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
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