the libertine

the whip sheet of the liberal party

issue twelve / 21.04.2002

zero	a message from the secretary Last night’s Bulldog Days debate was—was—amazing. We had over forty pre-frosh, a bunch of Yalies, and some really good cake. The great turnout was due in small part to my cool flyers, in much larger part to Clayton’s stunning chalk drawing at Phelps Gate. Bravo. News comes from France today that the terrifying Jean-Marie Le Pen, candidate for the Front National, has qualified for the second round of the presidential election; he’ll face incumbent Gaullist Jacques Chirac. Pseudo-socialist Lionel Jospin, the current prime minister, seemed to be a lock, and his loss to an anti-immigrant fascist who once said that the Nazi gas chambers were “a detail in history” continues a wave of leftist defeats in Western and Northern Europe. It’s very scary—protests have already begun (“F comme fasciste, N comme nazi!” is the popular chant), and the Communists, Socialists and Greens have already thrown their support to Chirac to prevent any possibility of a Front National victory. I myself was a fan of the Workers’ Struggle candidate Arlette Laguiller, who according the New York Times wears “sensible shoes.” This Wednesday I have an interview for my prospective summer internship, and I’m very, very nervous: whatever shall I wear? –j.s.f.
one	goings on in the liberal party 22.04.2002 / Monday / 05.30 / Lib dinner Join us in Commons under the portrait of George H.W. Bush. 01.05.2002 / Wednesday / sometime early / Lib New York trip Join us on our annual trip to New York to meet with cool liberals. More information to follow. later / unknown day / sometime late / Lib caucus Elections for Liberal Party e-board and for YPU officers are coming up as well. More information to follow.
two	artist of the left: nazim hikmet, poet [N.B. that much of this has been plagiarized from the New York Times. –j.s.f.] This year marks the centenary of the birth of Turkey’s greatest modern writer. Nazim Hikmet, born in Salonica in 1902, came of age during the revolution of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. While Hikmet embraced Atatürk’s policies of modernization, he was horrified by the economic inequality he found in his travels through his country. He visited the Soviet Union in 1922 and returned to Turkey to write fiery verse in praise of the common man and critical of government oppression. Branded as a subversive, Hikmet was sent to prison several times, where he continued to write poetry that lauded his country’s citizens but contained a sadness of unjustified patriotism: “I love my country,” he wrote in 1939. “I swung in its lofty trees, I lay in its prisons. / Nothing relieves my depression / Like the songs and tobacco of my country.” By 1950, he had been granted amnesty but had been forced to flee Turkey. Back in the Soviet Union, Hikmet saw Stalin’s corruption of Marxism and became disillusioned by the idea of the Communist Party; while he maintained his beliefs, he became politically independent. While he never returned to Turkey, he toured the world in the 1950s and 1960s and saw the oppression of leftist thought in the United States; he wrote, “I traveled through Europe, Asia and Africa with my dream, / only the Americans didn’t grant me a visa.” While Hikmet’s real legacy is the modernization of the long tradition of Near Eastern poetry, combining the freeform style and psychological inquisitiveness of international modernism with the linguistic tropes of Ottoman verse, he is undeniably a great leftist artist, a martyr of sorts who mixed an egalitarian socialism with a laudatory nationalism of the individual.
three	a final thought Can blindly continued fear-induced regurgitated life-denying tradition be overcome? —Alanis Morissette