At 9:58 PM -0500 20/12/2001, Joseph Duemer wrote:
>The catastrophe (not tragedy) [I trust literary folk will be able to parse
>this distinction] of 9/11 has ceased to be an event & has become a pretext
>for various textual manipulations. Which have precious little to do with
>poetry. Perhaps this is the way history gets written, but it makes me sick
>at heart. I'm hopelessly passé in this, but I'm with Wordsworth: poetry is
>more philosophical than history.
Not merely textual manipulations, Joseph, as I know you're aware.
Behind the words are real actions, which affect thousands, millions
of people, including us.
What is or is not to do with poetry will forever be a contested area
- but I have to say that I simply can't believe that these things
have _nothing_ to do with poetry. Muriel Rukeyser, Blaise Cendrars,
would say they have everything to do with it. Even if these
discussions, (or what I hope are discussions) are, in the end, merely
a question of outlining those psychic bars we have to dissolve in
order to write it, as David was hinting when he posted his own poem.
At 11:31 PM -0500 20/12/2001, Michael Snider wrote:
> > Even if the numbers in the piece of "journalism" you quoted are true,
>> there's an enormous difference between deliberately killing innocent
>> people and killing equally innocent people despite real efforts, however
>> inadequate in practice, to avoid those deaths. The first is murder. The
>> second, whether or not Allied policy in Afghanistan is justifiable, is
>> NOT murder. The people of Afghanistan have no trouble seeing the
>> distinction -- why can't you?
The people of Afghanistan have, in fact, enormous difficulty seeing
the difference: which is why a bunch of Afghan villagers recently
beat up Robert Fisk, the most informed and fairest reporter there and
the only one who's been inside Taliban territory and not reporting
from the relative safety of Kabul. Try reading something outside the
US press for a change, because, as has been widely reported, they
have all agreed that publishing figures on civilian deaths in
Afghanistan might be deemed "unpatriotic".
The journalism you refer to was carefully sourced and the figures
worked out by that US academic were conservative and based on UN, aid
agency and other verifiable deaths. It was in the Guardian, not the
News of the World, as Candice intimated, and wasn't even the article
she was sneering at. Now, if you think the Pentagon and the US
Government are totally reliable sources of information and that they
are totally committed to justice, a view which seems not to be borne
out by their conduct for the past thirty years, I'll leave you to
contemplate your happy world. Not even my own fantasy worlds are
that unrealistic.
A
--
Alison Croggon
Home page
http://www.users.bigpond.com/acroggon/
Masthead
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