It was through mysterious means that, years ago, I first got a subscription to Mother Jones, and at first I was unimpressed. The stories were too often like brushing a turkey while it’s roasting: you know there’s something good there, but all you see is drying, cracked skin. I lobbied K to kill the scrip and find something better, but for one reason or another she never did, and quite suddenly the magazine became excellent—I remember being surprised when I realized it. On that note, I cannot recommend enough Mac McClelland’s story in the current issue about Karen refugees from Burma who sneak across the border from Thailand to document the Junta’s human rights abuses. Its familiar narrative structure of a naïf being introduced to the horrors of the world could have undermined her subjects, but McClelland keeps her focus tight on their struggles and the Junta’s genocidal actions. I think I will not quote from the story; instead, just go read it.
On the eve of sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, Vietnam is percolating to the surface in places both expected and unexpected. Last week, the first segment of Bill Moyers Journal was dedicated to Lyndon Johnson’s conversations with advisers about Vietnam, soon after John F. Kennedy’s assassination but before the 1964 election. Primarily told through Johnson’s (secretly) taped conversations, the segment is a fascinating portrait of the deliberations of power.
Similarly, Vietnam arises in in the Poetry Foundation’s Poetry off the Shelf podcast. Curtis Fox and Michael Hoffman unpack Robert Lowell’s “July in Washington” as a meditation on American empire at the time Johnson was worrying on the phone. In contrast to Moyer’s focus on the office of the President, Lowell turns attention to Congress, or perhaps more generally all those who seek and find power in the beltway. Here is Lowell’s poem.
July in Washington
The stiff spokes of this wheel
touch the sore spots of the earth.
On the Potomac, swan-white
power launches keep breasting the sulphurous wave.
Otters slide and dive and slick back their hair,
raccoons clean their meat in the creek.
On the circles, green statues ride like South American
liberators above the breeding vegetation—
prongs and spearheads of some equatorial
backland that will inherit the globe.
The elect, the elected … they come here bright as dimes,
and die dishevelled and soft.
We cannot name their names, or number their dates—
circle on circle, like rings on a tree—
but we wish the river had another shore,
some further range of delectable mountains,
distant hills powdered blue as a girl’s eyelid.
It seems the least little shove would land us there,
that only the slightest repugnance of our bodies
we no longer control could drag us back.
—Robert Lowell
