Fogo Island

Well, I am into photography, not just hardcore criticism.  And I'm into Newfoundland and Labrador.  Why?  The answer is in the photo above.  I shall be returning in June once again.

Sherman Alexie

For the cartoon I sketched on Sherman Alexie scroll down a ways on my blogs...
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An American Glavlit Change of Rules

A rose by any other name might smell just as sweet, but a poem about a rose by a non-white writer is obviously better than a poem by a white writer. Even if it's the same poem.  This is a story about a white poet who made it all the way into Best American Poetry by using an Asian name.  

—Daniel Greenfield, Frontpage magazine

After a poem of mine has been rejected a multitude of times under my real name, I put Yi-Fen’s name on it and send it out again.  As a strategy for ‘placing’ poems this has been quite successful… The poem in question… was rejected under my real name forty times before I sent it out as Yi-Fen Chou (I keep detailed records). As Yi-Fen the poem was rejected nine times before Prairie Schooner took it. If indeed this is one of the best American poems of 2015, it took quite a bit of effort to get it into print, but I’m nothing if not persistent.

—Michael Derrick Hudson, poet who got a poem into The Best American Poetry

So, the scandalous news is out: the Best American Poetry guest editor, native-American Sherman Alexie, prefers race-based selection of poetry.   In essence, Alexie overtly changed what had already been covertly changed regarding established-order Glavlit* rules.  Diversity was now officially dictated into the rule book as Rule #2:  poetry by whites is to be disfavored, unless authored by women.  However, Rule #1 still remains intact:  criticism of the literary established order is absolutely verboten. 

Now, thanks to Hudson’s overt confession (see quote above), guest editor Alexie was forced to also confess and ended up presenting a rather rambling justification of the total lack of objectivity in the selection process:  “and, hey, guess what? In paying more initial attention to Yi-Fen Chou's poem, I was also practicing a form of nepotism. I am a brown-skinned poet who gave a better chance to another supposed brown-skinned poet because of our brownness.”  Racist?  You bet!

Now, add to that aberrant comment:  “I am a powerful literary figure and the pseudonym user [Hudson] is an unknown guy who has published maybe a dozen poems in his life.”  Modest?  Far from it!  Alexie further notes:  “If I'd kicked him out… he might have tried to go public with that news. And he would have been vilified and ignored. And I would have been praised. Trust me, I would much rather be getting praised by you poets than receiving the vilification I am getting now.”  Well, at least that’s positive!  Poets were actually decrying the poor fellow?  Good!

“If I'd pulled the poem then I would have been denying that I was consciously and deliberately seeking to address past racial, cultural, social, and aesthetic injustices in the poetry world,” notes Alexie.  But does American literature really need PC social-justice race-warrior indoctrinees determining what poetry is best and what isn’t?  Hell, they’re overseeing just about everything else nowadays!  

So, the scandal broke and in jumped white-privileged author Conor Friedersdorf, penning a reportage/analysis on the Alexie Affaire in the Atlantic and in full support—oh, but of course—of the avowed anti-white racist guest editor. “Sherman Alexie’s post offers a refreshing degree of candor,” he argues.  “It is blessedly free of euphemism, jargon, or evasions.”  Candor or rather forced candor?  And sadly NOT “blessedly free” from a gross strain of vanity and vapid PC-diversity verbosity.  The article becomes seriously tedious after Friedersdorf notes “there is an internally consistent integrity to his actions.”  Yet internally consistent PC is hardly integrity.  Reason is integrity.  PC often and ineluctably conflicts with reason.  Merit is reason; skin color is PC.  

“At the very worst, he did the wrong thing. Who among us hasn’t?” noted Friedersdorf, apologizing for the guest editor.  Yet how easily one could say the same about Hillary… and Nixon… and how about Hitler, Mao, and Stalin?  Yes, they did the wrong thing.  BUT who among us hasn’t?  That constitutes a horseshit apologia.  Period.  

Thus from a reportage/analysis of a seeming literary insanity, manifest in the guest editor’s justification, Friedersdorf manifests his own seeming literary insanity of RACISM as the crux in poetry, as it’s become everywhere else in America.  The white-privilege author jumps on the White-Privilege bandwagon:  “It is the strongest, most widely persuasive premise from which to declare white nepotism immoral and intra-white solidarity irrational and unnecessary.”  So, am I really privileged in the world of poetry because I'm white?  Yet I’ve been shut out right and left by lit magnate mignons.  Were they shutting me out because of my white skin color?  If so, doesn’t that contradict the vacuous white-privilege notion?  Well, from my perspective, it was not my skin color at all, but rather my vocal hardcore criticism against the instrinsic corruption in the literary establishment, as illustrated by the likes of Alexie.  How can one possibly believe that a black or native-American mignon would have to stand behind someone like me to get published?  Absurd!  

So, what did the high-brow Alexie/Friedersdorf Affirmative Action, white privilege hogwash not address?  What Friedersdorf failed to realize in his lengthy, social-justice-warrior article was the significance of the statement that “In the end, I chose each poem in the anthology because I love it.”  In essence, one egocentric, autocrat, established-order, minority poet got to choose the “best” poems in America.  It was the same egregiously clouded fact regarding the poet laureate of the U.S. Congress.  One egocentric, autocrat librarian of Congress gets to choose the “great” American laureate.  Was this not something that should be highlighted and in fact challenged?  Apparently not!  

Perhaps it was time David Lehman change the name of his autocratic anthology from Best American Poetry to Brown Lives Matter American Poetry.  Sadly, it is always the call for diversity of skin color, not of ideas, and where inclusiveness always implies exclusion of certain ideas, especially tough criticism of the likes of Alexie and Friedersdorf.  As Daniel Greenfield wisely (i.e., reasonably) noted:  “When you artificially privilege people by race, then you reward work by race, not by merit and you encourage fraud. And you are responsible for that fraud. For all the talk of ‘entitlement’ and ‘white privilege’, the bottom line is a white guy pretending to be a minority gets a leg up.” 

In conclusion, Friedershof writes:  “With limited resources, he did the best he could to put together a great book of poems and to run what he regarded as a just process for doing so.”  Friedershof thus opens wide and spews the widely-unchallenged fraud of implicit objectivity imbuing the term “great,” especially when applied to poetry... and racism has become a "just process."  

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*As for Glavlit, read Solzhenitsyn’s The Oak and the Calf.  Vladimir Lakshin notes:  “Glavlit is the Russian acronym for the body which censored all printed matter in the USSR.  Each glavlit censor was supplied with a secret book of instructions, constantly amended and updated, which lists the topics that may not be mentioned in print."

Robert Weide

Matt Jennings

Cloaked (College-as-Usual)

“My name is Matt.  Please join me in this conversation,” notes Matt Jennings, editor of Middlebury Magazine in his brief editorial, “Uncloaked.”  Of course, I’ve heard that one before.  Sadly, the term “conversation” seems to have become code for "ideological monologue," as in the let’s-have-a-conversation-about-race monologue.  Orwellian inevitably comes to mind, as I leaf through Middlebury Magazine, alumni mag of Middlebury College.  

“Inclusion!”  It seems PC-mimicry has become well-implanted at the college, where the “conversation” will not likely include Middlebury’s terrible speech-code rating, especially regarding its Anti-Harassment/Discrimination Policy (see the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, https://www.thefire.org/fire_speech-codes/middlebury-sexual-harassment/).  Needless to say I brought that up a while ago to the deaf ears of the editors of New England Review and Middlebury Campus (the student newspaper), as well as to the previous editor of Middlebury Magazine.  For me, it is incomprehensible why the vast majority of magazines and newspapers tend to knee-jerk reject criticism with their regard.  In each and every issue of The American Dissident, which I publish and to which the MC librarian refuses to subscribe, I include the harshest critique lodged against me and the journal.  What’s the big deal?  Well, those editors should look into the mirror and ask themselves that very question.  

Yes, “please join me in this conversation,” notes the college's interim Chief Diversity Officer Miguel Fernandez.  And yes, “what it means to be inclusive.”  Well, of course, that’s an easy question!  Inclusive means to exclude freedom of expression when those in power do not like that expression.  BTW, who is the college's Chief Democracy Officer?  Oh, it only has a Chief Diversity Officer?  I see.  Diversity (i.e., not of ideas, but of superficial skin color and ethnicity) is far more important than democracy (i.e., free speech and vigorous debate) at Middlebury!  Now, imagine the PC uproar if President Laurie Patton decided out of the blue to actually be original in academe and establish the first college Chief Democracy Officer!  Oh yeah, just a 60s pipedream.

Now, what in tarnation does Patton's “collective community ownership of inclusivity” mean?  Not even Orwell himself could have come up with such a term!  Hmm.  Yes, “we need to engage in discussion,” notes Fernandez, but only as long as that discussion excludes social-media misunderstandings of his understanding.  Hmm.  Anyhow, My name is Tod.  Please join me in this conversation.  

[Sadly, though quite predictably, nobody was willing to do that, not Fernandez, not Patton, not Jennings, and not the editors of those other rags, all of whom were sent this “let’s have a conversation addendum…]

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I'd also sent this front cover of The AD to those deaf Middlebury College ears.  Pres. Liebowitz was replaced by Patton.  Liebowitz is now Pres. at Brandeis.  Hmm.  College-as- Usual.  

Frederick Glaysher

Michael Finch

Hypocrites Always at the Helm

Below are two comments I made on FrontPage magazine's website.  Both automatically posted, one about two months ago, while the other only yesterday, which explains its title.  The day after posting, each was consciously and purposefully censored by the David Horowitz Freedom (i.e., Censorship) Foundation.

After the first censorship incident, I wrote Michael Finch, David Horowitz, and Professor Walter Williams.  Horowitz and Finch did not deign to respond.  Williams did.  Our correspondence follows the two posts.  Williams response was, of course, in support of censorship and via unoriginal vacuous semantics.

Poets like Michael Finch can be very fragile creatures.  Criticize their flaccid poesy and so many of them will fall into pieces...  

To Be Censored (Questioning and Challenging 
NOT Permitted Here When It Concerns Us)

One must wonder why poetry reviews must always be glowing.  In fact, one must wonder if reviewer Betty Mohr even possesses the intellect to wonder about that.  It is a strange conundrum of sorts.  Sadly, a negative review will likely not result in publication.

It is odd that only two reviews of poetry have appeared in recent times in FrontPage magazine and both of one book, Finding Home, by Michael Finch, president of the David Horowitz Freedom Center in Los Angeles, which sponsors FrontPage.  Egregious conflict of interest?  You bet!  And how utterly odd to state that Finch “fights every day to preserve America’s liberty, its religious freedom, and its unique culture,” for Finch favors the elimination (censorship) of comments (liberty of expression) that are not glowing with regards his writing.  Aberrant?  You bet!

“If as a people, and a nation, we can return to something lost, recovering something from our culture that has been torn, then it can only happen through art,” notes Finch in seeming total oblivion of the existence of the PC-art establishment.  Yes, Herr Finch, but only when that art does not upset the art establishment by “recovering something from our culture that has been torn,” including the freedom of expression Finch himself has helped tear.

Even more curiously irrational is the comment made by Finch hagiographer reviewer Betty Mohr  (Le Bon Travel & Culture):  “Indeed, Finch grasps the importance of art in the battle to preserve America.  Art, whether in fiction, in drama, in film, in painting, and in music conveys the force of philosophy. Those who control the field of artistic communication have had such a powerful impact on the spread of bad ideas that they have brought our country to the edge of a political and cultural abyss. The antidote for change requires that new patriots not relinquish the field of art to America’s enemies. Finch’s poetry is an important step in that right direction.”

Indeed, but how do “poignant excerpts from Finding Home” possibly constitute an “antidote for change”?  And does not the censorship (i.e., exclusion) of this very comment constitute one of those very “bad ideas that they have brought our country to the edge of a political and cultural abyss”?  Well, REASON has never been the forte of ideologues, left or right-wing.

For my censored comment—review of a review (and please don’t get bogged down in semantics and the official definition of censorship)—vis-a-vis the last glowing review, see below this comment, which is posted here:  http://wwwtheamericandissidentorg.blogspot.com/2016/02/michael-finch.html.  Also, check out the cartoon I drew regarding it, Walter Williams, and David Horowitz:  http://wwwtheamericandissidentorg.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2015-12-23T06:28:00-08:00&max-results=7 .

Finally, I guess I must be a troll, you know, the PC-term for those trying to get unwanted critical opinions into the public arena of ideas?  So be it…
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Let No Act of Censorship Go Uncriticized

FrontPage, an online right-wing journal, had rightfully been denouncing the increasing incidents of left-wing assaults on freedom of speech, especially with regards the shutting down of debate and creation of safe spaces and speech codes, on college campuses across the country from Yale to Missou to Smith to Vasser.

Hypocritically, its moderators (i.e., censors) also shut down debate.  Indeed, they refused to post my critical comment regarding a glowing review written by Mark Tapson, Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, of a book of poetry written by Michael Finch, Chief Operating Officer also at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.  The egregious hypocrisy of that act of censorship left me fully disgusted.  And not one person at the Horowitz Freedom Center would respond.

What had provoked me to comment, in the first place, was the very crux of the review, as clearly stated by the reviewer:  “But as many conservative writers such as Andrew Klavan and myself have noted for years, reclaiming America means reclaiming the culture, and that means engaging in the arts.”  Contrast that statement with the rather innocuous verse presented by the reviewer, as if somehow that verse would help in “reclaiming the culture.”  Mind-boggling!

In my initial comment, I criticized the crux statement as insufficient.  Indeed, mere “engaging in the arts” would accomplish little if anything.  What was needed was active questioning and challenging of the “arts” machine, which I’ve come to term the academic/literary established order. The poem fragments taken from FINDING HOME: POEMS IN SEARCH OF A LOST AMERICA clearly did not even remotely attempt that.  Note, for example:  

My mind remembers a soft, warm wind,

Sweet earth scent, and billows of clouds

In a wide prairie sky of youth’s eternal hope.

Where have you gone?

Now, how might those lines even remotely help the right-wing in “reclaiming the culture” in an effort to establish… its particular forms of censorship, let alone expose the lack of objectivity, egregious hypocrisy, and especially visceral knee-jerk rejection of any criticism regarding the left-wing “arts” machine?  Here’s another verse presented by Tapson:  

Years from now when the winds blow again,

When you stare at the midnight’s blue of

The setting sun, lined mountains black against

A cobalt sky, do one thing for the one who loved you:

Think of me when your eyes gaze at the wondrous sky,

Your eyes searching the heavens for one,

When the breeze blows one last time through your hair,

Do one final thing. Think of me.

Another big problem with the “arts” machine is the M.O. of egregious backslapping and self-congratulating.  In that sense, Tapson partakes in it, promoting the poetry of his admitted “friend.”  What else is new, eh?  Frank Kotter, whose comment was not censored by the moderators, sums up the inanity confronting poetry today.

I have not heard such touching and meaningful prose since Paul de Lagarde. May this also usher in a new era in our nation's consciousness just as those have who come before you.  I have ordered but am disappointed to see it is not offered in hard cover—A shame as this book will be cited in history books in centuries to come.

More often when someone like me questions and challenges the “arts” machine (i.e., the academic/literary established order), the latter will respond with proverbial deafening silence.  Imagine, for example, I had the gall recently to question and challenge the new poet laureate of Boston, Professor Danielle Legros Georges, who, as the Boston Globe headline stated, “wants to make poetry comfortable for all.”  Of course, by simply mentioning that fact here, I greatly lessen my chances of getting this essay published because it contravenes the first commandment of the “arts” machine:  thou shalt not criticize poets!  

Because I’d sent my critique to the student newspaper editors of Lesley University, Legros Georges’ employer, and only cc’d it to her, she called me “cowardly” in her response and wrote that if I really wanted debate then she was ready for it.  So, I wrote with that regard… and received no response!  Then days later, I wrote again, asking what happened to the will for debate.  And again, no response was received.  In essence, that deafening silence was the reason I’d chosen to write the student newspaper.  My long experience dealing with machine literati was deafening silence.  Sadly, my experience with student journalists had not proven much better, though a little bit.  Considering the innocuousness of the poem fragments illustrated in Tapson’s hagiography (for the entire piece, see 

http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/260860/finding-home-poems-search-lost-america-mark-tapson),  Michael Finch should have no problem at all getting published in “arts” machine magazines like Agni, Ploughshares, and Poetry magazine.  

Finally, Thoreau famously urged:  “Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.”  To that, I’d add left or right-wing machine.   And tis better to chime with Thoreau, than climb the ladder in search of vacuity, that is, fame, awards, invitations, tenure, and all the other crap serving to muzzle the truly cowardly like left-wing Legros Georges and right-wing Michael Finch… 

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From: George Slone

Sent: Tuesday, November 24, 2015 8:19 AM

To: wwilliam@gmu.edu

Subject: Your concern for liberty for your fellow man...

To Walter Williams,

If you are not the person, though I believe you are, who wrote the article on Free Speech in today's FrontPage mag, then ignore this missive.  If you are, however, then you did write:  "Most people want liberty for themselves. I want more than that. I want liberty for me and liberty for my fellow man."

BUT do you really want liberty for your fellow man?  FrontPage mag censored my comment several days ago.  It censored my liberty.  I protested that act of censorship to Horowitz and Tapson, but nobody deigned to respond, proving the right-wing is also into censorship.  If you truly cared about my freedom of speech, you would stand up and send a protest letter to Horowitz.  Why not tell him he ought to follow Jonathan Turley's policy of NOT moderating (i.e., censoring) comments.  Likely, you will not do that.  And that would answer the question about your desire of liberty for your fellow man.  The email and my censored comment figure below.  You will note the absence of threats, prohibited words, etc. in it.  

From: Walter E Williams

Sent: Saturday, December 19, 2015 9:09 AM

To: George Slone

Subject: RE: Prof Walter Williams cartooned...

One’s right to free speech does not impose an obligation that others to provide a forum for him.

Cheers.

Professor Walter E. Williams

George Mason University, Economics

4400 University Dr., MSN 3G4

Fairfax, VA  22030

http://www.walterewilliams.com

From: George Slone [mailto:todslone@hotmail.com]
Sent: Saturday, December 19, 2015 8:40 AM
To: Walter E Williams
Cc: pic@broadsideonline.com
Subject: Prof Walter Williams cartooned...

To Prof. Walter Williams,

For the new cartoon on you, see attached or wwwtheamericandissidentorg.blogspot.com .

You wrote: "Most people want liberty for themselves. I want more than that. I want liberty for me and liberty for my fellow man."

BUT do you really want liberty for your fellow man?  FrontPage mag, which publishes your essays, censored my comment several days ago.  It censored my liberty.  I protested that act of censorship to Horowitz and Tapson, but nobody deigned to respond, proving the right-wing is also into censorship.  If you truly cared about my freedom of speech, you would stand up and send a protest letter to Horowitz.  Why not tell him he ought to follow Jonathan Turley's policy of NOT moderating (i.e., censoring) comments.  Likely, you will not do that.  And that would answer the question about your desire of liberty for your fellow man.  The email and my censored comment figure below.  You will note the absence of threats, prohibited words, etc. in it.

[No further response from the Professor, who of course does NOT want liberty for me...]

Patricia Cartes