Thank you, capitalist, corporate, conservative America, for a high standard of living in the world, for the best health care in the world, and for being able to sleep at night
Cities are collective works of art, and New Orleans is one of America's masterpieces -- a delectable multicultural gumbo whose value is only more pronounced in a nation where the same stores, banks and malls make every place feel like every other place.
For that reason alone, the much-hyped "should we rebuild New Orleans?" debate is preposterous. Of course we should save New Orleans. To abandon it would be like Italy abandoning Venice. Besides, anybody who sets foot in this town knows that the best parts of New Orleans don't need to be rebuilt. They're still there.
You could hold a Mardi Gras parade tomorrow in the bone-dry French Quarter. The modern office towers and hotels of the central business district, graceless though they are, remain standing, poised to resume their role as hubs of commerce. Some of the city's extraordinary neighborhoods, such as the Garden District, with its white-columned antebellum mansions, came through the storm with little more than downed trees.
As so often with Kees, the most needling line is the plainest: “I did not know them then.” What a fine balance it strikes, implying both “my childhood was happy, since you ask, kept away from such mortal things,” and also, “how little I knew of the world—a world we ought to know—and of the damage it can wreak.” ...
More than half the poems falter and fail, either because they try too hard (“Can you hear the worthless morning’s mirth?”) or because they lunge disastrously at the surreal (“Impromptu unicorns enact ballets, / Applauded by bourgeoisie in negligée”). Still more of them are so profoundly in hock to the work of Kees’s masters that they barely evince any vital signs of their own. The wistful imperative of “Put on your hat, put on your gloves. / But there isn’t any love, there isn’t any love” could be issued only by someone whose bedside table creaked with too much Auden and MacNeice, while the debt to Eliot collapses into blatant homage... continued...
[Kahn] explains that “despite a widespread belief to the contrary, objective studies indicate that even though the amount of human tragedy would be greatly increased in the postwar world, the increase would not preclude normal and happy lives for the majority of survivors and their descendants.” For many readers, this has seemed pathologically insensitive. But these readers are missing Kahn’s point. His point is that unless Americans really do believe that nuclear war is survivable, and survivable under conditions that, although hardly desirable, are acceptable and manageable, then deterrence has no meaning. You can’t advertise your readiness to initiate a nuclear exchange if you are unwilling to accept the consequences.
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About the only original thing I've heard or read about the latest Pat Robertson eruption is by my former Chimes colleague Brian Bork. Quoth he:
In my estimation, Pat Robertson is just the "tails" side of a coin whose "head" is the portrait of a Paris Hilton. They are essentially similar pieces of cultural effluvia: both are famous, but no one can really concieve the reason why, both demand an undue amount of cognitive energy because of their ubiquitous cultural presence, both have achieved notoriety via visual media. ... Both also seem to espouse their own peculiar and bat-shit insane brand of morality - morality that few among us can identify with, but nevertheless seem enamoured by it all.
