September 4, 2007

• Letters on a low, dishonest decade

  Here's a letter sent very recently by one of my more erudite colleagues to our three elected representatives in Washington.  I've truncated his name to protect his privacy, though he does little to protect his own privacy.  The subject line is his.

  **********

  [I sent the following letter(s) to the slender reeds upon which our
  representation to the federal government rests. --CGE]

  September 1, 2007

  Senator Richard Durbin

  309 Hart Senate Building

  Washington, DC 20510

  [cc: Senator Barack Obama

  713 Hart Senate Office Building

  Washington, D.C. 20510]

  [cc: Representative Timothy V. Johnson

  1207 Longworth House Office Building

  Washington, D.C. 20515]

  Dear Senator Durbin:

  The rumored attack on Iran by the United States must be stopped, and it is
  your responsibility to do so.  You cannot acquiesce in the war crime that the
  Bush-Cheney administration seems about to commit.  Please do all that you can to
  prevent this enormity from occurring.

  An attack on Iran would obviously violate the United Nations Charter, which
  forbids "the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or
  political independence of any state."  American leaders would be guilty of what
  the German leaders were condemned for at Nuremberg -- "the planning,
  preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression." In a famous passage
  from their judgment, the four judges of the tribunal (American, British, French
  and Russian) declared the crime of aggressive war to be "the supreme
  international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains
  within itself the accumulated evil of the whole" -- i.e., even worse than
  terrorism.

  Of course the German leadership had excluded the legislature from the
  decision to wage aggressive war, so only the leaders were punished.  But if the
  Congress of which you are a member permits the executive to commit the supreme
  international crime, you too should be answerable before a new Nuremberg
  court.

  Sincerely,

  C. G. E.
  L. S. E.

  Enc.: W.H. Auden, SEPTEMBER 1, 1939

  =================

          

  SEPTEMBER 1, 1939

  W.H. Auden

          

  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.

  Accurate scholarship can

  Unearth the whole offence

  From Luther until now

  That has driven a culture mad,

  Find what occurred at Linz,

  What huge imago made

  A psychopathic god:

  I and the public know

  What all schoolchildren learn,

  Those to whom evil is done

  Do evil in return.

  Exiled Thucydides knew

  All that a speech can say

  About Democracy,

  And what dictators do,

  The elderly rubbish they talk

  To an apathetic grave;

  Analysed all in his book,

  The enlightenment driven away,

  The habit-forming pain,

  Mismanagement and grief:

  We must suffer them all again.

  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;

  Out of the mirror they stare,

  Imperialism's face

  And the international wrong.

  Faces along the bar

  Cling to their average day:

  The lights must never go out,

  The music must always play,

  All the conventions conspire

  To make this fort assume

  The furniture of home;

  Lest we should see where we are,

  Lost in a haunted wood,

  Children afraid of the night

  Who have never been happy or good.

  The windiest militant trash

  Important Persons shout

  Is not so crude as our wish:

  What mad Nijinsky wrote

  About Diaghilev

  Is true of the normal heart;

  For the error bred in the bone

  Of each woman and each man

  Craves what it cannot have,

  Not universal love

  But to be loved alone.

  From the conservative dark

  Into the ethical life

  The dense commuters come,

  Repeating their morning vow;

  'I will be true to the wife,

  I'll concentrate more on my work,'

  And helpless governors wake

  To resume their compulsory game:

  Who can release them now,

  Who can reach the dead,

  Who can speak for the dumb?

  All I have is a voice

  To undo the folded lie,

  The romantic lie in the brain

  Of the sensual man-in-the-street

  And the lie of Authority

  Whose buildings grope the sky:

  There is no such thing as the State

  And no one exists alone;

  Hunger allows no choice

  To the citizen or the police;

  We must love one another or die.

  Defenseless under the night

  Our world in stupor lies;

  Yet, dotted everywhere,

  Ironic points of light

  Flash out wherever the Just

  Exchange their messages:

  May I, composed like them

  Of Eros and of dust,

  Beleaguered by the same

  Negation and despair,

  Show an affirming flame.

          ###

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