alias Bruce.

The chaos now surrounding the American "deal" to release dissident Chen Guangcheng to the Chinese government

is a surprise only to the willingly blind. The accounts in today's NYT, including this one and this one, help to show why. This latest from CNN, though, also shows that Chen refuses to go quietly, and he is determined to put Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the American government on the spot just when they thought they had sidestepped this inconvenient problem.

It is clear that the U.S. wanted to squirm out of the Chen situation as quickly as possible so as to protect its shaky relationship with its creditor and cheap-labor-supplier China. In America's China policy, human rights rank well below the needs of the corporate and financial players who underwrite and steer our foreign policy. We all know this, although polite corporate media will not explicitly say it. Moreover, this has been true for many years, despite current Republican rants about the Obama administration's cowardly rush for an excuse to ditch dissident Chen. You can bet that a Republican administration would have been equally or more eager to find a quick way to dump Chen in the interest of business and finance, since both the Dems and the G.O.P work for the same employers.

Only an American policy team desperate to avoid a business-unfriendly fight would have believed (or pretended to believe) China's lame assurances that Chen and his family would not suffer further retaliation after his release back into Chinese hands. Chen himself seems to have panicked into accepting the deal, and now that reality is setting in he is, rightly, afraid and angry. Yes, he reportedly went along with it at first. But his current claim that Americans pressured him and failed to tell him all the facts appears to have some veracity. And in any case, when a panicked, injured, persecuted dissident shows up at an American embassy after a car chase, cooler heads have an obligation to assess the situation in the interest of justice.

To give you an idea of just how bad things had gotten for Chen by the time he reached the U.S. embassy, here is a short excerpt from one of the NYT pieces:

Although there were no legal charges pending against the couple, local officials had decided to turn their home into a makeshift prison with high walls, well-paid guards and sheets of metal to cover their windows.  The local government’s goal was twofold: to prevent Mr. Chen from engaging in his legal work against coercive family-planning policies and to keep the couple cut off from the outside world. When the Chens broke the rules — by trying to sneak out messages or secretly detailing their mistreatment in a homemade video — they were viciously beaten.

For the U.S. to then turn around and concoct a flimsy deal to drop Chen like a hot potato is, tragically, business as usual. In the aftermath of the dirty deal, we see handily-choreographed stances on both sides: China demands an American apology for its temporary sheltering of Chen. And the U.S. grandly refuses to say it is sorry. Everybody gets to protect their own flank. Except Chen, that is, whose ability to generate international outrage and pressure may determine his fate.

Meanwhile, the bloody economic gears keep turning.

Racial torture, libraries, and poems.

This is National Poetry Month, a time when – like Black History Month and Earth Day – corporate culture blinks for a moment at realities it generally ignores. Still, a glimpse can reveal plenty. This month, in one of the main windows of the downtown public library in my town of Baltimore, the poem on display is "If Mamie Till Was the Mother of God" by Joseph Ross, which won the local Pratt Library system's 2012 poetry prize. The poem has to do with the 1955 torture and murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi for whistling at a white woman. If you're sketchy on the details, here is Ross's explanation of how Emmett's mother, Mamie, electrified the world by displaying her son in an open casket:

Mamie Till’s decision to bury her son in a casket with a glass top was a momentous one. In her words, she wanted the world “to see what they did to my boy.” In 1955, Mamie Till sent her son Emmett to live with relatives in Mississippi for the summer. One night, he was dragged from his uncle’s house, beaten to death and dumped in the Tallahatchie River, with a cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire. His body was found downriver some days later. The image of her son’s beaten and distorted body were broadcast around the world. In the view of some, this murder was seen as the beginning of the civil rights movement.

Emmett Till, as I've mentioned, was not only brutally beaten but tortured, including having one of his eyes gouged out. As it happens, a few years ago I met and interviewed Emmett Till's cousin, who was in the same bedroom with Till the night that white men burst into the house and took him away to murder him. I will never, ever forget it.

Here is a photo of how you'd see Joseph Ross's poem if you walked past the Baltimore downtown library this month:

Photo: Robert Waxman

At a time when today's American brown shirts want for government's sole job to be the killing of infidels and the punishing of scapegoats, it's good to see a public library acting like a public library. My thanks to my friend Rachel for pointing this out.

There's a false rumor going around that the infamous Koch Bros are paying George Zimmerman's legal fees.

There are plenty of reasons to boycott Koch Industries, but not this bogus claim, which gives ammunition to those who want to trash liberal credibility. What is true is that Koch supported an organization that supported the creation of Stand Your Ground laws, although there is no direct link between Koch and the Florida law. See Snopes on this.

What if there were reporters

who conveyed reality on a level beyond debate?

There are. They're called poets.

I am not being cute. I am not suggesting that deep verse is a substitute for gutsy investigative journalism.

I am saying, though, that poetry, done with integrity, is a kind of soul journalism. It is a kind of ruthlessly deep reporting whereby the witnessing eye does not blink, the ear does not flinch, and the voice does not falter. Poetry is a kind of truthtelling in which even if the poem's reported events or visions did not empirically happen or exist, the poem's story is true. And the reader or listener knows it is true.

Not that there isn't debate about poems and poetry. Hell, the field of poetry criticism is a regular food fight. Thousands of folks – including some who crave a nearness to poetry but are frustrated by their inability to create it – make a living by critiquing, debating, and teaching poetry.

But the moment when the poet (or the painter or the sculptor or the singer) emerges to publicly offer what s/he has found, and the moment when the reader/looker/listener feels the sharp clap of recognition, are moments of truth.

Take, say, this stanza from one of Rainer Maria Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus (Part II, 1):

Breathing: you invisible poem! Complete
interchange of our own
essence with world-space. You counterweight
in which I rhythmically happen.

If only CNN or The Washington Post had that kind of veracity.

After having read Mike Daisey's March 25th blog post about his Apple monologue disaster,

and after having listened, in its entirety, to the March 19 talk he gave at Georgetown University about the scandal; and having listened, also in their entirety, to the original show he did on This American Life and the later TAL retraction show on which he was doggedly questioned about his looseness with facts, a few things appear clear to me:

1.) Mike Daisey is a mess. I think he'd be more than willing to admit this. In fact he pretty much does admit it, especially in the Georgetown talk and on the TAL retraction show. I think most of us, in his situation, would be a mess. He has been all over the place in his responses to the scandal: he was shell-shocked and in denial in the TAL grilling on the rules governing his art; he was defiant and disingenuous in his March 19 blog post about how it was "art," not lies, that moved his audiences (I have only heard the monologue portion that aired on TAL, but the parts I found most emotionally moving – such as the anecdote about the man with the ruined hand and Daisey's story about his personally having met 12-year-old workers – now appear to have been fabricated or exaggerated); he is earnest, repentantly self-effacing, and politically passionate about the untold stories of Chinese workers in his Georgetown talk; and now, in his March 25 blog post – faced with a quote from one of his past interviews in which Daisey clearly lays out the rules for theatrical truth-telling – he openly admits how he broke them in his Apple monologue and he seems to have let go of the need to artistically defend the license he took. His trajectory seems to be toward acknowledgement of what he did and calling even more insistently for addressing the much greater cause of justice and media attention for Chinese workers. He clearly got in way over his head with TAL, and I'd advise pundits to take care in trashing him. You know what they say about glass houses.

2.) Daisey didn't need to lie or misrepresent his experience in order to succeed with his monologue. That's the awful irony of all this. Between the things he actually experienced on his trip and the known facts about incidents and outrages in Chinese manufacturing for Apple, Daisey could have constructed and performed a monologue that was riveting, devastating, and, as TAL asked of him, bulletproof against the predictable attacks and questions from Apple and corporate media. In his Georgetown talk, Daisey says about his panicked deception of TAL's producers, "I should have been wiser. There must have been a path that would have worked [in being able to air the monologue without misrepresentation]. I don't know what it would have been, though." I could be all wrong, but I have a suggestion: had Daisey been honest with TAL, they might have instead constructed a show about how a gifted writer and actor with a compelling story found himself getting carried away with the telling of the story, and how he finally came clean about this under the pressure of doing a national radio broadcast. And Daisey could have performed a monologue, on TAL, about what he truly saw in China and what he didn't see, and how and why he had gotten carried away in some of his monologue lines, and what is actually documented as happening in Chinese factories, and how as an apolitical privileged American techno-geek he found himself devastated, disoriented, and evangelicized by the raw power of what he witnessed and what he learned from others about where his iPhone comes from. Sure, maybe that idea wouldn't have flown. All I can say is, as a TAL listener I'd certainly tune in to a show like that. But in any case it's water under the bridge. What is clear, and what Daisey clearly knows, is that his monologue doesn't (and won't) need misrepresentations in order to work as theater.

3.) Daisey is a great talker. He is a brilliant talker. He is such a good talker, in fact, that, given the glibly convincing way in which he represented untruths as real events in his monologue, I am not sure I believe much at all of what he now says. I'm not sure I believe his explanations for things he still insists he saw in China that his translator says didn't happen. I am not sure I believe his tortured account of why he did what he did and how he now feels about it. I am not sure, actually, that I believe anything Mike Daisey says. This is a real problem for me; there is much of what he now says that I want to believe. But I'm having a lot of trouble doing so. I don't know what to do with this. But I needed to say it.

4.) When Daisey says that he should not be the big story – that Apple and China should be the big story – he is absolutely right. I do think he understands that his dishonesty in the telling of such a heart-rending, high-stakes human story has become a hugely emotional public event partly because his story itself so deeply rocked our world as spoiled American gizmo-users, and partly because a lot of us, including me, feel an angry sense of his having betrayed and manipulated both us and the issue of workers and Apple. But Daisey is correct when he says it's an atrocity that the news cycle is dominated by his scandal rather than by the human suffering embedded in electronics built for us by people in China who we will never see.

That is why, as Daisey suggests, you need to read the New York Times series on Apple's suppliers, and listen to the NPR story about an explosion at an iPad plant that workers say happened just hours after Apple inspected the plant, and look at the research by NGOs  regarding cruel working conditions and worker suicides at Apple supplier plants in China.

And that is why, unless there is something of huge public importance related to him in the future, I will not blog about Mike Daisey again.

No matter what you think of Obama, this image nails Rush Limbaugh's role as a decoy paid to divert attention from what is destroying people's lives:

Of course, President Irrelevant is only a convenient bit player in this sucker act. Rush's underlying pitch to angry white Americans is: You, my fellow pissed-off white Americans, should be the rulers here, and you would be if it weren't for government. Don't be angry at corporations and their hired politicians or at rich folks like me who can buy great health coverage and dodge taxes. Be angry at that White House nigger who is bossing you around!

That's The Rush Limbaugh Act, brought to you by a tiny group of people who will never have to stand in line for anything.

Update re: the case of Mark Byron, who a judge punished for bad-mouthing his estranged wife on Facebook:

Byron emailed me yesterday in response to my recent post, in which I criticized his judgment in trash-talking his soon-to-be ex-wife on his Facebook page while I also pointed to the real freedom-of-speech questions his case raises. His email to me was polite and reasonable, and so I am reprinting it here (minus his contact information), followed by my own take on what he says.

MARK BYRON'S EMAIL:

Bruce,

Thanks for taking the time to write about me on your blog.  I'd like to encourage you to take a second look at my story, along with the facts of my case.  You make some great points-  that this is in fact a very interesting case to everyone.  Some of your statements about me are a little unfair, though.  I encourage you to take a look at the now public posts on my Facebook wall, for starters.  www.facebook.com/byronphoto - there, you'll see the confession email from the fellow who 'gave' my soon-to-be ex-wife his login credentials to Facebook which allowed her to see my private posting.  I agree with you that the site is not as public as some think that it is - however, I have more than 12 years in IT background.  I am an MCSE for example - and understand a great deal about privacy and security on computers as well as on Facebook.  I utilize groups on Facebook and used every bit of available security that Facebook has to offer.  Please consider writing a follow up once you've had a chance to take a closer look at my story.  Feel free to call me or write me with any questions you may have.

Sincerely,

Mark Byron

MY TAKE:

Byron, a New York photographer, is clearly staying on top of his story online, and I commend him for that. As I wrote previously, there is no way for we bystanders to know how right Byron may or may not be in having called his wife evil and vindictive, or how right she may or may not be in having filed for a protective order and claimed that the comments on his Facebook page frightened her. That is between the two of them and the court. What is clear, though, is that Byron badly overestimated the privacy that Facebook allegedly affords him and his FB "friends." Whatever his IT background, it appears that he still holds this mistaken belief, as shown in his statement in his email about "the fellow who 'gave' my soon-to-be ex-wife his login credentials to Facebook which allowed her to see my private posting." Truth is, in real terms there is no such thing as a "private posting" on Facebook. Facebook is so hackable that, with or without someone's willingly handing over a person's login info, anything posted there is at the mercy of anyone who has sufficient skills and ill intent. Posting anything on Facebook in the belief that it will be seen "only" by your "friends" is excruciatingly naive at best. It is a mistake that I hope and trust Byron will not repeat. Meanwhile, the issue of what a person has the free-speech right to say and not say on Facebook remains a legal football. With users' erratic learning curve on the limitations of social media privacy, the technical reality that all Facebook speech is de facto public doesn't necessarily mean that FB users who post provocative things intend for them to have meaning beyond their "friends" circle. But right now judges have tons of room to interpret, and make, law on this. Which is why the smart thing for we users to do is to treat such media as if they are entirely public.

If you use Facebook, the case of the guy who hate-posted about his estranged wife

shouldn't apply to you. But it should interest you.

It shouldn't apply to you because the behavior of the Facebook user, Mark Byron, was astonishingly stupid as well as belligerently venomous. According to the Huffington Post, Byron – who is in the midst of a nasty divorce in which his wife filed for a protective order – posted a comment to his "friends" on his FB page saying, in part, "If you are an evil, vindictive woman who wants to ruin your husband's life and take your son's father away from him completely — all you need to do is say you're scared of your husband or domestic partner and they'll take him away." You don't need to know anything about the actual facts of this marital war to know that the post was an unbelievably dumb move on Byron's part. Posting that statement to be read by an untold number of online "friends" on a notoriously-hackable site is nothing at all like telling real friends over drinks that your wife is an evil, dishonest person. Facebook, even when posts are supposedly visible only to your "friends," is a dangerously public place devoid of any real privacy. Anyone with more than two brain cells should know better than to do what Byron did. He paid for this by being required by a judge to post daily Facebook apologies to his wife in order to avoid jail time and fines. (Unseemly details here.)

But, in spite of the idiocy, Byron's case should interest you because it raises real questions about what "privacy" and "free speech" mean on Facebook – and, implicitly, on Twitter and whatever other electronic shout-out realms are soon to come. The judge, in response to a complaint by Byron's wife, ruled that Byron's FB post and resultant sympathetically angry posts by his "friends" were sufficiently abusive to cause his wife to feel intimidated and threatened. There is no way for you or me to know if this is true. Her attorney says it is. Some civil rights attorneys say it looks as if it's not. The larger issue, though, is that at this point nobody knows how to legally judge what the Constitution allows a FB user to post to his or her "friends." I think a good place to start is with existing standards for libel and threats of violence. But the reality is that, in the legal Wild West of online speech, judges are going to rule on what you post based on what they personally think, or on what they guess the government is going to think, or on what police or prosecutors prod them to do. That's not very comforting.

The lesson: treat every entry you make on Facebook, Twitter, and all other forums as if it is a transmission to every electronically-connected person on the planet. It may very well be.

Thanks to Laurie.

Agony, Art, and Apple.

It is a cliché that artists are among the last-ditch truthtellers in a society. It is also true.

These days, for example, as corporate journalists become less willing and less able to contradict the ruling script of American life (e.g., there is no alternative to 21st-century monopoly capitalism as a way of running our country or organizing the world), it is increasingly the artists who help break the actual news about what is wrong and what change is possible.

Who is passionately exposing lies and delusions on the part of both the Obama corporatists and the dog-whistle right? Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert -- comedians, for God's sake. Who wrote a famous open letter to Laura Bush declining her dinner invitation with the explanation that Ms. Bush had chosen to live in quiet harmony with a murderous and criminal regime? Internationally-celebrated poet Sharon Olds.

And who, now, is sending chills down corporate and consumer spines with his little one-man show about the people who actually make your iPhone? An overweight, nervy actor and monologist named Mike Daisey, whose theatrical monologue, "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs," has brought audiences the story of Chinese workers leaping to their deaths from factory complex roofs to escape a wretched life in service to Apple. The New York Times and other corporate media have since picked up pieces of the story of how the electronics industry runs horrifically dangerous, hellishly abusive, city-sized factories. But it was a solo guy with a touring one-man show who told it.

It's one more reason why artists should have way more societal stature: they are among our default sources of truth when the official tellers choose to shut up.

Read on Daisey's blog how Apple is now acting very, very afraid of these revelations. And listen here to an edited live performance of Daisey's monologue aired on the radio show This American Life.

A fellow musician mentioned the other night

that it's a bad idea for musicians to "listen with their eyes."

What he meant was that when we decide how creative or talented or worthy of respect a musician is on the basis of their received recognition by an audience or their image among connoisseurs, we make bad decisions. The only true way to know what you hear in the music is to listen to the music.

I like the way he put this. It's true for musicians, but it is also true for poets, readers of novels, sports fans, theater folks, painters, voters -- anybody who needs to have the clearest take they can manage on someone's contribution.

This isn't always easy. Sometimes huge popularity is -- wrongly -- a signal to us that someone is a hack. And sometimes obscurity is damn well deserved. It's all subjective, of course, but it's still complicated.

Take the hugely successful 1960s/70s rock band Grand Funk Railroad. They were a spectacular sensation among teenagers who wanted their music loud, brash, self-righteous, and infused with pot smoke. (I know. I was there.) Writers who "knew" music (a timelessly common condition among critics who know how to listen but not how to play) trashed GFR in print with bloody fury. And they were often right. Frontman Mark Farner did suck as a guitarist and was largely full of shit as a writhing, shirtless, pseudo-philosophical rock poet. The band did play to counterculture teenybopper clichés. Producer Terry Knight was in fact a slickster whose GFR album cover concepts and band marketing rivaled the product packaging of Alka Seltzer and Shake & Bake.

But Grand Funk Railroad rocked its ass off -- mostly because monster bassist Mel Schacher and drummer Don Brewer were among the first big-time white rhythm section players to understand a basic foundation of black R&B: when you synchronize the bass line with the bass drum, you get the funk. You create the gut thump. Go back and listen to vintage GFR, and you'll hear a white band that picked up on part of the seismic essence of James Brown and other funk pioneers. These white boys heard the underlying real shit, and they rendered it well enough in coliseums to drive thousands of bodies into a frenzy. Sure, like a lot of groups, they had help from ganja, acid, and Madison Avenue. But Grand Funk Railroad was and always will be a classic ass-kicking band, no matter how many armchair virtuosos cursed them in reviews of their albums and concerts.

That is why, when I listen to musicians who I believe thoroughly suck, I try -- sometimes successfully, sometimes not -- to listen beneath that for something I need to hear. And it's why some musicians, far more accomplished than I, try to do the same thing when they listen to me.