North Carolina has a higher standard for its beauty queens than New Jersey does for its poet laureates. Posted on 10/04/2002 7:35:18 AM PDT by SJackson
North Carolina has a higher standard for its beauty queens than New Jersey does for its poet laureates.
At least North Carolina has a standard.
Miss North Carolina, Rebekah Revels, was dethroned following a report she had posed for photographs in the nude.
Garden State poet laureate Amiri Baraka won't resign willingly, and at first blush can't be forced to resign, despite having read a poem accusing the Israeli government (among others) of having advance knowledge of 9/11 and warning 4,000 countrymen to stay away from the twin towers. He also said, as report in my home paper, The New Jersey Jewish News, that Ariel Sharon was supposed to have been in the World Trade Center but stayed away.
Better nude than crude, though even better neither than either.
Gov. James McGreevey rightly denounced the poem as anti-Semitic and called on Baraka to resign.
The Baraka story broke in The Jewish Standard, which serves readers in Bergen and northern Hudson counties.
Since then it has attracted national attention, shaping up as a conflict between those who believe a poet should be held accountable for his verse and those who believe in the distinct function of the poetic voice.
(We shudder at the idea that it could run as a story on Al Jazeera: "Official NJ poet endorses 9/11 conspiracy view popular in Islamic world.")
Actually, if state lawmakers act with dispatch, they could put an end to the whole affair, which has added to the multiple embarrassments afflicting the state.
We don't mind hairsplitting debates, but the first point to be made regarding Baraka is that we don't fancy his distinction between being anti-Israel and being anti-Semitic. True, one can support positions held by Palestinian moderates or those of the broad Israeli peace camp as a friend of Israel and the Palestinians. But this is decidedly not where Baraka places himself.
Responding to McGreevey's denunciation of him, Baraka denied that he was anti-Semitic, claiming to be merely anti-Israeli. "If you criticize Israel, they hide behind the religion and call you anti-Semitic," Baraka said.
Well, it depends on what you mean by anti-Israeli. There's a world of difference between the "Israel should be willing to leave the territories and recognize Palestinian self-determination" kind of criticism and "There shouldn't be any Israel at all" kind of criticism.
As the late Irving Howe once said of poets T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, "There's the kind of anti-Semitism that says, 'I don't want him in my club,' and the kind that says, 'Let's kill him.' There was a difference between Eliot and Pound."
Under the guise of opposing the policies of the Sharon government, much of the virulently anti-Israel Left has climbed back out of the hiding they went into with the advent of the Oslo peace process.
We also believe Baraka most certainly should have the mantle of state legitimacy removed from his clearly unworthy shoulders. This is not a case of free speech or art for art's sake.
The brouhaha has caught lawmakers and administrators by surprise. It seems no part of the statute addresses the possibility that, once installed, a poet laureate might have to be removed.
The lawmaker who coauthored the original bill establishing a poet laureate position tells us it's all up to the Council for the Humanities to reconvene the poets panel that picked Baraka.
But interviews with members of that panel indicate they will not act to remove Baraka. Moreover, an official with the council says it's all up to the state legislature.
We think the state legislature should therefore take up as an urgent item of business a proposal to amend the statue in order to provide for the current circumstance.
All of this reminds us of nothing so much as the decision in 1948 by a panel to award the first (and, as it would turn out, only) Library of Congress Bollingen Prize in Poetry to Ezra Pound for The Pisan Cantos. (Coming in second was Paterson by the Garden State's own William Carlos Williams.)
The distinguished panel included arguably two of the most important poets of their time, T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden, as well as Robert Lowell, Conrad Aiken, and Robert Penn Warren, among others.
Karl Shapiro at first went along with the majority, then dissented, beginning a career-long dispute with the modernist establishment over the award.
Pound was the father of modernist poetry. Eliot dedicated his epic 1922 poem, "The Waste Land," "to Ezra Pound, Il miglior fabbro [the greater craftsman]" because Pound had edited and revised the poem that famously begins, "April is the cruelest month." But he was also virulently anti-Semitic (there was no Israel for him to hide behind, and, anyway, Pound bought into the fascist worldview of Jewish conspiracies), broadcasting anti-Semitic and anti-American talks from Mussolini's Italy during World War II.
After the war, Pound was charged with treason but was acquitted by reason of insanity. For the Bollingen judges, the issue was the autonomy of art: "To permit other considerations than that of poetry achievement," they wrote, "would in principle deny the validity of that objective perception of value on which civilized society must rest."
This put them in the position of arguing that civilized society rests on an "objective perception of value" that allows for a deranged (and dangerous) lunatic to receive the nation's highest poetry award.
The storm soon broke.
Art critic Clement Greenberg wrote in Partisan Review that "life includes and is more important than art, and it judges things by their consequences."
Peter Viereck wrote a widely read critical piece in Commentary arguing that one could not effectively separate Pound's anti-Semitism from his Italian wartime radio broadcasts. Then the Saturday Review published a piece by Robert Hillyer, "Treason's Strange Fruit," which tried to link participants to a "Jungian Nazi conspiracy."
A New York congressman, Jacob Javits, called for a congressional investigation. The net effect was to stop government support of the arts for two decades. In this case, we should act with dispatch - both to clear the air fouled by Baraka's insane charges and to ensure that "civilized society," and state government, remain active in the arts.
Gov. James McGreevey rightly denounced the Torch as a loser and called on the Torch to resign.
PLEASE HELP ME TAKE BACK THE SENATE!
Because it's way too much work to have to check out both. Tell you what, we'll divide it up - you check out the poem and I'll check out the pictures.
BTW, Ezra Pound was nuts. Seriously, wall-pounding nuts. Anti-Semitism was the least of his problems...
..................
"I said, 'Governor, you're going to catch a lot of hell for this,' " Baraka said.
"He said, 'I don't care.'
I said, 'If you don't care, I don't care.' "
..................
Sounds to me like the Gov got what he asked for, next time he'll do his homework.
.............................
Blew Up America
Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones)
They say its some terrorist,
some barbaric
A Rab,
in Afghanistan
It wasn't our American terrorists
It wasn't the Klan or the Skin heads
Or the them that blows up nigger
Churches, or reincarnates us on Death Row
It wasn't Trent Lott
Or David Duke or Giuliani
Or Schundler, Helms retiring
It wasn't
The gonorrhea in costume
The white sheet diseases
That have murdered black people
Terrorized reason and sanity
Most of humanity, as they pleases
They say (who say?)
Who do the saying
Who is them paying
Who tell the lies
Who in disguise
Who had the slaves
Who got the bux out the Bucks
Who got fat from plantations
Who genocided Indians
Tried to waste the Black nation
Who live on Wall Street
The first plantation
Who cut your nuts off
Who rape your ma
Who lynched your pa
Who got the tar, who got the feathers
Who had the match, who set the fires
Who killed and hired
Who say they God & still be the Devil
Who the biggest only
Who the most goodest
Who do Jesus resemble
Who created everything
Who the smartest
Who the greatest
Who the richest
Who say you ugly and they the goodlookingest
Who define art
Who define science
Who made the bombs
Who made the guns
Who bought the slaves, who sold them
Who called you them names
Who say Dahmer wasn't insane
Who? Who? Who?
Who stole Puerto Rico
Who stole the Indies, the Philipines, Manhattan
Australia & The Hebrides
Who forced opium on the Chinese
Who own them buildings
Who got the money
Who think you funny
Who locked you up
Who own the papers
Who owned the slave ship
Who run the army
Who the fake president
Who the ruler
Who the banker
Who? Who? Who?
Who own the mine
Who twist your mind
Who got bread
Who need peace
Who you think need war
Who own the oil
Who do no toil
Who own the soil
Who is not a nigger
Who is so great ain't nobody bigger
Who own this city
Who own the air
Who own the water
Who own your crib
Who rob and steal and cheat and murder
and make lies the truth
Who call you uncouth
Who live in the biggest house
Who do the biggest crime
Who go on vacation anytime
Who killed the most niggers
Who killed the most Jews
Who killed the most Italians
Who killed the most Irish
Who killed the most Africans
Who killed the most Japanese
Who killed the most Latinos
Who? Who? Who?
Who own the ocean
Who own the airplanes
Who own the malls
Who own television
Who own radio
Who own what ain't even known to be owned
Who own the owners that ain't the real owners
Who own the suburbs
Who suck the cities
Who make the laws
Who made Bush president
Who believe the confederate flag need to be flying
Who talk about democracy and be lying
Who the Beast in Revelations
Who 666
Who know who decide
Jesus get crucified
Who the Devil on the real side
Who got rich from Armenian genocide
Who the biggest terrorist
Who change the bible
Who killed the most people
Who do the most evil
Who don't worry about survival
Who have the colonies
Who stole the most land
Who rule the world
Who say they good but only do evil
Who the biggest executioner
Who? Who? Who?
Who own the oil
Who want more oil
Who told you what you think that later you find out a lie
Who? Who? Who?
Who found Bin Laden, maybe they Satan
Who pay the CIA,
Who knew the bomb was gonna blow
Who know why the terrorists
Learned to fly in Florida, San Diego
Who know why Five Israelis was filming the explosion
And cracking they sides at the notion
Who need fossil fuel when the sun ain't goin' nowhere
Who make the credit cards
Who get the biggest tax cut
Who walked out of the Conference
Against Racism
Who killed Malcolm, Kennedy & his Brother
Who killed Dr King, Who would want such a thing?
Are they linked to the murder of Lincoln?
Who invaded Grenada
Who made money from apartheid
Who keep the Irish a colony
Who overthrow Chile and Nicaragua later
Who killed David Sibeko, Chris Hani,
the same ones who killed Biko, Cabral,
Neruda, Allende, Che Guevara, Sandino,
Who killed Kabila, the ones who wasted Lumumba, Mondlane,
Betty Shabazz, Die, Princess Di, Ralph Featherstone,
Little Bobby
Who locked up Mandela, Dhoruba, Geronimo,
Assata, Mumia, Garvey, Dashiell Hammett, Alphaeus Hutton
Who killed Huey Newton, Fred Hampton,
Medgar Evers, Mikey Smith, Walter Rodney,
Was it the ones who tried to poison Fidel
Who tried to keep the Vietnamese Oppressed
Who put a price on Lenin's head
Who put the Jews in ovens,
and who helped them do it
Who said "America First"
and ok'd the yellow stars
Who killed Rosa Luxembourg, Liebneckt
Who murdered the Rosenbergs
And all the good people iced,
tortured, assassinated, vanished
Who got rich from Algeria, Libya, Haiti,
Iran, Iraq, Saudi, Kuwait, Lebanon,
Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Palestine,
Who cut off peoples hands in the Congo
Who invented Aids
Who put the germs
In the Indians' blankets
Who thought up "The Trail of Tears"
Who blew up the Maine
& started the Spanish American War
Who got Sharon back in Power
Who backed Batista, Hitler, Bilbo,
Chiang kai Chek
Who decided Affirmative Action had to go
Reconstruction, The New Deal,
The New Frontier, The Great Society,
Who do Tom Ass Clarence Work for
Who doo doo come out the Colon's mouth
Who know what kind of Skeeza is a Condoleeza
Who pay Connelly to be a wooden negro
Who give Genius Awards to Homo Locus
Subsidere
Who overthrew Nkrumah, Bishop,
Who poison Robeson,
who try to put DuBois in Jail
Who frame Rap Jamil al Amin, Who frame the Rosenbergs,
Garvey,
The Scottsboro Boys,
The Hollywood Ten
Who set the Reichstag Fire
Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed
Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers
To stay home that day
Why did Sharon stay away?
Who? Who? Who?
Explosion of Owl the newspaper say
The devil face cd be seen
Who make money from war
Who make dough from fear and lies
Who want the world like it is
Who want the world to be ruled by imperialism and national
oppression and terror violence, and hunger and poverty.
Who is the ruler of Hell?
Who is the most powerful
Who you know ever
Seen God?
But everybody seen
The Devil
Like an Owl exploding
In your life in your brain in your self
Like an Owl who know the devil
All night, all day if you listen, Like an Owl
Exploding in fire. We hear the questions rise
In terrible flame like the whistle of a crazy dog
Like the acid vomit of the fire of Hell
Who and Who and WHO who who
Whoooo and Whooooooooooooooooooooo!
A $10,000 honorarium.
Why bother?
The author fails miserably to establish any comparative connection between the two issues.
Merely a cheap, superficial "journalistic" ploy to generate a catchy title.
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