Sherry Chandler

Here’s the money quote from Jeffrey Toobin’s New Yorker article on the Military Commissions Act of 2006, the one that killed habeas corpus for the Bush detainees:

Justice John Paul Stevens, in his opinion in Rasul v. Bush, observed pointedly, “Executive imprisonment has been considered oppressive and lawless since John, at Runnymede, pledged that no free man should be imprisoned, dispossessed, outlawed, or exiled save by the judgment of his peers or by the law of the land. The judges of England developed the writ of habeas corpus largely to preserve these immunities from executive restraint.” Or, as Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, a related case that was also decided in 2004, “We have long since made clear that a state of war is not a blank check for the President.”

I just received notification that FootHills Publishing has released Springfed Chapbook #63, Imagining a Life by Jane K. Kretschmann.

Jane’s work, and photos of her cats, have appeared several times on these pages (here and here, for example).

Here is the bio from the publication announcement:

Jane K. Kretschmann, a native of Alabama, lives in Piqua, Ohio, where she teaches at a community college. In addition to the publications credited in the Acknowledgements, Jane’s works can be found in ByLine, Writer’s Journal, and Wavelength: Poems in Prose and Verse, as well as online in Illustrated Word, a publication of the Episcopal Church and Visual Arts, Right Hand Pointing, and the Akron (Ohio) Art Museum web site. Recently some of her poems were broadcast on Art Waves, on WKCR in New York City, and included in Muscadine Lines: a Southern Anthology (Cold Tree Press).

Jane began writing poetry while taking a class with her colleague and friend, the poet Cathryn Essinger. It is with gratitude and affection that this chapbook is dedicated to Cathy. She also wishes to thank the members of the Edison Writer’s Club for their support. When not writing, Jane enjoys reading, singing, and walking her retriever, Belle. Jane is married to retired National Park Service superintendent Jim Kretschmann, her biggest fan, to whom the chapbook is also dedicated, with love.

To order, and to read a sample poem, visit the FootHills website.

Mark Danner closes his New York Review of Books article “Iraq: The War of the Imagination” with this quote from George F. Kennan:

Anyone who has ever studied the history of American diplomacy, especially military diplomacy, knows that you might start in a war with certain things on your mind as a purpose of what you are doing, but in the end, you found yourself fighting for entirely different things that you had never thought of before. In other words, war has a momentum of its own and it carries you away from all thoughtful intentions when you get into it.

Kennan, “The Father of Containment,” said this in the Fall of 2002. He was 98 years old at the time and watching the Iraq war develop from a Washington rest home. He died in March of 2005.

He also said, “You know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end.”

These words came to me in the wee hours of the morning today, made me contemplate why it is that I am so adamantly anti-war.

I have spoken of myself here as a pacifist but I’m not sure how purely I’m a pacifist. I don’t think, in the end, I’m either brave or true-believer enough for that.

I would fight to save my own life. I would fight, and have, if somebody was just up in my face giving me a hard time.

I would fight to save my children, though they’re grown now and probably better able to fight for themselves than I am to fight for them.

I would fight to save that proverbial endangered child being beaten in the street — though I think that ethical conundrum is as unfair as the one about torture: if you only had two hours to save the world, would you torture an informant? (Yes you probably would and you’d be as unlikely to get good information then as you would be in a more leisurely use of torture.)

I think we should hold all life sacred and do no more harm than we can help.

And I am strongly anti-war.

My reasons are moral and personal and also completely pragmatic. War is chaos. It unleashes unforeseen forces, call them evil if you will. It does not solve the problems used as a pretext for it and it creates problems that bring on the next war.

I think I would probably fight to defend my property, my neighbors, my country, if we were being invaded by some force more threatening than Mexican laborers. But I am adamantly against wars of aggression on foreign soil.

And I am offended beyond outrage by the kind of magical thinking that got us into the current war in Iraq:

Anyone seeking to understand what has become the central conundrum of the Iraq war—how it is that so many highly accomplished, experienced, and intelligent officials came together to make such monumental, consequential, and, above all, obvious mistakes, mistakes that much of the government knew very well at the time were mistakes—must see beyond what seems to be a simple rhetoric of self-justification and follow it where it leads: toward the War of Imagination that senior officials decided to fight in the spring and summer of 2002 and to whose image they clung long after reality had taken a sharply separate turn. In that War of Imagination victory was to be decisive, overwhelming, evincing a terrible power—enough to wipe out the disgrace of September 11 and remake the threatening world

You should read the Danner article and also Max Rodenbeck’s “How Terrible Is It?”

A prize of $1,000 and publication by Finishing Line Press is given annually for a chapbook-length poetry collection written by a woman who has never before published a full-length collection. Leah Maines will judge. All entries will be considered for publication. Submit cover letter, bio, SASE, and up to 26 pages of poetry with a $15 entry fee by February 15. 2007 (POSTMARK). In addition to the winner, up to 10 entries will be selected for the NWV series. The winner will be No. 50 in the series.

Finishing Line Press,
New Women’s Voices Chapbook Competition,
P.O. Box 1626,
Georgetown, KY 40324.

tel. (859) 514-8966.
email: FinishingBooks@aol.com
www.finishinglinepress.com

Note: My chapbook, Dance the Black-Eyed Girl, was #13 in this series. Also, for what it’s worth, February 15 is my birthday. So submit.

Yesterday being a beautiful November day (perhaps sinisterly so), I took a lunch-time walk over to the University of Kentucky’s W. T. Young Library and checked out Margaret Atwoods’ Writing with Intent (Carroll & Graf, 2005), a collection of her occasional writings.

Running my eye down the Table of Contents, I was immediately drawn to the little essay entitled “Why I Love The Night of the Hunter, a Film by Charles Laughton.” I also love Night of the Hunter, both the film (one that scared the be-jesus out of me when I ran upon it unawares showing on an oldies station in Chicago) and the Davis Grubb novel on which it is based. I could have sworn I’d written about them here but I can’t find anything in the archive.

The novel was a best-seller in 1953 and a finalist for the National Book Award. The movie came out in 1955. I was eight and ten respectively, so perhaps it’s understandable that I didn’t discover the latter until I was in my thirties and the former year before last when I attended the Appalachian Writers Workshop at Hindman Settlement School. (Davis Grubb is a West Virginian.)

The film stars Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, and Lillian Gish, with a small appearance by Peter Graves, and Billy Chapin and Sally Jane Bruce as the children at the center of the plot. The performances are stellar and it contains one of the eeriest duets of “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” you’d ever imagine — a piece that showed up on the Oxford American sampler a few years ago.

Basic plot summaries at wikipedia, IMDb (where it gets an extraordinary 8.2 rating), and rogerebert.com.

Here are some of the things Atwood has to say about this film:

Within [its] double frame is the folkloric tale itself, with its ogre (played by Mitchum). His name is Harry, as in “old Harry,” vernacular for the devil. Cross Richard III with Milton’s Satan and enclose him in a Southern psychopath posing as a preacher, and this character is what you’d get. He cannot be explained by the Depression—he is simply radical evil—but, in Laughton’s hands, he’s a complex figure as well, one of those fast-talking con men who recur throughout American art, embraced by society, then torn apart by it. He’s a monster, but finally a sacrificial one.

…oozing sexual power from every pore but especially from his lower eyelids.

Well, that does it. I’ll never be able to watch a Mitchum performance in quite the same way again.

Still, it’s great writing about a great film and what more can any bookworm ask. I recommend that you read it in its four-page entirety.

I am looking forward to reading the rest of the essays, in which Atwood “tries” everything from Virginia Woolf to Elmore Leonard, with a few really hairy subjects like Mordecai Richter thrown in.

Here’s a subject I’ve been meaning to broach for a while.

In this election, the Democrats finally got a winning margin big enough that we didn’t have to sweat a couple hundred lost or miscounted votes in Florida or Ohio. But it doesn’t mean we can all breathe a sigh of relief now because the vote is safe.

Because there were races in Florida and Ohio that hung on a few hundred lost or badly counted votes. The Sunday New York Times has a good overview article here and an editorial comment here. The race in Katherine Harris’s old Sarasota district is particularly egregious.

In my area of Kentucky, I heard many complaints that the new touch-screen machines — which we are continually told are “Federally mandated to be handicapped accessible” — were slow and glitchy. And in Bourbon, my home county, and at least one contiguous county, results were delayed because of problems tallying the votes on the new machines. If I understood correctly, the problem was in getting vote totals to balance. Sounds like something was lost or gained, doesn’t it? We had no close or contested races — our blue-dog Democratic Congressman is such a political power in the state that Republicans didn’t bother to waste money backing an opponent. Still, it had even my Rush-Limbaugh fan brother talking about a paper trail.

My family all voted on the old machines, the ones we’ve been using for a decade or so without trouble, though even they provide no paper trail. Next year, the touch-screen will be all we have to vote on.

We did have one case in Louisville in which a poll worker assaulted a voter for refusing to vote in a judicial race. I’m not sure, however, that that was in any way machine related. Still it brings me to a point that doesn’t get big attention but that I keep seeing pop up: poll-worker fatique and poll-worker ignorance. From the NYTimes article:

Election workers and experts say the advances in technology have simply overwhelmed many of the people trying to run things on the ground. At a hearing in Denver last week, one focus was on how hard it has become for the poll workers, often retirees getting paid $100 for a 14-hour day, and what it would take to attract younger people who are perhaps more savvy about computers.

“It used to be that you would come in, set up the machines, make a cup of coffee and say hello to your neighbors,” said Sigrid Freese, who has worked at Denver polling places for more than 20 years. Now, she said, the job is complicated and stressful, and “I know a lot of people who said, ‘Never again.’ ”

We have had the same poll workers for years, they know us by sight and we never have to prove who we are. They’re fine people but they look blank if you ask about a paper trail, as though they’d never in their lives heard of a contested vote.

So I would urge those of you who are young and media-savvy to consider volunteering to work at the polls. The country needs you and it’s one small thing we can do to make sure every vote counts.

And let’s don’t drop this issue just because we won most of the races this time.

Kudzu is now accepting submissions for its third annual poetry prize. Reading fee is $5.00 per poem. First place award is $100 and publication in the 2007 issue of Kudzu. Submission deadline is February 1, 2007.

This year’s contest will be judged by Kelly Norman Ellis, whose first collection of poetry, Tougaloo Blues, was published by Third World Press in 2003. Ellis is an associate professor of English and creative writing at Chicago State University. She has received a grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and she is a Cave Canem fellow.

Submissions should be 100 lines or less with no topical themes. Send two blind copies with a cover sheet listing titles of submitted work along with your name and contact information.

Mail submissions with reading fee to:

Kudzu
Hazard Community and Technical College
One Community College Drive
Hazard, KY 41701
Attn: Donna Sparkman

Submissions by e-mail are accepted. Send entries attached as Word documents to HZ-HCTC_KUDZU@kctcs.edu

Man, somebody at the Writers Almanac must really like Reid Bush. Poems from his Larkspur Press collection What You Know have been featured on that broadcast at least three times in the last three weeks: on Sunday, November 12, on Saturday, November 18, and again today.

Nice.

And nice for Larkspur Press.

Elaine Palencia writes that she has a poem in an anthology, Hurricane Blues, just released by South Missouri State University Press.

Hurricane Bluesis an anthology of previously unpublished poems dealing with hurricanes Katrina and Rita and the many effects they’ve had on the nation. This collection includes the works of various contemporary poets…

Among those poets: Mark Jarman, Linda Pasten, Bob Hickok, and, of course, Elaine.

The anthology, 184 poetry-packed pages, sells for $17. All proceeds go to hurricane relief, which is unfortunately still needed.

From the NYTimes:

WASHINGTON, Nov. 23 — Alarmed at the prospect of Democratic control of Congress, top executives from two dozen drug companies met here last week to assess what appears to them to be a harsh new political climate, and to draft a battle plan.

Hoping to prevent Congress from letting the government negotiate lower drug prices for millions of older Americans on Medicare, the pharmaceutical companies have been recruiting Democratic lobbyists, lining up allies in the Bush administration and Congress, and renewing ties with organizations of patients who depend on brand-name drugs.

Many drug company lobbyists concede that the House is likely to pass a bill intended to drive down drug prices, but they are determined to block such legislation in the Senate. If that strategy fails, they are counting on President Bush to veto any bill that passes. With 49 Republicans in the Senate next year, the industry is confident that it can round up the 34 votes normally needed to uphold a veto.

My mother just got past the donut hole in her Medicare Part D prescription coverage. She spends about $500/month on drugs. Part D will have covered her expenditures for almost six months and saved her somewhere between $1,000 - $1,500.

But as taxpayers, it is costing you and me a bundle because the Federal government gave up its right to bargain with the industry.

As the article says:

James C. Greenwood, president of the Biotechnology Industry Organization, another trade group, said, “There is a lot of pent-up animosity among Democrats against the pharmaceutical industry.”

So I recommend that you read the rest to learn how popular Democrats have become with the lobbyists of K Street.

I am pleased that the Democrats now have a share of power but citizens still need to watch out so that we don’t get a new boss, same as the old boss.