by Michael Liss

“You campaign in poetry; you govern in prose.” —Mario Cuomo, 1985

If Hillary Clinton does not become the next President of the United States, I have a feeling that whatever her regrets might be about emails and Benghazi, she's going to spend most of her remaining years wondering just how fate led her to be married to one political genius, be outmaneuvered by, lose to, and then serve under a second, and get jack-hammered by a third.

Bill, of course, was in his own league. Even now, with his fastball diminished by age, he can still conjure up a Luis Tiant-like variety of curves, knucklers, and other off-speed stuff. But in his prime, Bill had all the tools. He was the Muhammed Ali of politics. He could float, he could dip and dodge and shuffle and rope-a-dope, he could even sting like a bee (or hit like a mule) when needed, and all the while spouting his own special brand of poetry. Bill had another gift as well, less apparent, but there. He was a triple threat—not only a puncher and a poet, but also a worker, a real policy wonk who dove deep into the details. I sometimes wonder if one of the reasons Bill and Hillary stayed together through all of Bill's “adventures” was that they respected in each other the same quality—the willingness to keep at it doggedly until the task was accomplished, the staying power of plodders who won't give up. There was a price, of course, to Hillary's perseverance, as, to this day, she still carries a Clinton Bulls-Eye on her back—for his sins as well as her own.

When, in 2008, she reached for the nomination she was sure was hers, she couldn't possibly have expected that a second generational talent would stand in her way—Barack Obama. Yes, he gave a phenomenal speech at the 2004 Convention, but she clearly did not see him as a serious threat for the top spot. Obama looked Vice-Presidential to her—the guy who could go on her short list and perhaps even be an effective surrogate, but was more likely headed back to the Senate for more seasoning.

Hillary became the first national victim (John McCain and Mitt Romney would follow) of Mr. Obama's secret weapon—he's a lot like Derek Jeter in his prime, underestimated for being overestimated. What many of the President's political opponents have never quite grasped is that the extraordinary arc of his life is of his own design, not some mad spasm of feel-good political correctness. Behind the star status, and the poetry that enrages so many, is a cool organizing intelligence, a deliberateness, a carefully thought-out ground game. Obama doesn't punch much (his historic “first” status certainly constrains him), but he can grind it out with the best of them.

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by Paul North

Wind is low on the list of the awe-inspiring invisible powers. In other eras it ranked among the top forces beyond human control, blowing us this way and that. Today we think of wind as easily harnessed for human uses, as a mild amusement or nuisance, or as a fairy-tale character with puffed up cheeks and pursed lips.

If those lips could talk, we would hear some stories about uncontrollable forces. Although there hasn't been much talk of wind lately, a serious anemological investigation has been being carried out over the last three decades by the anime director Hayao Miyazaki. Wind is always blowing in Miyazaki, or almost always. Nevertheless, it doesn't always do the same thing. The main question driving his investigation into wind is: does wind liberate us or blow us in the direction of our destiny? One thing does stay steady across his films. Whatever we do on and in the wind, we never gain control over it. This doesn't mean that wind is in control of us. Miyazaki's is a control-less view of fate. Wind is the basic element in a fluid cosmic system that strews and carries, resists and supports, lifts upward and slams to earth with abandon. Where fate is King, wind is his advance scout, his highest ambassador and field marshal. It decides nothing: wind simply executes. In contrast, fate is rather abstract, a faint inkling of limits on what you can do or hope. When you face fate, however, you don't face a concept but a force. Wind is the force against which you push when you resist your fate, and when pushed, wind reveals itself to be only air. And you cannot push against air.

You can however ride it. Many things ride the wind in Miyazaki's landscapes. Pollution. War machines. Clouds. And depending how it is ridden, depending whether your calculations include the wind as the most salient factor, your endeavors may come out well or extremely ill.

In classical myths and tales wind is either a brutish force or a changeable force. The Aesop's fable about the North Wind and the Sun tells of wind's brutishness. Sun and North Wind argue: who can strip a traveler's clothes off more quickly? Wind goes first, blowing its all. Yet it doesn't loosen a button. Sun only shines on the traveler long enough and she starts to undress of her own accord. Persuasion wins over force—that's the moral of the tale. Both are forces—soft, effective persuasion and brutish, direct assault. But as a form of force, the sun is more pernicious. It disguises its violence as reason and presents its strength as gentility. Worse than this, whereas it exerts deadly force, the force appears to come from the victim—the traveler believes the decision to undress has been a free decision of her own. In contrast, the cold North Wind, Boreas, comes openly and directly, and human ingenuity can resist it, at least when it comes to clothing. Notice that both these fateful forces aim to render the traveler defenseless and naked, a plaything for nature's sadism.

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by Dave Maier

It’s been a while since my last music post, but I have to admit that the impetus for this one was less that fact, or even the release of Star Trek: Beyond, than the fact that I have not (*cough*) progressed far enough in my reading (even after finishing several more books – hey, it’s complicated!) to continue in a satisfactory manner from where I left off last time. So let’s go traveling instead (previous voyages here, here, here, here, and here).

This time: widgets! Although if you click the direct link to Mixcloud, you can access many other mixes without all the commentary.

Ashra – 77 Slightly Delayed Blackouts
Tangerine Dream – Exit Exit
Richard Pinhas – Iceland Part 2 Iceland
Eberhard Schoener – Meditation part 2 (exc.) Meditation
Jeff Greinke – Falling Away Lost Terrain
Pieter Nooten/Michael Brook – Finally II Sleeps With the Fishes
Terje Rypdal – Waves Waves
David Hykes & the Harmonic Choir – Lines to a Great Lord Harmonic Meetings

Our first mix is another time capsule from the 70s and 80s. The previous ones focused on some fairly obscure and hard-to-get material, but there’s no reason to avoid great music simply because it’s more generally available, right?

Ash Ra Tempel was one of the prime movers of the German space music scene in the early 70s, although their first efforts are more pan-stylistic lysergic freak-out – see this link for a comparison of their first album to Iggy Pop (!) – than the sequencer-driven Berlin-school material we hear later on, as in this track, the agreeably bouncy opener from 1977’s Blackouts, by which time guitarist and indeed sole member Manuel Göttsching had abridged the band name to Ashra. I love this picture, in which none of their faces is visible: drummer Klaus Schulze’s blocked by a cymbal, and Göttsching’s and bassist Hartmut Enke’s by their hair. Klaus must have liked the pic too, as he included it in the booklet of his retrospective album X in 1978, where I first saw it.

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by Humera Afridi

I arrived in Istanbul on the morning of July 3, fast on the heels of death.

Amjad Sabri, an eminent Pakistani qawwal—a Sufi devotional musician in the tradition of world-renowned Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and son of the famous singer Ghulam Fareed Sabri of the Sabri Brothers—had been shot dead in his car in Karachi ten days earlier by the Pakistani Taliban. He’d been praising the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) and his noble family a little too much for the Taliban’s liking. And so they had their way with him. In a nation inured to violence, Sabri’s death, nevertheless, struck at the communal soul of Pakistan. In the aftermath of the tragedy, the messy confusion of Pakistan’s conflicted national and cultural identity, inflected with the scourge of Wahabism—a tyrannical interpretation of orthodox Islam imported from Saudi Arabia—temporarily dissipated.

Thousands of Pakistanis came out on the streets, united in grief, to protest Sabri’s death. Sabri was a child of Pakistan’s own soil. He belonged to a venerable, centuries-old musical dynasty. His spiritual attunement and the muscular faculty of his voice transported people to ecstasy, raising mere mortals above the denseness of an earthly, mired existence, above differences of class and wealth into a celebration of the Divine. Sabri’s music was a glorification. And it belonged to a distinct tradition of South Asian music, a legacy irrefutably inherent in the DNA of Pakistan, twinned to the devotional practice of Islam and its syncretic cultural roots in the region. Invoking a transcendent joy, Sabri’s qawwali created a milieu of harmony—completely antithetical to the Taliban’s backward, beclouded ideology of hate which thrives on sowing seeds of discord.

On June 28, six days after Sabri’s murder, a triple suicide bombing at Istanbul’s Ataturk International Airport, killed 42 and plunged Turkey—and the world—into shock and mourning. I arrived in Istanbul four days later, and in my mind the two tragedies, Sabri’s death and this latest devastation in Istanbul—and what they both symbolized—became intertwined into a single loss: that of a particular vibrational note, indeed, that of musical harmony. It seemed we were witnessing the slow disintegration of the last bastion of a modernist, secular state in the Islamic world. Of all cities, Istanbul, to me, is the most plausible custodian and embodiment of the kind of “perfect music” of which the Indian musician and mystic Hazrat Inayat Khan, whose teachings bridge East and West, spoke of so cogently.

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by Matt McKenna

Long before the new Ghostbusters film was released, a vocal group of internet commenters had already decided what the movie meant to culture at large. Some commenters thought that the main characters being women was an obvious indicator of an overly politically correct culture. Others thought that the existence of bitter comments about the main characters being women was an appalling indicator of a sexist culture. Battle lines were therefore drawn before the film hit theaters, and the content of the movie appears to be nearly as irrelevant to politically engaged adults as it is to the children who enjoy the Mattel-produced Ghostbusters-branded toy tie-ins. The ultimate combination of politically engaged people and consumerist children, however, met at the Republican National Convention last week. As with Ghostbusters, for politically engaged individuals, the content of the convention was entirely beside the point and merely provided an opportunity to consolidate their faction’s previously held beliefs.

The 2016 Ghostbusters stars Kristen Wiig, Leslie Jones, Kate McKinnon, and Melissa McCarthy replacing Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, and Ernie Hudson from the original 1984 film of the same name. As with the original, 2016’s Ghostbusters begins with a hapless character (this time played by Zach Woods) being surprised by a ghost. This first scene provides laughs and scares, but the film has trouble maintaining its positive momentum. Though the leads pepper the screen with mostly good jokes, their affability is drowned out by the gooey, disjointed action sequences in which the Ghostbusters crack wise while shooting apparitions.

But I've already wasted too many words on the content of the film–instead I should have written about how my seeing the film served to confirm something I already believe. After all, this is how politics in the United States works: events aren’t input into an opinion-making process, but rather they are shrewdly interpreted to justify a previously held opinion. The Democrat and Republican nominating conventions are prime examples of this sort of confirmation bias. The conventions are unadulterated pomp in which the only output is to remove the “presumptive” qualifier from the “presumptive nominee” title of the candidate who won the primary election. Therefore, the conventions aren’t introspective events where people think about candidates and concerns, but instead they’re places where dissent is squashed and re-branded as “unity.”

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by Bill Benzon and Mary Liebman

On April 27, 2016, Donald Trump opened a foreign policy speech by declaring that he would “develop a new foreign policy direction for our country – one that replaces randomness with purpose, ideology with strategy, and chaos with peace.” He closed by assuring, “American will continually play the role of peacemaker.” If he is serious, then if elected he should create a Peace Office in the White House, an office specifically charged with developing peaceful solutions to foreign policy problems.

For that matter, why doesn't Hillary Clinton hold Trump's feet to the fire and make a peace office a prominent part of the Democratic Platform? Why doesn't Barack Obama beat them to the punch and earn his Nobel Peace Prize by creating such a White House office while he's got the power to do so? Now's the time!

As you may know, the idea was first proposed by Benjamin Rush, one of the founding fathers, in 1793. You may not know that legislation proposing a Department of Peace was before Congress through much of the previous century. That history has been told by Frederick L. Schuman in Why a Department of Peace?, originally published by Another Mother for Peace in 1969. Mother’s efforts were complemented and amplified by the Peace Act Advisory Council (PAAC, which then became Council for a Department of Peace, CODEP). Sitting at her kitchen table with a manual typerwriter and smoking countless cigarettes, Mary Liebman wrote PAX, the group’s newsletter, between 1970 and 1976.

Working with Charlie Keil and with Becky Liebman, Mary’s daughter, I have compiled these and other documents into a pamphlet, We Need a Department of Peace: Everybody’s Business, Nobody’s Job. In the rest of this post I present section six, “Peace is Everybody’s Business, Nobody’s Job”(Mary’s mantra), from the pamphlet. All of the quoted passages are from the newsletters that Mary Liebman wrote.

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