The Decline of the West Continues...

The Belmont Club's Wretchard has an excellent post essentially concerning the asininity of the intellectual class when it comes to grasping the issues of the day. In his commentary, he cites his favorite "poet against the war." We used his link to go to the original posting:

Wage Peace
by Judyth Hill, September 11, 2001

Wage Peace with your breath.

Breathe in firemen and rubble.
Breathe out whole buildings and flocks of red-wing blackbirds.

Breathe in terrorists
Breathe out sleeping children and fresh mown fields.

Breathe in confusion and breathe out maple trees.

Breathe in the fallen and breathe out life long relationships intact.

Wage peace with our listening: hearing sirens, pray loud.

Remember your tools: flower seeds, clothing pins, clean rivers.

Make soup.

Play music; learn the word "thank you" in 3 languages.

Learn to knit: make a hat.

Think of chaos as dancing raspberries.

Imagine grief
as the outbreak of beauty or gesture of fish.

Swim for the other side.

Wage peace.

Never has the word seemed so fresh and precious.

Have a cup of tea and rejoice.

Act as if armistice has already arrived.
Celebrate today.

Poetry like this karmic exercise does inspire me to think of dancing raspberries, but of a slightly different variety more appropriate to Yankee Stadium.

The site upon which it appears, "wagingpeace.org" as is usual with such sites buries references to their source of funding, but we'll try to check them out. The usual meme is at work here, and all their current action items at base emphasize pushing congressional action to force us to disarm and observe "international law" just like the Iranians always do.

An article on the site does address the Iranian issue, but soon steers back to the "Known Fact"™that it's all Bush's fault and Iran wouldn't have done this were Bush not so mean:

First this:

A dangerous escalation of tensions in the Middle East could produce a devastating new war there if diplomatic steps are not taken to head it off. The United States and Israel, with the cooperation of some European countries, have been stoking a climate of fear to justify a military attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. At the very least, they seem determined to refer the matter of Iran's nuclear program to the United Nations Security Council as a step toward imposing sanctions.

Then this:

And then there is the American dimension. The United States, bogged down ever more hopelessly in Iraq, seems to welcome a showdown with Iran as an opportunity for diversionary diplomacy. Iran, as an original member of the "axis of evil," was always in the cross hairs of neoconservative grand strategy for the region, and rather than be daunted by failure in Iraq, Administration hard-liners are clearly tempted to shift attention to Iran.

Which brings us back to the poetry. When you see bathetic stuff like this, the usual, carefully thought out (in 5 minutes) random strokes of simplistic formulas, you see what is left of poetry now subordinated to the service of the Utopian World State, more or less the way Marx might have envisioned it. This is yet another fine example of the corruption of the arts into propaganda tools by the left, and ample evidence once again, that we're going to have to start offering some serious re-linkings to our cultural past before the arts are destroyed altogether, subordinated purely to political use as exquisite propaganda tools that mimic received forms without containing the wisdom those forms once were accustomed to transmitting.