Arts & Culture

Of course war creates jobs:
People who lie for a living,
and people who die for a living.

Both are in high demand/
Like a marine band/
Or an honor guard/

Next to the 'Nam diggers/
Working hard/
In the graveyard/

Blowing bugles, firing rounds/
Simulating real war sounds/
Somber notes on hallow bounds/
Justified on shallow grounds/

And so the monied market waits/
For these fine jobs that war creates...

_______

christopher bifani is a poet, artist, musician and activist in Wilmington, North Carolina. His website is: Website

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Although the showing of David and Monsanto appeared to be a sold out showing at the Gateway Film Center on Sunday night, there were plenty of open seats--a result of online ticket buyers making other plans for the night. Or, for the more conspiratorial of us, a Monsanto employee may have bought up the remaining tickets at the box office in order to reduce the number of viewers. Oh, laugh now, but you may wonder after seeing the film.

David and Monsanto is the story of Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser and his legal struggle with corporate biotech company Monsanto. (Also featured is Troy Roush, an Indiana farmer of FOOD, INC. documentary fame.) This movie is a first hand account of the increasingly familiar tale of Monsanto harassing farmers with every means possible--civil lawsuits, stalking, trespassing, slander, threats, and crop contamination.

Percy Schmeiser is clearly no sophisticated businessman. He is a simple farmer. Perhaps that is why his message is so powerful. When Percy Schmeiser says, "GMO is about controlling the food supply" I believe him.

David Swanson, author of "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union," which rose to #1 among nonfiction books on Amazon.com the day it was published, will publish a new book called "War Is A Lie" on Monday, November 22nd and encourage readers to purchase it that day on Amazon.

More information as well as a variety of audio and eBooks, and bulk purchasing are available at http://warisalie.org

WAR IS A LIE is a thorough refutation of every major argument used to justify wars, drawing on evidence from numerous past wars, with a focus on those wars that have been most widely defended as just and good. This is a handbook of sorts, a manual to be used in debunking future lies before future wars have a chance to begin.

“David Swanson despises war and lying, and unmasks them both with rare intelligence. I learn something new on every page.” — Jeff Cohen, founder of FAIR and author of Cable News Confidential.

Read My Pins: Stories From a Diplomat’s Jewel Box
My nephew, Rob Havener, teases me that I am instantly captivated by shoes and shiny objects, and he is right. I love jewelry–shoes too, but that is another book review–and brooches are my favorite. They are at once distinctly adult and wonderfully feminine.

The Museum of Arts and Design in New York found Albright’s jewelry and the role it played in her diplomat career worthy of an exhibition, and the book was written as a companion volume. Read My Pins is a delightful romp through the history of jewelry, the third wave of feminism, American foreign policy and Albright’s own personal journey.

If one tried to fit music compositions into an equivalent literary style, Gilad Atzmon & The Orient House Ensemble’s latest release would come across as a most engaging political essay: persuasive, argumentative, rational, original, imaginative and always unfailingly accessible.

But unlike the rigid politicking of politicians and increasingly Machiavellian style of today’s political essayists – so brazen they no longer hide behind illusory moral façades - the band’s latest work is also unapologetically humanistic.

Those familiar with the writings of Gilad Atzmon - the famed ex-Israeli musician and brilliant saxophone player, now based in London – can only imagine that Gaza was the place that occupied his thoughts as he composed The Tide Has Changed.

In the 1930s, Woody Guthrie liked to write “This machine kills fascists” on his guitar. It was a period when folk musicians stood with the people against corporate greed. This is one of the reasons that folk musicians were attacked and blacklisted during the McCarthy era. But they rose again as the reporters that offered the soundtrack for the civil rights movement in the mid to late 50s. Phil Ochs told us more about what was going on in Mississippi than scholars and intellectuals.

Today, if you want to know what’s going on in the world, you want an accurate report on where injustice is being done and people are being oppressed, the best single source of news is David Rovics. I consider him one of the greatest singer-songwriters of our time. In the same way many people watch The Daily Show over the corporate for-profit news shows, Rovics albums give us a far more insightful view on what’s really going on in the world today.

Children of Catastrophe is a work of courage, love - of family, friends, and country - persistence, grief, sorrow, joy, anger, bravery, fear, and frustration - in short it encompasses all the emotions that not only are part of life, but a large part of life for a child born and raised in a refugee camp. Nahr el Bared refugee camp was established in 1949 after the nakba in Palestine. Set near the northern border of Lebanon with Syria, the camp existed, grew, and to a degree, thrived and prospered until it was destroyed by the Lebanese army in 2007.

Nakba and ethnic cleansing

The first sections of Jamal Kanj’s story outline very quickly the events of the nakba, with references to the even longer history of Zionism going back to 1896 and a declaration from Theodore Herzl concerning the endeavour “to expel the poor population across the border unnoticed, procuring employment for it in transit countries, but denying it any employment in our own country.”

Andrew Bacevich has written another authoritative and well written book examining the U.S. military and its influence on the United States. His writing -- here as with his earlier works [1] -- is provocative, challenging, well researched, informative, and logically argued. Only someone thoroughly imbued with the rhetoric of U.S. benign stewardship of global affairs and ignorant of many key events within recent and current U.S. foreign affairs might be able to ignore Bacevich's presentations and contentions about U.S. foreign policy and U.S. militarism.

It has been decades since it was fashionable to talk about the poor in the United States, especially if they are black. The last political candidate who was a champion of the disadvantaged was the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy. He truly identified with them, and during his run for the presidency in 1968, he was often heard exhorting America about their plight and reminding us that “We can do better.” Former Senator John Edwards also spoke passionately about poverty during his run for the presidency in 2004; he even announced his presidential candidacy in 2008 from the yard of a home in New Orleans, already a desperately downtrodden area further devastated by Hurricane Katrina. Now that he has been discredited as a political candidate, who will speak for America’s poor?

Like the Founding Fathers, Abraham Lincoln presents scholars, especially African American scholars, with quite a conundrum. On the one hand, here is the man who is given credit for freeing the slaves, the Great Emancipator. On the other, Lincoln was a man who publicly and privately professed a belief that blacks, whether slave or free were inferior to whites–clearly Lincoln must have thought of Frederick Douglass as an exception–and that colonization was a fine idea after all. Which Lincoln should we, especially those of us who are black, believe and admire?

Henry Louis Gates says that in order to answer that question, we might do well to consult a well-used notebook that Lincoln kept on his person dealing with the great issue of the day: slavery. In it were facts and figures he could call upon during a debate, while writing a letter or while wrestling with himself over the so-called Negro question.