ROUND AND ROUND AND ROUND WE GO...

In a 1919 essay called "The Sociology of Imperialisms", the Austrian economist Joseph Schrumpeter wrote:

There was no corner of the known world where some interest was not alleged to be in danger or under actual attack. If the interests were not those of Rome, they were those of Rome's allies; and if Rome had no allies, then allies would be invented. When it was utterly impossible to contrive such an interest--why, then it was the national honour that had been insulted. The fight was always invested with an aura of legality. Rome was always being attacked by evil-minded neighbours, always fighting for a breathing space. The whole world was pervaded by a host of enemies and it was manifestly Rome's duty to guard against their indubitably aggressive designs.

Substitute Washington for Rome... As things change, so they stay the same.

As for our elections here... well, I'm sure George Bush is very pleased (that's him on the phone with Stephen Harper yesterday, reputedly). If Harper actually governs well -- which I have a fair hunch he is capable of doing, despite his party platform and the wacky Christian Right elements in that party -- we could be in for a long legacy of Conservative government, with their accompanying systematic neglect of social programs, the public medical system, arts funding, etc. Hence I find myself actually hoping (against hope, since our collective burden of cynicism is already heavy enough) that his will be another scandal- and blunder-ridden government like so many Conservative governments in the past, and they'll get turfed out of there.

Anybody willing to take bets?

IRAQ

(AP Photo/Jerome Delay, courtesy of cbc.ca)

This is not normally a political blog, but who's to separate art from politics?

Today upon looking over cbc.ca for news on the fate of those four unfortunate aid-workers who have been kidnapped in Iraq (yesterday was the announced deadline for their execution, but as yet no word has been heard on whether their captors have followed through with their ultimatum), I came across this backgrounder on the history of Iraq. For me, at least, it was an eye-opener on a history of which I was at best only dimly aware.

According to this article, much of the the present misery can be dated from the carving up of the the Ottoman Empire by the British and French after WWI. As in Africa, this arbitrary divvying up lead to a kind of ongoing civil/international war -- which of course oil and American (OK, let's say Western) intervention have exacerbated to an unbearable degree. As much of the history of Canada can be told through the history of Quebec (an odd comparison, perhaps, but one which comes quickly to mind to one living here), so this is a very telling perspective on the history of the region. It's about colonization gone wrong. It's about feeding flames that lead to conflagrations. Etc. I won't say more. Just read.

PAPA WALT

What I'm saying here has been remarked plenty of times before, but maybe because some recent reading has smacked it once again into my face, it seems to bear repeating: if there's anything that is truly distinctive about American poetry as compared to that of other nations, if there is anything that truly distinguishes it, it can be summed up in one word: Whitman. (If you feel you've heard and read just about enough about Papa Walt, please feel free to click on to something else…) Sure, there are other currents- even at his time Dickinson and Poe provided very different poetics - but these seem like little eddies compared to the grand stream that followed Whitman's wake ("wake", by the way, in any sense you like it). Think of the poets who bear his mark, that expanded line, that relaxed diction, that joyful (even if anguished) cataloguing of everything: Pound ("Let there be commerce between us" - A Pact), Hart Crane (well, quite different in language sensibility, but yes--), Sandburg, the Beats (I think particularly of Ginsburg), Frank O'Hara, Ashbery, A.R. Ammons, Olson, Duncan, the langpo people like Bernstein, Hejinian, Silliman… am I missing anybody important?

John Ciardi had some perceptive things to say, in the 1987 edition of How Does a Poem Mean, which I've been reading with great delight these last few weeks. After citing Song of Myself, #26, he writes,

Whitman fathered a large pretence that his catalogues were all inclusive, that every sort of detail was equally welcome to his mind. Obviously, however, certain kinds of images were more welcome to his sensibilities than were others. Whitman tended to welcome without reserve, all images of industrial expansion, of fruitful nature, of the brotherhood of man, of astronomy, of the bustle of urban life, and of physical strength, for example, but one will not find anywhere in his catalogues such satanic images as one may find in Poe or in Baudelaire. One only has to turn to "Prufrock" or to "Dirge" (Kenneth Fearing) to see two categories of properties that would never occur in Whitman, despite his pretence to all-inclusiveness.

There is, that is to say, some principle of selection at work. One can see certain kinds of images that occurred readily to Whitman's mind and were welcomed into his poems. And one can locate other sorts of images that not only were pushed away from the poems, but that probably never occurred to the poet's mind. (p. 245)

Only America could have fathered Whitman (and it's funny how the word father keeps coming up in reference to Whitman… Pound again: "I come to you as a grown child/Who has had a pig-headed father"), and only at the time it did. Now as America sullies itself, the world, and indeed the planet, poets who follow his lead have been forced to admit images into their oeuvre that Whitman was able to happily screen out. The challenge for those poets is to catalogue everything and still maintain that feisty affirmativeness - in other words, to throw away the pretence, and still celebrate - or at least not throw themselves off a boat or bridge as Hart Crane or Berryman did. A tall order.

Of course, we Canadians have no Whitman, nor anyone who occupies such a central place in our poetry. What I'm doing here is what most Canadians do: live as far south as our citizenship permits, and observe from the sidelines. That 49th parallel cuts us out of that enterprising American spirit as conclusively as any Berlin Wall. What I observe is that the out-and-out materialism/imperialism of America, which created Whitman, now produces a series of hollow political parodies, the latest and most egregious being George W. Bush. Culturally speaking, Bush is to Whitman what Hitler was to Beethoven. And what I do as a writer is what many of the powerless do in America: absorb influences from everywhere I can, and out of my limitations, speak anguish, speak joy, speak out of a kind of loneliness.

DID BUSH STEAL THIS ONE TOO?

Exact? Yes. Plausible? Looks quite. True? Dunno. But check out this detailed site on what may be a growing voting machine controversy...

http://thesquanderer.com/votingmachines.html

Cruzarse los dedos...

Every night for the last couple of weeks, I've been half-expecting when turning on the news to hear of some catastrophe in the States, another 911 (planes winging it into the Sears Tower, perhaps?), a suicide bomber setting himself off in some ridiculously crowded place, or a New York subway train blown to smithereens, a la Madrid. Here it is, the morning of Election day and nothing like that has happened. (I'll continue though to keep my fingers crossed.) Should we thank Bush for keeping America safe? Personally, the idea of four more years of Bush bushes me. Like most of us up here north of the border, I would prefer Americans Kerry on with Kerry. (Excuse my punning… that's about the only sabotage I'm capable of right now…) Even if the latter sees us as a drug source comparable with Colombia (only vis-a-vis legal drugs). Bush doesn't seem to trust us as much… but look at those he does. (And we don't know half the story with either of those two.) Anyway, lots of reasons to keep fingers crossed...