Category Archives: Poetry

Poetry, Security

Poet wins lawsuit against FCC censorship

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According to the pridesource site, Wharton is hosting the decorated poet Sarah Jones:

She also received an NYCLU Calloway Award in recognition of Jones as the first artist in history to sue the Federal Communications Commission for censorship. The lawsuit resulted in reversal of the censorship ruling that had targeted her hip-hop poem recording, “Your Revolution.”

A regular uncensored guest on public radio, she has also made numerous TV appearances on HBO, NBC, ABC, CBS, PBS, CNN, and in her own special, “The Sarah Jones Show,” on Bravo.

Event details are here.

The group that helped Jones fight against the FCC has provided a description of the lawsuit:

The work entitled “Your Revolution” is a protest against the degrading treatment of women in popular culture.

The lawsuit filed in federal court in New York challenges the FCC’s indecency determination for focusing on sexual terms in the work without any acknowledgment that their context is a critique of the frequently offensive treatment of women in popular hip hop music. The FCC filed a motion to dismiss arguing that the artist can not challenge the agency’s determination in federal court.

[…]

While pleased that the FCC recognized the error of its ways, we remain concerned about FCC “indecency” procedures and the harm that can be done to artists like Sarah Jones, and will continue to work on the issue.

Poetry, Security

More news that Halliburton contaminated US soldiers

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I wrote about this security incident briefly last month. A new video on YouTube now sheds some absolutely shocking and downright gut-wrenching first-person evidence related to Halliburton’s apparent failure to treat water for soldiers or notify them that the water put into tanks was no different than that in the Eurphrates river itself.

It is one thing to read a story like Confessions of an Economic Hitman about the way Halliburton exploited and destroyed foreign markets:

As Chief Economist and Director of Economics and Regional Planning at MAIN, his primary job was to convince Less Developed Countries (LDCs) around the world to accept multibillion dollar loans for infrastructure projects and to see to it that most of this money ended up at MAIN, Bechtel, Halliburton, Brown and Root, and other U.S. engineering/construction companies. The loans left the recipient countries wallowing in debt and highly vulnerable to outside political and commercial interests.

But these latest reports are starting to show that Halliburton was even cheating with regard to the health of US soldiers who had no choice but to trust their systems. What kind of company would do such a thing? From the MSNBC quote of the original Granger [Theatre Water Quality Manager in the war zone for Halliburton’s KBR subsidiary] report:

“Theatre wide there is no formalized training for anyone at any level in concerns to water operations.â€? […] Confusion between KBR and military officials over their respective roles. For instance, each assumed the other would chlorinate the water at Ar Ramadi for any uses that would require the treatment. […] Inadequate or nonexistent records that could have caught problems in advance. Little or no documentation was kept on water inventories, safety stand-downs, audits of water quality, deliveries, inspections and logs showing alterations or modifications to water systems.

It seems to me the company was put in charge of purifying the water. So the fact that no one was actually running the purification system, coupled with the fact that no one was actually testing to see if the purification system was running…

Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962) “Shine, Republic”:

The quality of these trees, green height; of the sky, shining, of water, a clear flow; of the rock, hardness.

And reticence: each is noble in its quality. The love of freedom has been the quality of Western man.

Poetry

October

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by Robert Frost (1874 – 1963)

O hushed October morning mild,
Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;
Tomorrow’s wind, if it be wild,
Should waste them all.
The crows above the forest call;
Tomorrow they may form and go.
O hushed October morning mild,
Begin the hours of this day slow.
Make the day seem to us less brief.
Hearts not averse to being beguiled,
Beguile us in the way you know.
Release one leaf at break of day;
At noon release another leaf;
one from our trees, one far away.
Retard the sun with gentle mist;
Enchant the land with amethyst.
Slow, slow!
For the grapes’ sake, if the were all,
Whose elaves already are burnt with frost,
Whose clustered fruit must else be lost–
For the grapes’ sake along the all.

History, Poetry, Security

My Country Awake

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A poem by Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941):

Where the mind is without fear and the head held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by Thee into ever-widening thought and action;
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

I get stuck somewhere on the “desert dand of dead habit” as I see sand contantly changing and evolving while a stream is burdened by following a familiar path (thus it is a stream, rather than a sea or ocean). Heraclitus would probably disagree, though, as he said you can never step into the same stream twice; it, and you, have undergone countless changes.

Incidentally, I also found a site where you can hear and/or watch actor Martin Sheen read it aloud, “at a rally for Appalachia in Athens County, Ohio”. Sheen does a fine job with this politically charged commentary on political security, but something tells me he is slightly off the poet-to-poem connection. Maybe Sheen would have been more suited for a more self-reflective theme like Shatner’s “Has Been” collection.