The Good, the Bad, and the Funny

News that makes you despair of, hope for, and laugh at the human race.

The bad news first.

THE BAD NEWS: If this is winning in Iraq, what's losing?

Iraqi politicians spent most of the nearly three months since their widely hailed national election settling old scores and maneuvering for sectarian gains. They dithered as insurgents regained their momentum. . . . More than 100,000 American troops patrol the nation and more than 100,000 Iraqi security forces have supposedly been trained, yet guerrillas show increasing coordination in their attacks. . . .

On Wednesday, guerrillas shot to death a National Assembly member, one of the 275 elected in January. The list of horrors for this month alone includes staggered car bombings in Baghdad, scores of corpses found in the Tigris River and the downing of a commercial helicopter. Eleven people, including six Americans, died in that incident, and a militant website showed charred bodies and a lone survivor, the pilot, being executed by off-camera insurgents.

Today, 29 more people died and 90 were wounded. The new tactic: setting off a second, delayed bomb to kill and maim rescue workers.

The Iraqi elections made us happy, and, with a false sense of closure, moved the issue off many people's front burners. But it's still burning. In last night's press conference, President Bush refused to set a timetable for the withdrawal of American troops. That was prudent. It was also ominous.

(To segue into the good news, are you aware that Silflay Hraka has been posting a series on the birds -- and reptiles, and fishes -- of Iraq? Bigwig is a self-admitted "bird geek." He wants us to know there's a whole living world over there, not just the bombs and mosques and sandstorms we see on the news.)

THE GOOD NEWS: The ivory-billed woodpecker, long believed to be extinct, lives! The magnificent bird, nicknamed the "Lord God Bird" because people used to exclaim "Lord God!" when they saw it (in today's debased vernacular it would probably have to be dubbed the "Holy Shit Bird"), has been definitively sighted at least 8 times, and even videotaped, in the Arkansas swamplands.

The current surge of interest began on Feb. 11, 2004, when amateur ornithologist Gene M. Sparling III of Hot Springs, Ark., saw what he thought was an ivory-billed woodpecker while kayaking in the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge, halfway between Little Rock and Memphis, Tenn., and reported it to a bird-watchers' website.

A week later, Tim W. Gallagher, editor of the Cornell lab of ornithology's Living Bird magazine, and Bobby R. Harrison of Oakwood College in Huntsville, Ala., interviewed him and were so impressed by his account that they accompanied him on a second trip.

On Feb. 27, a large black-and-white woodpecker flew less than 70 feet in front of their canoe on the bayou. Both simultaneously cried out, "Ivory-bill!" (The L.A. Times)

This is good news about . . . a bird. Why does it qualify as the sort that can make you hopeful about humans? Because it is "a validation of efforts to preserve and restore forested areas throughout the country." (Interior Secretary Gale Norton has responded by pledging $10 million more to restore the bird's habitat, the Big Woods of eastern Arkansas.) But most of all (here I'm seconding Ann Althouse), because we care:

After they finished their notes and sketches of the bird, Gallagher said, "Bobby sat down on a log, put his face in his hands and began to sob, saying, 'I saw an ivory-bill. I saw an ivory-bill.' "

Gallagher said he was speechless after the sighting. "Just to think that this bird made it into the 21st century gives me chills," he said. "It's like a funeral shroud has been pulled back, giving us a glimpse of a living bird, rising Lazarus-like from the grave."

Why is this news thrilling? As Dave Bonta of Via Negativa says, "This is a story about us. It's a story about the possibility of redemption and the persistence of hope." After our penitent awakening to what we as a species have wrought (talk about good news -- even evangelicals are becoming environmentalists!,) a sense of reprieve and blessing is bestowed by the miraculous reappearance of the Lord God Bird. You could cite the irony that it's our centuries of unchecked depredation that have finally made us wealthy enough to afford the luxury of cherishing our endangered environment and fellow beings, either just in time or just too late. And you could go on about the Bush administration's delight at being handed the chance to make a low-priced symbolic environmental gesture. But before we revert to cynicism, let's just take a moment to celebrate the survival of rare beauty, and of our own hearts' ability to soar with it.

THE FUNNY NEWS: I guess it's not really so funny -- to serious poets it's deadly serious, with book contracts, academic jobs, prizes, and reputations at stake -- but the hoo-hah over foetry.com, a "watchdog" website that names the names of poet-judges who allegedly "select their students, friends, and even their lovers" to win prestigious contests, seems a little like a nuclear war with toy soldiers. Envy rampant and corruption exposed are funnier in miniature, as in David Lodge's Small World and other insider satires of academic life. According to the New York Times, foetry.com was shut down when its anonymous proprietor, Alan Cordle, a Portland, Oregon research librarian, was unmasked by a blog dedicated to that purpose, Whoisfoetry?. But now Cordle has the website up again.

At issue: is glam poetry superstar, Harvard professor and MacArthur "genius grant" recipient Jorie Graham a biased bestower of patronage? Do the University of Iowa, University of Georgia and other university-sponsored contests lavish prizes on their judges' pet students? Does suck-up and sycophancy play the same role in getting published as a poet that the casting couch plays in getting cast as a starlet? Or is Alan Cordle just a sour-grapes saboteur spreading rumors and lies? Cordle defends himself here. Who knew the poetry world was such a writhing nest of incestuous snakes? Or that so much heat could built up in a dollhouse pressure-cooker?

- amba