Baithak

Poets and critics have been around for a long time, and some writers have been both poets and critics, but the “poet-critic” was invented in the 20th century. This hybrid role was created by T. S. Eliot and then adapted by a generation of poets who won positions in American colleges as literary critics, before the M.F.A. in creative writing gave poets jobs teaching writing workshops. The poet-critics of that era shared a point of view. They were against experimental literature. They valued rhyme and meter not only as expressive forms, but as safeguards against sentimentality, narcissism and even madness. They saw poetry as a way to preserve the individual’s spiritual and intellectual integrity in a society dominated by science and mass culture. They praised reason and proportion, but their mood was apocalyptic.

Adam Kirsch is a poet-critic of this type. He has taken up the aesthetic ideas of Eliot and his successors with anachronistic fidelity. Kirsch is not an academic; most of the essays in “The Modern Element,” his new book on contemporary poetry, first appeared as book reviews in The New Republic. Kirsch writes with admirable clarity for a general reader not automatically familiar with the poets he discusses. But when he is done with his poets, the general reader does not have much reason to read them. Like the poet-critics he admires, Kirsch mounts a defense of poetry at the expense of poetry he disapproves of. His taste tends to be narrow and formulaic; and the results show not only in “The Modern Element,” but in “Invasions,” his new volume of poetry.

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Here’s a short “to-do” list:
1. Reduce the industrialized world’s carbon footprint 80 percent by 2050.
2. Prevent the projected 3 billion increase in human population over the next 30 years and actually reduce population by 2110 without famine, disease or war while preserving human dignity.
3. Revise the scientific method so that it better balances the goal of discovery with moral considerations and precaution.
4. Switch our economy to sustainable energy: solar, wind, hydro.
5. Make that economy one in which happiness and success do not require increased consumption.

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By Baithak.Net

BOOK REVIEW: The inside track on Afghan wars by Khaled Ahmed

Descent into Chaos:
How the War against Islamic Extremism is being Lost in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia;
By Ahmed Rashid;
Allen Lane London 2008;
Pp484; Price £12.99

Today, the Taliban and Mullah Umar continue to live in Balochistan, the Pakistani Taliban and Al Qaeda are in the Tribal Areas where they wrested possession of a large territory from the army that favoured them. The US and the EU are under threat. George Bush and Musharraf and Karzai are the most unpopular men in the region. It is clear who has won the war

The greatest compliment one can pay to a writer is to say that his latest book is his best. It indicates a rising graph of excellence rather than descent from the peak. Ahmed Rashid’s best book without a doubt is his latest, Descent into Chaos, a critique of the policies of the United States and Pakistan, the two countries who worked together and separately to convert their war against terror into chaos. President Bush is about to lurch out of the scene next year never to be remembered as a saviour by the West. Pakistan’s ‘schizophrenic chief executive’ President Musharraf is out of his office, universally condemned in Pakistan for having ruined the country in all sorts of ways. Four chapters in part three of the book contain the most comprehensive indictment of the US policy in Afghanistan the reviewer has ever read.

Ahmed Rashid’s friend Hamid Karzai is the president of Afghanistan today. He lived in Quetta starting 1983 and fell foul of the Taliban in 1999 when Mullah Umar had his father assassinated in Quetta, with the help of the ISI, according to Hamid. Ahmed had something in common with him. Both had criticised the Taliban, and in the case of Ahmed, it was his bestseller book Taliban (2000) that had ‘led to threats from the ISI and their extremist supporters’ (p.4). Hamid was in the Mujaddidi government after the Soviets left, but the US had left the Afghan policy in the hands of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the latter looking at Afghanistan as its fifth province.

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The FT report opens “Asif Ali Zardari, the leading contender for the presidency of nuclear-armed Pakistan, was suffering from severe psychiatric problems as recently as last year, according to court documents filed by his doctors.” Presidential candidate Zardari has been diagnosed as suffering from “emotional instability”, memory loss and concentration problems, and major depressive disorder. These court papers have caused alarm amongst the citizens of his country who question his ability, and his fitness, to occupy the presidential chair.

Now, constitutionally where does Zardari stand in view of the court-backed doubts about his mental state? The president, under Article 41(2) is required to be “qualified to be elected as a member of the National Assembly”. According to Article 63(a) a person is disqualified to be a member of the National Assembly if “he is of unsound mind and has been so declared by a competent court”.

The court in London accepted the psychiatrists’ certificates and acted upon them. Zardari, if he wishes to deny the diagnoses, must plead that the London court is incompetent and that the psychiatrists were falsifying. We must go with an editorial of Aug 28 which counselled that “It would be unwise to dismiss the recent revelations about the fragile state of Mr Asif Zardari’s mental health as irrelevant,” and asked “Does the country really need another potentially deluded individual to lead it through these troubled times?” Now, let us revert to our mutilated almost incomprehensible constitution which as far as Article 62 goes is clear. To qualify as a member of the National Assembly, and thus to be able to contest the presidential election, a man must be “of good character and is not commonly known as one who violates Islamic injunctions”, and he must be “sagacious, righteous and non-profligate and honest and ameen”. No further comment is necessary.

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By Baithak.Net