8th Blogiversary + Iraq War's 10th Anniversary

Donald Rumsfeld, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney
(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

I didn't start blogging until 2005; last month marked my 8th J's Theater blogiversary (I usually am deep in the vortex of teaching when the date rolls around, so I always end up missing it, but I will post a poem by Jay Wright, the subject of my first post, this week.)  In the run-up to the horrendous Iraq War, however, I expended screens of email, countless posts on various sites I belonged to, and time and energy attending and participating marches against what was, clear enough to me, a looming disaster. It was not just the architects behind it--George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Karl Rove, Richard Perle, Ahmad Chalabi,  Colin Powell, everyone involved with the Project for a New American Center and everyone clustered like a nauseating cloud around them--but the timorous and complicit US Congress, including all of the Democrats who cravenly or fearfully fell in line, as well as the still intellectually and ethically bankrupt, compliant, duplicitous US mainstream media and commentariat, all of them who cheerled this neoconservative debacle, from Andrew Sullivan and Peter Beinart to Thomas Friedman and Judy Miller, all of them, who enabled this catastrophe whose immediate effects, 4,000+ US and coalition troops dead, many thousands wounded and suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead or injured, sectarian lines more sharply drawn than when Saddam Hussein was in power and the decimation of Iraq's minority populations, including Christian Iraqis, trillions of US and Iraqi dollars flushed into the pockets of the military industrial complex, and the destabilization of the entire region (and consequent empowerment, of all countries, Iran!). That is to say, they have blood and lives on their hands, their souls.

What was clear back in 1999 and 2000, that George Walker Bush would be the worst president in my lifetime--I continue to believe that despite several nadirs in American leadership over the last two centuries (Franklin Pierce, Millard Fillmore, James Buchanan, Rutherford Hayes, Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon, etc.), W Bush will never be matched again if at least 50% of the voting population is even moderately sane--and would lead the country into certain disaster, the nature of which were not yet known then but the certainty of which was as clear as the candidate's stumbling, hazy answers and demonstrably phony cowboy persona, as well as by the toxic political and economic records of the people gathered round him, took material form from the day he assumed office, after the Supreme Court's judicial coup. But even with the California electric blackouts and the Enron collapse and of course, the sort of horrific incident and its aftermath that would have sunk many a presidency, the September 11, 2001 attacks by Al Qaeda, not even I could have imagined that Bush would, on the flimsiest of pretenses, con the Congress, the media, and millions of Americans, into the Iraq War. But he and his gang did. His and his associates' neoconservative, libertarian-laissez-faire fantasies, which included pimping out the US military to get ahold of that "sea of oil," as Wolfowitz once put it, and imposing their failed Randian policies on the new, juy-rigged state they created, predictably turned out badly. Very badly. Very, very badly. Criminally, and criminally badly. But that not of single of one these criminals has served time in jail or even been tried for war crimes speaks volumes to how rotten to the core our political system and media are. That any of the war-cheering pundits, like Friedman or David Brooks, both of whom still pontificate from their perches at The New York Times, also were not cast into the void of silence in the face of repeated critical failure, also is a dead mark on our society.

Tom Friedman's infamous "Suck on This" commentary about Iraq

In part because of all of the great blogs and sites that preceded and then swung into action in criticizing the rush to war, and its inept and corrupt prosecution, or the ones that emerged in the war's run up and wake, I initially vowed that I would not focus on politics, except indirectly, and for the most part, especially during my initial year of blogging, I maintained that stance. But I stepped away from that stricture a while ago, and while this never has become a political blog per se, I realized during the final, awful years of the Bush administration, which included the coup de grace bookend of the bursting housing bubble and global financial collapse (thank you, W!), and during various moments throughout this current administration's tenure, I have spoken out here and elsewhere. (I have often thought back about my early support for Barack Obama, in 2004, when he was running for the US Senate, and how I based that in part on his strong, vocal anti-war stance. I heard him articulate in person his opposition to the war. Perhaps the Presidency does change one, and perhaps his critique of Bush was opportunistic and paper-thin, but it was convincing. He will never be able to convince me of the viability of his drone war, or his stalwart support for the security and surveillance state, or many other issues on which he has shifted considerably to the right since his initial run for presidency, in 2008. (I also have come to realize that were she to run in 2016, I probably would support Hillary Clinton without hesitation, despite how abhorrent and pandering I found her support for Bush's folly.)

Iraq remains a deeply torn, traumatized society and country. While we should be hearing about what is happening there on a weekly or at least a monthly basis, we hear almost nothing about Iraq beyond intermittent posts about bombings, political quarrels, and demands the US continues to make on Iraq. Very few of the war enthusiasts devote more than the most cursory space, if even that, to Iraq today, to the challenges it faces, to its people and their voices, their stories, their lives. It is just another thing chewed on for a period, while it seemed useful, and spat out, without any real concern for the ramifications. In a sense, the war--which I do not want to reduce to the status of an analogy--is a good analogy for so much of what elites and their enablers wreak on this society. Perhaps they do consider the impacts of their actions, and perhaps they do pause, if for a second, but then again, if one goes simply on their actions as opposed to suppositions about their behavior, they act and apparently could care less. Unethical barely scratches the surface of such an outlook and mode of operate. But that's where we are. Ultimately those of us who see through the BS, the lies, the chicanery, the gaming of the system, the cravenness, the corruption, the destructiveness, the looming disasters, must never be silent and still, even if our cries and steps lead us into what looks like a cul-de-sac, a tunnel, a void. And we must be vigilant to call out those who lead us down paths of destruction, no matter how favored or well-placed or powerful they are. They bank on our silence, and our fear, and especially on a combination of both.

This Week, Pt.2: Int'l Writers + Waldrops + Anti-War Rally Downtown

Friday morning I flew back to Chicago, in order to participate in the university's International Writers Day, a series of events coordinated and hosted by the Center for Writing Arts and Center director Reg Gibbons. He and Assistant Director Stacy Oliver got things going that morning when they brought the six visiting writers, Nirwan Dewanto (from Indonesia), Hamdy El Gazzar (from Egypt), Ksenia Golubovich (from Russia), Lawrence Pun (from Hong Kong), Aziz Nazmi Shakir-Tash (from Bulgaria), and Lindsay Simpson (from Australia), to meet with poet Robyn Schiff's advanced sequence creative nonfiction class, and my advanced fiction class. All of the writers are currently residence at the University of Iowa's International Writing Program, and were in town for events at the university and in Chicago, at the Chopin Theater. After introducting themselves and their work, they conducted a discussion with our students, who had read their work and came prepared with sharp questions about their backgrounds, their work in genres, the role of politics, and related topics.

Golubovich's responses really struck me. She spoke about being a writer from different countries, a writer living in and on borders; an ethnic Yugoslavian whose family had fled Tito after World War II, she was born in the Soviet Union and lived now in a different country, and had a British stepfather who, from her 15th year, expected her to speak and be smartly amusing in English. (Her English was excellent, but then all five of the non-native Anglophone writers were fluent.) Her work, she said, faced the "idea of the border," and one of her challenges was the question: "how do you make yourself whole?" She continued by noting her and other writers of her generation's work redeeming language from its abuse by the state, and suggested that in writing there's always politics, and if not, "it's bad writing." In response to a subsequent question, she spoke about how she and another writer had engaged in the task of translating one of Bruce Chatwin's travel works, heavily influenced by one of Russia's greatest poets, Osip Mandelstam and his wife Nadezhda, back into Russian, and how this "double process" (Russian-->English-->Russian) created a new Russian, something--and language and idiom--that had not existed before. In effect, it changed and enriched her Russian. She pointed out that the Russian translation of The Catcher in the Rye in the 1960s had been fundamental for a generation of writers; the idiom it created influenced these authors as much as and perhaps more than any native Russian works or culture.

I also was taken with Aziz Shakir-Tash's statements about being of Turkish ancestry in Bulgaria. Though Turks were once the majority there, during the Ottoman Empire, after the First World War and Bulgaria's independence, Turks became a minority and it was in this context that Shakir-Tash grew up. As it is, he not only writes in Bulgarian and Turkish, choosing the latter in part because of the much larger pool of readers (70 million+ vs. 8 million), but also English (and he read some droll micropoems later that day) and Arabic, for which he was one of a few translators in his country. He felt that in light of the historical closeness of Bulgarians and Turks, who in a nationalist fervor that is well known across the globe, now hate each other, literature might serve as a bridge by revealing their shared history and experiences, and above all, humanity. "If they know each other they won't fear each other." If only this were true, though I admired his conviction (and hold it, against reality, unfortunately, myself).

After the class concluded, we headed to lunch, and were joined by the most of the rest of our creative writing faculty. It was great to break bread with the visitors, and I had an opportunity to chat a little with Golubovich, primarily about music; Pun, discussing films, particularly those of Wong Kar-Wai (though I confessed to him that Tsai Ming-Liang was perhaps even more of a favorite); and El Gazzar, who gave a colleague and me the names of some of Egypt's best younger fiction writers. I had to run to an afternoon class, my introductory fiction course, so I headed there and after we conducted a scheduled story workshop, we headed to the writers' reading and question and answer session, some of which I photographed below. Though I was exhausted by the end of the event, I also felt tremendous energized, and only wish that it were possible to have more of these sorts of events taking place all the time, particularly with creative people who were so open.


Pun reading his short story "What Exactly Did I Lose?"

Golubovich reading from a project that constituted a tribute, in part, to her British stepfather

Shakir-Tash and Golubovich listen as Dewanto (center) answers a question

El Gazzar, Simpson and Pun ponder a question after the reading

***

Yesterday afternoon, I was still beat, but I got up and after spending time doing some cleaning and shopping, and also reading student work, I headed down to the grand Harold Washington Library (the main branch of the Chicago Public Library) to catch Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop, exemplary poets, critics, translators, and publishers, as part of the Chicago Poetry Project's yearlong reading series dedicated to translation. And who better to launch such a series? They are extraordinary figures in the world of contemporary American literature, particularly experimental writing (talk about people deserving of MacArthur Foundation Fellowships!) and through their Burning Deck Press publishing house have published a wide array of US authors, from Walter Abish and Robert Coover to Marjorie Welish and Xue Di, while also bringing out numerous works in translation over the years. They're also two of the most welcoming people I've ever met, gentle, sage, full of knowledge lightly offered, encouraging, witty, and great storytellers. I can still recall vividly a story Rosmarie told, while I walk around with a few Keith's apothegms in my head as well. Like a number of writers I know, I think of their literary activism--which it is--as a model, and try not to miss them when they pass through. (I met Rosmarie and Keith during the year I taught in Providence, where they've lived for nearly 40 years, where Keith has trained generations of writers and artists at Brown University during that period, and where together they've run Burning Deck Press, one of the signature small presses, for decades.) Poet John Tipton (whom I sketched at his reading last fall) introduced them pithily, and then they read, Rosmarie first, then Keith. Below are a few photos, both of the reading and the library, which is one of my favorite spots in Chicago. (How often do you hear someone say that about a library?)


Rosmarie Waldrop, who started by reading some quotes by Edmond Jabès, whom she translated and knew well

Rosmarie Waldrop, holding up a copy of Curves to the Apple, published by New Directions in 2006; it brings together three of her most acclaimed volumes, The Reproduction of Profiles (1987), Lawn of Excluded Middle (1993), and Reluctant Gravities (1999)

Keith Waldrop, reading some of his translations of Baudelaire's poems from Flowers of Evil and Paris Spleen

From the mezzanine level, looking at the main floor of the Harold Washington Main Branch of the Chicago Public Library

Descending the escalator at the library

***

After I left Keith and Rosmarie's reading, I headed to the Fall Out Against the War Anti-War Rally, which was at Federal Plaza, just a few blocks away. It followed an early-afternoon staging and rally at Union Park, from which participants marched downtown. The Federal Plaza Rally was one of 11 regional marches and rallies; the others were in Boston, Jonesborough (Tennessee), Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York City, Orlando, Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, and Seattle. One of the speakers noted that perhaps 30,000 people were present (the crowd was vast, and people with placards were visible on streets many blocks away), though I overheard a cop scoffing that the speaker had "smoked too much pot" and that the crowd was about 10,000, which was what the traditional media (both the local TV news and NPR) announced. (Maybe they read straight off the script that cop had seen.) The wall of cops was incredible; in addition to the Chicago Police Department contingents, there were traffic cops and what I guess were details from Cook County (the county containing Chicago, Evanston, and few other suburbs) and who knows where else. There were probably even federal and state entities there, for exactly what reason who knows. I doubt it was to protect the marchers and rally participants. I got to hear several of the speakers, and they spoke not only about the ongoing disaster in Iraq, but about the looming threat of a US military attack on Iran, which increasingly seems possible given the worsening rhetoric coming out of the White House and Congress. I kept thinking that despite thousands of people out there in Chicago and more than a hundred thousand at other rallies, and despite the widespread sentiment, quantified by polls, against continuing Iraqmire or attacking Iran, if the people in power are set on doing this, they will. They are unconstrained by the popular will and have been since they seized power in the 2000 election. I know this sounds cynical and defeatist, but I'm not sure what else to say, at least at this point. My faith that the leading Democratic presidential candidates, like the Democratic Congress, will do anything to stop this craziness, is at an ebb. Congress seems to keep falling all over itself to do George Walker Bush, Dick Bruce Cheney and the Military-Industrial Complex's bidding. Nevertheless, it was encouraging to see so many people, from all over the Midwest, and from all points on the political spectrum, converging to express their collective hope and determination to ensure that we follow a more peaceful road than the current belligerent one.


Chicago's famous Federal Plaza, the site of the rally, with the Alexander Calder "Flamingo" stabile sculpture, and buildings (Everett McKinley Dirksen Building; the John C. Kluczynski Building; and the Loop Post Office) designed by one of the greatest modernist architects, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

The stage from a distance (the speakers were barely visible unless you got close, though you could hear them blocks away)

The stage, and some of the signs (note the Alfred E. Bush/George W. Newman) Impeach sign)

A "peace" standard bearer (and behind her, one of the many people carrying a Ron Paul sign)

Lots of buttons for sale

People milling about during the speeches

On my way back north, crossing the Chicago River

On my way back I encountered this lone protester highlighting another issue; take note!