Sherry Chandler

Friday morning musing

Well, well, well. Congratulations to Barack Obama for having won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. In the last eight years, Peace Prizes have gone to Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, and now Barack Obama. I think perhaps the Nobel committee is sending the United States a message, inviting us to come home to what they see as our true role in the world.

The 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Herta Müller, a Romanian-born German novelist with whose work I am not familiar.

Coming down to earth and closer to home, I had a big time at the Stars with Accents reading last night. Katerina Stoykova-Klemerer and James Brown put together a great set of readers with a wide variety of styles and genres from a great series of shows.

Accents, by the way, made the top three local radio shows in Ace Magazine’s annual Best of Lex ratings. Not bad for a newcomer who interviews poets!

And speaking of interviewed poets, I owe a debt of gratitude to my friend and fellow Green River Writers poet Sheri Wright, who in her September 25 interview on Accents chose my Dance the Black-Eyed Girl as the notable book of the week. She read my poem “Toxicodendron radicans.”

Sheri and Sonja DeVries were partnered for a great interview. You can listen to the podcast of that show and most of the others at this link. Sheri has a couple of notable books out herself, including one that gets my vote for best title, Contains Scenes of Indigenous Nudity. Her discussion of the origins of that title and her musings on why “indigenous” nudity is okay while other nudity is considered pornographic are worth a listen, especially her reading of the poem “Contains Scenes of Indigenous Nudity, the Upper Half.”

You can buy Sheri’s books at Carmichael’’s in Louisville.

By the way, WRFL was taping last night’s readings and I think highlights will be played on future broadcasts of Accents.

Stuff

Via Ron K. Jeffries, 12-year-old cat commutes by bus in England

Update: And this one: Florida man blames cat for downloading child pornography

You can generate your own Kenyan birth certificate at this link. And you can watch Bill Maher ridicule the birthers at this link. Thanks to The Sideshow.

Also via The Sideshow, A French Revelation, or The Burning Bush, in which James A. Haught describes how George W. Bush told Jacques Chirac that Gog and Magog were at work in Iraq and that’s why we had to invade.

Malcolm Gladwell deconstructs To Kill A Mockingbird in The Courthouse Ring.

Via Corrente, The Health Insurers Have Already Won or How UnitedHealth and rival carriers, maneuvering behind the scenes in Washington, shaped health-care reform for their own benefit Meanwhile, via Hippy Steve, DN! Nine Arrested in Iowa Single-Payer Protest. And lies Republicans tell here and here.

From tinydoctor, it was Russia killed Twitter. Or was it Georgia? Update: More on this story.

And this may be my favorite headline of the day: Ky. jailer resigns after rape conviction

Must reads

From the ACLU’s Blog of Rights: Heads: Detention, Tails: Detention

This plan, if carried out, would give President Obama the dubious distinction of being the first president in our nation�s history to seek congressional codification of an expansive system of preventive detention. Perhaps even more telling, however, the plan amounts to a plea for Congress to enshrine into law, perhaps with some as-of-yet-undefined oversight, the power that President Bush asserted without any statutory support.

From I See Invisible People: A Justice for All?

I�ve been watching the brouhaha over Sonia Sottomayor with a little bit of caution and a great deal of cynicism. Yes, she�s a woman. Yes, she�s Hispanic. I got that part. Now tell me where she stands on Roe v. Wade and the Lily Ledbetter case.

Liberal women are being patted on the head by the Obama administration and told to relax and trust him. Sorry, dude. Your track record doesn�t merit that kind of faith. Barely 100 days into his administration, Obama is backtracking on too many issues for me to give him the benefit of the doubt on this.

And Glenn Greenwald: Obama’s support for the new Graham-Lieberman secrecy law

It was one thing when President Obama reversed himself last month by announcing that he would appeal the Second Circuit’s ruling that the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) compelled disclosure of various photographs of detainee abuse sought by the ACLU. Agree or disagree with Obama’s decision, at least the basic legal framework of transparency was being respected, since Obama’s actions amounted to nothing more than a request that the Supreme Court review whether the mandates of FOIA actually required disclosure in this case. But now — obviously anticipating that the Government is likely to lose in court again (.pdf) — Obama wants Congress to change FOIA by retroactively narrowing its disclosure requirements, prevent a legal ruling by the courts, and vest himself with brand new secrecy powers under the law which, just as a factual matter, not even George Bush sought for himself.

The White House is actively supporting a new bill jointly sponsored by Sens. Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman — called The Detainee Photographic Records Protection Act of 2009 — that literally has no purpose other than to allow the government to suppress any “photograph taken between September 11, 2001 and January 22, 2009 relating to the treatment of individuals engaged, captured, or detained after September 11, 2001, by the Armed Forces of the United States in operations outside of the United States.”

But lest one think my entire view of Mr. Obama is negative, I do think he has some charm, and I think Michelle Obama’s dress is smashing.

�I am taking my wife to New York City,� the president said in the statement, �because I promised her during the campaign that I would take her to a Broadway show after it was all finished.�

Oh the dangers of empathy!

I love Dahlia Lithwick.

Remember the other day I posted a bit from Lance Mannion about how the Right likes to distort language?

Well, yesterday Lance has pointed me to this article by Dahlia Lithwick concerning the Republican hissy fit over Barack Obama’s statement that he wants empathetic judges, Once More, Without Feeling:

When did the simple act of recognizing that you are not the only one in the room become confused with lawlessness, activism, and social engineering? For a group so vociferously devoted to textualism and plain meaning, conservative critics have an awfully elastic definition of the word empathy. It expands to cover any sort of judicial malfeasance they can imagine. Empathy�the quality of caring what others may feel�signals intellectual weakness, judicial immodesty, favoritism, bias, and grandiosity. John Yoo also seems to be of the view that the kind of emotional incontinence that begins with empathy for others quickly leads to being “emotive” on the bench. Evidently it’s a short hop from empathy to having the judicial vapors.

. . . Empathy means being impartial toward all litigants without being blind to the consequences of your decisions. You can send up such concerns as gooey judicial sentimentalism, unmoored from any fixed legal principle. Or you can admit that judging requires acts of judgment beyond the mechanical application of law to facts and that it’s best for judges to know when the mechanical act of deciding cases gives way to ideology and personal preference. Empathy isn’t sloppy sentiment. It’s not ideology. It’s just a check against the smug certainty that everyone else is sloppy and sentimental while you yourself are a flawless constitutional microcomputer.

Politicians do what polliticians do. It’s in the interest of most of them to manipulate the voters. As a poet, one who has great respect for the power of language and the niceties of word meanings, this kind of Orwellian double speak offends me. As a voter, it’s my job to keep my eyes open and not let myself be manipulated this way.

Spicy mustard, how evil

From the incomparable Lance Mannion:

For decades the rhetoric of the Right has amounted to an actual assualt on language. Words, being conveyers of meaning, little blocks of thought, are a problem if your object is to short-circuit thought and incite rage. So words have to be stripped of their meanings. One method of accomplishing this is the Orwellian one of using words as if they mean their opposites. Another method is to use words any old which way. Pick a word, any word, and say it with the right tone and it won’t matter what it means, all that matters is the sound and the feelings those sounds arouse. By associating the sounds of some words with the sounds you’ve given to others you can erase the meaning from all the words and make them convey nothing but feeling. This is how the word liberal became an insult. It didn’t matter what it meant or what Liberals actual stood for or that polls showed that most Americans were actually liberal in their outlooks and in what they wanted and expected from their government. The Right turned the word into a mere sound and it was the sound of a sneer. Then they connected it with other sneering sounds they were fond of and suddenly even Liberals couldn’t use the word without sounding to themselves like they were sneering.

Now, all this feeling, all this rage, which depends on incoherence to get going, isn’t incoherent in its point. It coheres around one central feeling—fear of the Other.

The central emotion of the Right—it’s not a belief, beliefs are based on at least a little thought and require words to mean what they’re supposed to mean—has been Fear of the Other, and the most successful Right Wing politicians have been those who have been the most skillful at inciting and exploiting that fear. Fear of the Other can be expressed more positively as the sense that Only We Are Right, Only We Are the Real Americans, but it’s basically the same feeling, that there is an Us and a Them, and They are stronger, deadlier, and scarier, because they are less han human, and and They are out to get Us.

So, while most of us saw the President just being a guy who likes a good burger, what the Right saw, or what the demogogues in the Media told them to see, was the ultimate Other. A liberal black man who had somehow taken over the country from Us and given it to Them. The fact that he was doing something so routinely, even boringly American, ordering a burger and fries, made the images even more frightening.

The Right depends on its base feeling as if they are the only real Americans, the true U.S., the true Us. But here’s the Ultimate Other, the epitome and leader of Them going into a burger joint, one of the most iconic of American establishments, and acting not just at home but as if he owns the joint, ordering exactly what any real American would order, behaving as if he is a real American. This liberal! This elitist! This black man! And white people are waiting on him and acting as if there’s nothing wrong with it, as if they are in fact enjoying it! And he’s not only getting away with it, people love him for it. Look at that! They’re cheering!

By the way, our arugula is loving all this rain. It loves dry and sunshine too. The wonderful thing about arugula is that it’s so frippin’ easy to grow and you can eat it raw like a lettuce or cooked like kale greens. Such an elitist thing, arugula. And it tastes a little peppery, a little spicey, like Dijon mustard. It must be evil.

I remember when George H. W. Bush was astonished to learn about the Universal Product Code. I suppose the right is looking to turn the tables on the left with stuff like this mustard kerfluffle. But one of Mr. Mannion’s commenters has pointed out that all we’ve proved so far is that Barack Obama is from Chicago. Apparently cheddar with spicy mustard is a Chicago-style cheeseburger.

I see a number of things to question President Obama about: the bailout, the return of the military tribunals, his support of warrantless wiretapping, his faillure to support single-payer healthcare. But these are almost all Bush policies that he has continued. This spicy mustard thing is just misdirection.

Bob Dylan on why the South is different

from the Times Online:

It must be the Southern air. It�s filled with rambling ghosts and disturbed spirits. They�re all screaming and forlorning. It�s like they are caught in some weird web – some purgatory between heaven and hell and they can�t rest. They can�t live, and they can�t die. It�s like they were cut off in their prime, wanting to tell somebody something. It�s all over the place. There are war fields everywhere � a lot of times even in people�s backyards.

Read the rest to find out Dylan’s thoughts on Barack Obama, U.S. Grant, and the ghosts that Elvis say. You can also hear “Chicago After Dark,” a track from his new album.

Thanks to The Falcon.

Meanwhile, here’s a Dylan interview with Bill Flanagan that The Guardian thinks is better than the album.

Equal time