If you don’t know this fellow, give him a chance: “‘2012′ and the Poet’s Dilemma” is Daniel’s latest offering at Reality Sandwich (see sidebar for primary link). The topic is very close to my own daily deliberations, and there are some great comments appended. Here’s a sample of where Daniel is coming from:

I am very concerned, right now, with the seeming incapacity of most people in our culture to awaken to the dire urgency of our present situation, and to move from passive contemplation to active engagement. I feel that not just individual works but the entire construct of the contemporary art and literary worlds are functioning as another pacifying and distracting mechanism - someone may read a novel about war and cry, but that doesn’t translate into organizing to stop the wars we are now waging. It sometimes seems to me that forces have conspired to depolitize culture and make it socially irrelevant.