alias Bruce.

Introducing Poemmentary.com.

It's news headlines and political commentary -- but exclusively through poetry. Wherever it is found, seen, heard, or scrawled. Its motto is "Freed Speech."

For a different kind of reporting,  go to Poemmentary.com. The April 6th story, for instance, is "Illegal Immigration Is A Touchstone For Anger."

I launched the site this week after years of daydreaming about it. There is much, much more to come. In all kinds of directions. Please visit as it grows.

What we've learned so far from the non-indictments in Ferguson and Staten Island: 1.

This looks to be the start of a running list, in the coming days, of things that recent events have proven true:

1.) Racism + militarized policing = nascent fascism.

I know: it's the much-ridiculed f-word, something that reasonable Americans are taught cannot happen here in our ostensible democracy. Problem is, though, that it is already happening to selected groups of Americans nationwide.

Consider fascism's necessary ingredients:

• A chilling national fear about the safety and future of the "homeland."
• Sinking national self-esteem.
• Deprivation and desperation in a nation of people who believe they deserve better.
• Designated scapegoats for the threats of crime, treason, and national ruin.
• Military-style police who target these scapegoated groups – both in the communities where many of them live and in their movements in the larger society – and who enforce upon these groups a daily regime of random street stops, questionings, beatings, arrests, payoffs, assaults, occasional murders, and brazen judicial injustice.
• A colossal national project of incarceration that warehouses these groups in wild disproportion to their numbers.

That is the time-honored recipe. And that is what we now have in selected areas and populations of the United States. Call it Stop and Frisk, call it broken windows policing, call it immigration enforcement. Call it what you like. But see it for what it is. It has already regimented the daily lives of millions of poor Americans of color for years. And, one quiet act of "national security" and "public safety" at a time, it is making itself at home in every community across the country.

That is why the defiantly non-quiet response to the atrocities in Ferguson and Staten Island, both among the long-targeted and the recently-enraged, is a good thing for every neighbor on every street in America.

The U.S. is not willing to do anything meaningful about ISIS.

This is not an ideological claim. It's a fact.

Mere air power against ISIS is doomed to fail, as most of us have thought from the start and as Kurdish fighters have now said out loud. You cannot fight a war without fighting a war. Air power alone, unless you are willing to reduce an entire region to dust with nuclear weapons, is not a war and it will not win.

A U.S.-led ground war is not an option. Neither the U.S. nor any other major power has the resolve or the capacity to take the kinds of awful casualties that ground combat with ISIS would mean. Nor would a ground war change the dynamics that led ISIS to gain recruiting appeal and structural power.

And changing the actual situation that fostered the growth of ISIS -- that situation being a global corporate sucking machine that leaves huge portions of the world's population unpaid for their regions' riches and throttled in their desire for dignity -- is also off the table in the West. There is simply too much money to be made from corrupt extractive economies in the Middle East, Africa and South America.

So there is basically nothing that President Barack Obama, his corporate backers, and his cooperative "allies" are willing to do that will actually beat back ISIS. Nothing. Despite ongoing beheadings, the now tortuously familiar appeals by Western families for their hostage loved ones to be spared, and ground gains by ISIS in areas conquered through force of armed ruthlessness and abdicated governance.

Obama will speak with righteous fury and will act with hog-tied resignation. He has no good options and he knows it. He and his sponsors will wait, watch, and take what losses they feel they must. The winner, as before, will be whatever satisfactorily profitable arrangement Western capital can manage with this latest convolution in a portion of the brown-skinned world.

It's the cost of doing business.

Gunter Grass, Dave Eggers, Germany, Israel, Iran, and "What Must Be Said."

So Dave Eggers wins the $53,000 Gunter Grass Award for his book about American abuse of a Syrian-American humanitarian. And just before the scheduled award ceremony, Grass – who has admitted to having been in the SS in Nazi Germany – publishes a scathing poem about Israeli nuclear proliferation and aggression. Uproar ensues. Israel bans Grass from entering the country. And then Eggers announces he'll refuse to go to Germany to accept the award. He'll accept the money, though.

Here is a link to the Grass poem, titled "What Must Be Said."

And here is what must be said about this whole conflagration:

1.) Kudos to Grass. His poem is truthful, and more intellectuals of his celebrated stature need to rise up and declare in public – against the waiting accusations of anti-Semitism – that the contemporary Israeli regime has in some ways become the wickedness against which it claims to stand.

2.) It is horribly ironic but not shocking that the Israeli regime, over its lifetime, has plunged into such a long moral fall. Any psychologist who specializes in developmental trauma will tell you that awful suffering often later translates into exaggerated, delusional, or even sociopathic aggression.

3.) Grass's SS involvement as a young man hardly disqualifies him from condemning Israeli behavior. Grass has owned and rightly been culpable for his actions. One can argue, in fact, that Grass's first-hand knowledge of obedient or self-justifying groupthink informs his outrage at what he now sees in some Israeli trends. Not long ago I had a conversation with an Aryan German, who came of age during the Holocaust, who now recognizes much of what he saw in late-1930s Germany in early 21st-century America.

4.) Grass's poem is lousy as a poem. It's barely a poem, actually; it's more like a proclamation with lots of line breaks. But that's not the point anyway. Nobody cares about it as a poem. We care about what it says. Presenting it as a poem in a publication, actually, was a good move on Grass's part: it assured that his message would be disseminated intact, in its entirety. Had Grass simply called a press conference and issued the message as a statement, it would have been sound-bited and paraphrased beyond recognition.

5.) Eggers's refusing the personal tribute while accepting the money stinks to high heaven. His excuse in published reports that the controversy had become too much about Germany and Israel and Iran just doesn't hold water. A response of integrity would be to either be okay with the moral context of the award and to accept the prize and the money, or to not be okay with it and to reject the prize and the money. You can't have both. Good luck washing those dirty little hands of yours, Dave.

Amid today's Fourth of July rockets and porch flags,

I was part of a Facebook exchange with a man who said he feels deep guilt about not having served in the military, and a sense of loss at not having shared in the sacrifice and intense sense of belonging that military service can entail. Among the responses from folks on Facebook were cautions against romanticizing the horrors of war. What I wrote there, and what I'll paraphrase here, is:

I think that part of what is going on with "service envy" and other male feelings of social inadequacy is that American men, in particular, don't have the profound bonding experiences that we need. The culture's not built for it. It glorifies male childishness: a me-first corporate "work" ethic, selfishness, dominance, consumerism. So we seek male initiation in fake ways: fraternity rituals, gangs, "extreme" sports and other scary challenges, a ruthless model of male "leadership" in business and politics. I saw the Vietnam War destroy someone I knew, and I know that WWII destroyed one of my relatives. Glorifying war is bullshit. But I think the need for a sense of shared risk and commitment is real. That is why I think we American men need to relearn things like true passion and a sense of brotherhood, neither of which is rewarded by the current culture.

Happy Fourth.

Quote of the Day

Gary Younge in a Nation piece about the debate over the U.S. going to war in Libya (and yes, it is war):

"The innocence of the liberal hawk is one of the few truly renewable resources America seems to have in abundance. Liberal hawks treasure their innocence but are also very careless with it, for they keep on losing it. And each time they misplace it, they manage to find it again just in time for the next bad idea."

What was most interesting about President Obama's Libya speech last night

was what he did not say. But I'll get to that in a minute.

Overall, it was his usual dynamic oratory, a stream of ear candy that might have had the power to inspire were it imbued with substance and some demonstrated history of conviction. Even lacking those, it sounded beautiful. I listened to it on the radio and enjoyed the succession of boomy little thumps through the microphone when Obama brought his hand down on the podium for emphasis. His gift of gab and presence nearly conjures up a centrist version of Ronald Reagan, except that Obama is smarter, has an actual vocabulary, and doesn't understand (as The Gipper did) that if you won't fight for the things you say, others won't respect you or follow your lead. Strongest lines in the speech: Obama's pointing to the eight-year gazillion-dollar Iraq debacle as a warning against American occupation and nation-building in Libya. Here, his underlying indictment of George W. Bush's legacy cut like a razor in butter. Weakest lines: Obama's boilerplate run-ons about ruthless dictatorships being anathema to American "values" and our just role in the world. A laugh track would not have been out of place here.

Which leads to the interesting thing that Obama did not say. In countering critics, he made at least two references in the speech to the fact that American "interests" were a critical element in forcing our intervention in Libya, while we have chosen to ignore or abet monstrous regimes elsewhere. He went on to define these compelling "interests" as being 1.) the unacceptability of having a Gaddafi dictatorship smack dab between fledgling democratic revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, and 2.) the destruction of the credibility of the Western alliance if their threats against Gaddafi were not backed up with firm action. Leaving aside the shaky nature of NATO's Libya action and its unpredictable outcome, both of these claims of Obama's are pure cow pie. Realpolitik America tolerates enemies in proximity to non-enemies all the time for the sake of expediency. And if NATO's and the West's empty threats over the decades were terminally discrediting, we would have lost all international clout long ago.

But here is what is interesting. The unstated but clear admission behind Obama's statement is: Having three brutal dictatorships next to one another – Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt – was okay, but having one remaining dictatorship next to two newly overthrown ones is not okay. In other words, stability for American corporate and strategic interests is what matters. According to this unspoken worldview, if three adjacent bloody dictatorships maintain stability – as they have for decades with America's tolerance – then we're cool. And if three new less repressive governments mean stability, then that's cool, too. But if democratic upheavals (with no American help) in two of those nations stir up things so that our third dictator partner is now the odd man out – well, we can't have that. So here comes our convenient awakening of conscience. Hail democracy! Down with (our formerly approved) tyranny!

Pretty despicable, really. But Obama sure did make it sound pretty.

Jon Stewart's breakup with President Obama over Libya

 

The Daily Show
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

 
Thanks to Laurie.

 

Here's a celebration of Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy

worthy of the holiday, as opposed to the gelded tributes that trot out a clip of King's "I Have a Dream" speech like a Hallmark card every year. Skip the corporate-sponsored King Moments and watch this video:

 

Thanks to The Agonist for the tip.

Happy New Year. I didn't mean to take this long

to blog again, but somehow I just haven't been into opinionizing. I've been writing poems and playing drums and taking care of my sick (but now healthy) cat and otherwise keeping myself occupied with the sorts of elemental things that are not subject to debate.

Of course, in the (welcome) exit from 2010 there are plenty of things that are subject to question and worth a quick look back:

President Obama and his party took a "shellacking" in November not, as house-trained pundits have been fond of saying, because they overreached, but because they underreached. On health care (e.g., public option), on jobs, and on oversight of the banking sector, the Dems and Obama repeatedly came to the table predisposed to fold on issues on which they enjoyed a solid majority in the polls. Rather than use public opinion as a negotiating weapon against hard-nosed Republicans, Hopey and Company foolishly telegraphed their concessions before bare-knuckle bargaining could even begin. Result: a lousy health care compromise that forces citizens to buy crappy coverage from a ruling private sector; a stimulus package big enough to be expensive but too small and timid to jump-start jobs and increase economic security; and banking policies that flush billions of taxpayer dollars down Wall Street toilets while making "too big to fail" institutions even bigger and more vulnerable to future hubris and ruin. So the political right is angry and emboldened, the center is despondent, and the left is furious and defiant. Nice going, Prez.

The Obama tax deal was an obscenity, reflecting, again, the conciliator-in-chief's inability to fight for what the nation needs. The deal's endorsement by Bill Clinton -- the president who brought us triangulation, NAFTA, welfare reform, and continued deregulation -- was thoroughly unconvincing.

The repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell was a genuine victory, and one worth celebrating. It is nice to be able to say, in the year 2011, that one more version of Jim Crow has lost some of its legitimacy. I believe Obama sincerely wanted this, and what made it doable for a politician of his pliancy was the repeal's practical appeal. As was the case with racial segregation during and after World War Two, the easiest (and therefore first) breach in gay segregation is the practical matter of making all possible bodies available to a strapped American military. Only the most hardened bigots (and craven sycophants to hard-right mobs) in the House and Senate were willing to stand against the clear-eyed declarations of top generals that barring gays is militarily stupid and humanly unjustifiable. The necessity of repeal exploited a huge Republican weak spot -- Repubs were caught between fire-breathing conservatives and the military brass -- and it played into Obama's preference to let problems work themselves out rather than fight battles.

The ratification of the START Treaty is a joke, putting the phony stamp of mutual restraint on a U.S.-Russian nuclear arsenal sufficient to destroy mankind many times over.

The case of WikiLeaks' Julian Assange is where criminal prosecution and opportunistic politics meet. The timing of the Interpol warrant and the Swedish charges stinks to high heaven. If you think this sudden fervency for Assange's prosecution is purely about justice for women, I have a bridge I want to sell to you. At the same time, the case highlights the need for sexual assault to be taken seriously, as neither a tool to "get" a political dissenter nor fodder to preemptively make him a martyr. As I've said before, Assange is an object lesson in the danger of building an activist organization around a cult of personality. Successors -- and there will be successors -- will learn from this. I am beginning to think that the next truly potent movement against corrupt American political authority -- in the wake of the last one, which happened in the 1960s and 70s -- may be the cyberleak offensive, which exploits a quiet but profound vulnerability of modern capitalism: the ruling elite's dependence upon information technologies in which skilled outlaws have cultivated a decided advantage. Wouldn't that be something: the Halliburtons and Goldman Sachs and their government minions meeting their downfall not in street riots but in guerrilla cyberwarfare.

More soon.