Poets Against War continues the tradition of socially engaged poetry by creating venues for poetry as a voice against war, tyranny and oppression.
William Irwin Thompson
64 years old
Cambridge, MA
Author of 16 books; semi-finalist National Book Award, 1972; Oslo Poetry Festival Award, 1986. Founder of the Lindisfarne Association.
Cambridge Rant
Dear Mr. President,
When first did standing up before a crowd crowd out the truth? When first did Americans become consenting addicts to deceit? Did it start with FDR’s feigned surprise in his famous day in infamy’s speech, or back with Wilson’s “war to end all wars”? Or did it begin with our own sinking the Maine and blaming it on the Cubans so that the American Empire could set its ramparts out from Puerto Rico to Hawaii and the Spanish Phillipines? Or should I go farther back to Lincoln “the Great Emancipator” who did not want to free the slaves but only ship the inferiors back to Africa? Honest Abe was our first Imperial Bismark suspending habeas corpus, to forge the industrial nation-state and cover death with his own deathless prose. Or, President Bush, should we date it back to the Mexican-American War? A few Gulf of Tonkin lies are buried there. Let’s stop before we go too far and end with duplicitous Thomas Jefferson. To save the myth of our Founding Fathers, let’s stop with populist Andrew Jackson— the Charlton Heston hero on a horse-- a sharp real estate speculator who hated Indians to get their lands, a real leader of men who ordered execution for an adolescent who when swamp-soaked and mosquito-bitten was insubordinate to an officer. Or should we excuse the leaders and blame instead the mass benighting media of print, radio, movies and TV? Or is there something about the power of language that inclines us all to lie?
Chimps can lie, so perhaps living in groups requires illusions to keep us closed out from the cold truth that cuts too deep and separates one from the numberless. Better a true leader we like who lies than a Chomsky cocksure philosopher or solitary bard living for words. Churchill and FDR had radio, Hitler his own book and movie deal with Mein Kampf and The Triumph of the Will. McCarthy and Kennedy had TV to twist public wrestling into politics. By the time of Jackie’s gowned Camelot the art of public deception was glitzed, and Las Vegas became the capital of the new lit State of Entertainment-- of the rat pack, mafia, and murders of Kennedys and Marilyn Monroe. Washington was only needed to write the script as the work of lone assasins.
The last century was American, but it looks like the twenty-first is not. From Hitler, America received a gift of fascist Europe’s geniuses in flight, but now we’ve blown it all away on sports, computer games, pop music, and cool drugs. We’re back to being boom box kids cruising at night on empty down a Texan street. The television dumbing down has brought us back to the level we we were at with a Know Nothing Party, Scopes Trial, and public lynchings of radicals and blacks. Ashcroft intones now just like McCarthy. Lynne Cheney is making America First! a dumbing of public education. For the new century, Earth is tilting toward tyranical China with its love of executions in public stadiums. With Aids and tribal wars in Africa, the Middle East becomes the end of civilization where it began. Europe’s senescent mind now lives within an American home for assisted living.
Rage on, Ezra, but it’s not usura, you old modernist fake fascist bastard; and it’s not the Jews, Mr. Eliot— though I would certainly indict Sharon. Reactionary feudal William Yeats is truer to the lie of final time, and it’s that proud antithetical gyre that is now probably screwing us all. Or could it also be Wallace Stevens’ necessary angel of our ashen earth-- the tragic angel of a new Dark Age. Between the ancient and the classical came the archaic Aegean Dark Age. Between the classical and medieval arose the Eurasian Gothic Dark Age. Now between the global and the Gaian comes the Dark Age of dying religion. Whatever it is we spend on Klieglights, American movies are played in the dark.
