Month: April 2002

It looks very much like it. Salon and Spinsanity have the goods. Here’s the relevant extract:

A list of 48 dubious achievements of President Bush appears in Michael Moore’s bestselling “Stupid White Men,” without footnotes or citations of any kind. A reader might assume that they are accumulated nuggets from Moore’s own research. But a San Francisco activist says she came up with the list, and she’s not too happy about the way Moore is using it. Kirsten Selberg contacted Spinsanity following a piece detailing the numerous errors and factual distortions in “Stupid White Men” to say she compiled that list for a wall that was displayed at the “Voters March West” that took place nearly a year ago in San Francisco, on May 19. Still posted on the Voters March Web site, Selberg’s list contains 47 of the 48 facts about Bush mentioned in Moore’s book — in the exactly the same order and with very similar wording. The only difference is that, unlike Moore, Selberg provides sources for almost all of her facts. Representatives for Moore did not respond to requests for comment.

Recall that the Boston Globe suspended conservative columnist Jeff Jacoby for similar Internet copying. Any chance that the media will apply the same standards to a liberal?

SPINSTER SPIN: Could someone – anyone? – get Maureen Dowd a date? And no gay guys, please. She has enough of them.

Norway’s parliament wouldn’t let a visitor wear a Star of David on his jacket out of solidarity with Israelis under siege. Bruce Bawer has the details:

Dagbladet reporter Cato Vogt-Kielland writes that “Tveitt went into the Parliament building dressed in a thin summer jacket with the Star of David on the chest pocket. But after he had talked in the Parliament restaurant with Parliament members from the Progress, Conservative, and Labor parties, he was sought out by two security guards who asked him to come with them ‘because they had received reactions’ to Tveitt’s flag symbol. ‘I asked who had reacted, and what they had reacted to, but got no answer,’ said Tveitt. ‘I didn’t think that showing solidarity with Israel would create reactions in Parliament – especially not in Parliament.’ The two guards escorted him to the wardrobe. After he had hung up his jacket, they followed him back to his table. As Tveitt points out, “People walk around [in Parliament] with Palestinian scarves and other pro-Palestinian symbols without any reaction.”

If you can read Norwegian, here’s the original story. This from the same country that gives out Nobel prizes, in which some judges claim they now regret giving Shimon Peres such a prize. They have no regrets, as Bruce points out, about giving one to Arafat. Figures.

THE TRANSCRIPT: If some of you missed my online Washington Post chat session yesterday, and are interested in reading it, the transcript is now available here.

BEGALA AWARD NOMINEE: This time a Guardian cartoon.

POOPED: Spent all day in meetings, and all evening in rehearsals. Normal service will resume later today after a good solid eight hours of unconsciousness.

Terrific and obviously true piece by my colleague, Jonathan Chait, in The New Republic. He points out that since the current offensive started, suicide bombings have indeed declined. He argues that the use of female suicide bombers, far from being some grotesque extension of the vocation, may be due to the fact that male suicide bombers keep getting intercepted by the Israeli security forces. Perhaps, you know, killing and detaining terrorists might actually help lower rates of terrorism. That’s why I hope the Israelis get out of the West Bank unilaterally, but take their time to root out as many of these thugs and murderers as they can while they do. In time, we may come to thank Sharon for doing the unpopular but necessary thing. He may be performing the equivalent of the Osirak bombing – taking out terrorist threats now that could one day threaten more than Israelis.

EPIPHANY WATCH I: A fascinating little interview with Christopher Hitchens is a good insight into how a man of the left deals with the pressures of orthodoxy, loyalty and the whole idea of what an intellectual actually is. I’m impressed by his candor, as always:

[S]ome of the best known of the American public intellectuals have, I think, failed the test of September 11th. And somewhere in there is the difference between having an oppositional stance-an “engaged” position-and possessing some elementary, I’m sorry to make it sound so banal, some elementary morals. Or sense of moral proportion.

I think that gets it just about right. And reminding people of a sense of moral proportion is not, pace Mr. Alterman, an exercise in McCarthyism. It is an exercise in conscience. But you can see the wheels turning in Hitch’s head, away from the easy oppositionism that afflicted – and still afflicts – so many in his intellectual generation:

I think it’s now quite possible, and I think this is what September 11th may have clarified, that, the Russian Revolution having been-I would say, in spite of many things, but, nonetheless-a historical failure, to put it mildly … the model revolution for this, I should think, will be increasingly that of 1776. In other words, the real question in front of us is, will the American experiment succeed or not? That being defined as: a multicultural, secular, multiethnic, pluralist democracy.

Quite. The threat to that pluralism today comes primarily from terrorists. But, more benignly, this pluralist order is also threatened by the ideological policemen of right and left, who insist on corralling writers into one camp or another, who cannot understand a thinker or writer who insists upon independence, or complexity, or even, when it’s warranted, a certain honest dose of human contradiction. As Hitch writes,

[A]t the moment, my mailbox is full of people effectively accusing me of that, of being a propagandist for George Bush, let’s say. It doesn’t worry me particularly for myself; but it worries me that so many people have been so poorly educated that they can think that was a good point, or a good method of reasoning, when it’s not really a method of reasoning at all.

Amen, Hitch. Ditto all those emails telling me either to join the right and condemn homosexuality or multiculturalism or married priests or drug legalization or whatever; or those insisting that a gay man has no right or standing to dissociate from the left, or must somehow support liberal ideas in toto or be accused of aiding and abetting the ‘enemy.’ Isn’t the real task of a writer to think for himself – and to resist the temptation to tidy everything into one ideological rubric? I’m glad Hitch is around. It makes the intellectual world a less lonely and more invigorating place.

EPIPHANY WATCH II: Here’s another rather sharp and honest discussion of how 9/11 accelerated in one academic’s life her sense that her profession had become horribly estranged from the real life and real questions that intellectuals should never lose sight of. But in some ways this brilliant essay by professor Lisa Ruddick at the University of Chicago is an epiphanal rebellion against the aridity of much that passes for thought in today’s English departments. She puts it well here:

When colleagues and graduate students who are teaching this term get together, the conversation often turns to the question how to bridge the chasm between the syllabus–whatever it contains–and the students who are looking for help in figuring out how to sustain a humane connection to a world that’s overwhelming them. I listen to these conversations, then I look at recent issues of scholarly journals in my field, and I feel as if I’m in two different worlds.

Is this the voice of a recovering post-structuralist? I’ve long believed the sheer philosophical, spiritual and intellectual hollowness of this fad would eventually break down. So it’s wonderful to read a first-hand account of how this can happen:

When I was writing my first book I was so concerned about getting tenure that I adhered to the theoretical norms of the moment. It was alienating at times, but I did it. After that, though, I became paralyzed, because I couldn’t make myself observe certain omnipresent intellectual taboos that came under the heading of poststructuralism-taboos that I thought were oppressive but that I couldn’t challenge without courting disgrace. I felt I had to hide or smuggle in my humanist convictions about “what sustains people”-my faith for example in some quality of shared humanity that makes literary experience meaningful. And my anger and sadness about this feeling of constraint were preventing me from writing with conviction at all.

‘Conviction,’ as Ruddick puts it. ‘A sense of moral proportion,’ as Hitchens has it. And in both, much hope for a more open and more truly liberal intellectual future.

THE THEOCON VISION FOR THE CHURCH – AND AMERICA: I wrote yesterday that I could forsee a schism between the American Catholic church and Rome, if major reform didn;t come soon. A reader sent me a link to someone else who clearly looks forward to the opposite scenario: the number of American Catholics falling by perhaps a third, but becoming solidified around an Opus Dei-inspired rump. This piece is by one Father McCloskey, an Opus Dei prelate who apparently converted Bob Novak and Larry Kudlow to a highly conservative form of Catholicism. The conceit of this “letter” is that it’s written in 2030, looking back on the crisis of the post-conciliar church and seeing how pruning it back to its hardcore led to a new “springtime” for vocations. McCloskey writes to his imaginary future correspondent:

As you may have learned, there were approximately 60 million nominal Catholics at the beginning of the Great Jubilee at the turn of the century. You might ask how we went from that number down to our current 40 million. I guess the answer could be, to put it delicately, consolidation. It is not as bad as it looks. In retrospect it can be seen that only approximately 10% of the sixty or so were “with the program.”

That “program” is, I think, the Opus Dei agenda for reversing the liberalization that has taken root since the Second Vatican Council. I think this piece is worth reading to see what a conservative vision of the future of the American church looks like, one in which every Catholic is either married and reproducing throughout their lives, in religious orders, or celibate. But then there’s this passage. McCloskey, w
ho is already a prominent contributor to the current debate about the church, and was one of five leading Catholics interviewed ten days ago on “Meet The Press,” sees American constitutional democracy as it now is as a real threat to the church, and envisages a second civil war that will lead to the secession from the Union of the more God-fearing states. No, I’m not kidding. Here’s the salient passage:

In retrospect, the great battles over the last 30 years over the fundamental issues of the sanctity of marriage, the rights of parents, and the sacredness of human life have been of enormous help in renewing the Church and to some extent, society. We finally received as a gift from God what had been missing from our ecclesial experience these 250 years in North America— a strong persecution that was a true purification for our “sick society.” The tens of thousands of martyrs and confessors for the Faith in North America were indeed the “seed of the Church” as they were in pre-Edict of Milan Christianity. The final short and relatively bloodless conflict produced our Regional States of North America. The outcome was by no means an ideal solution but it does allow Christians to live in states that recognize the natural law and divine Revelation, the right of free practice of religion, and laws on marriage, family, and life that reflect the primacy of our Faith. With time and the reality of the ever-decreasing population of the states that worship at the altar of “the culture of death,” perhaps we will be able to reunite and fulfill the Founding Fathers of the old United States dream to be “a shining city on a hill.”

This is the Catholic, Francoite version of the Christian Reconstructionists – and it lurks behind the purgers on the Catholic Right. This visceral disdain for modern America found expression not so long ago in Richard Neuhaus’s journal ‘First Things’ which toyed with the idea of armed rebellion against the American constitutional order because of the Godlessness and faithlessness of this country’s judiciary. This agenda, of course, has about as much chance of happening in this country as the current pope’s ending the celibacy requirement for priests. But it’s certainly helpful to see where some of these people are coming from. The fight for the soul of American Catholicism – against the Francoite reactionaries who see the current crisis as an opportunity for a benign take-over of the Church – could end up being a fight for American democracy as well.

ROMENESKO VERSUS BLOGS:Medianews’ Romenesko does what he can to trash andrewsullivan.com again – by linking to a blog! John Scalzi’s piece all but accuses this site and others of fibbing about our numbers. (Scalzi, it should be remembered is Ted Rall’s good friend.) Scalzi uses Norah Vincent’s equation of “hits” with “visits” to suggest that my daily visit numbers are perhaps one fifth of what I’ve reported. Here’s what my not fantastically sophisticated server tells me: last week, this site got 220,000 visits from 76,000 unique visitors. Our best day was Wednesday when we got 40,000 visits from 23,000 unique visitors. On a monthly basis, we’re now over 800,000 visits from over 200,000 unique visitors. Are we bigger than the New York Times? Of course not. But that’s not the right comparison. Better to compare a news service like Drudge with a news service like the Times. Scalzi says the Times gets 2.2 million visitors a week. According to his site, Drudge gets 4 million visits a day. Let’s be very conservative and say that amounts to 1 million unique visitors a day. I’d say Drudge beats the New York Times website hands down. Of course, he provides only a tiny fraction of their original reporting. But if you’re looking for news stories, his web-page clearly out-performs the Times, and on the web, a page is a page is a page. It seems to me the right comparison for opinion bloggers like Instapundit or yours truly would be either visits to individual columnists online or visits to opinion magazines. I’m pretty sure National Review Online beats us all. But I’d be interested to know if the online versions of the Nation or The New Republic beat individual bloggers by a large amount. And remember that our pages are staffed by one, rather than around a dozen or so. When you look at it that way, bloggers’ contribution to the debate – in a matter of months, really – is pretty astounding. But the broader point is: this is not a zero-sum game. The old media won’t disappear, nor should they. The Times, for all its flaws, is an absolutely indispensable institution, and I hope to God it stays that way. What bloggers do is break up smug monopolies, disperse editorial power and give unheard voices a chance to get a megaphone. It seems to me only the truly insecure or untalented have anything to worry about. (Which may account for Eric Alterman’s panic.)

A good corrective to my post of last night on “How Churches Die.” It’s from a priest who’s been a reader of the site since almost Day One, and a great e-friend. Here’s his email:

Just read your post on how church’s die. To a certain extent, I believe youare right on target. On the other hand, however, I don’t see it. There will have to be some major changes– major changes. Change is the only certain thing right now. But on Easter weekend we had our largest crowds ever and our largest collection (no one seems to be holding back contributions.) I sense that the majority of Catholics are fed up with the hierarchy and are genuinely frustrated by the current news. However, if their local community is healthy– if it is a home, a place of safety and joy, then they seem to be able to make a distinction between that and the larger picture. No one in my parish has looked askance at me. Instead, I have experienced an outpouring of love and support from the people who are genuinely concerned about my own well-being in this environment. That has been truly affirming. However, as a citizen of a mostly non-Catholic “red state,” I can’t say the same when I go out in public.
For what it is worth, I think that so long as the people are being fed spiritually, they will still identify closely with their parish community. And, all modesty aside, if they love their pastor, he is more important than their bishop or pope. After all, I am there for their baby’s baptism and their mother’s funeral. The real test will be to see how this sort of new identification– against the whole idea of a Catholic Church and more of a sort of Particular Church, will pan out in the years to come.

Okay, I fail basic English. But here’s the poet who wrote “The Curse,” explaining what he meant:

The poem is a curse on those who flew into the World Trade Towers. When I wrote it I didn’t imagine that it could be read in any other way. The poem springs from the ancient moral idea (the idea of Dante’s Divine Comedy) that what you suffer for your actions should correspond to the nature of your actions. Shelley in his Defense of Poetry says that “the great secret of morals is love”-and by love he means not affection or erotic feeling, but sympathetic identification, identification with others. If you perceive the world as perceived by another, if you enter into his skin, there are certain terrible things that you cannot do to him. The poem condemns the high-jackers to enact again and again precisely what they lacked in life: identification with what their victims experienced. The poem imagines that this would burn away the “bubble of rectitude” that allowed them to think their action “moral.” Identification is here called down as punishment, the great secret of morals reduced to a curse. The reader who responded to you with the statement that begins “In fact, there’s more evidence to suggest that the curse is directed at the high-jackers” explores the poem’s intentions more eloquently than I can do myself.

Another credit to my amazingly smart readers. But also a credit to this new medium, huh? You don’t only get corrections at lightning speed, you even get line readings from poets! I feel like Woody Allen introducing Marshall McLuhan in Annie Hall. Only I’m the one humiliated.

Tomorrow at 1pm, I’ll be online at the Washington Post answering questions, etc, etc. Here’s the link. See you then.

Every now and again, I get an email telling me to recant my early suspicion that the anthrax attacks of last fall were probably terrorist-insprired. Every time the FBI suggests that a domestic source was responsible, emails come in telling me to drop my fear that Saddam or other foreign governments were involved. The truth, of course, is that we still don’t know. But the evidence unearthed by Michael Hosenball et al at Newsweek this week suggests that, whoever did it, he or she was a real pro. My suspicion is that it was a warning from Iraq that any attempt to disarm Saddam would lead to an immediate chemical or biological response in the U.S. I’m sorry, but that’s still my suspicion. I’d be happy and relieved to be disproved, but so far, the signs are nothing but ominous.

Safire has an invaluable column today on Saddam’s al Qaeda wing, attempting to attack and destabilize our Kurdish allies in the north. I have no doubt that the president is intent on removing Saddam from power. But I have much doubt that the C.I.A. is willing or able to help him, or that the know-it-alls at the State Department aren’t daily coming up with excuses for delay. I thought this was a race against time, guys. Those Americans who are in danger of being killed by a Saddam-Qaeda chemical, biological or semi-nuclear attack should keep reminding the administration of this. The current Iraqi-Iranian-Syrian initiative in arming Palestinians to murder their way onto our Middle East agenda should not affect our time-table in any way. If it does, we are simply inviting more such mischief.

TWO CHEERS FOR THE MONARCHY: “The reason we should try to feel emotion at the death of the Queen Mother is not because we knew her, or felt we knew her, or even had the slightest inclination to know her. It’s because she was there when our great-grandparents were there; she was there as an infant under Victoria; she was there as a teenager as the First World War destroyed a generation and as a depression laid waste to another. She was there when Britain was blitzed and when it rebuilt and when it staggered into decline and then revived. She was there when Britain was an empire and when it was a member of the European Union. Mourning her is not really about her; it’s about us.” A modest defense of a monarchy – in my latest piece, posted here.

A GIDDY THING: It’s been an exhausting weekend – about six hours of rehearsal a day. And have you tried memorizing lines like this one: “‘I took no more pains for those thanks than you took pains to thank me.’ That’s as much as to say: ‘Any pains that I took for you is as easy as thanks'”? Maybe I’m a lot older; maybe I have ingested too many foreign substances over the years; maybe ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ is a peculiarly ornate piece of dramatic rhetoric; but, boy, has it been tough getting these words to become completely automatic. My poor beagle hasn’t been able to get a word in edgewise for weeks. Still, it’s not as if I’m memorizing, say, Tony Kushner. My favorite Benedick line as of now is: “Shall quips and sentences and these paper bullets of the brain awe a man from the career of his humor?” Just the technical wonder of the deceptively simple composition – and the sheer sound of the words – thrill me. Actually, feeling my way gradually through the character of Benedick this past month – his emotional dysfunction, his wit, his nerve, his sexual confusion, his obnoxiousness, his honesty, his vulnerability – has been a wonderful exercise in how stupendously brilliant Shakespeare is. I know this is hardly news – but I know no better way to really absorb and appreciate Shakespeare than actually trying to act, speaking the words he wrote. With each rehearsal, you find something new. As you slowly leave the script behind and let the lines guide you forward, you find yet another – and another! – aspect of this complex, subtle human being coming into relief. Parts of him remind me of so many different people, and there are so many choices, and yet in the end you rest on the words themselves, and they create this extraordinary complex of feeling and perception between you, and your character, and his author, and anyone observing. Well, before I give myself a ‘poseur alert,’ I just have to say it’s a relief to be another person for while – even in play. We modern adults surely don’t play enough. And I don’t mean drinking or carousing or drugs or professional sports or whatever. I mean the kind of serious frivolity that children practice all the time and that allows them to grow. This play is seriously hard work, but its playfulness truly refreshes the spirit. Still, my weekend was made by dinner last night with Charles Francis (a supporter of the site) and Bjorn Lomborg, the current author of this month’s book club selection. We didn’t talk about the environment. But we had a great time and I dragged him afterwards to the best racially-integrated dance club event of the week in DC at the Lizard Lounge. He has to take part in a debate today, and I did my best to get him a hangover. But he’s a vegetarian teetotaller – so what are you gonna do?

THE ULTIMATE CONFLICT OF INTEREST: Kinsley fesses up about how his Parkinson’s disease inevitably affects his view of therapeutic cloning. I feel the same way about HIV and drug research. Of course I don’t want the government crippling pharmaceutical profits, because it will slow such research and mean I’ll probably die a few years sooner than might otherwise occur. Does this mean that because I’m HIV-positive, my view should be airily dismissed as too biased? I agree with Mike that this would be a bizarre inference. But the more interesting issue, of course, is whether Kinsley could have written this column with no conflict of interest before he had gone public with Parkinsons. I think that not disclosing such an obviously important piece of background material would have compromised the integrity of such a column. But I still believe that the right to privacy – especially about medical matters – would have and should have trumped that conflict of interest as a factor in ethical journalism. That’s because I believe in a pretty solid right to privacy. What I’d like to know from so many in the media who do not respect such a right is the answer to the following question: would they feel entitled to ‘out’ someone’s medical history in the event of such a column being written by someone who has kept their disease private? And if not, why not?

ANOTHER BROCK LIE? Did David Brock also partially fabricate his student journalism experience at Berkeley? A fellow student at the time, who worked with Brock in college journalism, thinks Brock did. At this point, to whom would you give the benefit of the doubt?

IN RETROSPECT: Fascinating data from Gallup on how people retroactively view various presidents. To my mind, the most interesting comparison is between the first president Bush and his successor, Bill Clinton. Clinton has the highest negatives (47) since Kennedy and the smallest net positive rating (+4), apart from Nixon. President GHW Bush gets a 69 percent approval rating, with a net positive of + 43. In general, I think the first Bush is a deeply under-estimated president. But the collapse in Clinton’s ratings is, I think, due to two basic things: the pardons and September 11. People have absorbed just how little he did, weighed against the gravity of the growing terrorist threat during his eight years in office. They get it. And, for all Joe Klein’s and David Brock’s spin control, they always will.

HOW CHURCHES DIE: Of all the material printed in the last few weeks on the current crisis in the American Catholic church, yesterday’s New York Times story on the near-collapse of the Irish church struck me as one of the more significant. What the story shows is that a combination of factors – modern, secular life, greater freedom for women, more awareness of homosexuals, economic success and growth – can hollow out traditional deference to church authority. Sex scandals – especially when they appear to be endemic and covered up – can deliver the coup de grace. It is perfectly possible that in the next few years, in the absence of radical reform, the Catholic church in America will become a rump of its former self. Perhaps among those communities that are as yet less touched by modernizing influences, such as the Latino immigrant population, the orthodox Church will endure. But what Ireland shows – and what the rapid spread of fundamentalist Protestantism in Latin America shows – is that even traditional cultures can suddenly abandon unthinking and unswerving obedience to a clerisy widely perceived as corrupt or psychologically warped. It will happen here. Rome won’t prevent it. And if American Catholics refuse to see their church go into radical decline, they will have to move toward some kind of schism to save it.

I’m sorry. I don’t see it. Reading through his speech on the plane back to DC, I was struck once again at how eloquent, powerful, and clear this president’s formal rhetoric can be. I could find nothing in the speech with which to disagree. Its clear and unmissable emphasis is the right one: that the prime responsibility for the violence in Israel and the West Bank in the last few months lies squarely with the terrorist, Yassir Arafat, and his accomplices. To say he has failed to live up to a single one of his promises to restrain violence is an under-statement. But it is equally true that re-occupation of the West Bank is not and should not be an option. Nor should maintenance of the settlements. The president significantly didn’t set a time-table for Israeli withdrawal – and Colin Powell won’t be in Irsael until the end of next week. So Israel has some lee-way, and should find a way to get out as effectively as possible. Besides, much has already been accomplished, not least of which is the rallying of Israeli will to fight for survival. I am no optimist about what lies ahead. My own view is that the pathology, delusions and hatred that now infect the Palestinian world is not unrelated to the manic terror of al Qaeda. I don’t think anyone will be able to talk them out of it. But it is equally clear that as a moral issue, we have to try. To have done so before Israel was allowed to have responded would have been a sign of weakness. To do so now, after thorough Israeli self-defense, is a sign of simple will. If some calm prevails, then it may be that our campaign against Iraq will fare better. For my part, I suspect that it is only after we have defeated Iraq and achieved a regime change in Iran that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will be amenable to settlement, of even a provisional kind. But I don’t blame the president for trying. And I don’t consider this a “reversal.” I see no capitulation to terror in Bush’s speech, and much resolve to continue the fight. For this, relief. For Israel a difficult but noble task – to try again.

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “Though we at THE TIKKUN COMMUNITY oppose the outrageous and disgusting acts of terror against Israelis, we know that the actual level of violence is small compared to the number of Israelis who die each year in automobile accidents.” – Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun.

I flew to Ohio yesterday, to give a talk at Kenyon College. What a great group of people – particularly the kids (several of whom, it turns out, are devoted to the site). Hung out with all the poli-sci jocks in the college bar afterwards. Then had to pull an all-nighter for a big piece for the Sunday Times. And now – in the wee hours – my Internet connection appears to be down and I don’t have the energy to fix it. I want to figure out what I think of Bush’s Middle East statement yesterday, but I can’t get a transcript and I don’t want to rely on clips or paraphrases. I should be back in DC by this afternoon for a react. Meanwhile, here’s Paul Begala and more on that bloody poem. Oh, and check out the book club selection for this month, will you? I think it’s our most challenging pick yet.

BEGALA AWARD NOMINEE: “By the way, let me also take up for my colleagues in the Clinton administration. It turns out we were the most ethical administration in history.” – Yes, it’s Paul Begala! Interviewed on Buzzflash.com. The rest of the interview has some real beauts as well.

THAT POEM: Curiouser and curiouser. Emails are running clearly in favor of the view that the Frank Bidart poem I linked to yesterday is, in fact, a condemnation of the World Trade Center bombers. But I’m still not completely sure. Take another look, if you still give a damn. Here are two readers’
letters weighing in on opposite sides:

Amazingly (to me) this is the poem I first heard read by Bidart at St. Paul’s in Boston in November. Thirty or 40 of us poets were asked to read something (anything, really, I suspect) about Sept. 11, and there was Frank, who prefaced his reading of this ugly little piece of fractured free verse by saying, “Some people are made very angry by this poem.” That was it–that was all. Nada. No more explanation, then just the poem.I was stunned, and turned to a fellow poet in the audience and said, “Am I going nuts or was that thing Bidart just read a curse on the dead of the towers?” She allowed as how that was impossible. I remain convinced Bidart was having it both ways. I.e., why aren’t “we” (the evil West) able to use moral imagination to feel what the bombers felt? See what I mean? Clever.

Now here’s another letter from someone at the same event!:

I wanted to throw in my two cents’ worth on Frank Bidart’ s poem, of which I was unaware until you linked to it this morning. I see that others have written to you in the meantime to point out that the poem should be understood as the curse that it purports to be, and that it makes a good deal more sense that this curse is directed at the terrorists (or the fundamentalist mentality) and their “rectitude.” I know Mr. Bidart faintly, and his poems generally are as far from any kind of simplistic political oratory as it is possible to be. If the genesis of the poem is of any relevance, a colleague of Mr. Bidart tells me that the poem was written within a month or so after September 11. He was prevailed upon to read the poem at a college roundtable discussion of the attacks, which he did only with the greatest reluctance-he seemed genuinely taken aback by the anger that the events of September 11 had aroused in him and that found voice in his poem.
I recommend Mr. Bidart’s work to you-his first three books are now collected in a volume called “In the Western Night” and another volume, “Desire,” has also appeared-the poems are often intense and sometimes dismayingly graphic, but they are consistently rewarding.

I think I’ll stick to prose in future. But, Mr. Bidart, if you’re out there and have caught wind of this, would you write me to let me know? Or are we all too post-modern to care what the poet actually meant?