Many of Dorn’s quasi-logical arguments about sexuality relate a lethal entity--in this case a disease--to broader administered powers of the medical industry and state. By taking the then recent cultural and medical phenomena of AIDS as subject of satire, he is able to reveal a moral and bureaucratic context in need of broader public reflection. Of course, it is risky to satirize a disease that at the time was afflicting specific communities who were identified as outsiders living beyond the realm of mainstream U. S. culture. These satiric poems, however, while courting outrage from a potential audience, aggressively expands reflection on the context of sexual identity within larger corporate and political systems.
For instance, what Dorn referes to as the “AID barons”--a medical industry composed of government, corporate, and health interests--forced an extension of bureaucratic language into individual practices of morality and sexuality, and so he ridiculed it in these poems, however troubling they may be.
His commitment to the rhetorical perspectives of individuals turned against other views that accepted power as the social construction of diverse agencies. One way he brings attention to social agency is to rhetorically flip social codes to broaden perspectives. In one of his most poignant satires, “Something we can all agree on,” Dorn offers the hypothetical comparison of AIDS to HELPS (Heritable Endemic Longrange Poverty Syndrome). The argument points out that people around the world are dying of the complex and numerous results of poverty, and that such socially constructed acronyms can be used as a strategy to keep certain groups of people in poverty. Indeed, an unwavering commitment to agonistic democratic practice is shown here, for Dorn remains consistent in his devotion to broader human problems beyond the view of particular factions. Often identified in the 1980s as a disease of predominantly gay men and intravenous drug users, Dorn ruthlessly used the growing research industry around HIV/AIDS to ridicule the class and ethnic selectivity motivating much of the research and application of new drugs and therapeutic methods. And today, of course, HIV/AIDS ravages African nations whose populations cannot afford treatment for the disease while western societies have watched the crisis diminish over the last two decades within their own borders.
And this footnote....
Dorn was a friend and correspondent with Harvey Bialy, a molecular biologist who edited Nature Biotechnology from 1984-1996. More recently Bialy was resident scholar of the Institute of Biotechnology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He studied epidemiology and genetics of antibiotic resistant enteric pathogens in Nigeria in the 1980s. Through Bialy’s research and work with Peter Deusberg, a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California at Berkeley, Bialy came to promote AIDS denialist theories. Duesberg likewise is notorious for a 1987 article in Cancer Research called “Retroviruses as Carcinogens and Pathogens: Expectations and Reality.” His research on retroviruses led him to challenge scientific consensus that regards HIV as the cause of AIDS. An avid reader of Nature and other scientific journals, Dorn would have been familiar with both men’s work in the 1980s. In a 1990s interview with the Sunday Times (London) Bialy states: “We have taken sex and equated it with death, and into that mixture we have thrown money. What an ugly stew.” See Neville Hodgkinson, “AIDS: Can We Be Positive,” Sunday Times (London) 26 April 1992.
Complicating all of this, however, is the timing of the reception of Dorn's work. I remember talking about this with Eileen Myles once who pointed out that to her and others in NYC in the 80s who lost close friends to AIDS Dorn's satires seemed wacko and totally dislocated from their experiences. This gap in the intimacy of experience with HIV/AIDS and the critique of the gov/med/pharm industry is a big one....
33 comments:
This is a significant post, Dale. Certainly, the conversation is just beginning, in view of the complexity of the record on Dorn—especially, perhaps, for anyone committed to what queerness could mean (or, just as importantly, fail to mean) in contemporary society. But what you say here, at least, pushes the conversation far beyond the familiar set of impasses.
And, for the record, I should add that I disagree with your reading. But the point is that the conversation is timely.
I'm with Boyd - this is fascinating and the conversation is beginning, long overdue. Boyd, what's your own reading, though??
Boyd, Don--thanks for your comments. If anyone's interested, I have a much longer draft of an essay that looks at Abhorrences and Hello, La Jolla. It mostly addresses the public nature of Dorn's satire. The small portion selected here fits into a much larger argument. Anyway, I'm not interested in defending Dorn. I want instead to look at the situation of his work and see if it tells us anything about the world he was responding to and, if so, how his writing accomplishes this.
I've joined the "discussion" of the original article so won't repeat here what I say there, but instead wanted to extend Dale's remarks analogically, as it were.
I just read a review of a book called The Vertigo Years: Europe, 1900-1914 by Philipp Blom in the New York Review of Books (April 30). In it, the reviewer, Adam Kirsch, says that this book differs from the former standard book on the topic, Barbara Tuchman's The Proud Tower, because in it, "politics matters much less than culture; or, rather, he writes out of the assumption that everything commences as culture and finishes as politics. In this, he offers what seems like a characteristically twenty-first century, European perspective. . . when fundamental debates over how to organize societies and economies seem less important than questions of identity and styles of living."
Kirsch goes on to explain how this difference worked itself out in practice; while both books mention a character named Prince "Phili" Eulenburg, Tuchman relates his fall in one long paragraph, while the newer book devotes seven pages to it, making clear that it can be attributed to "the vengeful homophobia of his enemies."
Now, Dorn was a fierce opponent of all known species of "identity politics," and had no tolerance whatsoever for any special claims by any special group -- he alarmed one poet some years ago by referring to the "jack-booted purveyors of multiculturalism." But in this, as with many of his jibes, I think one has to realize both his characteristic iconoclasm and the purpose of his satire: to sharpen one's attention to the real "villains," which he identified as systems of bureaucratic authority throughout human history, whether they were Alexander Hamilton's centralized government or the Catholic Church. As Anselm Hollo said in Tom Clark's biography, "Almost any take endorsed by the U.S. media, and perhaps especially by the 'liberal' wing of same, was instantly suspect, and Ed's m.o. was to assume the diametrically opposed position."
In other words, "Dorn is not a poet of causes. In fact, he is suspicious of anyone who favors anything." (Donald Wesling). He also scorned the Romantics, preferring the 18th century and the enlightenment. But, you know, people's feelings get hurt. I imagine the people Pope and Swift were writing about didn't like it either, but today, we don't even know their names.
Joe, thanks for this. Somewhere in the recent book of interviews, Ed Dorn Live, he says: "I'm just against everything." Elsewhere, I recall, Dorn located the point of down hillness with the advent of agriculture. Extending this view in the philosophical tradition would be E. M. Cioran's in The Trouble with Being Born. Birth, for Cioran, is the ultimate travesty. From there it only gets worse.
Jesus wept.
I'm in favor of opposing identity politics & multiculturalism as much as the next guy, but I missed the part where that entailed making fun of people dying miserably from a horrendous disease.
Guess I'm just a stick in the mud!
Look, for what it is worth, I think that’s the point: a reading of Dorn’s late work can’t get started unless it recognizes the centrality of Dorn’s contemptible actions. It is not about “Dorn had has reasons for doing what he did, so it was OK” nor is it about “Let’s blame Dorn and move on.” The point is that questions about AIDS, disease and queerness need to become more, not less, central for interpretations of Dorn in the ’80s and ’90s. And that has absolutely nothing to do either with “identity politics” or with exculpating Dorn. Joe seems to have a stake in defending Dorn from what he terms “hurt” feelings, and I have no interest whatsoever in participating in that debate except to say it shouldn’t be a debate.
Finally, let me add that it is not clear to me exactly what the appeal to the Enlightenment and eighteenth-century satire is supposed to demonstrate. If we’re going to center our attention on that as a means of diagnosing what is flawed about contemporary liberal discourse, then by no means can we overlook arguments between, say, Adorno and Habermas, or Habermas and Foucault on this. There is a flourishing literature on whether the rise (and disappearance) of what Habermas calls the “bourgeois public sphere” can explain what is missing in or wrong with the present ethos of publicity or, conversely, whether it merely confirms that ethos. Off the top of my head, the collection of essays in Habermas and the Public Sphere, as well as Michael Warner’s Letters of the Republic, Publics and Counterpublics and almost anything by Jodi Dean might be place to start on recent work. But I don’t see how any of that immediately clarifies things in the conversation at hand.
Boyd, thanks for this. You mention some good leads toward making plausible arguments about Dorn's late work in its context as public documentation. I appreciate your engagement and it helps me think more critically about the issues at hand. I think there's an interesting social-historical background that can help us think about sexuality, identity, social organization, publicity, and the public sphere, among other things, in Dorn's work.
More soon.... D
Do you even have the article in question, Michael (or Boyd)? I probably do, but it's stuck in a box somewhere in the garage and I don't have the time or inclination to search for it. It's certainly an unfortunate headline; don't know who wrote it. Tom, though, wrote the article, so it was he who gave out the "awards." Steve Abbott, who got one of them, later died of AIDS -- another very unfortunate event, as he was a sweet guy. Other people, not all of them homosexual, got other awards. And Ed published the article. So where does that leave us?
It leaves me upset that smart people can apparently make a leap from all that and accuse Ed of virulent homophobia or, as Boyd does above, "contemptible actions." Which ones? I'm not falling over myself trying to prove anything, but one "cause" I'll always stand up for, Michael, is to defend the unjustified slander of a friend. Even if it were true (and it isn't), it serves the purpose of character assassination, so that people will be less inclined to read the work. (I also disagree completely with your appraisal of that late work and its purpose, and recommend you read Keith Tuma's essay in Chicago Review, 49:3/4 & 50:1, Summer 2004, for another take on it.)
Boyd, I don't know the work you cite in your second paragraph, but I have spent a fair amount of time lately thinking and writing about the Enlightenment and its degeneration into Romanticism. Hardt and Negri's Empire was a book I admired; as I recall, they do a good job of explaining why it matters. It's a dense argument, but here's one quote: "When we begin to consider the ideologies of corporate capital and the world market, it certainly appears that the postmodernist and post-colonialist theorists who advocate a politics of difference, fluidity, and hybridity in order to challenge the binaries and essentialism of modern sovereignty have been outflanked by the strategies of power. Power has evacuated the bastion they are attacking and has circled around to their rear to join them in the assault in the name of difference" (138).
For Dorn, similarly, the enemies were international corporate capitalism, the exploitation of the third and fourth worlds it made possible, and the stupidity that tolerated it: he couldn't have cared less about an individual's sexual preference. He would have cast his lot, instead, with the people "known variously as progressives, radicals, philosophes, illuministi, and founding fathers . . . to end relentless poverty and widespread ignorance while destroying the mindless and oppressive power of parasitic monarchs and idle aristocrats" (from a biography of Tom Paine by Craig Nelson). If, of course, he cast his lot with anyone. Which he didn't.
I'll be sure to re-read the essay that appeared in the journal that I was contributing editor of, Joe (not at the time of the Dorn issue, but very soon thereafter).
Boyd has said all that needs to be said on this dead horse of an issue. "Slander" can occur only against the living, & if you don't find it "contemptible" to publish, as I get tired of pointing out, vicious mockeries of people who are dying, then you're not someone I want to know.
As for "character assassination," may I laugh my ass off? You do realize we're talking about someone for whom character assassination was a fine art?
Enough of all this: I can't keep on saying, as Boyd has also said, that it is not about blaming or exculplating Dorn but about recognizing his actions for what they are. If you cannot see that his personal feelings about sexuality or capitalism are absolutely beside the point, then we can't have a conversation, because you're rejecting premises that no one has proffered of positions that no one holds. I don't care whether Dorn wrote love letters to gay people or bombed Exxon, I'm talking about what he published. And yes, I've read the thing. It's not something you want to waste your time explaining away.
One thing I've noticed about discussions like this one, wherever they occur, is that people who want to defend indefensible things declare the discussion over. Or they say they're tried of repeating themselves. Or they call the issue under discussion a "dead horse." Or they insult the person who advances the arguments they disagree with. So congratulations, Michael -- you've just gone four for four.
Let's agree on one thing -- as far as this discussion goes, we're just a mass of ones and zeros. I don't know you, and you don't know me. Of course, I'm crushed that you might not want to know me, but I'll recover.
My problem is that my points aren't being understood. I'll try to say it again, this time in caps: IT'S NOT PERSONAL. Character assassination is personal. Slander is personal. Satire, although it often involves vicious mockeries of people, is not personal. This is why I think it's laughable for you to say, in your last paragraph, that Dorn's "personal feelings" are not the point. That's exactly what I've been trying to say! I take Dale's point in his last paragraph of this post -- that people who had lost close friends to AIDS thought Dorn's satires (even though they weren't Dorn's satires) "wacko, and totally dislocated from their experiences." But satire, by its nature, is SUPPOSED to be dislocated from anyone's personal experience.
This is what Dorn has to say about the personal: "In the meantime, how I take any given man will be my own affair, always subject to more critical factors, how he carries his body, the cast of his eyes, the tone and cadence of his voice" ("A Cup of Coffee," 1963). In other words, he was interested in treating people as people, not as representatives of some larger group.
So when Boyd said, above, "The point is that questions about AIDS, disease and queerness need to become more, not less, central for interpretations of Dorn in the ’80s and ’90s." . . . I just disagree. I tried to say why. Questions about AIDS, disease and queerness won't advance any discussion about Dorn's work of the 80s and 90s. On the other hand, questions about the medical and pharmacological industries, or cancer drugs, just might.
I'll take your advice that it's not worth digging out the article in question . . . but can you or can you not agree that the reputation of a writer who published work over a period of thirty years should not depend entirely on one article in one magazine that he didn't write, but merely published? You mentioned on that other site your personal observation of how "nasty" a person he could be; did he insult YOU, Michael? Is that what this is all about?
And when you do re-read the essay in the journal that you weren't yet the contributing editor for, take a look at my review of Ammiel Alcalay's book too. It extends the discussion.
Please tell me that entire comment didn't just disappear.
Shit. Dale's blog just ate a comment I probably spent 20 minutes on.
Anyway. Much more briefly.
Dorn wrote a poem satirizing a cruel disease (what a hoot!), but that's OK because "satire, by its nature, is SUPPOSED to be dislocated from anyone's personal experience."
Of course this isn't true. Pope's satires, for instance, are vehemently connected to personal experience, his own & others. Eskimo satiric songs are direct attempts to shame individuals & enemies. Archilocus's satires are intensely, bitterly personal. So this won't fly.
But it's irrelevant, because the point you insist so loudly upon - it isn't personal! - is one I don't dispute (I don't think anyone else did either). It is precisely the impersonal, cavalier disregard for the suffering of real individuals that I find so nauseating. I rather think it worth spending more time thinking about what offended Myles & her friends, who witnessed the devastation of this disease firsthand.
& no, I never met the man, just saw enough of his antics to know I didn't care to. But why are you getting so personal? Are you so sure that I'm so shallow that I'd sully the memory of anyone who insulted me?
I have about two hundred of the postcards CR put in its Dorn issue. They're posted around my apartment, testament to my admiration for Slinger, an admiration that is not all or nothing. I don't have to defend every single quality of the writers I love, & I rather insist upon being clear-eyed about their work.
Um, to clarify, only a few of them are posted about my apartment, not all of them. Most of them are in a drawer.
“I rather think it worth spending more time thinking about what offended Myles & her friends, who witnessed the devastation of this disease firsthand.”
Right. That is partly what I meant when I said a reading of Dorn’s late work can’t get started unless it recognizes the centrality of Dorn’s contemptible actions.
And one last thing, which I mean respectfully: the one who seems most confused about what is personal and what is not is you, Joe. I have absolutely no interest in preserving Dorn from “character assassination” if that means denying the cruelty of what he did. This isn’t about dismissal or so-called slander. I have consistently said that Dorn’s late work needs to be read and interpreted.
And your distinction between questions about “AIDS, disease and queerness” and questions about “the medical and pharmacological industries, or cancer drugs” would normally seem to me as merely the difference between two interpretive strategies for approaching Dorn’s work in the ’80s and ’90s. As I see it after our exchange so far, however, you insist on that distinction because you’re most invested in providing a set of contexts in which Dorn can only appear exculpated and in which the point Michael makes above can only appear negligible. If that is indeed the case, all this talk about satire and its nature is just a shell game that deserves its own kind of contempt.
Boyd, Michael -- Dale seems to have cut off the discussion, and of course, it's his blog. But I feel there might be a bit more to say, so if either of you feel so inclined, you can contact me at jsafdie@roadrunner.com.
I'm "invested" in the discussion not solely because I knew Ed, and not solely because I value the late work and want to understand why others might feel differently, but because the explanatory frameworks I've offered to understand the work weren't meant merely to "exculpate," but to illuminate. They're important as well for my own work. In that context, I sincerely want to understand what you're both saying about the tensions between public and private, political and personal. But it's perfectly possible, Boyd, that I'm "confused" -- it's my normal state of mind. It's just that I feel that people who are sincere in the points they're trying to raise should make a good faith effort to understand each other, and most blog discussions wind up with that not happening.
For what it's worth . . .
Joe, I appreciate your words here, and the conversation should go forward. I've just got a lot going on and I don't know how else to say what I've said. But others better prepared than me to speak here are welcome, as always, to do so....
thanks for your thoughtful (and generous) post Dale. you are truly Dorn's scholar, and I just a kid with a pop gun... what you are saying about "agonistic democratic practice" especially interests me. perhaps something you are devoting time to in your dissertation/research? I wld like to read more if you've got any... how does "agonistic democratic practice" line up with Flarf and other recent appropriationist poetries (Flarf just being one of the more extreme, and formational, or appropriationist constellations)? the very mention of the agonistic makes me think of Spicer, his own need for conflict (what's the image he uses in the grail poems: armor being torn off his body?). no need to respond here. but maybe send along work? --Thom
thom (underscore) donovan (at) yahoo (dot) com
I got the sense the sense that more than anything Dorn was writing against groupthink, which is such a big part of poetic and academic circles. Dorn wanted to vouch for the loner and the isolato, and yet to speak from that viewpoint to the community. As he did so he was necessarily abrasive in order to emphasize his errant viewpoint, a deliberately errant viewpoint that he dared to air against the inerrant nature of groupthink, which he would have found on any campus.
I dearly wish we could read his viewpoint on Ward Churchill. It might be as good or better in its own way than the blog called Durham in Wonderland, which satirizes (among other things), the Duke Group of 88 and their lynch mob mentality with regard to the lacrosse players set up by Nifong, and the others (Michael Hardt signed the Duke 88 document and has never distanced himself from that strange document, insofar as I know -- which damages his credibility outside the institution, even if it solidifies it from within the institution).
Against Groupthink there was an article in the WSJ this weekend talking about how important it was to have groups of people who disagree able to disagree without becoming warring communities who will have nothing to do with one another.
I think Dorn's larger point was to reveal how warlike the peace movement was, and also to reveal the intolerance of the supposedly tolerant, and to make the violently peaceful aware of their closed minds in the face of true difference of opinion.
He marshalled many routines in his later years -- calling certain kinds of Protestantism back to bear on a poetics that had fallen into a false sense of security in which a Buddhist-peace-Marxist amalgam was the new norm, and just as ridiculous as any older norm if not more so.
There are so many contradictions in the new norm that it is hard to keep them all straight. Dorn saw a lot of those contradictions, and pointed them out, which irritates those who are/were forming a new faith around the notions of race, gender, class, which in turn is creating debacles such as the one at Duke U. partially sponsored by Michael Hardt's Duke Group of 88.
Dorn's witness is essential as a forerunner to many of our own since he was among the first to stand up, and point out the failures and contradictions in the new norms.
I wish he was still with us.
Thom, thanks for your note here. I'd be happy to share some more with you on the agonistic stuff. You might also check Patricia Roberts-Miller's books "Deliberate Conflict" which is about the relationship between democratic cultures and agonism--why agonistic debate is essential for a rich and smooth-functioning democracy. Shoot me a note. I'll send more your way....
Dale
I think Dorn was also interested in the social construction of agencies that helped specific constituencies at the expense of others, and all the rampant careerism that attended this. There has, for instance, never been much of an outcry regarding Lyme's Disease. It's not a recognized disease within PC circles, although it now affects nearly 1% of the American population. But it garners almost nothing in terms of the CDC funding, whereas sexual diseases now garner nearly half of CDC funding. It's an amazing discrepancy.
Of course, sexual diseases (especially AIDS) are more often fatal, and Lyme's Disease can be treated to some extent. But many who get it are reduced to being awake only a few hours a day, attendant with enormous headaches, and a feeling of having the flu for years on end. Sometimes decades. It's terribly debilitating. Nevertheless, it isn't fatal, and you can't really put it into the Victim category run by the race, gender, class crowd (all kinds of people get Lyme's -- and it isn't associated with any particular behavior aside from walking about in particular areas and not noticing the tick that has attached itself to your leg).
There are many other diseases that are destroying children, in particular, or other groups, but children rarely are able to get advocacy groups to go to bat for them. I think Dorn was amazed at the selfishness of certain constituencies that presented themselves as victims, in order to make a career out of it, and to suck billions of dollars out of the polity that could have gone to treat children instead of treating adult members of militant advocacy groups.
This is probably something he saw initially during the Depression and the many agencies that grew up around it. He came from a small town in which self-reliance would have been the norm.
As he left the Bohemian milieu and entered nito academia he saw the growing power of victims groups lobbying for an increasing take of power, and saw the ridiculous side of it (the rampant careerism of Jesse Jackson who dips his hands in MLK's blood in order to become a symbol is perhaps a metaphor for a whole industry that is not without its careerist side).
Meanwhile, the socialist mechanism requires scapegoats, and anyone who stands up to the mechanism ends up in a kind of Siberian gulag, concocted on Silliman's part for instance by social ostracism, or silencing in some other manner (the shunning of the Amish toward dissenters is probably the ultimate model, since many Amish would have taught this to those involved in the so-called Peace Movements of the 60s).
At any rate, Dorn was brave, but also foolish (he foolishly believed in Democracy), and no doubt more than a little belligerent when he saw groupthink silence the questioning around the Naropa Poetry wars, and he stood with Tom Clark and others as witnesses to the corruption of the left (the left only ever imagines others as corrupt and selfish and careerist, but Dorn saw the rampant careerism of the left, and how they use scapegoating techniques, and shunning, to effect their nefarious aims at garnering more power, and silencing all opposition).
He grew up and lived in a century in which hierarchical lefts garnered such power, and silenced anyone who stood up to them -- not just Stalin's USSR, but all the East Bloc countries, all the Asian countries that adopted the model (N. Korea, most specifically, and Myanmar), but he would have also seen the same mechanism occurring through American academia. There is now almost no opposition to the left within academia. Anyone who might have voiced opposition has disappeared. In all the Ivies' Humanities Departments it's now about 1% or less who openly claim to be Republican. I think that number will slowly move toward 0% at which point some will be merely suspected, and silenced on that merit.
I think Dorn found it riotous.
At least that's how I read him. He was a critic of the abuses of power in any given milieu, and tried to open discourse to the truly powerless, instead of to those who had figured out how to marshall victimization in order to garner and monopolize power.
I'd love to hear what he thought of Obama: who's simply a genius at marshalling victimization on his own behalf, and brilliant at silencing opposition.
I think he saw this as the poet's role. Isn't it? It's something like the role of the jester under the kingdoms -- the ability to speak out. I think most see their role instead as to simply get on the bandwagon of whatever regime happens to be in power. Dorn's got a better understanding of his role, I think, even though many would like to exterminate him, and destroy anyone who defends him.
Kirby, good to hear from you. Lyme could certainly use more research and funding. I know several people who have had to deal with this debilitating disease. The medical industry is also something Dorn looks at in his final poems, Chemo Sabe, a brilliant, unflinching look at his cancer treatment.
Why can't we recognize Kirby's usual tedious red-baiting for what it is? This is a man who openly supported & as far as I know continues to support the American invasion of Iraq. (I'll say this much for him, though: he may not care at all about dead Iraqis (perhaps a million or more), but he is steadfast in his outrage at injustice if it involves some lacrosse players (the charges against whom were, of course, dismissed).) The very idea that mocking AIDS victims at a time when the disease sure as shit wasn't receiving the sorts of funding it is today is a protest a groupthink is itself a manifestation of the most pervasive form of contemporary groupthink: the belief that to oppose the left is ipso facto an act of courageous defiance of conformist thought. This is the dominant ideology, so of course it cannot actually describe the actual state of the nation -- a nation where the socialist mechanisms Kirby so plaintively bemoans are unfortunately nonexistent. What a maroon.
Michael, you and Kirby should get drunk, sleep in a bunk, and wake up, renewed and rejuvinated in some reality that matters, like on the Pequod. Anyway, hugs and kisses to you for the brevity--Kirby does tend to go on....
Dale
Dale, that last remark was pretty much textbook sexual harassment, if you take this as the definition:
"The making of unwanted and offensive sexual advances or of sexually offensive remarks or acts --"
You'll have to watch that kind of thing once you get hired, as I'm sure you will. There are some people who are a lot more sensitive than me, and can get terribly offended. I'm offended enough to not want to come to this site again, which was perhaps your intent. I'd assume the other party was equally offended, but people do differ. I think it's icky to verbally rape people, and not all that funny.
That said, I don't think I am a red-baiter. I just don't want the country to end up in the red. So I stand up against socialism, because it clearly doesn't work, except for the party in power. It's still working very nicely for Mugabe and Kim Jong-Il and the leaders of Myanmar, and I'm sure they see no reason to change it a whit. But it's not working for the great majority.
I can't stand all the sloppy thinking of the status quo that's leaning toward socialism at least in the academy, and which clearly has certain constituencies as part of its power base, and they don't include those with Lyme's disease. I think Dorn's lean, hard lines sometimes at least militated against the status quo, and against the Orwellian consensus of his time(s): in which the truly powerless never get a voice.
Kirby, I think my admittedly sloppy metaphor missed the boat. I was thinking of Ishmael and the Pacific Islander who were cramped with so many others on that sinking ship--the Pequod--in Melville's masterpiece. What I should have more carefully announced was that whichever side of the political left or right we may inhabit, the water's rising. In other words, let's look beyond faction at whatever common ground there may be.
Dale, thanks for the clarification.
I misunderstood your comment.
I agree that people should try to find common ground rather than simply go at one another's throat.
USA Today suggested such common ground about two summers back in an editorial I happened to peruse. They said that both sides are against sexual slavery, and against child molesting, and they mentioned about three other things.
Those were the two that I happen to recall.
I'm going to be brief because of your criticism of my longwindedness.
Best, Kirby
Oh, Kirby, don't be sore: come by any time as long as you like....
Dale
I feel better about this, and thanks for the invitation.
The conversation over at the Poetry blog is a good one. I just added something there, too.
I'm a little more sensitive than usual. My dad passed away last week, and I have been weeping all week. He was in good condition, and died after a sudden heart attack after a golf game.
So it's perhaps a bit me, and my circumstances. I'm very blue.
Fuck, Kirby, I'm very sorry to hear that: my sincere condolences.
Thanks, Michael. I'm reeling, and everything reminds me of him: dandelions, clouds, golf balls. Almost nothing doesn't remind me of him. But I've passed out of the extreme phase of crying into a simple resignation, and a sense that life is awful, and at the same time, I actually am much more aware that I am alive, and breathing, which is kind of an amazing situation. I just don't know why I'm alive, quite.
Your condolences mean something to me: peace.
牙醫,植牙,矯正,矯正牙齒,批發,皮膚科,痘痘,中醫,飛梭雷射,毛孔粗大,醫學美容,痘痘,肉毒桿菌,seo,關鍵字行銷,自然排序,網路行銷,自然排序,關鍵字行銷、seo,部落格行銷,網路行銷,seo,關鍵字行銷,自然排序,部落格行銷,網路行銷,牛舌餅，婚紗，台中婚紗,腳臭,腳臭,腳臭,腳臭,腳臭,腳臭,腳臭,腳臭,高雄婚紗,街舞,小產,雞精,性感,辣妹,雷射溶脂,雙下巴,抽脂,瘦小腹,微晶瓷,電波拉皮,淨膚雷射,清潔公司,居家清潔,牙周病,牙齒矯正,植牙。
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