Welcome to PoemAlley, Stamford, Connecticut's eclectic venue for poets, poetry reading and discussion! Open to anyone living in Fairfield County and the surrounding area, we meet Tuesday nights at 7:30 pm at Curley's Diner on 62 Park Place (behind Target) . Come contribute, get something to eat, or simply listen!
This Sunday, PoemAlley and participants from the
regional poetry community share their thoughts on gender relations, inequality
and related topics clustering about that all-too ubiquitous (yet fatalistically
under-examined) institution of organized mass violence, which has become the roaring
hearth of American society over the last twelve years.
Part of the Unitarian Universalist Society in Stamford’s series of
lay-led summer services, "Sex, Love & War" will be hosted by Ralph Nazareth
and feature readings from himself and fourteen other poets, including Robin Kurtz,
Lisa Labazzo, Bob Sanders and Ronna
Schenkerman, with guest readings by Neil Silberblatt (organizer of the popular
state-wide Voices of Poetry series), Middlebury-based poetry therapist Marianela Medranoand Jane Wickham.
In sympathy with the issues raised by such cases as Lynddie England's haunting, romantically-entangled
stint at Abu Ghraib, as well as the more recent focus on the prevalence of rape and sexual assault in the military, this Sunday’s presentation will use a combination of music, words and
video, both during and in the UU Social Room afterwards, to suggest how war
distorts love and loyalty and how sex and masculine identity are mis-defined to
validate endless armed conflict as normative.
While the 2012 documentary, The Invisible War (see trailer below under "Additional Information") is laudable
for campaigning against widespread sexual abuse within the American armed services, the
question lingers as to how realistic it is to implement reform without first acknowledging
such conduct as a byproduct of a belligerent foreign policy and the overtones
of martial authoritarianism and privilege that permeate domestic entertainment, sports and culture--ranging from interrogation
via sexual degradation at Guantanamo, the rape of an
unconscious teen by Steubenville High football team members, jingoistic films (click here for a recent critique of Zero Dark Thirty), the "doing the Lynndie" photo craze following the aformentioned England 2004 scandal, not to mention the misogynistic half-time mascot theatrics seen in college and professional sports:
On the hopeful side, if the supposedly universal allure of conflict and power seem a timeless head-scratcher rooted inviolably in our nature
or genes, maybe it only seems that way due to a lack of honesty to investigate
its origins, because the toddlers from this 2010 Yale study of innate empathy sure
don’t have trouble defying it:
Where: Unitarian Universalist Society in Stamford 20 Forest
Street (right across from the Avon Theatre)
Open Mic at Barnes & Noble welcomes award-winning poet Neil Silberblatt
this Monday evening as guest reader. First drawn to the form as a student of Frank
McCourt (Pulitzer Prize-winner, Angela’s Ashes), who taught English at Stuyvesant High School in New York at the time, Neil began writing his own work while attending Cornell University.
Now a New Milford resident, Neil travels around Connecticut
coordinating Voices of Poetry, a multi-venue poetry and music program that has
been hosted by the Minor Memorial Library in Roxbury, Gunn Memorial
Library in Washington, Wooster School in Danbury and the New Britain Museum of American Art.
A contributor to VerseWisconsin, the Naugatuck
River Review and other literary publications, it was fromHennen’s Observerthat Neil received a nomination for the Pushcart Award, as well as the Grand Prize in
its Open Community Poetry Contest for “Madison Avenue” (click here to read its efficient
and unflinching commentary on how financialized trade breeds inequality and consumer
narcissism). You can get a live feel for his timely social insight from
this April reading held at the Hartford Public Library last April:
So Far, So Good, Neil’s 2012
collection (Lulu), will be followed later this year by Present Tense.
In addition to a March appearance at Curley’s, Neil has been the
featured reader at Naugatuck
Valley Community College’s Confluencia literary reading series in Waterbury and
at the Wednesday Night Poetry Series in Bethel.
The
choice between standing passive and standing firm in the piece below demonstrates
historically how repeatedly both witnesses and perpetrators often enable one
another in a cold dance of public atrocity.
Stand Your Ground
Stand
your ground
like a tree that’s planted by the water,
near the banks
of the North Canadian River
this clear day in May,
as you jostle with others
for a good spot
to take pictures
of Laura and
her 15 year old boy Lawrence*
hanging from the bridge
like strange fruit.Stand
your ground
by the large sycamore tree
near City Hall in Waco
on another day in May,
as 17 year old Jesse,**
his body muscled
from hauling bales of hay
now naked and beaten,
baptized in coal oil,
hoisted like a flag
by his neck, and
lowered into the fire,
as the flames lick his skin
and his wordless screams fill thesmoke-filled
spring sky. Stand your ground
near the noisy fairgrounds by the silent railyard
as young Henry***
is placed upon a scaffold,
ten feet high,
and his body is caressed
by red hot iron brands
as kerosene is poured upon him, and set alight,
as little ones eat fried dough
and wave banners.
Stand
your ground
along an asphalt road
this dark night in June,
as James,+ his feet bound -
like a latter-day Saint Sebastian -
is driven across the back roads
of Jasper
greeting every rock
every stone
until his body
gives out.
Stand
your ground
for this child,
his skin,
the color of
the soil of those river
banks
the bark of that
sycamore
the lumber of that
kerosene-soaked scaffold
the dirt of that Jasper
road
has not been the first
who has been laid low
for no reason. Stand your ground
though it quakes
though it opens beneath you
though it threatens to swallow you whole.
Stand
your ground,
like a tree that’s planted by the water;
you shall not,
no, you shall not be moved.
* - Laura Nelson was raped; she and her 15-year old son Lawrence were then hanged from a bridge over the North Canadian River on May 25, 1911. Hundreds of sightseers gathered on the bridge the following morning, and photographs of the hanging bodies were sold as postcards.
** - Jesse Washington was a 17-year old farmhand who was tortured and lynched on May 15, 1916 after he was found guilty in a one-hour long trial for the rape and murder of a wealthy 53-year-old white woman. Although Jesse signed a confession, he was by all accounts illiterate.
*** - 17-year old Henry Smith was tortured and murdered at a public, heavily attended lynching on February 1, 1893 at the Paris Fairgrounds in Paris, Texas. Six days later, Henry's stepson, William Butler, was also lynched due to suspicion that he had known, and not divulged, the whereabouts of Henry Smith after he had fled.
+ - James Byrd, Jr. was murdered by three white men in Jasper, Texas on June 7, 1998, when he was dragged behind a pick-up truck with a heavy logging chain wrapped around his ankles. Byrd was pulled along for about three miles as the truck swerved from side to side. Byrd - who reportedly remained conscious throughout most of the ordeal - was killed when his body hit the edge of a culvert, severing his right arm and head.
Hosted by Frank Chambers and PoemAlley's Nick Miele, the Barnes
& Noble Open Mic Poetry program meets the second Monday of each month
in the cookbook section on the main floor of the bookstore (located in the
Stamford Down Center), beginning at 7:15 p.m.
For more information, contact:
Barnes & Noble
100 Greyrock Place Suite H009
Stamford, CT 06901
203-323-1248
___
Of related interest:
Low-budget exploitation movie maestro Roger Corman is justifiably proud of The Intruder (AKA Shame), his 1962 adaptation of Charles Beaumont's intense novel dissecting the symbiotic dynamic animating power, bigotry and mass violence in a story of unreliable first appearances and unexpected sympathies in a Southern town adjusting to school desegregation:
Note: this critique from March by Richard Duffee originally ran on the site of the American-Iranian Friendship Committee. Zero Dark Thirty is currently available on DVD. In light of the accumulated
testimonies of Bradley Manning (U.S. Army, pfc), Edward Snowden (NSA
contractor) and, in particular,John Kiriakou (see videos at the end of this post)regarding
the CIA’s torture activities, it’s vital to dissect the differences between why
these insiders acted as they did in defiance of the unforgiving hierarchies of
which they were a part and how Zero Dark, Argo, Olympus Has Fallen and similar hyper-nationalistic fare rationalize for
the rest of us support of the practices/policies they exposed—not to
mention what it says about our society if it proves itself unworthy of their
sacrifices in defense of truth and humanity.
I
saw Zero Dark Thirty yesterday. The film reveals the heart of what our imperialist
government likes to think of as its ethical system. The system is so simple
it’s terrifying. It has two parts: 1) obey your superiors and 2) tell the truth
to them. If you do those two things, you are supposed to be entitled to honor
and to feel your purpose in life is fulfilled.
The
film’s website,www.zerodarkthirty-movie.comand the other sites on Google will tell you
loads I don’t need to bother with. The heroine, Maya, (Jessica Chastain) joins
the CIA and arrives in Pakistan with the job of finding bin Laden and having
him killed. More than 80% of the film follows her activities. She’s like
Clarisse Sterling but her relationship to bureaucrats is portrayed as if it
were more like Rambo’s: she cares much more about finding bin Laden than anyone
else does and has to take extreme measures to get bureaucrats to act. Enough basic plot.
What Circumstances are Supposed to Make Torture
Ethical?
I’m
interested in the portrayal of ethics. First, the CIA thinks torture is OK because it is supposed to be necessary. Necessary for what? To pump information
out of Al- Qaeda guys. Why is that necessary? 9/11. But why did Al-Qaeda
destroy the World Trade Center (assuming it did)? Not one word. Did 9/11 have
anything to do with US support for Israel and its treatment of Palestine? With
covertly driving the USSR out of Afghanistan? With
backing the Saudis? With our
backing Iraq’s attack on Iran? With our efforts to control oil
Lynndie England holding a leash to a prisoner at Abu Ghraib, Iraq, 2004
and keep its
price down while selling it for enormous profits? With our installing and
keeping dictators all through the Middle East? With our refusing to pay our
share of the UN’s expenditures? With our blocking the Law of the Sea’s
provisions for technology transfer? With our refusal to sign crucial
international human rights treaties? With our refusal to sign on to the
International Criminal Court but instead to treat international crimes as cause
for war? Not one word.
What does “Might Makes Right” Mean?
Would
changing any of those things have prevented 9/11? Not one word. The assumption
is that we need oil and power and so we have the right to occupy the Middle
East, to dominate the economics and politics of the region, and, if that’s not
enough, to kill and steal. Might is supposed to make right: the standard
doctrine of Machiavelli and Fascists. What does “might makes right” actually
mean? Really, that there is no such thing as “right”: what people call “right”
is only what the most powerful say right is—in their own interests—and the rest
of us just repeat their nonsense because we’re terrified not to. Greed and the
lust for power are presumed to be sacred, so if pursuing them gets you into a position
where, to continue on your path, you have to torture, murder, and steal, that’s
understandable, so torture, murder, and theft are OK so long they’re approved
from above. Being approved from above is all that counts. Of course, the people
at the very top may arrange “plausible deniability” for themselves because it’s
OK if their underlings are fired or jailed, but notthem. It’s OK for the
people at the top to be liars and cowards. They’re too big to allowed to fail.
What Bothers the System about Torture?
Torture,
the characters admit, has two problems. A) It shouldn’t be publicized. Sooner
or later it’s going to get out, and you don’t want to be the one holding the
bag when it does. B) It wears the torturers out. Dan (Jason Clarke), the
torturer-in-chief, tells Maya he wants to leave because he’s “seen” a hundred
naked men now, a euphemism meaning he has stripped them to exhibit their pricks
and balls to women, the best way to humiliate a Muslim man—so
Explaining her participation with Charles Graner in
torture and humiliation of prisoners, England said in
a Der Stern interview: "I didn't want to lose him."
that, his dignity
gone, he’ll spill the beans. (This is more effective than agony and the threat
of death—the facing of which, of course, never results in Muslim men being
given any credit for courage. It’s just a problem for poor Dan; after all, he
has a PhD, so he must be sensitive, right? But it doesn’t seem to be a problem
for Maya: just after we’re introduced to her, we’re informed, “Washington says
she’s a real killer.” A point for Women’s Lib, right? So when you look at
torture in the film’s context, its drawbacks are supposed to be pretty small.
How the System Handles its Problems with Torture
Again,
being approved from above is what counts. Those above you can handle both
problems. A) They can keep everything secret, or they can let the press in—as
Bush did when he “outed” Valerie Plame to punish her husband. One’s superiors
have a wide range of latitude in this, but not quite wide enough for them:
folks like Bradley Manning
and Julian Assange can infringe on their privileges,
so they should get the worst possible punishment. B) Torturers and killers can
get worn down. The SS got worn down shooting Jews, piling them in pits, and
burning them, so crematoria had to be built in concentration camps. Dan’s
superiors know perfectly well he’s a competent torturer, so the blame isn’t
going to fall on him. Either some adequate replacement for him will be found or
some other method will have to be devised. Another occasion for Yankee
ingenuity. Worthy of Krupp.
Other Approved Activities
Charles “Look-what-I-made-Lynn- die-do!” Graner, England's superior officer and lover while at Abu Ghraib
What
is approved besides torture? Affairs, for instance. Maya’s one on-the-scene
female superior recommends she have a fling with Dan. That would be good for
her. Just a fling, of course. Maya has a prior commitment: she’s adopted the
project of finding and killing Bin Laden. Nothing can trump that. In fact, the
problem with Maya’s associates may be that they allow other commitments and
interests in life to interfere with their primary commitment in some way, but
not Maya. She is the perfect CIA agent, absolutely single-minded. For the ideal
agent, the rest of life is not really supposed to count. Maya doesn’t let it.
An affair may be all right, but it’s not the best. The best is killing Bin
Laden.
Since “Might Makes Right” Approval Creates
“Morality”
Being
approved from above is what makes something moral. You obey. Of course, if you
don’t obey, you lose your job. That’s a given.It could be worse, and it might be,
but we’re not shown that. All the characters we’re shown obey. Sometimes they
have to be threatened into obeying. Maya realizes that to get things done, she
sometimes has to threaten to report her immediate superiors to their superiors.
She’s skilled at this. She knows just how aggressive she can afford to get
under different circumstances. She knows when she has winning cards and how to
get her immediate superiors to recognize that she does.
What Creates Credibility with Superiors
The
most telling scene is the day the CIA Director (James Gandolfini) shows up. He
asks everyone the likelihood that Bin Laden is actually in the compound. Most
say 60%. Maya says, “100%, but since you guys don’t like certainty, 95%, but
really it’s 100%.” The Director is intrigued, so he approaches her in the
cafeteria and asks, “How long have you been in the CIA?” She says, “Eleven
years.” He asks, “Besides chasing Bin Laden, what else have you done for us?”
She says, “Nothing.” She’s passed the test. In her own case, when it counts,
she’s honest. He figures if she’ll answer that honestly when the chips are
down—when she knows that what is at stake is whether the Director is going to
recommend that the President have the compound attacked—as well as whether she
be promoted, demoted, or fired—he can afford to trust her judgment despite the
fact that it looks like hubris.
The Moral Toll on the Servants of the Assassination
System
In
the final scene, Maya gets on a huge transport. The pilot says, “You must be
awfully important. You’re the only item on the manifest. Where do you want to
go?” She doesn’t answer: she’s too exhausted to know where she wants to go. For
eleven years she has thought of nothing but killing Bin Laden. She has to start
life over and doesn’t have a clue. A single tear slides down her cheek.
The Underlying Questions
Now
the real questions start. What does it mean that all that matters is that one
obeys one’s superior and tells him the truth?
Who does one’s Superior Actually Represent?
The
Director of the CIA reports to the President. Is the President one’s ultimate
superior? This, of course, is what everyone in the government is supposed to
believe. They are all supposed to believe it because, more than anyone else,
the President is supposed to represent the majority of “the people.” But does
he actually represent the people? Let’s count some of the equivocations. 1) If
the election was honest, 2) he may represent the majority of those who voted,
but that’s not the majority of the electorate. 3) The majority of the
electorate is not the majority of the people. 4) The vast majority of those who
voted took only two candidates seriously. 5) They thought the sole significant
act they had in the choice was to vote down one pre-chosen candidate by voting
for the other. 6) The choices were made by the duopoly, the Republicrats. 7)
The leadership of the Republicans now has positions Barry Goldwater held in
1964. The leadership of the Democrats has domestic positions to the right of
Nixon’s and Rockefeller’s. 8) Both parties are flooded with money the Supreme
Court allows to come from anywhere unreported and unchecked, so that the rich
control both candidates. 9) 1% of the people have 41% of the wealth, 2% have
50%, while 40% have 0.3%. The wealth of 2%, being equal to everyone else’s
together, is at the disposal of the rich while most of the wealth of the rest
of us is committed in some way to enabling us to survive. It is not possible
for 98% of us—even if we all agreed—to outspend 2% on politics. 10) The result:
the President is dependent on the money of 2% of us. He knows it. About
all of this, of course, not one word.
Let’s
assume the President represents an oligarchy of 2% of us. Lots of scholars who
study power closely argue for a much smaller figure, often between 200 and 1500
people. But no matter whether the figure is as large as 6 million or as small
as 200, the essential problem remains a problem of human time.
Assume
the largest plausible figure, 2%, since 2% have as much as the rest of us, and
so have the power to hire the rest of us to do their will, or else marginalize
us so we can do virtually nothing at all. If it’s 2%, the question is “How can
1 person control 49?” One person can’t watch everything 49 do. The only way to
manage so many people is to choose a couple of people to manage a few more
people and get those to manage a larger group. What is crucial in this system
of domination? Loyalty. The people on top cannot make the decisions that will
keep them on top without accurate information. And they can’t get people to follow
their decisions unless the followers obey. Those are exactly the two “ethical”
issues over and over in Zero Dark Thirty: obedience and truthfulness to one’s
superior.
So what does this “ethical system” boil down to?
Being
the best servant to one’s superior. You don’t have to be good to anyone else.
No one else counts, just one’s superior—plus, of course, whomever one’s superior
wants to protect. That is the ethic the rich and powerful have to inculcate in
their underlings in order to run the world.
The Problem of Maintaining Such a System
For
the maintenance of the system, the problem is: “How do you convince the
servants of the system that they are gaining honor and fulfilling their purpose
in life by being servile? For they are servile. They are only truthful with
their superiors and the people their superiors allow them to be truthful with.
They stonewall everyone else, or they lie. And they force their rule on people
to whom it is entirely alien: over and over again, Dan tells Ammar, (Reda
Kateb), the man he waterboards, “Whenever you lie to me, I hurt you.” He tells
Ammar, “I own you”: that is, in Ammar’s case, Dan understands perfectly well
that the relationship he is acting out is one of slavery. Dan just can think
the same thought about himself; he can’t allow himself to think that the reason
he outrages prisoners is that he is a slave to his superior, but his slavery is,
supposedly, chosen, so he doesn’t call it that.
The
difference is involuntary slavery versus voluntary slavery. Dan is allowed to
say showing off the “stuff” of a hundred naked men is enough but Ammar can only
say “enough” by betraying his own superiors, friends, associates, and family.
Dan’s slavery is supposed to be dignified because he chose it, while Ammar’s is
supposed to be degrading because he didn’t. This is the real reason Dan needs a
break: the more extreme the polarities of power, the harder it is to keep the
double standard.
The System’s Real Problem with Torture Cannot be
Mentioned within the System
Ultimately
the problem with torture is that it threatens Dan’s hypocrisy. We see this in
the scene in which Dan finds that his monkeys have been killed. He wanted to
treat his monkeys kindly. He wanted SOMETHING he could be kind to so that he
wouldn’t be totally reduced to being the transmission belt between the absolute
domination of his superiors and the absolute humiliation of his prisoner.
And
this too is the meaning of Maya’s single tear. What has she given up to kill
Bin Laden? For eleven years she has failed to be a human being.
Of
course by far the greater suffering is that of those we conquer and force to
betray themselves. But there’s also a cost to the conquerors. It’s in her tear.
“Maya”
means “illusion.” She’s given her life to inhuman illusions of empire, the
illusion that mere power is authority, the illusion that conceals the mortality
of all of us.
In sympathy with the issues raised by such cases as Lynddie England's haunting, romantically-entangled
stint at Abu Ghraib, as well as the more recent focus on the prevalence of rape and sexual assault in the military, this Sunday’s presentation will use a combination of music, words and
video, both during and in the UU Social Room afterwards, to suggest how war
distorts love and loyalty and how sex and masculine identity are mis-defined to
validate endless armed conflict as normative. 
