Took awhile to get here, but I finally got my copies of Poems in the Aftermath, an anthology from Indolent Books of poems written between the 2016 election and the inauguration, including my poem “Patriotism Reconsidered. I’m honored to have my work included in this fine collection.
Many thanks to Indolent Books for publishing my poem, Beautiful Children as part of their What Rough Beasts series. The poem was written in response to our fearless leader’s statement that he bombed Syria because of the alleged chemical weapons attacks on “beautiful children”. If saving beautiful children is our litmus test for bombing attacks, we might want to start at home. Read the poem.
In the midst of this national crisis of fake news, disinformation and pathological lies, it is an honor to have my poem, Just The Facts, published by The Turnip Truck(s) Writers Resist series. This poem was first read at the Arlington, VA Writers Resist reading. In this rather dark poem, brevity speaks to our processing of the bombardment of ‘information’ that we endure on a daily basis.
In a comment on their Facebook page, the editor describes the poem saying that it “cleverly reflects our unsettling, distorted political reality”. That certainly is what I intended.
Many thanks to Indolent Books for including my poem, The Breakdown Of All Things, in their What Rough Beast series.
The poem begins,
Priests of old gods tell us
that we need a moral compass,
You can read the rest of it here.
Many thanks to Indolent Books for publishing my poem, Patriotism Reconsidered as part of their Transition Poems project in response to the election. This is how it starts:
My anthem is the serenade of birds…
Click the link for the rest of the poem.
Sunday morning newspaper, steaming hot coffee, peaceful reverie, lounge chair on my deck, birdsong chorus in the background–bliss until I saw the Outlook section of the Washington Post with two, yes two, life size headshots of Henry Kissinger.
My peaceful easy feeling went full throttle grumpy in a matter of seconds.
Which was quite justified when I found that this dual image travesty illustrated a review by Hillary Clinton of Kissinger’s new book (no I won’t provide a convenient Amazon link).
As a feminist, I am completely in favor of electing a woman president. It is long overdue. But as anyone who has read my work over the years knows, I am no fan of Hillary Clinton. Yes, she has done some good things, but her world outlook is as dangerous as the male politicians who have preceded her. Lest you doubt this, read the following few paragraphs from her very long review:
In his new book, “World Order,” Henry Kissinger explains the historic scope of this challenge. His analysis, despite some differences over specific policies, largely fits with the broad strategy behind the Obama administration’s effort over the past six years to build a global architecture of security and cooperation for the 21st century.
During the Cold War, America’s bipartisan commitment to protecting and expanding a community of nations devoted to freedom, market economies and cooperation eventually proved successful for us and the world. Kissinger’s summary of that vision sounds pertinent today: “an inexorably expanding cooperative order of states observing common rules and norms, embracing liberal economic systems, forswearing territorial conquest, respecting national sovereignty, and adopting participatory and democratic systems of governance.”
This system, advanced by U.S. military and diplomatic power and our alliances with like-minded nations, helped us defeat fascism and communism and brought enormous benefits to Americans and billions of others. Nonetheless, many people around the world today — especially millions of young people — don’t know these success stories, so it becomes our responsibility to show as well as tell what American leadership looks like.
Success stories? Through what warped lens is she viewing the world and our country? Rare is the book review that could be characterized as chilling. In this case, it is an apt descriptor.
Clinton is correct that many people, especially the young, don’t know these stories. But those of us who do call foul. This review is nothing short of an alarming adulation of Kissinger’s damaging tenure.
That she wrote it really isn’t a surprise, she has always bought into this toxic narrative and it tells us beyond doubt that regardless of the need to finally elect a woman as president in the United States, an Hillary Clinton presidency would be enormously dangerous.
I am not a big fan of patriotism or the holidays that glorify it (although admittedly I’m a sucker for marching band music). I’ve never quite understood the sense of arbitrary national boundaries which then seem to need to be defended just because they are there. Neither am I a fan of wars fought in the name of those boundaries because when you strip away the rhetoric, they essentially boil down to exercises in asserting dominion and power over a perceived adversary that cost a lot of money, do a lot of damage, and ruin a lot of lives.
But yet we insist on glorifying war and honoring those that fight while at the same time doing everything we can to minimize the carnage of those battles in our histories and memories.
A few months ago, I started taking a Tai Chi class which is taught by a nice woman named Nancy. For those of you not familiar with Tai Chi, it involves moving through a series of movements in a very prescribed manner. It is both an exercise and a meditation. Nancy tells us during class that if we practice enough, we will develop what she calls muscle memory, that the time will come when we will not need to be told how to move through the movements, at some point, we will just remember.
Unfortunately, the same can be said for war–we’ve gone there so many times that it has become politically reflexive. When it comes to peace, however, we’ve had far too little practice.
In my Tai Chi class, we are learning what is called 24 form Tai Chi, which means that there are 24 movements to learn. There are other versions of Tai Chi that have more than 100 movements, obviously it takes a great deal longer to learn and develop the muscle memory of the longer form.
When it comes to talking about war, our politicians and media are quite adept at simplifying the talking points they want us to remember. They would never think of pitching 100 talking points, we would never learn that. But their simplified narrative is all too easy to remember and accept. Unlike Tai Chi however, where a simplified version of the practice can be done without sacrificing the benefit, when we talk about war and leave out a significant part of the story, it is very damaging. And if we are ever to practice peace, we need to tell the full narrative of war.
Memorial Day
In memory,
not of the soldiers of war
who bear the false flag of patriotism,
the defenders of empire’s entitlement,but of the ones
our narrative wants to forget,the collateral damage of battle
for whom there is no holiday,
no brass band,
no wreaths solemnly laid,these are the ones we must remember.
Only then will we understand
that we must not to go to war.–Lucinda Marshall, © 2014
Some people have fantasy football teams. I have fantasy Sunday morning talk show guest panels that are made up entirely of women. These are my picks for my fantasy panel, Syria edition.
As U.S. posturing on Syria has escalated, the media has trotted out old white guy after old white guy as “experts”, never mind many of them are the same men who lied to us about chemical weapons in Iraq and then commenced to bomb the Iraqis with all manner of chemical weapons which left a horrifying epidemic of cancer, birth defects and death in that country and have backed U.S. policies that have contributed to the current situation in Syria and Middle East unrest in general.
I think most of us are supremely tired of listening to these guys and of a media that simply parrots the talking points of U.S. military domination.
Imagine if instead they presented a balanced view that brought in people who articulate alternative visions and oh what the heck, how about we just kick all the men out and listen to women for a change.
So for the benefit of the media, here are some voices you ought to be including as commentators in your coverage of Syria:
1. Sarah Van Gelder writes in Yes! Magazine that, “there are at least six strategies that could hold wrongdoers to account, deter war crimes of all sorts, and build peace”:
2. The women’s human rights organization MADRE similarly calls for the Obama Administration to:
3. The Nobel Women’s Initiative (who unlike President Obama, are using their status as Nobel Peace Prize winners to promote peaceful solutions) has put out a statement that reads:
The use of chemical weapons in Syria is a crime that cannot be ignored but bombing Syria is not the answer. Military intervention in Syria can only lead to more death and destruction, and further fuel the volatile situation in the region.
We applaud the vote of the UK’s Parliament against endorsing British involvement in attacks on Syria, and call upon the United States to step back from the brink of attacking yet another country in the Middle East/North Africa region. Such a move can only result in more hatred, more violence and more retaliation.
We call upon the UN Security Council to accept its responsibility to act in response to the use of chemical weapons in Syria instead of the ongoing posturing of its members based on their own self-interest instead of concern about the people of Syria.
We urge the Security Council to ensure the nonviolent resolution of this crisis within the ongoing crisis of the civil war in Syria. We call upon the Security Council to refer the matter to the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court (ICC).
We also call on the International Community to urgently convene the Syria Peace Conference, known as Geneva II, and to ensure women meaningfully participate. (emphasis mine)
4. Sonali Kolhatkar of KPKF’s Uprising radio program and Co-Director of the Afghan Women’s Mission writes,
Students of American imperial history do not have to look too far back to see the disastrous consequences of bombing dictatorial governments. As the debate over a US military strike on Syria heats up in Congress, American antiwar activists are clear in their opposition to the push for war. And they are correct to oppose any sort of military strikes if the long arc of destructive US foreign policy is to be trusted to remain the same.
5. Medea Benjamin points out that most Americans do not support the idea of bombing Syria.
6. Amnesty International looks at the problems of sexual harassment and forced marriages faced by Syrian women refugees.
7. The Women’s Media Center’s Women Under Siege has run a number of pieces about women in Syria.
The U.S. media owes its audience a fair and balanced representation of the issues, not just pro-war talking points and they need to include women’s voices and concerns as part of that discussion.
———-
Postscript–As several readers have pointed out, I left out the crucial voice of Phyllis Benis.
As the flags are waved and the parades marched this 4th of July, we would do well to consider the freedom and independence we claim to cherish and defend. In decidedly different ways, Edward Snowden’s leaking of NSA documents and Texas State Senator Wendy Davis’ filibuster have challenged us to think about what it means to stand up for what we believe in, in ways that don’t involve spending billions of dollars fortifying our borders, stopping and frisking without cause, arresting people for expressing their First Amendment rights in washable chalk, perpetually attacking other countries, the highest rate of incarceration in the world, and the highest per capita rate of gun ownership.
In just the six months since the Newtown killings there have been more Americans murdered by guns than the 4,409 United States armed forces killed in the Iraq war.
Aside from the fact that fighting spurious wars against other nations most decidedly makes us more vulnerable rather than safe, on our own streets and in our own homes, every day, we are waging war against ourselves.
Our military meanwhile censors news in defense of free speech and insists that maintaining the chain of command and good order trump legitimate prosecution of sexual assaults within the ranks, completely missing the point that the epidemic of personal violence being perpetrated by those who have sworn to protect us completely belies any semblance of a functional chain of command or good order.
At the same time, we have ignored both our own complicity in and the consequences of global warming. How is it that the President just got around to making a major speech on that subject?
Last week there was an insert in my PEPCO bill that informed me that 41% of my power came from coal, 18.6% came from gas, 34% came from nuclear and only 5.7% came from renewable sources. Meanwhile we are told that we must frack, never mind that it causes water to catch on fire and earthquakes, and we still don’t have a clue how to store nuclear waste (because the truth is it can’t be safely done) and we build tar sands pipelines through our farmland, wilderness and suburbs, and commit mountaintop mastectomies. Our air and land and water are polluted, wildfires rage and entire cities flood.
And too, we cut education spending, close schools and fire teachers, and saddle our college students with impossible debt. Even with “Obamacare” there will still be those who do not have insurance. In our legislatures and in Congress, a war is being waged against women’s reproductive rights. And retirement? Don’t even go there. And Wall Steet? Well it’s doing just fine.
That is the nitty gritty of the democracy for which we wave our flags. As Team America put it so eloquently, America, fuck yeah.
Josh Marshall (no relation) of Talking Points Memo makes the point that American democracy is dependent on secrecy as an integral part of its defense and questions whether breaking that secrecy (even when it exposes the abuse of that mandate) is acceptable,
Let me put my cards on the table. At the end of the day, for all its faults, the US military is the armed force of a political community I identify with and a government I support. I’m not a bystander to it. I’m implicated in what it does and I feel I have a responsibility and a right to a say, albeit just a minuscule one, in what it does. I think a military force requires a substantial amount of secrecy to operate in any reasonable way. (emphasis mine) So when someone on the inside breaks those rules, I need to see a really, really good reason. And even then I’m not sure that means you get off scott free. It may just mean you did the right thing…
…And I’m very skeptical of the notion that what Snowden did is awesome just because leaking state secrets is always a heroic act.
No question, America does indeed depend on secrecy. But as The New Yorker points out,
Snowden took classified documents from his employer, which surely broke the law. But his real crime was confirming that the intelligence agencies, despite their strenuous public denials, have been accumulating vast amounts of personal data from the American public.
Yes, precisely. And ask yourself this–Can you defend democracy with secrecy and spying or do those acts in fact completely undermine what you claim to hold dear?
Patriotism is a dangerous notion. It assumes the supremacy of the state that requires the constant exertion of ‘power over’ to maintain and the sanctity of borders that imply a damaging assumption of dominion and ownership which destroy any possibility of real freedom or democracy.
It’s time, past time, to reconsider what that flag we so proudly wave really represents and to stand up for the values that we hold dear.
The Sandy Hook massacre isn’t just about the need for gun control laws, it is about a culture that condones the killing of children and teaches children that killing is okay.
It is about a country addicted to violence on television and movie screens.
It is about cuts in education spending.
It is about giving the military free access to our schools where they regale our children with romanticized delusions of military righteousness.
It is about environmental and health policies that expose our children to all manner of toxins in the air, land and water.
It is about thinking we have the right to kill children with drones or by dropping toxic munitions on their countries that cause birth defects and miscarriages.
It is about saddling our children with crippling education debt and no prospect for jobs.
It is about telling boys (and men) they have to be tough and to fight and kill for what they want or think is right.
It is about a national policy that denies children basic rights and systemically teaches them that violence is okay.
And it is about a media so insensitive that it thinks it is okay to shove a microphone in the face of young victims in the name of sensationalized 24/7 cable “news” while under-reporting the root causes of this tragedy.
Sandy Hook did not happen because of a lone, disturbed young man and it is not an isolated incident. It is an epidemic and we are all to blame. And today (and tomorrow and every day after that) is the time to confront this self-inflicted tragedy.
Lucinda Marshall, photo by Jaree Donnelly