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Poets Against the War--Sam Hamill's commentary
Commentary by Sam Hamill

Just as we all turned to a new calendar year, the 3000 th U. S.
citizen-warrior died in combat in Iraq. No one knows how many Iraqis have
perished in Bush's War; no one knows how many Iraqis have died needlessly;
nobody knows how many tens of thousands of disenfranchised Iraqis have fled
their homelands to live in exile. What we do know is that while Bush mouths
the words freedom and democracy, they are, to him and Cheney and others of
their ilk, empty words‹empty because Bush & Co. has no meaningful concept of
freedom or democracy; to Bush and Cheney and their allies, these are merely
abstract ideas used to promote the concentration of power in the hands of
the rich white males who would rule the world. How otherwise could this
country continue to invest in murder, in the slaughter of innocents, while
turning its back on the slaughter of innocents in Darfur and on the
encroachment of our ally, the Israeli government, on Palestinian homelands?
Without some sense of justice, liberty and democracy are impotent concepts.

In a talk given at the Labor Exchange of Saint-Etienne a half-century ago,
Albert Camus said, ³If we add up the examples of breach of faith and
extortion that have just been pointed out to us, we can foresee a time when,
in a Europe of concentration camps, the only people at liberty will be
prison guards who will then have to lock up one another. When only one
remains, he will be called the Œsupreme guard,' and that will be the ideal
society in which problems of opposition, the headache of all twentieth
century government, will be settled once and for all.²

Remove the word Europe and replace it with America, and Camus might have
been writing about George W. Bush. It takes little or no imagination to see
Bush calling himself the ³Supreme Guard.² He has spoken parallel lines a
thousand times. Our grand ³Decider² has decided for all of us that our
Constitution simply doesn't work in a ³post 9-11 world,² that we need secret
prisons in foreign lands where we can freely torture anyone the Decider
decides needs torturing, that we can wage war upon an innocent nation in the
name of freedom and democracy, and that we do not need the 1 st, 4th, or
14th amendments to protect us from his supreme guardianship. But this
particular fascist can't even get the trains to run on time. He pursues his
war despite all reasonable counsel to the contrary and in the face of
unified opposition by the very American people he was (perhaps) elected to
serve. Even the Republican Party has come to oppose his ambitions.

All war is extortion. And this particular war will extort its cost not only
from us, but from our children, both morally and financially. What is far,
far worse is the abridgement of our Constitutional rights and the collapse
of congressional responsibility. The present administration has advanced the
causes of freedom and democracy nowhere‹neither at home nor abroad. It has
operated exactly to the contrary of those noble ideals and principles set
down by the authors of our Constitution. And our elected representatives,
ever in the service of their own seats of power, have conceded again and
again.

The Halliburton Corporation, the oil magnates, the arms manufacturers,
multinational media conglomerates ‹in short, those who provide the money and
legitimize the lies of Bush and company‹profit handsomely from the death of
innocents. The same companies that profit from the destruction of countries
profit again from rebuilding them. American oil companies have enjoyed
several years of record-breaking profits. This too is a form of extortion.
And nearly every politician running for office feels the need to tap into
the rich veins of corporate extortionists in order to be elected. Corporate
money and corporate ethics, not ideals of liberty and democracy, define our
electoral politics.

And what of poetry in the face of such circumstances? Camus reminds us that
if art ³adapts itself to what the majority of our society wants, art will be
a meaningless recreation. If it blindly rejects that society, if the artist
makes up his (sic) mind to take refuge in his dream, art will express
nothing but a negation. In this way we shall have the production of
entertainers or of formal grammarians, and in both cases this leads to an
art cut off from living reality.²

Four years ago, founding Poets Against War, we were a minority opinion in
our unified opposition to this war. We are now part of a vast mainstream
majority. Nevertheless the wars grind on in living reality and therefore
live on in our hearts and minds and in our poetry. The imagination fixes on
the suffering of Darfur, the unabated mayhem of Baghdad, the village battles
in Afganistan, the public bombings in Thailand or India, Indonesia, England
or Spain, and poetry seems almost impotent. But it is not. Each of us has a
tale-of-the-tribe; each of us must listen to the voices of the oppressed,
the victimized. Each of us must draw a line and make a stand for something
larger than ourselves if our art is to have usefulness. We poets do not and
cannot stand apart from the suffering in this world. Each of us must embody
and carry forward the very peace and justice we all seek.

In the name of justice and liberty, the war criminals should be impeached
and put on trial for crimes against humanity and our elected representatives
should be made to restore our Constitution. Peace, liberty, justice‹these
are concepts wrought in the individual heart-and-mind and made manifest in
this world only through individual courage and commitment. Our art, born in
the heart and polished through years of practice, is a part of the solution.

During World War II, during the terrible years of 1943 and '44, Camus
published several ³Letters to a German Friend² (see Resistance, Rebellion
and Death, Knopf, 1961) to explain his stance against nationalism. ³I cannot
believe that everything must be subordinated to a single end,² he said.
³There are means that cannot be excused. And I should like to be able to
love my country and still love justice. I don't want greatness for it,
particularly a greatness born of blood and falsehood. I want to keep it
alive by keeping justice alive.² Of course his German friend ³retorted,
ŒWell, you don't love your country.'² Camus says he felt ³a choking
sensation² as he thought of his friend's remarks, then says, ³No, I didn't
love my country, if pointing out what is unjust in what we love amounts to
not loving, if insisting that what we love should measure up to the finest
image we have of her amounts to not loving.²

Our country's greatness includes a power and prosperity build on the
shoulders and backs of the slave trade (which helped finance the American
Revolution) and two hundred years of genocide practiced against Native
American nations during our westward expansion. Our prosperity came, all too
often, at the expense of dictatorships and mass murder‹ direct preconceived
consequences of our imperialist policies in Mexico and in Central and South
America for more than one hundred years. (For a surprising treatise on this
subject by a Marine Corps general who won two Congressional Medals of Honor,
go to: www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm)

We should have learned from our experience in Vietnam that destroying a
country cannot save it. There are levels of resistance that military might
simply cannot overcome. There are means that simply cannot be justified.

For me, the greatness of our Constitution lies in the Bill of Rights, and
most specifically in three of its most compelling arguments: 1: The
inalienable right to free speech which opens the doors to the free exchange
of ideas (including even the most repugnant). 2: The separation of Church
and State, without which we'd all be members of the English church. 3: The
right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure.

George Bush has spent the last five years using ³a post-911 world² as his
excuse to undermine these Constutional rights as they have never before been
undermined. Even as I write, our government is planning a huge military
complex for Guantánamo where more prisoners can be tried without counsel,
without habeas corpus, and without Constitutional or Geneva Convention
interference. No President in our history has done more to destroy our civil
rights and abridge our system of justice.

If we as poets are duty-bound to hear the cries of the world, we are also
equally bound to celebrate the beauty and justice that blossoms however
mysteriously even amongst such carnage. That, after all, is our human
condition. Because we love our country and our language, we must be true not
to its tyrants, but to essential principles and what can be made of them in
the service of truth, justice, and the practice of decency, the practice of
compassion.

Love our country as we love our children. Every country is a child slowly
maturing. And just as we impose discipline on our children because we love
them, we must impose discipline on those who claim to serve us. We may have
to suffer through another two years of Caligula in the White House, but we
have the power to hold our congressional representatives' feet to a very hot
fire. We have become the majority, and there is much that can be done: now
is not the time for silence. We get the government we deserve.

May our poems continue to speak for the conscience of our country, as we
asked in founding Poets Against War four years, countless lives.

Sam Hamill's selected poems, Almost Paradise, was recently published by
Shambhala Publications.

  ©2007, Poets Against War, all rights reserved.

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