When I Was In College, I Lost

Someone Will Always Want To Mobilize Death On A Massive Scale For Economic Domination Or Revenge. And The Task, Taken As A Task, Appeals To The Imagination. The Military Is An Engineering Profession.

There Isn't A River Or Creek In The Country - Or There Are Very Few - That Doesn't Have Some Small Group Of People Working On A Restoration Or Creek Cleanup Project. Let Me Give You One Example That's A Great Metaphor: In Washington, D.c., There Is A Group Called The Anacostia Watershed Society. Two Rivers Converge And Define Washington - One Which Everybody Knows About, The Potomac, And The Anacostia, Which They Don't. The Anacostia Is One Of The Most Polluted Urban Rivers In The Country.

Poetry Is A Fireplace In Summer Or A Fan In Winter.

Another Problem About Writing About Politics In The "age Of Globalization" Is That So Much Of The Violence In The Form Of War And Also In The Forms Of Institutional Violence - Sweatshops, Child Labor, Victimization Of People Economically - Happens Elsewhere And Out Of Sight. And When We Do Know About It And Need To Witness It, It's Always Mediated By Images Of One Kind Or Another, So You're Kind Of Stuck Trying To Write About What It's Like Trying To Be You Living Your Life Thinking About And Experiencing This Stuff In That Way.

At Some Level, You Have To Be Able To Say, "this Is My Task." It's In Small, Local Ways That You Keep Yourself Alive And Refresh Ideas That Are Always Going Into Dead Abstraction.