It is fascinating and heartwarming to see how much protest is coming from all quarters (and how much of the reporting on it I pick up from the British press). Thanks to listmember Rick Ingrasci for this. “Anti-war poets force scrapping of White House symposium” The Guardian January 30, 2003 The White House yesterday confirmed that it had cancelled a poetry symposium after a number of American poets threatened to turn the event into an anti-war protest. The February 12 symposium on Poetry and the American Voice, which was meant to focus on the works of Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes and Walt Whitman, was one of a number of literary gatherings organised by the first lady, Laura Bush. When Washington-based poet Sam Hamill received an invitation to the event, he said he was “overcome by a kind of nausea” and refused to attend. Then he decided to email fellow poets, asking them to compose anti-war works and urging anyone attending the symposium to read works of protest. Explaining the cancellation, Noelia Rodriguez, a spokeswoman for Mrs Bush, said: “While Mrs Bush respects the right of all Americans to express their opinions, she, too, has opinions, and believes it would be inappropriate to turn a literary event into a political forum.” A former librarian, the first lady has made teaching and early childhood development her signature issues. Her series of White House symposiums to salute America's authors have been lively affairs, featuring discussions about literature and its impact on society. No future date for the poetry event has been announced. Mr Hamill, a co-founder of Copper Canyon Press, set up a website in a bid to turn February 12 into Poetry Against the War day. He said that he had received poems or personal statements from more than 2,000 poets during the last week, and plans to present an anthology of the poems to the White House. In an open letter on the site, Mr Hamill explained: “I believe the only legitimate response to such a morally bankrupt and unconscionable idea is to reconstitute a Poets Against the War movement like the one organised to speak out against the war in Vietnam.” Contributors have included WS Merwin, Galway Kinnell, Ursula K Le Guin, Adrienne Rich and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. “I'm putting in 18-hour days. I'm 60 and I'm tired, but it's pretty wonderful,” said Mr Hamill. Marilyn Nelson, Connecticut's poet laureate, said that she had accepted the White House invitation, and had planned to wear a specially-commissioned silk scarf with peace signs. “I had decided to go because I felt my presence would promote peace,” she said. Mr Hamill's more forthright form of protest, however, may have tipped the balance for White House planners. He told the Seattle Times: “What idiot thought Sam Hamill would be a good candidate for Laura Bush's tea party? Someone's going to get fired over this.” His is not the only protest in verse. Canadian poet Todd Swift took only one week to compile an ebook, 100 Poets Against the War, which he released on Monday to mark the report by weapons inspectors to the UN Security Council. “We're trying to create something that is like the Vietnam war protest,” said Mr Swift, speaking from his home in Paris. He said he was amazed by how quickly the collection had spread around the world. “About 25 of the poets in the collection are from the UK or Ireland, and we are adding John Kinsella and a few others this weekend to the revised version, which will be released next Monday to meet Mr Blair on his return from Bush's ranch,” he added. Contributors to the ebook include George Murray, Ethan Gilsdorf and Maggie Helwig.
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John Pilger after State of the Union speech
What expression can I make that delivers my sentiments about last night's Bush speech? Let me count the ways. The Internet is crackling today with eloquence, and I've honed in on one of my current favorites, John Pilger, also a favorite of listmember Wade Frazier (himself another of my favorites). Wade sent this today:
“Here is the first great response I have seen to Bush's little talk last night, and it fittingly came from John Pilger, one of my favorites. He shows how Tony Blair is playing Mussolini to Bush's Hitler. It is not wild rhetoric, for the current plans for Iraq are exactly the greatest crimes the German leaders were prosecuted for at the Nuremberg trials.”
Here are some quotes:
Waves of B52 bombers will be used in the attack on Iraq. In Vietnam, where more than a million people were killed in the American invasion of the 1960s, I once watched three ladders of bombs curve in the sky, falling from B52s flying in formation, unseen above the clouds. They dropped about 70 tons of explosives that day in what was known as the “long box” pattern, the military term for carpet bombing. Everything inside a “box” was presumed destroyed.
When I reached a village within the “box”, the street had been replaced by a crater. I slipped on the severed shank of a buffalo and fell hard into a ditch filled with pieces of limbs and the intact bodies of children thrown into the air by the blast. The children's skin had folded back, like parchment, revealing veins and burnt flesh that seeped blood, while the eyes, intact, stared straight ahead. A small leg had been so contorted by the blast that the foot seemed to be growing from a shoulder. I vomited.
I am being purposely graphic. This is what I saw, and often; yet even in that “media war” I never saw images of these grotesque sights on television or in the pages of a newspaper…
I was starkly reminded of the children of Vietnam when I traveled in Iraq two years ago. A paediatrician showed me hospital wards of children similarly deformed: a phenomenon unheard of prior to the Gulf war in 1991. She kept a photo album of those who had died, their smiles undimmed on grey little faces. Now and then she would turn away and wipe her eyes. More than 300 tons of depleted uranium, another weapon of mass destruction, were fired by American aircraft and tanks and possibly by the British. Many of the rounds were solid uranium which, inhaled or ingested, causes cancer. In a country where dust carries everything, swirling through markets and playgrounds, children are especially vulnerable. For 12 years Iraq has been denied specialist equipment that would allow its engineers to decontaminate its southern battlefields. It has also been denied equipment and drugs that would identify and treat the cancer which, it is estimated, will affect almost half the population in the south…
Let us be clear about what the Bush-Blair attack will do to our fellow human beings in a country already stricken by an embargo run by America and Britain and aimed not at Saddam Hussein but at the civilian population, who are denied even vaccines for the children. Last week the Pentagon in Washington announced matter of factly that it intended to shatter Iraq “physically, emotionally and psychologically” by raining down on its people 800 cruise missiles in two days. This will be more than twice the number of missiles launched during the entire 40 days of the 1991 Gulf War.
A military strategist named Harlan Ullman told American television: “There will not be a safe place in Baghdad. The sheer size of this has never been seen before, never been contemplated before.” The strategy is known as Shock and Awe and Ullman is apparently its proud inventor. He said: “You have this simultaneous effect, rather like the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima, not taking days or weeks but minutes.”
What will his “Hiroshima effect” actually do to a population of whom almost half are children under the age of 14? The answer is to be found in a “confidential” UN document, based on World Health Organisation estimates, which says that “as many as 500,000 people could require treatment as a result of direct and indirect injuries”. A Bush-Blair attack will destroy “a functioning primary health care system” and deny clean water to 39 per cent of the population. There is “likely [to be] an outbreak of diseases in epidemic if not pandemic proportions”…
“Endless war” is Vice-President Cheney's contribution to our understanding. Bush has said he will use nuclear weapons “if necessary”. on March 26 last Geoffrey Hoon said that other countries “can be absolutely confident that in the right conditions we would be willing to use our nuclear weapons”. Such madness is the true enemy.
MEDIA LENS expose continues — and see how hot a response they get from “us” writing great letters
I gravitate these days towards what MEDIA LENS sends out for how incredibly good they are at making sense of these times, where they are astute at seeing beyond the water we're swimming in. (As the student fish said to the philosopher fish, “Water, what water?”) They keep calling the media on their ostensibly objective portrayals, which in fact support the idea of war.
Their email of January 17 is “GUEST MEDIA ALERT: A LETTER SENT BY GRANT WAKEFIELD TO JOURNALISTS.” It's written by someone who's outraged by media coverage of Iraq. It was written in response to Media Alert urging letter-writing to media outlets. (There's a GREAT story about a result another one of those letters got — see “MEDIA LENS Really Sees, a previous post I made, and after you read my comment click through from there to the MEDIA LENS site to read the piece.) In their intro to Grant's letter, which is a piece in itself that's worth a read, they comment on our new find of undeclared weaponry in Iraq that could be the excuse for our war, citing some misleading reporting on British TV:
Current levels of public dissent are all the more remarkable when we consider the extent to which the public has been remorselessly bombarded by government and media propaganda suggesting that terrorism is threatening us on every side, with implicit and explicit links being made to these 'threats' and Iraq. The clash between political/corporate media propaganda on the one hand, and public common sense on the other, was revealed again in the latest ITN report in which anchor Nicholas Owen declared:
“The drumbeats of war do seem to be getting louder and louder. So what might be the countdown to conflict?” (Nicholas Owen, ITV Lunchtime News, January 17, 2003)
True enough, the drumbeats +are+ getting louder, but the drummers include corporate media employees like Owen and his colleagues, who saw fit to declare war inevitable one month ago.
…Owen interviewed Air Vice Marshall Tony Mason. Did the 11 empty shells found in an Iraqi bunker constitute a “smoking gun”, Owen asked. The Air Vice Marshall replied that we had first to be sure about what the shells actually contained, adding:
“The real smoking gun of course would be if one of those shells was still found to contain a chemical mixture.”
In other words, a massive attack by 200,000 troops against a country of 26 million impoverished people sitting on 200 billion barrels of oil would be justified by the discovery of one 122mm artillery shell with a range of 4 miles – this one shell, presumably, constituting a weapon of mass destruction and therefore a breach of UN Resolution 1441. Air Vice Marshall
Mason then proceeded to clarify what this one shell might mean for the people of Iraq:
“I would expect the air campaign to be very intense, but this time not concentrated so much on Baghdad but on deployed forces all over the country. Previously of course, as you know, we were concentrating in the southern area around Kuwait; now we've got to go after troops across the entire country.”
The sexy phrasal verb 'go after' (other favourites include 'take out' and 'take down') refers of course to the blasting, lacerating, puncturing, dismembering and incinerating to death of “troops across the entire country” – troops who are often conscripts, but who are anyway compelled to fight by a dictatorial regime. These are troops without air cover who are therefore completely defenceless against air attack. Other terms for Mason's “air campaign” are 'massacre' and 'turkey shoot'.
