Sherry Chandler

From Josh Marshall:

Here we have a headline from the New York Times …

Senate Narrowly Backs Bush in Rejecting Debate on Increasing Time Between Deployments

Well, no, I’m sorry. That’s not right. The vote was 56 to 41. A solid majority of senators supported increasing time between deployments.

Republicans blocked a vote on the bill. Say it again: They blocked a vote. They filibustered it.

Image of La Ferté Macé from GVSU

While serving as an ambulance driver in France in 1917, E. E. Cummings was arrested and imprisoned in La Ferté-Macé without charge or hearing. He was imprisoned because his friend wrote some letters expressing “anti-war sentiments.” (Sound familiar?) He was held for over 4 months. He writes about this experience in The Enormous Room:

It is like a vast grey box in which are laid helter-skelter a great many toys, each of which is itself completely significant apart from the always unchanging temporal dimension which merely contains it along with the rest. I make this point clear for the benefit of any of my readers who have not had the distinguished privilege of being in jail. To those who have been in jail my meaning is at once apparent; particularly if they have had the highly enlightening experience of being in jail with a perfectly indefinite sentence. How, in such a case, could events occur and be remembered otherwise than as individualities distinct from Time Itself? Or, since one day and the next are the same to such a prisoner, where does Time come in at all? Obviously, once the prisoner is habituated to his environment, once he accepts the fact that speculation as to when he will regain his liberty cannot possibly shorten the hours of his incarceration and may very well drive him into a state of unhappiness (not to say morbidity), events can no longer succeed each other: whatever happens, while it may happen in connection with some other perfectly distinct happenings, does not happen in a scale of temporal priorities–each happening is self-sufficient, irrespective of minutes, months and the other treasures of freedom.

Text from Project Gutenberg.