The words "migrant" and "workers" evoke in our minds, berry pickers and meat packers who cross America's south western borders by legal or illegal means, to make seasonal living in minimum wage conditions.
However, when we use "blue collar" and "migrant worker" together, we come up with a near-empty canvas, because in the history of American labor, blue collar workers have typically been members of a settled community of residents, a local, stable pool of high-school graduates, from whom a Ford, GM or 3M type corporations draw to employ in their factories.
But in a economy that has been affected by globalization, many blue collar workers find themselves migrating from their home states to find jobs elsewhere, to another state, where they live like migrants, i.e. as overnighters with no stable housing or communities available to provide a supportive structure.
Blue collar migrant workers are the subject matter of a new riveting film called The Overnighters. It's a Fast Food Nation gone native.
The overnighters in this case are workers who flock to North Dakota which has been experiencing an oil boom for the last few years, if only because oil is fossil fuel and is not a fungible goods. But as news report after news report has documented, the oil-boon is proving to be a short and long term curse for North Dakota.
Workers have migrated from all over the country to earn a livelihood and they have been single males with broken families, very little education and some, appallingly, have criminal backgrounds. Furthermore, cities in North Dakota have not planned ahead of time to provide secure housing for the migrant workers, and as the film tells us, many of them end up experiencing homelessness.
The central character of The Overnighters is a local padre who provides shelter to the migrants and earn the locals' displeasure in the process.
I noticed that the newest film adaptation of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre has been rated PG-13 for its “chaste passion” and “discreet violence”.
Additionally, Jane is marketed as a "mousy governess" on the poster.
I understand the commingling of passion with chastity—for the heroine, Jane, is an embodiment of chastity (i.e. she will be kissed by nor open her legs to anybody) which tempers the passion she develops over time for her beau, the Earl of Rochester.
What I don’t quite get is the reference to the “discreet violence”. Does this refer to the burning alive of Bertha Mason, Rochester’s West Indian wife, who is neglected by her husband once he brings her over to England? He enjoys her estate, gets rich off her, and then conveniently decides that she is mad and confines her to the attic of her house.
If the quarantining and subsequent death of Bertha Mason is emblematic of violence that's "discreet", then the whole history of colonial violence, the substructure, upon which the superstructure of 19th century British prosperity lay, is discreet.
But was this violence inflicted discreetly? Hell no; it was as overtly inflicted as is the modern day violence of a Ray Rice on his fiancee. The choice of the adjective "discreet" could be attributed to the race of the colonial master vis-a-vis the race of the servant subjugated by the former with impunity, back in those days.
Bertha Mason’s treatment, we know today, is a direct consequence of her race—she was black.
In the novel, Bertha hardly speaks; she is never seen. Only when the Rochester abode (which is refurbished with wealth from Mason's ancestral sugarcane plantation in Antigua) is up in flames, do we know that the madwoman in the attic is responsible for the arson.
Once the context is read into the novel, the violence done to Bertha hardly remains “discreet”.
Oh, and Jane can by no means be described as "mousy" (the film's poster sums up Jane's journey as a journey of increasing self-confidence). Her reticence is not a sign of her feminine diffidence; it's a pre-Victorian virtue, a virtue that would have been commendable in a young woman back then.
Context matters, else Jane Eyre would belong to the same category of fiction as The Nanny Diaries.
I'm not sure I have the words in which to describe the art house science fiction/horror film Under the Skin, but try I must for the film was a substantial experience for me.
Directed by the British Jonathan Glazer (of Sexy Beast fame), Under tracks the activities of an alien named Laura, played superbly by Scarlett Johansson, as she drives through the streets of a very working class Glasgow, picking up men in her van, taking them home and then consuming them, or devouring them sexually. The men are shown to sink into a dark pool on which Laura walks.
That's it, it's when we see Laura walk on water, we know she isn't human, i.e. not human in the sense we know humans to be.
Laura goes about the business of seduction in a disinterested way; she isn't titillated, or aroused; she is simply curious. While Laura prattles away a series of questions to her male victims, what's their name? Where are they headed? Where are they from? Are they single? the males, mostly un-literate, poor, into drugs and slightly thuggish, are mesmerised by her attention to them. These aren't men that attractive, London-accented young women would spare a first look at. The film seeks to jolt the sexual vanities of men out of their complacencies.
The prospect of having sex with Laura overrides the instinct for self-preservation, or benumbs the man to the fact that they are drowning in a nefarious cesspool while Laura, stripping herself off clothing, walks away from them. The men who drown are the proverbial donkeys who, lured by the shiny carrot of promise, would walk into their very deaths.
But one has to keep in mind that Laura isn't preying on the genteel; she's careful in her choice of slum dwellers. They won't be missed; their disappearance won't be an anomaly.
The film is also about Laura herself; Unlike other movie extraterrestrials, Laura looks remarkably like a human female and we are not given any distinct signs of her alienness. We, however, get ample evidence of her alienation from the sliver of earth in which she roams. The streets and the occasional club, the inside of a home, appear as they would to her eyes. They zip past us and remain mostly in a blur, the color of a day-old bruise on human skin. Means that nothing holds Laura's attention.
She picks up a disfigured man who is on his way to the grocery store at night; he interests her. The encounter proves to be transformative, for in the remaining part of the film Laura seems less alienated and more in a catatonic state of existence. She quits eating men; she tries to have real sexual intercourse with a kind male but runs away upon discovering that a crucial part of the female human anatomy, the genitalia, is missing from her nether regions.
The film ends on a most poignantly tragic of notes: a peeling off of Laura's skin reveals the dark slithery entity that she is under the human skin. She is set on fire and the last interlude is a depressingly violent one for Laura, yet it's the one time when Laura is seen to be riveted to something--the face of her temporary human body. As Laura holds up the face for viewing, she twitches with emotions that tell us that she has got attached to her skin.
I felt deeply sorry at the disintegration of Laura, into a pile of ashy substance.
Stanley Kubrick's classic Dr. Strangelove (1964) is undoubtedly about the cold war with America and the "commie" Russians as mutual antagonists. But the film--and I saw it for the first time recently--has, I think, a curious subtext: The Nazi virus is indomitable. The virus manifests itself in the plan that Dr. Strangelove has at the movie's end. After an American bomber drops the dreaded H bomb on a Russian ICBM base, Dr. Strangelove tells his spellbound audience, comprised of both Americans and the Soviets, that the radiation from the explosion will invade the earth's atmosphere for a hundred years making the planet uninhabitable. During these hundred years, says Dr. Strangelove, it's advisable to build a subterranean hideout, a society if you will, where the most virile of men will cohabit with the most seductive and fertile of women in the ratio of 1:10. What he doesn't spell out, but what strikes us like a bolt of lightning, is the fact that these would be males and females of a particular race, the chosen race. The truth of Dr. Strangelove springs out like a Jack-in-the-box when in a moment of exhilaration, the "doctor"--a German scientist who had emigrated to the U.S. after world war II and changed his name--gets out of his wheelchair and exclaims, "Mein fuhrer I can walk!!!"
The subtext then is that Dr. Strangelove had borne inside of himself the unfulfilled Nazi dream of racial domination--the emergence of a society of the racially superior types. After the fall of Hitler, who would revive that dream but the stupid Americans and Russians, punch drunk in love with arms racing?
In this magnificent satire on the Cold War and the hollow ideologies the war was supposed to have been fought in the service of (there are many hints that the war was really a way for Coca Cola and mega corporations of the ilk to thrive), Kubrick shows us how extirpation isn't just something we expect from fascists; the Americans and the Russians were equally extirpative in their outlook during the Cold War, except that the "death to all but the best among us" was hidden behind a veil of a just war.
N.B. There was also a rumor floating the time of the film's release, that Dr. Strangelove is a satirical portrait of Dr. Henry Kissinger. Kissinger, a Jewish-German emigre to the United States spoke with a distinct German accent; there were talks back then, in light of the Vietnam war, of trying him in the International Court of Justice at the Hague.
"Everything" says Eleanor, the teen daughter of Clara and the narrator of Neil Jordan's fascinating film, Byzantium, "is cold outside of time".
There is enormous maternal warmth though, not outside time per se, but within the mother's heart. The film charts the ends to which Clara, the human-turned vampire would go to protect her daughter from harm.
As a "warm" woman and mother, Clara is a misfit in the "cold" zone of atemporality. But neither mother nor daughter travels into this zone out of free choice.
The women are victims of circumstances that through centuries have befallen women who are shown to be a persecuted minority in a world dominated by men.
Vampirism is a refuge from a predatorial society for mother and daughter. At least being out of time grants them biological transcendence, for biology is the woman's worst enemy in a world where they are primarily food for the male sexual appetite.
Clara and Eleanor are immortal, as is customary of vampires; they are seemingly young but really are 200+ years old. Clara was but a mere wisp of a poor English girl, an orphan, making a living by selling shells and sea cockles during the Napoleonic wars. A brutish captain of the English army covets Clara and sells her into prostitution. He then goes on to repeatedly brutalize her till Clara gives birth to Eleanor and also falls ill with tuberculosis.
Despite a life of inhuman suffering, Clara loves her child and gives her up to an orphanage to protect Eleanor from getting similarly brutalized by nasty men.
In the meantime, however, Clara gets hold of a map that leads to an island where, inside a cave there resides the power of the "faceless" disembodied saint who converts humans into vampires if they are willing to "die". The "death" is a figurative one, a code for immortality and perpetual youth. The map was meant for the captain who had brutalized her because the vampiric legion is an all-male legion open to only men of high-birth.
By stealing the map from the captain and shooting him in the leg, Clara, by virtue of her "low" birth, her gender and her profession, becomes the quintessential interloper into the brotherhood. She goes to the cave and transforms into a vampire, illness-free, immortal and stuck at the ripe young age of 25ish for eternity.
To wreak vengeance on Clara, the brutal captain rapes Eleanor and infects her with a venereal disease. Clara is flabbergasted by this event; she kills the man and to save her daughter from certain death takes her to the cave.
Eleanor is thus converted to a vampire as well.
The film begins in the present, when mother and child are shown to be fugitives, always on the run, hunted for eternity by the brotherhood.
With its perceptive gender inflections, Byzantium is a wholly refreshing take on the vampire genre. The teen-pandering Twilight series has all but diluted the woman's place in the universe of vampires, by making them subservient to males. Even Bram Stoker's Dracula, which had a powerful male at the center of the action, reduced women to vessels for the master's life-bequeathing sperms.
Byzantium has a saucy, sexy, powerful woman, who is confident in her own sexuality, as the ur vampire. From her originates the actions.
In Byzantium, the vampiric demesne is shown to be filled with the same kinds of social biases that afflict the human world. Power is what the members of the brotherhood lust after, not women, but as in human societies through ages, the pursuit of power is peculiarly gendered: Men seek it, men exclude women from it and ultimately men overpower women with it. The disdain which the leader of the brotherhood for Clara doesn't diminish an iota for 200 hundred odd years. This kind of unabated contempt is eye-opening to say the least. As a prostitute, Clara was an outcast in human society; she is also an outcast within the brotherhood. There is no winning (of respect and equality) for the female sex.
One would think that the vampiric domain, being a domain that goes against the grain of everything temporal, would be a domain free of human bigotries. But the brotherhood has a poor opinion of women like Clara and believes that she is undeserving of the noble mantle of a vampire. The stench of male privilege emanates from this brotherhood. Here's an eye-popping instance of this stinky privilege: Between Clara and the Captain who is irredeemably immoral, the brotherhood chooses the Captain because he is a man of some birth and learning (as a result of his status). Clara, on the other hand, is a thoughtful, vivacious woman with a primal loyalty to her daughter. Yet, her gender is an automatic disqualifier.
It's at the very end that Clara expresses her pent-up (for over two centuries) outrage at the utter disrespect she gets from the brotherhood. She tells Savella, the brotherhood's leader, that she has, for 200 years resented the brotherhood's relegation of her to a position beneath the worst of the blood sucking, conscienceless vampires.
In his poem Sailing to Byzantium W.B. Yeats writes of a man's quest for eternal life; Byzantium is historically the site of timelessness as through time it has survived under various names such as Constantinople and Istanbul (and many prior and in-between) under the ebb and flow of global empires. Symbolically Byzantium is the elemental life that goes on ceaselessly despite the march of history.
Neil Jordan's Byzantium is an old, going-out-of-business hotel in a seaside resort just outside of London. The hotel becomes a metaphorical battlefield--of decisions and unfurling--for both Clara and Eleanor. The story reaches a crescendo and a crisis in this hotel; the owner of the hotel is a man whose mother has just died and left the failing business in his hands. He is a soft male who shows signs of having been ruled by a mother all his life and with the departure of his mother, he is at a loss of how to navigate life. Clara becomes the surrogate mother to this weak man; but the man is highly sympathetic to women and constantly reassures Eleanor that she is safe in his house.
The course of destiny within time has come full cycle in the hotel Byzantium; the hotel is momentarily a brothel, a space of female empowerment of a strange yet potent kind. Clara reigns in the hotel Byzantium till the moment when Eleanor betrays her and all hell breaks loose.
The film ends on a note of triumph for Clara; she defeats the orthodoxy of the brotherhood through guile and perseverance and saves her daughter's life for eternity.
I doubt if a film like Manakamana will be seen by more than 50 people.
And that is just fine, going by the core philosophy of makers Pachao Velez and Stephanie Spray's Documentary. The philosophy seems to be that the best of thoughts may go unexpressed and thus unheard; the best of things may go unseen and the best of sounds may go unheard.
The film is about the journey pilgrims make to Manakamana, a Hindu temple in a small mountain village in Nepal. Inside the temple resides the goddess Bhagavati.
The temple is in a remote location; over time pilgrims have endured, happily so, the arduous journey to the site. Recently, they have been riding a cable car to and from the temple. The cable car is a technological insertion into nature, but the regular pilgrims are not mesmerized by the cable car. Some mumble the fact that this is the first time in their life that they are aboard a cable car.
That's it.
The Documentary is not a homage to technology or to many aspects of modernity that we have taken for granted and feel deep lacunae when they go missing from our surrounding.
The Documentary is one that somebody like philosopher and art critic Susan Sontag would have liked: a no-frills-attached registering on our consciousness of a fleeting experience that quietly leaves its imprint on us.
Sontag had cringed at the thought of over-articulation of experiences, at the sight of tourists taking pictures of things they visit and see, at the cultural proclivity to record and note every sensation one experiences when one is in the presence of, let's say, a "wonder", man-made or natural.
The temple of Manakamana is a wonder to its pilgrims. But the pilgrims generally remain inarticulate about the wonder. Because of the cable car and other conveniences, the temple is now visited by outsiders as well. Tourists, the nemesis of a Sontagian universe, take pictures and jot down notes; there is a rock musician who jokes around and expresses cynicism. They are not looking at the temple; in essence with the noise they create, they are looking at themselves. The jokes they sprout, the cynicism they express, the notes and the photographs they take are silent echoes of themselves.
The traditional pilgrims approach the shrine with awe and ardor and leave in awe and ardor. The wonder they experience is left at that, not translated into words or into a narrative.
Jim Jarmusch's Only Lovers Left Alive, has something I appreciate--adult vampires instead of the odious teenage ones (a.k.a. The Twilight Saga twits).
Having familiarized myself with the vampire ecology in Bram Stoker's Dracula, I believe vampires to be intelligent adult creatures who have more than sex and chastity on their mind.
Count Dracula, was above everything else, an artist, an erudite adult male. Jarmusch brings back the adult erudition back to vampirism in his new film on a refreshing class of vampires who are lovers of old-world creativity and art in classic Bohemian style.
The female lead, Eve, played by the gorgeous Tilda Swinton, packs her suitcases with classics and Adam, her male counterpart decorates his walls with pictures of famous artists. Adam and Eve's muse, quite fascinatingly is Christopher Marlowe, one of Europe's original literary outlaws who was both spymaster and erudite poet and playwright who dismissed Shakespeare as a plagiarist and populist with grave literacy problems.
Marlowe, Adam and Eve look upon the present as a present of zombies, comprised of ordinary humans who have squandered and/or lost their ability to appreciate art.
Movie critic A.O. Scott describesOnly Lovers Left Alive as "a generational protest against the zombie kids and their enablers, digitally distracted creatures who don’t appreciate the tactile, sensual glories of the old things."
In the beginning there were the Ravi Shankars and the George Harrisons, .... singing of global peace.
Then there was the Pussy domination of "Jai Ho"(e), the signature tune of Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire, a song and dance number in which A.R. Rahman appeared subordinated by the PussyCat Dolls.
The song had a purely aesthetic value and was a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.
The latest in the line of East West duet is Peter Gabriel and Atif Aslam's song from Mira Nair's 2012 movie, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (based on the novel by Moshin Hamid).
The song is a beauty; the words sing of the individual's place in a world gone complex. It's a good place as long as the individual resists its commandeering by the forces that be.
As translated, the song is:
Speak, for your lips are yet free;
Speak, for your tongue is still your own;
Your lissom body yours alone;
Speak, your life is still your own.
Look into the blacksmith’s forge:
The flame blazes, the iron’s red;
Locks unfasten open-mouthed,
Every chain’s link springing wide.
Speak, a little time suffices
Before the tongue, the body die.
Speak, the truth is still alive;
Speak: say what you have to say.
Movie critic Manhola Dargis gives Catching Fire, a place in the film and cultural history of America:
“Catching Fire” isn’t a great work of art but it’s a competent, at times exciting movie and it does something that better, more artistically notable movies often fail to do: It speaks to its moment in time. “The mythic America,” the literary critic Leslie Fiedler memorably wrote, “is boyhood.” One of the things that “The Hunger Games,” on the page and on the screen, suggests is that the myth is changing. Boys (and men) are still boys, of course, including in movies, but the very existence of Katniss — who fights her own battles, and kisses and leaves the boys, only sometimes to save them — suggests cultural consumers are ready for change, even if most cultural producers remain foolishly stuck in the past. It’s unlikely Katniss will lead the real revolution the movies need, but a woman can dream.
Whatever (cinematic) Woody Allen makes is worthy of watching, especially his off-the-beaten path classic like Sleeper, a low-fi, science fiction farce. Sleeper came out in 1973.
Filmmaker Suman Mukherjee's new political and social satire, Kangal Malsat, meaning "War Cry of the Beggars", could very well be seen as an Indian version of George Orwell's political allegory Animal Farm.
The story of Kangal Malsat: In the derelict shanties and dark alleys of Calcutta live two warring groups of the nether world. The Fyataroos have the gift of flying and the Choktars practice black magic. Suddenly, the rival groups are joined together in alliance by an ageless duo - a primordial talking crow and Begum Johnson who consorted with Job Charnock and Warren Hastings. Masterminded by the two ancient progenitors of the city and led by the magically endowed rebels, an army of tramps and vagrants launch an uprising against the Communist government of West Bengal. As skulls dance in crematoria, flying discs whiz through the sky, and a portrait of Stalin angrily admonishes the Chief Minister, the Communist government falls. The political transition, however, sees many of the rebels being rewarded with awards and positions in the new government.
This unrelenting and bitterly sarcastic political film, based on a novel by Nabarun Bhattacharya, landed director Suman Mukhopadhyay in some trouble with the censors.
British filmmaker Paul Greengrass's movie, Captain Phillips, has been marked by film critics, including Manhola Darghis, as a story of "global capitalism" more than as a story of a virtuous captain attacked by villainous Somali darkies.
It's the forces of global capitalism that make outlaws out of the Somalis and the American Captain Phillips, a temporary hostage. Both are pawns in a "warfare" that's impossible to define in terms of a conventional warfare, but one can tell that the Somalis are emaciated, underfed, yet armed with stolen automatic weapons, and are interested in laying their hands on a jackpot of food that is ironically on its way to Somalia. The pirates have no affiliation with a nation; they want to seize this opportunity to pull off a heist.
The forces that bring the Somalis and Captain Phillips, who has roots in white and liberal Vermont, in the same space, need to be talked about, hints reviewer Darghis.
The bringing together of such disparate members of the global community also raises a poignant question of responsibility: In what ways, big or small, direct or indirect, are the likes of Captain Phillips responsible for the famine and war in Somalia?
I am reminded of Teju Cole's call for "constellational thinking" in order to respond to the question of responsibility. To understand Captain Phillips' role the dots in the landscape of global capitalism, of which the fugitive Somalis and the white liberal Phillips are residents, have to be connected.
The U.S. Marine rescues the ship and its crew members as we all know from the incident and Darghis says how the film ends with no David in sight, only Goliaths, meaning the muscular security men who are the keepers of the new world order.
Yet globalization had once upon a time promised the emergence of a multipolar world. The title of the film omits naming any one of the pirates as agents of the primary action, but that is to be expected; the world of Western entertainment media is largely unipolar. But Greengrass has made some room for the pirates in the movie, and humanized them somewhat.
As I understand, global capitalism has created a world of enormous economic disparities and the doors to opportunities of participation in the economy of global capitalism has gotten smaller and smaller. The Somali pirates in no way can lay hands on material resources by following the law. Captain Phillips alone makes twice the amount as a merchant navy captain, as a messenger, that is, than all of the Somalis who invade the ship taken together in a year.
Greengrass has globalized the book A Captain's Duty, in which Captain Richard Phillips gives an account of the Maersk Alabama saga.
It's a good thing that there is a movie on the experience of a black lesbian. I'm so tired of seeing blacks, men or women, depicted only within the framework of poverty, class struggle and race.
I hear Pariah, a film that won critical accolades at the 2011 Sundance festival, is a saga of a black teen's tempestuous journey through sexual identity.
Pariah is written by precocious African American writer (who went into film writing after getting an MBA in finance), Dee Rees.
"I'm broken, but I am free," says the protagonist of Pariah.
History is usually (and cynically) seen to be the story of the winners.
The Documentary, Poor Us, tells the history of the so-called "losers."
The poor in our modern era, are unfairly, and contra-historically, considered to be the "losers". But as this film shows, the "poor" aren't losers but a by product of historical processes.
The world, as we learn has got poorer, beginning with the proto-industrial and the industrial eras. The wise voice of Karl Marx says that the poverty we witness in the world wouldn't have happened without capitalist system of production.
The BBC has an interesting series of Documentaries called the "Toughest Places."
The series has "The Toughest Place to Drive a Cab," "The Toughest Place to be a Prostitute," etc.
The series focuses on the more basic professions in the world, and the "Toughest Place to be a Bin Man," is about scavengers. It's a job we rarely talk about, but without scavengers where would the shitters who live in fancy places be? I mean, as long as there are humans, there will be waste and there will be shit.
A London trash man spends 10 days in Jakarta, Indonesia to live the life, as it were, of an Indonesian trash man.
In essence, he encounters a different culture.
What's interesting about this film, is that the person who goes to the "other" place, the non-West, that is, isn't white and isn't from a privileged background in the west.
He is a black British, the son of West Indian immigrants to Britain. He makes a living by picking up trash in neighborhoods that range from the crutty council one's to the swanky. He has a truck with advanced technology and air conditioning; he has a regular pay and a pension to boot. In other words, he is secure, till the time he is sacked.
In Jakarta all these conditions are absent for the Indonesian Bin Man, Imam, whose job the British Bin Man takes on for 10 days.
While the Documentary doesn't have the "the Western savior" attitude, it does have a bit of a glorification of the life of the British Bin Man. It's as though the British Bin Man suffers from zero insecurities and there are no challenges in his work just because it's in London.
The Documentary does not interrogate the material conditions of the British Bin Man's life. Is he poor by London standards?
The Indonesian Bin Man, is by contrast, poor and doomed to die as a trash collector with zero security.
The film ends on a note of pious egalitarianism, as the British bin Man, back in London, reflects on how he and his Indonesian counterpart are the "same", they are "brothers," even; it's that they are born in different places and that makes the big difference.
I remember watching Errol Morris' documentary, Fog of War and feeling that I haven't had a more immersive experience in what I would call a celluloid confessional.
Fog of War allows former Secretary of State Robert Mcnamara's to speak about himself in response to a few questions asked by the filmmaker (who is absent from the screen).
We see and hear Mcnamara journey through his life, first as executive of Ford Motor company, then as an architect of the Vietnam war, as the 8th Secretary of State serving both John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.
Mcnamara basically assumes responsibility for creating the war as a geopolitical strategy instead of as a necessity of defence. The "fog" of the cold war strategist descends as Mcnamara alternately tries to justify the war and recuse himself from the genocidal accusations.
Morris has now made a documentary on yet another strategist cum Secretary of State, Donald Rumsfeld, who migrated from business to politics, just as Mcnamara did.
Rumsfeld, in many ways is known as one of the chief maker of the war against Iraq.
In place of the "fog" of cold war double-speak, Rumsfeld rained "memos" on his aides and juniors.
Had there been a Noble Prize for such a category of poetry, then rumsfeld would be the winner of the era's best "bureaucratic poet."
