New Climate Study reports 100% emissions cut needed in 10 years
It boggles my mind that this administration, facing massive national debt & an economic crisis, would continue to blow billions on an unpopular war started by a previous administration (tho it is quickly earning the title "Obama's War in Afghanistan"). In this perfect moment to start funneling some of our taxpayer money (which has largely gone toward the war) toward job creation in the green sector here at home, our Nobel Peace Prize winning president has just taken troop-reduction off the table.
Where do we live? How will we be looked at?
Robert Greenwald's new documentary, Rethink Afghanistan, makes a lucid & powerful case against the war, one that is worth spreading.
Meanwhile, what are the counter-mainstream mainstream poets doing about any of this?
Eliot Weinberger excoriated us for our complacency & insularity 6 1/2 years ago, in his "Poetry Is News." I was in my freshman year at Brown University back then, baffled by a newly begun war in Iraq-- and I do mean baffled. I didn't know what to think.
It feels like an increasingly untenable route to take--whatever this route I & we are taking-- and yet even now I can't see any good way out of it.
Weinberger provides three alternative models for action: 1) political poetry (of which he says 95% is bad, but, in effect, who cares); 2) Oppen (i.e. quit poetry altogether & organize); or 3) Vallejo (keep writing poetry, but also write vigorous political prose alongside).
And talking to my friend Melanie the other day it seemed clear that laughter was a way, woven into these.
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