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June 14, 2002
Mark Weisbrot
US Trade
Policy:
"Do as We Say, Not as We Did"
Starhawk
The Boy Who Kissed the Soldier
David Krieger
Farewell
to the ABM Treaty
Tom Turnipseed
The Fear Factor to Promote
War and Trample Truth
Steve Perry
How the
Bush Adminstration Buried Coleen Rowley
June 13, 2002
Linda Belanger
Israeli-Palestinian
Conflict:
The Story Behind the Headlines
Amira Hass
Indefinite
Siege
Mokhiber / Weissman
Time to Put Lives Over Patents
Robert Fisk
Bush's Weird
War
Stanton / Madsen
Democracy
in Crisis:
What is to be Done?
Roldan Tomasz Suárez
Venezuela:
Five Facts
About the Coup
June 12, 2002
Fran Shor
Dirty Bombs, Blowback
and Imperial Projections
Dave Marsh
Shelley
Stewart, Radio and the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement
Chris Floyd
Murder, Inc.
June 11, 2002
Omar Barghouti
On Dance, Identity and War
Robert Fisk
The Bush
Afghan Gang:
Murderers, Gangsters, Stooges
Minerva Wright
The Donkeys of the Holy Land
David Krieger
Stopping
a Nuclear War
in South Asia
June 10, 2002
Jeffrey St. Clair
Executioner's Last Songs
June 8/9, 2002
Gavin Keeney
Mademoiselle
M.
Or Getting Screwed in Paris
Susan Davis
Sleepless
in the Suburbs
Curing Insomnia: a new use for The Nation?
George Sunderland
"Send
in the Weekly
Standard": The Screaming Pundits Assault Corps
June 7, 2002
Michael Colby
Bush to the Nation:
You're All Cops Now
Tanweer Akram
Howard
Zinn's "Terrorism
and War": a review
David Krieger
New Security Challenges
Sam Bahour
The Palestinian
Intifada:
A Very American Struggle
Tom Turnipseed
A Crisis of Confidence
in US Leadership
June 6, 2002
Michael Colby
White House
vs. EPA:
Political Hot Air and
Global Warming
Ron Jacobs
The Indo-Pakistan Conflict:
It's Just a Shot Away
Francis Boyle
Take Sharon
to The Hague:
Prosecute Israeli War Crimes
at Jenin
CounterPunch Bulletin
60 Minutes and President Chavez's
Censored F-Word
Mark Weisbrot
Spying
and Lying:
The FBI's Shameful Past
June 5, 2002
Robert Fisk
Berlusconi the Censor
Danielle Brian
Nuclear
Plants and Terrorism
Ardeshir Cowasjee
For What Do We Fight?
George Monbiot
Kashmir
on the Brink
Michael Neumann
What is Antisemitism?
June 4, 2002
Dave Marsh
Bono the Useful Idiot
William Evan / Francis
Boyle
Kashmir:
Invoking Intl. Law to Avoid Nuclear War
Cockburn / St. Clair
The Future Wellstone Deserves
June 3, 2002
Ramdas / Makhijani
India,
Pakistan and Nukes:
A Road Map to Peace
Fran Shor
Meanwhile, Back in Afghanistan
Neve Gordon
The Caterpillar
Effect

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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

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Weekend
Edition
June 15/16, 2002
The Day They Shot a Wolf in
the Ghetto and What it Meant
by Daniel Wolff
I say I saw her end, but I didn't.
And how she began, nobody knows. In prison
is what the paper pretends: in a pen,
in a lab, with the gate half open,
and the wolf lunging out to get free.
As if that wasn't just the lead tot heir story
but the start of her life. Which then
took off
in a streak of gray across dark green lawns
-- its ears pressed flat, its legs going
hard--
so the students, walking, their books in their arms
saw something they didn't understand
sprint (fast)
across what they did. Before they could ask
what it meant, she was gone. Like a dream
disappears at the edge of meaning and means
something else on the other side. Except,
of course, she wasn't a dream. As soon as she leapt
away from the curb,
she became what the drivers swerved
around: the kind of soft mistake that
wakes the kids
or ruins the job or the marriage. The drivers did
what they always did: they leaned on
their horns and kept
on going. Shaking, now, and wet
with panic, the wolf dove (blind)
into narrow darkness and ran for a long time
from alley to alley.
Parts of the world are like the veins in an arm: hit one deeply
enough, and it's a disappearance.
The wolf submerged into pure silence,
till she came up, across town, in a garden.
Chlorine pools. Plastic fish. Iron
deer at absurd attention. A landscape chose
to look like nature but safer than that: frozen
solid. Green light slanting through planted
trees.
She must have stopped there and sampled the breeze,
maybe licked at the blood between the
cracks
in her paws, fooled into thinking she could stop and relax
by blending, like everything else, into
richness.
But the paper, later, quoted a witness:
"I thought," said the woman,
"she looked kind of funny.
Panting like that. And without anybody.
So when she didn't move, I called the
cops."
They spotted her there like you'd spot
an idea in the midst of a conversation.
And after that, came the wail of sirens
streaking across suburban blocks-- smearing
the sense
and symmetry-- till she hit the link fence
by the railroad tracks. Where (foam streaking her back)
she crossed over. The winos, the women at the laundromat,
barely noticed her passing. "Take
one to know one," they kidded later. Like the mistake
of the rookie cop when he asked
if they'd seen something dark and scared run past,
and everyone pointed in different directions
-- towards the sewer, the projects, up into heaven--
till the cop had to drive away. They
caught her, finally,
when the neighborhood dogs started whining
at the smell of fear in the air.
The cops simply cut off their sirens and stared,
and the howls of the dogs rose like a
map
superimposed on the back
of the city. If the wolf has to be a
symbol
of something, then the symbol now trembled
in knee-high grass. A vet in a pure white van pulled over:
in his trunk, a collection of tranquilizers--
on his hands, a pair of surgical gloves--
as if we became what we touched.
"We had her," the officer said,
"in a corner
and were attempting to take her alive, as ordered,
when she charged. And two of my men dispatched
her
before she could do any harm. Their reaction,"
he added, "was totally normal."
The paper, later, came up with a moral
by quoting the Dean of Science.
"We are saddened," he said, "by the use of violence
and the subsequent loss of learning."
But that wasn't learning I saw in the grass, turning
over and over itself till it died.
Her body was carted back to the lab, untied
on a table for the students to study,
and then
what was left of the wolf was abandoned.
Which is yet another end to the story.
Except, of course, there was still the body
and the meaning of that depended, again,
on how it looked (all cut into parts) and when
and where it was (on the floor). The
way
I see it, in a single movement, they
dropped the wolf down a chute to the
basement
where, in a plastic bag, she escaped.
Daniel Wolff
is a poet and author of the excellent biography of the great
Sam Cooke, You
Send Me, as well as the recent collection of Ernest Withers'
photographs The
Memphis Blues Again. This poem originally appeared in
the Spring 1990 edition of Three Penny Review.
He can be reached at: ziwolff@optonline.net
Weekend
Features
Ralph Nader
A Corporate
(Crime) State
Alexander Cockburn
Tourism
in Ancient Rome
David Vest
Have You
Been Serviced?
Karl Kraus
A Minor
Detail
Alexander Cockburn
The
Terrorism of Everyday Life
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