Dear friends,

 Please click on the link and choose video diary link in the text to watch Jonas Mekas, with help of Vyt Bakaitis, herald the excluded works from a new anthology from Penguin.

Friday, May 25,  5-7:30 p.m.
MANHATTAN INN
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The death of American secularism

Who is America’s leading secularist? Thats right, there isn’t one. And if someone effective doesn’t start speaking up for the seperation of church and state soon, it could be lost for good,  argues Jacques Berlinerblau

Sorry, but had to remove this video as it started automatically whenever anyone went on my site.

A  Putsch Against War

GENERALS AND secret police chiefs get together for an attack on the politicians.

In some countries, they arrest the president, occupy government offices and TV stations and annul the constitution. They then publish Communique No. 1, explaining the dire need to save the nation from perdition and promising democracy, elections etc.

In other countries, they do it more quietly. They just inform the elected leaders that, if they don’t desist from their disastrous policies, the officers will make their views public and precipitate their downfall.

Such officers are generally called a “junta”, the Spanish word for “committee” used by South American generals. Their method is usually called a “putsch”, a German-Swiss term for a sudden blow. (Yes, the Swiss actually had revolts some 170 years ago.)

What almost all such coups have in common is that their instigators thrive on the demagoguery of war. The politicians are invariably accused of cowardice in face of the enemy, failure to defend national honor, and such.

Not in Israel. In our country we are now seeing a kind of verbal uprising against the elected politicians by a group of current and former army generals, foreign intelligence and internal security chiefs. All of them condemn the government’s threat to start a war against Iran, and some of them condemn the government’s failure to negotiate with the Palestinians for peace.

Only in Israel.

IT STARTED with the most unlikely candidate to lead such a rebellion: the ex-Mossad chief, Meir Dagan.

For eight years, longer than most of his predecessors, Dagan led the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, comparable to the British MI6.  (“Mossad” means “institute”. The official name is “The Institute for intelligence and Special Operations”.)

Nobody ever accused Dagan of pacifism. During his term, the Mossad carried out many assassinations, several against Iranian scientists, as well as cyber-attacks. A protégé of Ariel Sharon, he was considered a champion of the most aggressive policies.

And here, after leaving office, he speaks out in the harshest terms against the government’s plans for an attack on Iran’s nuclear installations. Not mincing words, he said: “This is the stupidest idea I have heard in my life.”

This week he was overshadowed by the recently relieved chief of the Shin Bet. (Shin Bet and Shabak are different ways of pronouncing the initials of the official Hebrew name “General Security Service.”) It is equivalent to the British MI5, but deals mostly with the Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories.

For six years, Yuval Diskin was the silent chief of the silent service. His shaved head could be seen entering and leaving meetings of secret committees. He is considered the real father of “targeted eliminations”, and his service has been widely accused of extensive use of torture. Nobody ever accused him of being soft on Arabs.

And now he has spoken out. Choosing a most unusual venue – a get together of some two dozen pensioners in a small-town cafe – he let fly.

According to Diskin – and who would know better? – Israel is now led by two incompetent politicians with messianic delusions and a poor grasp of reality. Their plan to attack Iran is leading to a world-wide catastrophe. Not only will it fail to prevent the production of an Iranian atom bomb, but, on the contrary, it will hasten this effort, this time with the support of the world community.

Going further than Dagan, he stated that the only factor preventing peace negotiations with the Palestinians is Netanyahu himself. Israel can make peace with Mahmoud Abbas at any time, and missing this historic opportunity will bring disaster upon Israel.

As chief of the Shin Bet, Diskin was the No. 1 official government expert on Palestinians. His agency receives and collates all the evidence, spy reports, interrogation results and information gathered from listening devices.

Leaving no room for doubt, Diskin said that he knew Netanyahu and Barak from close up, did not trust them and thought they were unfit to lead the nation in a crisis. He also said that they are deliberately deceiving the people. He did not omit to mention that they live in extreme luxury.

Anyone who thought that these accusers were lone voices, and that the whole choir of current and past security chiefs would rise and condemn them unanimously, was disappointed. One after another these experts were quoted by the media as agreeing with the two in substance, though not necessarily on their style. Not a single one questioned their assertions or denied what they said.

The current Chief of Staff and the Mossad and Shin Bet chiefs let it be known that they share the views of the two on Iran. Almost all their predecessors, including all the recent military Chiefs of Staff, told the media that they agree, too. Suddenly there was a united front of experienced security leaders against a war with Iran.

THE COUNTER-ATTACK was not late in coming. The entire battery of politicians and media hacks went into action.

They did what Israelis almost always do: when faced with serious problems or serious arguments, they don’t get to grips with the matter itself, but select some minor detail and belabor it endlessly.

Practically no one tried to disprove the assertions of the officers, neither concerning the proposed attack on Iran nor concerning the Palestinian issue. They focused on the speakers, not on what they said.

Both Dagan and Diskin, it was asserted, were embittered because their terms of office were not extended. They felt humiliated. They are venting their personal frustration. They are speaking out of sheer spite.

If they did not trust the Prime Minister, why did they not get up and resign while they were in office? Why didn’t they speak out before? If this was a matter of life and death, why did they wait?

Alternatively, why don’t they continue to shut up? Where is their sense of responsibility? Why do they help the enemy? Why don’t they speak only behind closed doors?

Diskin, it was added, has no idea about Iran. It was not in his area of responsibility at all. Dagan knew about Iran, but had a limited view. Only Netanyahu and Barak knew all the facts and the entire spectrum of opportunities and risks.

Sources “close to the Prime Minister’s office” also had another explanation: Dagan and Diskin, as well as their predecessors, were just stupid. Taken together with Dagan’s and Diskin’s assertion that Netanyahu and Barak are not rational (and perhaps not quite mentally balanced) this means that our national security depends entirely on a group of irrational and stupid leaders – and that this has been the case for years.

A frightening thought: what if everything they say about each other is true?

THE MAN accused by his security advisers[ ]of messianic tendencies was exposed to personal scrutiny by another event this week.

His father, Ben-Zion Netanyahu, died at age 102, having remained of clear mind to the end. At the public funeral, he was eulogized by Binyamin. As could be expected, it was a kitschy speech. The son addressed his dead father in the second person – (“You taught me”…”You formed my character” etc) – a vulgar practice I find particularly distasteful. He also shed tears on camera.

There is no doubt that the father had a huge influence on his son. He was a professor of history, whose whole intellectual life was centered on one topic: the Spanish inquisition – a traumatic chapter in Jewish history comparable only to the Holocaust.

Ben-Zion Netanyahu was an extreme rightist, obsessed by the idea that Jews might be exterminated at any moment, and therefore cannot trust any Goy. He held Menachem Begin in contempt, considering him a softy, and never joined his party. His intellectual attitude was reinforced by a personal trauma: his eldest son, Yoni, the commander of the spectacular Entebbe raid, was the only soldier killed in this operation.

It seems that he didn’t have such a high opinion of his second son. He once remarked publicly that Binyamin was unfit to be prime minister, but would make a good foreign minister – an uncannily accurate judgment, if one sees the job of the foreign minister as marketing.

The home in which “Bibi” grew up was not a very happy one. The father was a deeply embittered man. As a historian, he was never accepted by the academic world in Jerusalem, who disavowed his theories. (Mainly, that the Inquisition did not persecute the Marranos – Jews who had accepted Christianity rather than leave Spain – because they practiced Judaism in secret, but out of pure anti-Semitism. This was an attack on one of the most cherished tenets of Jewish mythology: that these Jews had remained true to their faith to the point of sacrificing their lives at the stake.) Not getting a professorship in Jerusalem, the father emigrated to the US, where Binyamin grew up. The father never forgave the Israeli establishment.

The myth of the Great Historian laboring at his titanic task was a daily reality at home, in America and, later, back in Jerusalem. The three sons had to walk on tiptoe, not being allowed to make any noise that could disturb the great man, nor to bring their friends home.

All this shaped the character and world view of “Bibi” – the specter of imminent national annihilation, the role model of the fiercely rightist father, the shadow of the older and much more admired brother. When Binyamin now speaks endlessly about the coming Second Holocaust and his historical role in preventing it, this need not be just a ploy to divert attention from the Palestinian issue or to safeguard his political survival. He may – frightening thought!!! – actually believe it.

The picture that emerges is exactly that painted by Yuval Diskin: a Holocaust-obsessed fantasist, out of contact with reality, distrusting all Goyim, trying to follow in the footsteps of a rigid and extremist father – altogether a dangerous person to lead a nation in a real crisis.

Yet this is the man who, according to all opinion polls, is going to win the upcoming elections, just four months from now.

May 10, 1963

Dear Kenneth Irby,      No, I don’t mind your writing to me, and it’s got be “out of the blue” at some point.      Ron Loewinsohn had calld  my attention to your poem in change when he brought me my copy, and I like then immediately how solid (vs. fluid) words and sentences, in the movement of the poem the rise, are for you. By contrast to my own rhetorical river-of-sound nature that has to exert some vigorous art to give substance to the immediate area of the poem. And now that I read these two poems (the one you sent me with the letter) the land, Kansas, and plain begin to be a language — you’ve not really to win your way thru to writing at all (as I had some six years of writing poetry all wrong, before in 1942 some glimmer of a natural voice appeard — and then another four before, with Medieval Scenes, I began to have a poetic, an idea of what had to be done, and another two years (the Venice Poem) before I could do what I knew had to be done.)

All your questions — of starting the poem; of where does the poem work beyond us, beyond its own; — but then you see that even as you ask me — are urgencies of a poetic forming in you.      I can tell you at least of my own experience that these questions will never be done. I am dependent upon the poem itself and must follow it like a trail thru a jungle that exists (the trail) only in the immediate stop [?] on takes — all other appearances of trail, far ahead or just behind the explorer (who must after all map the territory as he goes, in order to go), all other sights of the way being false to the country.

Every mastery and obedience in the poem, the way we respect the syllable, the word — demand every feat of it — the firmness with which we intend our formal feeling — of outline, of mass, of phase, of parts belonging [?] to a whole — does work beyond us and the poem. For we and the poem too have been workd in our effort. I mean here just in the sense that every act works “beyond” — of any man.      Ignorance, affectation, “weakness”, stupidity, inelegance — work as major powers in, thru, and beyond.      “Tigers” I was going to say- but now I have on my mind the shoreline, where sea, wind, plants and the land work a form — is it content? It’s not an outline.      Of what? of sea? of land? For it’s an area of communication.

As in your grasslands you are searching rightly for what a poem is to be in another “poem” — the winds, the grass, the plains will tell you (makers of a horizon you’ve known, I’ve only seen idly in passing) what I can’t about beginning and end of “form” —

And what is exhilerating is that in two poems I can begin to see, because you’ve gone to these presences, terms [?] of far-reaching and back-yard that I hadn’t seen before.      Even, because the poems do take hold, do live thru your living.

The passage about Medieval Scenes that you saw must have been the paragraph ueming [?] quotes in his catalogus from an autobiographical essay I wrote to accompany the ms of the scenes when I sold them. And excerpted, it is misleading.      I do more assigned myself the idea of the poem than you assignd yourself the grasslands.      But I did dare  — myself?, the demon of the poem?      That there would be a scene each session. As at times I have prayd for and received dreams. That I would recognize and take my faith in what came in the poem. “Medieval”— on the one hand, because at that time in Berkeley the group of friends (who appear in the poem) were on the brink of the medieval world — eventually I was to return to the university after ten years as a student if medieval history — for there was a great historian there at that time Ernst Kantorowicz – who in turn had been a young acolyte of the poetic circle of George.

On the other hand, I was able to receive “medieval” scenes because I had to imagine them. I had only the knowledge of the medieval that was in my surroundings.

Yet “medieval” by some instinct for home too, as your grasslands are to you — however actual they were — imaginary. As the demand your imagination to be satistied. I still am aroused by the medieval — by the actual documents I’ve come to know in study, but also by the romance and fairy tale that I’ve known since earliest childhood.      As “Africa” is another realm that I come alive to. And the sea-shore.

I’ve tried to “get” San Francisco, the city — and I’ve no sense of it (as I have no sense or feeling for political ideals in the poem) — so: there are areas of our thought and feeling the poet doesn’t take hold in.

Thinking of your plans to leave Harvard — if you could manage it — Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, Ginsberg — a Canadian Poetess Margaret Avison — and I are all going to be reading, lecturing, conferring etc. in a Simmer Session course at the university of British Columbia at Vancouver July 24th — August 16th, eleven class-meetings 8-10 pm Fee $12.00 It will be a period too tho of many other discussions, for it will be the first time any three of us have been together at the same time same place. And we are all eager for the exchange. for information and enrollment the catalog says apply to: Creative Writing Workshop, Department of University Extension, U. of B.C., Vancouver 8, B.C.

I would be glad to see more poems if you find time to send them— yrs.

Robert Duncan