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America's First Terror War
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Today's Stories May 12 / 13, 2007 Alexander Cockburn Patrick Cockburn May 11, 2007 Patrick Cockburn Kathleen Christison Mike Ferner John Holt Laurie Hasbrook Christopher
Brauchli Margaret Kimberley Dave Lindorff Nicole Colson John V. Walsh Website of the Day
May 10, 2007 Tariq Ali Patrick Cockburn Neve Gordon Marjorie Cohn David Rosen Alan Farago John Hellman Kathy Rentenbach BANCO Richard Rhames Website of the Day
Jeff Leys Patrick Cockburn Glen Ford Paula Rothenberg Kathryn Weber John Chuckman Jordan Flaherty Dave Lindorff Stephen Lendman Website of
the Day
May 8, 2007 Dave Lindorff Patrick Cockburn Corporate Crime Reporter Ralph Nader Malini Johar Schueller Juan Santos Dave Zirin Joshua Frank Evelyn Pringle Eamonn McCann Website of the Day
May 7, 2007 Patrick Cockburn Monica Benderman Greg Moses Rannie Amiri Fitrakis / Wasserman Fred Wilhelms Ramzy Baroud Bruce K. Gagnon T. W. Croft Sonja Karkar Website of the Day
Alexander Cockburn William Blum Uri Avnery Franklin Lamb Fred Gardner Lawrence R.
Velvel Missy Beattie Robert Fantina Carla Blank Linn Washington,
Jr. Stephen F. Jackson P. Sainath Anthony Papa James T. Phillips John Ross Stephen Lendman Ben Terrall CounterPunch
Newswire Poets' Basement Website of
the Weekend
May 4, 2007 Patrick Cockburn Col. Dan Smith Norman Solomon Azmi Bishara Ron Jacobs Dave Lindorff Kevin Zeese Bob Fitrakis Janet Kauffman Website of
the Day
May 3, 2007 Jeff Halper Christopher
Brauchli Dave Zirin Corporate Crime
Reporter Robert Fisk Mike Ferner Mike Whitney Pham Binh Dave Lindorff Michael A.
Johnson Website of the Day
May 2, 2007 Saul Landau Dr. Susan Block Carla Blank Margaret Kimberly Kevin Zeese Carlos Villareal Michael Dickinson Tim Shorrock Alevtina Rea William S.
Lind Website of the Day
Andrew Cockburn Fred Gardner Chase Madar Ralph Nader John V. Walsh Joshua Frank Leslie Radford Shaun Harkin Dave Lindorff Peter Rost,
MD Peter Linebaugh Website of
the Day
April 30, 2007 Frank Menetrez Paul Craig
Roberts Ray McGovern Manuel Garcia,
Jr. Diana Johnstone Sherwood Ross Peter Rost, MD Robert Jensen Kevin Zeese Jane Stillwater Website of
the Day
April 28 / 29, 2007 Alexander Cockburn Jeffrey St.
Clair Fred Gardner David Orchard
Alan Maass Joe Bageant Robert Fantina Hanan Ashrawi Ron Jacobs Nicole Colson Ben Terrall Missy Beattie Harvey Wasserman Cindy Beringer Mike Roselle RAWA James McEnteer Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend
Eva Liddell Phyllis Bennis Mike Whitney Michael F.
Brown Jordan Flaherty Margaret Kimberly Christopher Brauchli Jacob Mundy Website of the Day
Andrew Cockburn Franklin Lamb Patrick Cockburn Roger Morris Henry Siegman Alevtina Rea Paris Nikolas Kozloff Alan Farago Matthew S. Miller Website of
the Day
Sharon Smith David Price Diana Johnstone Brendan Cooney Sonja Karkar Brian Concannon Lee Gaillard Leah Fishbein Dave Lindorff Neal Galloway Website of the Day
April 24, 2007 Ishmael Reed Lila Rajiva Paul Craig Roberts Patrick Cockburn Ralph Nader Mike Whitney Website of the Day
April 23, 2007 Saul Landau Patrick Cockburn Robert Fantina Sam Husseini Corporate Crime Reporter Elizabeth Lalasz Harvey Wasserman Dave Lindorff Gary Leupp Stephen Lendman Website of the Day
Alexander Cockburn Fred Gardner Kristoffer Larsson Barbara Rose
Johnston Manuel Garcia, Jr. John Scagliotti Marjorie Cohn Patrick Cockburn Diana Johnstone Ron Jacobs Evelyn Pringle BANCO Paul Richards Dan Bacher Ben Terrall Sherwood Ross Remi Kanazi Aseem Shrivastava Poets' Basement Website of
the Day
April 20, 2007 Doug Peacock Diane Farsetta Tom Clifford Amira Hass Nicole Colson Sonja Karkar Heather Gray Dr. Bouthaina Shaaban Agustin Velloso Matthew Koehler Website of
the Day
April 19, 2007 Emad Mekay
/ Patrick Cockburn Larry C. Johnson Norman Solomon Saul Williams Sunsara Taylor Harvey Wasserman Christopher
Brauchli Anthony Papa Dave Lindorff Website of the Day
April 18, 2007 Lila Rajiva Landau / Hassen Charles Fisher
/ Diane Christian Kevin Prosen China Hand Peter Rost,
MD Justin Akers Chacón Jerry Kroth Sherwood Ross Niranjan Ramakrishnan Alice Cherbonnier Website of
the Year?
April 17, 2007 Jean Bricmont
/ Paul Craig
Roberts Frida Berrigan Alison Weir John Walsh Jason Hribal Evelyn Pringle Ben Terrall Stan Cox Soren Ambrose Website of the Day
April 16, 2007 John F. Sugg Ismael Hossein-Zadeh Carl G. Estabrook Paul Craig Roberts Uri Avnery Ralph Nader Eamon McCann Lee Sustar Mike Whitney Don Fitz Stephen Lendman Website of the Day
April 14 / 15, 2007 Alexander Cockburn Jorge Mariscal Jeffrey St. Clair Dave Marsh Dr. Trudy Bond Joe Bageant Fidel Castro Alfredo Molano Alan Farago Michael Neumann Fred Gardner Ron Jacobs Gail Dines Linda Ford Missy Beattie Dan La Botz Giuliana Sgrena Laura Carlsen Abu Spinoza Elizabeth Schulte Poets' Basement Website of
the Weekend
April 13, 2007 Patrick Cockburn Stephen Soldz George Ciccarriello-Maher Laith al-Saud Dave Zirin John Ross Ramzy Baroud Harvey Wasserman Lopez, Olivo and Garcia Dols, Fukumori,
Judd and Tillett-Saks Website of the Day
April 12, 2007 JoAnn Wypijewski Paul Craig
Roberts Marjorie Cohn Evelyn Pringle Ron Jacobs Norman Solomon Joe DeRaymond Nicola Nasser Nikolas Kozloff William S.
Lind Siegfried L. Sassoon Website of
the Day
R. T. Naylor Vijay Prashad Patrick Cockburn Winslow T. Wheeler Jack Balkwill Alan Farago Russell D.
Hoffman Peter Rost, MD Mike Whitney Dave Lindorff Susie Day Website of the Day
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Weekend
Edition "Oh, I Was So Much Older Then, I'm Younger Than That Now ... "The Bitterness of Regis DebrayBy RON JACOBS Two books published in their original languages in the 1990s were recently released in English translations. The first book is fiction and details the doings of a band of poetic revolutionaries; the other is autobiographical and details the doings of an individual who hung out with a band of revolutionaries that the world considers poetic. Debray still lives, while Bolaño died in 2003. Both authors were participants in various leftist political revolutions in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s, although Debray's participation was certainly on a more involved level. Debray's pronouncements as of late included a call to vote to the left of the mainstream left in France, yet he ultimately decided to vote for Royal. Both of these books represent the same period of the 20th century, yet their tone could not be more different. Bolaño's autobiographical novel The Savage Detectives is written as if it were an oral history. This picaresque novel features a storyteller who is an interviewer traveling the world in search of the history and meaning of the visceral poets movement-a movement that exists as such only in the novel.. It is told with a humorous cynicism while the Praised be the Lords is just cynical. Debray's look backwards at his life among the Guevarist revolutionaries and other such sorts reminded me of the line from Bob Dylan's song about toeing a party line during his early folksinging phase titled "Fourth Time Around." The chorus of the song goes "I was so much older than/I'm younger than that now." Yet, there is a difference or two between Dylan and Debray's take on the matter. Dylan was laughing at himself as much as he was disparaging those he saw as party hacks. There are no chuckles from Debray. Furthermore, Dylan left behind the jackets others wanted him to wear for a set of clothes that ended up changing things even more than his primarily political work ever could. Debray, on the other hand, seems to have traded the somewhat colorful fatigues he shared with Ché for a modern French intellectuals suit worn most recently by the faux socialist Francois Mitterand. Out of the jungles of Latin America and into the jungles of the French bureaucracy, as it were. Bolaño's protagonists in The Savage Detectives, Arturo Belano, Ulises Lima and their poetic compatriots, would never even consider such a move. Between their rambling around the world, their poetry writing, their participation in various leftwing movements and uprisings, and their lovemaking and weed smoking, these visceral realists--the Yippies of the poetic world--live a life of liberation. Their story is not only entertaining, it is inspirational. Like Jack Kerouac's On the Road or Ché Guevara's Motorcycle Diaries, this is a tale that makes one want to leave their day job and go on the road. Or, if not on the road, at least to that part of the universal city where no one works except when they have to and life is truly free from the strictures that day jobs require. Despite Debray's cynical, often bitter hindsight, his narrative makes for quite interesting reading. Indeed, almost any writer would be hard put to tell the story of his life with Ché in Bolivia or sharing cigars and wine with Fidel in Havana and render it boring. The tales Debray relates provide a look into the early energy of that island revolution which became so much more. His breathless and sometimes garrulous narrative describing the flair of the guerrilla contrasted with the stodginess of the Soviet bureaucrats is even ~humorous. Where the book fails is in the analysis of the revolution in Cuba and the revolutionary surge around the world that took place in the wake of World War Two. Too much emphasis is placed on the individuals involved and their shortcomings and not enough emphasis is placed on the international situation of the time and the liberating zeitgeist of the period. If I were to put a label on this historiography, I would call it bourgeois history making, if for no reason other than that Debray is obsessed with individualistic interpretations of what was happening all around him. Of course, as any leftist historiographer will tell you, individuals do matter , but economic and political circumstances matter even more, though one would never know it from reading The Presence of the Lords. That Debray ignores this would seem counter to his credentials. Debray himself says his political adventures were part of his search for a father. From the men he chose as father figures, it is obvious that he felt he needed a strong one. In a diatribe only Freud could have imagined, Debray slays his father figures one by one. Althusser, Fidel, and Mitterand.... .bang, bang, bang.. At least Bolaño's visceral poets didn't want a dad. Or a mother. They just wanted to do what they pleased in the name of poetry and revolution. Their family is the one they created amongst themselves. Poets, lovers, Trotskyists, rich students and poor ones, winos and pot dealers, and a Stalinist or two make up this family of coincidence. A family that shared a common interest in the joy of life , but only occasionally blood. The protagonists of The Savage Detectives are naturally idealist, as was Debray. Yet the difference is that Debray transferred those ideals to men while the poets and rascals in The Savage Detectives didn't. The visceral realists never took themselves so seriously that they felt wronged by the twists and turns of the lives they chose. Indeed, they reveled in the ironies life cast upon them and moved on. Debray, on the other hand, presents himself as something of a humorless individual whose only salvation is his incredible intellect. Emotions in Debray's case are restricted to anger and a sense that he was wronged, while the visceral realists emotions run the gamut from uproarious humor to love, anger and back to a giddily detached enjoyment of what it means to be part of the human condition.. The visceral poets of Bolaño's novel are poets of their own revolution. The revolutionaries that Debray lived with in Cuba and Bolivia were part of a revolution that stemmed from a poetic vision. Debray's hindsight forgets that vision in favor of a retelling that suffers from disappointment, a sense of (probably unwarranted) betrayal, and an emphasis on the revolution's bureaucratic and military aspects. Bolaño's poets understand that the poetic and political revolutions they were part of are over, but they continue to live their lives as if they were lines from poems they certainly meant to write. No sense of betrayal, only a sense that they were the ones on whom the joke was played--HA HA. Is it fair to contrast fiction with biography? When both forms are speaking to a particular spirit--a zeitgeist--I have no doubt that it is. After all, neither text will be confused with formal history. Perhaps one lesson to be learned here is that revolutions make better stories before they succeed and even better ones when they fail. In other words, as an elder hero of the visceral realists tells the interviewer in the novel as he recounts his life and a visit with Arturo Belano, Ulises Lima and a couple other renegade poets: "Like so many Mexicans, I too gave up poetry.... From then on, my life proceeded along the drabbest course you can imagine." Likewise, when a revolution loses its poetic vision, it too becomes the drabbest thing you can imagine. Ron Jacobs is author of The
Way the Wind Blew: a history of the Weather Underground,
which is just republished by Verso. Jacobs' essay on Big Bill
Broonzy is featured in CounterPunch's collection on music, art
and sex, Serpents
in the Garden. His first novel, Short Order Frame Up,
is forthcoming from Mainstay Press. He can be reached at: rjacobs3625@charter.net  |
The Gang's All Here: Judy Miller, Bob Woodward, Jeffrey Goldberg, Rupert Murdoch, Bill O'Reilly...End Times Leaves No Reputation Unstained!  Buy End Times Now! CounterPunch Books! Saul Landau's Bush and Botox World with a Foreword by Gore Vidal  Click Here to Order!  Michael Neumann's Devastating Rebuttal of Alan Dershowitz Grand Theft Pentagon: Tales of Greed and Profiteering in the War on Terror by Jeffrey St. Clair           The Occupation by Patrick Cockburn           CITY BEAUTIFUL By Tennessee Reed        Bruce Springsteen On Tour By Dave Marsh                   |
