Sherry Chandler

Laura Rozen at War and Piece has this to say about our use of torture against suspected terrorists:

I was in a torture chamber once, in the basement of a police station in Kosovo days after it was abandoned by Serb forces defeated by Nato. It was hideous as you would imagine. The British soldiers who were with me were equally shocked. A lot of the instruments and interrogation drugs I saw there also suggest they were not designed to cause organ failure or death in their victims, just pain and terror, as Mr. Cheney and his office mates suggest is what they are going for in terms of legal wiggle room. And like Mr. Cheney and his office mates, Mr. Milosevic and his Serb troops didn’t seem to overly concern themselves with the Geneva conventions, until it was a bit late. Having laid my eyes on what such a scene looks like, I just associate such activities with the forces of not only the pathological and depraved, but those who are headed for defeat. If you’ve seen it, you realize in a way that’s hard to explain, it’s the tactics of the losers. If Cheney and his office mates haven’t had the experience, perhaps they should. And I really don’t think it’s inconceivable that the remote possibility of the Hague may lie in some of their futures. Things change fast when they do, as history shows, and they could find their current willing protectors eventually chucked from office, and a whole new climate at home and abroad.

This observation defines for me a thing I’ve felt about this administration from the very beginning of our never-ending “war on terror(ism):” we are being led by men who are frightened and weak. Losers.

Don’t forget the Kentucky Book Fair , Saturday November 12, 9 - 4:30 in the Frankfort Convention Center.

Several interesting new poetry collections available: Jane Gentry’s A Year in Kentucky, which is handset by Press Eight Seventeen, Elizabeth Oakes’s Farmgirl Poems (reviewed here), Jane Hicks’s new collection Blood and Bone Remember from the Jesse Stuart Foundation, Maurice Manning, Ed August, Richard Taylor (Braintree is a great collection; I’ve got it on my list to review but can’t get my grasshopper brain still long enough), Frank X. Walker, George Ella Lyon, and Jonathan Green, you’ll find them all along poet’s row. LaVece Hughes will be there with a couple of new cookbooks, Gwyn Hymen Rubio with her new novel. The catalogue says “more than 175 authors, 480 titles, and a salute to Daniel Boone.” Who would want to miss that?

You can download a PDF of the catalogue here.

Also remember that this is the last day to register for the “This Is Home Now” symposium with Carolyn Forché. Information here.