over, during winter break, and long after fall elections.

by Ross Keogh

I received an email from State Senate Candidate Tyler Gernant today that contained one of the more substantive policy proposals that I have seen this primary season. I wanted to share it, as I think it deserves broader attention as a practical and initial legislative solution to corporate influence in our political process. In his words:

“So I’m proposing a simple solution until Citizens United is overturned. First, require all corporations that wish to influence our elections to register to become eligible to electioneer. Second, electioneering corporations must publicly disclose their shareholders list, which they are already required to keep by law. Finally, no corporation registered to electioneer would be permitted to receive state contracts or favorable benefits from the state. We shouldn’t be using taxpayer dollars to fund corporate campaigns so they can just get more of our tax dollars.”

While we wait for grass roots permanent solutions, like Stand With Montanans to Mature, Tyler’s suggestions would seem to start the ball rolling in limiting corporate power over our elections.

by lizard

In a not-very-productive conversation I’ve been having, the person I’ve been mixing it up with took issue with how I referred to politics as a game, like it was some ad hominem attack. Campaigns are contests, and contests have winners and losers, right? Yeah, a game.

The ultimate political game is the presidential race, and to win that game it seems any semblance of common sense constraint gets tossed out the window with the ends justifying the means method of political combat.

In order to become the titular figure head of America, there have been some serious accusations leveled at past victors, like Ronald Reagan. The term October Surprise became associated with the theory that the Iranian hostage situation was prolonged by Reagan, who supposedly cut a secret deal to embarrass Carter and ultimately win the election.

With that in mind, it seems the reckless right, driven by the scary-crazy social conservative wing, may be willing to exploit a blind Chinese dissident to score political points against Obama.

Regardless of that level of speculation, Mitt Romney decided to idiotically insert himself into a sensitive diplomatic matter. Here’s the gist of what he said:

Mitt Romney condemned the Obama administration’s handling of blind Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng, calling the episode “a dark day for freedom” and “a day of shame” for President Obama if, he couched, reports are true that American officials communicated threats to Chen’s family.

Romney’s comments are dangerous, because at the very least it shows how willing he is to exploit a sensitive diplomatic tight-rope walk for short-term political gain. When it comes to playing games, this would be called “playing dirty”.

I read an article last month by Andrew Levine that was interesting, but kind of alarmist and overly speculative, imho. Here’s how it starts:

Will Mitt Romney and Benjamin Netanyahu concoct a war with Iran? Not if they have a tenth of the sense they were born with. But that’s not much consolation when we’re dealing, on the one hand, with a vulture capitalist and one time Mormon bishop whose flip flopping gives opportunism a bad name and, on the other, with a fascistically inclined ethnocratic zealot on a mission from God.

To pivot from national politics to local politics, M. Storin at Intelligent Discontent is accusing the Pam Bucy campaign of illegal robo calls and soliciting readers for evidence. We’ll see how that goes.

It makes one wonder, if the end is winning at any cost, then is the means whatever you can get away with?

by lizard

Every day I’m amazed how my two kids are developing—absorbing and processing their experiences of this world—and if I think too much about it, it sort of freaks me out. Parenting is an immense responsibility. It’s also a crazy dance of adjustments hoping on-the-fly parental innovations will work against new strategies these crafty little ones develop to get what they want.

What my (almost) 4 year old really wants—his currency, in parent-speak—is “screen time”. This includes computer, television, and the most precious (or maybe I should say, pernicious) device, in his eyes, the holy iPhone.

I have to admit, watching him press the button, slide his finger across the touch screen, then go to the settings to put it on “airplane mode” is a little disturbing, and makes me think about how this brand new tech-integrated generation born the first decade of the 21st century is going to be affected.

Luckily, in our house, Mom and Dad quickly issued a parental decree limiting screen time. We don’t want our kids developing nature deficit disorder, which is sadly the reality of too many kids. And we are blessed to live in Missoula, where nature is out our backdoor.

What kids absorb from the deepflow of consumer culture, like my kids will to some degree since their parents watch tv, use computers, and fiddle with those goddamn iPhone apps, is a bit staggering. Limiting exposure feels like a good idea.

Trying to be as aware as possible about what my kids absorb is what this week’s featured poem takes a stab at describing. Enjoy. Continue Reading »

by lizard

I didn’t want to derail jhwygirl’s post taking Bullock to task for his political calculation to win an election, but this post is along the same lines, looking at another single issue revolt that may play some role in how some Montanans decide to vote: medical marijuana.

Bullock may get a bit scraped by how he’s essentially shrugged his shoulders as the Feds came blowing in to bust a bunch of Montanans who thought they were operating within state law (and some who were not).

Pam Bucy may also not receive potential support for her role in opposing SB 326 as a spokesperson for the Montana Police Protective Association.

To show the kind of anger that exists out there, below the fold there’s a letter by Shane “Moose” Combs, of Helena, which was recently published in the Indy. I don’t share the same degree of anger because it doesn’t affect me personally. I don’t know anyone with the degree of need some people truly have, so I don’t feel viscerally betrayed by the politicians that had an opportunity to fix something instead of fuck it up worse.

That said, it is something I’m going to be thinking about when I vote. Continue Reading »

by lizard

I tried to catch network news tonight to see how the May Day protests were being reported, considering there’s been some hype about this being the relaunch of #OWS. Unfortunately Obama’s well-played May Day appearance in Afghanistan successfully dominated the headlines, which had lots of positive angles for the reelection effort.

Not having images of thousands of protesters mobilized across the country featured prominently on the boob-tube was just one of them.

Instead on the tube we had Obama saying things like

“As we emerge from a decade of conflict abroad and economic crisis at home, it is time to renew America.”

As the campaign version of Obama got his moment before the serious war machinery, talking about renewal and other meaningless political rhetoric, activists were getting the old NYPD/FBI intimidation treatment:

Oliver said the National Lawyer’s Guild is aware of at least five instances of NYPD paying activists visits, including one where the FBI was involved in questioning. (He wouldn’t elaborate.) We spoke to three of these activists.

In the first case: activist Zachary Dempster said that six NYPD officers broke down the door of his Bushwick, Brooklyn apartment at around 6:15am this morning. Dempster said they were armed with a warrant for the arrest of his roommate, musician Joe Crow Ryan, for a six-year-old open container violation. But Dempster believes this was an excuse to check in on him, as he’d been arrested in February at an Occupy Wall Street Party that was broken up by cops, and charged with assaulting a police office and inciting a riot.

After running his ID, a detective questioned Dempster in his bedroom for about five minutes about tomorrow’s May Day protest, he said.

“They asked what I was doing tomorrow, and if I knew of any activities, any events—that was how the conversation started,” Dempster said. Dempster said he’s not planning doing much, as his case from February is still open. Dempster’s roommate was also asked about him and May Day.

I’m sure this is all just to keep us good Americans safe, because there are lots of threats out there. To emphasize that point, I can point to another dangerous plot thwarted by the FBI. This time, instead of dark-skinned suspects, the FBI has produced 5 caucasians who were allegedly plotting to blow up a bridge in Cleveland:

Five men, at least three of them anarchists, plotted to blow up a bridge near Cleveland, but there was no danger to the public because the explosives were inoperable and were controlled by an undercover FBI employee, the agency said Tuesday in announcing the men’s arrests.

The target of the plot was a bridge that carries a four-lane state highway over part of the Cuyahoga Valley National Park in the Brecksville area, about 15 miles south of downtown Cleveland, the FBI said.

Authorities said three of the men were arrested Monday and are self-described anarchists, not tied to international terrorism.

Occupy Cleveland media coordinator Jacob Wagner said at least some of the suspects had attended the group’s events but that they weren’t affiliated with or representing the group.

So not terrorists, but anarchists, which, really, is almost as scary. AND they went to some occupy meetings in Cleveland. What a gift!

Notice, though, that this was another example of a “non-threat” threat, because the bombs were “controlled by an undercover FBI employee”.

The FBI has become very good at busting plots they help concoct then trap stupid people in. Also, great timing, but I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.

Those who continue building occupy wallstreet into a movement capable of taking on the systemic corruption and cronyism of late-stage capitalism are going to be in for a bumpy spring/summer. Obama may talk about renewal, but when it comes to the suppression of dissent, for his administration, it’s business as usual.