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A Special Report on the Presidential Elections Exclusively in the Print Edition CounterPunch How Progressive Challenges Have Been Killed Off Since LBJ; Gagging Fanny Lou Hamer; Eugene McCarthy on "a Peasants Rebellion;" Sabotaging McGovern; The Wreck of Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition; Smearing Nader, Not Once But Three Times: by Alexander Cockburn; The Thieves of the Green Zone by Patrick Cockburn; Murder in Mississippi: Could John Doar Have Saved Cheney, Schwerner & Goodman by David Kotz. In May, CounterPunch Online was read by over 20 million viewers! But remember, we are funded solely by the subscribers to the print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this website by buying a subscription to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you won't find anywhere else, or by making a donation for the online edition. Remember contributions are tax-deductible. Click here to make a (tax deductible) donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! Call Toll Free 1-800-840 3683 or write CounterPunch, PO BOX 228, Petrolia, CA 95558

Sex, Drugs & the Blues! Serpents in the Garden CounterPunch's Sizzling New Book on Culture and Sex is Now Available Click here to purchase Today's Stories July 17, 2004 Gary Leupp Apocalypse Now: Why the Book of Revelations is Must Reading   July 16, 2004 Dave Zirin Adonal Foyle: Master of the Lefty Lay-Up Shervan Sardar Dershowitz, the ICJ and Jim Crow Laws Ron Jacobs The Lil' Engine That Couldn't: Kucinich Surrenders on Anti-War Plank Robert Fisk Iraq, According to Edgar Allen Poe: Coffin Bombs in Baghdad Greg Moses The Forts of Iraq Mickey Z. Ad Infinitum?: Presidential Campaigns in the Age of TV Dan Bacher A Landmark Win for Salmon and the Tribes Dave Lindorff The Mumia Case: Support from NAACP, But a Movement in Shambles Paul McGeough Did Allawi Shoot Inmates in Cold Blood? Website of the Day 10 Reasons to Fire Bush (and 9 Reasons Kerry Won't Be Any Better)   July 15, 2004 Heather Williams McMissing the Point: Supersize Me Crashes on Its Message Werther Iraq: Follow the Money Tom Crumpacker The Birds of Guantanamo Brian Cloughley What Does the Bush Regime Object To? Bill Christison Reorganize the CIA? Of Course, But... July 14, 2004 Jeffrey St. Clair Chronicle of a Nomination Foretold: the Green Deceivers Neve Gordon Of Socrates and the Apartheid Wall Diane Christian The Priesthood of Death Stefan Wray Who Benefits from Missing Data at Los Alamos Nuclear Lab? Josh Frank The Nader / Dean Debate Conn Hallinan Divide and Conquer as Imperial Rules Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg Bring My Brother Home!: Class, War and Education Website of the Day Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear and the Selling of US Empire   July 13, 2004 Ray McGovern The CIA and Iraq: an Intelligence Debacle...and Worse Mark Donham The Sierra Club's Inexplicable Treatment of Cynthia McKinney Ben Tripp Politus Interruptis: With Friends Like These, Who Needs Electorates? Mark Gaffney Slipping Towards Armageddon: Israel in Iraq Dave Lindorff Osama Wins! Election Postponed! Chris White Double Think: the Bedrock of Marine Indoctrination   July 10 / 12, 2004 Kathleen Christison The Problem with Neutrality Between Palestinians and Israel Janine Pommy Vega Trail of the Comet: a Gathering of the World's Poets Against War Sherry Wolf From Maverick to Party Attack Dog: Howard Dean Gay-Bashes Nader Saul Landau and Farrah Hassen A Transfer of Power, Sort Of Michael Donnelly How to Steal an Election: the Green Version, 2004 Stanton / Madsen Iraq Survey Group: Rumsfeld's al-Qaeda? Richard Lichtman The End of Innocence: Reflections on American Pathology Gila Svirsky Thank You, Your Honors: a Legal Blow to the Wall Kurt Nimmo Clinton's Life Toni Solo Empire-Speak: What Roger Noriega Really Means Ron Jacobs The Black Panthers and the Rest Camelo Ruiz Marrero Gene Warfare in Oaxaca: Genetic Mutation of Mexican Maize Omar Barghouti Wither the Empire: Rise of a Global Resistance Poets' Basement Curtis and Albert   July 9, 2004 Dave Zirin Carlos Delgado on Deck: Blue Jays Slugger Stands Up Against War Justin Delacour Wishing Kerry Would Shut Up About Latin America Robert Fisk Iraq in Reverse: Martial Laws Fuel Insurgency Boris Kagarlitsky Two Congresses and a Funeral William S. Lind The October Surprises Sibel Edmonds Our Broken System: John Ashcroft's War on Truth Ron Jacobs Reading Tea Leaves: What Vietnam Tells Us About Iraq's Future Gary Leupp The Lie That Will Not Die: Cheney and the Iraq/al-Qaeda Link   July 8, 2004 Niranjan Ramakrishnan The Inexplicable John McCain Toufic Haddad Protesting Israel's Apartheid Wall: a Letter from the Hunger Strikers' Tent Dave Lindorff Liberation as Martial Law Joshua Frank The Fall: How Beltway Dems Sank Howard Dean Christopher Brauchli Bush & Cheney Play the Hitler Card James Petras The Truth About Jimmy Carter   July 7, 2004 John Chuckman Kerry's BBQ: a Deafening Silence of Meaning Virginia Tilley A Line in the Sand: Azmi Bishara's Hunger Strike Susan Martinez A Letter to Bill Cosby Mickey Z Elie Wiesel's Strange Parade Michael Donnelly Our Own Private Wilderness: Trusting the Land in the Inland Empire Sean Donahue Boston Social Forum: the Dems aren't the Only Show in Beantown Diane Christian Sovereignty and Freedom in Iraq   July 6, 2004 Lisa Viscidi Fleeing Guatemala: Central Americans Risk Lives to Reach El Norte Marc Norton The Felonious Five Ride Again: the Supreme Court and Enemy Combatants James Brooks Chemical Warfare on the West Bank? Ray McGovern Porter Goss as CIA Director? William Cook Legacy of Deceit: If Dante Knew of Bush and the Neo-Cons...   July 5, 2004 Forrest Hylton US Imperialism in Latin America: Sept. 11, July 4 and Systematic Torture Chris White A Former Marine Sgt. on the Meaning of Independence Day Joe Bageant Cranky Reflections on the 4th of July Robert Jensen Stupid White Movie: What Michael Moore Misses About the Empire Kathy Kelly "Two Days an' a Wake-Up"   July 3 / 4, 2004 Elaine Cassel Bush's Police State and Independence Day Stan Goff ABC of Opportunism: "Progressive" Latin American Leaders Support the Coup in Haiti Snehal Shingavi "We Want Real Justice for Bhopal": Two Survivors Speak Out Bruce Anderson The Cheney-Leahy Metaphor and the Greens Sharon Smith Twilight of the Greens: the Chokehold of "Anybody But Bush" Josh Frank Ralph Nader's Revolt: an Interview with Greg Bates Robert Fisk Pentagon Tried to Censor Saddam's Hearing Joe Bageant Sons of a Laboring God: Leftnecks Unite! Brian Cloughley Fortress Bush and the One Law Doctrine Justin Delacour The Anti-Chavez Echo Chamber: Venezuela's Media Tycoons William S. Lind Saudi Spillover Linda S. Heard A Joke Called "Justice" Greg Moses "It's Illegal, But It's Our Right": Korean Labor Won't Back Down Ron Jacobs "Ain't You Proud to be White on Independence Day?" Toni Solo Weary of Indigenous Resistances? Just Pretend They're Not There Dan Nagengast Chicken Manure as Cattle Food: Safe, But Do We Want to Eat It? Stew Albert Brando, a Personal Recollection Dave Zirin From the Black Panthers to Sacheen Littlefeather: a Eulogy for Our Brando Patrick W. Gavin The Progressive Case for Dodgeball Steven Rosenthal / Junaid Ahmad The Problem is Bigger Than the Bushes: a Review of F911 Poets' Basement Kearney, Ford and Davies Website of the Day Global Peace Solution   July 2, 2004 Jeffrey St. Clair Suicide Right on the Stage: the Demise of the Green Party Douglas Valentine Fahrenheit 911: Mocking the Moral Crisis of Capitalism Gary Leupp "Just Because I Could": On Obscenities and Opportunities Lee Ballinger Illegal People: Kerry Opposes Immigrant Rights Robert Fisk Saddam in the Dock: Confused? Hardly CounterPunch Wire "What Law Formed This Court?": a Transcript of Saddam's Arraignment Christopher Brauchli Bush's Drug Card Lottery: the Price Ain't Right Saul Landau Buzz Words and Venezuela   July 1, 2004 Katherine van Wormer Bush's Damaged Mind: the Madness in His Method Joe Bageant Is Our President a Whackjob? Does It Matter? William James Martin The Dogma of Richard Perle Dave Lindorff Bush's Evacuation Moment Robert Fisk Bread and Circus Trials in Iraq Alan Maass Green Party in Reverse Website of the Day Michael Moore and Israel: Blind or a Coward?     June 30, 2004 Kurt Nimmo Nicholson Baker's Checkpoint: a New Kind of Anger About Bush Tariq Ali Getting Away with Murder in Iraq Jennifer Van Bergen Bush and the Detainees Douglas Valentine Apotheosis of the Psychopaths: Instead of Fahrenheit 9/11, Rescreen The Quiet American David Price Fahrenheit 9/11 Through the McCain-Feingold Looking Glass Roger Normand America's Criminal Occupation of Iraq Stan Cox Sanitized for Your Protection: Ashcroft's War on Art Henry David Thoreau On the Futility of Bush v. Kerry: All Voting is a Kind of Gaming Ben Tripp Who Dast Call Him Liar: a Rebuttal to Nicholas Kristof                       Hot Stories Alexander Cockburn Behold, the Head of a Neo-Con! Subcomandante Marcos The Death Train of the WTO Norman Finkelstein Hitchens as Model Apostate Steve Niva Israel's Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings? Dardagan, Slobodo and Williams CounterPunch Exclusive: 20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians Steve J.B. Prison Bitch Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber True Lies: the Use of Propaganda in the Iraq War Wendell Berry Small Destructions Add Up CounterPunch Wire WMD: Who Said What When Cindy Corrie A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter I Can't Hear From Gore Vidal The Erosion of the American Dream Francis Boyle Impeach Bush: A Draft Resolution Click Here for More Stories.     Subscribe Online

Weekend Edition July 17 / 18, 2004 Professor Ricks and the Chasm of Inartiquity Dylan Without the Music By DAVID VEST The question of how seriously to take Bob Dylan remains vexing. Those of us (myself among them) who believe his importance as an artist can scarcely be exaggerated have had four decades to say why, yet even the most fervent among us must admit that we haven't been notably successful. Many essays on Dylan still remind me (shudderingly) of Fifties album covers, with their liner notes attempting to justify jazz music to intellectuals, droning on about "improvisation" and trying to define swing so classical musicians who can't feel it can understand it by reading about it. We have had more than fifty years of these explanations, and we have taken jazz right into the universities, yet by and large classical musicians are no closer to being able to play credible jazz than they were when John Lewis and the MJQ first approached them about it. Older explanations of jazz sound corny today because they adopted the language of the people-who-didn't-get-it, who in turn tried adopting hipster lingo, with excruciating results. It was a make-the-squares-comfortable kind of racket in those days. Didn't want to frighten Mr. Jones, did we? So we made him feel hip and sent him on his way. There are those who seriously believe that to analyze an artist such as Dylan, or to "study" him at all, is to miss the point. He is whatever he is, runs the argument, and there is nothing to be gained by trying to make him into a "literary" figure, for to do so is to concede that his art is somehow inferior to the stuff studied in academies or that he would gain stature by inclusion in their canon. Anyway, trying to explain his art to professors who don't get it is a fool's errand, goes this line. On the other hand, those who have tried to make the case against Dylan have been, if anything, even less articulate than his admirers. They sound like nothing more than rule-obsessed Augustan Age critics condescending to denounce Shakespeare for "violating the Unities". These people prefer Keats to Dylan, sight unseen, though they have trouble demonstrating, as Allen Tate proved long ago in a devastating essay, that they would know the difference between Keats and a turnip, or between the best line in "Ode On A Grecian Urn" and this one: "More happy love, more happy, happy love!" From their elitist point of view, to "analyze" one such as Dylan is to belittle analysis itself. Polarities aside, the number of literary academics who know little or nothing about Dylan is probably far greater than the ranks of defenders and detractors combined. Into this Chasm of Inartiquity rides the good Christopher Ricks, to at least make a valiant stab at it. The studiedly Whitmanesque photo of its subject on the dust jacket of "Dylan's Visions of Sin" announces Ricks' intent, which is to persuade the good professor's peers that his lifelong obsession with Bob Dylan is no folly and that Dylan's work both deserves and rewards serious critical scrutiny. Or at a minimum, is fun to think about. He succeeds at all this. Ricks is now Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and had he been writing this very sentence, he would follow my first comma with a fantasia about Oxford, England and "Oxford Town", Mississippi, finding significance if not outright fatefulness in the "fact" that Bob Dylan once wrote a song about a town with the same name as the one where Ricks now lives and moves and has his stipend. Trust me, "Dylan's Visions of Sin" is replete with far less compelling "parallels" and "similarities," many of which cheerfully fail the test of plausibility. And yet the most devoted Dylanologist will probably hear a few of the songs in a new and better way after reading it. It seems to me that Ricks overcomes two near-fatal decisions in this book. He is the kind of critic who regards criticism as an opportunity to be "creative", and so he cannot resist the temptation to compete with Dylan, or to discuss any song without entertaining us by archly quoting from other songs. Others will feel differently about all the punning and quoting, but for me it is rather like standing at a Dylan concert next to someone explaining all the songs to his date, with particular emphasis on where he was when he first heard them. The other decision is the more deadly. Ricks buys into an unnecessarily desiccated notion of what "poetry" is, accepting without thinking too much about it the hoary phallic metaphor of a poem as something that must "stand up on the printed page." (Calling Dr. Susan Block!) Here his chief guide is the minor poet Philip Larkin, himself a critic, one who notoriously insisted that Charley Parker, Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk had "ruined" jazz. Larkin is quoted, approvingly, as complaining that hearing poetry aloud means you miss such essentials as "the punctuation, the italics." For Larkin, poetry was an intensely bookish and private experience to be sheltered at all cost from the public, the communal. Not for him the Russian spectacle of Voznesensky and Yevtushenko saying (not "reading") their poems to a packed stadium in the Sixties. Voznesensky once told me he was astonished to discover that American poets didn't even know their own poems by heart, but carried books onto the platform with them. "Anything you can forget, you should forget!" he said, with considerable heat. Well. There have also been those who genuinely preferred "closet drama" to live theater, but would you choose an agoraphobic for your guide to the plays of Oscar Wilde? It is one thing to be "Against Interpretation," with Susan Sontag, but quite another to be a poet and to argue Against Listening. Ricks is far from voluntarily deaf, and listens admirably, but although he is said to possess hundreds of Dylan bootlegs, in this volume he consistently complains whenever he finds Dylan departing from the preferred, i.e., printed "text." Alas, establishing a definitive Dylan text is a bit like trying to determine the definitive "version" of a river. There are plenty of notable British and American poets who believe that poetry is chiefly an oral art, even that all literature is written to be heard aloud, that much of the meaning of a work is in the noise it makes, but Ricks does not avail himself of them. Indeed, he does not elect to place Dylan in the context of other living poets writing in English. Most surprising, not to say alarming, is the fact that in a book beginning outside its covers with a photo of the young Dylan dressed as Whitman, the name of Walt Whitman does not appear. Why not, one wonders? It would be rash to conclude that one so learned as Ricks does not know as much about modern and contemporary poetry in English as he does about other areas. Usually when Ricks knows he doesn't know something, he tells you forthrightly. He is the first to admit that he is unfamiliar with much of the background and milieu in which Dylan works, meaning that he is often unable to hear the allusions to older songs, and thus cannot always hear in their rightful context the very works he is analyzing. The decision to organize his effort according to the Seven Deadly Sins, the Virtues and the Heavenly Graces is a mere convenience, as Ricks acknowledges, more or less arbitrary and not especially productive, though not unreasonable. It enables Ricks to look at Dylan not so much through a microscope as through a kaleidoscope. There is some gushing at the pretty colors. People at least casually familiar with Dylan's songs, or who have seen "Don't Look Back", may be mildly surprised to find, out of 517 pages, only seven and a half devoted to Anger (by contrast, Envy gets 38). I have set forth a few misgivings about Ricks' project not to discourage anyone from reading his book, but as a way of taking him seriously. True, he is the most prominent literary scholar yet to tackle Dylan. Also true, you may learn more about Dylan's art from a month or two of following the links on www.expectingrain.com than from this book. Or not. Hear me when I say that is not necessarily the fault of Professor Ricks. That is just the way it is. In any event he has got the ball rolling downhill. David Vest writes the Rebel Angel column for CounterPunch. He and his band, The Willing Victims, just released a scorching new CD, Way Down Here. His essay on Tammy Wynette is featured in CounterPunch's new collection on art, music and sex, Serpents in the Garden. He can be reached at: davidvest@springmail.com Visit his website at http://www.rebelangel.com     Weekend Edition Features for July 10 / 12, 2004 Kathleen Christison The Problem with Neutrality Between Palestinians and Israel Janine Pommy Vega Trail of the Comet: a Gathering of the World's Poets Against War Sherry Wolf From Maverick to Party Attack Dog: Howard Dean Gay-Bashes Nader Saul Landau and Farrah Hassen A Transfer of Power, Sort Of Michael Donnelly How to Steal an Election: the Green Version, 2004 Stanton / Madsen Iraq Survey Group: Rumsfeld's al-Qaeda? Richard Lichtman The End of Innocence: Reflections on American Pathology Gila Svirsky Thank You, Your Honors: a Legal Blow to the Wall Kurt Nimmo Clinton's Life Toni Solo Empire-Speak: What Roger Noriega Really Means Ron Jacobs The Black Panthers and the Rest Camelo Ruiz Marrero Gene Warfare in Oaxaca: Genetic Mutation of Mexican Maize Omar Barghouti Wither the Empire: Rise of a Global Resistance Poets' Basement Curtis and Albert WWW http://www.counterpunch.org   Keep CounterPunch Alive: Make a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online! home / subscribe / about us / books / archives / search / links /