Sherry Chandler

Firebombing, revisited

A day or two ago, I did a post about James Dickey’s poem, “The Firebombing,” and I was very pleased when Dickey’s son, Christoper left a comment. Here is part of what Christopher Dickey said:

Back in 2003 I wrote a long essay about “The Firebombing” because it struck me that the poem tried very hard to come to terms with the weird detachment that has come to characterize much of modern warfare. Anyone interested can Google “Firebombings: From My Father’s Wars to Mine.” The direct link to the pdf is http://www.strom.clemson.edu/events/calhoun/guests/dickey.pdf

Christopher Dickey is an excellent war correspondent, a man whose writings we should all have given more heed. Maybe then we would not have gotten ourselves into the mess of Iraq. But as he says himself, mostly Americans just want to forget about the rest of the world.

Dickey also writes well and interestingly about his father. In 2007, I wrote a post here about his article “War and Deliverance.,” which appeared in Newsweek on October 2007 on release of the Deliverance movie to HD DVD.

So naturally I went looking for the article “Firebombings: From My Father’s Wars to Mine.” Here is part of what Christopher Dickey has to say about James Dickey’s poem “The Firebombing:”

At my father’s poetry readings, he’d usually give a pretty long introduction to this poem “which attempts to come to terms with modern warfare and with the fact that for many people engaged in modern warfare there is no guilt, because guilt depends ultimately on contemplating the destruction that one is responsible for.

“So much destruction in modern war takes place miles and miles away from the source of the destruction, the human being who has caused it,” my father would explain to the audience. “The man in this poem has been twenty years ago a bomber pilot and has made firebombing raids on civilian populations over Japan. He is a decent fellow, like most pilots were, and are, and he’s thinking now twenty years later in his pleasant suburban home that he is the same person who burned women and children alive with jellied gasoline called napalm.”

As I have said before, and will probably say again, I was born during the firebombing of Dresden, though I didn’t know that until I was grown. Reading Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five was one of the formative events of my life. And then, of course, there was Vietnam, which overshadowed my life from ages 15 to 30.

As one who had lived through Vietnam, I was horrified by the glee with which our nation welcomed George H.W. Bush’s Gulf War, the way we all gathered around our televisions to watch the smart bombs fall, as though this were some virtual reality game. And, in many ways, for us it was all a game.

Here is Christopher Dickey once again:

For more than fifty years after World War II, and more than thirty years after my father wrote that poem, technology, especially American technology, continued to dehumanize the inhumanity of war until, by the late 1990s, we were able to convince ourselves, at our great distance from the destruction, that such a thing could be waged as a war that was humane.

Now, that’s a pretty dangerous concept if you think about it. Because a humane war, especially one waged from a sanitary distance, is implicitly an EASY war. It doesn’t have to be righteous. It doesn’t even have to be memorable.

. . .

Have you ever heard the term “fire and forget”?

“Fire and forget” is a bit of military jargon that describes, say, an anti-tank missile that does the work of tracking and hitting the target by itself once you pull the trigger. The munitions the Air Force and Navy use today, the “smart bombs” and cruise missiles, might also fit into that same category. It’s about guidance systems. But “fire and forget” could just as aptly describe the way the United States makes war and the American people have learned to perceive it in the last quarter century. And it tells us a lot about some of the misguided fights we’ve gotten into of late.

Since 1981, we have carried out an act of war, on average, just about every year.

This article was written early in our current “War on Terror” — terminology that seems blessedly to have been dropped lately — before the “Surge,” before hawks were able to declare something like victory in Iraq, though it was published a few months after George W. Bush’s ridiculous “Mission Accomplished” stunt.

In the meantime, I hope we have learned some difficult lessons about the nature of war. I hope we have learned what Dickey, father and son, kept trying to tell us — that, though we ourselves may be detached from our war making and though we may consider our technological warfare humane, things looks considerably different to the people on the ground being killed and maimed.

As Christopher Dickey says:

If you’ve been on the ground at the receiving end of those American bombs, however, among the people who won’t forget, don’t get closure and can’t just change the channel, you know that much of the hatred of the United States in the world comes not from these leaders who are “jealous” of its strength, as some in Washington would have us believe, and not from people who “hate freedom,” certainly, but from those innocent people who’ve either been victims of America’s awesome, insouciant power, or fear that they might be.

Consider that word insouciant.

Though I have strong reservations about Barack Obama’s decision to try to go back to Afghanistan and “win” that war, I do applaud his willingness to put people on the ground there to help rebuild, to give our country a more human face. Civilians, too. I also have some reservations about using armies as nation builders, not because I’m against nation building, but because it blurs a line that ought not to be blurred.

Like, for example, when our civilian President salutes his military.

But we are still depending on our technological war toys. We’re still using drones that maybe are killing terrorists but definitely are killing their wives and children. We have young soldiers killing in Pakistan now without ever leaving the continental United States. For this work, we recruit the ones who are good at video games.

That is really frightening.

___________
By the way, today is Albert Einstein’s birthday, that man whose hindsight was much better than his foresight. Like all of us, I guess.

__________
I have discovered this site, James Dickey: Deep Deliverance, which I should have found before:

A personal site devoted to some of James Dickey’s writing, thinking, living and loving. Here you will find bits of his poetry, a few lines from his books, images of his life, and memories from his friends. If you are teaching James Dickey or studying James Dickey, this is a good place to start (c) Christopher Dickey

More stuff

The Last Moonshiner. Any comments?

Shenandoah turns 60 and turns digital.:

Shenandoah will publish in its usual format in fall 2010. In spring 2011, there will be a limited-edition anthology of poems published in Shenandoah over the last 15 years. And then will come the biggest change of all. “For the foreseeable future,” said Smith, “that will be the last print issue of Shenandoah.”

Starting with the fall 2011 issue, it will be entirely online. A paid subscription will be a thing of the past. “It is perhaps inevitable when we look at what has happened to other literary journals,” said Smith. “Literary magazines per se are going to have to change their way of conceiving themselves and of reaching their audiences. And this is all tied up in the deep inquiry going on in our culture about the future of print. There is time to make that transition and be an innovator.”

The way the journal involves students in its work will be innovative as well. “The interns will not just observe and theorize about the actual editorial decisions, from design to contents to policies,” said Smith, “but they will also participate in the decisions, plus do things like screening submissions and blogging.”

See Death of a lit mag, and thanks to Edward Byrne for the news.

Texas Conservatives Win Curriculum Change

AUSTIN, Tex. — After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light

. . .

Cynthia Dunbar, a lawyer from Richmond who is a strict constitutionalist and thinks the nation was founded on Christian beliefs, managed to cut Thomas Jefferson from a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century, replacing him with St. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and William Blackstone. (Jefferson is not well liked among conservatives on the board because he coined the term “separation between church and state.”)

I’m not sure why Texas gets to hold our entire education system hostage but there it is.

On the other hand, the most Draconian version of Utah’s anti-abortion bill did not pass:

DENVER — A sweeping anti-abortion statute in Utah that would have allowed up to life in prison for a woman whose fetus died from her intentional or reckless behavior was withdrawn by its sponsor on Thursday and will be revised to be narrower in scope.

. . .

The sponsor, Representative Carl D. Wimmer, a Republican, said he had removed a key clause that would have allowed prosecution under Utah’s criminal homicide laws for a “reckless act of the woman” that resulted in death to a fetus. Language will remain, he said, that makes a woman’s “intentional” actions, if resulting in the death of her fetus in an illegal abortion, a felony.

The bill was prompted by a case last year in which a 17-year-old who was seven months pregnant sought to induce a miscarriage by paying a man to beat her. She was arrested, but released by a judge who said seeking an abortion was not a crime.

Legal abortions, performed by a doctor, would not be affected by the old bill or its replacement. But Utah has statutes on the books intended to discourage abortions, including a parental consent requirement for minors.

My bleeding heart instincts say that any 17-year-old as desperate as all that should be treated with great compassion and not exploited as a poster-child for turning women into criminals.

Meanwhile, there’s this from Amnesty International. I would somehow feel more sympathetic toward the anti-abortion idealogues if I thought there was any real compassion involved. But I see little evidence of it.

Amnesty International’s report Deadly Delivery: The Maternal Health Care Crisis in the USA, urges action to tackle a crisis that sees between two and three women die every day during pregnancy and childbirth in the USA.

A total of 1.7 million women a year, one-third of all pregnant women in the country, suffer from pregnancy-related complications.

The report also revealed that severe pregnancy-related complications that nearly cause death — known as “near misses” — are rising at an alarming rate, increasing by 25 percent since 1998.

Minorities, those living in poverty, Native American and immigrant women and those who speak little or no English are particularly affected.

“This country’s extraordinary record of medical advancement makes its haphazard approach to maternal care all the more scandalous and disgraceful,” said Larry Cox, executive director of Amnesty International USA.

, , ,

“Mothers die not because the United States can’t provide good care, but because it lacks the political will to make sure good care is available to all women,” said Larry Cox.

Amnesty International’s analysis also shows a health care reform proposal before the US Congress does not address the crisis of maternal health care.

And then there’s this, an antidote to Oscar hype (though I’m pleased about Jeff Bridges):

Advocacy

I have been reading in Fooling With Words, a book of interviews Bill Moyers had with poets at the Geraldine R. Dodge Festival over a decade ago.

This moning I was reading his interview with Marge Piercy. Moyers asked her whether her poems about the “grittiness of life” come from her own experiences, her years of working as a clerk, a switchboard operator, a secretary. Piercy answers:

No more so than growing up in the center of Detroit and losing a good friend to heroin when I was fifteen. No more than being in the movement against the Vietnam War and experiencing the violence of the government’s willingness to use force against people who dissent. No more than packing a woman with ice so she wouldn’t bleed to death because a doctor wouldn’t help her when abortions were illegal.

There is more to this passage, and Piercy ends by affirming life, as she does in her poetry, but reading that last sentence reminded me what life used to be like for women and how the radical right wants it to be again.

I have been very discouraged lately about the state of the world and feeling powerless to do anything about it. So I had vowed to stick to my poetry and stay out of the culture wars. That I didn’t need to say anything about this Focus on the Family Tebow ad that’s scheduled for the Super Bowl and that my signing yet another e-mail petition was just another meaningless powerless gesture.

But reading Piercy convinced me that I need to speak out, even though my soapbox is small. Anyway, today is the birthday of Betty Friedan, founder of the National Abortion Rights Action League, a good day to speak out in support of a woman’s right to choose.

In case you’ve been living in Lower Slobovia, here’s the deal:

Focus on the Family, that paragon of “righteous” bigotry, has landed a coveted 30-second TV spot during the game that is expected to deliver an anti-abortion message, and the Women’s Media Center, with the support of several reproductive rights organizations, has kicked off a campaign for CBS to ban the ad.

Here’s what we know so far about the ad: It features star college quarterback Tim Tebow and his mother, Pam, sharing “a personal story centered on the theme of ‘Celebrate Family, Celebrate Life,’” according to a Focus on the Family press release. It’s safe to assume the spot will tell the story of how Tebow’s mom fell ill during her pregnancy but refused doctors’ advice that she have an abortion for her own safety. Luckily enough, she gave birth to a healthy baby boy and future Heisman Trophy-winner. Tebow only confirmed suspicions that the ad takes this tack when the controversy was raised at a recent press conference: “I’ve always been very convicted of it” — presumably his antiabortion view — “because that’s the reason I’m here, because my mom was a very courageous woman.”

Winning the Heisman Trophy, by the way, doesn’t strike me as a guarantee of moral probity. A man who is an amazing football player is not necessarily the same man I’d pick as a spiritual leader. Seems to me like O.J. Simpson won that prize once upon a time. Star athletes in general have a recent record of behaving badly. And if the ad argues as predicted, it strikes me as the worst kind of rhetorical trickery, emotional and manipulative.

I should also disclose here that I have never watched a Super Bowl and don’t intend to start this year. So the Focus on the Family ad is not targeted at me or folk like me.

This campaign is not about saving babies. It’s about controlling women. If it were about saving babies, these same people would be working hard to see that poor women get good sex education* and good prenatal care and that the babies of poor women get good healthcare and a good education. I don’t see that happening.

As for CBS, now that they’ve broken their self-imposed ban on advocacy ads during the Super Bowl, looks like they’ll have to take them from all sides. Like, for example, this one from Planned Parenthood

Women’s Media Center protest letter is here.

Gloria Allred Threatens CBS For Allowing Tim Tebow Anti-Abortion Super Bowl Ad

_______________
*A new study published in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine that abstinence-only can work with younger adolescents for a short period of time if coupled with intensive sex education.

_______________
Added: From William Saletan via Jeff Hess:

Pam’s story certainly is moving. But as a guide to making abortion decisions, it’s misleading. Doctors are right to worry about continuing pregnancies like hers. Placental abruption has killed thousands of women and fetuses. No doubt some of these women trusted in God and said no to abortion, as she did. But they didn’t end up with Heisman-winning sons. They ended up dead.

Being dead is just the first problem with dying in pregnancy. Another problem is that the fetus you were trying to save dies with you. A third problem is that your existing kids lose their mother. A fourth problem is that if you had aborted the pregnancy, you might have gotten pregnant again and brought a new baby into the world, but now you can’t. And now the Tebows have exposed a fifth problem: You can’t make a TV ad.

On Sunday, we won’t see all the women who chose life and found death. We’ll just see the Tebows, because they’re alive and happy to talk about it. In the business world, this is known as survivor bias:
Failed mutual funds disappear, leaving behind the successful ones, which creates the illusion that mutual funds tend to beat market averages. In the Tebows’ case, the survivor bias is literal. If you’re diagnosed with placental abruption, you have the right to choose life. But don’t be so sure that life is what you’ll get.

Who’s terrified?

Here’s a modest proposal from a columnist in our local weekly newspaper, The Bourbon County Citizen. The column is called Uncommon Sense; it is written by one Kevin Garrison. Last week’s number was entitled “I Am Getting Tired of Being Treated Like A Criminal.” He’s talking about airport security.

Here’s the proposal:

Justice should be sure and swift for terrorists. United States citizens should not put up with having to be scanned to the point of nudity in order to travel their own skies. I am sorry but a guy who just burned his wee-wee off with a bomb in his underwear isn’t a “suspected terrorist” or an “alleged bomber”. He is the guy. He is the one who had the explosives in his pants. He should be shot with a pork laden bullet within twelve hours of his conviction and his body should be sent back to Nigeria and put on display.

Well, that would certainly show those barbarians how us civilized folk live here in the land of the free. And, of course, it kind of does away with the Bill of Rights and the presumption of innocence. Not to mention a whole bunch of the New Testament.

And of course it sort of turns us into the terrorists.

As it turns out, I am opposed to full-body scanning too, but not because I trust I government to know who needs shooting and who don’t. After 8 or 9 years of this war on an emotion, the only people I see who are all that terrified are the U.S. citizenry.

I am against these scans because they’re an invasion of privacy, because they are unproven, and because they’ll still depend on human operators (airport security personnel who aren’t being allowed to use collective bargaining to get decent pay). I’m against them because, as Glenn Greenwald argues, what we need is not more security but more-intelligent security, and with David Brooks that it’s impossible for our government to protect us from every threat:

All this money and technology seems to have reduced the risk of future attack. But, of course, the system is bound to fail sometimes. Reality is unpredictable, and no amount of computer technology is going to change that. Bureaucracies are always blind because they convert the rich flow of personalities and events into crude notations that can be filed and collated. Human institutions are always going to miss crucial clues because the information in the universe is infinite and events do not conform to algorithmic regularity.

Resilient societies have a level-headed understanding of the risks inherent in this kind of warfare.

I do not want to live in a surveillance state. I’ll take my chances.

Of course, that’s pretty safe for me to say, living as I do in a backwater with nothing more than a few tons of aging chemical weaponry to cause me nightmares.

I do tend to be against a “bring me the head” mentality. I thought that stuff went out with the ancient Romans — remember all those crucified bodies displayed to terrify the local peasantry? I think we were against that.

I was going to thread this post around to this report on “The Guantanamo ‘Suicides’” and this description of how we treated prisoners at Guantanamo:

On June 9th, 2006, [Aamer] was beaten for two and a half hours straight. Seven naval military police participated in his beating. Mr. Aamer stated he had refused to provide a retina scan and fingerprints. He reported to me that he was strapped to a chair, fully restrained at the head, arms and legs. The MPs inflicted so much pain, Mr. Aamer said he thought he was going to die. The MPs pressed on pressure points all over his body: his temples, just under his jawline, in the hollow beneath his ears. They choked him. They bent his nose repeatedly so hard to the side he thought it would break. They pinched his thighs and feet constantly. They gouged his eyes. They held his eyes open and shined a mag-lite in them for minutes on end, generating intense heat. They bent his fingers until he screamed. When he screamed, they cut off his airway, then put a mask on him so he could not cry out.

My point being that a nation sort of gets the kind of security it deserves.

But my son sent me a link to the video below and I think, in some twisted intuitive way, it’s a pretty good answer to Mr. Garrison’s argument:

Dr. Margaret Palmer on the Colbert Report

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/261997/january-18-2010/coal-comfort—margaret-palmer

Mud Mothers

This morning, Allison Hedge Coke posted to the Wom-Po list a poem by Lenelle Moïse, “Mud Mothers,” which begins like this:

Mud Mothers

the children of haiti
are not mythological
we are starving
or eating salty cakes
made of clay

because in 1804 we felled
our former slave captors
the graceless losers sunk
vindictive yellow
teeth into our forests

what was green is now
dust & everyone knows
trees unleash oxygen
(another humble word
for life)

This poem reminded me that back on December 2, I mentioned Margaretta Mason Brown, wife of Kentucky’s first U.S. Senator, who wrote,to her husband that

the Monster Slavery may destroy the people of Kentucky before long [p. 57]

As I wrote then, Margaretta Brown was an emancipationist, one who favored a gradual freeing of the slaves. She made this statement because she was afraid of an uprising like that in Santo Domingo. She was afraid that the incendiary language of abolitionists would incite such a rebellion.

Once upon a time evangelicals were on the side of the angels, and in 1834, a particularly fiery abolitionist sermon by “a young Presbyterian minister, Mr. Davidson” in a church “to Galleries overflowing with Negroes,” caused Mrs. Brown to write to her niece:

The cause of gradual emancipation is gaining ground daily in the West, but these premature and violent measures, will have a tendency to create such a spirit of insubordination amongst the slaves, as will render it necessary to rivet their chains more closely in order to our self preservation, or they will be stimulated to take their cause in their own hands and the tragedy of St. Domingo may indeed be reacted here.

The passage above is from Helen Deiss Irvin’s Women in Kentucky. The paternalism of it makes me cringe, but it illustrates how the institution of slavery enslaved a whole culture. Look at this story from Irvin:

. . . Kentucky owners dreaded slave uprisings. Like other slaveholders, they feared poisonings and the hand raised against an owner that might begin some frightful massacre. [john W.] Coleman [author of Slavery Times in Kentucky] tells of a Lexington woman from Massachusetts, Caroline Turner, despised by whites for her insanely sadistic treatment of slaves. While she was whipping a young coachman in chains early one morning, he broke free and strangled her. Sympathetic as they had previously been toward the Turner slaves, Lexington citizens quickly closed ranks to hunt the young slave down and have him hanged. [p. 57]

It pains me to believe that the people of Haiti are still suffering because once they took their fates in their own hands. And yet, here is Pat Robertson illustrating that the memory of ignorant whites is long. If there is a devil involved here, I would say it has a white skin. How did such a man as this become the voice of evangelism, evangelism that once was on the side of freedom for all? I wonder how Mr. Robertson would react to being whipped in chains.

To learn more about the Haitian Revolution and how Robertson got it all wrong, see Juan Cole who reminds us that these things are never simple:

As Charles Tilly pointed out, all revolutions are multiple revolutions

Read more about the deforestation of Haiti here at the Alicia Patterson Foundation:

No matter how many environmental, agriculture and forestry experts in American and international aid agencies one talks with, there are no illusions that even the best techniques available today can save Haiti. It will never be restored to the richest jewel that adorned France’s colonial crown in the 18th century. The French brought a million African slaves to clear the forests for sugar and coffee. As a result, a huge part of Haiti’s precious woods were felled. This was followed by a procession of lumber companies in the 19th century that paid large sums to landowners and corrupt government officials for access to the forests. The Haitian peasantry also was in need of fuel, building materials and crop lands. They cut down more forests and ended up being blamed for the devastation, now in epic proportions.

(My emphasis)

To read more of Lenelle Moïse at her blog, where you will find links to donate to the Haiti earthquake fund.

__________
Added: Another good explanation of how Haiti came to be where it is today from The Guardian:

As Stephen Keppel of the Economist Intelligence Unit puts it, Haiti’s revolution may have brought it independence but it also “ended up destroying the country’s infrastructure and most of its plantations. It wasn’t the best of starts for a fledgling republic.” Moreover, in exchange for diplomatic recognition from France, the new republic was forced to pay enormous reparations: some 150m francs, in gold. It was an immense sum, and even reduced by more than half in 1830, far more than Haiti could afford.

“The long and the short of it is that Haiti was paying reparations to France from 1825 until 1947,” says Von Tunzelmann. “To come up with the money, it took out huge loans from American, German and French banks, at exorbitant rates of interest. By 1900, Haiti was spending about 80% of its national budget on loan repayments. It ­completely wrecked their economy. By the time the original reparations and interest were paid off, the place was basically destitute and trapped in a ­spiral of debt. Plus, a succession of leaders had more or less given up on trying to resolve Haiti’s problems, and started looting it instead.”

ACLU

I give lip service to a number of causes and organizations here on this blog, but there is one that I support consistently with my purse. That organization is the American Civil Liberties Union.

Glenn Greenwald explains their vital importance here:

It is not hyperbole to say that, over the past decade, there has been no organization more important to the United States, the Constitution, and basic political liberties than the ACLU. From the start of the Bush/Cheney assault on core civil liberties — when most organizations and individuals were petrified of opposing any efforts justified by “terrorism” — the ACLU was one of a small handful of groups which defied that climate of fear by vigorously and fearlessly opposing those erosions. Along with that same small handful of civil liberties and human rights groups, the ACLU since then has been at the center of virtually every fight against government incursions into basic rights. They defend core Constitutional principles regardless of party or ideology, and they continue to lead this fight even now that Bush is gone from office.

Here’s an excerpt from an e-mail I received recently from the ACLU:

For a number of years, the ACLU has received extraordinary support from an anonymous donor, including over $20 million in 2009 alone. He has informed us that, due to market conditions, he will not be able to lend us that support in 2010. This loss of funding will have a particularly hard impact on ACLU programs targeted at the most vulnerable in our society.

In one fell swoop, we stand to lose nearly 25% of the whole organization’s budget—unless you and others step in to help.

David Gelbaum, the largest individual donor in ACLU history—someone who chose to give anonymously for years—decided to reveal the reasons for his support to the ACLU so that we can fully describe this situation to our supporters. In Mr. Gelbaum’s own words, he’s made this decision so that the ACLU, “will not be constrained by donor confidentiality, may fully explain how these programs were created and financed, and may ask others to step forward to help sustain them in the future.”

In response to this crisis, we are engaged in belt-tightening at every level of our organization. We’ve already seen remarkable acts of generosity from donors large and small all across the country.

But protecting the ACLU’s most essential work will require an extraordinary outpouring of support.

You can help by being part of our Acting Together campaign. If we can get 100,000 friends like you to donate to the ACLU by December 31, we’ll be well on our way to keeping essential work on track.

Whatever their virtues, it’s obvious that the Democrats now in control of our Federal government are not going to investigate or even reverse the incursions against civil liberties made by the Bush administration. It’s up to organizations like the ACLU. Greenwald again:

. . .their crucial efforts extend far beyond litigating and lobbying, as they have often been forced to fulfill the investigative and oversight role intended for — but abdicated by — our national media and Congress. Indeed, most of what we know about the Bush torture regime and other lawbreaking schemes is the result not of newspapers or Congressional investigations but the ACLU.

I urge you to support the ACLU. Include them in your seasonal giving.

__________
By the way, Facebook privacy is one of ACLU’s issues, though I’m not sure there’s anything they can do about malicious viruses.