Colonialism in Ten Minutes – The Scramble for Africa
by amun ra ~ April 30th, 2010. Filed under: Uncategorized.
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Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, Our Man in KabulOver the past several years, when he complained again and again about American attacks in his country that were killing civilians in surprising numbers and remarkably often, he was generally humored and dealt with as an irrelevance or an annoyance. Now, given the rampant drug trade, the corruption, the "tantrums," the emotional outbursts, the threats to join the Taliban, and his embracing of the Iranians and the Chinese, he is dealt with in Washington as a cross between a big baby, an unstable adult, an overemotional drug-taker, and a prime danger to the American project in Afghanistan. He was given a lot of TLC by the previous resident of the White House, while being studiously ignored or reproved by this one. American officials have lavished praise -- and scorn -- on him. They have brandished hard power -- and laid on the soft power -- to tame him. They have regularly tried “new tacks” in dealing with him, and then tacked -- and tacked again. I’m talking, of course, about Hamid Karzai, the American-installed president of Afghanistan, our man in Kabul, as Alfred McCoy so aptly dubs him. He’s our boy, our nemesis, the definition of our problem in Afghanistan, our worst mistake, and our missing conscience all wrapped in one.
McCoy, a historian at the University of Wisconsin and an expert on the Vietnam War, the CIA, and the drug trade, offers a powerful reminder that we’ve been here before. And he’s not the only one who knows it. After all, Richard Holbrooke, the president’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, spent his first six years in government service in, or focused on, Vietnam during the war years. And as the Obama administration was setting its Afghan course in the fall of 2009, a number of key figures in the White House, including the president, took time out to study Gordon Goldstein’s book, Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam, which recounts, among other things, the grim tale of Ngo Dinh Diem, the Hamid Karzai of that moment, and the CIA plot that led to his overthrow and assassination, as well as a wider, more disastrous war for the U.S.
As McCoy makes clear, however, the history lesson in all this goes deeper than Karzai and Diem, despite the unbelievably eerie parallels between them. As that old Seinfeld break-up line goes: It’s not you, it’s me. And whatever Karzai’s problems are, it’s not, in the end, him, it’s us. It’s a problem that goes to the riven imperial heart of the matter. Tom
America and the Dictators
From Ngo Dinh Diem to Hamid Karzai
By Alfred W. McCoyThe crisis has come suddenly, almost without warning. At the far edge of American power in Asia, things are going from bad to much worse than anyone could have imagined. The insurgents are spreading fast across the countryside. Corruption is rampant. Local military forces, recipients of countless millions of dollars in U.S. aid, shirk combat and are despised by local villagers. American casualties are rising. Our soldiers seem to move in a fog through a hostile, unfamiliar terrain, with no idea of who is friend and who is foe.
After years of lavishing American aid on him, the leader of this country, our close ally, has isolated himself inside the presidential palace, becoming an inadequate partner for a failing war effort. His brother is reportedly a genuine prince of darkness, dealing in drugs, covert intrigues, and electoral manipulation. The U.S. Embassy demands reform, the ouster of his brother, the appointment of honest local officials, something, anything that will demonstrate even a scintilla of progress.
After all, nine years earlier U.S. envoys had taken a huge gamble: rescuing this president from exile and political obscurity, installing him in the palace, and ousting a legitimate monarch whose family had ruled the country for centuries. Now, he repays this political debt by taunting America. He insists on untrammeled sovereignty and threatens to ally with our enemies if we continue to demand reforms of him. Yet Washington is so deeply identified with the counterinsurgency campaign in his country that walking away no longer seems like an option.
This scenario is obviously a description of the Obama administration’s devolving relations with Afghan President Hamid Karzai in Kabul this April. It is also an eerie summary of relations between the Kennedy administration and South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon nearly half a century earlier, in August 1963. If these parallels are troubling, they reveal the central paradox of American power over the past half-century in its dealings with embattled autocrats like Karzai and Diem across that vast, impoverished swath of the globe once known as the Third World.
Our Man in Kabul
With his volatile mix of dependence and independence, Hamid Karzai seems the archetype of all the autocrats Washington has backed in Asia, Africa, and Latin America since European empires began disintegrating after World War II. When the CIA mobilized Afghan warlords to topple the Taliban in October 2001, the country’s capital, Kabul, was ours for the taking -- and the giving. In the midst of this chaos, Hamid Karzai, an obscure exile living in Pakistan, gathered a handful of followers and plunged into Afghanistan on a doomed CIA-supported mission to rally the tribes for revolt. It proved a quixotic effort that required rescue by Navy SEALs who snatched him back to safety in Pakistan.
Desperate for a reliable post-invasion ally, the Bush administration engaged in what one expert has called “bribes, secret deals, and arm twisting” to install Karzai in power. This process took place not through a democratic election in Kabul, but by lobbying foreign diplomats at a donors’ conference in Bonn, Germany, to appoint him interim president. When King Zahir Shah, a respected figure whose family had ruled Afghanistan for more than 200 years, returned to offer his services as acting head of state, the U.S. ambassador had a “showdown” with the monarch, forcing him back into exile. In this way, Karzai’s “authority,” which came directly and almost solely from the Bush administration, remained unchecked. For his first months in office, the president had so little trust in his nominal Afghan allies that he was guarded by American security.
In the years that followed, the Karzai regime slid into an ever deepening state of corruption and incompetence, while NATO allies rushed to fill the void with their manpower and material, a de facto endorsement of the president’s low road to power. As billions in international development aid poured into Kabul, a mere trickle escaped the capital’s bottomless bureaucracy to reach impoverished villages in the countryside. In 2009, Transparency International ranked Afghanistan as the world’s second most corrupt nation, just a notch below Somalia.
As opium production soared from 185 tons in 2001 to 8,200 tons just six years later -- a remarkable 53% of the country’s entire economy -- drug corruption metastasized, reaching provincial governors, the police, cabinet ministers, and the president’s own brother, also his close adviser. Indeed, as a senior U.S. antinarcotics official assigned to Afghanistan described the situation in 2006, “Narco corruption went to the very top of the Afghan government.” Earlier this year, the U.N. estimated that ordinary Afghans spend $2.5 billion annually, a quarter of the country’s gross domestic product, simply to bribe the police and government officials.
Last August’s presidential elections were an apt index of the country’s progress. Karzai’s campaign team, the so-called warlord ticket, included Abdul Dostum, an Uzbek warlord who slaughtered countless prisoners in 2001; vice presidential candidate Muhammed Fahim, a former defense minister linked to drugs and human rights abuses; Sher Muhammed Akhundzada, the former governor of Helmand Province, who was caught with nine tons of drugs in his compound back in 2005; and the president’s brother Ahmed Wali Karzai, reputedly the reigning drug lord and family fixer in Kandahar. “The Karzai family has opium and blood on their hands,” one Western intelligence official told the New York Times during the campaign.
Desperate to capture an outright 50% majority in the first round of balloting, Karzai’s warlord coalition made use of an extraordinary array of electoral chicanery. After two months of counting and checking, the U.N.’s Electoral Complaints Commission announced in October 2009 that more than a million of his votes, 28% of his total, were fraudulent, pushing the president’s tally well below the winning margin. Calling the election a “foreseeable train wreck,” the deputy U.N. envoy Peter Galbraith said, “The fraud has handed the Taliban its greatest strategic victory in eight years of fighting the United States and its Afghan partners."
Galbraith, however, was sacked and silenced as U.S. pressure extinguished the simmering flames of electoral protest. The runner-up soon withdrew from the run-off election that Washington had favored as a face-saving, post-fraud compromise, and Karzai was declared the outright winner by default. In the wake of the farcical election, Karzai not surprisingly tried to stack the five-man Electoral Complaints Commission, an independent body meant to vet electoral complaints, replacing the three foreign experts with his own Afghan appointees. When the parliament rejected his proposal, Karzai lashed out with bizarre charges, accusing the U.N. of wanting a “puppet government” and blaming all the electoral fraud on “massive interference from foreigners.” In a meeting with members of parliament, he reportedly told them: “If you and the international community pressure me more, I swear that I am going to join the Taliban.”
Amid this tempest in an electoral teapot, as American reinforcements poured into Afghanistan, Washington’s escalating pressure for “reform” only served to inflame Karzai. As Air Force One headed for Kabul on March 28th, National Security Adviser James Jones bluntly told reporters aboard that, in his meeting with Karzai, President Obama would insist that he prioritize “battling corruption, taking the fight to the narco-traffickers.” It was time for the new administration in Washington, ever more deeply committed to its escalating counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan, to bring our man in Kabul back into line.
A week filled with inflammatory, angry outbursts from Karzai followed before the White House changed tack, concluding that it had no alternative to Karzai and began to retreat. Jones now began telling reporters soothingly that, during his visit to Kabul, President Obama had been “generally impressed with the quality of the [Afghan] ministers and the seriousness with which they’re approaching their job.”
All of this might have seemed so new and bewildering in the American experience, if it weren’t actually so old.
Our Man in Saigon
The sorry history of the autocratic regime of Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon (1954-1963) offers an earlier cautionary roadmap that helps explain why Washington has so often found itself in such an impossibly contradictory position with its authoritarian allies.
Landing in Saigon in mid-1954 after years of exile in the United States and Europe, Diem had no real political base. He could, however, count on powerful patrons in Washington, notably Democratic senators Mike Mansfield and John F. Kennedy. One of the few people to greet Diem at the airport that day was the legendary CIA operative Edward Lansdale, Washington’s master of political manipulation in Southeast Asia. Amid the chaos accompanying France’s defeat in its long, bloody Indochina War, Lansdale maneuvered brilliantly to secure Diem’s tenuous hold on power in the southern part of Vietnam. In the meantime, U.S. diplomats sent his rival, the Emperor Bao Dai, packing for Paris. Within months, thanks to Washington’s backing, Diem won an absurd 98.2% of a rigged vote for the presidency and promptly promulgated a new constitution that ended the Vietnamese monarchy after a millennium.
Channeling all aid payments through Diem, Washington managed to destroy the last vestiges of French colonial support for any of his potential rivals in the south, while winning the president a narrow political base within the army, among civil servants, and in the minority Catholic community. Backed by a seeming cornucopia of American support, Diem proceeded to deal harshly with South Vietnam’s Buddhist sects, harassed the Viet Minh veterans of the war against the French, and resisted the implementation of rural reforms that might have won him broader support among the country’s peasant population.
When the U.S. Embassy pressed for reforms, he simply stalled, convinced that Washington, having already invested so much of its prestige in his regime, would be unable to withhold support. Like Karzai in Kabul, Diem's ultimate weapon was his weakness -- the threat that his government, shaky as it was, might simply collapse if pushed too hard.
In the end, the Americans invariably backed down, sacrificing any hope of real change in order to maintain the ongoing war effort against the local Viet Cong rebels and their North Vietnamese backers. As rebellion and dissent rose in the south, Washington ratcheted up its military aid to battle the communists, inadvertently giving Diem more weapons to wield against his own people, communist and non-communist alike.
Working through his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu -- and this should have an eerie resonance today -- the Diems took control of Saigon’s drug racket, pocketing significant profits as they built up a nexus of secret police, prisons, and concentration camps to deal with suspected dissidents. At the time of Diem's downfall in 1963, there were some 50,000 prisoners in his gulag.
Nonetheless, from 1960 to 1963, the regime only weakened as resistance sparked repression and repression redoubled resistance. Soon South Vietnam was wracked by Buddhist riots in the cities and a spreading Communist revolution in the countryside. Moving after dark, Viet Cong guerrillas slowly began to encircle Saigon, assassinating Diem’s unpopular village headmen by the thousands.
In this three-year period, the US military mission in Saigon tried every conceivable counterinsurgency strategy. They brought in helicopters and armored vehicles to improve conventional mobility, deployed the Green Berets for unconventional combat, built up regional militias for localized security, constructed “strategic hamlets” in order to isolate eight million peasants inside supposedly secure fortified compounds, and ratcheted up CIA assassinations of suspected Viet Cong leaders. Nothing worked. Even the best military strategy could not fix the underlying political problem. By 1963, the Viet Cong had grown from a handful of fighters into a guerrilla army that controlled more than half the countryside.
When protesting Buddhist monk Quang Duc assumed the lotus position on a Saigon street in June 1963 and held the posture while followers lit his gasoline-soaked robes which erupted in fatal flames, the Kennedy administration could no longer ignore the crisis. As Diem’s batons cracked the heads of Buddhist demonstrators and Nhu’s wife applauded what she called “monk barbecues,” Washington began to officially protest the ruthless repression. Instead of responding, Diem (shades of Karzai) began working through his brother Nhu to open negotiations with the communists in Hanoi, signaling Washington that he was perfectly willing to betray the U.S. war effort and possibly form a coalition with North Vietnam.
In the midst of this crisis, a newly appointed American ambassador, Henry Cabot Lodge, arrived in Saigon and within days approved a plan for a CIA-backed coup to overthrow Diem. For the next few months, Lansdale’s CIA understudy Lucien Conein met regularly with Saigon’s generals to hatch an elaborate plot that was unleashed with devastating effect on November 1, 1963.
As rebel troops stormed the palace, Diem and his brother Nhu fled to a safe house in Saigon’s Chinatown. Flushed from hiding by promises of safe conduct into exile, Diem climbed aboard a military convoy for what he thought was a ride to the airport. But CIA operative Conein had vetoed the flight plans. A military assassin intercepted the convoy, spraying Diem’s body with bullets and stabbing his bleeding corpse in a coup de grâce.
Although Ambassador Lodge hosted an embassy celebration for the rebel officers and cabled President Kennedy that Diem's death would mean a "shorter war,” the country soon collapsed into a series of military coups and counter-coups that crippled army operations. Over the next 32 months, Saigon had nine new governments and a change of cabinet every 15 weeks -- all incompetent, corrupt, and ineffective.
After spending a decade building up Diem's regime and a day destroying it, the U.S. had seemingly irrevocably linked its own power and prestige to the Saigon government -- any government. The “best and brightest” in Washington were convinced that they could not just withdraw from South Vietnam without striking a devastating blow against American “credibility.” As South Vietnam slid toward defeat in the two years following Diem’s death, the first of 540,000 U.S. combat troops began arriving, ensuring that Vietnam would be transformed from an American-backed war into an American war.
Under the circumstances, Washington searched desperately for anyone who could provide sufficient stability to prosecute the war against the communists and eventually, with palpable relief, embraced a military junta headed by General Nguyen Van Thieu. Installed and sustained in power by American aid, Thieu had no popular following and ruled through military repression, repeating the same mistakes that led to Diem’s downfall. But chastened by its experience after the assassination of Diem, the U.S. Embassy decided to ignore Thieu’s unpopularity and continue to build his army. Once Washington began to reduce its aid after 1973, Thieu found that his troops simply would not fight to defend his unpopular government. In April 1975, he carried a hoard of stolen gold into exile while his army collapsed with stunning speed, suffering one of the most devastating collapses in military history.
In pursuit of its Vietnam War effort, Washington required a Saigon government responsive to its demands, yet popular with its own peasantry, strong enough to wage a war in the villages, yet sensitive to the needs of the country’s poor villagers. These were hopelessly contradictory political requisites. Finding that civilian regimes engaged in impossible-to-control intrigues, the U.S. ultimately settled for authoritarian military rule which, acceptable as it proved in Washington, was disdained by the Vietnamese peasantry.
Death or Exile?
So is President Karzai, like Diem, doomed to die on the streets of Kabul or will he, one day, find himself like Thieu boarding a midnight flight into exile?
History, or at least our awareness of its lessons, does change things, albeit in complex, unpredictable ways. Today, senior U.S. envoys have Diem’s cautionary tale encoded in their diplomatic DNA, which undoubtedly precludes any literal replay of his fate. After sanctioning Diem’s assassination, Washington watched in dismay as South Vietnam plunged into chaos. So chastened was the U.S. Embassy by this dismal outcome that it backed the subsequent military regime to a fault.
A decade later, the Senate’s Church Committee uncovered other U.S. attempts at assassination-cum-regime-change in the Congo, Chile, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic that further stigmatized this option. In effect, antibodies from the disastrous CIA coup against Diem, still in Washington’s political bloodstream, reduce the possibility of any similar move against Karzai today.
Ironically, those who seek to avoid the past may be doomed to repeat it. By accepting Karzai’s massive electoral fraud and refusing to consider alternatives last August, Washington has, like it or not, put its stamp of approval on his spreading corruption and the political instability that accompanies it. In this way, the Obama administration in its early days invited a sad denouement to its Afghan adventure, one potentially akin to Vietnam after Diem’s death. America’s representatives in Kabul are once again hurtling down history’s highway, eyes fixed on the rear-view mirror, not the precipice that lies dead ahead.
In the experiences of both Ngo Dinh Diem and Hamid Karzai lurks a self-defeating pattern common to Washington's alliances with dictators throughout the Third World, then and now. Selected and often installed in office by Washington, or at least backed by massive American military aid, these client figures become desperately dependent, even as they fail to implement the sorts of reforms that might enable them to build an independent political base. Torn between pleasing their foreign patrons or their own people, they wind up pleasing neither. As opposition to their rule grows, a downward spiral of repression and corruption often ends in collapse; while, for all its power, Washington descends into frustration and despair, unable to force its allies to adopt reforms which might allow them to survive. Such a collapse is a major crisis for the White House, but often -- Diem’s case is obviously an exception -- little more than an airplane ride into exile for the local autocrat or dictator.
There was -- and is -- a fundamental structural flaw in any American alliance with these autocrats. Inherent in these unequal alliances is a peculiar dynamic that makes the eventual collapse of such American-anointed leaders almost inevitable. At the outset, Washington selects a client who seems pliant enough to do its bidding. Such a client, in turn, opts for Washington’s support not because he is strong, but precisely because he needs foreign patronage to gain and hold office.
Once installed, the client, no matter how reluctant, has little choice but to make Washington’s demands his top priority, investing his slender political resources in placating foreign envoys. Responding to an American political agenda on civil and military matters, these autocrats often fail to devote sufficient energy, attention, and resources to cultivating a following; Diem found himself isolated in his Saigon palace, while Karzai has become a “president” justly, if derisively, nicknamed “the mayor of Kabul.” Caught between the demands of a powerful foreign patron and countervailing local needs and desires, both leaders let guerrillas capture the countryside, while struggling uncomfortably, and in the end angrily, as well as resentfully, in the foreign embrace.
Nor are such parallels limited to Afghanistan today or Vietnam almost half a century ago. Since the end of World War II, many of the sharpest crises in U.S. foreign policy have arisen from just such problematic relationships with authoritarian client regimes. As a start, it was a similarly close relationship with General Fulgencio Batista of Cuba in the 1950s which inspired the Cuban revolution. That culminated, of course, in Fidel Castro's rebels capturing the Cuban capital, Havana, in 1959, which in turn led the Kennedy administration into the catastrophic Bay of Pigs invasion and then the Cuban Missile Crisis.
For a full quarter-century, the U.S. played international patron to the Shah of Iran, intervening to save his regime from the threat of democracy in the early 1950s and later massively arming his police and military while making him Washington’s proxy power in the Persian Gulf. His fall in the Islamic revolution of 1979 not only removed the cornerstone of American power in this strategic region, but plunged Washington into a succession of foreign policy confrontations with Iran that have yet to end.
After a half-century as a similarly loyal client in Central America, the regime of Nicaragua’s Anastasio Somoza fell in the Sandinista revolution of 1979, creating a foreign policy problem marked by the CIA's contra operation against the new Sandinista government and the seamy Iran-Contra scandal that roiled President Reagan’s second term.
Just last week, Washington’s anointed autocrat in Kyrgyzstan, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, fled the presidential palace when his riot police, despite firing live ammunition and killing more than 80 of his citizens, failed to stop opposition protesters from taking control of the capital, Bishkek. Although his rule was brutal and corrupt, last year the Obama administration courted Bakiyev sedulously and successfully to preserve U.S. use of the old Soviet air base at Manas critical for supply flights into Afghanistan. Even as riot police were beating the opposition into submission to prepare for Bakiyev’s “landslide victory” in last July’s elections, President Obama sent him a personal letter praising his support for the Afghan war. With Washington’s imprimatur, there was nothing to stop Bakiyev’s political slide into murderous repression and his ultimate fall from power.
Why have so many American alliances with Third World dictators collapsed in such a spectacular fashion, producing divisive recriminations at home and policy disasters abroad?
During Britain's century of dominion, its self-confident servants of empire, from viceroys in plumed hats to district officers in khaki shorts, ruled much of Africa and Asia through an imperial system of protectorates, indirect rule, and direct colonial rule. In the succeeding American “half century” of hegemony, Washington carried the burden of global power without a formal colonial system, substituting its military advisers for imperial viceroys.
In this new landscape of sovereign states that emerged after World War II, Washington has had to pursue a contradictory policy as it dealt with the leaders of nominally independent nations that were also deeply dependent on foreign economic and military aid. After identifying its own prestige with these fragile regimes, Washington usually tries to coax, chide, or threaten its allies into embracing what it considers needed reforms. Even when this counsel fails and prudence might dictate the start of a staged withdrawal, as in Saigon in 1963 and Kabul today, American envoys simply cannot let go of their unrepentant, resentful allies, as the long slide into disaster gains momentum.
With few choices between diplomatic niceties and a destabilizing coup, Washington invariably ends up defaulting to an inflexible foreign policy at the edge of paralysis that often ends with the collapse of our authoritarian allies, whether Diem in Saigon, the Shah in Tehran, or on some dismal day yet to come, Hamid Karzai in Kabul. To avoid this impending debacle, our only realistic option in Afghanistan today may well be the one we wish we had taken in Saigon back in August 1963 -- a staged withdrawal of U.S. forces.
Alfred W. McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, which probes the conjuncture of illicit narcotics and covert operations over the past 50 years. His latest book, Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State, explores the influence of overseas counterinsurgency operations on the spread of internal security measures here at home.
Copyright 2010 Alfred W. McCoy
via tomdispatch.com
gtsstl — September 16, 2006 — Music Video for Black Uhuru's "Solidarity", 1984
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African Booty Scratcher [short film]
Nikyatu Jusu, an up-and-coming filmmaker from Atlanta (born to Sierre Leonean immigrant parents), has crafted a lovely short film. African Booty Scratcher is a humorous, gorgeously shot meditation on culture clash and assimilation.
The First Spokenink Audiostory Competition
Submissions are invited of stories of no more than 1,500 words.Stories must be the original work of the author, and must not have been published before in any medium.
The stories must be sent by email to competition@spokenink.co.uk as attachments, and must be in .doc, .rtf or .pdf format.
A long list of ten stories will be posted on the site.
A short list of three stories will be selected by our panel, recorded and posted on the site. The public may then vote on them.
The winner will receive £250, second prize is £50, and third prize £25
Copyright of the material remains with the author, but Spokenink shall have non-exclusive rights to publish the stories for free audio download for a period of two years.
The competition closes on 30th June 2010.
The winner will be announced in September.
To keep you informed, there will be regular updates in our newsletters.
A fee of £4 must be paid for each submission, and you may make as many submissions as you wish.
By entering the competition, you agree to the conditions above.
When clicking the Paypal button, below, you will be given the option of paying by Paypal or credit card
We look forward to reading your stories! Good luck!
Entry fee: £4.00
To enter, supply the required details above, then click to use our secure payment method. After successful payment, you will be supplied with a unique competition entry code. When entering the competition, supply both the 'Author's name' and the entry code with your submission.
via spokenink.co.uk
2010 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize
Judge: Maggie Anderson
$2,000 for a First Book of Poems
This prize is offered annually to a poet who has not previously published a full-length collection of poems. The winner receives $2000 and the winning volume will be published by the Kent State University Press in Fall 2010. The winner will give a reading with the 2010 judge of the competition on the Kent State campus. In 2009, the winner was Visible Heavens by Joanna Solfrian, chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye.
Entry Requirements:
- The competition is open to poets writing in English who have not yet published a full-length collection of poems (a volume of 50 or more pages published in an edition of 500 or more copies).
- There is a $20 reading fee. Checks should be made payable to the Wick Poetry Center.
- Submissions must consist of 50 to 70 pages of poetry, typed on one side only, with no more than one poem included on a page. Only clean, legible copies are acceptable.
- The poet's name is not to appear on the manuscript. Two title pages should be included. The first must include the poet's name, address, e-mail, telephone number, and the title of the manuscript; the second should list the title of the manuscript only. Entries are judged anonymously.
- The manuscript may be submitted simultaneously to other publishers, but the poet must notify the Wick Poetry Center immediately if the manuscript is accepted for publication elsewhere.
- All manuscripts will be recycled after judging. For notice that the manuscript has been received, enclose a self-addressed, stamped postcard. For notice of the winning selection, enclose a self-addressed, stamped envelope. The winner will be announced late in the summer of 2010.
- Manuscripts must be postmarked between February 1, 2010 and May 1, 2010. No late entries will be read.
Entries should be sent to: Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, Wick Poetry Center, 301 Satterfield Hall, Kent State University, P.O. Box 5190, Kent, OH 44242-0001, (330)672-2067, www.kent.edu/wick
via dept.kent.edu
Contest
Short Short Contest:
A prize of $1,000 and publication in Sonora Review is given annually for a short short story. Joe Wenderoth will judge. Submit a story of up to 1,000 words with a $15 entry fee, which includes a copy of the Summer 2010 issue of Sonora Review, by May 1. Include a cover page with your full name and current address. No previously published work will be accepted.
Short Essay Contest:
$1000 and publication in Sonora Review will be given for the first annual Concentrated Nonfiction Contest. The inaugural contest will be judged by Ander Monson. Submit a work of unpublished nonfiction, up to 1,000 words, by June 1st. Entry fee is $15, which includes a copy of the Summer 2010 issue of Sonora Review. Include a cover letter with full name, title of work, mailing and email address. The author’s name should not appear anywhere on the manuscript. No previous published work will be accepted.
By “concentrated nonfiction” we mean a short essay of any variety under 1000 words, not limited to any specific type of essay. In fact, we encourage creativity that projects the malleability of the form. We also are willing to publish multimedia essays as long as the main force of the essay is through language (and it is short).
Submit Online Through Submishmash. Click Here.
Simply click on the type of contest you’d like to submit to, register, pay, and we’re all good to go.
Send Submissions To:
Sonora Review. Contest
Department of English, University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721
Congratulations to Peter Jay Shippy, winner of our Winter poetry contest judged by Caroline Bergvall! Also, congratulations to the finalists Michael Tod Edgerton, Nadine Lockhart, and Matt Mauch.
via sonorareview.com
Time, Water Running Out for America's Biggest Aquifer
AOL News
(April 21) -- In 1823, a government surveyor named Stephen Long was working to map out the Great Plains, an expanse of land acquired along with the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. He was unimpressed by what he saw. As his geographer wrote in the report that accompanied the expedition:Long would have been shocked to see what the region looks like today -- not merely fit for cultivation, but in fact one of the most fertile and productive areas of the world. Since World War II, dramatic leaps in technology have allowed farmers to pump groundwater for irrigation and extend America's breadbasket through the entire Great Plains, transforming what Long called "The Great American Desert" into an expanse of green circles defined by the reach of central pivot irrigation systems.I do not hesitate in giving the opinion that it is almost wholly unfit for cultivation, and of course, uninhabitable by a people depending upon agriculture for their subsistence.But that water is not infinite, and many are becoming concerned that Great Plains agriculture is a more precarious proposition than it appears -- meaning Long's report may have been not just a description, but a prediction.
Charlie Riedel, APA sprinkler sprays a field near Hoxie, Kan. Water for Great Plains irrigation comes from the Ogallala Aquifer, a vast underground lake that is being drained at an alarming rate.
That groundwater for irrigation comes from the Ogallala Aquifer, a massive underground lake that stretches from southern South Dakota through northern Texas, covering about 174,000 square miles. It is being drained at alarming rates, and some places have already seen what happens when local levels drop below the point where water can no longer be pumped."You go to areas where the aquifer has been depleted, [they] look pretty poor now," David Brauer, program manager for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service Ogallala Aquifer Program, told AOL News. "And it only takes a few years.
"The magnitude of this is incredible," he continued. "We're talking about, for the last 20 years, 20 percent of the irrigated acreage of this nation is over the Ogallala."
For an idea of what a severe drought could do to the communities of the Great Plains, consider the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, when gigantic "black blizzards" ravaged farms and forced thousands of families to give up their land and try to make a living elsewhere.
But the implications of ceasing irrigation on the Great Plains go far beyond local communities. The farming areas fed by the Ogallala supply such large quantities of grain that any drastic changes to that economy would ripple across the world -- as seen in 2007, when fuel costs drove up corn prices and sparked a food crisis in other countries, most notably Mexico.
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Mortician Offers Green Urns
DIY Dryer Lint Urns
People have been warning about the aquifer's depletion for years, but coordinating conservation programs among farmers has proved difficult. Recently, Texas has imposed state controls on the amount of groundwater that farmers can pump, requiring 16 groundwater districts to each provide a target for an acceptable groundwater level in 50 years.Such measures, however, are mostly designed to delay the inevitable, since the recharge rate for the Ogallala Aquifer is small enough to be considered negligible. And so, Brauer says, as a natural resource the Ogallala is comparable to a vein of coal: What you take out doesn't get put back in. "All we're doing is buying time," he says.
Buying time is important -- it will allow farmers to develop dry-farming techniques and give the biotech industry a chance to deliver on the promise of drought-resistant crops. But without groundwater irrigation, crop yields will almost certainly drop, and the local, national and global economies will have to adjust.
via aolnews.com
When Bootstraps Aren't Enough
Why two new black self-help books don't get it right. No, conversate isn't a word. And yes, there are some things that black folks need to stop doing. But there's a difference between enabling and empathy.
- | Posted: April 28, 2010 at 7:19 AM
After coming home from another day busting my butt working and attending school to see my unemployed father lying on the sofa, it was time for him to go.
via theroot.com