Welcome to Swans Commentary http://www.swans.com/ June 20, 2011
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Ricardo Gonsalves & Deanna Duron-Gonsalves for your generous financial
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Note from the Editors: "It's difficult to believe that people are
starving in this country because food isn't available" -- a priceless
quote by Ronald Reagan with which Gilles d'Aymery introduces his Blips
on food of the contaminated, extinct, and exorbitant variety. What would
Ronny think about the number of people who are obese in this country
because they don't have access to healthy food? Or that one of the
wealthiest countries in the world based on GDP has the fourth highest
poverty rate within the OECD, which utilizes wealth distribution as its
measure. Reaganomics has been a smashing success... for the elite!
Unfortunately, with only 12% of American high school seniors reportedly
proficient in history, it's hard to be optimistic about the prospect of
learning from it. We can, however, learn from a Ph.D. student in
history, Harvey Whitney Jr., who explains why the problems with the US
education system are much more complex than what the corporate media and
the major political parties and demagogues suggest. Meanwhile, Michael
Barker holds out hope that Western citizens will learn from contemporary
history and rise up to overthrow the ultra-violent warmongers who manage
their countries, but it's doubtful the warriors are losing sleep...
Peter Byrne uses satire to explain how their propaganda team operates,
and we're rerunning a cartoon by Jan Baughman that illustrates Peter's
point. The revision of Bosnian contemporary history continues, and
Aleksandar Jokic takes Ian Buruma to task for his recent article that is
a veritable study in how not to take seriously the arrest of the former
Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladi´c.
Reaching for the book -- and the DVD -- Louis Proyect provides an
excellent review of three works on the fascinating life of Bobby
Fischer, and you don't have to be a chess player to appreciate this
must-read article. Fabio De Propris considers Nobel Prize winner Orhan
Pamuk's first novel, which recounts the might East-West encounter viewed
from the intimacy of three generations of a bourgeois Turkish family.
Karen Moller remembers the eclectic artist John Cage and other
influential artists from the Fluxus genre; and returning to education,
Raju Peddada considers his own son as a study in understanding and
coping with inattentive, daydreaming children. We close with the
haunting poetry of Guido Monte, who confronts the historical wall of
indifference toward North African migrants, and your letters on Charles
Marowitz's "balderdash," Jonah Raskin's treatise on aliteracy, a hanging
Chad, and news from austere England from a Swans supporter.
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Cordially,
Gilles d'Aymery -- Swans
"Hungry man, reach for the book: It is a weapon." B. Brecht
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