Fourth of July Fireworks at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas. (U.S. Air Force photo by Robbin Cresswell, public domain)
Why “America the Beautiful” Should Be Our National Anthem
By John Unger Zussman
No, it’s not because the “Star-Spangled Banner” (let’s call it SSB) is unsingable. The notes span about an octave and a half, which is within most people’s range. (The issue is that different people’s ranges don’t necessarily overlap.) But I digress.
The problem is the underlying attitude toward America framed by the SSB. It’s hinted in the opening verse, which we all know, but much more explicit in the last:
Then conquer we must,
When our cause it is just,
And this be our motto:
“In God is our trust.”
The SSB idealizes a militaristic, imperialistic America, one that turns to God for help in imposing our view of justice on the world.
Contrast this with “America the Beautiful” (ATB), which is not just about the scenery. Consider the second verse:
O beautiful for pilgrim feet
Whose stern impassioned stress
A thoroughfare of freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America! America!
God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!
ATB portrays an America that celebrates not just spacious skies and purple mountains, but immigrants and freedom, self-control and law. It sees America, realistically, as imperfect, but asks for divine help to perfect it.
And the poetry’s better. Thank Katharine Lee Bates, who wrote the lyrics.
That’s the America I plan to celebrate this Independence Day. Because there’s more than one kind of patriotism. Don’t let anyone tell you different.
Marisa and I arrived at LAX late in the evening and when we finally got home I hit the sack right away. I was due to work on a Japanese Kirin Lager Beer commercial featuring Harrison Ford early the next morning, out at Zuma Beach in Malibu. I had not realized that the time had changed while we were in Kauai. Daylight savings time. This strange horological tradition does not affect Hawaii, and so the morning of my shoot I woke up an hour late. Nothing like the phone ringing and your boss yelling at you before your morning cup of coffee.
I floored it all the way to Malibu, my red 1975 Toyota pick-up truck a blur on the highway, its SR-20 engine humming like a distressed honeybee. I peeled into the Zuma parking lot and dashed to the Production trailer, formulating a profuse sorry on my lips. All was well. Harrison hadn’t arrived yet. I walked down to the set, an overly built Japanese campfire set by the beach. Two small grey whales came near the shoreline, attracted by the large lights we’d set up. My friend Tim and I waded out into the surf and got close to the beautiful creatures. I remember looking into their eyes and sensing recognition. Then, like two bored tourists, the whales dipped into the water and swam off.
I helped carry cases of beer to the set and chilled them in the coolers. Harrison arrived in his rented Black Mercedes SL500 convertible. His bodyguard followed him in a black SUV. A thin Vietnam Vet with hard looks, the bodyguard eyed us all suspiciously before kind of relaxing.
Within the hour, Harrison started his scenes. “Kirin Laga Beeroo Koodasai,” he kept saying. The Japanese applauded each take. What luck to have Indiana Jones sell your beer. What luck and 3 million dollars.
At lunchtime I took a swim and was called out of the water by a lifeguard who said he’d spotted a shark near me. My nerves just a wee bit frazzled, I walked up to the parking lot, all the while thanking my lucky star that I hadn’t become a McNugget to a California Great White. I found Tim hunched over by the bushes, trying to snare lizards with a homemade horse-hair noose. Tim is a quarter Sioux Indian, which I guess explains this odd obsession. I tried to snare a lizard with the contraption, unsuccessfully. Greeks are not good lizard-catchers. Harrison and his tense bodyguard walked by. Harrison smiled at us. The sun was behind him and we were blinded.
Tim told me that he’d talked to the bodyguard and he told Tim that he didn’t carry a gun. “Don’t need one,” the bodyguard had said. I believed him. Tim returned to snaring lizards. “Dude, did you hear the news?” he asked me. “What?” I responded, watching Harrison enter his motor home. “Kurt Cobain blew his brains out.” Harrison Ford slammed the door shut, the snapping sound making me jump. The bodyguard leaned against the motor home, peering out towards the sea like the Marlboro Man. I looked at Tim. “Got one!” he said and lifted a dangling lizard to my face.
–Andreas Economakis
This piece is part of a collection of stories on blindness entitled: The Blindness of Life.
Slavoj Zizek is a senior researcher, Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and visiting professor at American universities (Columbia, Princeton, New School for Social Research, New York, University of Michigan). Ph.D. (Philosophy, Ljubljana; Psychoanalysis, University of Paris). A cultural critic and philosopher who is internationally known for his use of Jacques Lacan in a new reading of popular culture and is admired as a true ‘manic excessive’. Author of The Invisible Reminder; The Sublime Object of Ideology; The Metastases of Enjoyment; Looking Awry: Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture; The Plague of Fantasies; The Ticklish Subject.
Slavoj Zizek has cast a very long shadow in what can only be termed ‘cultural studies’ (though he would despise the characterization). He is an effective purveyor of Lacanian mischief, and, as a follower of the French ‘liberator’ of Sigmund Freud, Slavoj Zizek’s Lacan is almost exclusively transcribed in mesmerizing language games or intellectual parables. That he has an encyclopedic grasp of political, philosophical, literary, artistic, cinematic, and pop cultural currents – and that he has no qualms about throwing all of them into the stockpot of his imagination – is the prime reason he has dazzled his peers and confounded his critics for over ten years.
Primarily the goal appears to be to demolish the coordinates of the liberal hegemony that permit excess and aberration insofar as it does not threaten the true coordinates. He suggests as well that the true coordinates are much better hidden than we realize. The production of cultural difference is to Slavoj Zizek the production of the inoperative dream – a dream that recalls perhaps George Orwell’s 1984 or even Terry Gilliam’s Brazil where a kind of generic pastoralism or a sexualized nature substitutes for authentic freedom – the flip side of this is film noir. Slavoj Zizek has determined that late-modern capitalism has engendered a whole range of alternative seductions to keep the eye and brain off of the Real. The Real only exists as a fragment, fast receding on the horizon as fantasy and often phantasm intercede. These dreams and nightmares are systemic, structural neuroses, and they are part of the coordinates of the hegemonic. The hegemony – the prevailing set of coordinates – always seeks to ‘take over’ the Real, and, therefore, this contaminated Real must be periodically purged.
In his essay ‘Repeating Lenin’ (1997) – ever the trickster, he convened a symposium on Lenin in Germany in part to see what the reaction would be – Slavoj Zizek sets up a deconstruction of the idea of form to effectively liberate the idea of radical form:
‘One should not confuse this properly dialectical notion of Form with the liberal-multiculturalist notion of Form as the neutral framework of the multitude of “narratives” –not only literature, but also politics, religion, science, they are all different narratives, stories we are telling ourselves about ourselves, and the ultimate goal of ethics is to guarantee the neutral space in which this multitude of narratives can peacefully coexist, in which everyone, from ethnic to sexual minorities, will have the right and possibility to tell his story. The properly dialectical notion of Form signals precisely the impossibilty of this liberal notion of Form: Form has nothing to do with “formalism,” with the idea of a neutral Form. Independent of its contingent particular content; it rather stands for the traumatic kernel of the Real, for the antagonism, which “colors” the entire field in question.’
He is interested in discerning the Lacanian Real amid the propaganda of systems. In appropriating ‘Lenin’ he is also looking for the moment when Lenin realized that politics could one day be dissolved for a technocratic and agronomic utopia, ‘the [pure] management of things’. That Lenin failed is immaterial, since Slavoj Zizek is extracting the signifier ‘Lenin’ from the historical continuum, which includes that failure – or the onslaught of Stalinism. The version of Lenin that Slavoj Zizek often chooses to re-enscribe into radical political discourse is ostensibly (by his own admission) the Lenin of the October Revolution, or the Lenin that had the epiphany that in order to have a revolution ‘you have to have a revolution’.
In his critique of contemporary capitalism Slavoj Zizek finds not simply the conditions that Karl Marx anathematized but those same conditions reified and made nearly intangible:
‘A certain excess which was as it were kept under check in previous history, perceived as a localizable perversion, as an excess, a deviation, is in capitalism elevated into the very principle of social life, in the speculative movement of money begetting more money, of a system which can survive only by constantly revolutionizing its own conditions, that is to say, in which the thing can only survive as its own excess, constantly exceeding its own “normal” constraints […] Marx located the elementary capitalist antagonism in the opposition between use- and exchange-value: in capitalism, the potentials of this opposition are fully realized, the domain of exchange-values acquires autonomy, is transformed into the specter of self-propelling speculative capital which needs the productive capacities and needs of actual people only as its dispensable temporal embodiment.’
In the era of globalization, then, the main question is: ‘Does today’s virtual capitalist not function in a homologous way – his “net value” is zero, he directly operates just with the surplus, borrowing from the future?’
‘In a proper revolutionary breakthrough, the utopian future is neither simply fully realized, present, nor simply evoked as a distant promise which justified present violence –it is rather as if, in a unique suspension of temporality, in the short-circuit between the present and the future, we are – as if by Grace – for a brief time allowed to act AS IF the utopian future is (not yet fully here, but) already at hand, just there to be grabbed. Revolution is not experienced as a present hardship we have to endure for the happiness and freedom of the future generations, but as the present hardship over which this future happiness and freedom already cast their shadow – in it, we already are free while fighting for freedom, we already are happy while fighting for happiness, no matter how difficult the circumstances. Revolution is not a Merleau-Pontian wager, an act suspended in the futur anterieur, to be legitimized or delegitimized by the long term outcome of the present acts; it is as it were its own ontological proof, an immediate index of its own truth.’
Slavoj Zizek’s agenda is to foster and engender a withering critique of the structural chains that enslave late-modern man. His nostalgia is for very large gestures: the meta-Real, the Universal, and the Formal. ‘This resistance is the answer to the question “Why Lenin?”: it is the signifier “Lenin” which formalizes this content found elsewhere, transforming a series of common notions into a truly subversive theoretical formation.’
Slavoj Zizek was a visiting professor at the Department of Psychoanalysis, Universite Paris-VIII in 1982–83 and 1985–86, at the Centre for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Art, SUNY Buffalo, 1991–92, at the Department of Comparative Literature, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, 1992, at the Tulane University, New Orleans, 1993, at the Cardozo Law School, New York, 1994, at the Columbia University, New York, 1995, at the Princeton University (1996), at the New School for Social Research, New York, 1997, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1998, and at the Georgetown University, Washington, 1999. He is a returning faculty member of the European Graduate School. In the last 20 years Slavoj Zizek has participated in over 350 international philosophical, psychoanalytical and cultural-criticism symposiums in USA, France, United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, Belgium, Netherland, Island, Austria, Australia, Switzerland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Spain, Brasil, Mexico, Israel, Romania, Hungary and Japan. He is the founder and president of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, Ljubljana.
The foolish run.
The clever wait.
And the wise go into the garden.
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was an Indian Bengali polymath. He was a popular poet, novelist, musician, and playwright who reshaped Bengali literature and music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As author of Gitanjali and its “profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse”, and as the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, Tagore was perhaps the most widely regarded Indian literary figure of all time. He was a mesmerizing representative of the Indian culture whose influence and popularity internationally perhaps could only be compared to that of Gandhi, whom Tagore named ‘Mahatma’ out of his deep admiration for him. (Annotated biography of Rabindranath Tagor courtesy of Wikipedia.org.)
Editor’s Note: This piece was by suggestion of my mother, a poet and gardener who, often, knows best.
Last night marked one week since Israel’s attack in international waters on the Mavi Marmara Turkish humanitarian ship bound for Gaza, killing nine. One by one, the hundreds of witnesses aboard the vessels have been returning home to tell their stories after being stripped of any and all footage. By confiscating all non-military evidence of the incident, Israel has been able to successfully dominate the narrative, at least in the US where news of the attack had begun to dwindle by the time witnesses were released. One wonders, if Israel is conveying the whole story of what happened that night, why eliminate every single other piece of documentation? What does Israel have to hide?
According to hundreds of eyewitnesses, the Navy shot at the boat and threw tear gas and sound bombs before boarding the ship, and then hit the ground shooting. The videos released by Israel show those aboard the ship attacking soldiers with sticks. Israel claims that the deaths were an accident, that the soldiers were startled by the sticks and thus forced to shoot people to defend themselves.
Now let’s put things into perspective. In 2005, the Israeli Army removed 8,000 ideological settlers from Gaza, many of them kicking and screaming with sticks and rocks in hand. The Army managed not to kill or even shoot a single one of them. Do sticks from Turks hurt more, or is it not about the sticks at all?
As Dr. Norman Finkelstein pointed out, Israeli officials met for an entire week prior to the flotilla to plan precisely what they intended to do. The Israeli Ambassador to the US Michael Oren himself stated that the Mavi Marmara was simply “too large to stop with nonviolent means.” It’s hard to believe that this was an accident.
While the world focuses on the flotilla and Gaza, Israel’s restrictions on Palestinian rights in the rest of Palestine continue to tighten. On Friday, soldiers surrounded the Old City in Jerusalem to prevent Muslim men from praying at Al-Aqsa mosque. Only those younger than 15 or older than 40 were allowed through. Hundreds of men gathered outside the metal bars installed by the Army around the city gates. Frustrated, many men sat down to wait to pray on the sidewalk, but soldiers on horseback pushed through the crowd, forcing the men to scatter.
It’s important to note that many Palestinians wait for years to receive a permit to visit Jerusalem for just one day. Sometimes the permits are valid only for a few hours. I saw a woman in Beit Sahour whom I’d met in Syracuse last Fall. She said it’s easier for her to travel to New York than to go 10 miles away to Jerusalem. She said often permits are sent to the wrong village and families fall over themselves to get the permit to the right person in time, often failing. At the gates, some men argued with the soldiers, close to tears, not knowing if they would ever get another chance to realize a life-long dream of praying at their country’s holiest site.
Eventually, hundreds of men began to gather next to the wall of the Old City and across the street. If they could not enter, they would pray as close as they could. As the call to prayer rang out (at least sound can overcome walls), a noticeable calm came over the space as they bowed down in unison. The soldiers stood over the group, some filming with cameras. In the middle of the group were an olive tree and a young child who stood by himself, watching.
When the prayers ended, those who hadn’t brought prayer mats wiped the dirt off their foreheads and gathered with others across the street where an imam had started to speak. Lara, a Palestinian delegate in our group translated bits and pieces of what he said.
The sermon was about the importance of compassion and justice in Islam. There they were, being denied their religious freedom, and they were talking about compassion. The imam asked that their prayers be accepted even though they could not be in the house of God. At one point, he raised his finger and called out the following: “Someday, we will live in a place where it doesn’t matter what color your skin is, or where you’re from.” With every sentence the group resounded in a collective “Amen.”
After the prayers, hundreds of women and older men poured out, one of whom told me he’d seen a man beaten by the Army for calling out against Israel’s attacks on the flotilla. This is likely precisely what the Army wanted to avoid by keeping Muslims from congregating at the mosque, and they had been largely successful, at least so they thought.
Just as I was turning to return to the hotel, I heard a chorus of women’s voices coming from inside the city walls. Soon a large group of women emerged carrying a Turkish flag and singing out familiar calls for justice and praising those who gave their lives to free Gaza. The soldiers thought that keeping the men out would be enough, but they had underestimated the women.
Israel has also underestimated the international civilian community, which continues to speak out. Day and night, we watch protests around the world unfold one after another, seemingly stronger and larger by the day: Japan, Paris, India, Oslo, Australia, and beyond. This is being called “Israel’s Kent State.”
Far more significant than protests is the fact that worldwide disapproval has been transforming into concrete rejection of normalization with Israel, including major victories for the Palestinian movement for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) on Israel until it complies with international law.
This past week, the student body at Evergreen College voted to divest from “Israel’s illegal occupation.” Before she was run over by Israeli soldiers in a US-made Caterpillar bulldozer in Gaza, Rachel Corrie had attended Evergreen. Along with divesting, students have voted for a “Caterpillar free” campus. You can support the students by clicking here.
A week before the flotilla, Italy’s largest supermarkets COOP and Nordiconad announced a boycott of the Israeli produce company, Carmel Agrexco. Four days later, Deutsche Bank (Germany’s largest bank, worth more than $1 trillion) announced divestment from Elbit Systems, an Israeli firm that supplies technology for Israel’s military, settlements, and Wall (as well as the Wall between the US and Mexico). Deutsche Bank was one of the company’s largest share-holders.
The next day, it was announced that Sweden’s largest national pension funds were also divesting from Elbit. (Norway did the same more than one year ago.) Going a step further, the Swedish Port Workers Union announced last Wednesday that it would temporarily stop handling Israeli cargo in response to the attacks on the flotilla.
On the same day, Britain’s largest union, Unite, passed a unanimous motion “to vigorously promote a policy of divestment from Israeli companies” and to boycott Israeli goods and services as in “the boycott of South African goods during the era of apartheid.”
Then yesterday, the Pixies canceled of their upcoming concert in Israel in response to Israel’s attack on the flotilla. Musical artists Klaxons and Gorillaz canceled as well. This on the heels of cancellations by Santana, Gil Scott-Heron, Snoop Dog, Sting, and Elvis Costello.
These are but a few of the BDS victories that have happened just in the last month. The movement that officially began in 2005 crossed its first threshold in 2009 (having gained in four years the same momentum it took the BDS movement against South Africa 20 years to achieve), but 2010 has brought it to a new level.
Last month marked 62 years since 80% of the families in Gaza were displaced during Israel’s creation, the Palestinian Nakba. And this week marks 43 years since Israel occupied the Gaza Strip and West Bank. The Occupation has been in place 70% of Israel’s life-span so far. It is not temporary. And it is but one part of the problem. Along with Israel’s discrimination against Palestinians within Israel’s de-facto borders and outside historic Palestine, the Occupation will not be stopped voluntarily by Israel. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said: “Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” I spoke with a member of Boycott from Within (Israelis supporting the Palestinian BDS Call) paraphrased a common phrase during the anti-Apartheid struggle in South Africa: We will bring them to their senses, or we will bring them to their knees. For Israel, as was the case for the South African Apartheid government, the former has simply never worked.
Anna Baltzer is a Jewish American who has been documenting human rights abuses and supporting nonviolent direct action in the West Bank with the Int’l Women’s Peace Service. Witness In Palestine is the title of her book detailing her experiences
I’ve always been a little superstitious. Okay, I don’t wig out if a black cat crosses my path (maybe because I once read that the Portuguese consider the black cat a sign of good luck), but I do make a point of putting on my left sock first every morning. I don’t know why I do this, it’s just that I’ve been doing it for as long as I can remember. Call it a part of my routine, call it some kind of DNA signature, this left sock thing has never done me wrong. I’m alive and kicking to prove it.
I guess you could say I believe in signs. So you can imagine what was running through my head when my girlfriend Justina mentioned that our 8-year relationship was in trouble on the exact same day that our cat Buddy was run over in the driveway by our idiot neighbor Quentin. Yup, the meaning of this wasn’t lost on me. After all, Buddy had been our very first kitten and he was probably the sweetest of our cats. People need symbols and Buddy became a symbol of our relationship, a symbol of our budding love. At least for me. And as anyone who’s ever believed in something will tell you, when a symbol dies, well then the thing that it represents dies as well.
Justina moved out shortly after Buddy’s death, the very day after I celebrated my thirtieth birthday. It was nice of her not dumping me on my birthday, all in all. Okay, it sucked that I had to spend the day all alone (Justina had once again feigned a heavy work load at school, leaving me a cupcake and a pink Hallmark card by the key dish), and it also sucked that my free birthday eggs at Denny’s were watery, cold and tasteless, but at least I was still in a relationship. Or so I believed. When my girlfriend showed up with a moving van the next day, I worried that this cataclysmic event would influence all of my thirties. I shivered in dread.
How would the relationship ads read? “30 year old male, shy, not too bald, with nice smile, totally dependent and mono-focused on his ex-girlfriend, is now totally and utterly alone and looking for companionship. A pretty decent cook, likes animals and enjoys romantic Sunday afternoon hikes up Runyan Canyon.” “Ugh, just shoot me here and now and get it over with,” I thought to myself. Ads aside, a bigger dilemma was now at hand: what does one do with oneself when not in a relationship?
Suddenly the accidental bachelor, I hit the streets looking for answers. All I saw were happy couples and groups of friends, everyone smiling and jocular and together. The only solitary people I came across were either crazy or passed out from drugs or alcohol or poverty. That’s when it occurred to me. Insanity is the quickest way out of a broken heart. Everyone feels pity for a young man who loses his marbles, even if those marbles were all there but a week before. And what’s even better is that when one does actually go crazy, nothing is expected of him. It’s like total freedom. How cool is that? I decided to go insane without further ado. I rushed home all excited, eager to set my new plan in motion.
First off, I would have to get rid of my cats, for a crazy man cannot follow a routine of feeding pets and cleaning up after them. I loved them dearly and so deliberated a long time before leaving them and the remaining supply of cat food on my girlfriend’s doorstep (I was still having a hard time annunciating the prefix “ex”). Justina may not love me anymore, but she must surely have a soft spot in her heart for the cats. Right? I mean, they’d been with us for so many years and they slept with us every night, albeit on my side of the bed (Justina always insisted that they preferred my side, though I knew she swished and swooshed her feet under the covers to chase them away). I decided to not leave a note as that would give her an opportunity to return the cats with a reply.
The next step was to clear out of the apartment. I meticulously gathered all the shreds of my life and bagged them in Smart & Final jumbo garbage bags (“curiously spot on this company name,” I thought as I stuffed my outdated cd collection and utilitarian Ikea cd racks in one of the bags). I hauled the bags a few blocks away, tossing them in a restaurant dumpster. Almost like an omen, Fabio, the faux-Italian longhaired model/actor smiled and waved at me as I walked in front of his shiny peach-colored sports car just off of Melrose. “I’m friends with Fabio?” I wondered as he drove away. I was now more than ever convinced that my plan must be working, that surely I must be going insane.
I drank my last celebratory beer on the dusty floor of my apartment, staring at the clumps of cat hair that floated about the now empty living room. As a token to my new found life, I bit down on the can until my mouth started to bleed. I smeared the sticky blood all over my face, screamed at the top of my lungs and rushed out of the apartment all bleary-eyed but determined, leaving the door wide open. That was the last time I ever went through that door. My new life snatched me up and propelled me forward.
I found a safe place to sleep next to a burnt out building on Spaulding. I dreamt that my girlfriend was trying to wake me up by tickling my eyelashes with her hair. I kept brushing her hair away, trying to prolong the dream of her tickling my eyelashes. I woke up shivering after swatting my nose. A huge cockroach fell off my face and scurried under my jacket. I jumped up and started ripping my clothes off, trying to find the roach. I couldn’t find it and so I decided to shuffle off, cursing and trying to rearrange my torn clothes. I quickly realized that I was barefoot. Someone had stolen my shoes and my socks while I slept. The significance of my new predicament didn’t escape me. Without a left sock to put on first, what did fate have in store for me?
I walked on, vowing to take a straight line down Spaulding, vowing to go straight until I could go straight no longer. I could not for the life of me fathom making a right or a left. That would be calamitous. Two nervous women walked by, stepping on the grass next to the sidewalk so as not to come too close to me (oh, you think I didn’t notice, but I did…). I decided to mimic them and stepped on the grass as well. Shit, I inadvertently made a right! I cringed and quickly shielded my head, expecting a lightning bolt to scream out of the sky and strike me between the eyes. That’s when I stubbed my toe on a sawed-off tree trunk. I fell without grace, clutching my injured toe and tipping backwards. I smacked my head on the edge of the sidewalk, snapping my neck in the process. I died a couple of minutes later, amused by all the confused voices and sirens competing for space in my increasingly tranquil brain.
–Andreas Economakis
This piece is part of a collection of stories on blindness entitled: The Blindness of Life.
Between going and staying the day wavers,
in love with its own transparency.
The circular afternoon is now a bay
where the world in stillness rocks.
All is visible and all elusive,
all is near and can’t be touched.
Paper, book, pencil, glass,
rest in the shade of their names.
Time throbbing in my temples repeats
the same unchanging syllable of blood.
The light turns the indifferent wall
into a ghostly theater of reflections.
I find myself in the middle of an eye,
watching myself in its blank stare.
The moment scatters. Motionless,
I stay and go: I am a pause.
Octavio Paz (1914-1998) was a Mexican writer, poet, and diplomat. Under the encouragement of Pablo Neruda, Paz began his poetic career in his teens by founding an avant-garde literary magazine, Barandal, and publishing his first book of poems, Luna Silvestre (1933). In 1962, Paz became Mexico’s ambassador to India and resigned six years later in protest when government forces massacred student demonstrators in Mexico City. Paz was awarded the Cervantes Award in 1981, the Neustadt Prize in 1982, and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990.
Editor’s Note: This post is both in line with my love for great Spanish poets and with an ongoing discussion here on As It Ought To Be of the role of artists in politics. In a time of great turmoil – the new racist police state law in Arizona, the BP oil catastrophe, and Israel’s attack on those trying to aid occupied Palestine, to name a few – we as artists have a responsibility to use our voices for the greater good. May Octavio Paz serve as an inspiration to do so.
Even when your friend, the radio, is still; even when her dream, the magazine, is finished; even when his life, the ticker, is silent; even when their destiny, the boulevard, is bare;
And after that paradise, the dance-hall, is closed; after that theater, the clinic, is dark,
Still there will be your desire, and hers, and his hopes and theirs,
Your laughter, their laughter,
Your curse and his curse, her reward and their reward, their dismay and his dismay and her dismay and yours—
Even when your enemy, the collector, is dead; even when your counsellor, the salesman, is sleeping; even when your sweetheart, the movie queen, has spoken; even when your friend, the magnate, is gone.
Kenneth Fearing(1902-1961) was an American poet, novelist, speechwriter, editor, and journalist. One literary critic named him “the chief poet of the American Depression.” He helped found the Partisan Review and took an active interest in leftist politics while also churning out pulp fiction that sometimes bordered on the pornographic under the pseudonym Kirk Wolff. His poetry uses contemporary vernacular to probe the grotesque in the urban landscape.
As It Ought To Be 