Doug,

I'd utterly agree about the existence of the dissident refuges within the
US - it is big country, after all, with a lot of room for alternatives
within. But, as you say yourself, there is a switch going on, and that
'great tradition' of free speech is being undermined, and very slowly,
insidiously, its intellectual elite are co-operating with this. After all,
tenureships are at stake. Its noticeable on poetry lists how right-wing US
fundamentalists are very slowly becoming legitimate, a bit at a time, over
here one cannot but be aware of the collapse of articulate opposition in
most quarters. The Guardian or the Daily Mirror wakes up sometimes, but
inexorably they're being drawn into the web. One of the most telling signs
to me was that appalling post that Frederick Pollack forwarded recently, one
which was signposted on other lists, where in effect Australians were
threatened for being disloyal, never mind that Australia has just elected
John Howard for a third term, but we seem to be entering a moral and
political climate where ANY dissent is viewed as treachery.

Here we have a Labour Government that has effectively disowned the entire
century-long tradition of the Labour movement. While US (and probably
British) planes have clearly committed mass bombings of civilians in Kandhar
and that's ok, an occasion for 'Up Yours Osama' type of headlines and pious
poems by our Poet Laureate. Maybe John Ashbery could write something
facetitious about it or Marjorie Perloff could advise the survivors to read
'Under Western Eyes' or the collective wits of LangPo could say nothing at
all or Kent Johnson could assume another identity or somebody else could win
the SuperBowl or Cuba could be liberated for the Mob again or the ghost of
Richard Nixon could say 'I was under medication at the time'.

Failing that, I'm sure Billy Collins has a nice little poem ready, like a
cherry pie.

Best

Dave



Best

Dave


David Bircumshaw

Leicester, England

Home Page

A Chide's Alphabet

Painting Without Numbers

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----- Original Message -----
From: "Douglas Barbour" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, December 09, 2001 12:07 AM
Subject: Re: Fwd: Re: opinion


> David
>
>  this is all too familiar, alaas, now, although the detention and all is
> *only* directed against those suspected of being 'terrorists' (& we all
> know that they won't make any mistakes about that!)
>
> >
> >here detention without trial is being legalised, as is interception of
all
> >private e-mail, while the tv (just) was showing a programme that
portrayed
> >Britain (of all places) as being beset by armed criminals. For this
reason,
> >the show opined, soon we will have to become like America, with the
police
> >routinely armed. People I talk to, day to day, are swinging further and
> >further to the right. It's all the immigrants' fault, they think (people
in
> >Leicester are apt to go on strange diatribes against Somalis, as urban
myth
> >has established hereabouts that armies of Somalians are being pampered by
> >the state, they get free tv's, cookers, suites, carpets, I'm told) Myself
> >I've never seen a Leicester Somali, but the tale is peddled.
> >
> >But I think the key-point is the US, a country that supposedly prides
itself
> >on its democratic traditions but in reality is totally corrupt, in its
arts
> >and letters as well as its social organisation, it is poisoned and it
wants
> >its poison everywhere else too, by the standards of some of the
right-wing
> >rhetoric that comes out the States (which rhetoric has some very strange
> >bedfellows) even the social critiques of The Simpsons would be a
subversive
> >act if committed in poetry.
>
> BUT:
>
> I dont fully agree that its arts and letters are so poisoned. In fact, it
> is in those places that I place my faint hopes. The poets I know (&,
> interestingly, also the SF people I know) there are almost all concerned,
> have a complex response, & are very worried about the way their government
> has responded. Some are writing about that. The other thing, & the reason
I
> could not support those who said that maybe bin Laden had a point, however
> much American foreign policy has gone wrong, is corrupt, etc, is that the
> US ideal of democracy, freedom, and openness to the future, is a great
> ideal, and one I would hold up against all forms of theocracy, etc. Sad,
> indeed, then that so many USamericans (a usage of George Bowering's to
> remind all that there are many other Americans -- canadians for example )
> seem to be turning aweay from the great freedom of state from church to be
> found in their constitution.
>
> Doug
>
> Douglas Barbour
> Department of English
> University of Alberta
> Edmonton Alberta Canada T6G 2E5
> (h) [780] 436 3320      (b) [780] 492 0521
> http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm
>
>         I put the difficulty down to god
>         Who failed to be unambiguous in such matters
>
>                         Eli Mandel
>