Ishmael Reed

[Henry M]

It's called reconciliation.  Other countries manage to do it.

One more word on Nader: So 50 years ago.

AsB4,
٩(●̮̮̃•̃)۶
Henry Mu
http://astore.amazon.com/tdcoccamsaxe-20


On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 4:44 AM, Michael Bailey <
michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:

> I surrender before your righteous arguments
> (last little peep of resistance: to really make peace, we have to find
> a way not to hate those who have made war, no?)
>
> On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 12:11 AM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> > Because of Nader we have cleaner air, safer cars and safer food and more
> protection from unsafe products. I have a hard time matching that and so
> does Obama and what about you? Do you really think the people in Afghanistan
> cares which political party is leading the occupation and killing.  You
> can't even defend Obama, Henry, though I have listed his crimes again and
> again. You only go on about the horrible Republicans; they never  could have
> done a damn thing without the Democrats.
> >
> > Last week I went to Washington to be arrested with veterans who have
> served in our wars and who are asking to converse with the President. He was
> too busy. Too busy  parroting the generals, too busy cutting deals with fat
> cats, too busy selling the country to bankers, too busy pimping weapons and
> war and drones and lies about clean coal. Here is what Chris Hedges ( over a
> dozen years as NYT war correspondent) wrote about the event; it is worth
> thinking over:
> >
> > Bitter Memories of War on the Way to Jail
> > by Chris Hedges
> > The speeches were over. There was a mournful harmonica rendition of taps.
> The 500 protesters in Lafayette Park in front of the White House fell
> silent. One hundred and thirty-one men and women, many of them military
> veterans wearing old fatigues, formed a single, silent line. Under a heavy
> snowfall and to the slow beat of a drum, they walked to the White House
> fence. They stood there until they were arrested.
> >
> > The solemnity of that funerary march, the hush, was the hardest and most
> moving part of Thursday’s protest against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
> It unwound the bitter memories and images of war I keep wrapped in the thick
> cotton wool of forgetfulness. I was transported in that short walk to places
> I do not like to go. Strange and vivid flashes swept over me—the young
> soldier in El Salvador who had been shot through the back of the head and
> was, as I crouched next to him, slowly curling up in a fetal position to
> die; the mutilated corpses of Kosovar Albanians in the back of a flatbed
> truck; the screams of a woman, her entrails spilling out of her gaping
> wounds, on the cobblestones of a Sarajevo street. My experience was not
> unique. Veterans around me were back in the rice paddies and lush
> undergrowth of Vietnam, the dusty roads of southern Iraq or the mountain
> passes of Afghanistan. Their tears showed that. There was no need to talk.
> We spoke the same wordless language. The butchery of war defies, for those
> who know it, articulation.
> >
> > What can I tell you about war?
> >
> > War perverts and destroys you. It pushes you closer and closer to your
> own annihilation—spiritual, emotional and, finally, physical. It destroys
> the continuity of life, tearing apart all systems, economic, social,
> environmental and political, that sustain us as human beings. War is
> necrophilia. The essence of war is death. War is a state of almost pure sin
> with its goals of hatred and destruction. It is organized sadism. War
> fosters alienation and leads inevitably to nihilism. It is a turning away
> from the sanctity of life.
> >
> > And yet the mythic narratives about war perpetuate the allure of power
> and violence. They perpetuate the seductiveness of the godlike force that
> comes with the license to kill with impunity. All images and narratives
> about war disseminated by the state, the press, religious institutions,
> schools and the entertainment industry are gross and distorted lies. The
> clash between the fabricated myth about war and the truth about war leaves
> those of us who return from war alienated, angry and often unable to
> communicate. We can’t find the words to describe war’s reality. It is as if
> the wider culture sucked the words out from us and left us to sputter
> incoherencies. How can you speak meaningfully about organized murder?
> Anything you say is gibberish.
> >
> > The sophisticated forms of industrial killing, coupled with the amoral
> decisions of politicians and military leaders who direct and fund war, hide
> war’s reality from public view. But those who have been in combat see death
> up close. Only their story tells the moral truth about war. The power of the
> Washington march was that we all knew this story. We had no need to use
> stale and hackneyed clichés about war. We grieved together.
> >
> > War, once it begins, fuels new and bizarre perversities, innovative forms
> of death to ward off the boredom of routine death. This is why we would
> drive into towns in Bosnia and find bodies crucified on the sides of barns
> or decapitated, burned and mutilated. That is why those slain in combat are
> treated as trophies by their killers, turned into grotesque pieces of
> performance art. I met soldiers who carried in their wallets the identity
> cards of men they killed. They showed them to me with the imploring look of
> a lost child.
> >
> > We swiftly deform ourselves, our essence, in war. We give up individual
> conscience—maybe even consciousness—for the contagion of the crowd and the
> intoxication of violence. You survive war because you repress emotions. You
> do what you have to do. And this means killing. To make a moral choice, to
> defy war’s enticement, is often self-destructive. But once the survivors
> return home, once the danger, adrenaline highs and the pressure of the crowd
> are removed, the repressed emotions surface with a vengeance. Fear, rage,
> grief and guilt leap up like snake heads to consume lives and turn nights
> into long, sleepless bouts with terror. You drink to forget.
> >
> > We reached the fence. The real prisoners, the ones who blindly serve
> systems of power and force, are the mandarins inside the White House, the
> Congress and the Pentagon. The masters of war are slaves to the idols of
> empire, power and greed, to the idols of careers, to the dead language of
> interests, national security, politics and propaganda. They kill and do not
> know what killing is. In the rise to power, they became smaller. Power
> consumes them. Once power is obtained they become its pawn. Like
> Shakespeare’s Richard III, politicians such as Barack Obama fall prey to the
> forces they thought they had harnessed. The capacity to love, to cherish and
> protect life, may not always triumph, but it saves us. It keeps us human. It
> offers the only chance to escape from the contagion of war. Perhaps it is
> the only antidote. There are times when remaining human is the only victory
> possible.
> >
> > The necrophilia of war is hidden under platitudes about honor, duty or
> comradeship. It waits especially in moments when we seem to have little to
> live for and no hope, or in moments when the intoxication of war is at its
> pitch to be unleashed. When we spend long enough in war, it comes to us as a
> kind of release, a fatal and seductive embrace that can consummate the long
> flirtation with our own destruction. In the Arab-Israeli 1973 war, almost a
> third of all Israeli casualties were due to psychiatric causes—and the war
> lasted only a few days. A World War II study determined that, after 60 days
> of continuous combat, 98 percent of all surviving soldiers will have become
> psychiatric casualties. A common trait among the 2 percent who were able to
> endure sustained combat was a predisposition toward “aggressive psychopathic
> personalities.” In short, if you spend enough time in combat you go insane
> or you were insane to begin with. War starts out as the annihilation of the
> other. War ends, if we do not free ourselves from its grasp, in
> self-annihilation.
> >
> > Those around me at the protest, at once haunted and maimed by war, had
> freed themselves of war’s contagion. They bore its scars. They were plagued
> by its demons. These crippling forces will always haunt them. But they had
> returned home. They had returned to life. They had asked for atonement. In
> Lafayette Park they found grace. They had recovered within themselves the
> capacity for reverence. They no longer sought to become gods, to wield the
> power of the divine, the power to take life. And it is out of this new
> acknowledgement of weakness, remorse for their complicity in evil and an
> acceptance of human imperfection that they had found wisdom. Listen to them,
> if you can hear them. They are our prophets.
> >
> > The tears and grief, the halting asides, the catch in the throat, the
> sudden breaking off of a sentence, is the only language that describes war.
> This faltering language of pain and atonement, even shame, was carried like
> great, heavy boulders by these veterans as they tromped slowly through the
> snow from Lafayette Park to the White House fence. It was carried by them as
> they were handcuffed, dragged through the snow, photographed for arrest, and
> frog-marched into police vans. It was carried into the frigid holding cells
> of a Washington jail. If it was understood by the masters of war who build
> the big guns, who build the death planes, who build all the bombs and who
> hide behind walls and desks, this language would expose their masks and
> chasten their hollow, empty souls. This language, bereft of words, places
> its faith in physical acts of nonviolent resistance, in powerlessness and
> compassion, in truth. It believes that one day it will bring down the house
> of war.
> >
> > As Tennyson wrote in “In Memoriam”:
> >
> > Behold, we know not anything;
> > I can but trust that good shall fall
> > At last—far off—at last, to all,
> > And every winter change to spring.
> >
> > So runs my dream: but what am I?
> > An infant crying in the night:
> > An infant crying for the light:
> > And with no language but a cry.
> >
> >
> > Copyright © 2010 Truthdig, L.L.C.
> > Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated
> from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign
> correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books,
> including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should
> Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on
> America.  His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy
> and the Triumph of Spectacle.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > On Dec 20, 2010, at 5:59 AM, Henry M wrote:
> >
> >> Tracy, how can you confuse Nader's talk with actually doing anything?
>  Obama talked about what he wanted to do if elected, but couldn't follow
> through.  I doubt he knew how powerless the POTUS really is until he was in
> the White House.
> >>
> >> Nader is just a gadfly gassbag. If he isn't in the pay of the right, he
> might as well be for all that he had "done."  He keeps people from
> supporting viable candidates.  How can anyone who has the slightest idea of
> deconstruction be so naive as to confuse words with action?
> >>
> >> AsB4,
> >> ٩(●̮̮̃•̃)۶
> >> Henry Mu
> >> http://astore.amazon.com/tdcoccamsaxe-20
> >>
> >>
> >> On Sun, Dec 19, 2010 at 9:12 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> >> Nobody expected the wars to end in a day but Obama expanded the war in
> Afghanistan. Other nations are leaving,  many atrocities have been revealed,
> Obama has the power to change what we are doing and he has not.  THEY are
> not the republican party. That is baby talk. The impotence you feel is
> probably from doing nothing but supporting one of the 2 war parties. Your
> assertions about Nader are crap, he has been making a difference and
> sticking to his principles for years.
> >>
> >> On Dec 19, 2010, at 7:25 PM, Henry M wrote:
> >>
> >>> By childish, impractical standards, all Presidents of the US have have
> been "mass murderers," and if Ralph Nader were elected tomorrow, he would be
> just another one.  That conflation BS only helps THEM.  It leads to a
> death-spiral of impotence, which they love.
> >>>
> >>> AsB4,
> >>> ٩(●̮̮̃•̃)۶
> >>> Henry Mu
> >>> http://astore.amazon.com/tdcoccamsaxe-20
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> On Sun, Dec 19, 2010 at 2:38 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net>
> wrote:
> >>> You may choose to vote for a mass murderer because you think his heart
> is in the right place, but all you will accomplish is the continued reign of
> violence.  I understand your choice but will vote for someone clearly
> opposed to imperial warmongering , mass murder, spying without warrants
> extraordinary rendition and the rest of the duopoly agenda. Palin works for
> the same people Obama works for.
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> On Dec 15, 2010, at 5:55 AM, Henry M wrote:
> >>>
> >>>> I've been saying exactly those things, Albert, but the Nader-voting
> lefter-than-thou crowd says that I must be a running-dog-lackey for the
> bourgeoisie, and the right just knows that I'm a Socialist.
> >>>>
> >>>> AsB4,
> >>>> ٩(●̮̮̃•̃)۶
> >>>> Henry Mu
> >>>> http://astore.amazon.com/tdcoccamsaxe-20
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>> On Wed, Dec 15, 2010 at 3:33 AM, Albert Rolls <alprolls at earthlink.net>
> wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>> Is Obama far enough to the left, perhaps in his head but not in his
> actions. Does that mean I'm not going to vote for him if he's the guy on the
> ticket. Hell no. I'm voting because if the left doesn't vote the right gets
> into office and what use is that to me or anyone else, even a whole bunch of
> people voting for the right. And to just make the contrast between Obama and
> what you get when the left doesn't vote because the goddamn middle is what
> used to be the right see what Obama did with the meals-for-kids program this
> week and then remember that Reagan wanted to define ketchup as a vegetable
> so that the meals-for-kids program in the '80s could save money by
> substituting ketchup packages for costly vegetables. And don't think that
> shit doesn't have a lasting effect (beyond the malnourished generation of
> kids from low-income families that have to suffer through it. I saw a chef
> on a cooking segment of some morning news program (a Saturday program, I
> think) remind the audience that ketchup was a vegetable: that was less than
> ten years ago. If the left doesn't vote because Obama is a dissapointent, we
> get Gingrinch, Huckabee, Palin, Romney or whoever. I don't need a president
> whose only use is to rallying people against him/her. Those people will do
> more damage than someone whose hopes are at least pointing in the right
> direction.
> >>>>
> >>>> -----Original Message-----
> >>>>> From: Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
> >>>>> Sent: Dec 15, 2010 2:41 AM
> >>>>> To: P-list <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> >>>>> Subject: Re: Ishmael Reed
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Joseph Tracy  wrote:
> >>>>>> Ishmael Reed may enjoy sucking on his own member participation in
> Scam Obama, (Yes we can , If massa says it's OK). But I will not be joining
> him.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> yeah, as a pacifist I'm disappointed in Obama, well, not really
> >>>>> "disappointed" because I didn't expect him to court assassination by
> >>>>> repudiating Bush's wars (although wouldn't that be cool! maybe they
> >>>>> wouldn't kill him off, who knows, it'd be a heckuva ride to try and
> >>>>> find out...but he never said that was his trip)
> >>>>> (more's the pity)
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Reed's "coolest guy in the room" isn't saying coolest guy in the
> world
> >>>>> - that'd be, like, oh, Desmond Tutu or Pharoah Sanders...somebody
> like
> >>>>> that (Tom Waits?  Thomas Pynchon's in the running too...)
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Hippest dude in a very uncool room, Obama...
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>> --
> >>>>> "Three things in life are important. The first is to be kind.  The
> >>>>> second is to be kind.  And the third is to be kind." - Henry James
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>
> >>
> >
> >
>
>
>
> --
> "Why must I be like that? Why must I chase the cat?" - George Clinton,
> Atomic Dog
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20101221/74430047/attachment.html>