LATE FEBRUARY WINTER HANGS ON IN THE CATSKILLS

Winter is hanging on here fairly insistently. I taught a poetry round table last Wednesday night in Andes, NY, and crowdsourced daily images of late winter in the Catskills.

Using the 200 or so images I gathered, I put it into a poem and got it published this afternoon in a very fine local online newsletter called Watershed Post (this is the source to which I turn for news of all things local):

http://www.watershedpost.com/2011/coping-february-verse

Surf City/Serf City

When the Hawaiian president said he would change the country many people heard, "Surf City!" Many other people heard "Serf City!"

What's all the fuss about a single vowel?

Weltanschauung (World View)

World View has a lengthy article at Wikipedia. Among its many facets were the linguistic theories of Benjamin Whorf who thought that the key to understanding a culture was through understanding its keywords. So he thought that the vocabulary of the Eskimos with its many different terms for snow was almost very important to understanding them. Keywords is the title of a very sharp volume by Marxist Raymond Williams that defines terms such as "liberal" and "Marxist" (profoundly different in his and in my view, and I have an almost exact agreement with his terminology). [NB: I apologize to contributors who don't feel that Marxism and Democratic ideologies coincide, but I feel that the center of the Democrat party is Marxist, NOT liberal in Williams' (and my) sense.]

One of the things to understand about the conservative/Marxist divide (also what I see as the Republican/Democratic divide) is that there are two separate theologies going on. One is free market based, and one wants the government to control and even in some cases to own the market.

Worldview has a very good definition of what the Nazi worldview was, and then a fabulous breakdown of various American worldviews. I present them here. The list of American worldviews, I have to say, does not find an exact category for me of any kind. I don't fit into the list. Do you? After the list, I shall try to define myself, although I am perhaps sui generis (in starting this blog, I had hoped not, but it may end up being the case). Also, please see if you can fit into this list. Meanwhile, here is what the article has to say about Weltanschauung and Nazism (a very divisive and hurtful conversation we've been having hinges on those key terms and whether or not they are related):

"In The Language of the Third Reich, Weltanschauungen came to designate the instinctive understanding of complex geo-political problems by the Nazis, which allowed them to act in the name of a supposedly higher ideal[8] and in accordance to their theory of the world. These acts, perceived outside that unique Weltanschauung, are now commonly perceived as acts of aggression, such as openly beginning invasions, twisting facts, and violating human rights.
[edit] Worldviews in religion and philosophy


The Christian thinker James W. Sire defines a worldview as "a commitment, a fundamental orientation of the heart, that can be expressed as a story or in a set of presuppositions (assumptions which may be true, partially true, or entirely false) which we hold (consciously or subconsciously, consistently or inconsistently) about the basic construction of reality, and that provides the foundation on which we live and move and have our being." He suggests that "we should all think in terms of worldviews, that is, with a consciousness not only of our own way of thought but also that of other people, so that we can first understand and then genuinely communicate with others in our pluralistic society."[11]

The philosophical importance of worldviews became increasingly clear during the 20th Century for a number of reasons, such as increasing contact between cultures, and the failure of some aspects of the Enlightenment project, such as the rationalist project of attaining all truth by reason alone. Mathematical logic showed that fundamental choices of axioms were essential in deductive reasoning[12] and that, even having chosen axioms not everything that was true in a given logical system could be proven.[13] Some philosophers believe the problems extend to "the inconsistencies and failures which plagued the Enlightenment attempt to identify universal moral and rational principles";[14] although Enlightenment principles such as universal suffrage and the universal declaration of human rights are accepted, if not taken for granted, by many.[15]

A worldview can be considered as comprising a number of basic beliefs which are philosophically equivalent to the axioms of the worldview considered as a logical theory. These basic beliefs cannot, by definition, be proven (in the logical sense) within the worldview precisely because they are axioms, and are typically argued from rather than argued for.[16] However their coherence can be explored philosophically and logically, and if two different worldviews have sufficient common beliefs it may be possible to have a constructive dialogue between them.[17] On the other hand, if different worldviews are held to be basically incommensurate and irreconcilable, then the situation is one of cultural relativism and would therefore incur the standard criticisms from philosophical realists.[18][19][20] Additionally, religious believers might not wish to see their beliefs relativized into something that is only "true for them".[21][22] Subjective logic is a belief reasoning formalism where beliefs explicitly are subjectively held by individuals but where a consensus between different worldviews can be achieved.[23]

A third alternative is that the worldview approach is only a methodological relativism, that it is a suspension judgment about the truth of various belief systems but not a declaration that there is no global truth. For instance, the religious philosopher Ninian Smart begins his Worldviews: Cross-cultural Explorations of Human Beliefs with "Exploring Religions and Analysing Worldviews" and argues for "the neutral, dispassionate study of different religious and secular systems—a process I call worldview analysis."[24]
[edit] Impact on politics

According to Michael Lind, "a worldview is a more or less coherent understanding of the nature of reality, which permits its holders to interpret new information in light of their preconceptions. Clashes among worldviews cannot be ended by a simple appeal to facts. Even if rival sides agree on the facts, people may disagree on conclusions because of their different premises." This is why politicians often seem to talk past one another, or ascribe different meanings to the same events. Tribal or national wars are often the result of incompatible worldviews. Lind has organized American political worldviews into five categories:

* Neoliberal Globalism believes that at home governments should provide basic public goods like infrastructure, health care and security by market-friendly methods
* Social Democratic Liberalism claims an economic safety net, protecting citizens from unemployment, sickness, poverty in old age and other disasters, is necessary if democratic government is to retain popular support.
* Populist Nationalism tends to favor restriction of legal as well as illegal immigration to protect the core stock of the tribe-state from dilution by different races, ethnic groups or religions. Populist nationalism also tends to favor protectionist policies that shield American workers and businesses, particularly small businesses, from foreign competition.
* Libertarian Isolationism would abandon foreign alliances, dismantle most of its military, and return to a 19th-century pattern of decentralized government and an economy based on small businesses and small farms.
* Green Malthusianism synthesizes mystical versions of environmentalism with alarm about population growth in the tradition of the Rev. Thomas Malthus

Not all people will fit neatly into only one category or the other, but Lind argues that their core worldview shapes how they frame their arguments.[25]"

Where I think I agree with this is with Populist Nationalism but not in terms of race, or ethnic groups, but religious orientation. I don't care about the race or gender. If someone is Lutheran, or has something close to Lutheran commitments, I'll accept them. If they go against the commandments against murder, theft, adultery, speaking in a gentle way toward neighbors and of neighbors, or if they tend to enslave others, and treat their servants or workers roughly, I don't like them.

But I also have a strong commitment to humorists and poets, and feel they ought to have carte blanche. I can sympathize across cultures with humorists in the Sufi tradition, Zen tradition, and even secular traditions (I like George Carlin although I don't like anything he actually says).

I like the hilarity of surrealists such as Breton and his black humor gang even though I dislike almost everything about the way they lived their lives.

I like the sheer hilarity of the Aboriginal worldview (dreaming!), even though I would hate to be amongst them.

I like the word Weltanschauung, although I think it's crazy to have two u's in a row.

Woodpeckers Suffer No Brain Damage

In this weekend's WSJ (a virtual phantasmagoria of reading pleasure!) there is an article on C4 that says that woodpeckers can strike a tree twenty times in one second "with a force of 1200 g's" and fly away without brain damage!

They attribute this to an "elastic beak" that connects to "spongy bone" "then harder bone arrives as a final brain-shield" then finally there's something called a "hyoid" that helps to "dissipate vibration."

This is from a book entitled "A Mechanical Analysis of Woodpecker Drumming and Its Application to Shock-Absorbing Systems," Sang-Hee Yoon and Sungmin Park, Bioinspiration & Biomimetics (March).

Biomimetics! Who knew? That's a great title for a field.

In our sports conversations we lamented the inevitable brain damage suffered by boxers and soccer players and football players (particularly linemen). We might say that such players were birdbrains. But maybe birdbrains are better insulated than ours from shock, and then again maybe they have less to lose. Can a woodpecker receive a concussion? If so, do they lose comprehension? If so, how would that be calibrated, or registered?

If we could create a football helmet that had some of the properties of the woodpecker's skull, perhaps that would cut down on the brain damage. Maybe if the helmet was as big as the stadium, for instance?

But then I suppose it would be hard to fit anything else into the stadium, plus there is the expense of putting that much material on someone's head.

At any rate, it seems that they are thinking that this might help to insulate the wiring inside of cellphones once they're dropped.

Lots of other applications, too, especially in the sports world, I should think, and perhaps in terms of aviation, on shows like Jackass, in terms of car accidents (inflatables) and of course in contemporary politics, which is as hardhitting as any sport, as recent events have shown. Verbiage intended to detonate constantly moves through the blogosphere, now through the Arabic world, and even in Madison, where some checks are being removed in order to correct the balances.

We've also been talking about conservativism, and what it is. Conserving your brain, and conserving your own constitution, are good things, I should think, for all parties ... boneheaded progressives and hardheaded regressives, Neanderthals and Mutants for Change.

HOMES MUST BE FOUGHT FOR

I was born into a Lutheran family. My father was for Goldwater, my mother was for Kennedy. We rarely talked about politics. We rarely talked about anything, but I liked my family, and loved each person in it. I went to the local Lutheran church, and enjoyed Sunday School, and the sermons.

In my teen years I became aware of politics. I was born in 1956. When I was fourteen the Vietnam War was going. I thought, well, they deserve self-determination. Little was I to know that the communist win meant that everything was to be determined by a communist elite who rewarded poets with death and imprisonment.

I studied with Allen Ginsberg in the late 70s when I was barely 19. I thought he heralded the latest thinking, and I took his technique to heart. I thought he was for the young. Little did I know that he was a long-standing and unrepentant member of NAMBLA, and that he was actually AFTER the young.

In my twenties I lived in Seattle. By then I had stopped going to church. I didn't know any Christians. (I still felt the church was a home I would one day return to, but at this point I was curious about what else was out there.) I liked the Jungian feminists of the period, and thought it was healthy to see new archetypes of the male. About ten years later I began to get the sense that "the dead white male" was going to mean cultural extinction.

In Graduate School the "dead white male" was going to be a killing field in which the likes of Hemingway and Shakespeare and Milton would all end up replaced in the canon by Toni Morrison, Andrea Dworkin, and Eldridge Cleaver. It looked for a while like this might happen.

In my thirties and early forties I lived in Finland. I wasn't particularly welcome in some quarters. At night, I heard, "Go home, India, motherfucker!" I am somewhat dark, but geez. I'm not saying I suffered racism as blacks did in Alabama in 1863. Alabama was their home, and they had nowhere else to go. I was in another country, on the other hand, and could go home. I did go home. I was DESPERATELY homesick. I missed my country, and my family. Shortly after my arrival, two planes slammed into the WTC. Some academic critics rejoiced. Ward Churchill said that all we lost was a bunch of "little Eichmanns," and that what America needed was "a thousand Mogadishus." Echoes of this dismissal of America's loss reverberated throughout the internet.

The 3,000 dead in the WTC massacre were celebrated (by some) as the beginning of a move toward the destruction of America itself. Churchill taught at a major American university. Outside of academia his ideas were detested, but inside I heard very little criticism. Silence seemed to indicate approval.

I lived then, as I do now, in a virtually uninhabited area of New York State that is largely within the watershed of NYC. You can hardly take a step without seeing bobcats and fox, bears and coyotes, and some claim there are mountain lions (I haven't seen one but it's only because the deer and other wildlife are piled so deep). NPR does not penetrate this forest. On my cable package are stations devoted to hunting and fishing, and there is also Fox News. I watched it one night. Sean Hannity was criticizing Ward Churchill's destructive dismissal of America. I liked this, and began to tune in more frequently.

In 2004, I voted (somewhat reluctantly) for W. I didn't like Kerry's disgraceful dismissal of his comrades in Vietnam. I didn't like Vietnam. Few follow the place or know about its one-party state. Most on the left still celebrate the fall of Saigon, and the destruction of the American army during the Tet Offensive.

In Finland, I had married a Lutheran. Coming home, I wanted to find my childhood again in a Lutheran church. I had begun going to a Lutheran church. I read church circulars. Home had come to mean Lutheranism.

In Finland I had rethought many of the tenets I had held during my youth. Finland was a quasi-socialist country. That is, they had high taxes for the rich and employed, and the people at the bottom benefited. The good part of this was that everyone had a home, and enough food, and a decent education. There were no beggars. The bad part was that you couldn't make any money. Doctors told me they tried to do a couple of years in America in order to buy a house & have a nest egg in Finland, because their salaries, after taxation, were so low. As a professor in Finland I could barely afford a small apartment. I liked Finland, and was impressed by how they had fought for their country against the Soviet Union and sent home a million dead invaders during WWII in order to keep their country. They had paid dearly. A quarter of their population died in the war. They were still a Christian country, and their socialism had been underwritten by the Lutheran ethos. There were few foreigners in Finland. About 6000 Vietnamese Christians lived there. A few thousand Somalis lived in the capital. Crime was almost unheard of outside of Helsinki (where the Somalis kept the police quite busy). Equality was the overall norm. Women felt safe. Do unto others was a cultural norm.

More and more, I was on the side of the Christian conservatives throughout the world from India to Norway, from Russia to Zimbabwe. There is much about Christianity that is worthy of preservation. Even in 2002 I was moving in this direction. 9/11 was a watershed moment for me. I want this country to survive, and I want its Christians to survive, and the only people who seem to view it from this viewpoint are the Christian conservatives. Capitalism is a good because it allows people to own their own homes, and to have a say in their future, and not remain simply under the thumb of the all-powerful government. America's my home. I don't feel at home anywhere else. I wrote about this in a poem that was published today, here, at the Barnwood International Poetry Journal:

http://web.mac.com/tomkoontz/Site_33/Olson.html

(NB: The picture at top is of a painting in a small church in Kitinoja, Finland where we received a blessing for our marriage from the local priest.)

What is Conservatism?

People have asked me in the past what is conservatism? I didn't know although I could point to Adam Smith or Friedrich Hayek or John Locke or John Adams as exemplars. But what is the thread that runs through all of them?

This morning on BookTV a guy named Emmett Tyrell of the American Spectator was asked the same question. He said it was the right to pursue happiness, and that this meant a free economy. He had recently published a new book called Ronald Reagan: A Life.

I thought his answer was marvelously simple, and simply marvelous. An unfettered economy, both in terms of what we can produce, and what we can say, is the American dream in a nutshell. So, let's conserve it.

Against this are all kinds of leftists who want to control what we can produce, and what we can say.

Sex Slavery Versus Poetry Publication: A Comparison of Evils

Some things make me feel like Mount Pinatubo (pictured).

When writers compare themselves to slaves, or whine about their problems, I feel like I'm about to turn into Mount Pinatubo. Writing is in itself an amazing luxury. No animal can do it. Very few people around the world can do it. Many people are actually illiterate. Even people who CAN write rarely have the time.

Novelist Tama Janowitz said once that she felt inequity when she was forced to go to publishing parties wearing the same dress, because her dad had only set $35 thousand dollars a year for her to go to NYC in order to make it as a writer in the 1980s! She wrote a book that used the metaphor of SLAVERY to cite such preposterous conditions: Slaves of New York was basically about the difficulty of finding real estate (writer's digs) in Manhattan, and the terrible conditions writers and artists had to endure with only a small set-aside. Only a few dresses! Had to type their own manuscripts! Small royalty checks! Novelists' quarters next to noisy neighbors!

It's hard to know how to resolve all the inequities of the world, but before we rectify the situation of the moderately talented, hopeless wretches like Tama Janowitz, and how to get them to turn out more and better books, and her problem of the mere $35,000 dollars a year, what about the sexual slaves, the child sexual slaves, living in places like Hong Kong, Manila, and Brooklyn?

Sex slaves can't write, can't publish. According to this month's Reader's Digest, 500,000 Filipino girls and women are sold into sex slavery every year. Girls in former communist countries are sold into sex slavery. Mexican gangs kidnap young women from El Salvador and sell them to gangs in North America. Penalties are light. You get a couple years for raping a child.

http://www.military.com/NewContent/0,13190,SOF_0904_Slavery1,00.html

In Soldier of Fortune magazine, it says that sex slavery is common in most parts of the world, including Hong Kong.

And yet, this statistical discrepancy is now on many blogs in the small press publishing world:

http://vidaweb.org/the-count-2010

Men are published more often than women in the top poetry journals. Some reasons might be that women are the primary caregivers for small children. Small children require attention. Some moms might prefer to play with children rather than write (why didn't they abort the kids so they could publish more poems?). Emily Dickinson wasn't much on getting her work out. Perhaps some women write for themselves (how selfish, since women's poetry publishing numbers are low!).


Once I went to a conference with a literary giant named Gordon Lish, who gave a talk in a Penthouse suite in NYC. People paid fortunes to attend, and many of them would later be rewarded with book contracts. The talk was brilliant, and I was riveted. I myself was encouraged to drop everything, move to NYC, and walk some rich person's dog for ten years in exchange for living in a small room as the servant, so I could be close to the writing scene, and get a novel into a large publishing house so I could be called -- the guy who wrote a masterpiece called SLAVE OF THE DOG. (NB: I hate dogs.)

I decided to go another route.

There were many takers for the dogwalking gigs. I could see stretch limousines pulling up with attractive young women stepping out with their notebooks and tiny dressed-up dogs, ready to attend the seminar! They were very serious!

Miniature poodles.

As for the small press scene, I find the whole situation quite difficult, but getting published is easy enough if you write something wonderful. But even if you do get published in a crummy journal like Bolshevik Review, or Mad Max Review, who really cares? Nobody reads those journals. These are little incestuous operations for little incestuous groups. The Hapsburg empire at its close was so inbred that their jaws wouldn't close, so large was the overbite. Hapsburgs dined with fourteen forks and twenty spoons as the gallery looked on in 1913 at this strange world hoping for a breach of etiquette. That's what I feel about the freakish world of the small press and their degenerate scenesters.

Meanwhile, 85% of the country is Christian. I find the representation of Christians in literary journals to be so tiny as to constitute deliberate cultural genocide. When I'm reading, I'm usually looking for the viewpoint of Christians. I can only think of one widely published Christian poet in America -- Richard Jones (who's British). There are a few others -- Robert Cording, and well, can you think of any others? I tend to buy their books and read them thirty times. In terms of CONSERVATIVE Christian poets, I don't know any. I can't think of any poet who could get published if they were openly against abortion, or thought sex with strangers was a TERRIBLE idea, or even thought it was less than FUCKING FANTASTIC.

If you went through the top 100 literary journals in America, many of which are published with federal money, how many openly out-of-the-closet Christian writers or writings would you find? The number of readers and writers left standing in the fifth year of the Khmer Rouge would be many times larger.

SUPER BOWL RESULTS: Packers win!

I don't think I have ever watched an entire NFL football game. I don't like football because you can't see the players' faces, and thus have no sense of their emotions. Why then would you watch it? It's fun to watch chess or boxing or American Idol because you can see the emotions on the stars' faces. Last night I watched football, because the kids wanted to have a Superbowl Party. We loaded up on Doritos and pizza, and turned the game on. My initial impression was that the Steelers looked like Sumo wrestlers on steroids. Their huge guard Chris Kemoeatu (#68), was so big his love handles themselves were sixty pound droplets of fat. He's only 6'3" but he weighs 344 pounds.

We googled him and he's from some Pacific island kingdom named Tonga. Five NFL players hail from that tiny island.

After the game (the Packers won but it was close until the last three minutes) I flicked the channel and caught the last ten minutes of Bill O'Reilly's interview with President Obama. O'Reilly asked Obama if he planned to see the Superbowl (the interview was pre-taped). Obama said yes, and he didn't plan to chit-chat during the game because, as he said, "I know football." He also said the Packers were a faster lighter team, and so he thought they would win.

The game was the classic tactical problem of strength versus speed and maneuverability.

Obama's prediction turned out right. I thought that here (finally) is an area of competence for the president. It would be fun if he turned out to be an NFL play-by-play announcer for ESPN after his stint goofing up American legislation, and causing a crisis among constitutional lawyers with Obamacare, (which looks like it's going to tie up American state and appellate courts for the next two years at least).

I ate five large slices of pizza, and slammed Doritos during the game, and even drank a non-alcoholic beer in order to experience America at its phattest.

I got on the scale this morning and was at 178, four pounds over my average. I was stunned. I still weigh 166 pounds less than Chris Kemoeatu but ...

Here's a video of Chris Kemoeatu in action:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2OufAOf3jM

CULTURAL COLLISIONS POETRY CONTEST

Ends February 14, 2010. Usual rules apply: Less than 26 lines, voting held on the 15th. One vote per discussant/participant.

LANGUAGE FUTURES

The squeaky wheel was once the Greeks
As they rolled siege engines toward Troy
Helen was on a trading route
Later the world capital was Rome then Paris

Now it's New York
Named after the Duke of York
Brother of Charles II
Glittering green fields of Haarlem
The Dutch of New Amsterdam
Gave way to the commercial potential of Wall St.

Now it's been struck by planes
With men speaking Arabic
Futures in Arabic up 50%
Korean growing rapidly
We haven't had a war w/France
Since the 1760s
(French study down, departments closing...)
People along the border learn Spanish
Talk to your invader
Maybe it'll make some cents