Lo, I too am come, chanting the chant of battles

One of the more interesting figures in early Russian history is Prince Sviatoslav (r. 964-972 CE). According to George Vernadsky, Sviatoslav was tough as nails, a tireless military campaigner. He also scorned stealth when attacking his enemy, preferring instead to send couriers ahead of his troops bearing the message, "I come against you" (Vernadsky, A History of Russia, New York: Bantam (1961), p. 35).

In the death-bed edition of Leaves, Whitman's "Inscriptions" include these lines:

I too haughty Shade also sing war, and a longer and greater one/than any,/Waged in my book with varying fortune, with flight, advance/and retreat, victory deferr'd and wavering,/(Yet methinks certain, or as good as certain, at the last,) the/field the world,/For life and death, for the Body and for the eternal Soul,/Lo, I too am come, chanting the chant of battles,/I above all promote brave soldiers.

Lying admirals, I come against you.
Obscene generals, fat, gorged on the blood
of innocents, I come against you, too.
Murderers, torturers, thieves in the name
of liberty: I come against you.
Christo-fascists, I come against you.
Craven Newspeak politicians, index
fingers in the wind: I come against you.
Republican, Democrat, right and left,
for the Body and for the eternal Soul,
Lo, I too am come, chanting the chant of battles...

Guantanamo Suicides Spun As "Act of War"

"They are smart, they are creative, they are committed," Admiral Harris said. "They have no regard for life, neither ours nor their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us."

You must read the New York Times article. The galling effrontery of the Pentagon's Orwellian Newspeak has achieved new depths never before imaginable in the history of American political rhetoric.

I cannot decide which was the greater act of desperation: the suicides or Admiral Harris' insultingly disingenuous attempt to spin them.

Any person capable of making assertions such as Admiral Harris' must be deeply troubled--pathologically so. Anyone who would buy such assertions is likewise suffering from a psychological disorder. And moral and spiritual disorders.

Tacitus put it best when he observed: "Crime once exposed has no refuge but in audacity."

How long, O Lord, until these criminals in uniforms and suits are brought to justice?

A Profile in Courage...

… not to mention sound Constitutional interpretation:

June 7, 2006

US officer says won't fight in 'unlawful' Iraq war

By Akiko Fujita

TACOMA, Washington, June 7 (Reuters) - A U.S. Army officer said on Wednesday that fighting in the war in Iraq would make him "party to war crimes" and he would not go.

First Lt. Ehren Watada's supporters -- including clergy and a military family group -- said he is the first commissioned officer to publicly refuse to serve in Iraq and risked being court-martialed.

The Pentagon said Watada was among a number of officers and enlisted personnel who have applied for conscientious objector status.

"The wholesale slaughter and mistreatment of the Iraqi people is not only a terrible moral injustice but a contradiction of the Army's own law of land warfare. My participation would make me party to war crimes," said Watada in a taped statement played at a Tacoma news conference.

His superiors at the nearby Fort Lewis military base would not let Watada leave the base to attend the press conference. Another news conference took place in Watada's native Hawaii.

Watada, 28, had been scheduled to be deployed to Iraq for his first tour later this month. He joined the Army in 2003, and has served in Korea.

Watada said his moral and legal obligations were to the U.S. Constitution "not those who would issue unlawful orders."

Nearly 2,500 U.S. soldiers and an estimated 40,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

In recent weeks, Marines have been accused of killing 24 Iraqi civilians in the town of Haditha, raising concerns about abuse of force.

Paul Boyce, Army spokesman at the Pentagon, said Watada's case was being reviewed, adding it "is not the first case, nor is his case particularly unique."

Joe Colgan, whose son Benjamin was killed in Iraq, said sending sons and daughters to Iraq was "unpatriotic."

"I ask that we all think about our moral conscience and what we have done in God's name," said Colgan.

Has Anybody Here Seen My Old Friend Bobby?

Yesterday, unconscious of the fact that 38 years ago to the day my mother walked into my bedroom with tears streaming down her face to inform me that Bobby Kennedy had been shot, I changed my screensaver to an archive photo of him giving a speech. I imagine the impetus to do so was the email that I received yesterday morning from the RFK Memorial Foundation describing current projects (I am on their email list)--although I have no recollection of any mention being made in the email of the anniversary of the assassination. It may also have been triggered by my reading of RFK, Jr.'s piece in the most recent issue of Rolling Stone reporting his findings of the Republican party's theft of the 2004 presidential election...

Today, looking for a little sanity on Tom Tomorrow's website, I ran across the following from mikegerber.com:

Forty years on, Kennedy-King-Kennedy looks to me like the moment things started going bad, when control really clamped down from above, and apathy really took root below. Our country is headed in the wrong direction, and without a shred of romanticism, I think that direction was set by the assassinations of the 60s--not only by the loss of those people, their ideas and their ability to inspire, but also by our getting used to unsolved public murder as business as usual. That is a coarsening equal to any suffered by the Roman Republic. Is it merely coincidence that we've turned from a country of possibilities to one grinding out the same tragic, hoary imperial script? The country is traumatized, directionless, hurt; and a generation of politicians have risen who are experts at keeping us that way.

I could not have said it better myself. I particularly like the qualification "...and without a shred of romanticism," meaning, I take it, misty-eyed romantic nostalgia--the kind of "romanticism" that gives Romanticism a bad name. The full post may be read at mikegerber.com.

Thanks, man.

Reflections on a Few of the Latest Outrages

Abu Ghraib, Fallujah, Haditha...And these are just the atrocities that have slipped passed the neo-fascist-compliant Fourth Estate's unrelenting cloud of censorship. The Pentagon promises to make it all better by giving the troops "core values" training. The Orwellian ring of that phrase is almost unbearable to me. The perpetrators of these crimes against humanity ARE exhibiting the "core values" of occupying armies. Are we really expected to believe that soldiers are social workers? They are trained killers; apparently, some of them are going to work with real enthusiasm.

The Gang of Four, their co-conspirators and accomplices, are an international crime syndicate operating "under color of law" (how I love that phrase). They are responsible for the death of innocents, destruction, and mayhem that must be the envy of mass murderers the world over. If al-Qaeda were an institutional reality rather than a bad faith fictional projection of the Gang of Four's propaganda machine, its members would have no choice but to look to the Gang of Four, their co-conspirators and accomplices, as sources of inspiration.

"...and there it was, black, dried, sunken, with closed eyelids--a head that seemed to sleep at the top of that pole, and, with the shrunken dry lips showing a narrow white line of the teeth, was smiling, too, smiling continuously at some endless and jocose dream of that eternal slumber." Conrad, Heart of Darkness. Kurtz, too, surrounded himself with the trophies of his brutality.

Are we really like Casablanca's Captain Renault, "Shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here?"

Dear Winston: Please tell O'Brien that 2 + 2 still equals 4...

W.W.W.D.?

What would Whitman do?

Start the presses! Let the T-shirts and bumper stickers roll! I'll let Harold Bloom do the talking:

I think that poetry at its greatest--in Dante, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Blake--has one broad and essential difficulty: it is the true mode for expanding our consciousness. This it accomplishes by what I have learned to call strangeness. Owen Barfield was one of several critics to bring forth strangeness as a poetic criterion. For him, as for Walter Pater before him, the Romantic added strangeness to beauty: Wallace Stevens, a part of this tradition, has a Paterian figure cry out: "And there I found myself more truly and more strange." Bloom, The Art of Reading Poetry, New York, HarperCollins (2004), pp. 54-55.

The effect of experiencing this combination is for Bloom (following Barfield), "a felt change of consciousness." To perceive the "otherness" of the beautiful in the reading of poetry opens one to the possibility of the beauty in an-other. Paul Ricoeur imports a similar idea in his late ruminations upon the possibility of the self--seeing oneself as another.

This is the challenge that Whitman presented continually in Leaves of Grass: singing his most strange self, or selves, Whitman would awaken us to a vision of America as a place where the (previously) untold beauties of otherness would gather.

"Yeah, but how do you make a buck off that?"

Get thee behind me, Satan! You make it at all the trades and professions that Whitman extolled; but you do so with a felt change of consciousness.

It strikes me as very odd that we have somehow lost the sense that practicality and romance can go hand in hand. Did we ever have it? Russell Goodman (American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition) and others have tried to rearticulate this sense--tracing pragmatism's Romantic roots, for example. I myself published an article in the journal Soundings back in the mid-1990's in which I argued for what I termed a "Critical Romantic" ethos for lawyers. But none of this penetrates the national consciousness (if one can speak of such a thing) very far. It certainly has no traction among individuals in the upper reaches of our government. I would imagine that any one of the Gang of Four would defend their position with respect to Iran, for example, as being forged in the smithy of "reality." But it is, like every reality, one of their own making: it reflects their self-righteousness, their greed, their paranoia, their deep dishonesty about the available intelligence--the list of elements is quite long.

Somebody should tie Condi to a chair and make her read Leaves until she, well, leaves... And the same goes for the rest of them.

But rather than close this post with spleen, let me suggest that when we begin to broach questions of "world-making," "self-making," "reality-testing," "consciousness-expansion," etc., we are arriving at the philosophical thresholds of what I intend by the term "Romantic Orientalism"--both halves of which require explication. I intend to undertake that task shortly. But in the meantime: what would Whitman do?