Either this war is going to wind down soon - as cooler heads prevail - or it might escalate. If it does, and the West is pulled in (as Georgia tonight seems to hope) to support a nascent democracy and would-be-NATO member - then all bets are off. This could be the next world war to start in August. At the moment, Russian tanks are still advancing. David Cameron has called for stronger measures, as has the US vice-president (who we know calls the shots). But what can be done, without a tipping point being reached, that is really chilling?
When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se. What do I mean by smart?
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And one good thing to have come out of all the new technologies that came from the labs in that area that doesn't officially exist -- the invisible off limits place too ? for the leaders of the (un)Free world to acknowledge and which gets billions pumped into it to make efficient killing machines - is the information revolution, which means silence and sheep like acquiescence and agreement on the basis of a Texan talking tough on telly, are hopefully over.
9/11 changed everything and at first we all fell for the official story, but now the web has brought many experts together who so not buy it, pointing to a wealth of information which all stacks against what we have been told, and which -- if true - reveals an utter contempt for Democracy by rich men whose rhetoric comes not from personal experience of physical bravery (indeed the opposite) but the memories of their fathers generation. And these neo-cons, we are just a bit of furniture in their cracked philosophy of how to run a planet.
Overgrown frat boys of the skull and bones persuasion, profiteers who have never been or gone without, and who think safe-me First, with the rest of us, numbers on a roll of potential dead who will do the bidding of the money machines which grow profitable on the proceeds of what men write, their daydreams built on a grasp and experience of wall street, not the human Love reality in which the reliance on oil is a challenge to be solved, not something to give two million dollars a year to. If the Pres wasn't so dangerous and useless, who put the two billion a month going into Iraq, into finding a new energy (many believe they already have in that place that doesn't officially exist) instead of looking for excuses to spread his brand of gun-point democracy, this would be more sensible and mass death avoided.
Now is a time when we wake up, put manners on them drafting policy papers on how the world should look, which should be based on the dreams of the masses, not the miniscule few for whom we are mugs to be lied to and who are laughing all the way to the bank.