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July 15, 2002
Rahul Mahajan
Justice
for Bhopal
Jeffrey St. Clair
Seduced
by a Legend
The Return of Jimmy T99 Nelson
July 14, 2002
Bill Christison
The
DOA (Poem)
David Vest
I'll Never
Get Out of This Band Alive
July 13, 2002
M. Junaid Alam
A Process
of Dehumanization
Gavin Keeney
Go Tell
Karl Rove!
Matt Vidal
Corporate
"Ethics" Red Herrings
Ed Whitfield
Lessons
from Independence Day
July 12, 2002
Sean Donahue
The Other
Harken Energy Scandal: Oil, Death Squads
and Colombia
Walt Brasch
Sin Tax
Scam
"Psst. Cigarettes. A Buck Each."
Steve Perry
A Tale
of Two Twits
Wall Street Burns, Bush Fiddles, But Where's Wellstone?
July 11, 2002
Lloyd Marbet
Arrested
by the Chamber
of Commerce
David Krieger
Law vs.
Force
David Vest
Fountain
of Foo:
Strike Three Called
Irit Katriel
A Deep
Ideological Crisis
Richard Glen Boire
Dangerous
Lessons:
Public School Drug Testing
July 10, 2002
CounterPunch Wire
Third Party
Woes
South Carolina Denies Kevin Alexander Gray Ballot Status
Nassar Ibriham &
Majed Nassar
Bush's
Middle East Plan: Always Changing, Never Changing
Robert Fisk
Ain't That
America:
A Strange Kind of Freedom
Dave Marsh
The Return
of CREEP:
Record Cartel Accounting
Bernard Weiner
Hope and
Despair in
the Body Politic
Gary Leupp
European
Worries and
Bush's Terror War
July 9, 2002
St. Clair / Cockburn
The Atomic
Clock is Ticking:
All Roads Lead to Yucca Mtn.
Jack McCarthy
Florida:
a Terrorist Sanctuary for Bush's Bloody Pals?
Robert Fisk
How a Saudi
Billionaire
Does Beirut
Stanton and Madsen
God, Incorporated
Kurt Nimmo
IDF, Gangbanging
with Tanks
Bill Christison
Disastrous
Foreign Policies
of the US Part 3:
What Can We Do About It?
July 8, 2002
Rick Mercier
Yucca
Mountain Bound
Lev Grinberg
The
BUSHARON Global War
Tariq Ali
How Bush
Used 9/11 to Remap the World
Lori Allen
The Tugs
of War:
Palestinian Life Under Curfew
July 7, 2002
Alexander Cockburn
White
House Crooks
Resources:
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Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
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Al Gore:
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July
15, 2002
Be
Still My Beating Heart
by Gavin Keeney
Here's a snippet from William
Safire's latest op-oratorio, "Hence, Loathed Melancholy",
in The Upper Right Coast Times:
"[T]he capitalist
system is not in crisis. In recent months, it has been doing
what it is supposed to do in the wake of every speculative binge:
correcting itself. After a bubble bursts, people who have been
deliriously blowing bubbles demand to know: How could 'they'
have done this to us? But we, the investing people, have done
it to ourselves -- as we do in almost every generation."
(07/15/02, New
York Times)
Safire unpacks his polemic
by quoting from Milton's Il Penseroso ... "Hence,
vain deluding joyes ..." And he goes on to blame the victim
for participating in the economic meltdown precipitated by what
otherwise dispassionate analysts see as unprecedented malfeasance
across the board (across the boardrooms) in corporate America.
I love structuralism when it is deployed as a critical tool.
I despise it when it is used as an excuse. When I hear statistical
abstractions summoned to explain distortions in the market or
political horrors of one kind or another, I remember Mark Twain's
comment, "If I stand with one foot in a bucket of boiling
water, and one foot in a bucket of cold water, according to statistics,
I am warm." I am also reminded, when mechanistic theories
are deployed to deflect guilt, of Paris in 1968, when "structure
took to the streets".
Here's my response to Safire's op-ed item (which in The Times
usually means op-portunistic ed-itorial):
Date: Mon, 15 Jul 2002 07:44:09 -0700 (PDT)
From: "Gavin Keeney"
Subject: Hence, Loathed Melancholy
To: safire@nytimes.com
Il penseroso ... You missed one hell of an opportunity to also
appropriate Milton's "Necessary fall ..." Who, in this
current imbroglio, is the interloper, leaping the walls of the
garden, transforming himself into a snake ... GK
Here's WS's response:
From: safire@nytimes.com
Date: Mon, 15 Jul 2002 10:45:14 -0400 (EDT)
To: ateliermp@netscape.net
Subject: AUTOMATED RESPONSE
You were good to write. (That's better than "It was good
of you to write," because sentences beginning with "it"
are boring.)
Your comments go into the thought processor inside my head and
may one day pop up in a column.
Thanks again (which is repetitious but not redundant).
Sincerely,
-- William Safire
Swoosh! In other words, in one head and out the other!
This is terribly cute, mostly because Safire is the author of
an infamous column in The Upper Right Coast Times Magazine,
"On Language", wherein he lectures us on the language
games of present-day cultural production.
So, let's turn the tables. What's with the "--" thing
before his name? Isn't that usually reserved for identifying
a quotation by an author? To locate the axiomatic epigram? Isn't
he unconsciously (or consciously) denoting his own self-importance?
I wonder if WS mistakes himself for the true genius of language,
WS from Stratford-on-Avon. For him to throw Milton at us in an
op-ed homily is very becoming his high opinion of himself. I
like Milton, as a post-arcadian. If only we could rescue him
from Stanley Fish (and now William Safire)! I say give Stanley
Fish any color Jaguar he desires, as long as he gives back Milton.
But back to The Times. I've encountered both pathetic
fallacies and ferocious pathologies in the op-ed pages and the
forums that go with them. When Paul Krugman was lecturing us
about the virtues of globalization and, in particular, the Quebec
Declaration early last year, I wandered into a forum where an
Irish brawl was taking place. It was all but impossible to discuss
anything because the site had been hijacked by economic hooligans
with a "let them eat cake" approach to the Third World.
They were no doubt acolytes of First World triumphalism. I've
saved some of the exchanges for a good laugh ...
http://www.geocities.com/ateliermp/krugman.html
To his credit, Paul Krugman has been merciless lately on the
subject of crony capitalism, especially regarding the Bush League.
He has even backtracked somewhat regarding neo-liberalism and
globalization. Safire, on the other hand never apologizes for
anything. He is so much the contrarian that his agenda is, in
fact, 'libertarian' and he will in one breath attack Bush as
a wannabe dictator (for breaches of civil liberties and etc.),
and in the next praise the idiotic triumphalism of post-cold
war capitalist imperialism. His role as apologist (and sometimes
strategist) for the brutal policies of Ariel Sharon in suppressing
the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank is another matter.
Combined with Pulitzer prize winner Tom Friedman's pro-Israel
rhetoric, the op-ed pages of The Times have become all
but unbearable. I suppose they let Maureen Dowd dump on Bush
for comic relief from time to time just to spare us from total
despair and/or cynicism.
But back to Milton ... Il Penseroso is an exquisite study
in melancholy. It exudes a world-weariness that only a poet can
capture in words. Melancholy is the affliction of humanists.
I knew a humanist once upon a time, before the advent of neo-liberalism
...
Sic transit specious appropriations.
Gavin Keeney
is a landscape architect in New York, New York. and the author
of On
the Nature of Things, a book documenting the travails
of contemporary American landscape architecture in the 1990s.
He can be reached at: ateliermp@netscape.net
Today's Features
Rahul Mahajan
Justice
for Bhopal
Jeffrey St. Clair
Seduced
by a Legend
The Return of Jimmy T99 Nelson
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