Peter Dale Scott: The Meeting Of Poetry, Prose, And Politics

PETER DALE SCOTT:The Meeting of Poetry, Prose and Politics

Peter Dale Scott comes from a worthy Canadian line and lineage.  His grandfather, Fred Scott, was a contemporary of Stephen Leacock, an important Canadian poet, an Anglican priest and padre to many soldiers and at the forefront of the Winnipeg strike in 1919. Fred Scott embodied, in thought, word and deed, a vision of responsible citizenship. Peter’s father,  Frank Scott, was one of the best known Canadian poets, constitutional lawyers and founder of the League for Social Reconstruction (LSR) and the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF). The LSR-CCF were the forerunners of the New Democratic Party (NDP). Frank Scott was a student of Stephen Leacock. Peter’s mother, Marian Dale, was an accomplished Canadian painter. The Politics of the Imagination: A Life of F.R. Scott (1987), by Sandra Djwa, recounts, as an authorized biography, the life of Frank and Marian Scott.

Peter Dale Scott, therefore, grew up in the centre of most of the pressing and substantive literary, political, economic, legal and public issues of the time. Peter was born in 1929 in Montreal, and he completed a Ph.D in political science from McGill in 1955. Peter was a Canadian diplomat from 1957-1961, and while a diplomat worked at the United Nations General Assembly and for two years in Warsaw, Poland. Peter left his job as a Canadian diplomat in 1961, and he became a Professor of English at University of California, Berkeley. Needless to say, Scott’s turn to California in the 1960s placed him front and centre in the student counter cultural movement, the Vietnam War and a revisionist read of President Kennedy’s death. Noam Chomsky was quick to quote from Peter Dale Scott in some of his 1960s articles, and Scott and Chomsky are contemporaries, although they differ on the reasons for Kennedy’s assassination. Oliver Stone’s film, JFK, drew deeply from Scott’s reflections on the reasons for Kennedy’s assassination.

There are many dilemmas in Peter Dale Scott’s life and writings, and I will touch on five in this short essay.

First, Peter Dale Scott had to wean himself from his father’s political and poetic outlook. Frank Scott was a pioneer and leader in Canadian political thought and action on the political Left. The Left, at the time of Frank Scott’s leadership, was closely linked with American unions and the clash between union and management, but both unions and business were at one on the primacy of the American way of life. They just differed on how the economic pie should be sliced and distributed. Frank was an avid fan and supporter of Roosevelt’s New Deal, and, for the most part, the American battle, in the Cold War, against Communism. Frank tended to hob knob and vacation with many of those in the American political elite such as the Dulles family. There were mild criticisms of American foreign policy, but, when push came to shove, Frank tended to be a faithful fan of the American way. It was this uncritical merging of Canadian and American thought and life, at the highest levels, from which Peter had to cut the umbilical cord.

Second, Peter, who taught at UCLA-Berkeley in the 1960s-1970s, came to see that American foreign policy in Vietnam and Indonesia was brutal and violent. The land of manifest destiny, liberty and democracy could be as vicious and unbending as could Stalin or Mao. Many were the deaths of naïve Americans, those from Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Indonesia who differed to differ with the new Roman empire and its centurion guards.

The assassination of President Kennedy in 1963, and the CIA overthrow of General Sukaro of Indonesia in 1965 nudged Peter Dale Scott to ponder more deeply his father’s uncritical acceptance of the American empire as the great and good place for Canadians to bow and genuflect before. It was these events, and many others in the 1960s and 1970s, that moved Peter Dale Scott to put quill to parchment and ponder, in a personal and political way, through both prose and poetry, the aggressive nature of the USA. Literary criticism would merge with politics. 

 Third, most Americans and Canadians, when they think of American foreign policy in the 1960s and 1970s, turn their attention to Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. The invasion of Indonesia and the many deaths of Chinese and suspected communists is often ignored. Peter Dale Scott turned his gaze in this direction and wrote voluminously about it. The Politics of Escalation in Vietnam (1966), The War Conspiracy (1972), The Assassinations: Dallas and Beyond (1976), Crime and Cover-up (1977), The Iran-Contra Connection (1987), Cocaine Politics (1991) and Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (1993) all point to an overarching preoccupation of Scott’s.  The American empire is aggressive, expansionist and, at a level of deep politics and power politics, quite willing to drive the sword into the back of their children who differ with them. Peter Dale Scott walked the extra mile to ponder why Kennedy was assassinated. Kennedy seemed to be moving in a more dovish direction, and he was willing to pull troops out of Vietnam. This worried the hawks in the Democratic and Republican parties. Such a move would make the USA vulnerable in the Cold War. The more Kennedy moved to the dovish left, the more the hawks circled him. He had to go. Oswald and Ruby played their parts well, but the strings of these puppets were being pulled at a higher level. Johnson was known to be tougher on the communists than Kennedy, hence with Kennedy gone, the hawks in both parties would be pleased, and the war in Vietnam escalated and in Indonesia initiated. Peter Dale Scott in the books listed above, and articles such as “The United States and the Overthrow of Sukarno, 1965-1967” and “The Vietnam War and the CIA-Financial Establishment” spelled out his arguments about Vietnam, Indonesia and Kennedy’s assassination in incisive and poignant detail. Oliver Stone’s JFK builds firmly on Scott’s arguments.

Needless to say, Fred Scott would have his worries about the path and direction Peter Dale was taking.

 Fourth, many of Scott’s articles and essays in books were, consciously so, public, revisionist and political. But, there was much more to Peter Dale Scott than this. Scott was also a poet as was his father and grandfather. Scott’s poetry brings together the personal and political in an autobiographical way in which his prose does not in the same way. Scott is best known for his trilogy, Coming to Jakarta: A Poem About Terror (1988), Listening to the Candle: A Poem on Impulse (1992) and Minding the Darkness: A Poem for the Year 2000 (2000). The seculum trilogy clearly established Scott as a first rank political poet that wedded his Canadian experience with his life in the USA.  There is a delicate touch in these poems mixed with tough and demanding political insights. Scott does not flinch from facing the darkness in all its dread and brutality, but he also listens to the flicker of the candle in the process. Murmur of the Stars (1994) is a book of poetry by Scott that is often not read, but there is many a delicate and probing line in it. Scott’s two poems about his father, “Flight” and “The achievements of F.R. Scott” are quite touching and highlight some of the tensions that existed between father and son. These poems fold well into other poems that Peter Dale Scott wrote about his mother and father in the seculum trilogy. Scott has had a preoccupation in his literary career with epic poetry, but he has often been concerned with the way epic poetry serves power and imperial ambitions. Coming to Jakarta, Listening to the Candle

and Minding the Darkness are written within the epic genre, but they seek to challenge those in power and the establishment. It is in this sense that Scott is doing a revisionist read on how authentic epic poetry should be written.

 Fifth, the fact that Peter Dale Scott has a Ph.D. in political science, was a diplomat, has taught literature and bridges the American -Canadian experience means that there is much he has seen and had to ponder in a way most have not. Scott’s writings on literature and literary theory have much gold in them. “Alone on Ararat: Scott, Blake, Yeats, and the Apocalyptic” and, more to the point of the Canadian-American literary traditions, “The Difference Perspective Makes: Literary Studies in Canada and the United States” is a must read and keeper for those who naively assume Canada is just a junior and younger brother in the greater North American family. The fact is Canadians are from a different family, and their DNA and genetic code makes them a different people. Peter Dale Scott’s two articles make it more than clear how and why he parted paths with his father and why and how Canadians part paths with the empire to the south.

The fact that Scott was born in Canada, but has lived much of his life in the USA, means that certain connections he could have made, he has not. There is no doubt that the USA was behind the coup that overthrew Sukarno and brought to power Suharto in Indonesia in 1965. Scott connects the dots well.

But, Scott speaks little about Canada-USA-Indonesia. If he had spent longer in Canada, such thinking could have been done. Elaine Briere, in her award winning film, Bitter Paradise : The Sell-Out of East Timor, highlighted the explicit and complicit role of Canada in the take over of Indonesia and the Indonesian betrayal of the East Timorese. Peter Dale Scott does not deal with these connections any more than he probes Canada’s complicit involvement in Vietnam. Scott is more preoccupied, given his American context, with exposing the gap and chasm between rhetoric and reality in American domestic and foreign policy. There is no doubt such a deed needs to be done, and Scott, as a Canadian, like Chomsky, Said, Vidal, Herman, Stockwell, Agee, Zinn and many other Americans have made it clear that the USA is an empire, and, as an empire, it crushes opposition that opposes its imperial interests. This being said, though, there are plenty of allusions to Canada in Scott’s poetry and prose. The way Scott probes the complicated network of complicity on a variety of familial, educational, economic, personal and political levels does give Scott’s poetry a certain reflective integrity. 

I fear that Peter Dale Scott, like Noam Chomsky, and unlike Frank and Fred Scott, lacks a substantive understanding of the positive role of political parties and the state. It is much too easy and simplistic to only see the negative role of the state, and chant this mantra ad nauseum. There is no doubt states do brutal things, and the Chomskys and Scotts of the world are needed to make this clear. But, states also provide many goods, and when an excessively negative view of the state is taken, particularly by Canadians and within the Canadian context, most of the evils protested against such as American imperialism, globalization and the neoliberal institutions that are cheerleaders for neoliberalism, are facilitated by naïve protest anarchists and advocacy groups. It is only states that have the power to question and oppose the institutions and organizations that facilitate global injustice, and when protest and advocacy types, like Chomsky and Scott, are cynical of the state, they might just be the agents, in a subtler way, of furthering the actions they so firmly oppose.     

There is no doubt that Peter Dale Scott is one of the most important Canadian political poets. His epic poetry challenges the classical notion of epic poetry just as his analysis of the deep politics of American and domestic and foreign policy lays bare the real facts of the empire. Do read this genius of a Canadian poet. Much will be learned, and much gold will be found in the learning. But, be also willing to ask some critical questions of those who are sure footed about what we are to be free from but rather weak on what we are to be free for and the practical and prudential means to walk for such freedom to be imperfectly realized.