Plus ça change, plus …
How yet resolves the Governor of the town?This is the latest parle we will admit.Therefore to our best mercy give yourselvesOr, like to men proud of destruction,Defy us to our worst. For, as I am…
Category: The War-making State
Walt, Various
1. I was simmering, simmering, simmering; Emerson brought me to a boil.–Walt Whitman 2. In 1968 Susan Sontag visited Hanoi for two weeks. In her account of her experiences, she seemed a bit surprised the…
Reckoning with Russia, War, and Ourselves: A Spring-Summer Class
War presented itself to him only as a matter of subjecting himself to danger, to the possibility of death, and thereby earning awards, and the respect of his comrades here and of his friends in…
4.4.22, National Poetry Month
Contemporary war is a bureaucratic and capitalistic enterprise that requires its bored clerks, soulless administrators, ignorant taxpayers, contradictory priests, and encouraging families. If we understood that a war machine is a pervasive system of complicity…
State of Emergency, January 2003
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and ReflectionsEdited by Hannah ArendtSchocken Books, 1988 The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that “the state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We…
Share the Wealth with Robert MacArthur– Military Service & Conscientious Objection: A Personal Perspective
On Sunday, March 20th Robert MacArthur will discuss his journey serving on active duty in the military, wrestling with his conscience for many years and his decision to ultimately leave as a conscientious objector. Attendees…
Birds of a Feather
From Matt Taibbi’s article today at Substack–Which brings us back to Cheney. All those things Trump is rumored to be, Dick Cheney actually is. That’s why it’s so significant that he appeared on the floor…
Dear Daisy Zamora
(After Reading Riverbed of Memory) I admit itI am filled with guiltWe didn’t do enough back in the 80sWhen the Reaganites were determinedTo crush the RevolutionTrue, you might say, the Sandinistas were far from perfectBut…
Why Did All Those People Die?
W. D. Ehrhart, The Madness of It All: Essays on War, Literature, and American Life [2002] This is a collection of the Vietnam veteran and poet’s prose pieces up till 9.11. Some are quite short…
A Letter from 2005
April 6, 2005 Dear Andrew, I recently finished a small book by Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, and it made me think of many conversations we’ve had over the past couple of years. So…