There's an article in today's The New York Times that has me seeing red.  It's entitled "Restless Pioneers, Seeding Brooklyn" and was written by Donald G. McNeil, Jr.

Now, before I get to just what so upset me on reading the piece, I should point out that my store and cafe, Shakespeare's Sister, is often credited for "starting it all" in Cobble Hill, with being the first upscale hangout in what is now one of the trendiest neighborhoods in Brooklyn.  And I have lived in Brooklyn for about twenty of the last forty years, primarily in places that had not yet been "discovered."  I know something about urban change, having seen it happen.  And I know something about the people the change "happens to."

My reaction, on reading Barack Obama’s Philadelphia speech yesterday, was that he has offered us and our presidential candidates the chance to raise the level of debate in America to a level not reached for more than thirty years.  This morning, The New York Times, in an editorial, agrees: "

We can’t know how effective Mr. Obama’s words will be with those who will not draw the distinctions between faith and politics that he drew, or who will reject his frank talk about race. What is evident, though, is that he not only cleared the air over a particular controversy — he raised the discussion to a higher plane.

Does a delegate go to a political convention to lead?  To represent?  To decide?

I had always thought their task was to represent and, based on that, to decide.  After all, the very word "delegate" itself implies a transfer of power, a representation—and not duties of leadership.  In today's New York Times, however, Geraldine Ferraro tells me that I'm wrong.

Let me start with this: I am no fan of Hillary Clinton.  Her husband does look a little better in retrospect and by comparison to his successor, but I never really liked him all that much.  His "triangulation" seemed to look more to personal than national success.  And I see much the same in his wife.

On the other hand, Barack Obama exudes an aura of inclusion, that he's for all of us, not simply looking to his own advancement.  But he's still a politician, however, and winning will always be his goal.

That said, I will be supporting whichever of them earns the Democratic Party's nomination—as long as they both keep in mind that it matters more that a Democrat get elected in November than which Democrat.  As long as they don't participate in what Frank Rich today (echoing Roger  Wilkins) says may be "a flashback to the Democratic civil war of 1968."

We saw enough of that nonsense in South Carolina.

In a recent post, frontpager DarkSyde asked, "Why Is the Right So Angry?"  He lists all of the victories of the right over the last six-plus years and wonders just why so many of that persuasion are still furious at America and American culture.  Following DarkSyde’s piece are almost six hundred comments.

Among those comments (I didn’t read them all) may be some that got it right, but most talked about things like ‘declining world view,’ ‘fear of coming defeat,’ ‘fragile egos,’ ‘lack of principle,’ ‘loss of illusion,’ and the like.  These, I suspect, are more along the lines of wish fulfillment and self-congratulations than they are serious comment on what’s going on rightward.

[With apologies to Lewis Carroll]

Son Bush was shining on the sea,
Shining with all his might:
He did his very best to make
Occupation smooth and bright--
And this was odd, because it was
The middle of the fight.

Al Gore was shining sulkily,
Because he thought the son
Had got no business to be there
After Florida was "won"--
"It's very rude of him," he said,
"To come and spoil the fun!"

For the month of October, Shakespeare’s Sister, my gift store and gallery at 270 Court St. in Brooklyn (take the F to Bergen St.), is exhibiting the quilts of Ruth Marchese.  We invite anyone who happens to be in New York during this time to come and take a look.  There are even easy chairs in the gallery, where you can sit and contemplate what led Marchese to these remarkable creations.  And there’s no charge for looking... or for sitting.

What’s remarkable about these quilts is that they were inspired by global political events of the last six years, starting with the one called, simply, "Sept. 11."  With disaster only apparent if you look closely, it evokes Andrew Wyeth’s "End of Olson’s," another seemingly static work with explosion at the edge and a sense of deep, deep loss.  Other titles include "Walking in Darkness," "Glimmer of Hope," "Despair," "In the Eye of the Storm-New Orleans," Lebanon 2006," Waiting...," and "Running for Shelter."  They tell the dark story of these last years yet are stunning, also, for their beauty.

In the premier issue of Bookmark, a new publication for supporters of the New York Public Library, is the excerpted transcript of a panel discussion held May 1 at the library.  The participants were Dexter Filkins, a former New York Times correspondent in Baghdad, George Packer of The New Yorker, Dana Priest of The Washington Post along with moderator Alex Jones, a former journalist who now teaches at Harvard.  The panel was called "Covering Foreign Conflict and the Military over 20 Tumultuous Years."

It is disturbing reading.

I posted the following on 9/11/01 on my first, feeble blog.  It was to be one of the last posts, for I hadn't the heart, I soon found, to continue.  I post it here to commemorate the dead, including Jackie Sayegh Duggan who, with her brother, had owned a restaurant a few stores from my store and cafe.  To make ends meet, she had taken a job with Windows on the World.  On 9/11, she had just been married.

As I walked from teaching in Brooklyn Heights this morning, someone said that one of the World Trade Center towers had collapsed. We had heard the sirens in class; a couple of students discovered through their cell phones that planes had hit the towers, so I knew that a tragedy was in progress. But I refused to believe that either of the towers could collapse.

I walked to the promenade over the East River where it joins the Hudson, where one normally sees a magnificent panorama centering on lower Manhattan. I wanted to prove to myself that both towers still stood.

Others were doing the same. All silent. No one walking fast.

A couple of years ago, an NPR commentator named Jay Keyser said that Wallace Stevens’ "The Snow Man" is "the best short poem in the English language."  While I think it unproductive to call any work of art "best" in any category, I won’t say that Keyser is wrong.

These days, for me, "The Snow Man" is an extremely sad poem, for it brings to me the idea of a particular person so frozen that he can no longer (if he ever could) "think of any misery in the sound of the wind," who contemplates the world only in terms of an imagination that is so meager that it contains nothing and sees nothing—and not just nothing, but "Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is."  The seasons the rest of us know are completely separate from his paltry perception and different from his lacking imagination.

Certain things should be absolutely clear.  One is that US military might is sufficient to defeat any force arrayed against it in Iraq.  That’s an easy one.  Our military is much better equipped, trained, and led.  In battle, it is going to win.

So what?

Winning battles is not going to lead to success in Iraq.  We’ve been winning battles for more than four years—and are no nearer victory now than when we invaded.

Yet our Democratic Party leadership seem panicked that the "surge" is working.  Somehow, they don’t get it: the "surge" is not working, not even if the violence seems to be subsiding.  The US is simply stomping down, forcing the insurgency into temporary quiescence—and only here and there.  That is not success, and provides nothing for the future.  There is no progress at all in Iraq in any "surge success," nor could there be.

For me, the current Iraq fiasco is tied to an incident in northern Togo on August 2, 1990, though through a connection of media and coincidence, nothing more.  The two events become a single, sustained note, a "punctum"—as Roland Barthes might have called it—as opposed to the "studium" of our general, fleeting perception.  What happened to me became one of my bookends for the first Iraq war and has colored my perceptions of the second.  It is also one of those stories one tells and retells, constantly reevaluating it in light of unfolding events.  

For a long time, I saw the connection as simply emotional, arising from a chance confluence.  

Saddam invaded Kuwait; an elephant charged me.  

History and the personal: we each use the latter to enhance our memories and understanding of the former.  I did not see any broader connections—though I do now, as the continuation of the mad "adventure" in Iraq makes me angrier and angrier.

Dust and smoke.  From desert and fire.

Everyone south of the Sahara in Africa knows them intimately.  From Abidjan to Mombassa, Africans understands what these twinned hazes mean to their lives, their futures.  Dual signs of the destruction of the savanna—born of the over-use of farmland and of wood burned as fuel—they’ve become omens, precursors of the desert sands certain to follow.  Signals, they are, that life in the villages will only get harder as time passes.  Global warming?  Africans have been living with it for quite a long time.

Something made me think of Richard Farina the other day.  Something often does.

He was dead (1966) before I had read Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me or was familiar with his music directly (I knew it through the recordings of others), so there has always been a bit of nostalgia for lost possibility in my negotiation of his art.

I just got back from seeing No End in Sight, the new movie about the occupation in Iraq.

Though it won't tell anything new to any of us who have been appalled by this war and occupation since before it began, this may be an important film--even something of a watershed.

The answer (for all I love Delaware Dem) is "No."

When we start thinking in terms of "us against them," we are taking the first steps down the path to our own totalitarianism.  We are beginning to reject the very basis of liberalism, that a variety of viewpoints is the basis of effective democracy.  We are beginning to become like "them."

If Michael Moore did not exist, we would have to invent him.

Not that he's perfect.  He makes mistakes, cuts corners... does all the things that humans do.

But he cares, and admits that he cares.  He never pretends to that myth "objectivity" or places himself "above the fray."  He's the perfect human antidote to the lumbering CNN dinosaur that looks down in amusement at the 'little people'--never realizing that its time is done and completely oblivious to the need for change.

Which, of course, brings me to his letter today to CNN about this weeks' Gupta brouhaha.

Yesterday, The New York Times published a piece by ‘guest columnist’ Roger Cohen of The International Herald Tribune entitled "The Long View in Iraq."  If I were inclined towards paranoia, I might believe it to be the result of a secret decision to convince Americans that we are going to be in Iraq for decades, no matter what.  Certainly, it is the conceit du jour.