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Monthly Archives: May 2011
The Editors – The Hearts of Men (Who Run the World)
Considering the reputation and self-presentation of the IMF’s Dominique Strauss-Kahn, we work hard to resist the thought that he sure *looks* guilty enough. The former governor of California, Terminator, Kindergarten Cop, et cetera, et cetera, at least spares us the personal trial of deciding how guilty we presume him to be as we debate the significance to our public and private lives of what these men did, and what men, quite generally, do.
History was unkind to both in meaningful ways. An ordinary economy would have allowed the governor to impress friends and enemies alike with his honest and earnest firmness, and belief in a smaller and more sensible government (if not, alas, a smaller and more sensible governor). He’d have been a good counterweight to the unions and other organized interests in the state, had things been more or less as they’d been before. But there were no good options post 2008, and California was filled as much as any other state and more than many with the long-lingering effects of poor personal financial decisions, malicious banks, and sleepy regulators.
Strauss-Kahn, remarkably, was considered quite brilliant at his job even in the face of global financial disaster. Hard to know why on the merits, but his job was certainly one of the few at which one cannot – short of assaulting the maid – fail. He directed considerable lending of other people’s money generally without collateral, on the principle that economic ideas ought to drive the global economy. Hard to do that too terribly wrong, unless one tries too hard, and Strauss-Kahn has a reputation for many excesses but not for excess of effort at the central work of his day job, for which the world really ought to be grateful.
Are there lessons from the travails of these men? Not many that might regard the governing of states or global ubernational banks, but perhaps a lesson here or there about the folly of all men’s work, and, just at the level of a whisper, the false hope for perfection. None of us, it turns out, are that much better than others, and that ought to limit our hopes not only in the habits of men, but in the workings of institutions that might at times seek to save our souls, or our accounts.
Randall Bloom – Poem (“Over”)
Never a good thought to
conclude
that the thing itself – the constellation
of time and place, of apprehension
and – to say it simply, of hope –
is lost.
Aspiration may be the point,
or merely the hint of
direction, but it stays
close
and the few words
we build our public places,
we set stone,
upon, still sit square
and express some
centered
notion of
common
creation
that
demands
regard
Benjamin Franklin – Letter (To Thomas Paine)
TO THOMAS PAINE.
[Date uncertain.]
DEAR SIR,
I have read your manuscript with some attention. By the argument it contains against a particular Providence, though you allow a general Providence, you strike at the foundations of all religion. For without the belief of a Providence, that takes cognizance of, guards, and guides, and may favor particular persons, there is no motive to worship a Deity, to fear his displeasure, or to pray for his protection. I will not enter into any discussion of your principles, though you seem to desire it. At present I shall only give you my opinion, that, though your reasonings are subtile and may prevail with some readers, you will not succeed so as to change the general sentiments of mankind on that subject, and the consequence of printing this piece will be, a great deal of odium drawn upon yourself, mischief to you, and no benefit to others. He that spits against the wind, spits in his own face.
But, were you to succeed, do you imagine any good would be done by it? You yourself may find it easy to live a virtuous life, without the assistance afforded by religion; you having a clear perception of the advantages of virtue, and the disadvantages of vice, and possessing a strength of resolution sufficient to enable you to resist common temptations. But think how great a portion of mankind consists of weak and ignorant men and women, and of inexperienced, inconsiderate youth of both sexes, who have need of the motives of religion to restrain them from vice, to support their virtue, and retain them in the practice of it till it becomes habitual, which is the great point for its security. And perhaps you are indebted to her originally, that is, to your religious education, for the habits of virtue upon which you now justly value yourself. You might easily display your excellent talents of reasoning upon a less hazardous subject, and thereby obtain a rank with our most distinguished authors. For among us it is not necessary, as among the Hottentots, that a youth, to be raised into the company of men, should prove his manhood by beating his mother.
I would advise you, therefore, not to attempt unchaining the tiger, but to burn this piece before it is seen by any other person; whereby you will save yourself a great deal of mortification by the enemies it may raise against you, and perhaps a good deal of regret and repentance. If men are so wicked with religion, what would they be if without it. I intend this letter itself as a proof of my friendship, and therefore add no professions to it; but subscribe simply yours,
B. Franklin
The Editors: The Healing Progress of Nothing Dramatic
The world is still with us, or so the observable evidence suggests, with this Saturday’s predicted Armageddon either delayed, canceled, or merely imagined all along.
And Donald Trump is no longer talking about President Obama’s lack of a valid, stamped, sealed U.S. birth certificate, one having been recently issued to the public by the state of Hawai’i.
And already, a number of presumed and hoped-for presidential candidates are dropping by the wayside, more often than not because the fringe hatreds that can gather a few thousand fierce supporters, enough to draw a crowd during the pre-game, remain unwanted by the broad sweep of Americans.
Less and less seems to be happening for the moment, and we are all so clearly better off for it.
Charles Olson – Poem (“Maximus to Gloucester, Letter 27 [withheld]”)
I come back to the geography of it,
the land falling off to the left
where my father shot his scabby golf
and the rest of us played baseball
into the summer darkness until no flies
could be seen and we came home
to our various piazzas where the women
buzzed
To the left the land fell to the city,
to the right, it fell to the sea
I was so young my first memory
is of a tent spread to feed lobsters
to Rexall conventioneers, and my father,
a man for kicks, came out of the tent roaring
with a bread-knife in his teeth to take care of
the druggist they’d told him had made a pass at
my mother, she laughing, so sure, as round
as her face, Hines pink and apple,
under one of those frame hats women then
This, is no bare incoming
of novel abstract form, this
is no welter or the forms
of those events, this,
Greeks, is the stopping
of the battle
It is the imposing
of all those antecedent predecessions, the precessions
of me, the generation of those facts
which are my words, it is coming
from all that I no longer am, yet am,
the slow westward motion of
more than I am
There is no strict personal order
for my inheritance.
No Greek will be able
to discriminate my body.
An American
is a complex of occasions,
themselves a geometry
of spatial nature.
I have this sense,
that I am one
with my skin
Plus this—plus this:
that forever the geography
which leans in
on me I compell
backwards I compell Gloucester
to yield, to
change
Polis
is this
The Editors – Pre-Mature, Again. . .
There was a moment in the early days of the Second World War when American veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (that ragtag assembly of American communists and socialists best understood through George Orwell’s HOMAGE TO CATALONIA) itching to fight against Hitler and his proxies once again, found that many of their U.S. Army files were stamped with three mysterious initials: PAF.
Eventually it became clear. PAF meant “Pre-Mature Anti-Fascist.” Which begs the question of whether it is ever the right moment to *be* a fascist, or a wrong moment to be against one. Could one be a pre-mature anti-child-molester, for example? Or a pre-mature opponent of human slavery?
Clearly not. And so we wonder how our ally Pakistan sheltered the nation’s nemesis without our notice. Or how the Northern Alliance once fought *with* the Soviets, but then turned *against* the Taliban and became our nation’s new old friends. And all this says nothing about those perfectly-on-time anti-communists in Central America once called “the moral equivalent of our founding fathers,” by a man, later president, who went from leftish union activist to corporate song-and-dance man to the Great Republican Hope in the course of a relatively few years.
Do these contradictions matter? Yes, we think they do.
We need to see more evidence that our nation believes in some consistent human ideals, and will act on them with some consistency over time.
We wish to believe that we stand for something that is neither fashionable nor perishable like a quart of milk. Something it is never too early nor too late to believe in – and, perhaps, in the darkest moments, to fight for.
The.American.Word. 