Last Saturday, the Pulitzer Prize-winner and former US poet laureate died at the age of 80. William Grimes looks back to his early work:
His first poetry collection, “Sleeping With One Eye Open,” published in 1964, set the tone. … Echoes of Wallace Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop could be heard in his compressed, highly specific language and wintry cast of mind, as could painters like Giorgio de Chirico, René Magritte and Edward Hopper, whose moody clarity and mysterious shadows dovetailed with Strand’s own sensibility.
“He is not a religious poet on the face of it, but he fits into a long tradition of meditation and contemplation,” said David Kirby, the author of “Mark Strand and the Poet’s Place in Contemporary Culture” and a professor of English at Florida State University. “He makes you see how trivial the things of this world are, and how expansive the self is, once you unhook it from flat-screen TVs and iPhones.” Reading Mr. Strand, he said, “We learn what a big party solitude is.”
Dan Chiasson asserts that Strand’s poems were “often about the inner life’s methods of processing its social manifestations”:
A 3D-printed 1:1 scale mask of President Barack Obama is on display at the Smithsonian Castle in Washington, DC on December 5, 2014. By Alex Wong/Getty Images.
I am having trouble understanding why you and many of my friends are so exercised about this case. Yes, it is a tragic accident, but, when I watch the video, I don’t see a murder, or even manslaughter. What I see is a big man resisting arrest and a police officer trying to restrain him. It is hard to tell from the video, but it does not appear to me that the officer continued to apply the “chokehold” (a label that may have been inaccurately applied to this case) after Garner said he could not breathe. It looks to me as if that officer grabs him around the neck for only a few seconds, and then, while Garner is still conscious and speaking, tries to restrain him by holding his head in place.
There have been a lot of comments online about whether the officer should have been trying to arrest someone for selling “loosies” on the street. The fault for that doesn’t lie with the officer, but the politicians who wrote the law and the officer’s superiors who insist that the law be enforced in this particular way. Imagine you’re that officer, and your job is to arrest someone twice your size who is resisting arrest. How would you do it? Pepper spray or a taser? We know how controversial that is. Is it fair to send this guy to jail for honestly trying to do his job? I don’t think so.
Another reader quotes me:
But there was no way to interpret [Megyn] Kelly’s coverage as anything but the baldest racism I’ve seen in a while on cable news. Her idea of balance was to interview two, white, bald, bull-necked men to defend the cops, explain away any concerns about police treatment and to minimize the entire thing. Truly, deeply disgusting.
I didn’t see Kelly that day. But I caught her show yesterday and she was very forthright in condemning the police. The only point she made is that she didn’t see proof that the excessive force used against Garner was motivated by racism. I tend to agree with her.
Secretary of State John Kerry personally phoned Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Friday morning to ask her to delay the imminent release of her committee’s report on CIA torture and rendition during the George W. Bush administration, according to administration and Congressional officials. Kerry was not going rogue — his call came after an interagency process that decided the release of the report early next week, as Feinstein had been planning, could complicate relationships with foreign countries at a sensitive time and posed an unacceptable risk to U.S. personnel and facilities abroad.
First, the Obama administration set up a white-wash, in the form of the Durham investigation; then they sat back as the CIA tried to sabotage the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence; then Obama’s chief of staff prevented the report’s publication for months, by insisting on redactions of the report to the point of it being near-unintelligible; and now, with mere days to go, the administration suddenly concludes that a factual accounting of this country’s descent into barbarism poses “an unacceptable risk” to US personnel abroad. Now, after this report has been stymied for two years; now, just days before its scheduled publication; now, because if the administration can prevent its publication this month, they know full well that the Republicans who will control the committee in January will bury the evidence of grotesque and widespread torture by the US for ever.
Of course this complicates relationships with foreign countries; of course it guts any remaining credibility on human rights the US has; of course the staggering brutality endorsed by the highest echelons in American government will inflame American enemies and provoke disbelief across the civilized world. But that’s not the fault of the report; it’s the fault of the torture regime and its architects, many of whom have continued to operate with total impunity under president Obama.
Make no mistake about it: if this report is buried, it will be this president who made that call, and this president who has allowed this vital and minimal piece of accountability to be slow-walked to death and burial, and backed the CIA every inch of the way. But notice also the way in which Kerry’s phone-call effectively cuts the report off at its knees. If it is released, Obama will be able to say he tried to stop it, and to prevent the purported damage to US interests and personnel abroad. He will have found a way to distance himself from the core task of releasing this essential accounting. And he will have ensured that the debate over it will be about whether the report is endangering Americans, just as the Republican talking points have spelled out, rather than a first step to come to terms with the appalling, devastating truth of what the American government has done.
I’m genuinely shocked by this last-minute attempt to bury the truth. Does anyone doubt that one agency in that inter-agency review is the CIA itself? And can anyone seriously believe that if this moment passes, we will ever know what happened? I have confidence in Senator Feinstein’s backbone on this. I wish I had confidence in the president’s.
So let me make one last appeal: Mr President, make the right call. Release the report. Let the facts be in the sunlight. It’s what you promised. And it’s the least this country deserves.
Update from a reader:
I think you may be interested in what Democratic Senator Mark Udall told Esquire in an interview conducted on November 21 and scheduled to run in the January 2015 issue. Esquire decided to release a portion of it today:
… obviously, if it’s not released, then I’m gonna use every power I have, because it’s too important. It’s too historic. And we can’t afford to repeat the mistakes to let this slide.
What about the ban on British blood, due to fears of mad cow disease? I’ve not been able to give blood for over 10 years due to this ridiculous ban.
Another is also barred:
It’s annual Xmas blood drive time, and I’m again reminded that I can’t give, because I lived in the UK for more than three months between 1980 and 1996. (Hard not to have done so, since I was born there.) The reason is Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, better known as mad cow – a scourge which has affected 229 people in all of recorded history. British beef appears to be the vector. The net cast to prevent vCJD transmission is extremely wide, and among things it rules out just about every adult European now living in the U.S. and just about every American servicemember who was stationed in Europe during the last decade of the Cold War. That’s surely millions of people.
It really seems – on vCJD, gay sex, and other risk factors – the Red Cross uses an awfully big hammer to bury some awfully small nails. With all our medical advances, there must be better tools available today than these blanket bans.
Relatedly, Brian Resnick explains how important veterinarians are in preventing disease in humans:
Leaders of Hong Kong’s protest movement are mulling whether to keep going, shift tactics, or retreat after two months of street demonstrations failed to persuade authorities to hold an open election for the city’s leadership in 2017:
“This is really, really bad. It means, of course, that when I dismissed Richard Bradley and Robby Soave’s doubts about the story and called them ‘idiots’ for picking apart Jackie’s account, I was dead fucking wrong, and for that I sincerely apologize. It means that my conviction that Sabrina Rubin Erdely had fact-checked her story in ways that were not visible to the public was also wrong. It’s bad, bad, bad all around,” – Anna Merlan, Jezebel. Award glossary here.
Ask yourself: What would it take, really, for your average white cop not to see your average black male young adult as a potential threat? Because we can pass all the ex-post facto laws we want, and we can even convict the occasional police officer, which does happen from time to time. But that’s not where the problem starts. The problem starts in that instant of electric mistrust when the cop reaches for his gun, or employs a homicidal chokehold. That moment is beyond the reach of legislation, or of any punishment that arrives after the fact.
I have no doubt that Asian Americans suffer from racism and oppression in this country. No doubt at all. However, they don’t suffer from systematic exclusion from American colleges in general or from elite colleges specifically. On the contrary: in both cases, Asian Americans represent a higher percentage of college students than they do the population writ large.
This is, frankly, codswallop. DeBoer ignores the fact that Asian-Americans admitted to selective schools must have higher academic qualifications than Whites! This, not crude proportional representation, is the very essence of discrimination.
Of course, DeBoer’s “out” is that he doesn’t believe in academic qualifications or merit, because he doesn’t believe that “standardized tests and grades can be objective and separated from socioeconomic context.” But the fact is that test scores/grades are the most accurate predictor of academic success that we have. The fact that they correlate with socioeconomic status doesn’t change this fact. Far less does it mean that anyone, least of all Asian-Americans, simply absorb academic ability through some sort of magical force field that permeates their homes.
There is a subtle subtext to being Asian-American in this country that goes something like this:
