Month: February 2017

Next weekend in New Brunswick, Harvest Moon is hosting a cask fest, featuring craft brewers from around the state. You can read the story I wrote about it at centraljersey.com.

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I wrote this review of Devin McKinney’s Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History for PopMatters in March 2005.

Magic Circles
The Beatles in Dream and History by Devin McKinney

The attempt is perhaps a vain one, an ambition impossibly grand, one that cannot be reached. The crafting of an intellectual history, a dream history as the title says, an exploration of mass cultural change triggered by the unexpected appearance on the world stage more than 40 years ago of four lads from Liverpool, England. This is what Devin McKinney sets out to do in Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History, to re-place the greatest band in rock and roll history—perhaps (again that word) in the history of recorded music—within the context of the volatile time in which the band exploded into the public consciousness, changing the band, its four members and everyone forever.

This is a hopelessly lofty goal, so McKinney can be forgiven if he fails to reach its apex. But in aiming so high, in reaching for peaks that ultimately are impossible to reach, he still manages to conjure something important, to get inside the phenomenon of The Beatles in a way the explains their connection to their fans and their growth as artists and the time in which they worked.

Magic Circles is not a biography of the band; it is, rather, a meditation on its music, the epoch and the role these four lads from Liverpool played in the changing times, in the turbulence that the band helped create and that was swirling about it. For McKinney, the band is both he trigger of change and a mirror that reflects the changes, exploding from a still-broken Europe playing American rock ‘n’ roll at breakneck speed and ear-splitting volume. From its earliest moments in Liverpool and then in Hamburg, and then later as fame chased them around the world, across Asia and through the heartland of America, The Beatles were both the artist and the canvas on which the world created its own new mythologies. Later, as he writes, the band helped foster the delusion of peace and love, the simplistic cliché of apathetic hippiedom, drawing the wrath of leftist critics (in this formulation, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is the great fake) before catching a whiff of—and casting it in song—the failure that would bring the decade to its painful, unfulfilled end.

Continue reading here.

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The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speaks out against the Vietnam War during an April 4, 1967 speech at the Riverside Church in New York. (Common Dreams)

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in one of his most important but too-often overlooked speeches, “Beyond Vietnam”:

This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all mankind. This oft misunderstood, this oft misinterpreted concept, so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force, has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I’m not speaking of that force which is just emotional bosh. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John: “Let us love one another (Yes), for love is God. (Yes) And every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love. . . . If we love one another, God dwelleth in us and his love is perfected in us.” Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day.

We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says: “Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word.”

I post this to make a point about the failure of our memories, remind us that none of us have clean hands when it comes to war, peace and the failure to aid refugees and migrants (legally, they occupy different statuses, though in reality many are fleeing some kind of violence, whether oppression and war or environmental and economic disaster). Tavis Smiley, during a discussion with Brian Lehrer yesterday, offered a response to criticism of Trump’s comments defending Vladimir Putin on Sunday to Bill O’Reilly that we need to take to heart.

Trump told O’Reilly: “Lots of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What do you think? Our country’s so innocent?

Don’t get me wrong. As Smiley points out, Trump’s comment was not offered as a criticism of our long national history of institutional violence, which starts with genocide of Native Americans and the systemic violence of slavery and runs through various military invasions, excessive force by law enforcement, drone warfare, deportations, and so. It was meant to justify his own penchant for violence, his own claim of personal exceptionalism and his desire to return America to some vague and mythical past. Trump, after all, spent the campaign criticizing eight years of Obama/Clinton foreign policy as weak, implying that it was not violent enough.

But, and I think this is what Smiley was getting at, we do the nation a disservice by pretending that what we are witnessing over the last three weeks has no precedent. I wrote in an earlier post — and in an upcoming Progressive Populist column — previous presidents and Congressses have laid the groundwork for what we are seeing, so in many ways Trump is just the culmination of the war on terror and the history of violence that King talks about above. At the same time, Trump is an aberration, something far worse than anything we’ve witnessed in the past. His policies may build on those of the George W. Bush administration — and the Obama administration to a lesser degree — but they are far worse, far more dangerous, far more unhinged and disrespectful of the ideals we’ve cited as the nation’s raison d’etre.

We need to find a way, as we resist, as we oppose, as we stand up to Trump’s authoritarian tendencies, his xenophobia and hatred, and the efforts of his allies to tear down the gains we have made in recent years, to be honest about our own failures and not to excuse past administrations for those failures.

Trump was right — I can’t believe I just typed those words. We are not so innocent. But he was right for the wrong reasons. Rather than follow him down the spider hole into an era of expanded hatred and violence, we need to take heed from Dr. King and remember that “History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate.”

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Reminder: As an Alien in a Land of Promise is available for purchase

Hank Kalet’s As an Alien in a Land of Promise is a book-length mediation on homelessness and American capitalism. Interspersed with Sherry Rubel’s black-and-white photos, the hybrid work of poetry and journalism tells the stories of those living in a now-defunct homeless camp in central New Jersey, asking why our economic system turns people into refuse.

Based on a year of interviews and research in the former Tent City in Lakewood, Kalet tells the stories of people like Angelo, who lost his job in the crash of 2008, and the musician Michael. Interspersed with their voices – and those of “the pastor,” are writers like Jonathan Kozol and Michael Harrington, whose earlier research informs Kalet’s work.

The poet Eliot Katz, a former advocate for the homeless in New Brunswick, calls the book an “inventive mix of objectivist-influenced, journalistic poems and moving photographs” that “brings real, often-ignored human stories, statistics, and local geographies to life.”

B.J. Ward, author of Jackleg Opera, says Kalet “works in the poetic traditions of the inspired and observant narrator in Whitman’s ‘The Sleepers’ and, with his sense of lineation, Williams’ image-emphasis.”

Kalet is a journalist, essayist and poet, whose work appears regularly in NJ Spotlight and has been published by The Progressive, In These Times, The Progressive Populist, Main Street Rag, Lips, The Journal of New Jersey Poets and elsewhere. He is the auther of Stealing Copper, Certainties and Uncertainties, and Suburban Pastoral.

The book is published by the independent Piscataway House Press.

For more, see asanalieninalandofpromise.wordpress.com/ The book can be ordered at channel-surfing.blogspot.com/p/buy-books-by-hank-kalet.html, from Piscataway House, or Amazon. For press information, contact Hank Kalet at hankkalet@gmail.com. Press kit available upon request.

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My Progressive Populist column:

The Big Con

We have done great violence to ourselves.

I can’t think of a better way to describe the new American era. We have done violence to ourselves, shot ourselves in our collective foot, cut ourselves, inflicted unnecessary but potentially clarifying pain upon ourselves.

Perhaps I’m just a pessimist — or is it optimism, this sense that our retreat from reality may provide us with the first real clarity we as a nation have had in decades.

I write this just days before Donald Trump is to be sworn in as the 45th president of the United States. I write this as the Republicans begin an aggressive dismantling of the safety net, as nearly 20 million are to be stripped of their health insurance, as undocumented immigrants are about to face a purge, as efforts to ratchet up police power are being promised.

The press is under siege. Conflicts of interest are ignored. The truth — well, the truth has no bearing.

Read more here.

Here is a comment I just made on Facebook, which offers a bit of a preview of an upcoming column:

These are not normal times and this is not a normal presidency. We can’t fall into old habits, which is what helped drive the bus off the cliff in the first place. The simple dichotomy of R and D has blinded us to a pernicious authoritarian creep that has culminated with the current menace in the White House, but has its roots in the expanding powers granted to presidents over the last several decades. At the same time, the media has ceased to focus on things that matter, preferring to focus on the political back and forth, the insider-baseball stuff. the distractions, rather than the real questions of who wins and loses among American citizens when corporate power grows, when we allow a permanent war party to take hold of Washington and when the safety net is shredded. Our debates have been between centrists and the right, shifting the center ever rightward. Obama, after all, had considered a grand bargain to dismantle or severely gut Social Security, and the health care plan he created left the insurance industry essentially in charge. Glenn Greenwald‘s point the other day, which I used as a jumping off point for a column that will run in The Progressive Populist next month, that Trump did not arise out of nowhere is important. Trump is both culmination and aberration, and we have to attack the dangers he poses on both fronts. We have to cut off his political oxygen. He is outside of the mainstream, but also a product of its dysfunction.

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