Sherry Chandler

they’ve bought Ali:

NEW YORK (AFP) - Legendary US boxer Muhammad Ali has sold an 80 percent interest in his name and image to New York-based entertainment firm CKX for 50 million dollars, CKX said.

In the deal CKX gets an 80 percent share in the name, likeness and related rights of the man sometimes called the greatest athlete of the 20th century.

Ali and his family will retain the remaining 20 percent.

CKX, which focuses on entertainment-related marketing, already has a major interest in the name and related properties of Elvis Presley, including operating the rock-and-roll great’s Graceland mansion.

It also has rights related to American Idol, the leading US television show.

Here is part of a poem, “This Is Not About Politics,” that I wrote in 2001 after listening to an NPR report about lethal injection in Texas. The report dealt with the effects of execution on prison personnel. At that time, Texas was doing hundreds of executions, and prison guards who participated were having pretty severe psychological side effects. The poem was fraught but sincere. It was never published though it was read at a Moby Dick symposium at Hofstra University. Don’t ask how Moby Dick comes into it. “Teddy Bear” is the nickname of a prison guard:

Teddy Bear and his team take thirty seconds
to snug the straps. The tech prays for an easy vein.
The warden lifts his glasses. The executioner,
across the one-way mirror, injects pentothol,
pancuronium bromide, potassium chloride, one,
two, three. The chaplain keeps eye contact.
The wails of the dead man’s mother pierce
the walls, the barred glass, the warden’s ears.

I have always thought lethal injection a nightmare just because it is so cold and clinical. Think about being strapped to a gurney, having an IV needle inserted, and then knowing that this lethal cocktail will soon be travelling your veins. It’s enough to give you nightmares the next time you have some minor surgery. I think I might rather be hanged or beheaded or put before a firing squad.

And I understand that these prisoners may not be worthy of sympathy, but their inhumanity should not be an excuse for mine.

Anyway, now it turns out that lethal injection may well be a worse nightmare than I had thought. From today’s New York Times:

The three chemicals used in lethal injections in about 35 states have long attracted attention for what critics say is their needless and dangerous complexity.

The first chemical in the series is sodium thiopental [note: also called sodium pentothol], a short-acting barbiturate. Properly administered, all sides agree, it is sufficient to render an inmate unconscious for many hours, if not to kill him. The second chemical is pancuronium bromide, a relative of curare. If administered by itself, it paralyzes the body but leaves the subject conscious, suffocating but unable to cry out. The third, potassium chloride, stops the heart and causes excruciating pain as it travels through the veins.

Problems arise, lawyers and experts for the inmates say, when poorly trained personnel make mistakes in preparing the chemicals, inserting the catheters and injecting the chemicals into intravenous lines. If the first chemical is ineffective, the other two are torturous.

Lethal injections are being put on hold now because judges are ruling that doctors must supervise, and it isn’t always easy to find doctors willing to participate in an execution. For one thing, such participation violates the AMA code of ethics.

Once upon a time many years ago a friend of mine who is a physician said that he was opposed to lethal injection because it would make executions appear to be humane. Whatever you may think of capital punishment — I am strongly against it — I don’t see much way you can call it humane. It looks to me like law as revenge.

HewAinslee was born in Ayrshire in 1792, the year Kentucky joined the union, and he didn’t come to American until he was thirty. He farmed in New York for a while and spent some time in the Utopian community of New Harmony in Indiana. (New Harmony is a neat place, preserved now as an artists’ community. The Ropewalk Writers Retreat is held there. It’s a good place to retreat.)

Ainslee came to Louisville in 1828, when he was about 30, and became a contractor. He didn’t really consider himself an American poet. He wrote in Scots dialect, after Burns, whom he admired greatly, and many of his works are re-creations of old Scots ballads. A Pilgrimage to the Land of Burns, published in 1822 which would have been the year he immigrated, is described as “songs, ballads, and conversations with friends of Robert Burns.” Scottish Songs, Ballads, and Poems was published in 1855. The photograph at left is from the frontispiece to that book.

Daniel Hoffman said recently, in an e-mailed “Poetry Month Pick” from Poetry Daily, that the American poets before Whitman were challenged to find a distinctive voice and tended to write fairly generic poems, unmarked by the specifics of the American experience or landscape. This statement is certainly true of Hew Ainslee’s few poems that deal with the New World. In fact, in the introduction to Scottish Songs, Ballads, and Poems, he apologizes for writing about America at all. The poem below is the best I could find.

He wrote almost entirely in ballad stanza, Emily Dickinson’s hymn stanza: quatrains alternating lines of iambic tetrameter with iambic trimeter. These are, after all, songs. He writes a pretty lively ballad but you’re on your own with the dialect. Some of it is glossed but nothing in this particular poem was explained. (I leave you to make your own adolescent puns.)

Come Awa to the West

Come awa to the bonny green West!
   Where the lauld an' the brave hae thriven;
Come, see our braid valleys still drest
   In the crap that was planted by heaven.

Come, leave the dull gear-getting crew,
   Come away frae the lordling an' slave —
It is not a right land for you,
   Wha canna bow down wi' the lave.

Tho' wealth hath not offered yet to deck
   Our valleys wi' taste and wi' art,
Yet the head o' ilk freeman's erect,
   And his language still empties his heart!

Come, come to our bonny green West,
   Whar liberty soughs in the breeze!
O, the flesh, Jamie, never can rest,
   Till the heart an' the spirit's at east!

— from Hew Ainslie Scottish Songs, Ballads, and Poems (New York, Redfield, 1855)