Sherry Chandler

from the Boston Herald:

Professor, peacemaker, penman, publican - Padraig O’Malley is many things to many people.

But today, the 64-year-old UMass-Boston professor is set to cement his status as one of the world’s top unsung peace brokers with the announcement of a historic agreement between warring Iraqi factions.

For the past 10 months, O’Malley has been the driving force behind bringing Shi’ite and Sunni parties together to thrash out a pact to ban militias from operating outside the law in Iraq.

“The move to bring people together and march without violence is his inspiration,” said Peter O’Malley, Padraig’s younger brother. “We grew up in Ireland, which was very fractious. So growing up in that atmosphere and, I would say, the influence of Martin Luther King inspired him.”

King’s inspiration, O’Malley said, pushed his brother to play crucial roles in forging peace deals in both Northern Ireland and South Africa.

The Iraqi agreement - described as a framework to allow further discussion between opposing Iraqis - was hammered out during privately funded reconciliation meetings in Helsinki, Finland, organized by O’Malley.

…

But away from the hotbed of violence, the native Dubliner has more modest roots in the heart of Cambridge where, in 1969, he and his brother opened the now landmark Irish bar, The Plough and Stars. They also co-founded poetry magazine Ploughshares.

Via qarrtsiluni

From the NYTimes:

JOHN McCAIN and Barack Obama are not the only winners to emerge from the long presidential primary season.

The two presumptive nominees, along with the many candidates who bowed out along the way, spent more than $900 million through the end of May, about $470 million more than was spent on primaries in 2000, when both major parties last had competitive primary battles. Nearly half of the current spending has been paid to just a few dozen companies.

…

Some experts say they think that as campaign spending rises, the candidates benefit much less than the companies. “The total amount of money doesn’t matter, especially since you start to see diminishing returns,” said Ray C. Fair, an economist at Yale who studies economic influences on presidential elections. “What matters is the difference in spending between the two parties.”

Elections are bought in this country. So, while it may be one (wo)man, one vote at the polls, it is not on human one dollar. That’s only on your IRS return.

It struck me that the following passage, from Seamus Heaney’s essay “A Torchlight Procession of One” on the Scottish nationalist poet Hugh MacDiarmid, could also describe the man who might be called an Appalachian nationalist poet, Jesse Stuart. Both men were what you might call vernacular poets. McDiarmid’s work preceded Stuart’s by about ten years:

He was very clear-headed about his productions and in the 1960s wrote to a BBC producer as follows: “My job, as I see it, has never been to lay a tit’s egg, but to erupt like a volcano, emitting not only flame, but a lot of rubbish.” From a person of less abundant capacity and with a less compulsive appetite for overdoing things, this could have sounded like an excuse; from MacDiarmid, however, it emerges as a boast. With him, the speech from the dock is sure to be a roar of defiance. No wonder Norman MacCaig suggested that the anniversary of his death should be marked each year by the observance of two minutes of pandemonium. “He would walk into my mind,” MacCaig said at the graveside in Langholm in 1978, “as if it were a town and he a torchlight procession of one, lighting up the streets…”

Still, although his vitality was epoch-making, MacDiarmid has probably written more disconcertingly than any other major twentieth-century poet. Anybody who wishes to praise the work has to admit straight away that there is an un-get-roundable connection between the prodigality of his gifts and the prodigiousness of his blather. The task for everybody confronted with the immense bulk of his collected verse is to make a firm distinction between the true poetry and what we might call the habitual printout.

— Seamus Heaney, “A Torchlight Procession of One: On Hugh MacDiarmid” in The Redress of Poetry (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), pp 104-105