Amerikai Magyar Szó, 1985. július-december (39. évfolyam, 27-48. szám)
1985-09-05 / 33. szám
Thursday, Sep. 5. 1985. AMERIKAI MAGYAR SZO 15. NEWS AND REVIEW LETTER TO AN IMAGINARY FRIEND, Parts Three And Four. By Thomas McGrath. Copper Canyon Press, P.O. Box 271, Port Townsend, Washington, 98368. Paperback: $9.00. Letter to an Imaginary Friend is a single vast poem, a “mission of armed revolutionary memory” by radical visionary poet, Thomas McGrath. Written and published over a span of 30 years, it is both a reflection upon and creation within one lifetime, written along the way and across the space of the poet’s life. Parts three and four, the most recent sections to appear, fuse the most deeply personal recollections with the historical scope of revolutionary prophecy, two perspectives which in traditional bourgeois poetry have long been separated which McGrath reunites. It is with this clarity of purpose that McGrath states, “I have been working on only one poem throughout all my work.” In the poem, McGrath returns to scenes of his youth on a North Dakota farm, a once pristine wilderness now marred by nuclear silos, a landscape of “law and number where all money is armed” and “Old Ugly, the ultimate weapon sits.” The season is Christmas, the winter terrain appropriately mirroring the ruthless corruption and hypocrisy of the social system. It is dominated by “lifetakers and death- makers and justicefakers all,” those “united in unholy marriage of Money and Law,” on Christmas eve, which is a “false peace. The poet continues an exploration of this tainted history through the vehicle of his personal memories, a political history and “false past” that “begins with the first wound: with Indian blood.” It is a measure of McGrath’s creative and perceptual powers that he is able to chronicle these grim political details and at the same time forge a hope and anticipation of a regenerated future, a liberating “countersong” through which he uncovers the “statue of the Possible Hero” that is contained in all of us, a collective force that transcends time and place, and a dynamic principle passing readily between dimensions of past and future, dreams and reality, “returning us to ourselves.” Budapest FACTS AND FIGURES Number of inhabitants is 2.064.000, or 19,3% of Hungary's population. 23,6% Hungary's industrial workforce works here. A major center of transportation. The national highways and motorways branch out from here, Hungary's only international airport and harbor are also located in the capital. Budapest is a center of intellectual life; 85% of research workers and scholars work here. One out of every four high school students and 45% of university students study in Budapest. There are 2.000 hours of sunlight annually. The average temperature is 11° C with the January average at - 1° C and the July average at 22°C. Letter to an Imaginary Friend travels full circle on an excursion through several centuries of bitterness and struggle, and finally to the outrage of the present, under the burden of a missile-cluttered society. The Thomas McGrath SAFE FOR DEMOCRACY: The American Response to Revolution, 1913-1923. By Lloyd C. Gardner. Oxford University Press. 1984. Hardcover: $25 Few areas in American history have been as distorted as U.S. foreign policy, particularly U.S. relations with the Soviet Union. Our policymakers promote research proving that the Soviet “threat” is historical fact. Rea- ganite policies thereby acquire halo, wings, and historical necessity. But for quite some time, Rutgers professor Lloyd C. Gardner has resisted such pressures. He has written of U.S. policy between the two World Wars and during the Cold War. Though he does not write from a Marxist viewpoint, or as a supporter of socialism, he has in earlier books stated facts which most non-Marxist historians have misread or ignored (and which Marxists have quite often been alone in perceiving): that U.S. policy in Latin America and Asia have served big business; that anti- Sovietism energized Hitler’s Western appeasers at Munich (1938); that anti- Sovietism became U.S. policy while the USSR was still our wartime ally and FDR’s body was yet warm in the grave; that the atomic bombing of Japan was the first blow of the Cold War. In his new work, Gardner examines U.S. and British perceptions of revolution, focusing on the views of President Woodrow Wilson and Prime Minister David Lloyd George. Drawing upon seldom used or previously unresearched material, Gardner portrays the arrogant maneuvering of Western policymakers in the teens and 1920s. Jungle law was in force: jostling for influence, scrambling for investments, riding roughshod over other countries and their people (Mexico, China, Russia), propoem, in its conclusion, merges with the reader, who becomes a singular envisioned force of renewal, of our collective potential for change, the writer “searching for your hand while we write this down together.” It is this viding miscellaneous advantages to Wall Street. By the end of World War I, statesmen and businessmen had established these “civilized" norms of international behavior. Gardner conveys the sweep of U.S. and British interventions, noting also the effort by Wilson and Lloyd George to endow imperialism with virtue, to eschew the “Big Stick” in favor of more careful, less brutal, but no less anti-democratic violation of other peoples’ rights. And so we find U.S. and British officials plotting coup d’e- tats in Mexico, conceding “special rights” to Japan in exploiting the mineral wealth of China, claiming turf like gangsters in the street; in Wilson’s words (1912), “we must broaden our borders and make conquest of the markets of the world.” Statesmen fawn over czarinas, disparage “Jew- Bolsheviks”, and name Lenin as the man to stop in early 1917. Gardner takes us on quite a tour: Japanese, British, and American troops supporting counterrevolution in Russia, with London appointing a “High Commissioner” in Siberia; U.S. Food Administrator Herbert Hoover, incubating his Depresion-era callousness with a warning to food recipients in war-torn Europe to shun radicalism or go hungry; Winston Churchill drafting “ultimatums” to Moscow, endorsing “force to restore the situation and set up a democratic Government”; Siberian-based British advisor Alfred Knox attacking the “Hebrew influence” for Woodrow Wilson’s apparent lack of anti-Soviet fervor; and U.S. Secretary of State Robert Lansing shedding diplomatic shellac, speaking from his upper class gut against the revolution that brought working people to power in Russia: if that revolution survived, it would so inspire the “ignorant and incapable mass of humanity” that the latter would soon became “dominant great strength of shared possibilities that McGrath distills from the most oppressive human experience that gives Letter to an Imaginary Frien- dits unique magic and spirit. — Prairie in the earth.” “Compromise with radicalism” and “the unwisdom of giving special recognition to a particular class of society (worker) as if it possessed exceptional rights,” seem also to have deeply offended the unselfish Lansing. One finds profound class bias and chauvinism in the personalities portrayed by Gardner, their unflagging belief that the Revolution would go down the tubes because (as one official put it) of “the cowardice of the mob in Russia. . .” Denial of legitimate internal sources of revolutions — in Russia, China, Mexico — quickly became dogma at the State Department. After 1917, writes Gardner, Western policymakers “downgraded internal causes of revolution in favor of putting the blame on conspiratorial intrigues and outside agitation.” That this was more than incidental in policy-making is illustrated by the fate of the first (1921) British-Soviet treaty. In response to British labor’s demand for jobs through trade, Lloyd George consented to sign a major trade accord with the socialist state. The treaty obligated the two sides to refrain from interfering in each other’s internal affairs. Later on in the 20s, British officials condemned Soviet expressions of support for anti-colonial movements — and for the struggles of British labor — as not only a violation of that treaty, but also as the source of those movements. The treaty foundered on that reef. The Soviet “threat” has never existed. “Threats” to peace and independence came from Wall Street, the Pentagon, Downing Street in London, and from the “better classes” and their statesmen. Few historians have done a better job in correcting that most hazardous and unscholarly of distortions — the perennial Soviet “menace” — than Lloyd C. Gardner. — D. A.Niel Basalt, granite, gabbro, metaphoric marble, contemporary ore— Era and epoch up to the stony present, the rigid Past Flows and reshuffles, torn by insurgent winds, Shocked and reshaped as History changes its sullen face. And the future groans and turns in its sleep and the past shifls as the New Is born : Star of blood, with your flag of the underground moon— That sickle of liberating light—you strike my chains and lead Me from the'throne of death and up the untraveled stairs Toward the shine of the sun and other stars! Though one leg be stone Forever I lag and limp behind you as long as blood Shall beat in my veins and love shall move as it moves me now, Chipping the flint of this page to blaze our passage home — From Letter to an Imaginary Friend, by Thomas McGrath Blowing away anti-Soviet myths
