POEM: Nemesis, new girl in the neighborhood
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- Written by Fran Lucientes
Brookline, MA, poet John Shreffler dedicated to historian Chalmers Johnson this poem about an American avatar of the Greek goddess Nemesis.[1] -- Johnson inspired Shreffler's poem by his evocation of Nemesis in the closing pages of his 2004 volume, entitled The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (Metropolitan Books): "Failing such reform [of Congress], Nemesis, the goddess of retribution and vengeance, the punisher of pride and hubris, waits impatiently for her meeting with us" (p. 312). -- Johnson has named a new, even more dire volume Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (Metropolitan Books, 2007). -- UFPPC's book group Digging Deeper will take up Johnson's new book and three others related to the theme of democracy vs. empire at 7:00 p.m on Mon. evening, Apr. 9, at the Mandolin Café (3923 S. 12th St., Tacoma, WA), and continue the discussion on three following Mondays....
SPEECH: Mark Rudd warns left to 'stay away from violence or any talk of violence'
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- Written by Hank Berger
In the first part of his speech to the first national MDS meeting in New York on Feb. 17, Mark Rudd offered rueful and timely reflections on his role in what he called an "historical crime" — the 1969 decision to "kill off SDS because it wasn't revolutionary enough for us."[1] -- Rudd is now an advocate of "total nonviolence" on "solely" practical grounds. -- He expresses regret for and warns against a repetition of the "hyper-militancy and armed struggle line created a deep division which weakened the larger anti-war movement and demoralized many good people." -- What happened in the 1960s, he believes, was "totally unnecessary." -- "[P]olitical violence in any form can never be understood in this society," he said. -- "So the greatest lesson I draw from my disastrous history is the left must absolutely stay away from violence or any talk of violence. The government is violent, we oppose their violence." -- Rudd fears the same error may be about to repeat itself. -- "To this day anarchist groups defend their right to commit property destruction, as if the morality of this form of self-expression (which, by the way, I don’t dispute) trumps the political damage. Last week I picked up a zine produced by an SDS chapter and there it was again: an argument for property destruction based on the apparently moral principle that it’s legitimate to use a small amount of violence to stop a larger violence. The writer even intelligently tells an old parable about the Buddha killing a really bad guy to prove her point. However, this timeless argument, which I myself used uncounted times back in 1969, includes no recognition of the practical reality that any sort of violence stemming from the left — or talk of violence — is guaranteed to get us isolated and smashed." -- "This is a long struggle and the repression will only get more intense. So let’s not play into the hands of the enemy." -- Parts II and III of Rudd's speech offer practical suggestions and advice about the way ahead....
COMMENTARY: 'Because we have feelings, our moral perfections remain intact'
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- Written by Hank Berger
In his monthly column in the March 2007 Harper's Magazine, Lewis Lapham surveyed the "big-ticket movies storming the objective of an Academy Award" and noticed the extent to which they "play to America's fear of losing its way in the world." -- One useful theme that runs through the films is that redemption is still available to the morally corrupt. -- But a "stronger line of film appreciation accords with the geopolitical thinking of President George W. Bush, also with the enthusiasms of the Washington warrior intellectuals who continue to hold fast, despite the results of last November's election, to the neoconservative doctrines of forward deterrence and preemptive strike." -- This teaches the lesson: "Behold the world for what it is, a raging of beasts and a writhing of serpents. Get used to it; harden thy resolve; defend the homeland against the deadly imports of unlicensed evil. Know that the war on terror will be with us for the next forty years and that the way forward, in Iraq as in 'Apocalypto' and 'Children of Men,' is through the splashing of blood and the trampling out of the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored." -- And there is consolation: "Yes, maybe it's true that America is busy at the task of devouring the earth, our global financial markets blind to the wretchedness of the naked and undernourished poor, deaf to the cries of drowning polar bears, but all is not lost. We might know that America is doing things that good people shouldn't be doing, but because we feel bad about it, sorry for the luckless victims of unfortunate circumstance, we haven't been robbed of our humanity. We have feelings, feelings as innocent and fine as the ones worn on the sleeves of this year's Democratic presidential candidates, and because we have feelings, our moral perfections remain intact, and our conscience, like the flag at old Fort McHenry, is still there." -- Lapham judges that these films' common themes embody "the images of disaster [that] confirm the presence of a monstrous enemy in opposition to whom or what or which America can define itself both as the Old Testament Father in Heaven and the New Testament Son on the Cross. Both interpretations assume that we're the world's designated good guys, released from the prison of history and therefore free to imagine that our era will never pass, that our day will never die. The delusion constitutes the necessary instrument of power than no self-respecting military empire can afford to be without." ...