The Problem with President Obama

I write this blog post as a continued supporter of the President. The problem with the president is that he really does not understand that what has been called for during the past three years has been someone to channel the rage that now fills the United States. The rage that has been captured by the "tea party" and the rest has been channeled instead by others who have used it to destroy this presidency.

Lets be honest from the moment President Obama was attacked and demonized by the Fox News/Michelle Malkin/Rush Limbaugh/Bill O'Reilly/Laura Ingraham wing of the right. they wanted him to fail and they used their power and money to do that. Since they were the only ones screaming and yelling they got listened to and they financed the Tea Party with their corporate friends to channel legitimate rage to their own ends.

In contrast to Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Ronald Reagan President Obama let his opponents define him and demonize him and while America continues to live under despair he slowly became irrelevant. So instead of attacking the problems the way Roosevelt, Truman and Reagan did and speaking directly to the American people rallying the country to move towards change.

President Obama tried to be calm and reasonable while millions of people were losing their homes and retirements. He tried to be an "adult" while we watched our whole economy collapse and when he tried to empathize it came across like the pat on the head from a Priest or Teacher rather than a fighter for us.

The result is that the rage in America, and this rage is real, has been taken by the Right Wing and made into their rallying cry. This has happened before in history in the 1920's in Germany. America and Germany in the same period are often contrasted but today America is more like Germany in the 1920's a damaged power. Do not delude yourself America is a country where a pandora's box has opened and do not be surprised if what happened in England last week does not come here to America soon. Two whole generations, X and Millennials are being crushed by this Recession and they are angry.

President Obama could have avoided this fate. If he had just gone out to the country and rallied the nation to change that would have dealt with the China challenge and the obvious decline of the nation.

If he had just demanded that Americans work together to deal with our problems and fought for those who have lost everything his photo would be in every house the way FDR's was in the 1930's.

Even if he had salved Americans the way Reagan did that would have been an improvement but instead he did not bring passion to the nation and he gave those who hate him a cudgel that they are now using against him.

We are looking at President Rick Perry to manage our decline.

If President Obama had just listened to everyone in the Grant Park it might have been different. We wanted to be inspired and told we could do anything and instead we got despair.

Elitism is the Problem in Art and Business

Elitism is the problem?

Whether it is poetry or business I find that elitism is what stifles us as a society.

The doors to opportunity are blocked by an elite that make sure their power is not challenged. What has happened is that those who have much make sure that they retain what they possess and close out innovation and change.

In poetry this is represented by the Elites in fine universities who dominate the poetic discourse. What has been created is a world where to be a 'poet' means something you have an advanced degree and teach at a university. Yet only the tenure tracked elite really rule this world and most poets and writers who do teach toil as adjuncts with no benefits and the usually "progressive" academics do everything in their power to keep their positions and keep out younger or more innovative voices.

You see this in all areas presses, foundations, and even bookstores. Poetry in general is dominated by elitism while most real expression is marginalized as "Unserious".

In business too this is the case.

As a poet who also is a business person I see it all the time. The young innovator is squashed ignored because their ideas would upset the apple cart. Business leaders like to worship at the altar of "innovation" but actually most senior executives are just scared and wont innovate in today's environment.

The result is that energy and innovation is at best ignored or at worst eliminated. Look at who loses jobs in a company? Look at who gets promoted I assure you that the corporate "player" gets the promotion and the "innovator" gets shown the door.

I have written here about the fall of the Roman Empire and the Fall of the American Empire and I think another parallel is the fact that in the last 100 years of the Roman Empire social classes froze. People were proscribed into jobs because of who their parents were or because they fit into a certain social class. The result was an end of innovation and the end of Art.

How many late Roman poets do we read?

How Many Late Roman Innovations, save Christianity, do we laud?

In the end the problem is elitism and I think that when the history of today is written that will be the thing that people remember and wonder how a society a based on the precept that anyone can rise allowed that to become reality.

Diocletian and Constantine

I am now convinced that we are witnessing the fall of the American empire. Ronald Reagan was our Diocletian and Barack Obama is our Constantine.

The End of Borders Books

When Borders books entered the Chicago Market in 1986 I was a sophomore in college. Chicago had some good local bookstores of which Barbara's and Seminary Coop have survived and a couple of locals like Kroch's and Brentano's which did not. But Borders in Oak Brook was different. It reminded you more of Prairie Lights in Iowa City it had a great selection and was a good place to buy books in suburbs without good bookstores.

Now they are going out of business.

Much has been written about the demise of bookstores. The fact is that a whole series of irreplaceable institutions are being destroyed in America. In many places Catholic schools are but a memory as are small liberal arts colleges and the demise of bookstores is the same problem. You can talk about the internet and kindles and alike but should all the knowledge of the world be only in the ether?

I continue to buy real books. I continue to shop at the Book Table in Oak Park, IL , Seminary Coop in Hyde Park and any other good bookstore. I love the serendipity of it all. Finding a book by looking and reading a few pages and when I am finished putting it on my shelves for future use. I hope that the day never comes when that simple pleasure cannot be enjoyed and I will miss Borders only because it was another place to do that when your wife was shopping for panty hose or brasseries.

My Ancestors the Crusader

As a poet I have always wondered if I could write prose? I can do essays and blog posts but to write a novel was in fact something that always scared me. So I began to work on a novel a few years ago and as part of that work I began to research my family tree for interesting characters and stories. I come from an interesting bunch that ranges from southern Italian rock farmers to it appears aristocratic nobiles from Brescia.

There is a character from my personal history who was always an enigma to my family. My Grandmother Matilde was named after her and was her favorite grandchild and this person was my ancestor and Great Great Grandmother Nobile Metilde Gorno. Nonna Metilde we were always told was a Nobile and that she came from a great family but she chose to marry my great great grandfather, Luigi Guerra who owned a hotel and restaurant and whose name I bear in my middle name. I always wondered why she would leave a life of privilege in the 1870's?

While that mystery has not been solved of why she would marry my ancestor who was known for running a great restaurant. I have found out so much about her family that none of my Grandmother's siblings or my mother's cousins knew about.

They were not only nobles but have a fascinating history. They survived the black death as one of the few families in their town and rose to prominance. My wife Waltraud and I went to their town last month on a vacation and it became evident how prominent they were with palaces and streets named after them. and one of of their forefathers one Scipio Conde di Luzzago was a Crusader. If you have ever seen the Verdi Opera i Lombardi it is about his Crusade.

The world is a very small place and all history is personal.

July 4th 2011

When I was child we would go to Italy for vacation to see family and sometimes on July 4th we would go to Pinzolo, the town of my Grandfather for the fourth of July. Pinzolo was known for two things creating missionaries and priests and exporting knife grinders to the world. All over the world there are Pinzolo knife grinders today and many of them had returned to the town of their birth to retire and open businesses. It was always funny to me to hear them talk. They all had different accents. My grandfather had a New York accent but there were grinders from Australia, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta and South Africa but they would gather for the fourth and they built a memorial in Pinzolo to their efforts. The thing that made me proudest is that these people had done so much with their lives and they were full of hope.

The Fourth of July for them was a day of hope.

I fear that that hope has been extinguished. It is not political it is just a fact. In the USA that hope that anything is possible and that if you work hard and try to save and build you will be rewarded had been destroyed by a global system that rewards cleverness over hard work and which in the end has destroyed the greatest economic story of human history. It is evident to me that the hope that my 19 year old grandfather had sharpening knives during the depression in Brooklyn does not exist anymore in the USA. We are victims now of a global financial system that does not care for his kind of anachronistic vision.

This sadness and lack of hope pervades the United States. Some of it is manifest by Tea Partiers and others by Leftists but watch MSNBC ior FOX for a evening and what you get is negative, hopeless and sad. Where is the America of John Glenn? Where is the America of my grandfather coming to America and when he died be had worked hard and lived a good life and built something?

That America has been killed by a theory.

America was never a "Free Market" nation. That was what Britain was. We were always a nation that allowed small markets and local people work really hard to build something but over time conservatives had made bigger better and more free to exploit so we de industrialized and in the end we became two nations one educated and the other in "service".
College had become a life long expense where a family can almost never pay for it and where students amass tens of thousands in debt not allowing them to ever follow their dreams. And those who are protected like corporate titans and union workers sit in their gains keeping out the rest.

America in 2011 looks more like Brazil in 1950 and Brazil in 2011 looks more like America in 1950. It is the fault of the class that runs America both left and right and if they do not change what is happening it is going to make Greek and British riots look like child's play.

American hopefullness and dream is ending and what will replace it?

Another President from Texas?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303635604576391671267240408.html

I just watched a blistering speech by Governor Rick Perry of Texas. A combination of Jefferson Davis and Davy Crockett this speech was the kind of red meat that Conservatives love and it looks like he is going to run for president. So here we have it our deep thinking, socially liberal president of the future, who comes from Hyde Park in Chicago against a man who comes from the cotton fields of Abilene, Texas and who once said that Texas ought to leave the Union.

What will Americans choose?

Frankly, I think the Texan wins.

For all the "Yes We Can" rhetoric of the Obama campaign the thing that President Obama has not done is crush his opponents. The fact is that Progressives in the United States have not had a leader who crushed opponents since President Johnson. To put it simply in America the Right does what it wants and its followers are rabid supporters while the Left retreats to its enclaves and complains.

In 2009 the Democrats had complete control of the Federal Government. They passed some good legislation. But they also compromised with those who lost the election and in the end what we got was a muddle rather than change we could believe in. Can you imagine Franklin Roosevelt running this that way? Within a year of his election there were pictures of the President everywhere. Within a year of President Obama's election 50% of the country thought he was a Muslim Communist who caused the Recession. This is because the Left refuses to fight to win and the Right does not do that.

America has been destroyed by Conservative policies. In 1980 America was the world's leading exporter and was the world's creditor nation. In 2011 American companies created more jobs in China than in the United States. In 1980 America was a leader in many sectors. In 2011 we are a laggard. For most of the 1980's, 90's and 2000's we have been governed by Conservative policies. What have those policies gotten us;

1) We have outsourced or off shored millions of jobs.
2) Once Thriving Cities have fallen into the abyss while Southern states, subsidized by Northern Taxes to pay for Water and Power (See Dallas, Atlanta, Las Vegas and Los Angeles) have undercut them.
3) Deficits run up by presidents Reagan and George W Bush turned America into a debtor nation yet our poor Liberal President Obama is blamed for spending?
4) Deregulation of Banks caused the largest financial crash in 70 years. Now the Republicans want to destroy any reform.
5) American used to look forward to pensions and retirement. Today most Americans born after 1950 will NEVER retire.
6) The American Public University System the pride of the country is being systematically defunded so that only the elite can afford an education.
7) Americans have not seen their wages rise in real terms since the 1980's

And this plan is what Rick Perry has in mind for the United States. Rick Perry wants to finish the job of turning America into a nation where "success is rewarded" which is a euphemism for
helping the successful and ignoring the rest.

In fact America and Brazil have traded places. While we were wasting trillions in Iraq, Afghanistan and bailing out unregulated Banks and "opening" our markets to "free trade". Brazil spent its money educating millions of children, building work class infrastructure, creating a bio fuels market that makes the nation self sufficient and protecting their core industries. The Germans have a high value export driven economy. The Chinese are spending millions sending their best students to American Universities and repatriating these students to their shores we on the other hand are building walls and fences to keep people out.

For those of us who so want President Obama to succeed we wait in horror for another President from Texas.

The Valley of My Ancestors

To Most Americans, even those of Italian descent, a visit to Italy is a combination of tourism, gelato, and Roman ruins. But for me Italy is always a visit to the valley of my ancestors. As a poet and writer I am always listening to the music of a place and Vestone the town where my mother is from and my family has dwelt since at least 1500 is a feast for the aural senses.

First off as a person who speaks Italian, Portuguese and Spanish I am very attuned to Latin languages and the dialect spoke is eastern Lombardy is a delight. The guttural sounds and sounds that combine French and Provencial with an almost round sound and then enters sharp and hard grunts that create a language that frankly is so superior to the sweet language of Dante and St Francesco that it pains me why more poetry is not written in that tongue.

The valley where my mother is from is a deep green. With small towns that no tourist bothers to visit but it is a place we are connected to and while my family and friends there are very stylish, frankly the guy who takes care of the goats is more fashionable than most Americans there is a sense of style that I as a fat American cannot but attempt to imitate. Lake Garda another spot of family is just beautiful and my relatives there are just delicious.

The ten days I spent in Italy, more particularly the Valle Sabbia of the Province of Brescia was delightful and to be in the valley of my ancestors, eating Spiedo, Polenta and great Red Wine with a piece of Bagoss.... pretty damn good. You can keep Florence and Milan I will take Vestone everytime. With a side dish of Padenghe and Lake Garda as dessert.

America Causing its Own Decline

The Economy is Stagnant. The May Jobs Report is a disaster. A whole generation is seeing future wash away. If you wanted to know what it felt like in the 1930's you now are getting to feel it. The difference however is that America has always been optimistic until now.

61% of Americans believe that they will never be as prosperous as they were before the Great Recession. Yet in Washington we are arguing about Ayn Rand and Franklin Roosevelt. Lets be honest for the past 30 years America has made a series of bad decisions. Now America needs to make things right. The answer is not ideology. Paul Ryan is wrong and so is Barack Obama we need America to stop arguing and work together.

I think that the US should force Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow to merge their TV shows. Make one side political show illegal. As we watch America decline I think about Rome and Britain and grieve the America of the mood walk is gone perhaps for ever.

John Paul II Great Man- Not a Saint

In 1999 it was the mania to try to pick a Man of the Century. Time Magazine picked Einstein but I have always thought that the true man of the 20th Century was Karol Woytija, Pope John Paul II. He was a victim and opponent of both of that century's evils Nazism and Communism and he also was an opponent of that other great evil, materialism. To say that he was not a good man and an important figure would be untrue but to say that he is a saint?

It seems that Conservative forces need to canonize their leaders see the blessed Ronald Reagan for example but to call John Paul II a saint caused me and millions of other Catholics to pause and wonder what exactly does it mean? Yes it is true that John Paul did good things. But he also allowed some very bad things. Things that are still with us today. He allowed the curia to ignore global sexual abuse and pedophilia. These were not isolated insodents, in over 40 countries hundreds of priests have been convicted of the worst abuse many protected by their bishops so that they could damage multiple children. I know from own life at least three former priests that have been indicted or convicted of these crimes and my bishop covered this up. This happened on John Paul's watch.

I know many will say the Church is a big institution and the Pope cannot see everything. But John Paul and the Present Pope Benedict had interest in all kinds of minutiae. They silenced theologian Hans Kung, Charles Curran and Leonardo Boff. The destroyed in Latin America the Christian Base Community movement allowing Evangelical Churches to fill that void and they created whole new decades of the Rosary. They had the time to redo Church liturgy and prayers and to investigate Nuns and Sisters but they did not have the time or desire to protect Children.

Is this the life of a saint?

There are many people whose sainthood is self evident for their greatness, Francis, Ignatius, Teresa of Avila, Catherine of Siena, Dominic and Benedict. There are people whose sainthood was simple and quiet, Teresa of Lisieux, St Maria Goretti or St. Charbel. There have been Popes who were also saints but has there ever been a saint who allowed evil to thrive?

John Paul is a great man not a saint

Paul Ryan: The End of America as We Knew it.

http://www.salon.com/news/budget_showdown/index.html?story=/tech/htww/2011/04/06/paul_ryans_plan_to_dismantle_the_great_society

Congressman Paul Ryan, who is the same age as I am, announced a budget yesterday that essentially destroys the social safety net in the United States. He also wants to lower the highest tax rate to 25% assuring us that this continued massive transfer of wealth to the rich will make America "fiscally sound".

Paul Ryan and I grew up in in the same America.

Actually we grew up less than a hundred miles from each other and we both watched as whole industrial sectors of our economy up and left because of competition and government policy.

We watched as the Midwest, once one of the most stable and civic minded regions degraded into a series of empty small cities with faded industrial cores, (See Janesville, Buffalo, Rockford, Flint, Gary, Galesburg, Decatur, Newton, Kalamazoo, and many more). We both watched as America made a series of mistakes that lead us to where we are now; unfunded wars, massive subsidies for Sun Belt Growth while we neglected older places, Trade Policies that resulted in the destruction of America's industrial base.

Paul Ryan's solution is to finish off the societal infrastructure that made the America we grew up in possible. He wants to destroy the New Deal and the Great Society even though it was these two movements that made our lives possible. The goal here is to destroy Medicare, thus removing from every senior citizen who are presently under 55 any certainty in their retirement. He wants to gut Medicaid. This would mean that my 97 year old grandmother, who has spent all of her savings on a nursing home would be out on the street or better living with dementia with my parents who are in their 70's. He wants to also attach Social Security later so that their would be no safety net at all but what he wont do is raise taxes on the rich.

When I stood in Grant Park three years ago I did not think that we were voting to make Ayn Rand's America a reality-

President Obama what are you doing? What a disappointment you are. When are you going to fight for the America we wanted?

2011 Irascible Baseball Preview

Recently on the ESPN Baseball Today Podcast Eric Karabell and Company told an English potential fan to root for the White Sox. We of course welcome this fan and I have offered to take this new White Sox fan around Chicago if he ever comes to Chicago. But as the White Sox Poet Laureate it is my duty to keep poetry and the White Sox in check. So now we must preview the 2011 season with a dry eye remembering that there are no more dastardly words than Cubs Win or Twins Win Again.

As we look at 2011 however here are my Irascible Predictions. Invite comment but know that any Cubs propaganda will be deleted. Twins' propaganda is welcomed but will be refuted.

Lets start with the National League

2011 was a good year for the small ballers. I think that 2011 however will be a different year for many reasons.

In the NL East I think that it will be a two team race. The Braves and the Phillies will fight it out until the end. I think that the Mets turmoils will become acute and the team will be sold by September. Florida will face in the humidity.

The NL Central will be moribund. I think that the Cardinals, Reds and Astros will stumble through the summer. The Cubs will lose 95 games and the Brewers will be the biggest disappointment as there risk on Zack Grenke will result in nothing.

The NL West will be all Giants all the time. I think that the Dodgers troubles and the fact that Don Mattingly will fail as manager results in a boring summer with the Giant's repeating.

Now on the Major Leagues

In the American League East I think that the Red Sox will run away with the division. The Yankees are too old and have no pitching and Tampa will not do much. Look for the Blue Jays to have a good year winning at least 87 games and watch for the Orioles. Buck Showalter is a good manager and he will do something for the O's.

The AL Central will be a death cage match. The Twins, Tigers, and White Sox will fight it out all summer in a death spiral. The Royals will win 83 games and the Indians will lose 100 games. I do think that the White Sox will win out but I think it goes 158 games and the three division leaders will tear each other apart. Our Sox win it with 90 wins.

In the AL West this is Oakland's year. Their pitching looks good. Now if they could just fill up there stadium. I wish the A's (or Ray's) would move to New Jersey they would fill up stadiums there and would be welcomed.

In the playoffs I see in the NL

Philadelphia

Atlanta

St Louis

San Francisco

NLCS Philadelphia over San Francisco

In the Playoffs I see in the AL

Boston

Tampa

Chicago

Oakland

ALCS

Boston over Chicago

World Series Philadelphia over Boston

Happy Spring.....

1929 a Hinge in History

My sister's friend is in the process of putting together photos from Vestone, (BS) Italy. What separates this group of photos from so much of the geneology bric a brac that now fills so many websites is that this little town sat at a various nexuses of the 20th century while remaining until recently a small mountain town. The fact that the photos include my Grandmother and Great-aunts makes for more interest for me as well.

Vestone, where my mother is from is one of those places where big things and small things seem to meld. It sits on the road from Austria to the Po Valley. It is a place where Gallo-Italian culture meets German Culture and you can see in the faces the many people who have moved up an down the valley's walls.

For me it has always been the place that I am from. I was born in America but my history for years is from this little place. In fact my family owned the same Albergo from 1413 until 1976. Often today I think kids are taught the kind of platitudes grandparents share.

The stories I heard from these people where of great things. Wars, Art, Literature and great meals and I am thankful that I knew them and carry their images inside of me.

Sounding Like Bill O'Reilly

Downloaded a Poetry Reading by Charles Bernstein. Does anyone else notice that Charles sounds like Bill O'Reilly when he reads?

Also downloaded a poetry talk with Al Filres and other Kelly Writer's House Grandee (great place where Michelle Taransky works). Totally interesting but mind candy.

Black Swans and Poetic Mirrors

As a poet who also works in the business world I have had a unique perspective on what has happened to America and the world over the past three years. I have often wondered what it would be like to live at a time that could be termed a hinge of change and now I know. You can see the signs everywhere of decline. And yet no one who caused this destruction has really had to pay.

http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/

Recently, I read a Book by Professor Nassim Taleb called the Black Swan Theory. His thesis, which by the way was put forth in 2007 is that predictions are mostly bunk and that random events, like the discovery of the internet or the black death or other things cause us to be fooled by the randomness.

In the end what Taleb is arguing for is what America was about until 1980. Starting in 1980 risk became part of our lives in a way that it was not for many years. This was exacerbated by avarice and greed on the part of many people- not just the rich. We all remember the million dollar mortgages to people making $ 70,000 a year.

We are now reaping the whirlwind yet where is the art and poetry reflecting this Black Swan moment?

Not much has changed for poets and poetry While the Black Swan had decimated so many those who dwell in poetry's establishment on campuses and within the Poetic Industrial Complex (this runs from Berkeley to Iowa City, to the Poetry Foundation, to Penn, to Wesleyan, detours at Brown and ends at the Poetry Project in New York) may have seen their funding drop but the conversations seem numbingly the same.

There is no urgency.

Poets in America have never been very political but they have been mirrors of their times. From Whitman t0 Sandberg to Williams to Ginsburg there has been a sense that in our Poetry you could sense America .

I read contemporary poetry from the Post Avant to the Neo Formal and I see the same conversations and same kinds of work as three years ago. The work is aPolitical unless it is about sexual or gender issues.

Vallejo's Book of Spanish Civil War Poems were published in 1937 . Guernica by Picasso was in the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 World's Fair. Literature has encapsulated moments in our history. I am looking for that synthesis and cannot find it in Poetry.

Are there any poets that want to encapsulate this period or is that too much to ask of the ironical poets of our time?

The Incarnation and Bookstores

Normally on Christmas Eve I post the first lines from the Gospel of John about the word becoming flesh and dwelling amongst us. The fact is that the one thing about Christianity- the Roman Catholic kind in my case- that makes it different from other great religions is that we believe that God lived as a person and died for all of us. That God understands intimately what it means to be human and that His incarnation sancifies life and the world. The idea of Incarnation or taking the flesh is essential not only to our faith as Christians but it also means something else all people are equal in the eyes of God and should be so in the eyes of people.

The idea of becoming flesh, in fact becoming real is essential as we venture more and more into a virtual world. Everything seems to be digitized and everything is being reduced to code and the next victim of this could be the bookstore.

As the owner of over 5000 books and a collector of the same the idea that I will never again get to spend a Saturday afternoon trolling the front table at Seminary Co-op in Chicago or looking through the drawers of Chapbooks at Woodland Pattern in Milwaukee or working through the stacks at Powells in Portland, Oregon is a fate worse than say the destruction of Parma, Italy with its great Hams and Cheeses. It is just a sad thing.

I am not a Luddite. I am writing a blog post right now. I love the internet and my iPod but the idea that my books as friends would not be on shelves, full of memories loved and used as they were meant to be is something that I cannot believe that bibliophiles will allow to happen. Right now I am looking at my shelves.

There is a first edition of Robert Duncan's poetry that I bought with my food money at Murphy Brookfield Books in Iowa City. A 1938 section of the Cantos of Ezra Pound that I bought in New York. In the American Tree by Ron Silliman, the Anthology that made me want to write poetry. The Memoir of Pablo Neruda... Clayton Eshelman's wonderful translations of Vallejo that made me want to be a translator and of course Thomas Merton's Seven Storey Mountain which made me remain an angry but obedient Roman Catholic.

How would I consume all of these on my iPad again and again??

In the end for me Bookstores and Books are like the Incarnation. Books with us. Not something apart or distant but a created thing in my hands that has a history and a future. We can embrace technology but must everything be reduced to code?

Merry Christmas, God With Us, Preserve our Books and let us Continue to Have our Friends on our Shelves.

The Future of Poetry without Serendipity

One of the first thinkers to use the Codex which is the immediate ancestor of the book was the Christian philosopher Origen. He translated the Old Testament and put it in columns so that your could read the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek across the page. It was a great triumph for which he was a Doctor of the Church until someone in the early Middle Ages declared him a heretic. but that said the book has been a part of our lives for over 1800 years.

Now we face a challenge. You cannot deny that the e book and the iPad and its kin are a great thing but this great thing might have a very destructive impact. The book is a way for the poet or writer to control what he/she has written. The author decides what goes in and what says out and this means that it is a work of art not a newspaper article.

The problem with the e book and its kin is that the author, the artist, loses control over her own work. Another problem is the death of Serendipity. If you want to make an analogy when I was younger it was possible to go to record store (CD's also) and browse and get suggestions from an actual person on a new band or music group.

Serendipity is also essential for books and poets.

Imagine a world where all poetry is electronic. Where in order to find poetry or novels for that manner that are only generated by electronic media. Imagine a time when the bookstore and the physical book no longer exist? This means for us that the chance finding of a new author or new type of reading will also no longer exist. What does this mean for the future of literature?

I would argue that the book as object as a work of art is too important to not be discussed? Someone out there tell me what is the solution? Or are we all okay with this change?

Is Everything For Sale? Standing with Liu Xiao Bo

Carl von Ossietzky won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1936. He was also not allowed to recieve it in person. von Ossietzky was not allowed to recieve the prize by a new and dynamic political system that also viewed "national sovereignty" as more important than the rights of the individual. He died in a Nazi labor camp of a heart attack after being abused for being a pacifist.

The difference between what happened in 1936 and what happened in 2010 with Chinese poet Liu Xiao Bo is that Germany was never as powerful as China is today or will be in the future.

I have been to China many times and there is not a more creative or harder working people but like the German people who are also creative and hard working they are victims of a system that preaches National Renewal while ignoring human rights. People are regularly imprisoned for going to Mass, or writing poetry or asking for the most basic human rights. The Chinese have unfettered Capitalism with none of the human rights that should come with that system.

The problem with what happened to both von Ossietzky and Liu is that out of fear the free peoples of world's response has been muted and quiet because of fear of the oppressing government's financial power. Yes, I know that President Obama said that he supported Liu and I know that President Roosevelt's administration decried the death of von Ossietzky's death in a Nazi labor camp in 1936 but that was not enough then or now.

I am writing this blog post on a computer made in China. My clothes are made in China. My iPod is made in China and the money in my bank account was loaned to the US government by China. Unlike the 1930's it is impossible to boycott China or Chinese things as it was with German things but the principal is the same. The Declaration of Independence, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen and the UN Charter should not be sold out because the Chinese might be offended. Or they might foreclose on America. It is often said that China is the future. Does the future include being put in a Labor Camp for writing poetry, working as a journalist and asking for China to become a multi party democracy?

That is why Mr Liu is in a Labor Camp.

It is time that we in the Free world, the inheritors of the legacy of Washington, Jefferson, Voltaire, Mazzini, Bolivar, King, Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi ask ourselves are our cheap iPods worth supporting a regime that regularly imprisons people for asking for basic human rights?

I realize that by saying this I might offend the Chinese. But, I choose to stand with Mr Liu. And ask when will this end and when will offense stop being used to justify oppression?

Or is everything for sale?