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Today's
Stories
November 13, 2003
Jack McCarthy
Veterans
for Peace Booted from Vet Day Parade
Adam Keller
Report
on the Ben Artzi Verdict
Richard Forno
"Threat Matrix:" Homeland Security Goes Prime-Time
Vijay Prashad
Confronting
the Evangelical Imperialists
November 12, 2003
Elaine Cassel
The
Supremes and Guantanamo: a Glimmer of Hope?
Col. Dan Smith
Unsolicited
Advice: a Reply to Rumsfeld's Memo
Jonathan Cook
Facility
1391: Israel's Guantanamo
Robert Fisk
Osama Phones Home
Michael Schwartz
The Wal-Mart Distraction and the California Grocery Workers Strike
John Chuckman
Forty
Years of Lies
Doug Giebel
Jessica Lynch and Saving American Decency
Uri Avnery
Wanted: a Sharon of the Left
Website of the Day
Musicians Against Sweatshops
November 11, 2003
David Lindorff
Bush's
War on Veterans
Stan Goff
Honoring
Real Vets; Remembering Real War
Earnest McBride
"His
Feet Were on the Ground": Was Steve McNair's Cousin Lynched?
Derek Seidman
Imperialism
Begins at Home: an Interview with Stan Goff
David Krieger
Mr. President, You Can Run But You Can't Hide
Sen. Ernest Hollings
My Cambodian Moment on the Iraq War
Dan Bacher
The Invisible Man Resigns
Kam Zarrabi
Hypocrisy at the Top
John Eskow
Born on Veteran's Day
Website of the Day
Left Hook
November 10, 2003
Robert Fisk
Looney
Toons in Rummyworld: How We Denied Democracy to the Middle East
Elaine Cassel
Papa's Gotta Brand New Bag (of Tricks): Patriot Act Spawns Similar
Laws Across Globe
James Brooks
Israel's New War Machine Opens the Abyss
Thom Rutledge
The Lost Gospel of Rummy
Stew Albert
Call Him Al
Gary Leupp
"They
Were All Non-Starters": On the Thwarted Peace Proposals
November 8/9, 2003
Kathleen and Bill Christison
Zionism
as Racist Ideology
Gabriel Kolko
Intelligence
for What?
The Vietnam War Reconsidered
Saul Landau
The
Bride Wore Black: the Policy Nuptials of Boykin and Wolfowitz
Brian Cloughley
Speeding Up to Nowhere: Training the New Iraqi Police
William Blum
The Anti-Empire Report:
A Permanent Occupation?
David Lindorff
A New Kind of Dancing in Iraq: from Occupation to Guerrilla War
Elaine Cassel
Bush's War on Non-Citizens
Tim Wise
Persecuting the Truth: Claims of Christian Victimization Ring
Hollow
Toni Solo
Robert Zoellick and "Wise Blood"
Michael Donnelly
Will the Real Ron Wyden Please Stand Up?
Mark Hand
Building a Vanguard Movement: a Review of Stan Goff's Full Spectrum
Disorder
Norman Solomon
War, Social Justice, Media and Democracy
Norman Madarasz
American Neocons and the Jerusalem Post
Adam Engel
Raising JonBenet
Dave Zirin
An Interview with George Foreman
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Albert and Greeder
November 7, 2003
Nelson Valdes
Latin
America in Crisis and Cuba's Self-Reliance
David Vest
Surely
It Can't Get Any Worse?
Chris Floyd
An Inspector
Calls: The Kay Report as War Crime Indictment
William S. Lind
Indicators:
Where This War is Headed
Elaine Cassel
FBI to Cryptome: "We Are Watching You"
Maria Tomchick
When Public Transit Gets Privatized
Uri Avnery
Israeli
Roulette
November 6, 2003
Ron Jacobs
With
a Peace Like This...
Conn Hallinan
Rumsfeld's
New Model Army
Maher Arar
This
is What They Did to Me
Elaine Cassel
A Bad
Day for Civil Liberties: the Case of Maher Arar
Neve Gordon
Captives
Behind Sharon's Wall
Ralph Nader and Lee Drutman
An Open Letter to John Ashcroft on Corporate Crime
November 5, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Just
a Match Away:
Fire Sale in So Cal
Dave Lindorff
A Draft in the Forecast?
Robert Jensen
How I Ended Up on the Professor Watch List
Joanne Mariner
Prisons as Mental Institutions
Patrick Cockburn
Saddam Not Organizing Iraqi Resistance
Simon Helweg-Larsen
Centaurs
from Dusk to Dawn: Remilitarization and the Guatemalan Elections
Josh Frank
Silencing "the Reagans"
Website of the Day
Everything You Wanted to Know About Howard Dean But Were Afraid
to Ask
November 4, 2003
Robert Fisk
Smearing
Said and Ashrawi: When Did "Arab" Become a Dirty Word?
Ray McGovern
Chinook Down: It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Vietnam
Woodruff / Wypijewski
Debating
the New Unity Partnership
Karyn Strickler
When
Opponents of Abortion Dream
Norman Solomon
The
Steady Theft of Our Time
Tariq Ali
Resistance
and Independence in Iraq
November 3, 2003
Patrick Cockburn
The
Bloodiest Day Yet for Americans in Iraq: Report from Fallujah
Dave Lindorff
Philly's
Buggy Election
Janine Pommy Vega
Sarajevo Hands 2003
Bernie Dwyer
An
Interview with Chomsky on Cuba
November 1 / 2,
2003
Saul Landau
Cui
Bono? The Cuba Embargo as Rip Off
Noam Chomsky
Empire of the Men of Best Quality
Bruce Jackson
Midge Decter and the Taxi Driver
Brian Cloughley
"Mow the Whole Place Down"
John Stanton
The Pentagon's Love Affair with Land Mines
William S. Lind
Bush's Bizarre Korean Gambit
Ben Tripp
The Brown Paste on Bush's Shoes
Christopher Brauchli
Divine Hatred
Dave Zirin
An Interview with John Carlos
Agustin Velloso
Oil in Equatorial Guinea: Where Trickle Down Doesn't Trickle
Josh Frank
Howard Dean and Affirmative Action
Ron Jacobs
Standing Up to El Diablo: the 1981 Blockade of Diablo Canyon
Strickler / Hermach
Liar, Liar Forests on Fire
David Vest
Jimmy T99 Nelson, a Blues Legend and the Songs that Made Him
Famous
Adam Engel
America, What It Is
Dr. Susan Block
Christy Canyon, a Life in Porn
Poets' Basement
Greeder, Albert & Guthrie
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher David Vest: Winner of 2 Muddy Awards for Best
Blues Pianist in the Pacific Northwest!
October 31, 2003
Lee Ballinger
Making
a Dollar Out of 15 Cents: The Sweatshops of Sean "P. Diddy"
Combs
Wayne Madsen
The
GOP's Racist Trifecta
Michael Donnelly
Settling for Peanuts: Democrats Trick the Greens, Treat Big Timber
Patrick Cockburn
Baghdad
Diary: Iraqis are Naming Their New Babies "Saddam"
Elaine Cassel
Coming
to a State Near You: The Matrix (Interstate Snoops, Not the Movie)
Linda Heard
An Arab View of Masonry
October 30, 2003
Forrest Hylton
Popular
Insurrection and National Revolution in Bolivia
Eric Ruder
"We Have to Speak Out!": Marching with the Military
Families
Dave Lindorff
Big
Lies and Little Lies: The Meaning of "Mission Accomplished"
Philip Adams
"Everyone is Running Scared": Denigrating Critics of
Israel
Sean Donahue
Howard Dean: a Hawk in a Dove's Cloak
Robert Jensen
Big Houses & Global Justice: A Moral Level of Consumption?
Alexander Cockburn
Paul
Krugman: Part of the Problem
October 29, 2003
Chris Floyd
Thieves
Like Us: Cheney's Backdoor to Halliburton
Robert Fisk
Iraq Guerrillas Adopt a New Strategy: Copy the Americans
Rick Giombetti
Let
Them Eat Prozac: an Interview with David Healy
The Intelligence Squad
Dark
Forces? The Military Steps Up Recruiting of Blacks
Elaine Cassel
Prosecutors
as Therapists, Phantoms as Terrorists
Marie Trigona
Argentina's War on the Unemployed Workers Movement
Gary Leupp
Every
Day, One KIA: On the Iraq War Casualty Figures
October 28, 2003
Rich Gibson
The
Politics of an Inferno: Notes on Hellfire 2003
Uri Avnery
Incident
in Gaza
Diane Christian
Wishing
Death
Robert Fisk
Eyewitness
in Iraq: "They're Getting Better"
Toni Solo
Authentic Americans and John Negroponte
Jason Leopold
Halliburton in Iran
Shrireen Parsons
When T-shirts are Verboten
Chris White
9/11
in Context: a Marine Veteran's Perspective
October 27,
2003
William A. Cook
Ministers
of War: Criminals of the Cloth
David Lindorff
The
Times, Dupes and the Pulitzer
Elaine Cassel
Antonin
Scalia's Contemptus Mundi
Robert Fisk
Occupational Schizophrenia
John Chuckman
Banging Your Head into Walls
Seth Sandronsky
Snoops R Us
Bill Kauffman
George
Bush, the Anti-Family President
October 25 / 26,
2003
Robert Pollin
The
US Economy: Another Path is Possible
Jeffrey St. Clair
Outsourcing US Guided Missile Technology to China
James Bunn
Plotting
Pre-emptive Strikes
Saul Landau
Should Limbaugh Do Time?
Ted Honderich
Palestinian Terrorism, Morality & Germany
Thomas Nagy
Saving the Army of Peace
Christopher Brauchli
Between Bush and a Lobotomy: Killing Endangered Species for Profit
Laura Carlsen
Latin America's Archives of Terror
Diane Christian
Evil Acts & Evil Actors
Muqtedar Khan
Lessons from the Imperial Adventure in Iraq
John Feffer
The Tug of War on the Korea Peninsula
Brian Cloughley
Iraq War Memories are Made of Lies
Benjamin Dangl
and Kathryn Ledebur
An Uneasy Peace in Bolivia
Karyn Strickler
Down
with Big Brother's Spying Eyes
Noah Leavitt
Legal Globalization
John Stanton
Hitler's Ghost Haunts America
Mickey Z.
War of the Words
Adam Engel
Tractatus Ridiculous
Poets' Basement
Curtis, Subiet and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Project Last Stand
October 24, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
Ashcroft's
War on Greenpeace
Lenni Brenner
The Demographics of American Jews
Jeffrey St. Clair
Rockets,
Napalm, Torpedoes and Lies: the Attack on the USS Liberty Revisited
Sarah Weir
Cover-up of the Israeli Attack on the US Liberty
David Krieger
WMD Found in DC: Bush is the Button
Mohammed Hakki
It's Palestine, Stupid!: Americans and the Middle East
Harry Browne
Northern
Ireland: the Agreement that Wasn't
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
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November
14 / 23, 2003
Rebel Angel: a Memoir
Owed to the Confederate Dead
By DAVID VEST
Having destroyed all drafts of my only novel,
I took a teaching position in Farmville, Virginia, renting a
second story apartment across the street from the campus and
with a view of the ubiquitous statue of the Confederate soldier.
I could see him from the window at my writing desk, his rifle
held at his waist, his angry gaze looking southward as though
looking for the people who sent him on his doomed errand.
If you look at a map of Virginia you
will notice that Farmville is in the center of the state and
that everything interesting is toward the perimeter. It is as
far as you can get from the parts of Virginia that anyone would
want to see, with the exception of Appomattox Courthouse. Originally
known as Bizarre, Farmville had changed its name a few decades
before my arrival, opting vainly for the bland. Prince Edward
County had been notorious in its resistance to Integration. Alabama
had blustered, George Wallace had stood in the school house door,
but Farmville had responded to the 1954 Supreme Court decision
by simply shutting its public schools altogether. At the time
of my arrival, white pupils attended a racist "academy"
and black pupils either attended an impoverished county school
or went out of state. On a per capita basis, Farmville was the
suicide capitol of the nation.
I soon moved out of the apartment into
a rented house that had belonged to a prominent dentist now among
the voluntarily deceased. The basement was full of old dental
equipment.
I took naps in "the chair" and listed "dentistry"
as my hobby on the college personnel form.
Longwood College, formerly the State
Female Normal School and Teachers College, still had an all-female
student body in those days. During orientation new male faculty
were sent to a little meeting with the president, who told us
that the students were fair game, hormonally speaking, as long
as we didn't create any problems he would have to deal with.
"Discretion is the thing," he told us.
On my first day of teaching I eagerly
asked my students to write a few paragraphs on why they chose
Longwood. At the end of the period I gathered the folded papers,
put a rubber band around them, dropped them into my briefcase
and walked eagerly to my office. Opening the stack, I looked
at the first paper ever submitted to me by a student. The first
sentence of it I have never forgotten: "To future one's
life in today's world, one must higher educate yourself."
I closed the paper, put the rubber band
back around the stack, locked my office door behind me and entered
a decade of hard drinking. If you think rock and rollers or bikers
or rugby players are serious boozers, you should attend a few
English Department cocktail parties. If you live through them,
you'll know who the real drinkers are in this country.
I did have some good students at Longwood.
More than one good poet passed through my classes, Dara Weir
and Dan Corrie to name a couple.
I was continually in trouble for raising
the fact that the college employed not a single minority faculty
member or administrator. I was told at first that no qualified
person could be found. Besides, it would not be fair to ask one
of "them" to live in Farmville. Later I was informed
that no qualified person was "affordable." "They"
were now in demand, it seems, and we could not compete in bidding
wars, could we?
In Alabama, bottom-line racists had worn
white robes and hoods. In Virginia, they served in the Senate.
You could take your pick. The Democrats offered Sen. Harry "Massive
Resistance" Byrd, a man who would have made Trent Lott look
like Thurgood Marshall by comparison. On the Republican side
of the aisle was Sen. William Scott, surely one of the stupidest
men ever to hold public office. It was Scott who once stood on
the banks of the Suez and vowed that over his dead body would
the canal ever be returned to Panama.
Such were the glories of the two-party
system. Oh, well, at least it produced a visit to Farmville by
Elizabeth Taylor, campaigning with her temporary husband John
Warner. She of the diamond-flashing eyes succeeded in electing
Warner to Scott's Senate seat before fleeing the Old Dominion
for more fashionable precincts.
Other celebrities wandered in and out
of Farmville, too. I met Vincent Price after watching him do
his one-man show, "An Evening with Oscar Wilde." Ned
Rorem dropped by to hear the college music department attempt
some of his songs. I learned that Vladimir Nabokov had once lectured
at Longwood. Erica Jong came for a reading. She visited the college
bookstore and discovered that, apart from textbooks, the store
carried little other than copies of Bride magazine. "Did
you notice that you could read several issues of Bride magazine
and never discover that weddings might also involve a man?"
she observed.
For the most part, though, diversion
from drabness was at least 65 miles away, in Charlottesville
to the north or Richmond to the east.
The longer I stayed in Farmville, the
more I felt like a character Dirk Bogarde might have played.
Since I found suicide unappealing (certainly in others but especially
in oneself), I did what most people would have done: I tried
to write my way out of the situation. I had begun writing poetry
at Vanderbilt, winning an Academy of American Poets competition
and publishing a few poems in literary journals. Now I was serious
about it. Over the next few years a good many of my poems saw
daylight in the usual places of that time: Antaeus, Virginia
Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, etc. I was in an anthology of contemporary
poets from Virginia and in 1978 Poets in the South published
a book-length feature complete with critical appraisals.
I began to give readings on the circuit.
At one of these I met Henry Taylor, who became a lifelong friend.
We would sit up all night reciting poems at each other. He would
send me a new poem in Poulter's measure and I would fire one
back the same day. Henry later won the Pulitzer Prize and probably
hasn't had a day's rest since.
For a time I did so much writing in blank
verse that I began to dream in it. Characters in my dreams at
least could speak whole paragraphs of it effortlessly; why is
it so hard to write?
I was also able to bring a few writers
to the college for readings and other events. Andrei Voznesensky
and Robert Penn Warren drew huge crowds. Audiences of 300 people
were not uncommon for poets such as Richard Eberhart and Charles
Simic. The writers were usually pleased, since they may have
read to 7-15 people the night before in Charlottesville. With
support from the administration I was able to establish the John
Dos Passos Prize. Mark Strand served on the first jury with me
and nominated Graham Greene, who accepted.
Longwood was substantially damaged by
fire in 2000 and has lately proclaimed itself a university.
I taught for a couple of semesters at
Randolph-Macon College in Ashland. Three memories stand out from
that period. In one of them, a student stands in my door and
demands to know "just what you have to do to make an A in
my course." I mention coming to class occasionally, handing
in some of the assignments, and so forth. "Oh," he
says. "I just wanted to know." In another, the chairman
of the department charges me with recklessness and irresponsibility
after Gregory Orr and I give a joint reading. He finds our poems
depressing and worries that we will inspire sensitive young people
to kill themselves. I ask him whether he reads much modern poetry.
He prefers fiction, he tells me.
In the third memory, Donald Hall and
I meet for drinks in the lounge at a local motel, where a sign
on the stage proclaims that Tiny Tim will perform later.
In 1978 I went down to Tampa to read
my poems at a literary festival. I was on a panel with Harry
Crews, who was a handful in those days. He behaved less than
ideally under the influence. The next morning, however, I learned
from the newspaper that it was I who had done so: the reporter
had gotten our names mixed up. I wondered whether to complain
or send flowers.
It had been seven years since I last
played music in public. I gave a solo performance at Longwood
and a few others at colleges around the state. At one of them
a student told me, "If you're doing anything but playing
the piano and singing, you're wasting your life." It took
me a while to hear it, though.
The following year I was whisked out
of Virginia and packed off to Eastern Europe as Fulbright Lecturer
at the University of Bucharest. It was to be the most dangerous
year of my life.
THE DEATH OF EDGAR POE
By DAVID VEST
That night as he lay in the
gutter in Baltimore
abandoned by the politicians and the men
of busyness, who had gone home to console
their morbid sense of practicality
that night as he groaned in
the ditch in Baltimore
there was a fine rain falling slowly, then it stopped
and the small drops were suspended in the air
like the jewels of a city he had dreamed.
The light wind came to a halt and remained intact.
The gray light sank deeper into the streets.
That night as he rolled in
the slush it seemed to him
he had never heard the sound of his own voice
and raising himself on one arm he extended the other
to a strolling citizen and told him desperately
"When they dig my grave they will find nothing but promises,
I wish to be buried in my poems"--but the citizen passed.
That night as the cold settled
down over Baltimore
he caught at his own reflection in a storefront
but failed in the final effort to get his attention.
He discovered again that he would never be the same.
Whatever he had seen he refused to salvage.
He surrendered his rage to
the rain
sight without consciousness
He surrendered his thirst to the wind
that empty mirror
He surrendered his fear to the dark
which is crouching in the ruin of silver birch
He surrendered his breath to the dead
who choose to remain in the present
He surrendered his hunger to the stones
which are feeding in silence
The life he gave away
was never his life.
David Vest
writes the Rebel Angel column for CounterPunch. He and his band,
The Willing Victims, just released a scorching new CD, Way
Down Here.
He can be reached at: davidvest@springmail.com
Visit his website at http://www.rebelangel.com
Weekend
Edition Features for Nov. 8 / 9, 2003
Kathleen and Bill Christison
Zionism
as Racist Ideology
Gabriel Kolko
Intelligence
for What?
The Vietnam War Reconsidered
Saul Landau
The
Bride Wore Black: the Policy Nuptials of Boykin and Wolfowitz
Brian Cloughley
Speeding Up to Nowhere: Training the New Iraqi Police
William Blum
The Anti-Empire Report:
A Permanent Occupation?
David Lindorff
A New Kind of Dancing in Iraq: from Occupation to Guerrilla War
Elaine Cassel
Bush's War on Non-Citizens
Tim Wise
Persecuting the Truth: Claims of Christian Victimization Ring
Hollow
Toni Solo
Robert Zoellick and "Wise Blood"
Michael Donnelly
Will the Real Ron Wyden Please Stand Up?
Mark Hand
Building a Vanguard Movement: a Review of Stan Goff's Full Spectrum
Disorder
Norman Solomon
War, Social Justice, Media and Democracy
Norman Madarasz
American Neocons and the Jerusalem Post
Adam Engel
Raising JonBenet
Dave Zirin
An Interview with George Foreman
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Albert and Greeder
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