Correspondence
Correspondence POETRY AS POLITICS WITH REGARD to J. Bottum's excellent cover story, "The Poets vs. the First Lady" (Feb. 17), I found the flip incivility and poor manners exhibited by Sam Hamill...
...For those whose attitude is "Hell no, we won't go...
...Elliot I. Susser Eastport, NY COLUMBIA VS...
...Such a farcical understanding of political poetry is not limited to the ephemeral postings found on the internet, as the unfortunate career of Adrienne Rich demonstrates...
...Far more curious than David Tell's 5,500-word promotional piece for my book is the magnitude of his anger toward me, Planned Parenthood, and, above all, toward the very notion of women controlling their own destinies...
...Prior to the 19 th century, armies consisted of small groups of well-trained professionals...
...Likewise, poetry is subordinated to the dictates of the cause, with poetry standing as a placard of political activism...
...Hamill has embraced is mere partisanship, politics in its most trivial form...
...The weapons are highly accurate, but only if operated by people who have acquired the necessary skills to use them effectively...
...Indeed, poetry has something to say to us regarding the subject of war...
...it calls upon the basest of human instincts...
...17), I found the flip incivility and poor manners exhibited by Sam Hamill and his colleagues less troubling than the assumption, widely shared by many of the poets quoted, that politics comprises the alpha and omega of human existence...
...Actually, this is a historical aberration peculiar to the 19 th and 20th centuries...
...But Mr...
...RICHARD L. JOHNSON College Station, TX PLANNED PARENTHOOD I WAS GENUINELY SURPRISED to see so many stories from my new book, Behind Every Choice Is a Story, reprinted in —of all places—The Weekly Standard, considering each story is a testament to the importance of reproductive freedom ("Planned Un-Parenthood," Jan...
...One is narrowly self-serving, self-loathing, and ultimately self-destructive...
...GLORIA FELDT New York, NY LETTER TO THE GOVERNOR THANK YOU SO MUCH for the article about governors and taxes ("Republicans Who Love Taxes," Stephen Moore, Feb...
...Later, I read Charles Krauthammer's "Redeeming Columbia" (Feb...
...Among the other "reforms" of the French Revolution, a decree dated February 14, 1793, declared that all able-bodied men owed military service to their country...
...OSAMA I SAW ANOTHER MESSAGE RECENTLY, purportedly from osama bin Laden, spewing his venomous bile and hatred of Western culture for what amounts to the historic failures of Arab civilization...
...PEGGY SPENCER Cox's Creek, KY...
...After all, the soldiers in question volunteered for military service, they want to go to war to earn faster promotion, and no one was forced into the army who didn't want to join...
...As of today, the U.S...
...armies cannot afford to issue million-dollar weapons to hundreds of thousands of draftees...
...STEPHEN DAWSON Forest, VA DRAFT DODGING WOODY WEST'S "Good Reasons to Dodge the Draft" (Feb...
...The other European powers had to resort to the draft to be able to compete with Napoleon's armies, because, as one of Napoleon's maxims of war says, "God is on the side of the heaviest battalions...
...our increasingly hightech weaponry demands intelligent recruits who must then be trained for many months, sometimes years, to be able to use those weapons to their highest potential...
...The end of the fear of a draft will in turn eliminate most of the antiwar activism this country saw in the Vietnam era...
...The same will hold true in the 21st century...
...The singular importance of one's political cause, for example, obviates the need for manners and civility...
...Hamill and others like him have discarded poetry for politics...
...The weapons are also extremely expensive...
...What Mr...
...in sum, the draft, which was essential as recently as World War ii, is as obsolete as the weapons of World War ii...
...Little more, i'm afraid, than the rude noise of uninformed opinion...
...in the 21st century, there will simply be no need for a draft, because we no longer need the huge numbers that 19th- and 20th-century armies required...
...17) and I was affected by the startling juxtaposition of human thought expressed between the two messages...
...This was called the "levee en masse," and Napoleon used it to raise armies larger than any Europe had ever seen...
...Most people think that armies composed of huge numbers of men, drafted by their governments, are the norm in warfare...
...The single factor which made the antiwar movement of the Vietnam era so powerful in America was the draft...
...Army does not accept recruits who do not have a high school diploma...
...As we say in Texas, even the chickens under the porch know that...
...The other is expansive, and it romantically summons what is majestic and glorious in the human spirit—not for parochial self-interest, but for the universal good of mankind...
...our government was then taking young men out of school and forcing them to fight in a political war for which many Americans saw no vital need...
...all they have to do is not join the army, which is rather easy to accomplish...
...Nevertheless, most of us recognize every woman's fundamental human and civil right to make our own decisions about childbearing...
...We no longer need 100,000 men firing single-shot muskets to guarantee that no enemy force can cross a given field...
...Increasingly, 21st-century warfare will be fought with extremely high-tech weapons, requiring training measured in years rather than in weeks...
...100 men equipped with high-tech weapons could produce the same or even a greater rate of deadly firepower...
...By contrast, the traditional pre-19th-century army, composed of volunteer career officers and enlisted men, could be sent to fight a war without causing an antiwar movement to gain much credibility...
...I have sent it to my governor, who, though an idiot, may have some smart advisers...
...His fumigations raise the question as to what a poet who has renounced poetry has to tell us...
...No, that's not quite right...
...17) fails to recognize the main reason the draft should be avoided by Congress: The draft is no longer necessary...
Vol. 8 • March 2003 • No. 24
