Sherry Chandler

One man’s view of compassion

Joseph Brant, a War Chief of the Mohawk, seems to have carried on an extensive correspondence in English. He made this statement in a letter to an unknown correspondent. It is quoted in the Life of Joseph Brant by William Leete Stone, published in 1845:

The palaces and prisons among you form a most dreadful contrast. . . . Those you call savages relent; the most furious of our tormentors exhausts his rage in a few hours, and dispatches his unhappy victim with a sudden stroke. Perhaps it is eligible that incorrigible offenders should sometimes be cut off. Let it be done in a way that is not degrading to human nature. Let such unhappy men have an opportunity, by their fortitude, of making an atonement in some measure for the crimes they have committed during their lives.

But for what are many of your prisoners confined? — for debt! — astonishing!— and will you ever again call the Indian nations cruel? Liberty, to a rational creature, as much exceeds property as the light of the sun does that of the most twinkling star. But you put them on a level, to the everlasting disgrace of civilization. I knew, while I lived among the white people, many of the most amiable contract debts, and I dare say with the best intentions. Both parties at the time of the contract expect to find their advantage. The debtor, we will suppose by a train of unavoidable misfortunes, fails; here is no crime, nor even a fault; and yet your laws put it in the power of the creditor to throw the debtor into prison and confine him there for life! a punishment infinitely worse than death to a brave man! And I seriously declare, I had rather die by the most severe tortures ever inflicted on this continent, than languish in one of your prisons for a single year. Great Spirit of the Universe! — and do you call yourselves Christians? Does then the religion of Him whom you call your Saviour, inspire this spirit, and lead to these practices? Surely, no. It is recorded of him, that a bruised reed he never broke. Cease, then, to call yourselves Christians, lest you publish to the world your hypocricy. Cease, too, to call other nations savages, when you are tenfold more the children of cruelty than they.

Journal mining

On this anniversary of passage of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,* I turn the page of my old journal to January 23, 1993, and find that I have made notes about Ursula K. Le Guin’s long essay called “The Fisherman’s Daughter,” in Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places (Grove Press, 1982). [Link is to a re-issue.]

I don’t remember reading this essay and yet, when I see the quotes I’ve written down, I think it must have had a considerable influence on my thinking. It’s the way we assimilate things I guess.

Take for example, this statement from Le Guin:

This sort of many namedness doesn’t happen to men; it’s inconvenient, and yet its very cumbersomeness reveals, perhaps, the being of a woman writer as not one simple thing — the author — but a multiple, complex process of being, with varous responsibilities, one of which is her writing. [p. 231]

And also this quote from Alicia Ostriker from Writing Like a Woman (Univ Michigan, 1983) as quoted by Le Guin:

“We think back through our mothers if we are women,” declares Virginia Woolf, but through whom can those who are themselves mothers . . . do their thinking?

Last year, I was moved to write a cycle of 17 acrostic poems based on the “maiden” names of my grandmothers, insofar as I could establish them, back to the eighteenth century. I thought at the time this was happenstance. I was looking to form to help me write voice poems (persona poems, dramatic monologues) about women who were part of Kentucky’s colonial, agrarian culture. I needed some way to find individual “voices” for these women about whom I knew very little. I tried one acrostic and I like the outcome, so I tried another, and then another.

Friends have asked me why I couldn’t just tell the stories. I gave reasons similar to those discussed by Ellen Bryant Voigt. But these names were important to me and I wonder whether my great desire to write poems based on the very names of my grandmothers may have been influenced by reading this essay sixteen years ago (sort of the amount of time it takes to raise a child, huh?

Speaking of which, Le Guin discusses the ideas of Carol Gilligan (In a Different Voice, Cambridge, 1982) that I know have influenced my thinking. It begins with this statement from Le Guin:

No book by a woman who had children has ever been included in that august list [i.e., the Canon of English literature]. [p. 222]

This may be in part because, according to Gilligan, men are brought up to think in terms of their rights, women in terms of their responsibilities. Men think hierarchically and women do not. Therefore, “Great Artist,” being a hierarchical concept, is not a feminine concept.

Then there is this fragment, taken a bit out of context, that expresses what you might call a female writer’s ethic:

Nobody lives in great isolation, nobody sacrifices human claims, nobody even scolds the baby. Nobody is going to put their head, or anybody else’s head, into an oven: not the mother, not the writer, not the daughter—these three and one who, being women do not separate creation and destruction into I create/you are destroyed, or vice versa. Who are responsible, take responsibility, for both the baby and the book. [p.231]

To which, in 1993, I have written this response:

If Ursula Le Guin doesn’t think this is artist as hero, what does she think a hero is? To take responsibility for anything is hard. To take responsibility for the baby is the most heroic act of all. To take responsibility for anybody else, even my own babies who I made, even my parents who made me, is the hardest thing I can do. It is nearly impossible. To take responsibility for the baby and the book, too — shit, that is superwoman.

I wish I were superwoman. But I am not.

To which Le Guin may have answered:

To have and bring up kids is to be about as immersed in life as one can be, but it does not follow that one drowns. A lot of us can swim. [p. 235]

So could I swim? Yes and no.

At the time I wrote this, my sons were about to turn 14. They were starting a high school career and needed a lot of attention. I also had a somewhat demanding full-time job. I had lost my father about 18 months before.

I was writing. I see poem drafts in this journal. But I wasn’t publishing much, and I didn’t produce anything that could be called a book until my children were nearly finished with college, more than ten years after this journal entry was written. Even now, I haven’t published a full-length book of poems.

So I don’t know. I’d say I didn’t so much swim as tread water.**

But I didn’t drown.
__________
By the way, considering my previous journal mining about Joan Didion, I was amused to find that I had written down a comment that Le Guin had made about The Book of the Dun Cow (which I never managed to finish):

Almost worse than Joan Didion. (I said almost.) [p. 254]

I also like and can identify with this line:

I did not know how to write about women because I thought what men had written about women was the truth. [p 234]

__________
*That odd word suffrage, is from the Latin suffragium meaning “support, vote, or right to vote.” It may look like suffer, as in “to tolerate or allow,” but it has a different root.

**I wonder whether one great argument in favor of academic careers for poets is that such careers allow women their best chance to have both the book and the baby.

The unholiness of holy war

I have been reading old New Yorkers again, as is my wont when my friend sends me a care package. This week, in addition to some fascinating archaeological study of the Donner party and some surprising revelations about the Little House books, I was absorbed by Jill Lepore’s Plymouth Rocked, an article that is basically a review of historical treatments of the Pilgrims.

Given my interest in the interaction between indigenous peoples and the European settlers of North America, it will come as little surprise that I was most interested in this article’s take on King Philip’s War, one of the bloodiest and least known of our American history. I deal a little bit with King Philip’s War and how it contributed to our national mythology and the literature of captivity myths in this post.

What interests me in Lepore’s article is the role King Philip’s War played in our sense of what you might call Manifest Destiny as holy war.

In proportion to population, King Philip’s War was one of the deadliest wars in American history. More than half of all English settlements in New England were either destroyed or abandoned. Hundreds of colonists were killed. Thousands of Indians died; those who survived, including Philip’s nine-year-old son, Massasoit’s grandson, were loaded on ships and sold into slavery. Because the conflict was, for both sides, a holy war, it was waged with staggering brutality. New England’s Indians fought to take their land back from the Christians, mocking their praying victims: “Where is Your O God?” One, having killed a colonist, stuffed a Bible into his victim’s gutted belly. Puritans interpreted such acts as a sign of God’s wrath, as punishment for their descent into sinfulness. Not only had they become, over the years, less pious than the first generation of settlers; they had also failed to convert the Indians to Christianity. The Boston minister Increase Mather asked, “Why should we suppose that God is not offended with us, when his displeasure is written, in such visible and bloody Characters?”

Reading those scarlet letters, Puritans concluded that God was commanding them to defeat their “heathen” enemies by any means necessary. For the English, all restraint in war, all notions of “just conduct,” applied only to secular warfare; in a holy war, anything goes. Ministers urged their congregations to “take, kill, burn, sink, destroy all sin and Corruption, &C which are professed enemies to Christ Jesus, and not to pity or spare any of them.” Such a policy, then as now, breeds nothing if not merciless retaliation. As a Boston merchant reported to London, the Indians, in town after town, tortured and mutilated their victims, “either cutting off the Head, ripping open the Belly, or skulping the Head of Skin and Hair, and hanging them up as Trophies; wearing Men’s Fingers as Bracelets about their Necks, and Stripes of their Skins which they dresse for Belts.”

After the blood bath was over, Lepore says the Pilgrim’s repented of their savagery.

I suppose in those days as in these, the brutal over-reaction was born out of terror.

But the lesson to be learned here is one we never ever seem to learn. Or one we have to learn over again with each generation.

Poets for the Living Waters

Via Rocket Kids, Poets for the Living Waters Call for Work — Gulf Coast Poems:

Call for Work – Gulf Coast Poems Poets for Living Waters is a poetry action in response to the Gulf Oil Disaster of April 20, 2010, one of the most profound man-made ecological catastrophes in history.

The first law of ecology states that everything is connected to everything else. An appreciation of this systemic connectivity suggests a wide range of poetry will offer a meaningful response to the current crisis, including work that harkens back to Hurricane Katrina and the ongoing regional effects.

Please submit 1-3 poems, a short bio, and credits for any previously published submissions to:
poetsforlivingwaters@yahoo.com

So far they have poems up by Franz Wright, Evie Shockley, Bill Marsh, and Kate Schapira. Company’s good.

Meanwhile, via Tamiko Beyer at the Kenyon Review blog, David Biespiel writes about poets and politics:

America’s poets have a minimal presence in American civic discourse and a minuscule public role in the life of American democracy. I find this condition perplexing and troubling—both for poetry and for democracy. Because when I look at American poetry from the perspective of a fellow traveler, I see an art invested in various complex, fascinating, historical, and sometimes shop-worn literary debates. I see a twenty-first-century enterprise that’s thriving in the off-the-beaten-track corners of the nation’s cities and college towns. But at the same time that poetry’s various coteries are consumed with art-affirming debates over poetics and styles, American poetry and America’s poets remain amazingly inconsequential to the rest of the nation’s civic, democratic, political, and public life.

This divide between poet and civic life is bad for American poetry and bad for America, too.

This almost seems like a blame-the-victim article to me. As I think I’ve said before here, poets are like every other kind of protester (who isn’t a teabagger) in this country. They’ve been confined to a “free speech zone” and marginalized. The American political powers that be have realized that marginalization works better than suppression. Don’t fight the press, embed it. Don’t use water cannons on the protesters, let them holler themselves hoarse over in the little protesters ghetto. As Tamiko points out,

I find it ironic that Biespiel is, himself seemingly too insulated in his own poetry world to recognize the work of established poets such as Myung Mi Kim, the late June Jordan, Martín Espada, Patricia Smith, Joy Harjo, and Juliana Spahr (yes, mostly women and people of color). Not to mention the rich, exciting work of emerging poets who are unabashedly and unapologetically engaging in the poetics of politics – poets such as Craig Santos Perez, Ching-In Chen, Tara Betts are just a few that immediately come to mind.

. . .

The fact that Biespiel is not aware of – or perhaps does not count – these poets actually proves his point, I think. The truth is, poetry that actively seeks to engage in political dialog is unarguably marginalized by the gatekeepers and tastemakers of the literary establishment (who are, for the most part, white and male).

The question really is not “why aren’t poets more politically active?” as per the headline on the Huffington Post. There are plenty of great poets who are politically active both in their daily life and in their work. The question is “why are politically active poets not more widely recognized and appreciated?”

Anybody got an answer?

I think that we’re back to a question that keeps arising here — is there a way to use the internet to subvert the gatekeepers? Are the tastemakers still in control?

It’s time to put an end to this excremental outpouring

Paul Krugman has it right about the passage of the healthcare bill:

This is, of course, a political victory for President Obama, and a triumph for Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker. But it is also a victory for America’s soul. In the end, a vicious, unprincipled fear offensive failed to block reform. This time, fear struck out.

There may have been real reasons to debate or oppose this bill but bullying, name-calling, racism, and blind obstruction should not be tolerated.

__________

A Ticket for Rush! Thanks to Deb Scott for the link.

__________

Republicans Face Drawbacks of United Stand on Health Bill

David Frum, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, the conservative research organization, said Republicans had tried to defeat the bill to undermine Mr. Obama politically, but in the process had given up a chance of influencing a huge bill. Mr. Frum said his party’s stance sowed doubts with the public about its ideas and leadership credentials, and ultimately failed in a way that expanded Mr. Obama’s power.

“The political imperative crowded out the policy imperative,” Mr. Frum said. “And the Republicans have now lost both.”

“Politically, I get the ‘let’s trip up the other side, make them fail’ strategy,” he said. “But what’s more important, to win extra seats or to shape the most important piece of social legislation since the 1960s? It was a go-for-all-the-marbles approach. Unless they produced an absolute failure for Mr. Obama, there wasn’t going to be any political benefit.”

I say this again — the only aim of the Republicans in this was to obstruct. They were basically holding their collective breath so Mommy would give in. And when that didn’t work, they kicked and screamed and spit. Not a pretty sight.

______

Just don’t tell [Rush] about Costa Rica’s successful universal healthcare system.

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):