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May 6, 2002
John Chuckman
The
Paradoxes of Israel
Rep. Ron Paul
End Corporate Welfare, Pull
the Plug on the Ex-Im Bank
Hussein
Ibish
Devastation
Only Feeds Resistance to Israeli Rule
May 5, 2002
Jeffrey St. Clair
High and Dry in the Mojave
May 4, 2002
Robert
Fisk
Sharon
the Merciless
and Arafat the Corrupt
Sam Bahour
New United States of Israel
Alexander
Cockburn
Extreme
Solutions:
Priests and Palestinians
May 3, 2002
Arundhati Roy
Democracy and
Religious Fascism
Wayne
Madsen
Dispatch
from Paris:
Le Pen's Strange Coalition
Yigal Bronner
A Journey to Beit Jalla
CounterPunch
Wire
Otto
Reich Named to Board of School of the Americas
John Troyer
Hatemongers Try to Cleanse History:
Gays and 9/11
John Stauber
Big
Food/Tobacco/Booze
Attacks "Mad Cow" Authors
Kathleen Christison
Before There Was Terrorism
May 2, 2002
CounterPunch
Wire
Rep.
Dick Armey Calls for Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians
Rami Kaplan
Israeli Soldiers Resisting
the Occupation:
Why We Refuse to Fight
Carol
Norris
Subterranean
Mini-Nuke Blues
Bernard Weiner
A Peek Inside Colin Powell's Personal
Diary
May 1, 2002
Badiou,
Michel, Lazarus
French
Elections:
What is to be Done?
Baruch Kimmerling
The Battle of Jenin as
an Inter-Ethnic War
Edward
Hammond
Hiding
History:
NAS Suppresses Chem/Bio War Documents
Kristen Schurr
Inside Gaza
Sam Bahour
Corporate
America and
the Israeli Occupation
Jacques Ranciere
Prisoners of the Infinite
April 30, 2002
Mike Leon
Chomsky,
Letters to the Writer and the Peace Movement
Dave Marsh
The FBI and the Music
Industry: Paying the Cost to Feed the Boss
Steen
Sohn
Something
Rotten in Denmark:
New Danish Government's Alliance with Far Right
Desmond Tutu
Apartheid in the Holy Land
Christopher
Reilly
Kissinger:
the Wanted Man
April 29, 2002
Larry Hales
At the Church of the Nativity
Michael
Colby
The
Times Does Brockovich:
Ralph Nader with Cleavage?
CounterPunch Wire
Bank Robs Publisher,
Vows to Repeat
Gavin
Keeney
So
Long, Frank O. Gehry?
April 28, 2002
Michael Neumann
The Jewish Left and Palestine
April 27, 2002
Dr. Susan
Block
Adelphia
Going Down:
Cover Ups, Censorship
and Naughty Accounting
Jordy Cummings
Stuck Inside the Journalism School
Pyramid
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Set
This Flag on Fire!
April 26, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
Act
Now to Stop the Killing
of an Innocent Man
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Anti-Bribery
Law Takes a Hit
Tariq Ali
Letter to a Young Muslim
April 25, 2002
Francis
A. Boyle
Home
Brew? Biowarfare,
Terror Weapons and the US
Adam Federman
"And the Earth Wept"
Bush at Saranac Lake
Stanton
and Madsen
US
Media Interests:
Champions of Profit, Propaganda and Puffery
Aaron Hawley
Cop a Buzz Day in Vermont:
Education v. Incarceration
David
Vest
Code
Red: Politics and Wordplay at the Vatican
Bernard Weiner
Time Out! A Pause for Longer-Range
Thinking
Rep. Dennis
Kucinich
Standing
with the Peace Movement
April 24, 2002
David Vest
State of Politics in France:
Code Bleu
Jean Fallow
A20
in Seattle:
Cops Get Rough, Again
Kevin Alexander Gray
Help Save the Life of an Innocent Man:
Ask for Clemency for Ricky Johnson
Tanya
Reinhart
Jenin,
the Propaganda Battle
Todd May
Drowning Children, Palestinians and American
Responsibility
Alexander
Cockburn
The
Loneliest Road
Nir Rosen
The Broken Home:
Revisiting Israel
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
A
Big Blow to Big Tobacco
April 23, 2002
Brian Wood
Where Is the Aid for the Victims in
Jenin?
John Chuckman
I,
George:
Gomer as Claudius
Norman Madarasz
French Presidential Elections
Absenteeism and Le Pen
Dr. Susan
Block
Bernard
Parks, Goodbye:
A Farewell to My Chief
Joan Smith
Who Will Rid Us of
These Pedophile Priests?
April 22, 2002
CounterPunch
Wire
EPA
Ombudsman Resigns
in Protest
Dave Marsh
DeskScan: What's Playing
at My House This Week
Ron Jacobs
A20
in DC: Taking the
Message to the Beast's Belly
Kathy Kelly
An Open Letter to
Israeli Soldiers
Irit Katriel
Word
Games and Body Bags
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
We Come for Peace
Daniel
Bar-Tal
Is
There a Way Out?
Occupation, Terror
and Understanding
David Wilson
A Week of Coups, But Now
The Freedom Train Hits Town
Shaik
Ubaid
Today
I Was a Palestinian
April 21, 2002
Michelle Campos
Suckered Again in Israel
Mike Leon
200,000
in DC Protest Say:
"We Are All Palestinians Today"
C.G. Estabrook
Sex and Power in Catholicism
Kathy
Kelly
Gimme
Some Truth Now
A Walk Through Jenin
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
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How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
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This Explosive
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Reviews of Gore:
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May
6, 2002
For a Dancer
Love Hurts
by Dave Marsh
Karen Swymer-Shanahan, 32, died Monday in Milford, Mass. Karen's death
spelled the end of an era-an era in which the most remarkable
person I've ever met gathered around herself a circle of loved
ones for the privilege of sharing a great human drama. She lived
my favorite song lyric-"It ain't no sin to be glad you're
alive"-in ways I never expected to witness.
The day before she turned 11, Karen learned
that the lump in her arm was Ewing's sarcoma, a rare, virulent
cancer. Almost fifteen years later, in her second year at Boston
College law school, a second cancer, osteosarcoma, erupted in
the same arm. It also invaded her lungs.
I met Karen in the midst of the second
battle, and she became like a daughter to my wife, Barbara Carr,
and me. Over the past two years, as she fought cancer a third
time, she became a frequent figure in these columns.
Karen loved music. She was an early fan
and friend of Dave Matthews, and a recent one of Cindy Bullens.
She got to know Bruce Springsteen on the Tom Joad tour. She and
two of her sisters dancing at the edge of the stage at Bruce's
Hartford show in '00 remains for me the proof of the power in
that slight body-she'd just been diagnosed with cancer for a
third time.  Once, I left Karen
alone for five minutes at an awards ceremony and when I got back,
she was old friends with Etta James. Emily remembers seeing Karen
receiving chemotherapy at the hospital, wearing headphones and
thrusting her arm in the air at a crazy pace. The nurses got
scared-was she having a seizure? No, she was listening to "Land
of Hope and Dreams."
Sometimes, I'd buy Karen discs, but often,
I'd burn her CDs. I played her one Terry Callier record and it
wound up sparking a long immersion in all his music for both
of us. She also reinforced my convictions about Iris Dement,
Gretchen Peters and Patty Griffin. At her funeral Friday, it
was Iris's "This Kind of Happy" that provided the final
eulogy.
If the choice of songs seems unusual,
you need to know more about her. Karen was smart, beautiful,
graceful like a great dancer, a brilliant public speaker, a perceptive
art historian (her impromptu discourse, from a wheelchair parked
in front of Bellini's St. Francis at the Frick last summer, hushed
a roomful of people, although she was addressing only two). She
was wickedly funny and had such absolute cool that she needed
no sense of shame. When she went back to law school, she met
Bill Shanahan and they gave everyone else a glimpse of what it
means to be each other's heaven. Bill told me recently that Karen
woke up every morning, even when she was in the greatest pain,
and smiled to greet the day. She loved being alive without qualification.
It took cancer more than 20 years to
impinge on those things, and it had to invade nearly every part
of her body before it did. Yet her spirit it never touched.
I wish I could say the same. When Karen
died, I felt like Guy Clark in "The Randall Knife"-I
couldn't find a way to cry. It wasn't until late that night,
sitting at home alone amidst a crowd, that my face got wet. It
was one of Karen's favorite songs that pushed me over the edge:
Gretchen Peters' "On a Bus to St. Cloud."
"We were just gettin' to the good
part / Just gettin' past the mystery," Gretchen sings. Well,
you never get past the mystery of encountering someone this magnificent-and
I haven't room to tell you 10% of the truth about someone who
got a five minute standing ovation at her own funeral.
Some of the rest is in last Wednesday's
Boston Globe, in a splendid obit by Dan Shaughnessy, another
member of her circle. Yet even that's a shadow, not even quite
a ghost, of what Karen Shanahan gave to the world.
How fortunate I am to be haunted by it.
Memorial contributions can be sent to:
Karen's Legacy Fund
c/o Rosemary Wilson
Sullivan & Worcester LLP
One Post Office Square
Boston, MA 02109
DeskScan
(This is the list of tracks I put together
on a CD in memory of Karen-a mixture of things she loved and
things that, I hope, speak to the feelings of those who loved
her):
1. The
World's Greatest, R. Kelly
2. Land
of Hopes and Dreams, Bruce Springsteen
3. When
My Morning Comes Around, Iris Dement
4. Five
Hearts Breaking, Alejandro Escovedo
5. Angel,
Dave Matthews
6. Better
Than I've Ever Been, Cindy Bullens
7. Touched
by an Angel, Stevie Nicks
8. Only
Time, Enya
9. Walk
On, U2
10. Happy,
Bruce Springsteen
11. On
a Bus to St. Cloud, Gretchen Peters
12. At
Last, Etta James
13. Occasional
Rain, Terry Callier
14. Forever
Young, Chrissie Hynde
15. Not
Alone, Patty Griffin
16. As
Long as You Love, Cindy Bullens
Dave Marsh coedits
Rock and Rap Confidential.
He can be reached at: marsh6@optonline.net
Dave Marsh's
Previous DeskScan Top 10 Lists:
April 30, 2002
April 22, 2002
April 15, 2002
April 9, 2002
April 2, 2002
March 25, 2002
March 18,
2002
March 11,
2002
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