Howelings  / Mandela Led Build Down Of Nuclear Weapons

 

By Mark Howell

 

Question: What is the only country to have developed and built nuclear weapons, then voluntarily given them up?

 

 

 

Answer: South Africa, whose nuclear-bomb program began in 1978 at the urging of Prime Minister P. W. Botha in response to a perceived threat from by Soviet-backed Cuban troops arriving in neighboring Angola.

 

 

 

The program was ultimately dismantled during the administration of Nelson Mandela.

 

 

Poet and playwright Amiri Baraka, last of the black Beats, has died at the age of 79.

 

 

 

Born in Newark, N.J., he was married to Hattie Cohen, with whom he founded Totem Press, and then lived with Diane Di Prima, with whom he founded Yugen magazine. They and his daughters by them, Kellie, born 1960; Lisa, born 1961; and Dominique di Prima, born 1962, survive him.

 

 

 

Baraka was most renowned for the books of poetry published under his birth name, Leroi Jones, for example “Preface to a 20-Volume Suicide Note” (1961) and “The Dead Lecturer” (1964) — (he actually died of complications from diabetes following an operation) — and his plays “The Dutchman” and “The Slave” (1964). Among his last publications was “Someone Blew Up America,” 2003.

 

 

 

Two other great black Beat poets predeceased him: Bob Kaufman, founder of Beatitude magazine and author of The “Abomunist Manifesto” (1958), died in 1986. After learning of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Kaufman took a Buddhist vow of silence that lasted until the end of the Vietnam War in 1973.

 

 

 

Ted Joans, who died in 2003, was a New Yorker and world traveler whom we met in London. He who wrote “Funky Jazz Poems,”  “Beat Poems” (1959) and “The Hipsters” (1961).

 

 

The hottest book to come our way in years is “The Cool School.” Edited by Glenn O’Brien, it’s subtitled “Writings from America’s Hip Underground” and has just been published by, of all people, the highbrow Library of America. Most insightful of the pieces surely is the 1950 essay by Delmore Schwartz called “Hamlet, or There Is Something Wrong With Everyone.”

 

 

 

Here’s a sample: “People have been arguing for hundreds of years what was really wrong with Shakespeare’s character Hamlet. And there is one fascinating view that all the mystery is utterly clarified if we suppose that everyone is roaring drunk from the beginning of the play to the end.

 

 

 

“Needless to say, I have a theory, too. But I don’t know if it’s correct or not. For what it’s worth, I will say in brief that I think Hamlet suffered from a well-known pathological disorder. He was manic; and he was depressive. No one knows what the real causes of the manic-depressive disorder are, whether physical, mental or both, and that is why no one understands Hamlet.

 

 

 

“Now that is my point, the fact that you can have this gift or that disease, and no one understands why, and no one is responsible, and no one can really alter matters, and yet no one can stop thinking that someone is to blame. To be manic-depressive is just like being small or tall, blond, strong, fat — there is no clear reason for it, it is quite arbitrary, no one seems to have had any choice in the matter, and it is very important, certainly it is very important.

 

 

 

“This is the reason the story of Hamlet is very sad, bad and immoral. It has all these traits because Hamlet’s diseased emotions caused the death of the beautiful Ophelia, her pompous but well-meaning father, her hot-headed brother Laertes and his own talented self.

 

 

 

“In this way we must recognize the fact that there is something wrong with everyone and everything’.

 

 

Quote for the Week:

“God has been replaced in America, as he has all over the West, with respectability and air conditioning.”

               — Amiri Baraka  (1934 – 2014) 

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