The Activist Awards

By Ralph Nader, The Nader Page

16 February 14

he annual Academy Awards GALA, viewed by one billion people worldwide, is scheduled for the evening of March 2, 2014. Motion pictures and the people who act in and produce them are center stage. Apart from the documentaries, this is a glittering evening of “make-believe” and “make business.”

Now suppose our country had another Academy Awards GALA for citizen heroes – those tiny numbers of Americans who are working successfully fulltime in nonprofit groups to advance access to justice, general operations of our faltering democratic society, and the health, safety, and economic well-being of all citizens.

This must sound unexciting in comparison with the intensity of the world of film. Until you see what these unsung people do in your local communities, your state, and your country. Then let’s see if you think what my choice of civic heroes do every day isn’t exciting. They are selected because they work in groups associated either directly or indirectly with me over the course of several decades.

1. Clarence Ditlow, director of the Center for Auto Safety and an engineer and lawyer. Mr. Ditlow has forced the auto companies to recall millions of defective motor vehicles, has brought auto companies to justice on many occasions in courts of law, and puts out volumes of information to inform elected representatives and the public about the need for stronger federal regulation of the resisting auto industry.

2. James Love, director of Knowledge Ecology International. As a mere high school graduate, he stunned specialists with the brilliance of his written analysis of energy subjects in Alaska. Mr. Love has been on the move all over the world challenging the tax-subsidized, highly profitable drug companies to stop gouging millions of patient-victims with “pay or die” marketing schemes. Big Pharma endured a rare defeat when Mr. Love convinced Ministers of Health and Dr. Yusuf Hamied, head of India’s CIPLA Pharmaceutical, in 2001 to break the $10,000 per patient per year drug treatment for AIDS and bring the cost down to $300 per year (http://fireintheblood.com).

3. Dr. Michael F. Jacobson was a young PhD student in biochemistry at MIT when I interviewed him for a position with us. I told him we were looking for long-termers. He nodded. Nearly forty-five years later, Dr. Jacobson, having started the Center for Science in the Public Interest, has done more than anyone to document and brightly publicize enjoyable nutritional diets with less salt, sugar and fat. His Center knows how to communicate. Nutrition Action goes to 900,000 subscribers. He sends messages to your stomach in order to stimulate your mind.

4. Al Fritsch, another scientist PhD, joined us at the same time as did Michael Jacobson. He didn’t spend much time in Washington before he returned to his home region of Appalachia where he started the Appalachia Center for Science in the Public Interest. Applied science and technology, as if people mattered most, was his credo. He pioneered simple, old and new ways – for example, to preserve the land and forest, make the drinking water safe, and grow more food – that he conveyed to local people of all ages who then became community scientists innovating themselves.

5. Lois M. Gibbs started as a mother and housewife until she saw what the chemicals seeping through the ground of their middle-income housing project in Niagara Falls were doing to residents, especially children. She then became unstoppable, moving from protesting for a cleanup to starting the Center for Health, Environment and Justice in 1981 with chapters and activists all over the country taking on and often winning the battle against the silent violence of reckless industries.

6. Dr. Sidney M. Wolfe founded with me the Health Research Group of Public Citizen. Do you want to see what a small group of half a dozen people can accomplish in getting rid of hundreds of prescription and over the counter drugs “that don’t work?” Or do you want to learn how Dr. Wolfe has kept the Food and Drug Administration’s feet to the fire and held many doctors accountable to professional standards? Or how about investigating scores of harmful conditions bred by the avarice or incompetence of the medical/hospital/drug industry complex (http://www.citizen.org/healthletter)?

7. Joan Claybrook, went from heading our immense Congress project, that issued magazine-sized profiles of every member of Congress going for re-election in 1972, to running the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) for President Jimmy Carter, and then to the presidency of Public Citizen for nearly thirty years without missing a beat. The auto companies called her “the Dragon Lady.” A fixture on Capitol Hill, she roared down the corridors on behalf of safety protections for millions of Americans.

8. Karen Ferguson started, a few years out of Harvard Law School, with my help the Pension Rights Center (PRC) in 1976. Karen and her staff dedicated themselves completely to being a watchdog of Congress, the Department of Labor, and a myriad of corporations, proposing legislative and regulatory changes and responding to the growing crisis of declining or looted traditional pensions for millions of workers. One of the biggest economic injustices in our economy is the loss or shredding of defined benefit pensions which either aren’t being replaced or are replaced by exploitable 401(k)s. Trillions of dollars and millions of families are affected – luckily, the PRC and Ms. Ferguson are there year in and year out.

9. Robert C. Fellmeth in 1970 brought hundreds of eager law students from Harvard and other law schools to work with us. In a short time he authored or co-authored three large books, then went to California to become a prosecutor, then combined a career as law professor, litigator and leading public advocate for children through his Children’s Advocacy Institute. No one can ever outwork or out-produce Fellmeth. His example has prompted his associates to coin the word “Fellmethian.” His emphasis on children – protection, legislation, lawsuits, exposes, and a unique annual California Children’s Budget only provide a glimmer of this creative civic giant’s prodigious successes.

10. Robert G. Vaughn, when in his mid-twenties, chose our project on the federal civil servants. His work became a book titled The Spoiled System (1975). Over forty years later he teaches at American University Washington College of Law in Washington, D.C., is an expert on civil servant law and is the world’s leading authority on whistle-blowing in dozens of countries (see The Successes and Failures of Whistleblower Laws, Edward Elgar, 2012). He has inspired hundreds of law students in treating law as justice and practicing along that pathway.

11. John Richard, has worked with us since 1978 becoming a peerless networker and adviser for citizen groups, their leaders and staff on all kinds of subjects. In his thirty-five years, he has participated in more gatherings and action meetings on more topics than anyone. This has nourished the wisdom of his assistance to scores of civic advocates who seek his help. Mr. Richard avoids taking any credit but his daily low-key pushing forward of the train of justice speaks for itself.

These people of significance, and many more stalwarts who labor in the vineyards of a better life for all Americans, receive far less public attention than cartoon characters, misbehaving entertainers and athletes, and carousing politicians.

The more difficult, despairing, and overburdened are the livelihoods of millions of hard-pressed Americans, the more they spend time becoming spectators of mass entertainment and sports as a distraction and relief from their painful and desperate situations.

A drama-filled activist award night for civic courage and creativity will inspire millions of viewers to try their hand at operating the levers of power for the good of our society. And what is more dramatic than real life struggles and successes for justice against the bullies, the greedhounds and the authoritarians who presently make up the few who rule the many?

Dare it be said that the more people immerse themselves in learning about these heroics, the more compelling will be their civic interest and passion. Certainly there is more meaning to their daily lives than watching “make-believe” or someone putting a ball in a hoop or into the ground.

Where is the enlightened billionaire who can launch such a televised national activist awards evening for the greatest work of humans on Earth – which is advancing justice?

Can Atrocity Be the Subject Matter of Poetry?

By Robyn Creswell, The New Yorker

16 February 14

an atrocity be the subject matter of poetry? Carolyn Forché’s prose poem “The Colonel” was published in “The Country Between Us” (1981), a volume whose best-known poems concern the civil war in El Salvador. That conflict was just beginning when Forché travelled to the country, on a Guggenheim fellowship, to work with Amnesty International. “The Colonel” describes the poet’s dinner at the home of a military man. After the meal—“rack of lamb, good wine”—the officer leaves the room and comes back with a grocery bag full of human ears, which he spills onto the dinner table. He tells the poet that human-rights workers can go fuck themselves, then raises his glass in an ironic salute and says, “Something for your poetry, no?”

The excitement generated by Forché’s early work—Denise Levertov called her “a poet who’s doing what I want to do,” and Jacobo Timerman suggested that she was the next Neruda—grew out of a sense that she was reinventing the political lyric at a moment of profound depoliticization. While her contemporaries wrote poems of domestic unhappiness and the supermarket sublime (so this story goes), Forché was making engagé poetry out of Reagan-era dirty wars. Forché herself shied away from such claims. The poetry that interested her was not political, per se, but was what she called a “poetry of witness.” This was not the work of partisans but of those who, like Amnesty International, stood in solidarity with “the party of humanity.” Witness poetry was testimonial rather than polemical. The opening line of “The Colonel” states, simply, “What you have heard is true.”

Twelve years after publishing “The Country Between Us,” Forché edited an impressive anthology, “Against Forgetting” (1993), which argued for the poetry of witness as a coherent tradition in twentieth-century poetry. In her introduction, Forché located the intellectual origins of witness poetry in the work of European philosophers and poets—Walter Benjamin, Paul Celan, Edmond Jabès—whose lives and writings were marked by the experience of the Holocaust. In the aftermath of the death camps, such thinkers conceived of the poem as a stay against oblivion, “an event and the trace of an event.” Witness poetry also made ethical claims on its readers, who were asked to recognize, at a bare minimum, “that-which-happened.” As Wislawa Szymborska writes in “The Hunger Camp As Jaslo”:

Write it. Write. In ordinary ink
on ordinary paper: they were given no food,
hey all died of hunger. “All. How many?
It’s a big meadow. How much grass
for each one?” Write: I don’t know.
History counts its skeletons in round numbers.

Alongside poets whose primary trauma was the Holocaust, Forché included works by Latin Americans, Russians, Eastern Europeans, and Arabs, often in remarkably good translations. The anthology made it possible to link the fractured stanzas of Celan (“no one / bears witness for the / witness”) to the lyrics of Mahmoud Darwish, another poet of traces and inscriptions, whose verse establishes a counter-history of Palestine. If the poetry of witness is in some sense an invented tradition, then Forché’s anthology was nevertheless a valuable one. By placing such disparate poets together in one book, she allowed the reader to make unexpected, even startling, connections, which is what anthologies do at their best.

Now Forché has collaborated with Duncan Wu, a professor of English Romantic poetry at Georgetown, to edit a second big anthology, “The Poetry of Witness: The English Tradition, 1500-2001.” The collection begins with verse by Thomas More and ends with a ghazal by Agha Shahid Ali. Many of the selections are war poems, mainly from the English and American civil wars and the two world wars, while others take up the cause of abolitionism or women’s rights. There are a number of poems composed in prison, some in sight of the gallows (Wyatt’s “Sighs are my food, drink are my tears”), as well as devotional verse and, particularly in the modern period, many elegies.

It isn’t always clear why these poems belong in the same book, or why they count as poems of witness. Each editor has written a separate prefatory text, and it is difficult to make the two match up. Forché’s essay in the collection, “Reading the Living Archives,” repeats many points made in her introduction to “Against Forgetting.” She enlists the philosophies of Emanuel Lévinas and Jacques Derrida to her notion of witness poetry, but makes no mention of English-language verse. And, in fact, it is hard to see how Lévinas’s notion of witnessing as “the owning of one’s infinite responsibility for the other” could help one to determine a selection of poems. Perhaps Forché’s essay wasn’t written with the present anthology in mind, but, then, one wonders what it’s doing here.

Duncan Wu’s introduction sets out the editorial criteria more straightforwardly. Unlike Forché, he emphasizes the poetry of witness as a type of political verse. “The poems in this book are acts of resistance,” he claims. “Some of our authors defy injustice to the extent of incurring the wrath of those willing to impose the ultimate sanction of death; some face risks, whether on the battlefield or in the forum of public debate.” This seems an overstatement. It is true that Marvell’s “An Horatian Ode Upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland,” arguably the finest piece of political rhetoric in English, is no mere panegyric. It manages to elegize Charles I and to register Marvell’s doubts about Cromwell’s scorched-earth tactics in Wexford and Drogheda. But to call it an act of resistance stretches the sense of that phrase.

There is something frustratingly vague about the notion of a poetry of witness, even in Forché’s initial formulation. Does the poet of witness need to have direct experience of the events in question, as seems to be the case with “The Colonel,” or can witnessing take place at a distance, so to speak? Some of the most powerful poetry of witness—Charles Reznikoff’s “Testimony,” for example, or the pages devoted to the Armenian genocide in Les Murray’s “Fredy Neptune,” neither of which appear in this volume—does not rely on having been present at the events in question. And what, exactly, is an “event”? Is there a common scale of experience between a solitary death, a protracted civil war, and a genocide?

Wu’s conflation of witness poetry with political verse may add to the confusion. “The Poetry of Witness” includes many works by nineteenth-century women’s-rights advocates and critics of slavery, “motivated by their willingness to denounce religious or political injustice,” as Wu writes. But is denouncing the same as bearing witness? And why are only these movements represented in the anthology? Bearing witness—as Forché does, at least, seem to recognize—is a politically neutral action. There is nothing inherently progressive about being a witness. (Ezra Pound on Hitler: “Like many martyrs, he held extreme views.”) The editors’ decision to include the voices of heroic liberalism also means there is too much verse that is, by all conventional criteria—vividness of language, ability to surprise, techniques of rhyme and rhythm—very bad.

Yes, injured woman, rise, assert thy right!
Woman! Too long degraded, scorned, oppressed;
Oh born to rule in partial law’s despite
Resume thy native empire over the breast!

—Anna Laetitia Barbauld, “The Rights of Woman”

For all their arguments about the past, one senses that both editors are ultimately concerned about the poetry and poets of today, as many anthologists are and should be: a tradition needs heirs. In his introduction, Wu argues, “The concentration of contemporary poets on the realm of the personal, almost to the point of myopia, is peculiar to recent times. Prior to that, poets commonly discussed experiences shared by the larger community in which they lived.” Lots of critics tell the same story. Whereas poetry was once a public art addressed to a broad audience, it has become—since around the sixties—the concern of a coterie, incomprehensible even to educated readers. Rather than discussing the experiences of the larger community, poetry has retreated into the workshops of Master’s programs, where its death throes go on unnoticed by the rest of the culture.

This story isn’t wholly inaccurate. Who would deny that poetry occupies a more and more restricted terrain in our republic of letters? But this isn’t because poets refuse to discuss the experiences of the larger community. In fact, much of the smartest poetry being written today is explicitly political, though I would not call it a poetry of resistance or denunciation.

One of the best collections of poetry published last year was Geoffrey G. O’Brien’s “People on Sunday.” The title poem refers to a German silent film that depicts group of young Berliners on a weekend outing, and O’Brien’s poems are animated by a concern with work and leisure, pleasure and unemployment. Few books evoke life in a recession (“Your best work is still behind you”) more acutely than this one: “It takes weeks / To learn how to use a negative space / Effectively. When the markets close / You feel time flows differently inside / Then you may close the book and drive, / Full of arid conflicts.” For O’Brien—whose work I take to be representative in this sense—poetry cannot establish its relevance by denouncing injustice. After all, we live in a time when “the poem / Is now believed to be the most distant / Object ever seen.” The more urgent (and patently political) task is to reconceive what community is, including the community of poetry: What are its borders, what binds it together, how is it maintained, why does it fall apart? In O’Brien’s version, this task can be a joyful one, similar to what Marx would call unalienated labor: “We decided to rebuild our home again / In the intermittent sun, strangers with arms / Linked to protect the thing behind them.”

“The Poetry of Witness” argues for the importance of a public-spirited poetry, willing to speak the truth to power. This is an important argument, but I wonder if its lessons and examples will instruct contemporary poets. The best of them seem to think of poetry’s possibilities along rather different lines than the verse of this anthology (though perhaps not so differently from Walt Whitman). Not as acts of resistance or denunciation but, rather, as efforts to reimagine, for our own time, what is public, what is poetic, and how they might come together.