by Terese Svoboda

We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately. –Ben Franklin

Watching the Oathkeepers cry during the federal court trials under the charge of sedition, I considered the fate of seditious Loyalists during the Revolutionary War whom they most closely resemble in the topsy-turvy world of contemporary politics. The Revolutionary War was a civil war, combatants were united with a common language and heritage that made each side virtually indistinguishable. Even before hostilities were underway, spies were everywhere, and treason inevitable. Defining treason is the first step in delineating one country from another, and indeed, the five-member “Committee on Spies’ ‘ was organized before the Declaration of Independence was written.^[1]  But the records of the courts handling  treason during the Revolutionary War are handwritten and difficult to read, especially on microfilm, according to Bertrand Roehner, the historiographer I mentioned in my last column, who works at the Sorbonne.^[2]

Historiography is the study of how historical recording and interpretations shift with time as a result of many factors. Roehner helped me collect documentation available on violence in postwar Japan for my 2008 memoir, Black Glasses Like Clark Kent, sharing information from his research into Allied Occupation archives in Australia, Britain and New Zealand, and from Japanese and American newspapers. I was specifically looking for evidence of executions of Americans convicted by US forces, but I was also interested in the Japanese response to GIs in that period. What Roehner gleaned contradicted the premise of John W. Dowers’ Pulitzer-winning book Embracing Defeat, which frames the Japanese as meek losers, resigned to their status and reliant solely on Americans for their welfare. Dowers omits the huge demonstrations organized by the Japanese populace that took place periodically, the guerilla snipers and mysterious murders and rail sabotage – as well as the many acts of violence committed by the Americans – rape, automobile “accidents.” Dower had not reviewed or could not access Roehner’s sources, partly due to MacArthur’s policy of total censorship – even the mention of censorship was forbidden – that has only recently been lifted in Japan. While we would like to consider our side of the Revolutionary War terror- and violence-free, carried out by well-behaved Americans, the truth might be that we won the war because we were just as (or more) violent as our opponent — which would explain why 200,000 Loyalists left their homes and went into exile.^[3] Read more »

Poets Talk Time

poets talk time
to get a handle on it,
to hack a place to hold it
to turn it, to fold it
to climb it and mount it
to ride it, to flip it
to hide it, to turn it
to toy with and tip it
to wrench it, to rip it
apart to unlearn it
to kill it, to burn it
to track it in the innards of clocks
to tear it to shreds like a crow on a corpse
to drill it to dig it to bore it
and finally, ignore it

but poets would do well to pour time
like water, or blood & wine
and, savoring,
sip it

by Jim Culleny,
© 2/28/12
.

by Michael Liss

I’ve always liked this image. It’s quiet, it sneaks up on you, brings back old memories of pizza parlors, barbershop walls and drug-store soda fountains.

Norman Rockwell’s “Four Freedoms” had been inspired by FDR’s 1941 Annual Message, given at a time when Germany had swept through much of Europe, and democracy was in great peril. While the United States was not then yet at war, and isolationism was still strong, a growing number of Americans could see that our involvement might be inevitable. Roosevelt wanted to define the values that a post-war world would embrace. Drawing from the Constitution as well as from the lived experience of the Depression, FDR called for Freedom from Want, Freedom from Fear, Freedom of Worship and Freedom of Speech.

This one is Rockwell’s masterpiece. The composition was, according to him, inspired by a town meeting he had attended, where a young man took an unpopular position. Rockwell portrays him with shoulders thrown back a bit as he speaks, as if to project his unamplified voice through the hall. His hard, weathered hands hold the chair in front of him, a copy of a Town Report folded in his pocket. His face is roughened by the sun and wind, he’s flanked by two older men in white shirts and ties, and, on the face of one, there’s a small smile. No screaming, no doxing, and certainly no video captured on someone’s phone, uploaded, and seen by hundreds of thousands of partisans.

Rockwell’s painting gets to the essence of “Constitutional” free speech. However contrary this speaker’s opinion is, it is his right to voice it at a public hearing without fear of punishment. The First Amendment has very few content-based exceptions—the government can intervene only where obscenity, defamation, fraud, incitement, and speech integral to criminal conduct is involved. Read more »

by Jeroen Bouterse

In 2022, I worked harder than before to keep my students’ tables free of smartphones. That this is a matter for negotiation at all, is because on the surface, the devices do so many things, and students often make a reasonable, possibly-good-faith case for using it for a specific purpose. I forgot my calculator; can I use my phone? No, thank you for asking, but you won’t be needing a calculator; just start with this exercise here, and don’t forget to simplify your fractions. Can I listen to music while I work? Yeah, uhm, no, I happen to be a big believer in collaborative work, I guess. Can I check my solutions online please? Ah, very good; but instead, use this printout that I bring to every one of your classes these days. I’m done, can I quickly look up my French homework? That’s a tough one, but no; it’s seven minutes to the bell anyway and I prepared a small Kahoot quiz on today’s topic. (So everyone please get your phones out.)

As a matter of classroom management, some of these questions are more of a judgment call than eating and drinking in class (not allowed, with some exceptions immediately after a PE lesson) but less complicated than bathroom visits (allowed in principle, but in need of limits that I may never be able to express algorithmically). In spite, however, of the superficial similarities between these phenomena – all subject to teacher- and class-specific settlements, informed and assisted by school-wide institutions such as regulations and phone bags – it feels as if more is at stake when it comes to smartphones. I sense more urgency, as if I’m laboring to stop a tide from coming in; as if what I am inclined to view as ‘complex’ and ‘multi-faceted’ and ‘also an interesting challenge, actually’ is actually one big thing only: an external force threatening to infiltrate my classroom and undo what I am trying to achieve there (which is called ‘education’ and which is therefore plainly also one big thing). I don’t feel this way about chewing gum.

To help me make up my mind, I decided to consult a writer who passed away before smartphones were ‘a thing’: media and educational philosopher Neil Postman, famous for his criticism of the role of television in modern culture and education. Though this choice of authority seems to be loading the dice rather heavily in one direction, I did briefly consider the counterintuitive case that Postman might have seen 21^st-century media technology as a step in the right direction. In the end, however, I think the more predictable reading – that, in Aubrey Nagle’s words, mobile media represent “Postman’s fear of TV on steroids” – is the more interesting one, allowing us to apply his broader cultural criticism to our time. Read more »

Lita Albuquerque. Southern Cross, 2014, from Stellar Axis: Antarctica, Ross Ice Shelf, Antarctica, 2006.

More here, here, and here.

by Rafaël Newman

When we began, our gods were junior,
Their profits, and our problems, punier.
The deities who drilled at dawn
Paraded in a pantheon:
Born out of Chaos and castration,
Theirs was a piebald population.
They mingled with a breed of men
And women we’ll not see again,
Who shared those gods’ own groaning board,
Where things were rarely untoward—
Unless you count the odd abduction,
The semi-bestial seduction,
The anthropophagous pot-au-feu,
Or the Promethean pas-de-deux.

But more than this, our gods were many,
Though not, for all that, two-a-penny.
A deathless numen dwelt within
Whatever was, would be, had been,
And granted every abstract noun
Its aegis, buckler, crest, or crown;
Its anvil, lightning bolt, caduceus;
Its cuneiform, and its cartouches.
There was a holiness at large,
A broadly scattered, sacred charge.

But now? Our gods have been compress’d,
And we, in consequence, less bless’d:
From Twelve Olympians downgraded
To single Seigneur. We have traded
That polychrome diapason
For a grimly grayscale monotone.
At best, our world is Manichaean,
Though not as praised in Persian paean.
The tyrants twain who rule this globe
Are those that frame the Book of Job:
A sadist, distant from the Earth,
And Satan, who assays the worth,
In worship and obedience,
Of hominid ingredients. Read more »

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

A tree in the vicinity of Rumi’s tomb has me transfixed. It isn’t the tree, actually, it is the force of attraction between tree-branch and sun-ray that seems to lift the tree off the ground and swirl it in sunshine, casting filigreed shadows on the concrete tiles across the courtyard. The tree’s heavenward reach is so magnificent that not only does it seem to clasp the sun but it spreads a tranquil yet powerful energy far beyond itself. It is easy to forget that the tree is small. I consider this my first meeting with Shams.

Of average human-height, the tree is non-descript, other than how its heavenward reaching creates an embrace that enricles and enlarges everything around it, so that motion ripples out of stillness, light edges shadows. In a moment such as this, the senses deepen spirit; words fail, words fail. All that we know evaporates, we are left with spirit. Here is the limit of knowledge, the Sufis teach us; no amount of book learning alone can bring us closer to the Divine than the spirit engaged in making a wide embrace. The Divine is an experience, and knowledge is only a part of it. If there is one word that comes close to describing this, it is love. But of course, the word is insufficient. No single word in conventional language can contain love. Poetry, arguably, owes its existence to the impossibility of defining love in the dictionary. In Maulana Rumi’s case, it was Shams who brought this awakening, this great desire for the Divine beloved that colored every thought, action and word that was to come out of him in the future. Read more »

by Brooks Riley