Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.

On poetry: Why we need to remember and want to forget

We too often forget that we live in a time of war. The violence is elsewhere and the soldier come from places we in the middle class suburbs know little about. But war is our reality and, in this brilliant poem by Rosalind Brackenbury, we are reminded why we try so hard to forget this even as we know we must not.

I want to forget their names, the generals,
advisors, puppet rulers,
the puffed-up and the brought-low,

I want not to know them,
not hear their plans, their excuses,
the President and the President’s men,
the Pope with his white smoke for voodoo,

the suits, ties, teeth, insignia,
the guns, the names of trucks and weapons.

I want to forget them all,
to be washed of them,
to begin again: where no one knows who anyone is,
or what he believes.

To forget, however, is impossible — though, to ignore is not. And the effort at forgetting is the reminder that we can’t, and shouldn’t, that the generals and presidents and popes count on our ignorance, on their disguises and that the “one clear word” — humanity — must never be spoken.

Arrogance unbecoming

Tom Moran has sometimes treated Chris Christie as though the Star-Ledger had a man-crush on the governor. But even Moran could not let Christie’s arrogant audition for vice president go without criticism.

Moran, in pointed column yesterday, called Christie an “economic royalist” and painted him as out of touch.

It is bad enough that economic royalists such as Christie are pushing for tax cuts that are heavily tilted toward the rich. Do we really have to hear his morally superior lecture on top of that?

The answer is yes. Because to justify shrinking government as much as Republicans want and to justify big tax cuts at the same time, you have to build a story that turns government into the enemy. So programs that provide help are turned into demons that corrupt our collective spirit.

As Moran notes, Christie has never been about tax fairness, only about tax cuts and really only for cuts that benefit the best off in the state.

Christie, despite his pledge on taxes, has actually increased taxes on the working poor by shrinking the earned income tax credit. Does a parent unlucky enough to be raising a family on minimum wage really need the governor’s condescending kick in the pants?

The aforementioned unlucky parent doesn’t, but maybe our arrogant chief executive does. At he very least, he deserves a very large serving of humble pie.

Charges expected in Trayvon Martin shooting

The Times — and every other news outlet — report that George Zimmerman will be charged in the shooting of unarmed teen Trayvon Martin in Florida.

Angela B. Corey, the prosecutor, called a news conference in Jacksonville for 6 p.m. Wednesday to announce the charges against Mr. Zimmerman, 28, a crime watch volunteer, who fatally shot Mr. Martin, an unarmed teenager, in a case that has captivated the country and brought to the fore issues of race, violence and precisely what constitutes self-defense.

Critical to the decision of the prosecutor will be whether or not the shooting fell under Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law, which gives wide leeway to people who claim self-defense, and which does not require people to retreat before using deadly force.

The question that is likely to be at the center of the case is not Zimmerman’s feelings about race, but whether his apparent disregard of the dispatcher’s orders to avoid confrontation and his decision to follow Martin through the condo complex preclude his ability to claim self-defense. I would think it does, but in a still-racialized America that has bought into the vigilante myth central to so much of our cinematic product (most Westerns, the Dirty Harry movies, nearly every superhero) it is difficult to predict whether a jury would convict.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

A runner’s diary

I used to be an avid runner. There was a time when I put in 25-30 miles a week, ran 5K races and complete the Long Beach Island 18-mile run.

Then, for a lot of reasons, most of them not very good, I stopped. My running became sporadic at best, my weight ballooned and with it the statistics that doctors point to as problems.

I kept saying I’d get back to the road, to the gym, to my old runner’s ways. Kept saying it, over and over and over.

Until two weeks ago. That’s when I decided to get serious again, laced up my running shoes and hit the road. Since then — March 27 — I’ve managed nine runs at modest paces. The goal right now is not speed, but distance and consistency.

At the same time, we’ve been increasing the frequency and distance of our dog walks, so I have been getting an additional two-plus miles in a day that way.

I hit a wall over the weekend and should have taken a few days break. Instead, I hit the gym on Monday, hit the weights for my legs and then tried to run — and while I managed two miles, it was difficult. Tuesday was supposed to be a rest day, but I walked the dogs for two miles.

So here I am on a chilly Wednesday morning with a sinus headache and sore legs standing in the breeze getting ready to run. I did some minor warm-ups and got started. Then stopped. And started and stopped, and so on. I walked and ran this morning, a total of two miles — an awful effort that has me disappointed. Plus, I rolled my ankle midway through when I hit a branch.

I have no idea what all of this will mean as my training goes forward, but I need to be ready to run a decent 5K come April 28, when Hugs for Brady holds its annual race.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Rick Santorum quits a race he wasn’t going to win

Mitt Romney is the Republican nominee for president. He doesn’t have the delegates yet, but everyone knows he is the candidate and everyone has known he would be the candidate for months.

And yet, the GOP primary race continues, a freak show of remarkable proportions that has done little more than succeed in damaging what little credibility Romney had.

Today’s big news, that Rick Santorum has “suspended his campaign,” really isn’t news at all. Santorum was never going to be the nominee and never should have been taken serious as a candidate. Santorum is a right-wing nut, a religious conservative with 16th-century views on women, sex and patriotism. His success in the primary — carrying the most rabid and backward voters imaginable — only proved the existence of the dark heart of the GOP.

Santorum was only the latest in a long list of the kind of candidates that Hunter S. Thompson would have loved to write about. Herman Cain, Rick Perry, Michelle Bachmann, Newt Gingrich — all of them were varying shades of dangerous and weird.

Only Ron Paul, who had his own nasty baggage, offered any kind of alternative (criticism of crony capitalism and imperialism), and he was dismissed by the commentariat from the outset.

To capture the nomination, Romney — nominally a centrist/moderate in his past — has sprinted to the far corner of right-wing lunacy, with few among the mainstream press batting an eye. It was just something he needed to do, they say, and now he can tack back to the center and run the campaign he’s always wanted to run.

In this kind of atmosphere, one in which the strategy of the campaign is all that’s worth discussing, we are unlikely to get the kind of conversation about issues we need, or any honesty about the corporate-centered policies both parties push.

The difference between Romney and Barack Obama is one of degrees, not one of major substance. Both are beholden to the corporate order and tied to (different wings of) the foreign policy establishment. At least Obama doesn’t have to cowtow to the lunatic fringe. That, in and of itself, may be earn him a second term.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.