The fact that the poor were once slaves, etc., also resulted from
war. "War" has no function, good or evil, but individual wars do. My
argument about this one is not just my distaste for the appeal to and
validation of the basest of human feeling on the part of the administration
(yup, I'm an elitist, no problem there), and its use to attack much of what
I value at home, but precisely because in this case I think we're in the
process of generating the worse, in a large part of the world and for a
long time to come, by fighting the bad.
This morning I got a note from a Mexican poet. He's to read with me in SF
on April 10th. Here's what he said: "I'm going to tell you what I'm really
thinking. I will fullfil my committment to read, of course, but this makes
no sense to me. Your country is behaving like the nazis, there's no sense
about doing 'poetry' right now in the U.S." I think he's wrong in his
conclusion, and his "behaving like nazis" is overstated. But what's
important is that I'm getting this from a lot of people in Mexico who are
deeply involved with and knowledgeable about US culture and by no means
apologists for their own or for tghat matter Iraq's.
Mark
>The fact that the poor are citizens rather than slaves, serfs, or rabble
>resulted from war. The fact that they are cared for at all instead of
>being left to starve resulted from wars their predecessors fought
>against their rulers. If they want more than dehydrated cheese, they
>will, again, have to fight for it. Alan Sillitoe, a working-class Brit
>writer I loved in my youth, once said that guns are the language of
>history. It's a language the sentimental pride themselves on not
>learning.
>
>"Politics means making use of the bad to fight the worse. This
>recognition will never be comfortable, or even possible, for people
>who pride themselves on their virtue, not their effectiveness."
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