Category: Blogging

Trading Democracy airing Tuesday February 5th at 10:00 on most PBS stations This program promises to show how “NAFTA’s secret tribunals have the power to put a price tag on environmental and health laws. And we pay the bill.”

Considering American businesses’ exploitation of the Third World, it seems truly ironic that the recent rise in concern over NAFTA, particularly Chapter 11, should be inspired by the Canadian company Methanex’s attempts to sue the State of California over the banning of MBTE as a gasoline additive, especially since Chapter 11 has been repeatedly used by American companies to fight environmental actions in Canada and Mexico.

As an avid environmentalists who’s equally worried about exploited Third World workers everywhere, I’m constantly bewildered by the complexities of world trade. Although I consider myself literate and fairly well educated, economics have been sadly neglected in my education.

NAFTA, has been particularly confusing to me because I have felt America has exploited Mexico so much in the past by relying on Mexican workers for cheap labor while neglecting to develop the Mexican economy itself. Thus, while I was worried about American and Canadian jobs being exported to Mexico, I saw NAFTA as a chance to help Mexico build their own economy.

At the same time, I have little trust of large business organizations, international or otherwise. I’m not blind to the environmental damage they have done to our environment. It’s frightening to imagine what they would do if the legal system was unfairly stacked on their side.

Moyer’s show Tuesday is definitely going to be must watch for me.

There’s a number of good background sources on the web if you want to be more informed before watching the show:

IISD net offers a summary of Chapter 11’s impacts on the environment.

Public Citizen offers background on a number of lawsuits filed on Chapter 11.

Melinda Steffen offers a legal opinion on the California lawsuit.

Not wanting you to think I’d forsaken all else for the sake of poetry, I’m taking a day off (at least from writing about it) to mention a few blogs I’ve been visiting regularly.

Moving near the top of my list (though not likely to replace wood s lot is Visible Darkness a blog written by a young writing teacher in Arkansas, although he seems to be missing California at the moment. Though I don’t necessarily share his love of Shelley’s Defence of Poetry, I find most of his blogs fascinating. They certainly provide me with a fresh view of the world, something I desperately need while I’m caught up in my review of graying and past-graying poets.

I also recently discovered If in my referrer logs and have been reading it regularly since. While many of the entries are short, they almost invariably lead to new and interesting destinations. Short and sweet is hard to beat. Take it from someone who probably has way too much to say.

I also discovered Synergyin my referrer log. It turned out to be a letter from someone suggesting that he look at my page. Later, though, I found a link to my “Why I Blog” essay, you know the one in the upper left corner that Diane recently suggested I should add to the page (as if I didn’t have more than enough to write already). I haven’t really had much time to explore Synergy yet, but I certainly love the page’s motto: Something beautiful every day. There can never be too much beauty in the world, that’s for sure.

In fact, my son-in-law the other day said that “In a Dark Time” seemed like a very depressing title to him, but the truth is that it’s the second half of the title (you know, the part where it says “The Eye Begins to See”) that’s most important to me. I’m not into denying reality, but the truth is that I tend to see the world more positively than most people imagine.

I’m also glad to see that Whiskey River has recently returned to regularly updating his page, as has Cloud 9. At my age I tend to become a creature of habit, and it’s annoying when you find yourself reading an old entry day after day.

I take that list of blogs on the left seriously. If I quit visiting a site regularly I take it off the list. I won’t recommend a site to a reader if I don’t visit it regularly myself. I’m not into linking for the sake of linking or simply to draw more visitors to my site. Actually, I continually add and subtract to the list of blogs I read regularly, but I don’t include my entire list in my recommended list until I’m convinced it’s something I want to read regularly. And I don’t necessarily recommend all sites I personally like.

Speaking of form and the limitations necessary for art, writing about May’s book has made me very conscious of the limitations of a blog. In fact for a moment I almost, but not quite, missed the classroom where I could have a dialogue with students about a book rather than just “lecturing” to myself.

Having written the summary of the first two chapters of The Courage to Create, I resisted writing more summaries (as you could probably tell if you came back for several days in a row). Although I admire Philosophical Investigations’ attempts to discuss Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations online, I personally find it very difficult to discuss a long work in my blog. The first time I tried to discuss a philosophical book, I posted an entry but then later deleted because I couldn’t figure out how to finish it online.

I find that quite frustrating because novels, and other full-length works, have been just as influential in shaping who I am as poets or musical artists have been, and I would like to deal with them in this blog. Although they aren’t as easy to deal with as a poem or a song, they have sometimes been more influential in my life. Books like Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure have been pivotal in shaping my “world,” to use Rollo May’s term.

I’m convinced that the philosophy that has emerged from my interaction with the “real” world and the world of ideas that I encountered in literature have allowed me to cope with my experiences as effectively as possible and to avoid, though neither unscathed nor unchanged, the life-crippling despair and bitterness that many of my friends have experienced when they experienced similar situations.

One of many reasons I became a teacher after my experiences in Vietnam was the belief that the young soldiers I served with in Vietnam has not been prepared for the “world” they met in Vietnam. To the contrary, they came to the war with an idealistic view of America’s role in the world that was belied by most of our actions in Vietnam. These recruits came expecting to gloriously rescue the “good” South Vietnamese from the “evil” North Vietnamese. Instead, they encountered a peasantry that, at best, was indifferent to the Americans, and, at worst, was fighting at night to defeat us.

Many of these young soldiers reacted very differently to the war than I did, and I’m convinced that in many cases it was because I had a different background than they did. After four years of reading modern literature in college, I was more skeptical of America’s war aims. Books like Camus’ The Stranger and Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead gave me a different expectation of war than the patriotic, distorted high-school history classes these young men had taken. They had been told about all the great ideas America stood for and about our noble deeds in the past. Unfortunately, the media and their teachers had ignored all the bad things we had also done, like our treatment of the American Indians or America’s questionable practices in South America

As ill-prepared as they were psychologically, little surprise many of them simply couldn’t come to terms with the reality of what was going on in Vietnam. They couldn’t reconcile their “world” with the “real world” of Vietnam.

I, on the other hand, suddenly understood Camus’ The Stranger, a novel that seemed incomprehensible when I encountered it in college five years earlier. Existentialism itself became clear. Kiekergard’s despair became my despair, but at least it didn’t come completely unexpectedly. I must admit, though, that sometimes even I was shocked to realize that just a few years earlier I had been sitting on a college campus reading poetry and watching all the beautiful young ladies walk by.

When I came back from Vietnam, I couldn’t believe the changes I had undergone. I was even half-thankful that I had gotten a “Dear Loren” letter before I left because I didn’t think the girl could possibly recognize me as the same person I was when I left, for I hardly recognized myself.

The point is that books have played an integral part in developing my philosophy. If I’m going to continue to blog and explore who I am online, I need to find a satisfactory way of dealing with long works so that I don’t bore the hell out of myself and anyone else who just might drop in to see what I have to say on a particular day.

If you have an opinion, drop me an email.

Blogging has reawakened my interest in the internet.

After years of using the internet, I had begun to feel that it, like much of everything else in our society, had been taken over by commercial interests. While I enjoyed the convenience and savings of ordering software and hardware for my Macintosh from the net, I wasn’t willing to pay $40 a month for the convenience.

Even when I did find articles on the web, they were often useless, either little more than encyclopedia articles or written with an obvious bias.

Personally, I found it more and more difficult to find intellectually stimulating ideas on the web. Either I didn’t know how to find them, or I was unwilling to wade through the tons of pages looking for relevant material.

Since finding blogs several months ago, though, I have a renewed interest in the internet. First, as mentioned in an earlier blog, I found some great sources of articles on the web and I didn’t have to spend hours doing it. Some of those sites are found in my links section, but I still rely daily on wood s lot.

More recently, I found several personal, philosophical sites that are close to my own personal philosophy, yet with a different enough perspective that I use them to inspire and to help refine my own thinking, sites like Cloud 9 , The Obvious? and whiskey river. I’ve even enjoyed briefly exchanging emails with some of them, but more importantly than that, I feel like there is another community, an international one at that, that I am a part of and that inspires me to focus my ideas and put them down on the page.

This community may not offer the kind of feedback that a personal dialogue does, but, at its best, it reminds me of an international university where ideas are shared among colleagues.