April 28: War poets; bad-news Mets; Santorum

Blog material April 2-28

Hank Kalet
War and the poets

April 28
   Slate, the online magazine, reminds us of the power of poetry in a time of war with a selection of five poems, selected and commented on by five editors and poets.
   The poems — "In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations,’ " by Thomas Hardy; "Just Children" by Adam Zagajewski; "One need not be a Chamber—to be Haunted—" by Emily Dickinson; Virtue" by George Herbert; "Vigil Strange I Kept in the Field" by Walt Whitman — each explore the emotional dissonance created by the impending violence. Some offer consolation, others anger, all are worth reading.
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"M-E-T-S Mets of New York town"

April 28
   Eight errors. Eight errors. Eight errors.
   I think that sums up this New York Mets ball club: eight errors and 27 strikeouts over an 18-inning stretch.
   This is a bad baseball team, a mix of ill-matched parts that will be lucky to get to .500 the way things are going. Before the season started, I figured on thm getting into the mid-80s in wins and maybe, just maybe, challenging for the wild card spot in the playoffs.
   But to do that you need to catch the ball and put the ball.
   Basically, the Mets are old, slow, fundamentally weak, can’t hit in the clutch and seem generally clueless. Have I left anything out?
   I’d really like to see them bring up Aaron Heilman and see what he can do on the mound. Or at least give Jason Middlebrook the ball and see if he can get some hitters out. Then they can try and move Steve Trachsel and maybe Pedro Astacio when he proves he’s healthy.
   I’d keep playing for now but start reconstructing for the future — though that will be tough given that they can’t do anything in center or right or at first. I’d stay with Mo Vaughn (I don’t know why, but I like him and I still think he’s got some hitting in him) and then see what happens with Robbie Alomar — maybe consider moving him in the right deal, maybe force whoever wants him to take Roger Cedeno — and then get a young arm or a young outfielder in return.
   Basically, I see no way that General Manager Steve Phillips can come back next year. He has done little to warrant his time here at this point and seems to have no clue how to function in the new baseball economy — G.M.s like Billy Beane of the Athletics and Brian Sabean of the Giants seem to have a game plan and look for efficient ways to spend money. That’s why they build winners, even when they lose major cogs.
   The Mets seem to have no plan and us fans can plan on not having a playoff team until this ridiculous mess is cleaned up.
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Fundamental flaws

April 28
   Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania is the third-highest ranking Republican in the U.S. Senate. Therefore, what he says, by virtue of his position, should be seen as an extension the beliefs of the national Republican Party.
   So it is troubling that someone with as much power as he has is willing to say something so crass and offensive as the comments he made last week:
   "I have no problem with homosexuality. I have a problem with homosexual acts. As I would with acts of other, what I would consider to be, acts outside of traditional heterosexual relationships. And that includes a variety of different acts, not just homosexual. I have nothing, absolutely nothing against anyone who’s homosexual. If that’s their orientation, then I accept that. And I have no problem with someone who has other orientations. The question is, do you act upon those orientations? So it’s not the person, it’s the person’s actions. And you have to separate the person from their actions."
   He said government has a right to restrict those "actions" — which he lumped in with bigamy and polygamy, adultery, beastiality and other behaviors as destructive of "basic unit of our society because it condones behavior that’s antithetical to strong, healthy families."
   And he said he views the right to privacy as antithetical to the structure of American society.
   "The idea is that the state doesn’t have rights to limit individuals’ wants and passions," he said. "I disagree with that. I think we absolutely have rights because there are consequences to letting people live out whatever wants or passions they desire. And we’re seeing it in our society."
   He added that "The right to privacy is a right that was created in a law that set forth a (ban on) rights to limit individual passions. And I don’t agree with that. So I would make the argument that with President, or Senator or Congressman or whoever Santorum, I would put it back to where it is, the democratic process. If New York doesn’t want sodomy laws, if the people of New York want abortion, fine. I mean, I wouldn’t agree with it, but that’s their right. But I don’t agree with the Supreme Court coming in."
   (The full text of his interview with the A.P. can be found on SF Gate, the Web site for the San Francisco Chronicle.)
   This analysis of homosexuality and privacy smacks of the kind of government control of our private lives that we have witnessed in theocratic states like Afghanistan under the Taliban (a good analysis of this can be found on Salon.com by Joan Walsh).
   In the wake of his comments, Democrats have called for him to step down (not really a surprise), as have gay-rights groups and some civil-rights organizations. But the Republican leadership has remained quiet, perhaps hoping that the storm surrounding Sen. Santorum will die down.
   But what Sen. Santorum said is really no different than Sen. Trent Lott remembering the good old days of segregation — remember his comments essentially saying that the country would have been better off if Strom Thurmond’s segregationist party had won the White House in 1948? — and should be met with the same kind of censure.
   Instead, we have President George W. Bush and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (who replaced Sen. Lott in the post after the Thurmond flap) calling Sen. Santorum an "inclusive man," and hoping this thing will go away.
   What do I hope? That Sen. Santorum comes to be seen as representative of the leadership of his party, that his fundamentalist approach to privacy and sex is dangerous for our democracy and our freedoms. And that, as Joan Walsh put in on Salon.com, the senator’s "candor wakes more Americans up to the fact that Iraqis aren’t the only ones at risk of losing their freedom to religious fundamentalism."
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Penalty out of proportion

April 24
   The evidence is piling up that the death penalty is a failed policy.
   Amnesty International is issuing a report today that just how skewed capital punishment has been by race.
   "Blacks and whites are victims of murder in almost equal numbers in the U.S.A., but 80 percent of the more than 840 people executed since judicial killing resumed in 1977 were put to death for murders involving white victims," the organization says.
   "Most murders in the U.S.A. involve perpetrators and victims of the same race, yet nearly 200 African Americans have been executed for the murder of white victims — 15 times as many as the number of whites put to death for killing blacks, and at least twice as many as the number of blacks executed for the murder of other blacks.
   "African Americans account for 12 percent of the population, but more than 40 percent of death row and one in three of those executed. The U.S.A. will soon execute its 300th African American prisoner since 1977." (Click here to see the report.)
   And there is this fine Bob Herbert column in today’s http://www.nytimes.com/New York Times that offers a nice take on just why capital punishment cannot and should not be fixed.
   "It is time to pull the plug on the death penalty in the United States," he writes. "Shut it down. It is never going to work properly. There are too many passions and prejudices involved (and far too many incompetent lawyers, prosecutors, judges and jurors) for it to ever be administered with any consistent degree of fairness and justice."
   I couldn’t have said it any better.
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Fighting Route 92

April 24
   Opponents of Route 92 are finally taking matters into their own hands.
   They have launched a Web page to make it easier for people opposed to the highway to make their voice heard. (See South Brunswick Post story by
Sharlee DiMenichi.)
   The Web page is a good first step to taking this fight into their own hands. I’ve criticized opponents — both in columns and editorials — for not stepping up their activism in their effort to fight the roadway. Too much has depended on the bureaucratic process and too often they have relied on elected officials to wage their battles for them.
   Let’s hope the site will lead to other efforts by citizens and that opponents can create the kind of momentum necessary to kill this unnecessary behemoth.
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Ted Rall strikes again

April 24
   Cartoonist Ted Rall in an angry and biting cartoon on Wednesday takes on the companies that are profiting from the war on Iraq. Don’t take my word, click here to see it.
   He also offers a lucid commentary linking the war to President George W. Bush’s lust for more oil.
   Check out his Web site, too.
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Dispatches

April 24
   Check out this week’s Dispatches, offering some final thoughts on Michael Jordan’s amazing legacy.
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Born in the U.S.A.

April 23
   Bruce Springsteen is a great American. Not because he waves the flag, but because he understands the ideals that underpin what it means to be an American citizen.
   The New Jersey rocker has issued a statement defending the much-maligned Dixie Chicks, who had the temerity to criticize President George W. Bush during the lead-in to war in Iraq.
   You remember the controversy, don’t you? Lead singer Natalie Maines, who hails from Lubbock, Texas, tells a crowd at a London show that "we’re ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas." In response, the watchdogs of all things American go on the attack.
   As John Nichols relates in his OnLine Beat for The Nation magazine, he describes the nonsense that followed:
   "South Carolina legislators passed a bill declaring those words to be ‘unpatriotic,’ disc jockeys organized rallies at which tractors were used to destroy Dixie Chicks CDs, and radio stations across the south barred songs by the groups. Though officials of Clear Channel, the media conglomerate that controls more than 1,200 radio stations across the US denied that they had issued a network-wide ban order, Clear Channel’s country and pop music stations were among the first to declare themselves ‘Chicks Free.’ And the chattering class of conservative talk-radio and talk-TV piled on with calls for boycotts of the group’s upcoming concert tour."
   Nichols goes on to tie the Dixie Chicks episode to others — including the absurd decision to cancel a celebration of the 10th anniversary showing of the film "Bull Durham" because two of its stars, Tim Robins and Susan Sarandon, were outspoken in their opposition to the war. (Here is the text of the speech Robbins delivered April 15 at a luncheon at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. and the correspondence between the actor and the Hall of Fame, both on The Nation Web site. And from the Common Dreams Newscenter, an opinion piece on the Robbins/Hall controversy by Tim Bottorf.)
   And then he lauds Springsteen for his "powerful defense of the Dixie Chicks and artistic free speech."
   Bruce Springsteen’s statement can be found at www.brucespringsteen.net.
The cynic in chief

April 23
   I do not want to hear anymore that President George W. Bush is a moral and upstanding man.
   I do not want to hear it said again that political calculations do not figure into his decisions.
   This story in The Charlotte Observer should lay to rest any notion that Dubya is a man of principle.
Recommended reading

April 23
   Some good columns the last couple of days worth checking out:
   • James Carroll in The Boston Globe writes about the effect of war on the psyche of the nation in this outstanding piece.
   • Robert Scheer in The Los Angeles Times cuts through the hyperbole of recent weeks to ask if the Bush administration intentionally lied about Iraq’s weapons capability to prove the need for war in this Tuesday column.
   • E.J. Dionne Jr. in The Washington Post offers this warning about the dangers of American triumphalism in his Tuesday column.
   • Paul Krugman in The New York Times questions the fuzzy math behind the president’s assertion that his tax cut will generate 1.4 million jobs in this Tuesday column.
   • Bob Herbert in The New York Times asks — and answers — the question of who is benefiting from the Bush administration’s war mongering in this trenchant Monday column.
On the ball

April 22
   Professional athletes, as a class, are not known for their intelligence away from their chosen field of play.
   But there are some worth noting and praising for their intelligence and behavior off the court or ballfield. There is Steve Nash, the Dallas Maverick point-guard, who is well-read and willing to wear his political opinions on his sleeve. There is David Robinson, Spurs center and Naval Academy graduate, another thoughtful athlete, who had a little public disagreement with Nash over his views on the Iraq war.
   There are baseball players whose interests reach beyond the standard charity work (Mets pitcher Al Leiter is funny and politically active, though I disagree with his politics and Yankee centerfielder Bernie Williams, an accomplished classical guitarist).
   ESPN.com writes today in its Page 2 section about the work of Adonal Foyle, backup center for the Golden State Warriors and a founding member of Democracy Matters, which is working to change the way we fund our elections.
   Foyle tells Eric Neel that he embarked on his quest to reform American politics because it was obvious to him that too many of our problems are tied to the people who help pay for elections and then benefit from their access to the winners.
   "Everything I looked at came back to one thing — money’s influence on politics," he says. "Not to oversimplify things, but it’s quite amazing. If you want to talk about the environment, about civil rights, about gender issues, about education, it all comes down to who has the money, who has the financial wherewithal to get their ideas heard."
   His organization focuses on college students because "I felt the most important thing was to show young people a way of getting inside the system, a way of changing the system from within, and a way of articulating their ideas and raising their voices.
   "That’s why we started Democracy Matters — we tell them they have a responsibility to have ideas and opinions. We tell them they have a stake in what happens in this country, and they need to make arguments and take part in the debate. If you are not speaking, someone is going to do the speaking for you, and it’s not necessarily going to be in your best interest."
   Check out the story. You can find Democracy Matters at democracymatters.org.
Rebuilding Iraq

April 21
   A headline from the Sunday New York Times raises some questions about our intentions in Iraq and could give fuel to those who wish to fan the flames of anti-Americanism in the Arab world.
   The headline, "Pentagon expects long-term access to key Iraq bases; projecting U.S. power; Deal with a new government in Baghdad would extend American forces’ reach."
   The reason for concern should be pretty obvious: It creates the impression — perhaps based in fact — that our interest in toppling Saddam Hussein had less to do with freeing the Iraqi people or ridding the region of dangerous weapons than with extending our military reach. The story goes on to say that it is unclear what kind of relationship might be created and that the United States is shrinking its "military footprint" in the region, but it is hard to see how when Iraq, like Turkey and Saudi Arabia, offer such a nice platform from which to control the region.
   And isn’t this what Osama bin Laden has been complaining about (American military in Saudi Arabia as violation of Islamic law and slap in the face of Muslims) and organizing around?
   Also from Sunday’s Times: "Iraqi Shiites, jockeying for power, preach an anti-American sermon."
   The story offers a tale of conservative clerics attempting to rally Iraqi Shiites around the standard canard that Western values are antithetical to Islamic principles — the West here being the United States.
   "Nearly 100 Islamic clerics have affirmed an emerging fundamentalist, anti-American position for Shiite Muslims in the capital, asserting authority over the country’s Shiite community, whose governance is among the most pressing issues in the new Iraq."
   The clerics have announced they are opposed to democracy and want the country governed by strict Shariah law — which they say "mainly orders good and prevents evil." The Americans — and the rest of the coaliton "are infidels," they said.
   (It is worth turning to a fabulous forum in The Boston Review on "Islam and the Challenge of Democracy.")
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Good to be the Kings

April 21
   Is anyone really surprised that the Lakers destroyed the Minnesota Timberwolves in the opening game of their first-round series? Does anyone (aside from Kevin Garnett and Flip Saunders) really think the T-Wolves have a shot?
   And is anyone surprised that Tracy McGrady put the Orlando Magic on his back and carried them past the Detroit Pistons for an opening win? Detroit is far too deficient on the offensive end to go very far in these playoffs.
   My picks – a day late, I admit:
   East: Nets over the Bucks, though I doubt it will be as easy as it was in game 1. Figures to go six.
   Orlando over Detroit in six. See above comment.
   Sixers over New Orleans in seven – Allen Iverson is too good and the Hornets are too error-prone.
   Celtics over the Pacers in seven. Pacers are a better team, but I don’t trust their psyche.
   Round two: Philly over Orlando and Nets over Celtics. Sixers to beat Nets in brutal seven-game series to go to the finals.
   In the West: Lakers over T-Wolves in five – T-Wolves wills steal game two, riding the greatness of Kevin Garnett.
   Spurs over Suns, but this is going deep. Suns have good matchups and could give the Spurs real fits. Figure six games.
   Kings over Jazz in four. Jazz’ best two players are too old and Sacramento is too deep for there to be any questions here.
   Mavericks over Blazers in six. Mavericks have too much talent and the Blazers are too selfish and uncoachable to do much damage to anyone but themselves in the playoffs.
   Round two: Sacramento over Dallas in five games. Sacramento can match Dallas’ firepower and is better coached, plays better defense and is a better rebounding team.
   Lakers over Spurs in seven. Kobe and Shaq v. Tim Duncan in battle of league’s three best players. Spurs just don’t match up well.
   Kings over Lakers to get to the finals — a seven-game masterpiece of a series in which Chris Webber finally shakes off the big-game demons that have plagued him since he was a senior at Michigan.
   Kings to win it all. They’re just too deep.
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Dispatches

April 17
   Check out this week’s Dispatches on the Iraq war.
Chemical dependence

April 16
   Ellis Henican in his Newsday column today points out what might seem an obvious contradiction, one no one covering the war with Iraq or the Bush administration’s foreign policy more generally seems able to identify or willing to make.
   Essentially, if chemical weapons and weapons of mass destruction are so dangerous and so destabilizing that we were willing to go to war, what about the massive stockpiles we’re keeping on American soil.
   "So now, public attention turns to Syria, as American troops continue their hunt for forbidden weapons in Iraq," he writes.
   "Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell are wagging their fingers at Damascus. And the stockpiles still wait on the home front.
   "Here’s hoping the Syrians don’t ask: ‘But what about yours?’"
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"Off the Cuffs"

April 16
   Soft Skull Press, a small independent publisher in Brooklyn, has released an anthology of poems by and about the police called "Off the Cuffs." It includes such notable poets as Martin Espada, Wanda Coleman and Diane DiPrima — and me. My poem, "Picture of a Cop’s Wife," is included. For information on the anthology, check out this link.
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Poetry as protest

April 16
   I almost forgot to mention the great interview with poet Sam Hamill in the April issue of The Progressive magazine. Mr. Hamill, one of the organizers of Poets Against the War, offers some insights into the writing process, translating the poems of others and the intersection of literature and politics.
   Here is a rather long quotation from the interview:
   "Each of us as poets, as decent suffering human beings, has to find a way to run our lives that is compassionate toward one another and toward our environment. Because if we don’t, we are going to be committing suicide at a very large level. We’re certainly not perfect, and we’re not probably even better than anybody else, except that perhaps we are given to certain kinds of contemplation that provide a valuable balance to the knee-jerk reactionary behavior of most of our newspapers and political leaders. Poets are great doubters.
   "What poetry does above all else is develop sensibility. And that’s what makes poetry so dangerous. That’s why poetry is so good at undermining governments and so bad at building them. There’s nothing harder to organize than a group of poets.
   "The only thing we all agree on, virtually every poet in this country, is that this Administration is really frightening, and we want something done about it.
   "Bush is using language that’s a mirror image of the language of Osama bin Laden when he says, ‘We have God on our side. This is the struggle of good against evil.’ Isn’t that exactly what bin Laden said? Bush the born-again Christian, bin Laden the born-again Muslim, and they’re both convinced that they have God on their side, and they’re both willing to kill countless numbers of innocent people to assert their rightness. Very dangerous, very dangerous."
   Yes, indeed.
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Tax Day

April 15
   Today is the day that tries too many of our souls, the day on which we are reminded just how much it costs each of us to have the kind of government we have, the kind of services we desire – and we get to be angry about the money that is not going into our pockets.
   Today’s column by Paul Krugman in The New York Times, therefore, offers a solid tonic, reminding us that we can’t have it all and that the tax cut plans being sold right now to the middle class are really designed to aid the wealthy.
The death toll

April 15
   Eric Alterman asks this trenchant question: "How can you brag that you worked hard to prevent civilian deaths if you refuse to try to assess how many were killed?" Good question.
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TV coverage

April 15
   Frank Rich offered an on-target hit on TV coverage of the war in Iraq in his Sunday column in the New York Times Arts and Liesure section.
   The piece focused on how the networks used the war to create their own brand insignias and win viewers. Check it out.
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b>Fighting for freedom
April 10
   The line I keep hearing on television is that our soldiers have been in Iraq fighting for our freedoms.
   They aren’t, really, and this is no knock on the brave folks who wear the uniform.
   The soldiers who were in harms way every day, who were putting their lives on the line, believed that’s what they were doing and they deserve the utmost respect and gratitude from all of us.
   But the reality is that our freedoms were never in doubt. Saddam Hussein, tin-pot dictator, has not been a real threat to the United States for a long time and had been contained pretty tightly by the world community.
   The fighting for freedom myth is something the major news outlets has foisted on all of us as part of the flag-waving that has come to characterize coverage of the world in America.
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Some good reading

April 10
   William Pfaff offers a strong case in the International Herald Tribune that the Bush administration is taking us down the path of empire, led by a bunch of dangerous neoconservative hawks.
   Also, check out Seamus Milne in the Guardian U.K. and Robert Fisk’s many reports (find the most recent here) in the Independent U.K. on the war.
   And, as always, Bob Herbert in the New York Times. He’s always worth reading.
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Dispatches

April 10
   Check out this week’s Dispatches on the Bush tax cuts.
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Fall of Saddam

April 9
   The Associated Press is reporting that Iraqis in Baghdad are celebrating the fall of Saddam Hussein today, as coalition forces have taken over control of the city.
   This is good news for anyone who cares about the lives of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians — of all lives in Iraq.
   But success cannot justify this war, which was waged by us ultimately because we could wage it and no one could offer any roadblocks that mattered.
   Now comes the hard part, of course, as we attempt to reconstruct Iraqi society, to rebuild its battered infrastructure and create a civil society in a nation that has spent more than three decades under the iron fist of dictatorship. This is hard work, made all the more difficult by the Bush administration’s dismissive attitude toward the United Nations and the rest of the world. Having been dismissive, however, the administration and the British government are calling on the United Nations to play a role in postwar Iraq, but only that of providing food and medical aid. Nothing more. The United States and Great Britain will control the political decisions — not something the so-called Arab street is likely to be happy with.
   We need to remember that the kind of celebrating now taking place on the streets of Baghdad can turn to violence, that if we are serious about a free Iraq we need to include the people of Iraq in the creation of their new government, and not rely on hand-picked leaders.
   So keep this piece from The American Prospect in mind when a new Iraqi government is cobbled together. It tells the tale of one Ahmed Chalabi, the man favored by a host of Defense Department strategists to lead the new Iraq. Describing Mr. Chalabi as a democrat seems a stretch.
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Asking the right questions

April 9
   James Carroll in The Boston Globe asks all the right questions — hey, he asks all the questions — about our war in Iraq, questions demanding answers, questions that the news media and the Bush administration will not answer.
   It’s a great column and proves why Mr. Carroll is one of the handful of great newspaper columnists in the country.
   You can find it here.
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Musical break

April 9
   Any reason why we must be subjected these days to bad remakes of mediocre songs from the past? I can understand remaking a good song, or even making a mediocre song better (Lauren Hill does a perfectly sublime version of "Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You" on "The Miseducation of Lauren Hill" and her band the Fugees offer great remakes of "Killing Me Softly" and Bob Marley’s "No Woman, No Cry").
   There are four songs on the Billboard Top 40 right now that are remakes — two good, two bad. I like Uncle Kracker and Dobie Gray remaking Dobie Gray’s "Drift Away." And there is the Dixie Chicks singing "Landslide." I like it. Don’t know why.
   But was there any reason the Counting Crows and Vanessa Carlton thought it necessary to jazz up Joni Mitchell’s "Big Yellow Taxi"? I mean, the original was a good tune, not great, but this is just, well, I feel like getting in a taxi and driving over the radio every time I hear it.
   Worse is the remake of "Don’t Dream It’s Over" by Sixpence None the Richer. Why would anyone drag that terrible mid-’80s song by Crowded House from the mothballs and subject radio listeners to a new and unimproved version? Can’t answer that. Just can’t.
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Why I hate technology

April 9
   Some of you may have noticed that Channel Surfing has not been updated in a few days (maybe you haven’t noticed — I have no way of knowing). You can thank the wonderful world of computers for that. A server crash made it difficult to access our site to update the old weblog. But we’re back now. (I know, excuses, excuses, excuses.)
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Dispatches

April 3
   Check out this week’s Dispatches on the unfinished dream of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
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Rough going

April 2
   Slate offers this explanation for the unexpected criticism the Bush administration is getting for the seemingly slowed progress of the war. (The notion that this is going badly or slowly is absurd on its face, given that we are talking about war.)
   Gideon Rose says "the Bush team, by refusing to acknowledge any problems and by treating all critics as nervous nellies or quasi-fifth-columnists, is running the risk of compounding its earlier mistakes and opening up a significant credibility gap. Amazingly, what the administration seems not to understand even now is just how much of the flak it is taking is its own fault—an inevitable backlash against the hardball tactics it has used to bring on a war that few others wanted."
   And that’s why I have no sympathy for the administration.
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Another antiwar song

April 2
   R.E.M., one of my favorite bands, has recorded an antiwar song called "The Final Straw." It is not available commercially yet, but what the band calls "a rough mix" is available on its Web site REMhq. Michael Stipe offers this explanation for the song: "This is the strongest voice I could think of to send out there. We had to send something out there now. We are praying and hoping for the lives of all people involved, the troops, the Iraqi civilians, refugees, pow’s, families of troops, the innocents — that they are safe and okay. Safe home, all."
   The song is a mournful ballad that does not mention the war directly and it features a passionate vocal by Michael Stipe over a strummed acoustic guitar. Here is a sample lyric:
   "As I raise my head to broadcast my objection
   "As your latest triumph draws the final straw
   "Who died and lifted you up to perfection?
   "And what silenced me is written into law."
   I recommend at least a listen and I hope it shows up on an official release somewhere soon.
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Consequences of the war

April 2
   A good piece by Robert Fisk in the Independent (U.K.) on the effect this war is having on public opinion in the Arab world.
   He questions the planning of the war and offers this summation of the ultimate consequences:
   "The ghastly Saddam, the most revolting dictator in the Arab world, who does indeed use heinous torture and has indeed used gas, is now leading a country that is fighting the world’s only superpower and that has done so for almost two weeks without surrendering. Yes, General Tommy Franks has accomplished one ‘truly remarkable achievement.’ He has turned the monster of Baghdad into the hero of the Arab world and allowed Iraqis to teach every opponent of America how to fight their enemy."
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Oscar talk

April 2
   Michael Moore won an Oscar last week for his documentary "Bowling for Columbine" and then created a stir during his acceptance speech.
   The reason: Most Americans have difficulty with someone speaking out and being critical of President George W. Bush — especially when someone is from the entertainment industry. The idea is that the people who make music or movies are supposed to remain neutral, to stay out of the fray — especially on special nights like the Oscars or the Grammys.
   But that diminishes their role as artists who have a responsibility to be true to their convictions and to produce are that is substantive and from the heart.
   That no one at the Grammys thought it necessary to comment on those who died in the Rhode Island nightclub fire or that Grammy producers apparently asked musicians to refrain from political comments was a shame.
   That Michael Moore was booed after his Oscar speech, by many who may have agreed with him, offered a real glimpse into the sycophantic ways of Hollywood — no one is allowed to rock the boat.
   For Moore’s take on all of this, see his op-ed in the Los Angeles Times. (If the link no longer works, go to Moore’s Web site.
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