by Michael Liss

“In every country there must be a just and equal balance of powers in the government, an equal distribution of the national forces. Each section and each interest must exercise its due share of influence and control. It is always more or less difficult to preserve their just equipoise, and the larger the country, and the more varied its great interests, the more difficult does the task become, and the greater the shock and disturbance caused by an attempt to adjust it when once disturbed.” —Henry J. Raymond, Editor of the New York Times, January, 1860 (as quoted by Allan Nevins).

“We don’t win anymore. But we are going to start winning again.” —Donald J. Trump, just about any and every day, 2015-16.

The monster is loose.

Donald Trump is done with keeping quiet. It’s possible you might not have noticed the buttoned-up, reserved Trump (I’ve heard it compared to the Higgs boson), but worry not; it’s no longer relevant, and you won’t be seeing it in the future.

Trump wants to be Trump, and he’s tired of people telling him he needs to appear more substantive, more Presidential. So he shook up his campaign, demoted the controversial Paul Manafort (who subsequently resigned), elevated the pollster Kellyanne Conway to campaign manager, and made Stephen Bannon the campaign’s chief executive. Conway is an operative who previously worked for Ted Cruz and has good contacts with the conservative base. But Bannon is the real prize, and the one who raised eyebrows, and a little fear, even amongst Republicans. Bannon runs the influential and persistently inflammatory conservative outlet Breitbart News, which has recently closely coordinated with Trump’s messaging. And Breitbart takes no prisoners. Wild speculation, innuendo, and hyperbole are its stock in trade, and if you are in its sightline, expect to lose.

Trump has made a decisive choice. He will do what got him the nomination. Back to his fastball: an unscripted (but obviously deliberate) stream-of consciousness mélange of pugnacity, promises, patriotism, law-and order, and a firm, unkindly hand towards those who are undesirable because of their origins or political beliefs. He will occasionally throw in a kinder, gentler Donald because he’s retained slash-and-burn types to act as surrogates, but the core Trump message will remain intense and in your face. That’s who he is, a hammer in search of a nail.

This is actually a very smart move, a businessman’s move, and the freak-out from his fellow Republicans misses the mark. Trump isn’t like other politicians. He doesn’t do “pivot.”

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Asamprajanya

I’m in the weeds on my knees pawing dark earth
looking for my squash among prolific opportunist grasses
and broad-leafed virtuosos at finding sustenance
in the garden of a part-time farmer—
finding advantage in his jammed schedule,
in life’s necessary distractions and precious
irrelevancies, his asamprajanya

On knees I sweat under an indifferent sun
to undo the effects of looking the other way
while rooted intruders ensconced themselves
in a life of ease throttling zucchini
under the erratic care of a life-long
junkie of mysteries, dreams and peeks behind scenes,
looking for grails among wild greens
which threaten his squash’s fundamental urge to bear fruit,
who counts angels and grasps at clouds
while many weeds take root
.

Jim Culleny
8/7/16

*Asamprajanya (Sanskrit): inattentiveness, non-alertness

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by Leanne Ogasawara

The other night, I was dancing with the Dalai Lama. We were in a large auditorium that looked like a high school gym– and in front of a packed audience sitting in the bleachers, we danced, just the two of us–cheek to cheek. I am not actually such a huge fan of his holiness– so this all was rather unexpected.

As we were floating and twirling ballroom style out on the dance floor, he pressed me very close, and giggled– and I started to laugh; and then still in my dream, I thought, “Wow, maybe I died and this is heaven…”

Paradiso

I've long wondered, why it is that right from the very start, peopled have preferred Dante's Inferno to his Paradiso?

Am I the only one who– while utterly unable to imagine hell– often finds myself lost in dreams of paradise?

It's true, I love to fantasize about paradise.

Often imagining it like a Persian garden, there is the intoxicating fragrance of roses, jasmine and gardenias. There is music and gently perfumed spring breezes. And people picnic, unendingly.

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by Dave Maier

Consider how difficult it has been to get Big Tobacco to admit that cigarette smoking is bad for you at all, let alone that it kills many thousands of people every year. In particular, you might remember that time when all the major executives swore under oath at Congressional hearings that cigarettes are perfectly safe. Consider as well that most tobacco profits come from heavy users of tobacco, not smokers of only the occasional cigarette. So the all-important bottom line – public health be damned – can be preserved only by recruiting new heavy smokers as the older (or not so older) ones die off or quit. For Big Tobacco, this means targeting children, who are not only risk-takers by nature, but very often concerned above all to be cool. If cigarettes are risky and cool, then children will become smokers, and many (some studies say 30%) will become hooked, preserving corporate profits for another generation.

Marijuana prohibitionists hold the analogous establishment of Big Marijuana up as a nightmare scenario. If big money is involved – as of course it is – it is quite natural to worry that Big Marijuana will be just as bad as Big Tobacco: fighting warning labels, putting out deceptive and child-friendly advertising (Joe Camel = Joe Cannabis?) fighting class-action lawsuits with expensive lawyers, and so on. Prohibitionists point to the existence of yummy cannabis edibles (THC-infused gummy bears! “Pot Tarts”!) and fanciful marijuana strain names (“Girl Scout Cookies”! “Green Crack”!) as evidence that even the nascent legal cannabis industry has our defenseless children in its sights.

The most vocal proponent of this line is Kevin Sabet of the anti-legalization organization Project SAM [Smart Approaches to Marijuana]. Sabet represents a new development in prohibitionism, consciously distancing himself from old-school drug-warrior tactics in the hope of reaching a more moderate audience. In terms of actual policy recommendations, in fact, Sabet sounds quite a bit like yesterday’s marijuana reform activists. NORML's Roger Roffman, for example, whose book we looked at last time, spent most of his career pushing not for legalization, but for decriminalization, and more generally a reconstrual of marijuana policy not as a matter for law enforcement but instead as a public health issue: not arrest and incarceration, but education and treatment.

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by Matt McKenna

Though the target demographic for Suicide Squad can’t yet vote in the United States, it was was still thoughtful of director David Ayer to create a PG-13 film that educates children as to the state of the Republican Party. By fashioning the silly misanthrope protagonists in Suicide Squad after Republican candidates, Ayers deftly describes the sad circumstance many Republican politicians and voters are experiencing this election cycle–they dislike the candidates they’re obliged to support.

For those unfamiliar with the Suicide Squad comic book franchise, the protagonists are a group of DC Comics villains who are pressed into service by the United States in order to battle other, even worse villains. These anti-heroes, who share a cinematic universe with Batman, Superman, and other superheros in similarly boring films, are compelled to fight alongside the “good guys” because the good guys have threatened to detonate an explosive device implanted in each of the villain’s necks. It does seem a bit unfair to call the team the “Suicide Squad” given that if the protagonists don’t go along with the plan, their heads will be blown off. Alas, I suppose a more accurate title like “Hostage Squade” isn’t quite as mellifluous.

If the concept of Suicide Squad seems like a breath of fresh air compared to the noxious wind that accompanies most of the other Marvel and DC comic book movies, prepare to be disappointed. While the protagonists may not be the trite, righteous do-gooders we’ve been forced to endure over the past decade of me-too comic book cash-grabs fashioned in the form of feature films, the plot centers around the same tired tropes as its predecessors. Like the similarly incoherent Ghostbusters film from earlier this summer, Suicide Squad involves an action-figure-ready gaggle of wry underdogs charging into a skyscraper to battle a supernatural being who, before destroying the world, must first conjure a glowing beam of light and shoot it into the sky for two hours. Why does this evil spirit monster need to project a glowing energy beam through the ceiling? I don't know; Maybe that detail was covered somewhere within the bountiful dialogue, but even if it was, I can't imagine myself thinking, “Ohhh, okay. Sure, that makes sense.” Anyway, what Suicide Squad lacks in an interesting plot, it certainly makes up for in its uncanny depiction of the current state of the Republican Party.

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by Bill Benzon

These songs of mine have to be played. They mustn’t be lost, they have to be out there….They’re Byzantine and their ‘roads’, their tunes are ancient.
–Markos Vamvakaris

To read this book, this as-told-to autobiography of Markos Vamvakaris, is to confront how strange is this thing we call writing, the child of this strange thing in which we live, called civilization. It is not that Markos, as he came to be known, is uncivilized. It is not that. Living at the time and place that he did, Greece during the early and middle twentieth century, he couldn’t avoid it, this civilization.

But he could resist it. And that he did, with wine, women, and song. Hashish too, more than the wine, and the bouzouki, along with the song and more than the women. Civilization didn’t win, neither did Markos. But I wouldn’t call it a draw either. It was a dance.

* * * * *

I knew almost nothing about rebetiko – Greek urban folk music with Asian influence – when I began reading this book, this circle dance between Markos the road warrior, Angeliki Vellou-Keil, scholar and scribe who published the material in Greek in 1972, and Noonie Minogue, who translated and edited this English edition (2015). Yet the story herein set forth, Markos Vamvakaris: The Man and the Bouzouki, that story is a familiar one: poverty, social marginalization, drugs, rubbing shoulder with criminals, womanizing, dedication to craft, and the transformation of a nation’s musical culture. Rebetiko has been likened to the blues, and the stories of major blues musicians have all those elements. It is a story of resistance, survival, and transformation.

Markos Vamvakaris was born in 1905 on the island of Syra in the Cyclades in the South Aegean Sea. That puts it on one of the major crossroads of world travel and trade for three millennia, between mainland Greece to the West and Turkey to the East. Its largest city, Ermopouli, was the major Greek port in the second half of the 19th Century, and a center for commerce and industry. Many different peoples have lived in and passed through Syra, as they do today in these days of destruction and despair in the Middle East. The dance of snivilization, as James Joyce called it, power and domination, freedom and music, pomp and circumcision, the bouzouki vs. bullets. Markos snubbed the law and the songs won. For awhile.

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