Christopher Ketcham has written for Vanity Fair, Harper’s, GQ, the Nation, Salon, Mother Jones, Men’s Journal, Good Magazine, Radar, National Geographic, Hustler, Penthouse, Maxim, FHM and many other magazines, newspapers and websites. He divides his time between Brooklyn, New York, and Moab, Utah, where he writes more poetry than is publishable or readable. In 2002, he was selected as a Livingston Awards finalist for his Salon.com coverage of the 9/11 attacks in New York. In 2004, he published a book of poetry about September 11, which Norman Mailer declared “the best book I never got. Can you re-send?” A 2006 article in New York Press, “The Dogs of Gowanus,” has recently been optioned for a feature film.
1) Time Magazine recently ran a profile on the 2nd Maine Militia, which is headed up by the wonderful novelist (and all-around sweet-hearted lady) Carolyn Chute (check out her most recent book, The School on Heart’s Content Road). Choice line from one of the 2nd Mainers at their annual meeting: “Fuck America. What have they done for us lately? Let’s cut the United States loose and let it drift downstream.” Indeed.
2) For those of you dosing on the swine flu vaccine, see “Swine Fools” in CounterPunch.
3) CounterPunch also found the space to publish my profile of ex-CIA operative Bob Baer, the veteran Middle East case officer and author whose books became the basis of the film Syriana. See “Unlearning the CIA”. A sample:
But what Syriana as film could not capture – because, after all, it’s a Hollywood operation and dedicated, like the CIA, to a good cover story, one that sells, keeps us watching without really understanding – is that the CIA isn’t very good at doing what it’s supposed to do, which is not to assassinate or to blow things up or to mount ill-conceived coups, but to know. The agency Baer labored for and loved has been credited in its lowest hours with so much foolery, atrocity, waste and deception, so much that is subterranean and unaccountable, and meanwhile it’s supposed to know what the rest of us can’t know, to get a grip on the secrets of the world, to be accountable in the final sense of providing what’s called “intelligence” – not stupidity.