Have you been waiting for an American version of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich—a searing account of life in the American Gulag? Well, according to the New York Times Book Review, your wait is over. Rush right out and pick your own copy of Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak.
To be sure, the Times’s reviewer, Wellesley professor Dan Chiasson, admits that the poems may be somewhat lacking in artistic merit. But, hey, he suggests, you gotta make allowances:
It is hard to imagine a reader so hardhearted as to bring aesthetic judgment to bear on a book written by men in prison without legal recourse, several of them held in solitary confinement, some of them likely subjected to practices that many disinterested parties have called torture. You don’t read this book for pleasure; you read it for evidence. And if you are an American citizen you read it for evidence of the violence your government is doing to total strangers in a distant place, some of whom (perhaps all of whom, since without due process how are we to tell?) are as innocent of crimes against our nation as you are.
Perhaps all???
Chiasson may be carrying his anti-Bush paranoia a wee bit far, given that the Gitmo detainees now include such charming characters as Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, the mastermind of the 9/11 plot. I have yet to hear even the most ardent critic of the administration suggest that KSM is actually innocent.
But Chiasson seems to be writing from an alternative reality—call it Planet Academia—where the Gitmo detainees are not the world’s most vicious terrorists but, rather, political prisoners of a repressive American regime akin to Stalinist Russia. The only thing he can’t seem to figure is why Amerika, that bastion of fascism, would allow these poor souls to publish their writings: “imagine a volume of Osip Mandelstam’s poetry released by the Soviet government in 1938, or an anthology of poems by Japanese internment prisoners released by our government during the Second World War.” He speculates, rather cunningly, that this might actually be a plot by the U.S. government “to make Guantánamo and our abuses there unfold on an abstract ‘literary’ plane rather than in real life and real time,” and thereby to lessen our horror at what is transpiring behind the prison walls.
For my part, I have trouble figuring out why the Times editors would publish what amounts to a parody of liberal antiwar hysteria. Could it be that the dictator in the White House ordered the Times to run this essay in order to confine the antiwar activists to “an abstract literary plane” and thereby to hold them up to general public ridicule?
I would have thought they would have trained her from saying “you know” in prep school.
When a Kennedy says “you know”, it is an abbreviation for “Do you know who I am?”
Of course, there I go using passive voice.
Nice comment contra. Spot on.
What is so disconcerting and abrasive about Caroline’s impending incumbency in a seat that one would think merits a blueblood royal in mentition as well as lineage is that she emerges not as average, as Woman eclatant from a shell of motherhood-cum-professionalism-denied, but as slightly brittle, slightly brain-blighted. Not a deep thinker, certainly, but then, her relatives cannot be charged with that account. Nor a creative eloquent, who can bandy the bon mot with the best. She is not her father. nor is she even her less-than-stellar academic-minus brother. She is…as yet unavailable in Merriam-Webster, because she is a paradigm we have not often before encountered–a rich, privileged anaeroid without the evidence of her expensive near-erudition.
But room-temperature intelligence would not seem untoward for this august position, heretofore occupied by another virtual carpet-bagger, who came to it, at least, having expended some calories in law, community works, Presidential spousehood, and [failed] efforts at healthcare reform (which counts, obscurely, as something, inasmuch as she did research, homework, took meetings, assayed minutes, pulled together a variety of modalities…though it frightened the horses. And put most physicians in the country of a mind to absquatulate to the frigid North).
With nothing but a pallid DNA deracination from her elders, a shabby shamble, a proclivity to twitch with revulsion at being confronted by the fourth and fifth estate, a reluctance to impart significant information the public might deem de rigeuer, and a brace of books co-authored while she was yet a protected trophy (time, nannies and money aplenty with which to produce a screed or two), she appears an encrusted, embroidered embarrassment to any and all in the state who demand excellence in their selectees. As well, of course, as electees.
She appears an apotheosis of the Middle Ages’ much-despised and scandalous Sale of Indulgences: The tiniest and most meaningless relic or fauxmento sold to the highest bidder for false so-called heavenly merit.
She offers indeed a chance to reconsider the much-maligned and sturdy Sarah Palin, who in retrospect appears more multi-faceted, capable, capable and spritely than the backwash media gave her the slightest credit for during the late electioneering campaign.
Is New York in such a needy condition that we must tolerate such a Raggedy Caroline-Ann as one of our critical two senators?
Saddest of all, it matters not how strait the gate, how charged with tedium the scroll, because if our unelected and befuddled governor chooses to anoint this ne’er-do-anything, ne’er-even-work-once, so it shall be. Alas–a lass. And alack –a great lack.
I don’t like the Kennedys so I’m not a fan of Caroline K. as a senator. But I must say that I laughed at this posting, given that we’ve just been through the second failed Bush presidency, and that some fools are thinking that a third one of America’s most elegant white trash family ought to run for the senate from Florida.
So, Commentarians, I think I just might bookmark this item for when you slavishly lick Jeb Bush’s boots. After all, to watch your love for torture, the Lebanon invasion, and what your friends in Israel are doing in Gaza, we know that the neocon Bund has long since gotten over any vestigial anti-fascist principles it might have once held for a month or two in 1946. Given that, can your distaste for royalism be regarded as, well, tactical? No, of course not.
Outside of the Bush family, there’s nobody wanting to see more Bushes in The White House.
It’s a case of GHWB navel gazing.
No one in the Republican ranks is going to all servile like for Jeb.
And everybody is going to give the gimlet eye to his record, his pronouncements and whatever bona fides he presents to the base of the party.
We don’t trust the Bush family anymore.
What GW did, following up the damage his old man rendered, has probably put the Republican nomination beyond the reach of Georg P. Bush, let alone Jeb.
I think the Democrats have a real and growing fasination with royalty. Look at the celebrity status that was endowed on Obama during the election. Or the rule changes that Pelosi tried to shove through today getting rid of the number of years a committee chair can serve. Look how anyone with the name of Kennedy is treated. I have always thought that the Democrats wanted to rule us- I guess they’re not socialists but royalists?
Look on the bright side. Caroline will have many terms in the Senate to win over the hostile press.
Fun note: Studies have shown that devices like “you know” and “um” are signs of superior intellect. They signal that the speaker has many more word options to choose from than the rest of us.
A princess and a clown! Perhaps they should walk into the senate together, holding hands, to show everyone in the world the Democrat’s contempt for that bod.
I’m still a registered Democrat, though it’s not likely I’ll vote the way for some time. Nonetheless I’m glad that Caroline Kennedy’s assumption into the NY Senate seat is looking less likely. Fingers crossed.
What is so disconcerting and abrasive about Caroline’s impending incumbency in a seat that one would think merits a blueblood royal in mentition as well as lineage is that she emerges not as average, as Woman eclatant from a shell of motherhood-cum-professionalism-denied, but as slightly brittle, slightly brain-blighted. Not a deep thinker, certainly, but then, her relatives cannot be charged with that account. Nor a creative eloquent, who can bandy the bon mot with the best. She is not her father. Nor is she even her less-than-stellar academic-minus brother. She is…as yet unavailable in Merriam-Webster, because she is a paradigm we have not often before encountered–a rich, privileged anaeroid without the evidence of her expensive near-erudition.
But room-temperature intelligence would not seem untoward for this august position, heretofore occupied by another virtual carpet-bagger, who came to it, at least, having expended some calories in law, community works, Presidential spousehood, and [failed] efforts at healthcare reform (which counts, obscurely, as something, inasmuch as she did research, homework, took meetings, assayed minutes, pulled together a variety of modalities…though it frightened the horses. And put most physicians in the country of a mind to absquatulate to the frigid North).
With nothing but a pallid DNA deracination from her elders, a shabby shamble, a proclivity to twitch with revulsion at being confronted by the fourth and fifth estate, a reluctance to impart significant information the public might deem de rigeuer, and a brace of books co-authored while she was yet a protected trophy (time, nannies and money aplenty with which to produce a screed or two), she appears an encrusted, embroidered embarrassment to any and all in the state who demand excellence in their selectees. As well, of course, as electees.
She appears an apotheosis of the Middle Ages’ much-despised and scandalous Sale of Indulgences: The tiniest and most meaningless relic or fauxmento sold to the highest bidder for false so-called heavenly merit.
She offers indeed a chance to reconsider the much-maligned and sturdy Sarah Palin, who in retrospect appears more multi-faceted, capable, deft and sprightly than the backwash media gave her the slightest credit for during the late electioneering campaign.
Is New York in such a needy condition that we must tolerate such a Raggedy Caroline-Ann as one of our critical two senators?
Saddest of all, it matters not how strait the gate, how charged with tedium the scroll, because if our unelected and befuddled governor chooses to anoint this ne’er-do-anything, ne’er-even-work-once, so it shall be. Alas–a lass. And alack –a great lack.
Jacob: “Fun note: Studies have shown that devices like “you know” and “um” are signs of superior intellect. They signal that the speaker has many more word options to choose from than the rest of us.”
You’re kidding aren’t you? Her reliance on ‘you know’ is nothing more and nothing less than a bad habit. If we change ‘you know’ to say ‘fu**’ would you be as quick to claim a superior intelligence at work. What most people never get around to acknowledging is that when they speak they punctuate by means of brief silences and voice inflections. What Kennedy proves is that she cannot speak in complete sentences. So pray tell how is that a sign of ‘superior’ intelligence? It’s a wonder that she can even breath while speaking. Then again, maybe, oxygen deprivation explains her speech habits.
Should have been breathe.
Caroline certainly encourages another look at Sarah Palin.
Speaking of royalty, how about Bernie Madoff, the neocon croof who shipped billions to Israeli banks with the connivance of insiders at the SEC?
Would Hartscheiss explain, if he can, what a croof is, and how Madoff is a neocon, unless we’re back to D. Brooks’s definition of the appellation?
<i?Well, it’s not like the Democrats have a merit problem. . . .
Miss Thistlebottom says, “Next time, dear, please say It’s not as if the Democrats have a merit problem. After all, if we are going to draw attention to another person’s use and misuse of the word like we too should be careful how we use it.”
John H.
Please call the FBI, SEC, etc. with that information. Perhaps you also have the secret account numbers to make the tracing easier. They have been looking for the money for weeks now, and all they had to do was call you.
Madoff’s a crook. I made a typo. So sue me. Tell the SEC, you say? People tried to do that over the years, and the SEC ignored the complaints. Bernie had the SEC in his hip pocket. How far? Well, the SEC has said they’ll keep the list of Bernie’s assets secret. But the truth is leaking out. The money went to Israeli banks, and no one in this neocon Bund government is going to tell.
Or at least they’re trying really hard not to tell. However, as the list of the swindled expands, it’s going to get harder to keep the $50 billion under the carpet. Come on, Commentarians, the money went somewhere.