August 25, 2008
August 25, 2008
Trade liberty for safety or money and you'll end up with neither. Liberty, like a grain of salt, easily dissolves.
The power of questioning -- not simply believing -- has no friends. Yet liberty depends on it. ***
Note from the Editors:
The incompetence of the current crew and the entire foreign policy apparatus is beyond remission, redemption, and even comprehension. Its reckless move against Russia through its Georgian puppet brazenly demonstrates the extent of that incompetence. Not only can they not win a war, whether directly (Afghanistan and Iraq) or by proxy (Lebanon, Somalia, Georgia), they cannot think and shoot straight when, as Michael Doliner sensibly points out, whatever Russia-bashing rhetoric may originate within a foreign policy apparatus that was caught with its pants down, the Russians did not take this Georgian so-called miscalculation lightly, reacted proportionally to the perceived threat, and are darn serious -- and competent. Meanwhile, Michael Barker brings to the fore another crew of unpalatable individuals and organizations -- neocons, Humanitarians, religious imperialists, and Zionists -- that are hard at work destabilizing and demonizing China on the specious issues of human rights abuses in Tibet, Sudan, and against Falun Gong practitioners. What a motley bunch of bedfellows working together to sustain imperialism!
On the road to November 2008, Jan Baughman takes a look at the state of the US economy, the regime of taxation without representation (except for the corporations and the wealthy who don't pay much taxes at all), and the conditions of our faltering democracy turned into a national-security state with fenced-in cages for demonstrators and a detention center of make-shift cells topped with razor wire, bearing warnings of stun-device use for over-zealous protesters. Welcome to the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado, where the Obama-Biden couple will chant in unison, "No Four More Years," and "Yes We Can!" -- which brings Gilles d'Aymery to ponder in a short and to-the point essay what it would take for him to support Obama instead of Nader. As for the myth of change we can believe in, Carol Warner Christen puts her pen to work on the political expediency we continue to vote for despite the local and global entropy and individual chaos that results.
On the literary side, both Charles Marowitz and Peter Byrne have a take on Eric Bentley and Bertolt Brecht -- two completely coincidental pieces, the former told from the inside, the latter from afar. Michael Doliner revisits the 1968 novel A Sport and a Pastime, a poignant love story as told by an imaginary narrator through twists and turns of reality. Guido Monte presents another of his colorful, multilingual, and unique poems; and we end this issue with a short poem by Scott Porter and your letters.
As always, please form your OWN opinion, and let your friends (and foes) know about Swans. It's your voice that makes ours grow.
Ecrasez l'infâmeSwans About Swans
Library
Resources
"Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your common sense."
Quotations Search:
TO OUR READERS
RESISTANCE: In The Eye Of The American Hegemon
Ralph Nader
What is
YOUR Purpose?
Question
YOUR Answers!
War is NOT
the Answer
Think
before you think! —Stanislaw Lec
Don't believe everything you think!
Localize!
Relocalize!
Conserve!
Don't believe.
Think! |
Patterns Which Connect
The Situation In Georgia As I See It
The war in Georgia started on August 8 in the middle of the night with a Georgian attack on Tskhinvali, a city of 30,000 in South Ossetia. Tskhinvali had no military value and the attack was a genocidal one. The Russians counter attacked, as they claim they were required to do under an agreement of 1992, driving the Georgians out of both South Ossetia and Abkhazia. At the moment Russian forces occupy these two provinces and the area around Gori, a city near Tbilisi, the Georgian capital. How should we think about this? More... Michael Doliner has taught at Valparaiso University and Ithaca College. He lives with his family in Ithaca, N.Y.
The Project For A New American Humanitarianism
This essay examines the role of the Project for a New American Humanitarianism in the ongoing human rights offensive that is currently being waged against China. While there is some awareness, in progressive circles, of the work of antidemocratic think tank and neoconservative Project for a New American Century (PNAC) the majority of the public remain in the dark about its machinations. Another equally sinister, but highly visible group that obtains little critical coverage -- in even the alternative media -- is a coalition that might be loosely referred to as the Project for a New American Humanitarianism (PNAH). (1) Both groups promote America's imperial interests, but their activities differ in critical respects. PNAC favours military domination, or militaristic imperialism, which has been zealously promoted by a three-part coalition comprised of "aggressive nationalists..., Christian Zionists of the religious Right, and Israel-centred neo-conservatives." In contrast, the loose collection of concerned activists that coalesce within the Project for a New American Humanitarianism help sustain imperialism by both providing it with "moral cover, and sanctioning the abandonment of the rule of law in the purported interest of human rights." Ironically PNAH, like PNAC, is well supported by neo-conservatives. More... Michael Barker is a doctoral candidate at Griffith University, Australia.
US Elections 2008
Representation Without Taxation
President Bush was talking up the economy this June, touting the vitality that his 2001 and 2003 tax cuts created and continuing to argue that they should be made permanent. According to Bush, 70% of new jobs are created by small businesses, and 75% of the taxpayers who benefited from the reduction of the top bracket were small business owners -- the "mom and pops," not the rich, he claimed. "Why would you want to take money out of their treasury? Why wouldn't you want to encourage them to thrive by letting them keep more of their hard-earned dollars?" As it turns out, they have been keeping more of their hard-earned dollars, tax cuts or no tax cuts; temporary or permanent. A new report by the Government Accountability Office revealed that two out of three US corporations paid no federal income taxes between 1998 and 2005. More... Jan Baughman is a clinical researcher and Swans' co-editor.
Could I Support Obama Instead Of Nader?
Of course, I could! What a bizarre question... Barack Obama is a highly intelligent and thoughtful individual with a sturdy political acumen. His life's trajectory and background serve him well to understand and hopefully manage the complexities and the challenges America faces in this young 21st century. His wife Michelle would be an extraordinary First Lady, the most articulate one ever since Eleanor Roosevelt. She actually would make a better president than her husband (or Hillary Clinton for that matter). She is hors-pair in comparison to the current dystopian political apparatus that is drowning itself in an epidemic of cognitive dissonance. But for lack of our first African-American woman as president of the USA, I'd be happy to settle for our first African-American man, knowing that his first confidante and adviser would be Michelle Obama. So, what would it take for me to support the presidential aspirations of Senator Obama? It's rather simple, really, a Fundamental Paradigm Shift. More... Gilles d'Aymery is Swans' publisher and co-editor.
How To Help The Nader-Gonzalez '08 Campaign
Five steps to help Ralph Nader, Matt Gonzalez, and your goodselves to affect real change in America and in the world (updated August 25, 2008). Note: Ralph and Matt will be in Denver on August 27. The event will be broadcast live on Free Speech TV (check the update in red characters for further information). More... Gilles d'Aymery is Swans' publisher and co-editor. Jan Baughman is a clinical researcher and Swans' co-editor.
America: Myths & Realities
Expediency Creates Entropy Within The Human Environment
First, we need to define expediency. It is "advantageous, suitable, as do whatever is expedient...; politic rather than just; (n.) contrivance, device." The underlined part of the definition is the operative statement: politic rather than just. Politic means, besides judicious and expedient, scheming and crafty. Webster's does add "...of selfish use or advantage..." Second, we need to define entropy. Entropy is a scientific term in physics, rarely used as I intend to do in this essay. Entropy means "the measure of the unavailability of a system's thermal energy for conversion to mechanical work." It means "transformation" in Greek. (4) The term entropy does not appear in my 1879 encyclopedias. I prefer to use the older books for definitions because they are often more precise. This essay leans heavily upon "work" and "transformation" in those meanings. In the past decades, when we lost our citizenship to consumption, we have purchased an amazing amount of "stuff" that we "must" have. More... Carol Christen is a free-thinking Oregonian who minds about the promise of the US Constitution.
Arts & Culture
Fusing Brecht & Bentley
Somewhere in the spring of 1995, someone sent me a copy of Eric Bentley's The Brecht Memoir and, having already had my fill of the Brechtian canon, I listlessly began to thumb through the thin volume. Within moments, I found myself submerged in the book -- drawn in the way I imagine a shark draws in a helpless swimmer who invades its watery preserve. I read it in one sitting and immediately wrote Eric that I thought it the most pungent and revealing material I had ever come across about the playwright and, having been weaned on the author's scholarly tracts such as The Playwright as Thinker, What is Theatre, and The Life of the Drama, unquestionably the most personal writing of Eric's I had ever encountered. More... Charles Marowitz is an author of over two dozen books and numerous essays and articles.
Eric & Bert
The life of Eric Bentley has been a life with Bertolt Brecht. Far from Britain and his native Lancashire, an instructor at UCLA, he met the German writer in Santa Monica in 1942. In 1998, Bentley entered The American Theater Hall of Fame, honored for his cabaret performances of Brecht's songs. (Folkway Records recorded them.) Bentley is now 92 and this latest edition of his Bentley on Brecht is dated 2008. The 500 some pages of Bentley on Brecht couldn't contain everything the professor of Columbia University wrote about Brecht, but only what he considers essential and significant. More... Peter Byrne is an American-born teacher and writer who lives in Lecce, Italy.
Multilingual Poetry
Mondana Commedia n.1: Inferno (World Comedy n.1: Hell)
all over the world, l'aiuola che ci fa tanto feroci Guido Monte teaches Italian and Latin literature in Palermo, Italy.
Hungry Man, Reach For The Book
James Salter's A Sport and a Pastime
James Salter's A Sport and a Pastime is one of those very rare novels that seems not so much to have been written as discovered. At its heart is a love story, an encounter, that transforms its relatively ordinary protagonists into beings around whom the entire cosmos shapes itself. The love story is delicate and ephemeral, put together out of bits and pieces, like a bird's nest. The vulnerable lovers tremble, in the most mundane circumstances, on the edge of catastrophe. Simply the way one of them moves across the room to meet the other seems miraculous and hazardous. Were they to become aware of themselves everything would be lost. But there is no danger of that. More... Michael Doliner has taught at Valparaiso University and Ithaca College. He lives with his family in Ithaca, N.Y.
Poetry
Madness
Limbs are gone. R. Scott Porter is a General Contractor who lives in Laguna Beach, California.
Letters to the Editor
A few thoughts on rereading Zinn, reclaiming democracy, and an Unreasonable Man (i.e., Ralph Nader); speaking out against Russia-bashing; and the Bureau of Public Secrets' tenth birthday. More... We appreciate your comments. Please, remember to sign your e-mails with your real name and add your city, state, country, address and phone number. If we publish your opinion we will only include your name, city, state, and country. Thank you.
Swans by Subject
- Africa Keep in Mind...
– According to researchers at the University of Michigan's Center for Sustainable Agriculture, an average of more than 7 calories of fossil fuel is burned up for every calorie of energy we get from our food. So, it takes 3,500 calories of fossil fuel to eat your 500-calorie breakfast. – "They" say that nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki was necessary to end the Pacific War and save lives. Was Hiroshima necessary? You be the judge. What will "they" say once they have nuked Iran? – According to tolerance.org, every day at least eight blacks, three whites, three gays, three Jews, and one Latino become hate crime victims. – Please support Swans. – You can syndicate Swans with our RSS Feed, courtesy of Sean M. Burke. – Support your local businesses. – Say NO to Amazon.com and the corporate bookchains! Support your local independent bookstores! Books can be ordered through Booksense. Simply enter your Zip code and click on "Go" to find all local independent bookstores near you: – You can visit Swans READING ROOM for some books we recommend. – Every time you reload the front page, one of 87 different quotes appears randomly in the left margin. – If you wish to receive an e-mail regarding each new edition (twice a month) with the Note from the Editors, and have access to a restricted page containing Adobe Acrobat PDF files of the best of Swans and other special issues, you must become a financial subscriber and a helping hand to our efforts. See our Donate page. – Thank you for visiting Swans and for reading its contents. Endeavor to become an agent of change.
|
About Swans | Archives | Copyright | Resources | Contact
This site strongly supports Free Speech.
It can be viewed with Any Browser.
And its content is labeled by ICRA, the Internet Content Rating Association.
© 1996-2008 Swans. All rights reserved.
"hypertext" links to any pages of this site are authorized;
however, republication of any part of this site, inlining, mirroring, and framing are expressly prohibited.
53311