American Views Abroad

 
Two articles on the effects of the decline of the dollar, an op-ed piece, and a poet drew my attention this morning. In today's IHT Roger Cohen discusses The Almighty Dollar Looks Mighty Vulnerable at www.iht.com/articles/2004/12/10/news/globalist.html. On the front page Dollar's Drop is a Boom and a Curse reports on two companies on different sides of the Atlantic and how the decline of the dollar is affecting them at www.iht.com/articles/2004/12/10/business/dollar.html. James Carroll's Open Your Eyes, America talks about the paralysis of the American public in relation to the war in Iraq. '...the gravest foreign policy crisis in a generation, source of a crisis of conscience for tens of millions of citizens, is not a subject of political debate.' www.iht.com/articles/2004/12/10/opinion/edcarroll.html.

A poem in English in an obituary in the Hamburg paper (obits here are rather large compared to US papers and often have an original touch) got me to google for the poet. Though I couldn't find that poet, surfing through www.poets.org, I came across an American poet, Naomi Shihab Nye who was born in 1952 in Missouri to a Palestinian father and an American mother. The five poems reprinted on that site Blood, Making a Fist, San Antonio, Streets and Two Countries are worth reading. In Streets she begins

A man leaves the world
and the streets he lived on
grow a little shorter

With all that's in the news these days, reading a poem is a necessary respite.



- posted by Gloria @ 4:05 PM