[Peace-discuss] Fascinating...

[Randall Cotton]

For months, I've spent hours every day scouring the web for news and
commentary on current events in general and Iraq in particular. I think it's
fair to say I'm somewhat jaded when it comes to analysis or commentary
articles on Iraq. I never saw myself being so impressed by any particular
article that I would feel compelled to add to the already voluminous stream
of articles that are posted to this list. However, I just came across an
epic, stunningly elegant and deeply incisive piece by Gary Kamiya, Executive
Editor of Salon.com, called "Sleepwalking toward Baghdad" that
circumscribes, with great insight, how we arrived at this point in history,
poised above the abyss as we are, by using W.H. Auden's haunting poem
"September 1st, 1939" as a touchstone.

Sleepwalking toward Baghdad
As the sand runs out on peace, America drifts alone toward a strange and
unjustified war
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Gary Kamiya

March 10, 2003

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

W.H. Auden's "September 1st, 1939," written after Hitler invaded Poland to
start World War II, was much quoted in the United States after another
terrible September day, 62 years later. The poet's dread, as he stared into
a darkness about to cover the world, had become our own. Just as Hitler's
invasion killed the cheap hopes of a "low dishonest decade," so the savage
destruction of the World Trade Center had wakened us from our dream world,
where history no longer existed and hatred and death only touched others.
The poem was eerily prescient: In a coincidence so strange it would scarcely
be credible if such uncanny anticipations did not haunt the history of
literature, Auden invoked skyscrapers not once but twice:

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream [ ... ]

A few stanzas later, he was drawn back to the image, denouncing "the lie of
Authority/Whose buildings grope the sky."
Neither the strength of Collective Man nor of Authority was enough, on
September 1st or Sept. 11, to prevent the worst from happening.
Perhaps the poem's most arresting -- and disturbing -- synchronicity with
Sept. 11, however, is found in the second stanza, when Auden writes of
Hitler's Germany:
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence