Frank Parker wrote:
>I read through the article and what got my attention was the mass of
>footnotes at the end. Suddenly I was transported to the 1960's when
>diatribes published by the ultra-rightwing John Birch Society had pages of
>footnotes that sometimes outnumbered the pages of the article they
>supported. Somehow the sheer volume of footnotes were supposed to legitimize
>the argument of the article. Nonsense, of course.
>
>
How to describe this? I have heard enough talk radio in the last
several years so phenomena of the Campus Watch type no longer surprise
me. What really disturbs is when a moron like Ward Churchill poisons
everything for everyone else: the right wing media gets the opportunity
to verbally masturbate into ecstatic swoons over this imbecile and his
comparison of people who died in the Trade Center to a bunch of little
Eichmanns, the idea that the WTC was a legitimate target, etc.
Churchill becomes everything that is wrong with the academic left. I
don't remember even Edward Said catching this kind of hell, but then
again, Said was a smart man, not a jerk.
> "But his work has become the focus of like-minded leftist
>writers...who also use their poetry as politics, rather than art."
>
>Right. We're supposed to remember art has nothing to do with politics, that
>the two are mutually exclusive. I mean, the author of the article knows
>that, why don't we?
>
>
Like I said...the right grabs onto Churchill, thence onto those
dangerous beings, poets. I don't know where the rest of you are, but I
am HERE. It's New Jersey. I live in the same state as Baraka and
Ostriker. Boy are they dangerous. If it happens in New Jersey--like
the abolition of the Poet Laureate spot or the public censure of a radio
"shock jock"--you can bet your rear end it is politically inspired and
that the people who are making the most noise are the ones being paid by
some special interest group to say it. I think very, very little of
Amiri Baraka--to me he joined the Black equivalent of a White Citizens'
Council sometime around 1964--but it's Baraka as symbol that is
critical, not his stupid comments about white people. "Someone Blew Up
America" is a bit too close to truth, perhaps, and it's being used by
the people bankrolling Daniel Pipes' dirty little group. Now, what is
Alicia Ostriker's crime? Being anti-war? Being anti-Zionist? Being a
Jewish woman who won't wear a sheitl, perhaps?
>I don't like being pushed from the right or the left. Anyone yelling,
>"You're a poet so you should..." can fuck off in my book.
>
>
Oh, I agree. But we are also all in danger. I used to be a "fellow
traveller" of the Progressive Labor Party back in the late 1960s, and
that left me with a mistrust of leftists and surely as I mistrust the
right wing. Both groups would take me outside and put a slug in the
back of my head in half a second. Yours too. I am scared by true
believers whose God is on the earth.
Ken
--
Kenneth Wolman
Proposal Development Department
Room SW334
Sarnoff Corporation
609-734-2538
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