Sherry Chandler

A New Age

So an age ended, and its last deliverer died
In bed, grown idle and unhappy; they were safe:
The sudden shadow of a giant’s enormous calf
Would fall no more at dusk across their lawns outside.

They slept in peace: in marshes here and there no doubt
A sterile dragon lingered to a natural death,
But in a year the spoor had vanished from the heath:
A kobold’s knocking in the mountain petered out.

Only the sculptors and the poets were half sad,
And the pert retinue from the magician’s house
Grumbled and went elsewhere. The vanished powers were glad

To be invisible and free; without remorse
Struck down the sons who strayed in their course,
And ravished the daughters, and drove the fathers mad.

— W. H. Auden, Selected Poems (Modern Library, 1959)

Waiting for the Barbarians

What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

          The barbarians are due here today.

Why isn’t anything happening in the senate?
Why do the senators sit there without legislating?

         Because the barbarians are coming today.
         What laws can the senators make now?
         Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.

Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting at the city’s main gate
on his throne, in state, wearing the crown?

         Because the barbarians are coming today
         and the emperor is waiting to receive their leader.
         He has even prepared a scroll to give him,
         replete with titles, with imposing names.

Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
and rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?

          Because the barbarians are coming today
          and things like that dazzle the barbarians.

Why don’t our distinguished orators come forward as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?

          Because the barbarians are coming today
         and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking.

Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home so lost in thought?

          Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.
         And some who have just returned from the border say
         there are no barbarians any longer.

And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.

—Constantine Cavafy , translated by Edmund Keeley, text from UPenn

(NB: If you watch Terry Jones’s documentary series “The Barbarians,” you’ll learn that there never were any barbarians at the Roman gates, at least not in the sense we’ve always been taught: “And then there were the Dark Ages.”]

A correspondent has pointed me toward this article by Karen McDonald in the Peoria Journal-Star: Why Choose Peoria?

PEORIA — Why will the president of the United States come to Peoria to raise money for a 26-year-old, first-time congressional candidate?

Some political gurus say he’s looking for positive press to build his legacy. Others say he simply has nothing better to do - with Aaron Schock’s apparent lead in the race, George Bush can’t do much harm to his campaign.

“My speculation is there’s not much else he can do around the country right now in terms of campaigns.

“His poll numbers are very low. Nobody wants to be seen with him,” said Christopher Mooney, professor of political studies at the Institute for Government and Public Affairs at the University of Illinois-Springfield.

“(Schock) has got a comfortable lead, he’s got a lot of money, he’s got the smell of inevitability about him. If it was a close race, I don’t think you’d be seeing George Bush coming out here.”

Bush will appear today at Weaver Angus Farms for a $500-per-plate fundraiser for Schock, who is running for the 18th Congressional District seat against Democrat Colleen Callahan and Green Party candidate Sheldon Schafer.

If I hadn’t sworn off schadenfreude, I might take some satisfaction in the contrast between Barack Obama’s Berlin speech before a “vast throng” (according to David Brooks) and George W. Bush’s fundraiser in Peoria.

Though, mind you, it is still going to take more than a tone poem to secure my vote.

Anyhoo, my correspondent tells me Colleen Callahan is holding a $15 a plate catfish dinner in the Kickapoo VFW Hall at the same time that Bush is doing is $500/plate appearance. I know who I’d rather have a jug of joy juice with. (Come on. It’s the VFW Hall. No “with whoms” allowed. And if you’re old enough to know what Kickapoo Joy Juice is, then you’re old enough to know better.)

Photo by Tom C. Williams, I’m pretty sure.

The Cat’s Song

Mine, says the cat, putting out his paw of darkness.
My lover, my friend, my slave, my toy, says
the cat making on your chest his gesture of drawing
milk from his mother’s forgotten breasts.

Let us walk in the woods, says the cat.
I’ll teach you to read the tabloid of scents,
to fade into shadow, wait like a trap, to hunt.
Now I lay this plump warm mouse on your mat.

…

— Marge Piercy (read the rest at the link)

Eugene Deb’s most famous saying is probably this one:

While there is a lower class I am in it; while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

So I found this portrait of him in Moundsville prison, from Democracy’s Prisoner, telling:

Prison offered certain mind-expanding experiences for Debs as well. For decades he had been preaching about the problem of crime. Criminals were not evil, he had argued, but were the victims of social conditions created by capitalism. Always a champion of the underdog, Debs now lived among some of society’s most disenfranchised men. “I belong in prison,” he told [the journalist] Karsner. “I belong where men are made to suffer for the wrongs committed against them by a brutalizing system.” Though Debs had promised the warden he would not talk socialism to other inmates, he spoke through the power of practical example. From across the country hundreds of well-wishers sent him presents—flowers, cakes, books, and boxes of fruit. Keeping little for himself, he spread these gifts among the other inmates, white and black, who were delighted to be “smoking high grade cigars and eating choice candy, the like of which they had never before tasted.” …Some of the most hardened convicts still suspected that Debs was some kind of “schemer and palaverer,” but most were won over by his kindness. Sitting on the hospital porch in the evenings, he was surrounded by men who wanted his advice and sympathy, or his help writing letters home. With growing admiration, the warden conceded that Debs was one of the few men he had ever known who “practiced absolutely what he preached.”

Debs was very well treated in Moundsville. Not only was the warden taken with him but he also knew that many of Debs’s supporters would be looking for cause to protest. Debs was given light duties in the prison hospital, to help out “when he felt like it.” And he did have a bad heart so there was some reason for this treatment. But he also had a room of his own that looked out over landscaped prison grounds and he was allowed to take his meals in his room. His bending of the rules about mail privileges was also winked at. Nevertheless, he was in prison and he considered himself one of the prisoners.

By the way, Moundsville prison features in Davis Grubb’s book Night of the Hunter as well as in the film of the same title. It is in Moundsville that the preacher meets the young bankrobber and learns about the hidden money.

Moundsville was decommissioned in 1995 and is now a tourist attraction with a haunted house theme.

And one more aside. Eugene Debs reportedly also said:

It is better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don’t want and get it.

which you’ve already seen in the NYTimes:

Eating locally raised food is a growing trend. But who has time to get to the farmer’s market, let alone plant a garden?

That is where Trevor Paque comes in. For a fee, Mr. Paque, who lives in San Francisco, will build an organic garden in your backyard, weed it weekly and even harvest the bounty, gently placing a box of vegetables on the back porch when he leaves.

Call them the lazy locavores — city dwellers who insist on eating food grown close to home but have no inclination to get their hands dirty. Mr. Paque is typical of a new breed of business owner serving their needs.

Ah! the entrepreneurial spirit.

And then there are High Density Vertical Growth Systems, sort of like growing chickens in cages where they can’t stand up.

H/t Lambert and gizzardboy at Correntewire.

Eugene Debs did appeal his conviction under the Espionage Act, all the way to the Supreme Court. But it was a thoroughly conservative court that counted among its number Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Here is Ernest Freeberg on Holmes, from Democracy’s Prisoner:

He was a steely-eyed pragmatist who thought of the law as an expression of the majority’s will to power. Truth, as he famously put it, was determined by “the majority vote of that nation than can lick all others.” A Civil War veteran who had been wounded in battle, Holmes believed that the majority had a primordial right to defend itself by drafting men and sending them to the front. “No society had ever admitted that it could not sacrifice individual welfare to its own existence,” he wrote. “If conscripts are necessary for its army, it seizes them, and marches them, with bayonets in thier rear, to death.” [p. 123]

__________

I was musing this morning about what it is that makes me want to post this information, what I think the take-home message is.

One part of it is, as Holmes makes clear in this quotation, power will always protect itself, especially in time of war. And we will always need citizen watchdogs over government power. That belief is what makes me more Jeffersonian than not.

Another part is that these things are cyclical. These battles have to be fought over and over again. Which, I suppose, is the nature of life itself. Yesterday morning as I mopped up after one of our aging cats whose arthritic back makes it hard for him to hit the litter, I found myself whining that I am really tired of losing the same battles over and over again. But life is like that. And so is democracy. (Or even a republic.)

Some good things came in the aftermath Wilson’s repressions. For one thing, the American Civil Liberties Union was born and though they’ve been known to anger both sides, conservative and liberal, they have done good work for nearly a century in protecting our individual freedoms.

The last part is my desire to share this very good book with you. Though I got a little bogged down in the chapters about the legal niceties of Debs’s trial and appeal, for the most part I’ve found this glimpse of our history fascinating. And it’s good to have a human face to put on Eugene Debs, who has been hardly more than a name and a few quotable quotes in my universe.

“My heart cries out,” Helen Keller wrote to Debs when she heard the news that his appeal had been denied. “I should be proud if the Supreme Court convicted me of abhorring war, and doing all in my power to oppose it. . . . The wise fools who sit in the high places of justice fail to see that in revolutionary times like the present vital issues are settled, not by statutes, decrees and authorities, but in spite of them.”
— quoted in Ernest Freeberg, Democracy’s Prisoner (Harvard, 2008)

When Eugene V. Debs was sent to prison in 1919, activists on the left thought there would be a great uprising and general strike of American workers. This did not happen, but the government was so in fear of it that they secreted Debs through the back roads from Cleveland to the West Virginia State Penitentiary, otherwise known as Moundsville. They were in fear of mass demonstrations along the main routes.

The instrument used to send Debs to prison was the Espionage Act of 1917. Although the title of the act is at least more sensible than the U.S.A. PATRIOT Act, which has to be one of the most insulting acronyms of all times, it was just as repressive. The Espionage Act, quoting Wikipedia, made it illegal

• to convey information with intent to interfere with the operation or success of the armed forces of the United States or to promote the success of its enemies. This was punishable by death or by imprisonment for not more than 30 years
• to convey false reports or false statements with intent to interfere with the operation or success of the military or naval forces of the United States or to promote the success of its enemies and whoever when the United States is at war, to cause or attempt to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, refusal of duty, in the military or naval forces of the United States, or to willfully obstruct the recruiting or enlistment service of the United States. This was punishable by a maximum $USD 10,000 fine (almost $170,000 in today’s dollars) and 20 years in prison.

Pay particular attention to those words “with intent.” That meant that the speech did not have to have results, only “intention.”

The Act was the second prong of Woodrow Wilson’s two-pronged attack on widespread domestic dissent against his war policies. The first prong was the Committee on Public Information, which spread pro-war propaganda. A cynical person might call these two “prongs” misinformation and repression. Both are, I suppose, always a temptation for governments in wartime and are not particularly unique to the Bush administration.

Like U.S.A. PATRIOT, the Espionage Act addressed a real internal threat, in this case, German spies, saboteurs, and agitators. According to Freeberg:

Provisions of the new “spy bill” that targeted thesse activities were uncontroversial, though in the end they proved futile. During the war, the Justice Department did not convict a single German spy or saboteur under the Espionage Act. [p. 46]

So, I suppose, the Bush administration is not unique in this ineffectiveness either. (Speaking of which, the latest from the military commission trial.)

Provisions in the bill to control domestic speech were not at first well received, especially by the major newspapers, which argued, as they did not long ago, that they were already self-censoring and that surely nobody would really think a newspaper would publish information that would aid the enemy.

Perhaps caught off guard by this barrage of criticism, proponents of the bill implored their fellow lawmakers to trust the president’s good intentions. “If we cannot give our Executive power,” Senator Overman complained, “then God help this country.” The best reply to that line of argument came from New York’s freshman congressmen Fiorello La Guardia. “The law admittedly makes the president a despot,” he scoffed, “but with the comforting assurance that the despot about to be created has the present expectation to be a very lenient, benevolent despot.”

Love those New York legislators.

The censorship provision was defeated. But, also included within the bill was

. . .a provision that would give the postmaster general the power to deny mailing privileges to any publication “advocating or urging treason, insurrection, or forcible resistance to any law of the United States.” . . .the “mailability” clause gave an indirect, but potentially broader, censorship power to Wilson’s postmaster, a conservative and crotchety Texan name Albert Burleson. The bill would allow him to punish a paper, not for revealing sensitive military secrets, but for using a tone that struck him as “treasonous.” With little debate and perhaps unintentionally, Congress was granting the Post Office what one historian has called “virtual dictatorial control” over the nation’s journals and newspapers. [p. 49]

Burleson used that power to put many Socialist, pacifist, and union newspapers out of business.

Protestors also were able to defeat the “disaffection” clause that made it illegal to “willfully cause or attempt to cause disaffection in the military.”

Harriet Thomas, a leader of the Women’s Peace Party, startled the committee when she told them, “It seems to me that under this act I would be liable to imprisonment for life, or a more drastic penalty, perhaps, if I should say that I would rather my sons be shot for refusing to go out and kill and bear arms against a supposed enemy of this country.” A congressman interrupted her to ask, “Then you do not honor your citizenship of this country?” Thomas stood her ground. “I feel I have a right to interpret my loyalty to my own country in my own terms of citizenship, and according to my own conscience, and I do not need any bill to tell me what my love of country shall represent.”

At that point, several on the committee told her that, once the Espionage Act passed, she would no longer have a right to make those kinds of provocative statements. “If your speech goes to the point of being treasonous,” one scolded her, “you are denied that right, and you ought to be.” Another exasperated congressman summed up the government’s position this way: “People should go ahead and obey the law, keep their mouths shut, and let the Government run the war.” [p. 50]

More and more familiar.

Gilbert Roe called the law “so indefinite that it simply becomes a vehicle for oppression.” He also said

“If you pardon the statement, I hardly see how it would be safe to say the Lord’s Prayer if this bill becomes a law. When we pray that our trespasses might be forgiven as we forgive those who trespass against us, I think it might be construed that we were praying for the forgiveness of our enemies, the Germans.” [p. 52]

When the law was passed, it dropped “disaffection.” But “with intent” was enough to get Debs,

The text of Deb’s seditious speech is here. He delivered at a picnic in Canton, Ohio on June 16. 1918. It took him a couple of hours to deliver it. People stayed to listen.

From yesterday’s New York Times:

BEREA, Ky. — Berea College, founded 150 years ago to educate freed slaves and “poor white mountaineers,” accepts only applicants from low-income families, and it charges no tuition.

“You can literally come to Berea with nothing but what you can carry, and graduate debt free,” said Joseph P. Bagnoli Jr., the associate provost for enrollment management. “We call it the best education money can’t buy.”

Actually, what buys that education is Berea’s $1.1 billion endowment, which puts the college among the nation’s wealthiest. But unlike most well-endowed colleges, Berea has no football team, coed dorms, hot tubs or climbing walls. Instead, it has a no-frills budget, with food from the college farm, handmade furniture from the college crafts workshops, and 10-hour-a-week campus jobs for every student.

Berea’s approach provides an unusual perspective on the growing debate over whether the wealthiest universities are doing enough for the public good to warrant their tax exemption, or simply hoarding money to serve an elite few. As many elite universities scramble to recruit more low-income students, Berea’s no-tuition model has attracted increasing attention.

The article, with its focus on higher education in general, does not mention that the town of Berea, perhaps because of the College, is a powerhouse of art and politics in the state. Home to many fine craft shops (production as well as retail), including but certainly not limited to the Kentucky Artisan Center and the Appalachian Fireside Gallery. The world-class artisans who live in Berea include my friend Gin Petty, Teresa Cole, and Warren May. Berea is also world headquarters of the Kentucky Guild of Artists and Craftsmen.

Some of the best writers in the state live in Berea, including Jim Tomlinson, Normandi Ellis, Steve Rhodes (who has a book coming out soon from Wind), and my old friend Margaret Ricketts.

The town is also home to political activists, such as Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, which works to stop mountaintop removal mining, and the Mountain Association for Economic Development.

Yeats has been digitized at the National Library of Ireland, and reading about it yesterday in the NYTimes lent a certain irony to my opening my volume of Seamus Heaney’s Redress of Poetry (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995) to his lecture on Yeats and Philip Larkin, “Joy or Night: Last Things in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats and Philip Larkin.”

The irony, a very mild one to be sure, is that Heaney presents Yeats as a poet over against science in the sense intended by Czelaw Milosz:

As Czeslaw Milosz has observed, no intelligent contemporary is spared the presssure exerted in our world by the void, the absurd, the anti-meaning, all of which are part of the intellectual atmosphere we subsist in; and yet Milosz notices this negative pressure only to protest against a whole strain of modern literature which has conceded victory to it. Poetry, Milosz pleads, must not make this concession but maintain instead its centuries-old hostility to reason, science and a science-inspired philosophy. [Heaney, p. 153]

Heaney contrasts Larkin’s “Aubade” with Yeats’s “Cold Heaven,” both poems confronting the inevitability of death, and gives the laurels to Yeats.

The ghost upon the road, the soul’s destiny in the afterlife, the consequences in eternity of the individual’s actions in time — traditional concerns like these are profoundly relevant to “Cold Heaven” and they are also, of course, typical of the things which preoccupied Yeats for the whole of his life. Whether it was fairy lore in Sligo or Buddhism with the Dublin Hermetic Society or spiritualist séances or Noh dramas which imagined the adventures of Cuchulain’s shade in the Land of the Dead, Yeats was always passionately beating on the wall of the physical world in order to provoke an answer from the other side. His studies were arcane, his cosmology was fantastic and yet his intellect remained undeluded. [pp 149-150]

Well, perhaps after all it is appropriate that Yeats should become virtual. It is sort of the nerd’s version of resurrection.

I myself have been wrestling with a poem lately, on a much lower plane than either Yeats or Larkin of course, that confronts death and whether one will be able to carry through to the end with some dignity and courage. I am not quite ready to say, with Larkin:

…Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

There’s something to be said for “not scaring others” if you love them, but let that go.

Neither am I comfortable, after years of having religious fundamentalism oppose science to our great peril, with the notion that poetry must be hostile to reason and science. A poet like Linda Bierds finds much poetry in science itself, and while I don’t find myself at home in her work, I can recognize its worth. As Gregor Mendel could be both monk and scientist, so perhaps can a poet be both poet and rationalist (without going over to the dark side like Larkin).

I think I understand why a poet like Milosz would feel that way he does. I have read his essays in Witness of Poetry (Harvard University Press, 1983) and I think I understand that he was reacting to the nihilism that struck Europe in the period between the two world wars and in the post WWII period. But the pendulum has swung too far the other way and now we can see that “belief” can be as absurd and anti-meaning as “reason.”

But let Heaney continue:

Rational objections were often rationally allowed by [Yeats], if only to be imaginatively and rhetorically overwhelmed. Yeats’s embrace of the supernatural, in other words, was not at all naïve; he was as alive as Larkin to the demeaning realities of bodily decrepitude and the obliterating force of death, but he deliberately resisted the dominance of the material over the spiritual.
…
Yet it is because of Yeats’s fidelity to both perceptions and his refusal to foreclose on either that we recognize in him a poet of the highest attainment. [pp. 150, 151]

It’s a middle way we see Heaney praise here, not one that rejects reason but one that refuses to be cowed by it. Because

…I have repeatedly tried to establish through several different readings and remarks in the course of these lectures…that the goal of life on earth, and of poetry as a vital factor in the achievement of that goal, is what Yeats called in “Under Ben Bulben” the “profane perfection of mankind.”

In order to achieve that goal, therefore, and in order that human beings bring about the most radiant conditions for themselves to inhabit, it is essential that the vision of reality which poetry offers should be transformative, more than just a print-out of the given circumstances of its time and place. The poet who would be most the poet has to attempt an act of writing that outstrips the conditions even as it observes them. …The world is different after it has been read by a Shakespeare or an Emily Dickinson or a Samuel Beckett because it has been augmented by their reading of it. …We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves. [pp. 158-160]

I am not utterly convinced that humankind is the crown of creation but most of this reasoning makes sense to me.

You can visit the virtual exhibition at this link (broadband and flash required).