Showing posts with label 21st-century political commentary. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 21st-century political commentary. Show all posts
Monday, May 20, 2019
Tuesday, April 9, 2019
New Poem: Not Giving Way
big old dinosaurs stomp and roar
yellow orange President
wants to re-persecute immigrants
to further harden hearts without minds
maintenance man from recent past
talks of circular firing squad
almost 18 months before election
House mother tells young daughter
I’m not ready to advance your ideas
just wait your turn, stay patient
then a few years later,
I’ll think about it and say no
>
hey reasonable dispassionate Democrats
the middle of the political road
will lead to the barbed-wire ditch
and re-elections and rationalizations
and third-party scapegoating
>
I don’t want to live through this again
yellow orange President
wants to re-persecute immigrants
to further harden hearts without minds
maintenance man from recent past
talks of circular firing squad
almost 18 months before election
House mother tells young daughter
I’m not ready to advance your ideas
just wait your turn, stay patient
then a few years later,
I’ll think about it and say no
>
hey reasonable dispassionate Democrats
the middle of the political road
will lead to the barbed-wire ditch
and re-elections and rationalizations
and third-party scapegoating
>
I don’t want to live through this again
Friday, April 12, 2013
How a song from THE WIZARD OF OZ has hindered the mythification of Margaret Thatcher.
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/12/bbc-wont-ban-ding-dong-the-witch-is-dead-adopted-as-anti-thatcher-anthem/?partner=rss
The above article is quite interesting, though I wonder what would have occurred if, say, a song written during the Margaret Thatcher era (implicitly/explicitly about Thatcher and her policies) had been chosen instead to climb the UK charts.
Bonus irony: For a few minutes (CORRECTION: only five seconds), the ever-current BBC Radio One has to play a hit song from 1939--a supreme rarity.
The above article is quite interesting, though I wonder what would have occurred if, say, a song written during the Margaret Thatcher era (implicitly/explicitly about Thatcher and her policies) had been chosen instead to climb the UK charts.
Bonus irony: For a few minutes (CORRECTION: only five seconds), the ever-current BBC Radio One has to play a hit song from 1939--a supreme rarity.
Sunday, March 24, 2013
Glenn Greenwald on nonconformist political commentary.
Reprinting the opening paragraphs of Glenn Greenwald's article on how the mainstream media keeps Noam Chomsky away from the Cool Pundits table in the cafeteria of acceptable consensus ideas. And the words/phrases "poets", "poetry community", "writers" and "literary community" could be plugged into these paragraphs (along with names of writers and artists with works and ideas not considered Mainstream)--and Greenwald's comments make sense in another context.
The entirety of Greenwald's column can be found at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/23/noam-chomsky-guardian-personality
One very common tactic for enforcing political orthodoxies is to malign the character, "style" and even mental health of those who challenge them. The most extreme version of this was an old Soviet favorite: to declare political dissidents mentally ill and put them in hospitals. In the US, those who take even the tiniest steps outside of political convention are instantly decreed "crazy", as happened to the 2002 anti-war version of Howard Dean and the current iteration of Ron Paul (in most cases, what is actually "crazy" are the political orthodoxies this tactic seeks to shield from challenge).
This method is applied with particular aggression to those who engage in any meaningful dissent against the society's most powerful factions and their institutions. Nixon White House officials sought to steal the files from Daniel Ellsberg's psychoanalyst's office precisely because they knew they could best discredit his disclosures with irrelevant attacks on his psyche. Identically, the New York Times and partisan Obama supporters have led the way in depicting both Bradley Manning and Julian Assange as mentally unstable outcasts with serious personality deficiencies. The lesson is clear: only someone plagued by mental afflictions would take such extreme steps to subvert the power of the US government.
A subtler version of this technique is to attack the so-called "style" of the critic as a means of impugning, really avoiding, the substance of the critique. Although Paul Krugman is comfortably within mainstream political thought as a loyal Democrat and a New York Times columnist, his relentless attack against the austerity mindset is threatening to many. As a result, he is barraged with endless, substance-free complaints about his "tone": he is too abrasive, he does not treat opponents with respect, he demonizes those who disagree with him, etc. The complaints are usually devoid of specifics to prevent meaningful refutation; one typical example: "[Krugman] often cloaks his claims in professional authority, overstates them, omits arguments that undermine his case, and is a bit of a bully." All of that enables the substance of the critique to be avoided in lieu of alleged personality flaws.
The entirety of Greenwald's column can be found at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/23/noam-chomsky-guardian-personality
One very common tactic for enforcing political orthodoxies is to malign the character, "style" and even mental health of those who challenge them. The most extreme version of this was an old Soviet favorite: to declare political dissidents mentally ill and put them in hospitals. In the US, those who take even the tiniest steps outside of political convention are instantly decreed "crazy", as happened to the 2002 anti-war version of Howard Dean and the current iteration of Ron Paul (in most cases, what is actually "crazy" are the political orthodoxies this tactic seeks to shield from challenge).
This method is applied with particular aggression to those who engage in any meaningful dissent against the society's most powerful factions and their institutions. Nixon White House officials sought to steal the files from Daniel Ellsberg's psychoanalyst's office precisely because they knew they could best discredit his disclosures with irrelevant attacks on his psyche. Identically, the New York Times and partisan Obama supporters have led the way in depicting both Bradley Manning and Julian Assange as mentally unstable outcasts with serious personality deficiencies. The lesson is clear: only someone plagued by mental afflictions would take such extreme steps to subvert the power of the US government.
A subtler version of this technique is to attack the so-called "style" of the critic as a means of impugning, really avoiding, the substance of the critique. Although Paul Krugman is comfortably within mainstream political thought as a loyal Democrat and a New York Times columnist, his relentless attack against the austerity mindset is threatening to many. As a result, he is barraged with endless, substance-free complaints about his "tone": he is too abrasive, he does not treat opponents with respect, he demonizes those who disagree with him, etc. The complaints are usually devoid of specifics to prevent meaningful refutation; one typical example: "[Krugman] often cloaks his claims in professional authority, overstates them, omits arguments that undermine his case, and is a bit of a bully." All of that enables the substance of the critique to be avoided in lieu of alleged personality flaws.
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