A few weeks ago, while - like many others, I was enthralled, appalled, and otherwise apoplectic concerning the capitulations of Congress on the FISA issue, enraged and perplexed by the appearance in the NY Times Op-Ed page of the Pollack/O’Hanlon piece, obviously named by the Minister of Propaganda, A War We Just Might Win, and the confounding rhetoric of Democrats joining in the mantra of "the surge is working", while following the stories of death and destruction, including the single most deadly attack by factions of the insurgency; Aug. 15, 2007: a coordinated suicide attack on Tuesday, in the town of Qahataniya, 120 kilometers (75 miles) west of Mosul, Iraq; and the collapsed infra-structure of the political, physical, and theoretical reality of Iraq - I came upon an article about how the poet, Charles Simic, had been named U. S. Poet Laureate.
For a long time I have admired the sardonic, seemingly simple constructions of Simic’s poems, which always leave an evocative image. In an issue or two ago of The New Yorker, I came across a new poem of his and, after a few readings, it became part of my consciousness. The poem is entitled, Driving Home. The first stanza follows:
Minister of our coming doom, preaching
On the car radio, how right
Your Hell and damnation sound to me
As I travel these small, bleak roads
Thinking of the mailman’s son
The Army sent back in a sealed coffin.
The second stanza, and thus the entire poem, can be read here.
I had just been reading the amazing and well known poem by Wilfred Owen, Dulce Et Decorum Est, (if you've never read the poem, please follow the link) and was touched by the juxtaposition. The title of Owen’s poem comes from an ode by Horace, Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori (It is sweet and right to die for one's country.) The poem graphically deconstructs that notion with scenes of horror from a WWI battlefield, replete with images of dying from poison gas (...If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,...), and is made even more poignant knowing that the poet fought and died in the same war.
Today I came across three articles, or four depending on how one attributes the allusions, that formed a political fugue of sorts. I will recommend them in the order that I read them:
• Bush to CIA: 'Leave No Marks', by Nat Hentoff in the Village Voice
• The Problem Isn’t Mr. Maliki, today’s New York Times Editorial.
• How our seedy, corrupt Washington establishment operates, in Salon by Glenn Greenwald.
Okay, the Greenwald article references other articles at CNN.com, ABC News, et al. Alas, the themes, countersubjects, expositions, pedal points, and other fugal aspects began with the aforementioned three.
I could begin a disquisition on the articles and the complexities of their implications, but the authors have all hit their notes perfectly, and developed their themes in a contrapuntal exposition of truth.
I should also point out that important and similarly complex variations upon a theme have appeared in the diaries here today: <bold>American Madness</bold>, by One Pissed Off Liberal is a prime example. Listen to the themes of incredulity, outrage, confusion, angst, malaise, hair-pulling exasperation...
After you’ve read the poems and the articles, and let the words roll and roil, add your voice in the contrapuntal opposition to this insanity that must be stopped.