We have been reminded again this week of why the saying “May you live in interesting times” was a curse. In Mosul & Basra, citizens have relearned what the citizens of Hue and Hanoi already knew – why it is you don’t ever want the American people, so ignorant of geography & history, to learn the name & location of your city.

 

But in New York, San Francisco, London, Madrid, Chicago & elsewhere, the past few weeks also have seen the growth of a global anti-war movement at a pace that is unprecedented. That this movement has neither thwarted nor yet halted the war is not surprising, but that it has grown so rapidly from such relatively small roots is heartening. People have accomplished in days what literally took years in the 1960s, in terms of communication, outreach & education. In some respects, it is not so much the large actions in San Francisco or New York that drive this home most clearly as it is the simpler candlelight vigils in places like the Chester County courthouse here in Pennsylvania. In the 1960s, it was not until after the shock of the Kent State massacre that the peace movement permeated that far into the American hinterlands. & that took so long that it was no longer, properly speaking, even the sixties, but May 15, 1970, almost six years after the Gulf of Tonkin “incident.” This is an accomplishment & lesson that the organizers of the new peace movement should not take lightly. It is, in fact, something profound upon which to build.

 

Ironically, I suppose, the February-March issue of the Poetry Project Newsletter finally showed up in my mailbox, weeks – indeed it seems like months – after I first heard about its “Blank Generation” feature. I’d actually seen the feature itself – Steve Benson was good enough to send me a photocopy a few weeks back – but I would have missed Nick Piombino’s “Tessera,” a wonderful poem, had the issue itself not finally arrived.

 

The Blank Generation feature starts off from two comments, one made by Lyn Hejinian, the other taken from my Nov. 21^st blog entry, both to the general effect that there had been a depoliticization of the younger generation when contrasted with our own experience of the 1960s. This is followed by comments from twelve writers, ten of whom are significantly younger than either Lyn or I. Obviously, events have substantially rewritten recent history & my initial criticism about depoliticization is one charge I’ll never be able to raise again. That’s the good news.

 

But I’d like to revisit that comment of mine in the slightly broader context in which it was originally made, a part of Carl Boon’s interview, a response to the question of why I was doing this blog. In the passage that follows, the italicized boldface portions are what were given to so-called Blank Generation respondents & published in the issue:

 

But there has also been a depoliticization of younger people generally & that has impacted poets. Some of it has to do with the lack of tangible alternatives to unfettered capital following the collapse of the old Stalinist bloc – although for decades it has been difficult to find any western Marxist who would defend the so-called “actually existing socialist countries,” in large part because state control over capital is not socialism. In the West, there has been no primary shared point of agreement as to the goals of the left since the U.S. exited Vietnam in 1974. That’s a long time for groups to go without much sense of cohesion. The antiglobalism movement is not one thing, but many, & many of them contradictory. Identarian tendencies were a logical extension of the civil rights movements of the 1950s & early ‘60s, but they have inescapably fed into this demobilization by isolating the very people they seek to empower. You see the long-term result in a lot of writing these days that is simultaneously politically correct and depoliticized, a politics really of cynicism and disgust. So this also becomes an incentive not to organize, not to write critically.

 

Those edits – the excision of history, to be exact – are worth noting.

 

Like Lyndon Johnson & Richard Nixon before him, George W. Bush has provided just the sort of “primary shared point of agreement” that has been lacking for so long. To some degree, the response to date has been predictable, although dramatically accelerated. The real issue, it seems to me, will come after the war, when the U.S. and the ever-faithful United Kingdom are bungling the reconstruction of all that they have laid waste. That is the point in this process that the left of my own generation never successfully negotiated. To date, I do not see it being addressed, but it’s too soon & I would dearly love to be wrong in my skepticism on this point.

 

The first Gulf War evaded the issue neatly by its sheer brevity. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al would like to do that again, but at this moment in history it’s too soon to tell. If there is a dramatic affective difference thus far between the experience of the antiwar movement of the 1960s & that of this spring, it is simply that the level of crisis & action that people have gone through this past week lasted in the 1960s & ‘70s for ten straight years. In the context of that degree of exhaustion & frustration, the mistakes of, say, the Weather Underground or the SLA become, if not excusable, at least understandable. Try doing this for a decade – it will change who you are.

 

My comments were a response to Carl Boon’s question of why, exactly, I was doing a weblog. Since I made those remarks four months ago, I’ve been thrilled to see so many other poets pick up the form. It really doesn’t matter what your aesthetic commitments or heritage might be – acting, writing & thinking critically will add a dimension to your work, your poetry as well as anything else you might do, that I believe can only lead to good things. One excellent example of how this can be extended in ways that go far beyond poetry is Brian Kim Stefans – one of a handful of poet-bloggers to be blogging longer than I – and his Circulars project, a weblog that has become a focal point for collecting & disseminating information related to the war. The last I heard, it was getting thousands of hits per day. It should be on everyone’s favorites list.

 

I want to dedicate this blog to an old friend, Wade Hudson. I first met Wade over thirty years ago when we worked together on dozens of projects as part of the California prison movement & he never ceases to amaze me – I once ran into him giving Felix Guattari a tour of the Tenderloin in San Francisco. This week Wade is in Baghdad as part of the Iraq Peace Team. He’s taking an enormous risk for the benefit of the entire world. I recommend that you read his own weblog.