THREE HOPEFULLY QUICK THOUGHTS

1.

On James A. Baker III and Robert Gates (head of committee for solutions in Iraq or “how to save W’s ass” and W’s next Secretary of Defense):

“These are the same men who, fifteen years ago, abandoned Afghanistan to civil war and Al Queda, allowed Saddam to massacre his own people, and concluded that genocide in the Balkans was none of America’s business. They are not the guardians of all wisdom.” —George Packer, The New Yorker, November 27, 2006

That issue also has a good article by Seymour M. Hersh on a possible attack on Iran by the U. S. or Israel. Hersh is our greatest war correspondent, and has been for a long time. His articles on our war in Afghanistan, before we even attacked Iraq, were the source of my prescient perspective on that blunder in a long poem I wrote for a reading that turned out to have been coincidentally scheduled for the night before we invaded.

As a result, the poem, which had no title, became MARCH 18, 2003 and was thought by many in the first audiences to hear it, to be over the top in its seeming predictions of American soldiers, including sadistic women, torturing prisoners who hadn’t even been convicted of anything yet. But I got it from the articles Hersh wrote about what we were already doing in Afghanistan.

The poem was published by Vincent Katz in a new press he started the next year called Libellum, and in its latest incarnation, with drawings by Alex Katz, is out in a third edition published jointly by Libellum and an Italian art book publisher Charta.

Not for myself—at this point I’m pretty much over the need for any kind of public validation—but for the people who run Charta and take a chance on “political” books as well as art books, may I add that book to my recommendations for your gift giving list this season, or any gift-giving reason for that matter.

And add another from Charta—the best reportage on war I’ve read along with Hersh and Martha Gellhorn’s THE FACE OF WAR (out of print but available through the internet)—this newer collection of war reporting is called GREEN PARROTS (after the small anti-personnel bombs that appear to be toys to children and therefore are most lethal to them, and were used in Israel’s recent attacks on Lebanon, and by almost every other modern war machine as well, including us, even if only by proxy).

It’s subtitled “A War Surgeon’s Diary”, because the author, Gino Strada, is an Italian surgeon who started EMERGENCY, an organization to bring medical services to war torn areas that even “Doctors without Borders” often fear to go, or can’t, and is the most compelling book I’ve read in years.

Partly because it is so plain spoken and personal, and partly because, as with Gellhorn’s writing on almost every 20th Century war (she should have won a Nobel in my book), it is about the personal experience of war of noncombatants caught in the turmoil. This is more important than ever, and something Gellhorn tuned into long before most other writers, including Hemingway (the husband she was briefly married to, which is unfortunately what she has become most famous for).

Because before the late 20th century, most wars mostly killed soldiers and other combatants (the figure I heard was over ninety-five per cent of casualties) but in recent decades that figure has been pretty much reversed, and now in every conflict around the world, like Iraq, the “civilian” casualties, or “collateral damage” as the U. S. calls it, are over seventy-five per cent of casualties and growing.

2.

In that same issue of The New Yorker there’s a financial article by James Surowieki about the dire consequences to our energy policy from the protection of our ”sugar industry”. The reason is that ethanol can be distilled from sugar cane much more efficiently than from corn, but our politicians protect the domestic “sugar industry” from any competition from elsewhere and in the process the corn conglomerates that are responsible for most of the sweetening we eat now, in the form of high fructose corn syrup, though Suroweiki doesn’t get into that.

His point is that it would save enormous amounts of energy and money to distill ethanol from sugar cane as Brazil does, a huge country that is now free of dependence on oil from outside its borders thanks to their ethanol policy—making it from sugar cane. But because our politicians, Democrats as well as Republicans, have created a monster in the corn conglomerates that feeds the political maw, we not only end up paying more for real sugar in the U. S. (and we consume more than any other nation in the world) and hurt other countries’ economies, especially in the so-called “third world”, but because ethanol is mostly derived from corn as opposed to sugar cane, “the amount of energy it yields in proportion to how much energy goes into its production” is a lot lower. Sugar cane is not only cheaper, or would be without the tariffs and other added expenses our politicians have created, but it also yields “eight times more” “energy per unit” than corn!

The article is about ethanol saving us from dependence on “foreign oil”—Suroweiki doesn’t even mention high fructose corn syrup or get into the incredible damage that ingredient, in almost everything we eat now, has and is causing. As Bill Maher, a comic whose politics I generally agree with but whose personality and jokes often leave me cold, is always ranting about, the long term affects of the enormous intake of high fructose corn syrup that most citizens of the U. S. experience with every meal and snack are unknown, but the short term affects are apparent in the exactly parallel rises on the most elementary graphs charting the use of it and the increase in obesity in the U. S.

We’re not talking about family farmers raising corn here, we’re talking about giant agricultural conglomerates protecting their right to make historic and unconscionable profits with the help of taxpayer money, and tariffs on anyone else selling us cheaper and more natural “sugar” from outside. The same conglomerates that brought us genetically altered food, cows that eat their own and other animals’ shit instead of grass and hay like they used to, rivers of pig shit fouling our streams and water tables, etc.

They’re like the mob taking over an industry, only instead of with actual “muscle” with the muscle of money. Let’s find out who is willing to stand up and fight this in the new Congress and support them with as much information and publicity as we can generate. Whoa, I’m starting to sound like an ‘activist” again. See what a little “real” sugar can do in the morning (in my case from bananas and “naturally sweetened” twigs-and-branches health-food cereal).

3.

Just a quick addendum to my cream-doesn’t-always-rise-to-the-top posts that generated some comments, mostly in e mails to me rather than in the comments section of this blog, which I’ve been told is sometimes a pain in the ass to access, though I’ve tried to make it open to anyone with no restrictions.

Anyway, I wasn’t saying that those who achieve success in mainly the arts I was concentrating on, or anything else, don’t deserve it. I acknowledge anyone’s “making it” because even if I don’t appreciate their talent, I appreciate their figuring out or lucking into success.

And I never meant to imply that talented people don’t often make it to the top in their fields.

Nor did I mean to denigrate any one approach to various arts, especially the “language” approach to poetry. I edited an anthology in the 1970s called NONE OF THE ABOVE that included some of the early practitioners of “language” poetry, including Bruce Andrews and Ron Silliman, because obviously I dig their work! I was trying to make a point about how difficult many not-in-the-poetry-world people find that particular approach to poetry and therefore I am mystified by the attention it gets in the otherwise almost exclusively mainstream reviews in Publishers Weekly, for example.

I didn’t even mean to sound like I was disparaging Paul Muldoon, just the claims of his champions that his work is so original or great that he deserves all the prizes and kudos and comparisons to historic giants as they give him.

My whole point is a lament that so much great work never makes it to the wider audience that critical acclaim and lucky breaks can generate.

Just one example: Karen Allen, who made such an impact as the heroine of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, appeared in the play MONDAY AFTER THE MIRACLE back in the early 1980s, as I remember it. I first saw her in the play when it was in workshop form at the Actors Studio in New York. I went because we’re friends and I wanted to support her in what I knew was an enormous challenge, the role of Helen Keller, the blind and deaf real life heroine of her own drama, first portrayed as a child in THE MIRACLE WORKER decades before by the child actor Patty Duke, which became the basis for her successful acting career.

The other characters in Keller’s life were played by Ellen Burstyn and John Heard, better known and highly regarded actors. But Karen shone so brightly, just as the character she was playing always did, despite the fact she could only talk in sounds that were almost indecipherable and could not hear or see, she blew them off the stage.

They were replaced for the first run of the play at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC before it moved to Broadway. The DC theater was ten times or more the size of the space where I first saw the play performed, a big theater. Karen had to project what her character was thinking and feeling without the use of normal speech or movement to this large audience filling up this vast space. I was there and can swear that even if you were sitting in the last row you could feel the power of this character’s passion for life and love and moving humanity forward in whatever way she could contribute to. An unbelievable performance.

The play was a success out of town, but the producers weren’t experienced or smart or lucky enough to know what they were doing, so by the time it got to Broadway there wasn’t enough money for the kind of advertising campaign that a serious play desperately needed. They weren’t even smart enough to promote the play on the basis of Karen’s appeal to fans of RAIDERS, or of her performance in ANIMAL HOUSE or other popular films. In fact, they ran out of money.

The play ran for less than a month, if I remember correctly. It was eventually chosen for the year-end lists of a lot of critics. TIME magazine, for example, named it one of the best plays of that year. But too late, it had already folded. The producers were long gone, and it had gotten the attention necessary to make Hollywood producers fly to New York to check it out only after it closed. So Karen never got the full benefit of what to me will always be one of the greatest stage performances I have ever seen.

Yes, she had success in the movies, more so than many actors, but very few got to know how big her talent is and what she might have achieved if given the kinds of roles that went to other award-winning actresses.

A couple of years ago at The Tribeca Film festival, I saw her do what may be her best work in a film, playing the role of an alcoholic, aging, Southern-belle, ex-beauty-queen-trophy-wife to a U. S. Senator whose son is “gay” but has to stay closeted so as not to embarrass the senator. The film still hasn’t found distribution, so few will ever see that achievement either. But the audience I watched it with couldn't keep themselves from appluading her scenes, as the movie was still playing, she was so fucking good!

And this is the case of someone who made it to the top in her profession in other ways. My point is, what about the many who never even got that far, who created miracles in their own performances or writing or artwork or music that never got beyond the local coffee house or gallery or community theater or bar. I know, that’s life, which unfortunately is still “unfair”, I’m not denying that, just lamenting all the great work that just disappears without a trace, while often much more mediocre work gets recognized as more than it is and becomes a fixture in the firmament of popular or high art culture, even if only for awhile.