Category Archives: Ron Paul

Just one week in office, President Trump is already following through on his pledge to address illegal immigration. His January 25th executive order called for the construction of a wall along the entire length of the US-Mexico border. While he is right to focus on the issue, there are several reasons why his proposed solution will unfortunately not lead us anywhere closer to solving the problem.

First, the wall will not work. Texas already started building a border fence about ten years ago. It divided people from their own property across the border, it deprived people of their land through the use of eminent domain, and in the end the problem of drug and human smuggling was not solved.

Second, the wall will be expensive. The wall is estimated to cost between 12 and 15 billion dollars. You can bet it will be more than that. President Trump has claimed that if the Mexican government doesnt pay for it, he will impose a 20 percent duty on products imported from Mexico. Who will pay this tax? Ultimately, the American consumer, as the additional costs will be passed on. This will of course hurt the poorest Americans the most.

Third, building a wall ignores the real causes of illegal border crossings into the United States. Though President Trump is right to prioritize the problem of border security, he misses the point on how it can be done effectively and at an actual financial benefit to the country rather than a huge economic drain.

The solution to really addressing the problem of illegal immigration, drug smuggling, and the threat of cross-border terrorism is clear: remove the welfare magnet that attracts so many to cross the border illegally, stop the 25 year US war in the Middle East, and end the drug war that incentivizes smugglers to cross the border.

The various taxpayer-funded programs that benefit illegal immigrants in the United States, such as direct financial transfers, medical benefits, food assistance, and education, cost an estimated $100 billion dollars per year. That is a significant burden on citizens and legal residents. The promise of free money, free food, free education, and free medical care if you cross the border illegally is a powerful incentive for people to do so. It especially makes no sense for the United States government to provide these services to those who are not in the US legally.

Likewise, the 40 year war on drugs has produced no benefit to the American people at a great cost. It is estimated that since President Nixon declared a war on drugs, the US has spent more than a trillion dollars to fight what is a losing battle. That is because just as with the welfare magnet, there is an enormous incentive to smuggle drugs into the United States.

We already know the effect that ending the war on drugs has on illegal smuggling: as more and more US states decriminalize marijuana for medical and recreational uses, marijuana smuggling from Mexico to the US has dropped by 50 percent from 2010.

Finally, the threat of terrorists crossing into the United States from Mexico must be taken seriously, however once again we must soberly consider why they may seek to do us harm. We have been dropping bombs on the Middle East since at least 1990. Last year President Obama dropped more than 26,000 bombs. Thousands of civilians have been killed in US drone attacks. The grand US plan to remake the Middle East has produced only misery, bloodshed, and terrorism. Ending this senseless intervention will go a long way toward removing the incentive to attack the United States.

I believe it is important for the United States to have secure borders, but unfortunately President Trumps plan to build a wall will end up costing a fortune while ignoring the real problem of why people cross the borders illegally. They will keep coming as long as those incentives remain.

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The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity : A Better ...

WASHINGTON NEEDS TO STOP PLAYING ITS GAME OF SEMANTICS AND END THE INCOME TAX

Many Americans who have wrestled with a 1040 form, or who have paid someone to prepare their taxes, no doubt cheered the news that Congress will soon resume working on tax reform. However taxpayers should temper their enthusiasm because, even in the unlikely event tax collection is simplified, tax reform will not reduce the American peoples tax burden.

Congressional leaderships one nonnegotiable requirement of any tax reform is revenue neutrality. So any tax reform plan that has any chance of even being considered, much less passed, by Congress must ensure that the federal government does not lose a nickel in tax revenue. Congresss obsession with protecting the governments coffers causes reformers to mix tax cuts with tax increases. Congresss insistence on offsetting tax cuts with tax increases creates a political food fight where politicians face off over who should have their taxes raised, who should have their taxes cut, and who should have their taxes stay the same.

One offset currently being discussed is an increased tax on imports. This border adjustment tax would benefit export-driven industries at the expense of businesses that rely on imported products. A border adjustment tax would harm consumers who use, and retailers who sell, imported goods. The border adjustment tax is another example of politicians using tax reform to pick winners and losers instead of simply reducing everyones taxes.

When I was in Congress, I was often told that offsets do not raise taxes, they simply close loopholes. This is merely a game of semantics: by removing a way for some Americans to lower their taxes, closing a loophole is clearly a tax increase. While some claim loopholes are another way government distorts the market, I agree with the great economist Ludwig von Mises that capitalism breathes through loopholes.

By allowing individuals to keep more of their own money, loopholes promote economic efficiency since, as economist Thomas DiLorenzo put it, private individuals always spend their own money more efficiently than government bureaucrats do. Instead of making the tax system more efficient by closing loopholes, Congress should increase both economic efficiency and economic liberty by repealing the income tax and replacing it with nothing.

The revenue loss from ending the income tax should be offset with spending cuts. All federal spending, whether financed by taxes or by debt, forcibly removes resources from the private sector. Thus, all government spending is in essence a form of taxation. Therefore, cutting income and other taxes without cutting spending merely replaces one type of taxation with another. Instead of directly paying for big government via income taxes, deficit spending means citizens will be hit with an increase in the inflation tax. This tax, imposed on the people with the Federal Reserves monetization of debt, is the worst form of tax because it is both hidden and regressive.

Unfortunately, while Congress may make some small cuts in domestic spending, those cuts will be dwarfed by spending increases on infrastructure Keynesianism at home and military Keynesianism abroad. As long as Congress refuses to make serious reductions in spending, the American people will be subject to the tyranny of the IRS and the Federal Reserve.

The suffering will only get worse when concerns over government debt cause the dollar to lose its status as the world reserve currency. This will lead to a dollar crisis and a major economic meltdown. The only way to avoid this fate is for the people to demand a return to limited government in all areas, sound money, and an end to the income tax.

Ron Paul is a former U.S. Congressman from Texas and the leader of the pro-liberty, pro-free market movement in the United States. His weekly column reprinted with permission can be found here.

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Ron Paul: Cut, Don't Reform Taxes - FITSNews

The slight easing of sanctions on Russias FSB is a step in the right direction and President Trump cant be any bolder at the moment, while awaiting reaction from the US political establishment, Ron Paul, the veteran US politician, has said.

Further easing or the outright lifting of sanctions imposed on Russia over alleged meddling in American elections wont be easy for the new US President, since anti-Russian sentiment is very strong within the US political class, the former US Senator told RT.

The order to ease some restrictions on the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) is a step in the right direction and a feeler of sorts.

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I think he wants to reduce the sanctions and I think hes going to get a lot of heat for it, Paul told RT. A lot of people believe in all the rhetoric and the discourse about The Russians are coming, the Russians are coming, we got to punish them. So he has to deal with this more gently. So he puts on this example of trying to reduce sanctions, and he doesnt remove them, but I think he sort of testing the waters.

Hopefully, the possible opposition against the decision wont be too strong and Trump would be able to be consistent with his campaign promises to seek common ground with Moscow. Its still too early, however, to predict whether the US President will be able to get bold and remove all the sanctions, according to Paul.

I think thats very good, very significant and hopefully he doesnt get too much pressure therefore he backs down and goes in the other direction, Paul said. This is one thing that shouldnt be a surprise because he talked about better relations with Russia, and that is very good.

The decision to impose sanctions over quite weak allegations of Russian hackers meddling with the elections was very politicized in its root. A part of the US political establishment, which is eager to drift back to Cold War times, convinced Obama that it was a serious matter but Trump does not seem to believe that, according to Paul. All in all, intelligence activity, if even there was any, is such a common thing that it shouldnt have resulted in sanctions.

To me that was so superficial and should have been dismissed. Just generally speaking governments are spying on each other all the time. For me it was no big deal either way, Paul said. But I dont think the politicians and the political people, the party people might try to make fun of it People know that all governments spy on everybody, you spy on your friends and everything else. I find it rather disgusting.

READ MORE:Hard to expect a better start: Russian lawmakers & economists optimistic after Putin-Trump call

While the decision to ease anti-Russian sanctions is a good thing, the big picture of past two weeks is quite worrisome, as the new administration has already shown a consistent policy of picking fights.

He looks for battle with China but not with Russia. He wants to get in long battle with Iran. Its back and forth, Paul said. I just cant understand why if something is good for one country, why it cant be good for everybody. And I dont think any country should go out looking for enemies.

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Trump gently 'testing waters' with sanctions relief amid anti-Russia sentiment Ron Paul - RT

Just one week in office, President Donald Trump is already following through on his pledge to address illegal immigration. His Jan. 25 executive order called for the construction of a wall along the entire length of the U.S.-Mexico border.

While he is right to focus on the issue, there are several reasons why his proposed solution will unfortunately not lead us anywhere closer to solving the problem.

First, the wall will not work. Texas already started building a border fence about 10 years ago. It divided people from their own property across the border, it deprived people of their land through the use of eminent domain, and in the end the problem of drug and human smuggling was not solved.

Second, the wall will be expensive; it is estimated to cost between $12 billion and $15 billion. You can bet it will be more than that.

Trump has claimed that if the Mexican government doesnt pay for it, he will impose a 20 percent duty on products imported from Mexico. Who will pay this tax? Ultimately, the American consumer, as the additional costs will be passed on. This will of course hurt the poorest Americans the most.

Third, building a wall ignores the real causes of illegal border crossings into the United States. Although Trump is right to prioritize the problem of border security, he misses the point on how it can be done effectively and at an actual financial benefit to the country rather than a huge economic drain.

The solution to really addressing the problem of illegal immigration, drug smuggling and the threat of cross-border terrorism is clear: remove the welfare magnet that attracts so many to cross the border illegally, stop the 25-year U.S. war in the Middle East and end the drug war that incentivizes smugglers to cross the border.

The various taxpayer-funded programs that benefit illegal immigrants in the United States such as direct financial transfers, medical benefits, food assistance and education cost an estimated $100 billion per year. That is a significant burden on citizens and legal residents.

The promise of free money, free food, free education and free medical care if you cross the border illegally is a powerful incentive for people to do so. It especially makes no sense for the U.S. government to provide these services to those who are not in the United States legally.

Likewise, the 40-year war on drugs has produced no benefit to the American people at a great cost. It is estimated that since President Richard Nixon declared a war on drugs, the United States has spent more than $1 trillion to fight what is a losing battle. That is because just as with the welfare magnet, there is an enormous incentive to smuggle drugs into the country.

We already know the effect that ending the war on drugs has on illegal smuggling: as more and more states decriminalize marijuana for medical and recreational uses, marijuana smuggling from Mexico to the United States has dropped by 50 percent from 2010.

Finally, the threat of terrorists crossing into the United States from Mexico must be taken seriously; however, once again we must soberly consider why they may seek to do us harm.

We have been dropping bombs on the Middle East since at least 1990. Last year, President Barack Obama dropped more than 26,000 bombs. Thousands of civilians have been killed in U.S. drone attacks.

The grand U.S.plan to remake the Middle East has produced only misery, bloodshed and terrorism. Ending this senseless intervention will go a long way toward removing the incentive to attack the United States.

I believe it is important for the United States to have secure borders, but unfortunately, Trumps plan to build a wall will end up costing a fortune while ignoring the real problem of why people cross the borders illegally. They will keep coming as long as those incentives remain.

Ron Paul is a retired congressman, former presidential candidate, and founder and chairman of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity. Click here to contact him, follow him on Twitter: @RonPaul, or click here to read previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.

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Ron Paul: How About a Better Solution Than Donald Trump's Border Wall? - Noozhawk

President Trumps recent Executive Order banning entry to citizens of seven mostly-Muslim countries for 90 days has sparked protest and outrage. Lost in the din created by the protests is the fact that these seven countries have something in common: they have been targeted by the US for bombs or regime change. Where Iraq and Syria are now considered terrorist threats, for example, before US regime change and invasion there was no terrorist problem. Iran has never attacked or threatened the United States, but it is on the list of banned countries. Saudi Arabia was complicit in the 9/11 attacks on the US and 15 of the 19 attackers were Saudi citizens, however somehow the Saudis escaped President Trumps notice. Is this really about protecting us from terrorism, or is it about politics? We discuss today in the Liberty Report:

Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.

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Ron Paul on Trump's Travel Ban: Targeting Terrorism Or Iran? - Antiwar.com (blog)

Authored by Ron Paul via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,

Just one week in office, President Trump is already following through on his pledge to address illegal immigration. His January 25th executive order called for the construction of a wall along the entire length of the US-Mexico border. While he is right to focus on the issue, there are several reasons why his proposed solution will unfortunately not lead us anywhere closer to solving the problem.

First, the wall will not work. Texas already started building a border fence about ten years ago. It divided people from their own property across the border, it deprived people of their land through the use of eminent domain, and in the end the problem of drug and human smuggling was not solved.

Second, the wall will be expensive. The wall is estimated to cost between 12 and 15 billion dollars. You can bet it will be more than that. President Trump has claimed that if the Mexican government doesnt pay for it, he will impose a 20 percent duty on products imported from Mexico. Who will pay this tax? Ultimately, the American consumer, as the additional costs will be passed on. This will of course hurt the poorest Americans the most.

Third, building a wall ignores the real causes of illegal border crossings into the United States. Though President Trump is right to prioritize the problem of border security, he misses the point on how it can be done effectively and at an actual financial benefit to the country rather than a huge economic drain.

The solution to really addressing the problem of illegal immigration, drug smuggling, and the threat of cross-border terrorism is clear:

remove the welfare magnet that attracts so many to cross the border illegally, stop the 25 year US war in the Middle East, and end the drug war that incentivizes smugglers to cross the border.

The various taxpayer-funded programs that benefit illegal immigrants in the United States, such as direct financial transfers, medical benefits, food assistance, and education, cost an estimated $100 billion dollars per year. That is a significant burden on citizens and legal residents. The promise of free money, free food, free education, and free medical care if you cross the border illegally is a powerful incentive for people to do so. It especially makes no sense for the United States government to provide these services to those who are not in the US legally.

Likewise, the 40 year war on drugs has produced no benefit to the American people at a great cost. It is estimated that since President Nixon declared a war on drugs, the US has spent more than a trillion dollars to fight what is a losing battle. That is because just as with the welfare magnet, there is an enormous incentive to smuggle drugs into the United States.

We already know the effect that ending the war on drugs has on illegal smuggling: as more and more US states decriminalize marijuana for medical and recreational uses, marijuana smuggling from Mexico to the US has dropped by 50 percent from 2010.

Finally, the threat of terrorists crossing into the United States from Mexico must be taken seriously, however once again we must soberly consider why they may seek to do us harm. We have been dropping bombs on the Middle East since at least 1990. Last year President Obama dropped more than 26,000 bombs. Thousands of civilians have been killed in US drone attacks. The grand US plan to remake the Middle East has produced only misery, bloodshed, and terrorism. Ending this senseless intervention will go a long way toward removing the incentive to attack the United States.

I believe it is important for the United States to have secure borders, but unfortunately President Trumps plan to build a wall will end up costing a fortune while ignoring the real problem of why people cross the borders illegally. They will keep coming as long as those incentives remain.

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Ron Paul Suggests A Better Solution Than Trump's Border Wall | Zero Hedge

Last week, as the mainstream media continued to obsess over the CIAs evidence-free claim that the Russians hacked the presidential election, President Obama quietly sent 300 US Marines back into Afghanistans Helmand Province. This is the first time in three years that the US military has been sent into that conflict zone, and it represents a final failure of Obamas Afghanistan policy. The outgoing president promised that by the end of his second term, the US military would only be present in small numbers and only on embassy duty. But more than 8,000 US troops will remain in Afghanistan as he leaves office.

When President Obama was first elected he swore that he would end the US presence in Iraq (the bad war) and increase US presence in Afghanistan (the good war). He ended up increasing troops to both wars, while the situation in each country continued to deteriorate.

Why are the Marines needed in the Helmand Province? Because although the foolish and counterproductive 15-year US war in Afghanistan was long ago lost, Washington cannot face this fact. Last year the Taliban controlled 20 percent of the province. This year they control 85 percent of the province. So billions more must be spent and many more lives will be lost.

Will these 300 Marines somehow achieve what the 2011 peak of 100,000 US soldiers was not able to achieve? Will this last push win the war? Hardly! The more the president orders military action in Iraq and Afghanistan, the worse it gets. In 2016, for example, President Obama dropped 1,337 bombs on Afghanistan, a 40 percent increase from 2015. According to the United Nations, in 2016 there were 2,562 conflict-related civilian deaths and 5,835 injuries. And the Taliban continues to score victories over the Afghan puppet government.

The interventionists in Washington continue to run our foreign policy regardless of who is elected. They push for wars, they push for regime change, then they push for billions to reconstruct the bombed-out countries. When the liberated country ends up in worse shape, they claim it was because we just didnt do enough of what ruined the country in the first place. Its completely illogical, but the presidents who keep seeking the neocons advice dont seem to notice. Obama the peace candidate and president has proven himself no different than his predecessors.

What will a President Trump do about the 15 year failed nation-building experiment in Afghanistan? He has criticized the long-standing US policy of regime-change and nation-building while on the campaign trail, and I would like to think he would just bring the troops home. However, I would not be surprised if he accelerates US military action in Afghanistan to win the war once and for all. He will not succeed if he does so, as the war is not winnable no one even knows what winning looks like! We may well see even more US troops killing and being killed in Afghanistan a year from now if that is the case. That would be a terrible tragedy.

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The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity : Will Obama ...

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Downtown Milwaukee's never-ending saga over what to build at Fourth and Wisconsin continues. Could one of the latest proposals be 'the one?'

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In a move that is long overdue, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett is going on what he is calling charm offensive with residents of Wisconsin and political leaders in Madison who hold what he calls outdated, negative opinions of Milwaukees impact on the states budget and economy.

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David Meltzer 1937 - 2016

Here is a note I wrote on David's work here in 2005.

Ive written on numerous occasions that the so-called San Francisco Renaissance was largely a fiction, perpetrated in part by Donald Allen in order to give The New American Poetry a section that acknowledged just how much of this phenomenon rose up out of the San Francisco Bay Area a literary backwater prior to WW2, but now suddenly a primary locale for much that was new. The other part and its not clear to me who, if anyone, could be said to have perpetrated this was an allusion back to the earlier Berkeley Renaissance, which had been a decisive, thriving literary tendency in the late 1940s, early 1950s. If you look at Allens S.F. Renaissance grouping, you call still make out the vestiges of that earlier moment in the presence of Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer & Robin Blaser, the trio that had given rise to the Berkeley Renaissance while studying at the University of California, along with, I suppose, Helen Adam, who at the time of the anthology was something of a Duncan protg. Yet there are also poets representing an older San Francisco scene, such as Madeline Gleason & James Broughton & even tho its a stretch, given what a loner he was, at least when he wasnt actively channeling Robinson Jeffers Brother Antoninus (William Everson). Then there are a group of younger poets Richard Duerden, Kirby Doyle, Ebbe Borregaard & Bruce Boyd whom its harder to place aesthetically, a fact that is still true some 45 years after the books initial publication, as theyve become its least published participants. That Allen placed Lawrence Ferlinghetti into this grouping, rather than with the Beats, suggests just how arbitrary these distinctions were.

Given that he was improvising & fabricating in search of clustering principles in general, its curious that Allen completely missed one of the most interesting & useful formations among the New Americans, a western poetics that may have first revealed itself at Reed College in Portland, and which didnt fully take flight until the mid- to late-1950s in San Francisco. Gary Snyder, Lew Welch & Phil Whalen in fact were just the first of a number of poets who came out of this aesthetic one could probably put Duerden & Borregaard there as well, plus three other contributors to the Allen anthology, all of whom joined Snyder & Whalen in Allens curiously amorphous unaffiliated fifth grouping: Michael McClure, Ron Loewinsohn & David Meltzer. Beyond the Allen anthology itself, one might add Richard Brautigan, James Koller, Joanne Kyger, David Schaff, Bill Deemer, Drummond Hadley, Clifford Burke, David Gitin, John Oliver Simon, Lowell Levant, John Brandi, Gail Dusenberry & a host of others. In general, these poets were straight where the Duncan-Spicer axis was gay. Perhaps most importantly, this cluster really had no leaders as such. It was not as though some, such as Snyder or Whalen, might not have led by example, but that their personalities were not given to the constant marshalling of opinion that one could identify in such others as Olson, Duncan, Spicer, Ginsberg, OHara or even Creeley. This mode lets call it New Western perhaps reached its pinnacle of influence during the heyday of Jim Kollers Coyotes Journal during the mid-1960s. But without anything like a leader or a program, poised midway aesthetically between the Beats & Olsons vision of Projectivist Verse, the phenomenon never gelled, never became A Thing & by the 1970s already was entering into an entropic period from which it has yet to re-emerge.

Actually, considering just how many of the Beat poets were treated like rock stars while Meltzer, fronting Serpent Power with his late wife Tina (and drums by Clark Coolidge), actually had a rock band long before Jim Carroll or Patti Smith, its odd that Meltzer hasnt become much more widely known, celebrated before this. Davids Copy is at least the fourth selected poems hes published, the others being Tens, Arrows & The Name, and many of his earlier books were published by Black Sparrow, one of the rare small presses to have had some volumes mostly those by Charles Bukowski widely distributed through the big book chains.

Part of this neglect may also be due to the fact that Meltzer is Jewish. Its not that there were no Jews among the New Americans Ginsberg, Orlovsky, Eigner all come instantly to mind. But the intersection between the New American poetry & the New Age approach to religious experience in the 1960s (Serpent Power?) tended to mute its presence in all but Ginsbergs writing. Indeed, I wouldnt be at all shocked to discover that many readers of Eigner were late to discover the heritage of the bard of Swampscott. In the 1960s, the Objectivists were only gradually coming back into print. And Jerome Rothenberg didnt really begin making the space for an active presence for a Jewish space within American poetics until late in that decade, during that interregnum betwixt the New Americans & language poetry.

Finally, Meltzer and this I think is a sign of his youth relative, say, to Whalen or Snyder or Ginsberg or Olson or Duncan or OHara et al lacked the kind of visible trademark of a differentiated literary style that one associates with all of the above, and even with someone closer to Meltzers age, like Michael McClure. Meltzers work has always been in the vicinity of New American poetics without ever being its own recognizable brand as such, it would be difficult if not impossible for a younger poet to mimic. Its not that Meltzer lacked the chops & more as though he never saw the need per se. In this sense, Meltzers situation is not unlike that, say, of a Jack Collom, another terrific poet of roughly the same generation who has never really gotten the recognition he deserves. In a sense, those who were a little further outside the New American circle like poets in New York who were visibly not NY School, such as Rothenberg, Antin, Ed Sanders or Joel Oppenheimer had an advantage because their circumstance forced them to define themselves in opposition even to poets whose work they cherished.

Indeed, if there is a defining element or signature device in Meltzers work, its that he alone among the New Westerns has an eye for the hard edges of pop culture, something one expects from the NY School. Often, as in this passage from Hollywood Poems, its accompanied by a tremendously agile ear:

De Chirico without Cheracol saw space where its dead echo opened up a plain unbroken by the dancers. Instead a relic supermarket nobody shops at. Plaster-of-Paris bust of Augustus Claude Rains Caesar face-down beneath a Keinholz table whose top is blue with Shirley Temples saucers, pitchers. Mickey Mouse wind-up dolls in rows like Detroit. All tilt out of the running without electricity. Veils of history, garments worn in movies, hung on steel racks at Costume R.K.O. R. Karo wouldve used the towers light. Hed wear it as a cap to re-route lost energy.

So dense with details that it rides like a list (& sounds like a Clark Coolidge poem), this passage is actually a better depiction of a De Chirico landscape than those one finds in John Ashberys poetry. Davids Copy is filled with such moments, which makes it a terrific read.

One might squabble with the fact that the book is not strictly chronological, or that the first 25 years of his writing gets more weight (over 150 pages) than does the last 25 (roughly 100), tho I suspect thats because more of the recent work is still in print. On the whole, such squabbles are few. Editor Michael Rothenberg had done a first-rate job here, smartly including bibliography & a decent two-page bio note from Meltzer & an excellent introduction from Jerry Rothenberg. Toward the end of the introduction, Rothenberg notes:

Elsewhere, in speaking about himself, he tells us that when he was very young, he wanted to write a long poem called The History of Everything. It was an ambition shared, maybe unknowingly, with a number of other young poets the sense of what Clayton Eshleman called a poetry that attempts to become responsible for all the poet knows about himself and his world. Then as now it ran into a contrary directive: to think small or to write in ignorance of what had come before or in deference to critic-masters who were themselves, most often, nonpractitioners & nonseekers.

Paul Blackburn and Me

Edie Jarolim

Its been thirty years since I finished editing the Collected Poems of Paul Blackburn. I still cant quit him.

Paul Blackburn died on September 13, 1971 exactly forty-five years ago today. He was forty-four. I never met him, but I spent more than half a decade with him, writing my dissertation and editing his collected and selected poems. When I started this three-pronged project, it seemed to me that Blackburn had lived a reasonably long life. By the time I finished, I thought hed died tragically young.

***

I first encountered Blackburn in the late 1970s through M.L. Rosenthal, whose Yeats seminar I had taken as a grad student at NYU. Id been contemplating writing a thesis about one of the confessional poets, Rosenthals specialty, but when I went in to talk to him about possible dissertation subjects, Rosenthal said, What do you think about Paul Blackburn?

I hadnt thought about him at all. Id never heard of him. Rosenthal explained, Blackburns widow asked me to edit his collected poems. I dont have the time but I told her I would pass the job along to a qualified graduate student. He added, If you do the scholarly edition for your dissertation, youll end up with a published book when you get your Ph.D.

I got hold of The Cities, the book Rosenthal had recommended as quintessential Blackburn. Many of the poems were about the BMT subway line, which Id grown up riding in Brooklyn. I admired Blackburns technical skill, his musical score-like notations of the works, his ability to make the writing look easy. I shoved down my doubts about his attitudes towards women. A published book... Now there was a shiny object for an aspiring academic.

The project turned out to be far more complex than Id anticipated. First, I had to come up with a criterion for inclusion in the edition. I opted for poems that had been previously published. But what constituted publication? A lot of Blackburn poems appeared only in mimeographed editions. Should those be included?

I next had to decide on an organization. Should the poems appear in the same groupings as the published volumes? There was too much overlap, and many poems were published in poetry journals but not books.

My choice of a chronological arrangement led to other questions: Should the date be based on the first draft of the poem or the published version? And how would I determine the first draft date? And if Blackburn revised the poem after it was published, which version should I use?

I became a poetry detective, interviewing ex-wives and friends, identifying typewriters, tracking down biographical clues in the poems (luckily there were a lot of those). The process was fascinating, but time consuming. It didnt help my efficiency that I was commuting between New York and San Diego, where Blackburns widow, Joan, had sold his papers to UCSDs Archive for New Poetry.

San Diego now there was another shiny object. A typical Easterner, I went there expecting to find a smaller version of Los Angles. The freeways were there, and also some of the congestion, but so was a seascape of surprisingly pristine beauty, and a string of coastal cities, each with their own distinct character. USCD resided in the poshest and probably most stunning of them all, La Jolla.

I was hired to catalogue Blackburns archive and thus was often on the scene for the groundbreaking reading series created by poet Michael Davidson, the Archive for New Poetrys director. I became part of the inner circle of the graduate students and young academics in the UCSD literature department. I also got friendly with the local writers in town (Rae Armantrout and Jerome Rothenberg, for example), as well as visiting writers like Lydia Davis and Ron Silliman. By no means was this project all work and no play.

I never quite pinned down how I felt about Blackburns poetry, but after a while it didnt matter. The editing was an end in itself and Paul Blackburn was part of my life, day and night. He haunted my dreams. Sometimes the scenarios were sexual, sometimes as everyday as my kitchen cabinets. Kind of like his poetry.

Finally, I had a scholarly edition of 623 poems. For each, I detailed the decisions that went into the editing and dating. I added a critical introduction of maybe 50 pages, discussing Blackburns biography and his place in the poetry pantheon as well as the editing theory.

Seemed like a wrap to me.

The powers that be at NYU disagreed. Now that his oeuvre had been established by me! they argued that I had a basis for a real dissertation, a 200-page critical introduction about Blackburn himself, rather than about the editing process. Who says irony is dead?

When I finished this next Sisyphean task, I brought eight volumes into the office of the recorder at NYU. She said, Youre only supposed to bring in two copies of your dissertation.

That is two copies, I said.

Id had it with academia by then. It wasnt just the hoops Id had to jump through at NYU. By the time I took my qualifying exams, my prose style had been pulverized; I had the sentence structure of Henry James and the verbal clarity of Yogi Berra. A decade earlier, I was writing college papers praised for their lucidity. Next thing I knew, I was submitting a proposal for a dissertation titled From Apocalypse to Entropy: An Eschatological Study of the American Novel. I switched thesis topics and advisors but didnt kick the jargon and passive construction habits.

Which was a problem, because what I really wanted to be was a writer, not a literary critic.

My not so-brilliant career plan had been to get tenure and then, in my spare time, devote myself to my craft, in whatever genre that turned out to be. Being a teaching assistant at NYU had cured me of any desire to teach, which I realized would be the main part of my job description. And that published book that was going to help me secure my place in academia? It wasnt going to do the trick or even come close. Paul Blackburn, I now understood, was a dead white guy, academia-speak for someone representing the establishment. My untrendy specialty would consign me to the boonies before I couldmaybe, possibly, who knows? snag a job in a decent city.

Nor did I want to give up my Greenwich Village apartment.

I grew up in Brooklyn and had finally acquired what every bridge-and-tunnel brat aspired to in the days before the boroughs became hip: a rent-stabilized place in Manhattan. Call me crazy, but I didnt want to move someplace I didnt want to live to do something I didnt want to do.

I helped with the publication of the Collected Poems by Persea Press in 1985. I tackled the Selected Poems next. Somewhere in between there were small Blackburn books The Parallel Voyages, The Lost Journals and a few journal articles.

Slowly but surely I opted out of my role as the keeper of the Blackburn flame, handmaiden to his reputation and as a potential academic.

First, I happened into a job as a guidebook editor at the travel division of Simon and Schuster. It took two more travel publishing jobs and a move to Tucson in 1992 to finally jumpstart my long-delayed writing career. This time, I had fewer qualms about leaving New York.

***

My retreat from all things Blackburn continued until 9/11. My niece had phoned from San Antonio to make sure I was okay; though I was living in Tucson, I often visited New York and my old digs in lower Manhattan.

Talk about wake up calls. Suppose I were to die suddenly and intestate? I was divorced, had no children, and my parents were no longer alive. Everything would have gone by default to my older sister, from whom I was estranged. I didnt have much of an estate, except my literal estate. I loved the swirled stucco home near the University of Arizona that I had bought for a song and I still loved literature. I decided to will my house to the UAs excellent Poetry Center, where it would be a residence for visiting writers. It would be named for Paul Blackburn.

One day, maybe two years ago, a friend tagged me on Facebook to join a poetry discussion about Paul Blackburn. It was like attending my own funeral. One of the participants wondered what had happened to me. Another chimed in, authoritatively, that I had become a professional dog person. Clearly, my dog blog had better SEO than my genealogy blog.

This public erasure of my career between the Blackburn years and the publication of my dog book was one of the many things that inspired me to finish a memoir that had been on the back burner for about a decade, called Getting Naked for Money. Traditional publishing had by now hit the skids and I wanted more control over my work and, especially, over my royalties. I started a Kickstarter campaign to raise money to publish it myself.

It was through that campaign and reconnecting with old friends from my poetry past that I discovered there had been a combined celebration of the digitizing of Paul Blackburns archive at UCSD/surprise retirement party for Michael Davidsonto which I hadnt been invited. Well, fuck. Now even that accomplishment had been erased.

I thought about my bequest to the UA. Why was I still holding on to any connection to Paul Blackburn? Others around me had clearly moved on, abnegating my role. I still wanted to will my house to the university as a writers residence, but now, I decided, it would be reserved for women over 50 writing in any genre. Women that the world tended to ignore, in spite of the good work they were doing.

I contacted the UA and said Id like to change the terms of my bequest.

This was about a month ago. Heres where the story gets really weird.

At around the same time, I had dinner with a woman whose acquaintance I had made earlier this year at a Seder, another single ex-New Yorker. I started telling her about changing my bequest to the UA. She interrupted me mid-sentence. Did you say Paul Blackburn? she practically shouted.

Yes, I said, Paul Blackburn. I thought she was confused. Blackburn had always been a poets poet. In my experience, the publication of the Collected Poems and Selected Poems hadnt done much to widen his reputation.

She knew exactly whom I meant. Paul Blackburn had been her first lover. She had been 17; he had been in his mid-thirties and married to his second wife, Sara. They saw each other for about a year. She eventually left New York and married someone else but always thought, somehow, that Paul would turn up in her town, maybe to give a reading. She was shocked to learn that he died, about a year after the fact.

She sent me pictures that she and Paul had taken in a photo booth, he preserved in amber with a little goatee, she in a fresh-faced youthful incarnation that was equally mythical to me.

I wasnt surprised at the revelation of the affair; his poetry had always hinted at infidelities. I was saddened because Id liked Sara Blackburn the few brief times Id met her, but I was hardly one to judge. Mostly, I was appalled at the age and power difference. As my friend said, if it was today, he might have been charged with statutory rape by her parents.

I felt like I was in a weird time loop, doomed to relive a past that was no longer relevant to my present over and over.

And, I figured, if you cant escape your past, you can share your version of it with a little help from your friends.

Labels: Edie Jarolim, Paul Blackburn

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Former Republican Texas Congressman Ron Paul told The Daily Caller Thursday that the United States has been supporting the Islamic State, but he still thinksPresident Barack Obama has had a better foreign policy than former President George W. Bush.

The former Texas congressman said that the U.S. abroad isnt a peacemaker and is instead too often a mischief makers. Former Rep. Paul was a fierce critic of Bushs foreign policy andwas one of six Republicans to have voted against the House resolution authorizing military action against Iraq.

Paul told TheDC that President Obamas foreign policy has been better than Bushs, although it is miserable. He added, One thing I use is how many Americans died engaged in war duringeight years of Bush versus Obama.

More than 4,000 American troops lost their lives during President Bushs eight years in office, compared to less than 2,000 troops under Obama, according to a March report from The Atlantic.

Two things that Paul liked that the happened under Obama were improved relations with Iran and Cuba. He said, What he did with Iran is fantastic.

But he was cautious not to praise the president too much and criticized his policy in Syria. He said that in order to defeat Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Obama had to ally with the Islamic State.

If hed stayed out of Syria it would haveended a couple years ago. Hes made himself look foolish and the Russians have came out pretty strong on this. Theyre the peacemakers, the former Texas congressman told TheDC. He said that Obama has supported ISIS in a similar way to howthe U.S. backed Afghan mujaheddin in their fight against the Soviet Union.

RENO, NV FEBRUARY 02: Republican presidential candidate, U.S. Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) speaks during a campaign rally at the Grand Sierra Hotel on February 2, 2012 in Reno, Nevada. Paul is campaigning ahead of Nevadas caucus on February 4. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard and President-elect Donald Trump have both previously said that the Obama administration has supported terrorists. If you or I gave money, weapons or support to al-Qaeda or ISIS, we would be thrown in jail. Why does our gov get a free pass on this?, the congresswoman from Hawaii wrote on Twitter two weeks.

President-elect Trump said on the campaign trail that President Obama was the founder of ISIS. Gabbard has pointed to a news storiessaying the United States is arming rebels allied with an Al-Qaeda affiliated groups. Rep. Paul told TheDC that the U.S. doesnt support ISIS directly but indirectly.I think Hillary was involved. The evidence is pretty good that weapons left Libya and some went south and some went to Syria. I dont think theres too much argument about that, the former congressman and two-time Republican presidential candidate said.

Ina 2013 speech Hillary Clinton gave to Goldman Sachs released by WikiLeaks, she said that American allies Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates are supporting Jihadists in Syria. Pauls son Republican Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, who is on the Senate Armed Services Committee, has said the CIAs annex in Benghazi, Libya was used to ferry weapons to Syria among other places. Clinton told Sen. Paul during a senate hearing, I do not have any information on that.

Former Rep. Paulsaid arming extremist rebel groups has almost become tradition for the American government. We do that all the time. If we use radical Islam to get rid of Assad, we think we can contain that, he told TheDC.

Paul has not been known for being a pro-Israel politician, but he came out against Secretary of State John Kerrys Thursday speech in which he attacked Israeli settlement building in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Its an unnecessary mess, former Rep. Paul told TheDC. As a libertarian, we avoid these kind of things because you always have to pick sides, individuals can pick sides, but a country shouldnt go in there and decide what is best.

He said that that Middle Eastern peace wont be able to be settled by outsiders, and that he likes the idea of being more neutral on this but the emotions are so high, you cant possibly win.

Following the United Nations resolution condemning the Israeli settlements, on which the U.S. abstained voting, Republican South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham said, If UN moves forward with ill-conceived [Israel} resolution, Ill work to form a bipartisan coalition to suspend/reduce US assistance to UN.

Graham, war hawk, and Paul, non-interventionist, are at opposite ends of the political spectrum, but Rep. Paul told TheDC he the abstaining might be the closest thing to not supporting the UN. He said that, maybe this reassessmentof the positive nature of the UN is what is necessary, but added that Grahams statement was pure political stuff.

Paul said he has hope that President-elect Trump will change the current foreign policy of aggression, but added a retreat from interventionist policies will only happen when we go broke.

Were close to that. Ill have my way someday, Paul added.

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Ron Paul Says Obama Helped ISIS But He's Better Than Bush ...