No More Poems

I'm sorry to see that the Giant Mouth That Eats Everything has gotten the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska. She just died in Krakow at age 88.

Szymborska somehow won a Nobel Prize for writing poetry that non-professors can enjoy, such as "Reality Demands." I hope you will read it all, but here's the ending of it:

Where Hiroshima had been
Hiroshima is again,
producing many products
for everyday use.

This terrifying world is not devoid of charms,
of the mornings
that make waking up worthwhile.

The grass is green
on Maciejowice's fields,
and it is studded with dew,
as is normal with grass.

Perhaps all fields are battlefields,
those we remember
and those that are forgotten:
the birch forests and the cedar forests,
the snow and the sand, the iridescent swamps
and the canyons of black defeat,
where now, when the need strikes, you don't cower
under a bush but squat behind it.

What moral flows from this? Probably none.
Only the blood flows, drying quickly,
and, clouds.

On tragic mountain passes
the wind rips hats from unwitting heads
and we can't help
laughing at that

Someday I hope to write a book partly inspired by "Reality Demands," which will be about the places on earth where the most concentrated evil has occurred. If you glance at the cover of this imaginary book quickly, it will look like the title is "HELLO EARTH!" Only if you look closely will you see that there's a narrow space after "HELL" and a very small n after the letter O.

(Thanks to Tristero, who set one of her poems to music, for the news.)

—Jon Schwarz

Pulling a Tooth for Mandy

This 1865 letter from Jourdan Anderson to his former owner in Tennessee has been circulating online for a while, but I just saw it yesterday. It seems too beautiful to be real, but apparently it's genuine. If I were editing an anthology of the funniest writing in U.S. history, I'd definitely include it. This is the section that made me laugh the hardest, as Anderson explains the conditions on which he'll take up his owner's invitation to return to Tennessee and work for him:

Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars. Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor's visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams's Express, in care of V. Winters, Esq., Dayton, Ohio.

Sure, dunning your former owner for back wages is funny enough on its own. But what makes it is the sentence about deducting his owner's expenses (especially the perfect specificity of "pulling a tooth for Mandy"). You wouldn't want to be unfair to the guy who enslaved you.

—Jon Schwarz

À La Recherche des Homemade D&D Modules Perdu

One of the weirdest things about brains is how they're filled with a giant jumble of memories that you paradoxically can't remember you have without help. Like everyone except Marcel Proust, I usually notice this with songs. Something comes on the radio from 1993 and I realize I remember every single thing about it, but I wouldn't have had any conscious memory that the song even existed until it started playing.

For the first time in my life, and maybe anyone's life, I just had this experience with a homemade Dungeons & Dragons module. I was fustzing around and read this post on Boing Boing:

Homemade D&D module, 1981

Tim H sez, "A recent and amazing donation to the PlaGMaDA.org [ed: Play Generated Map and Document Archive] project: A beautiful, hand-made homebrew addition to the classic TSR Against the Giants series."

I saw that and I thought: wow, that looks incredibly familiar. And as I read through it I realized it looked familiar because I'd spent 700 hours playing it after elementary school during the early Reagan administration.

Even stranger is that I emailed the guy who originally posted it, and it turns out he didn't get from its creator, my 5th grade friend Gaius (aka G.J. Caesar). Instead, somebody gave it to him after they picked it up on eBay.

I can't help but wonder what else from my childhood that I've almost completely forgotten about is about to be posted online. Sometimes I wake up convinced that I accidentally killed someone in 1986 and successfully hid their body and kept the secret ever since. I think that's probably not true, but now I feel like I'll have to keep checking the internet every day just to be sure.

—Jonathan Schwarz

Clarification

By: John Caruso

Actually, accusing people like Haim Saban and Sheldon Adelson of "dual loyalty" is deeply offensive.  Their loyalty to Israel is second to none.

ADDED BY JON: Sorry to pile on a joke with something serious, but the ridiculous part about all the internet's yammering about this is that almost none of it on any side has anything to do with reality. Saban, Adelson, etc. have as much loyalty to the actual Israel (i.e., the one made up of the people who live there) as Netanyahu—in other words, none at all. Remember Sara Netanyahu's views:

Bibi is a leader who is greater than this entire country, he really is a leader on a national scale. We'll move abroad. This country can burn.

Saban and Adelson's actions, like Netanyahu's, have nothing to do with the well-being of actual Israelis, and everything to do with feeding their own bizarre egos and lust for power. And obviously it's the same with right-wing politicians and their funders in every country. George W. Bush was eagerly consolidating power after 9/11 even as his EPA lied to everyone in New York City and helped Osama bin Laden kill more of us.

You might say that Saban and Adelson have a greater loyalty to Israel's right-wing oligarchy than America's right-wing oligarchy, but I'm not sure even that is right. I'm pretty sure if you got to nut-cutting time, they'd choose America's oligarchy over Israel's, just because it better serves the hungry ghost inside of them.

State of the Illusion

By: John Caruso

For anyone on the left who's tempted to relapse into 2008 euphoria by the president's early-campaign turn to rhetorical populism, this remains as true as it always was: Obama is not your ally who's been co-opted; he's your enemy who is co-opting you.

— John Caruso

Why I Support SOPA

I support SOPA because it will formally transform the United States into a communitarian paradise. Just look at its official description:

To promote prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation by combating the theft of U.S. property, and for other purposes.

And here's Rep. Lamarr Smith, who introduced SOPA last fall, explaining why it's awesome:

The problem is a $100 billion problem. That's how much we think the theft amounts to of American goods, American products and stealing our inventions...These are online pirates. They are stealing our property.

What does this mean? Well:

1. 40% of stock market wealth is held by the richest 1% of Americans, and 80% is held by the richest 10%.

2. Large chunks of media corporations based in the U.S. are owned by foreigners (for instance, Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal).

It would be one thing if SOPA were just about protecting the wealth of the world's richest people at the expense of everyone else's free speech. But au contraire! It's clear from what its supporters say that SOPA will turn U.S. media conglomerates into our common property. We'll all get checks from them every year, like Alaskans do with their oil!

This is why I support SOPA and everyone smart like me should support it too.

—Jon Schwarz

This Sentence Is False

By: John Caruso

In protest of SOPA/PIPA there will be no postings whatsoever on ATR today.  If you're looking for a way to register your dissent, head on over to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

— John Caruso

I Paid Gingrich

The world's billionaires clearly plan to rerun the 20th century and see if it turns out differently. Given that, during a brutal economic downturn we should be on the lookout for what happened in the 20th century's most brutal economic downturn—i.e., right-wing businessmen funding crazy right-wing politicians so they can attack the "bad" kind of capitalists. These turn out not to be regular financiers, but "parasitic" financiers. The goal is to divert anger away from the "good" capitalists (who usually do exactly the same things as the "bad" ones), while gaining power to go on the attack against any left-wing alternatives.

And right on schedule, Sheldon Adelson is forking over millions so a Newt Gingrich-supporting PAC can attack Mitt Romney for his parasitic financier ways. Traditionally, the inherently-foreign-cosmopolitan-minorities-controlling-all-via-parasitic-finance would be Jewish. (And of course that's the undertone of the right's attacks on George Soros.) However, Adelson himself is Jewish, so 'King of Bain' had to look elsewhere. It's actually pretty funny to see them groping around for villains that will work for their audience. In the end, the puppeteers ruining the fatherland turn out to be from Massachusetts and/or Latin America and/or speak French.

Anyway, while I don't think Newt Gingrich is Hitler or Sheldon Adelson is Fritz Thyssen, it is unnerving to see this phenomenon cropping up again, even on a small scale.

—Jon Schwarz