Let them in, Peter,
They are very tired
Give them couches where the angels sleep
And light those fires
Let them wake whole again
To brand new dawns
Fired with the sun
Not wartime's bloody guns
May their peace be deep
Remember where the broken bodies lie
God knows how young they were
To have to die
God knows how young they were to have to die
Give them things they like
Let them make some noise
Give roadhouse bands, not golden harps
To these our boys
And let them love, Peter
‘Cause they’ve had no time
They should have trees and bird songs
And hills to climb
The taste of summer in a ripened pear
And girls sweet as meadow winds
With flowing hair
Tell them how they are missed
And say not to fear
It's gonna be alright
With us down here
Let them in, Peter...
_____________________
Lyrics by John Gorka, adapted from a poem brought home by an American nurse who worked in the Philippines during World War II; beautifully performed by John Gorka and accompanying musicians on his album "the company you keep."
Tuesday, May 10, 2005
Sunday, May 08, 2005
They can not feel your heart break
Father, Mother, forgive them,
for they know not what they do.
They are blinded by their passion,
they are deafened by their fears.
And they cannot feel your heart break,
and they cannot taste your tears.
______________________________________
excerpt from Kyrie by Swanee Hunt,
lyrics in The Witness Cantata by Swanee Hunt
for they know not what they do.
They are blinded by their passion,
they are deafened by their fears.
And they cannot feel your heart break,
and they cannot taste your tears.
______________________________________
excerpt from Kyrie by Swanee Hunt,
lyrics in The Witness Cantata by Swanee Hunt
Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold...
Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold,
Death's great black wing scrapes the air,
Misery gnaws to the bone.
Why then do we not despair?
By day, from the surrounding woods,
cherries blow summer into town;
at night the deep transparent skies
glitter with new galaxies.
And the miraculous comes so close
to the ruined, dirty houses --
something not known to anyone at all,
but wild in our breast for centuries.
______________________________
poem by Anna Akhmatova
incorporated as lyrics in
The Witness Cantata by Swanee Hunt
Death's great black wing scrapes the air,
Misery gnaws to the bone.
Why then do we not despair?
By day, from the surrounding woods,
cherries blow summer into town;
at night the deep transparent skies
glitter with new galaxies.
And the miraculous comes so close
to the ruined, dirty houses --
something not known to anyone at all,
but wild in our breast for centuries.
______________________________
poem by Anna Akhmatova
incorporated as lyrics in
The Witness Cantata by Swanee Hunt
Saturday, May 07, 2005
I am told you are the goddess of love, fertility, and war...
Dear Inanna:
I am told you are the goddess of love, fertility, and war, fond of the night skies of ancient Babylon. It seems you have been active in recent months. Are you, perhaps, alarmed, aggrieved, and angered by the hordes of American jet planes darting through your beloved desert air?
In photographs from the American run prison at Abu Ghraib I see signs of your vengeful play and, perhaps, the work of your associate Kiskill-lilla (Lilitu/Lilith,) the night demon.
In one picture an American soldier, a young woman, is shown pointing mockingly at the genitals of a naked male prisoner who has been forced to masturbate. She has an eager and wide smile as though she is pointing to a fish she has caught while out with the boys. We are told that she or another young female soldier caught up in the so-called 'prisoner abuse' returned home pregnant soon after the pictures were taken. So we have elements of war, fertility, and sex -- some of the hallmarks of your presence.
I write in hopes that you will be good enough to help me understand how it is that this American woman became an apparently enthusiastic participant in torture.
Before I explore this question I want to make clear that I try to approach such questions with due appreciation that “there but for the grace of goddesses go I.”
Psychologists have found it rather easy to elicit sadistic abuse from otherwise well-behaved middle-class college students who have been set up in situations of fairly unlimited and arbitrary power over other subjects. I don’t assume that I would not, through some combination of a need to conform to the expectations of my comrades and fear of exclusion or retribution, participate to some extent in a norm of abuse.
I do want you to know that sadistic sex play has never held any attraction to me. And, of course, this was not play, but real sadism. It was the exercise of sadistic power in a manner that would have made the worst characters of the Nazi SS proud.
As with the practice of the Nazis, there is in Iraq many of the signs of the dehumanizing “othering” of racism. I am confident that some of the American participants in torture brought a virulent strain of American racism with them to their job of guarding and caring for Arab prisoners.
The women in these pictures have joined the military which is a male institution at its core and which has a central function of organizing violence against people in other countries. These women are taught to kill, but also to follow orders and rules of engagement.
In today’s military culture there is constant questioning about whether the women are “equal” to the job, in other words, whether women belong there doing “a man’s job.” Women feel they have to prove they can “take it and give it out” as well as the men. Also they will earn favors from the powerful men if they “go along” and, perhaps better yet, reinforce the male behavior by doing it one better.
It is reasonable to speculate on the lives of these women before joining the military based on knowledge of the frequency of abusive behavior in American homes, schools, churches, and in dating relationships with men. These abusive female guards at Abu Ghraib may well have experienced physical and emotional abuse in one or more of the institutions and relationships in their lives.
Placed in a position of near total power over Arab prisoners in the late hours of the night, restraints relaxed by instructions, if not direct orders, to ‘soften up’ the prisoners, their emotions heightened by the proximity to “enemy” men who stimulate the fears they may once have felt with the men who abused them earlier, it is a situation perfect for the release of the rage they have held within them. Add to this the social context in which these women must always be careful to please the men who outnumber them and who set the cultural tone and the rules of the military institution and we have a stage set for vicious sadism complete with playful smiles.
Inanna, now I understand.
In this world where abuse remains prevalent we know that that the wounded will all too often turn their rage on the “other.” Revenge was easy on those who do not know how to heal their own wounds and are ready to “give it out” to prove something which can never be proven. Give them digital cameras and stir their rage in the excitement of their officially sanctioned power over other human beings.
While drunk on mortal power these young Americans had no idea what greater powers would envelope them in the desert nights of Babylon.
Inanna, you have taken your revenge and I am sorry for all who have suffered in its making. I wish that soon your desert skies return to peaceful beauty and that human beings leave off hurting the other.
Respectfully yours,
C.D.Knight
July 2004
I am told you are the goddess of love, fertility, and war, fond of the night skies of ancient Babylon. It seems you have been active in recent months. Are you, perhaps, alarmed, aggrieved, and angered by the hordes of American jet planes darting through your beloved desert air?
In photographs from the American run prison at Abu Ghraib I see signs of your vengeful play and, perhaps, the work of your associate Kiskill-lilla (Lilitu/Lilith,) the night demon.
In one picture an American soldier, a young woman, is shown pointing mockingly at the genitals of a naked male prisoner who has been forced to masturbate. She has an eager and wide smile as though she is pointing to a fish she has caught while out with the boys. We are told that she or another young female soldier caught up in the so-called 'prisoner abuse' returned home pregnant soon after the pictures were taken. So we have elements of war, fertility, and sex -- some of the hallmarks of your presence.
I write in hopes that you will be good enough to help me understand how it is that this American woman became an apparently enthusiastic participant in torture.
Before I explore this question I want to make clear that I try to approach such questions with due appreciation that “there but for the grace of goddesses go I.”
Psychologists have found it rather easy to elicit sadistic abuse from otherwise well-behaved middle-class college students who have been set up in situations of fairly unlimited and arbitrary power over other subjects. I don’t assume that I would not, through some combination of a need to conform to the expectations of my comrades and fear of exclusion or retribution, participate to some extent in a norm of abuse.
I do want you to know that sadistic sex play has never held any attraction to me. And, of course, this was not play, but real sadism. It was the exercise of sadistic power in a manner that would have made the worst characters of the Nazi SS proud.
As with the practice of the Nazis, there is in Iraq many of the signs of the dehumanizing “othering” of racism. I am confident that some of the American participants in torture brought a virulent strain of American racism with them to their job of guarding and caring for Arab prisoners.
The women in these pictures have joined the military which is a male institution at its core and which has a central function of organizing violence against people in other countries. These women are taught to kill, but also to follow orders and rules of engagement.
In today’s military culture there is constant questioning about whether the women are “equal” to the job, in other words, whether women belong there doing “a man’s job.” Women feel they have to prove they can “take it and give it out” as well as the men. Also they will earn favors from the powerful men if they “go along” and, perhaps better yet, reinforce the male behavior by doing it one better.
It is reasonable to speculate on the lives of these women before joining the military based on knowledge of the frequency of abusive behavior in American homes, schools, churches, and in dating relationships with men. These abusive female guards at Abu Ghraib may well have experienced physical and emotional abuse in one or more of the institutions and relationships in their lives.
Placed in a position of near total power over Arab prisoners in the late hours of the night, restraints relaxed by instructions, if not direct orders, to ‘soften up’ the prisoners, their emotions heightened by the proximity to “enemy” men who stimulate the fears they may once have felt with the men who abused them earlier, it is a situation perfect for the release of the rage they have held within them. Add to this the social context in which these women must always be careful to please the men who outnumber them and who set the cultural tone and the rules of the military institution and we have a stage set for vicious sadism complete with playful smiles.
Inanna, now I understand.
In this world where abuse remains prevalent we know that that the wounded will all too often turn their rage on the “other.” Revenge was easy on those who do not know how to heal their own wounds and are ready to “give it out” to prove something which can never be proven. Give them digital cameras and stir their rage in the excitement of their officially sanctioned power over other human beings.
While drunk on mortal power these young Americans had no idea what greater powers would envelope them in the desert nights of Babylon.
Inanna, you have taken your revenge and I am sorry for all who have suffered in its making. I wish that soon your desert skies return to peaceful beauty and that human beings leave off hurting the other.
Respectfully yours,
C.D.Knight
July 2004
Monday, May 02, 2005
Last of the outspoken fathers of the bomb
Phil Morrison was an esteemed member of my research advisory board. Phil died April 22nd. Jennet Conant wrote a tribute to Phil which appeared in the Boston Globe. I have copied this below:
Last of the outspoken scientists
Jennet Conant
Boston Globe
28 April 2005
Some deaths mark the end of an era, as with the passing of kings, presidents, and certain beloved pop stars, but seldom do they signal the end of a particular species, the last of their kind.
With the passing of Philip Morrison last Friday, however, so close on the heels of Hans Bethe and Robert Bacher, science has lost the last of the brilliant atomic pioneers who developed the first nuclear bomb, felt the blast of the terrifying test explosion at Trinity, and bore witness to the moral upheaval and unprecedented threat posed by the fiery display of force on that gray New Mexico morning on July 16, 1945.
Forged in the heat of that indelible explosion and the horrifying destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki less than a month later, Morrison, like many of his Los Alamos colleagues, became a leading advocate of international arms control and a vigorous critic of the political and military leaders he had faithfully served.
He belonged to a generation of outspoken citizen scientists who came of age before the nuclear transformation of warfare, the repressive politics of the Cold War, and the reliance of university research laboratories on military funding. The chastening example of Los Alamos's controversial director, J. Robert Oppenheimer -- who was investigated by the FBI for more than a decade before his opposition to the hydrogen bomb led to a humiliating hearing and his security clearance being revoked -- has stood for five decades as a lesson to scientists to keep their heads down and their mouths shut. Today it would be regarded as foolhardy for any ambitious young physicist to be an outspoken critic of US nuclear policy. Not surprisingly, few dissenting voices are heard.
Perhaps Morrison's passionate commitment to public life belonged to a time when American scientists' experience of war was not limited to a televised demonstration of shock and awe. Morrison was one of a handful of atomic experts sent to Japan to inspect the damage inflicted by their awesome new weaponry, and he accepted the assignment with the sense that he was completing his "long witness to the entire tragedy," from the bomb's creation to its dreadful execution.
He traveled across the flattened country by train and saw cities large and small left in smoldering ruins by raids of up to 1,000 B-29 bombers. In Hiroshima he saw hundreds of wounded lying along the railway platform and realized that most of them would eventually die from radiation sickness.
"Yet there on the ground, among all those who had cruelly suffered and died, there was not all that much difference between old fire and new," he wrote. "Both ways brought unimaginable inferno." The real difference was less in the nature or scale of the destruction than in the ease of the new kind of war and "the chilling fact" that a single bomb could take out a good-sized city.
Morrison's death, along with that of the other Los Alamos veterans, leaves not only a void but a troubling silence. Scientists have become a quiet, docile lot, and it has been left to the Los Alamos dragons like Morrison to have the temerity to say again and again what they first warned of as far back as August 1945.
"Secrecy will not defend us, for skill and atoms are everywhere," Morrison wrote in Scientific American in August 1995, reaffirming views he held to be as right today as they were at the end of the war. "No defenses are likely to make up for the enormous energy release; it will never be practical to intercept every bomb, and even a few can bring grave disaster. No likely working margin of technical superiority will defend us, either, for even a smaller nuclear force can wreak its intolerable damage."
Morrison remained convinced that the idealistic goal of Oppenheimer and Niels Bohr was still the only viable course of action: a comprehensive international control pact for nuclear weapons. He was not naive about the diplomatic challenges involved in achieving such an agreement, and he resolutely continued to fight an against-the-tide battle for disarmament. "The task is not simple," he wrote, "but was any international goal more important than securing the future against nuclear war?"
Jennet Conant is the author of the forthcoming book "109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos."
© Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Citation:
Jennet Conant. "Last of the outspoken scientists," Boston Globe, 28 April 2005.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This material is distributed exclusively as an educational service. Inclusion of copyrighted material is in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107 known as 'fair use' -- for more information visit http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml.
I urge visitors to this site to use the material herein only within the constraints of Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. For citations please use the original source included at the end of each text and do not link to these pages.
I urge you to respect the needs of writers and publishers to receive fair compensation for their services -- most publishers archive this material and provide it in electronic form for a reasonable fee.
Last of the outspoken scientists
Jennet Conant
Boston Globe
28 April 2005
Some deaths mark the end of an era, as with the passing of kings, presidents, and certain beloved pop stars, but seldom do they signal the end of a particular species, the last of their kind.
With the passing of Philip Morrison last Friday, however, so close on the heels of Hans Bethe and Robert Bacher, science has lost the last of the brilliant atomic pioneers who developed the first nuclear bomb, felt the blast of the terrifying test explosion at Trinity, and bore witness to the moral upheaval and unprecedented threat posed by the fiery display of force on that gray New Mexico morning on July 16, 1945.
Forged in the heat of that indelible explosion and the horrifying destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki less than a month later, Morrison, like many of his Los Alamos colleagues, became a leading advocate of international arms control and a vigorous critic of the political and military leaders he had faithfully served.
He belonged to a generation of outspoken citizen scientists who came of age before the nuclear transformation of warfare, the repressive politics of the Cold War, and the reliance of university research laboratories on military funding. The chastening example of Los Alamos's controversial director, J. Robert Oppenheimer -- who was investigated by the FBI for more than a decade before his opposition to the hydrogen bomb led to a humiliating hearing and his security clearance being revoked -- has stood for five decades as a lesson to scientists to keep their heads down and their mouths shut. Today it would be regarded as foolhardy for any ambitious young physicist to be an outspoken critic of US nuclear policy. Not surprisingly, few dissenting voices are heard.
Perhaps Morrison's passionate commitment to public life belonged to a time when American scientists' experience of war was not limited to a televised demonstration of shock and awe. Morrison was one of a handful of atomic experts sent to Japan to inspect the damage inflicted by their awesome new weaponry, and he accepted the assignment with the sense that he was completing his "long witness to the entire tragedy," from the bomb's creation to its dreadful execution.
He traveled across the flattened country by train and saw cities large and small left in smoldering ruins by raids of up to 1,000 B-29 bombers. In Hiroshima he saw hundreds of wounded lying along the railway platform and realized that most of them would eventually die from radiation sickness.
"Yet there on the ground, among all those who had cruelly suffered and died, there was not all that much difference between old fire and new," he wrote. "Both ways brought unimaginable inferno." The real difference was less in the nature or scale of the destruction than in the ease of the new kind of war and "the chilling fact" that a single bomb could take out a good-sized city.
Morrison's death, along with that of the other Los Alamos veterans, leaves not only a void but a troubling silence. Scientists have become a quiet, docile lot, and it has been left to the Los Alamos dragons like Morrison to have the temerity to say again and again what they first warned of as far back as August 1945.
"Secrecy will not defend us, for skill and atoms are everywhere," Morrison wrote in Scientific American in August 1995, reaffirming views he held to be as right today as they were at the end of the war. "No defenses are likely to make up for the enormous energy release; it will never be practical to intercept every bomb, and even a few can bring grave disaster. No likely working margin of technical superiority will defend us, either, for even a smaller nuclear force can wreak its intolerable damage."
Morrison remained convinced that the idealistic goal of Oppenheimer and Niels Bohr was still the only viable course of action: a comprehensive international control pact for nuclear weapons. He was not naive about the diplomatic challenges involved in achieving such an agreement, and he resolutely continued to fight an against-the-tide battle for disarmament. "The task is not simple," he wrote, "but was any international goal more important than securing the future against nuclear war?"
Jennet Conant is the author of the forthcoming book "109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos."
© Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Citation:
Jennet Conant. "Last of the outspoken scientists," Boston Globe, 28 April 2005.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This material is distributed exclusively as an educational service. Inclusion of copyrighted material is in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107 known as 'fair use' -- for more information visit http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml.
I urge visitors to this site to use the material herein only within the constraints of Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. For citations please use the original source included at the end of each text and do not link to these pages.
I urge you to respect the needs of writers and publishers to receive fair compensation for their services -- most publishers archive this material and provide it in electronic form for a reasonable fee.
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