With the campesinos, the Ekblads examined the surrounding media: What does that billboard mean to you, what’s that ad really trying to sell you? Their efforts bore fruit, and not just the fruit of the land. We visited the tiny village of Guachipilin (named for a local tree that provides a fine-grained yellow wood and yellow dye), where people were gleaning impressive amounts of produce from steeply sloping hillside plots that would challenge a mountain sheep. The work allowed a spirit of healing to descend on the place, which even manifested in the resolution of old feuds among neighbours. The sensation of balance seemed pretty fragile to me, but it was certainly there. Whether it has withstood the general slide into entropy that has infected so much of the world since then, I don’t know.
The Ekblads were involved in an ongoing moral struggle against the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), whose policies appeared designed to preserve the status quo, and whose agents were forever attempting to subvert the Ekblads’ work with promises of food handouts and chemical fertilizers. At a high point in their organizing, the Ekblads facilitated the operations of twenty-five hundred people who had gained independence in food production and community organization. Today Bob has a prison ministry in northern Washington state, but returns to Honduras semiregularly to offer continued support and guidance. Recently he told me that within a decade the work of USAID had reduced that number to five hundred, and that today many of the people in the region who were doing well two decades ago had been reduced once again to a life of privation and struggle.
Honduras, 1986. I plow a better furrow with a guitar.
photo credit: BOB EKBLAD
Although Honduras’s leftist insurgency and accompanying death squad activity didn’t get as much attention as those in other Central American countries, they were present. Most notorious was Battalion 3-16 (see chapter 12). Today several former members of Battalion 3-16 hold high positions in the federal government of Honduras, a regime openly supported by the administration of U.S. president Barack Obama despite knowledge of its current, ongoing death squad activities.
The dark miracle of the Internet now allows anyone to watch Honduran death squads in action. The November 21, 2012, assassination of two young brothers in Tegucigalpa, for example, was recorded on fixed security cameras and posted on the website of the Honduran newspaper El Heraldo. Eight heavily armed men pull up in two newer SUVs and corner five people who are on foot. They shoot at the three who run, wounding one of them, but they get away. The other two are made to lie facedown on the pavement and are shot several times with automatic rifle fire. Despite the excellent quality of the security video, the government has not identified the attackers, who were highly militarized and obviously well funded. Tegucigalpa, which annually suffers 91 homicides per 100,000 residents, is now, by the U.N.’s reckoning, the capital of the world’s most violent country. Death squads roam with impunity. All the spaghetti western clichés I had found absent in Mexico are writ large on the land of Honduras.
Goons in blackface creeping in the road —
Farm family waiting for the night to explode —
Working the land in an age of terror
You come to see the moon as the bad-news bearer
Down where the death squad lives
They cut down people like they cut down trees —
Chop off its head so it will stay on its knees —
The forest shrinks but the earth remains
Slash and burn and it grows again
Down where the death squad lives.
I’ve got friends trying to batter the system down
Fighting the past till the future comes round.
It’ll never be a perfect world till God declares it that way
But that don’t mean there’s nothing we can do or say
Down where the death squad lives
Like some kind of never-ending Easter passion,
From every agony a hero’s fashioned.
Around every evil there gathers love —
Bombs aren’t the only things that fall from above
Down where the death squad lives
Down where the death squad lives
Sometimes I feel like there’s a padlock on my soul.
If you opened up my heart you’d find a big black hole
But when the feeling comes through, it comes through strong —
If you think there’s no difference between right and wrong
Just go down where the death squad lives
This world can be better than it is today
You can say I’m a dreamer but that’s okay
Without the could-be and the might-have-been
All you’ve got left is your fragile skin
And that ain’t worth much down where the death squad lives
“WHERE THE DEATH SQUAD LIVES,” 1986
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/59.
I don’t go to war zones in search of song material. To go to a place steeped in suffering just to get something interesting to write about seems to me exploitative and obscene. I try to write what touches me. Sometimes a song comes out of exposure to conflict, sometimes not. War zones are by definition chaotic places, and they attract all sorts of characters: saints and killers, charmers and charlatans.
For an outsider who does not live in a state of war, however, there can also be a selfish component to visiting war zones. The adrenaline is literally intoxicating. In his book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, fabled Pulitzer Prize–winning war correspondent Chris Hedges describes being in El Salvador in 1982, where he got caught in a firefight between government troops and rebel forces. As he faced “several full bursts of automatic fire,” bullets bouncing off the road and buildings around him, Hedges—who holds a master’s degree in divinity from Harvard—prayed: “God, if you get me out of here I will never do this again.” Of course he did get out, retreating to San Salvador, where he “drank away the fear and excitement in a seedy bar. . . . I was hooked.”
It’s also a matter of (perhaps morbid) curiosity: this is an interesting thing for me to do for me. That’s a major factor, but “for me” has to also include some positive action to try to alleviate people’s pain. Otherwise you’re just engaging in voyeurism.
Travels of this sort have always been about something bigger than I that justifies going: something about stepping through doorways God has opened for me, something about serving humanity in some small way. Anybody can buy a ticket to anywhere in this world. If you want to go to Grozny to see what’s going on in Chechnya, you can buy a ticket and go there. But it may not mean much. As a selfish exercise it’s fine, and there’s nothing really wrong with that, if that’s where your interests take you; but it seems more worthwhile, if you’re headed to a war zone, to be affiliated with a group that’s trying to fix it, and in this way to potentially be useful in the world. Being under organizational auspices can provide connections and insights not necessarily available if you just buy a ticket and go, which is what some journalists do. They find out what’s going on from the taxi driver, or from the bartender, or from each other. I don’t mean people like Hedges or the courageous journalist Janine di Giovanni, but those correspondents who hole up in the Holiday Inn, or stay in another country, and get the story from afar.
There is ample reason for this, as wars become increasingly dangerous for journalists. The recent Iraq war was the most deadly in history for reporters, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, which reported that more than half of the 204 media workers killed in Iraq from 2003 to 2011 died in “targeted killings.” That would include Tareq Ayoub, who perished on April 8, 2003, when a U.S. warplane bombed Al Jazeera’s Baghdad headquarters shortly after the news agency provided the American military with the building’s coordinates. The United States also bombed Al Jazeera’s Kabul headquarters during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan.
In his book Hedges describes how he became a war junkie, though it didn’t take him long to sou
r on the rush. I very quickly acquired an understanding of the attraction. It’s like being in a shipboard romance with everyone you meet. Fear and an awareness of one’s fragility trigger an openness and vulnerability, an affection that people share with an unstated understanding that it could all be over in the next instant. Which of course is true anywhere at any time, but can’t be ignored in a war zone. There is no future to be assumed.
You could have gone off the Bloor Street viaduct
I could have been run down in the street
You could have got botulism anytime
I could have gone overboard into the sea
Anything can happen
To put out the light,
Is it any wonder
I don’t want to say good night?
I could have been hit by a falling pane of glass
You could have had shark teeth write “fini”
We could have been nailed by some vigilante type
In a case of mistaken identity—obviously
Anything can happen
To put out the light
Is it any wonder
I don’t want to say good night?
We could have been lynched and tarred and feathered
Been on a plane that crashed in flames
Could have done the neutron melt together
But here we are just the same!
You could have been daggered in the dead of night
You could have been gassed inside your car
I could have been walking in the open fields
And been drilled through the head by a shooting star
Anything can happen
To put out the light
Is it any wonder
I don’t want to say good night?
“ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN,” 1980
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/60.
15
A funny thing happened on the way to releasing World of Wonders in the United States. Just as I was beginning to enjoy the American capacity for healthy disputation, Bernie and I found ourselves embroiled in one of those quintessentially American flare-ups over content. As the Houston Press put it, “World of Wonders quickly became one of the first albums subjected to the wrist slap of censorship, not for dissing the U.S. government’s exploitation of underdeveloped countries, but for using the F-word.”
In 1986 the Powers That Be declared that one must not say “fuck” on an album without having a warning label affixed to the front of the packaging. (My mother also didn’t care for my intentional use of the vernacular. She said, “Did you have to use that word?”) “Fuck” appears in the opening song, “Call It Democracy,” about that spawn of transnational finance, the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Maybe it was the F-word that brought World of Wonders to the attention of American censors, or maybe it was the surprise of seeing their sacred monetary system called out in a popular song. I believe “Call It Democracy” remains the only song about the IMF, and certainly the only one containing the phrase “insupportable debt,” ever to get exposure on radio. Which is sort of amazing, given that the IMF and World Bank have interfered in the lives of millions of people around the world, including some great songwriters and, you’d have to think, at least a few radio program directors.
The planet’s poor suffer in service, and in inverse proportion, to the ongoing accumulation of wealth by the embarrassingly rich, who collectively control world finance, as well as entire nations, through institutions such as the IMF and associated bodies, banks, and agreements: GATT, NAFTA, WTO, G8, BCCI, HSBC, the alphabet soup of world domination. Over the last century the world’s financial elite have arguably impacted people and the environment in ways more devastating than any other human construct, with the possible exceptions of religion and war. In terms of environmental degradation the financiers actually weigh in at the top of the triad, though the U.S. military is the world’s single largest emitter of greenhouse gasses. But with all of this going on, some people felt it was my choice of language to describe it that was the problem.
We had a deal for U.S. release of the album with the independent American record label Gold Mountain, owned by legendary rock manager Danny Goldberg. His label was, in turn, distributed by MCA. One day Danny called Bernie with some bizarre news: lawyers at MCA had decided that, because of “fuck,” the record would require a “Parental Advisory Explicit Content” label for distribution in the States.
It was not a total surprise. We had been aware of an ongoing fuss inside the Beltway over the pernicious effects of rock music on youth. Bernie remembers it in his book: “We released this record in 1986, one year after the Parents Music Resource Center—a group dedicated to giving parents more control over music that they felt was violent or sexually suggestive—was formed. The founders, known as the ‘Washington Wives,’ included Tipper Gore, Senator Al Gore’s wife; Susan Baker, married to then–treasury secretary James Baker; and two other women whose husbands had senior government jobs in Washington.” Out of the bizarre biochemistry of Reagan’s D.C., the Washington Wives had evolved from hosting polo club luncheons to “protecting” American children—who in that era would have witnessed tens of thousands of murders on television (if not a few in their neighbourhoods) before they were eighteen—from a mere word. Would that they had addressed poverty and injustice with the same fervor.
The warning label became known as the “Tipper Sticker.” We didn’t make PMRC’s Filthy Fifteen list—songs that they deemed “rock porn” (categories included “the occult”)—but it was still galling to be targeted for censorship by this cult of unelected busybodies.
As if the folks in Washington didn’t have anything more pressing to think about, in 1985 the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee actually held hearings on PMRC’s proposed labeling idea. One of the best things to come out of the hearings was testimony by musicians, particularly Frank Zappa, who called the labeling scheme “somebody’s hobby project. . . . The establishment of a rating system, voluntary or otherwise, opens the door to an endless parade of moral quality control programs based on things certain Christians don’t like. . . . The PMRC proposal is an ill-conceived piece of nonsense which fails to deliver any real benefits to children [and] infringes the civil liberties of people who are not children. . . .”
The hearing did not result in a new law because the Recording Industry Association of America agreed to voluntarily develop a generic sticker that labels could apply to records on a subjective basis. (How history repeats, like acid reflux, from Hollywood blacklists and the Comics Code Authority on down!) This immediately included Zappa’s 1986 Grammy-winning release Jazz from Hell, an entirely instrumental album (which admittedly included the youth-warping title, “G-Spot Tornado”). And the warnings did result in censorship in that many major chains, including Walmart and Sears, refused to sell stickered albums. We didn’t know this at the time, so we agreed to be stickered to keep things easy between us and MCA, also eyeing the potential benefit of more attention for the album.
Things got wacky after that. MCA told Bernie it was abandoning the sticker idea for a better one: print the lyrics on the back cover of the album, and this would serve as the warning to the public. Okay, we said, what the fuck. Go for it. Then the MCA lawyers said that the word “fuck” had to stand out, so they decided to highlight it in yellow, which they did without our consent, shipping several thousand copies of the album before we could put a stop to it. Probably the only people who really benefitted from this misery are people who bought World of Wonders with the word “fuck” highlighted; it is now a collector’s item.
Padded with power here they come
International loan sharks backed by the guns
Of market-hungry military profiteers
Whose word is a swamp and whose brow is smeared
With the blood of the poor
Who rob life of its quality
Who render rage a necessity
By turning countries into
labour camps
Modern slavers in drag as champions of freedom
Sinister cynical instrument
Who makes the gun into a sacrament —
The only response to the deification
Of tyranny by so-called “developed” nations’
Idolatry of ideology
North South East West
Kill the best and buy the rest
It’s just spend a buck to make a buck
You don’t really give a flying fuck
About the people in misery
IMF dirty MF
Takes away everything it can get
Always making certain that there’s one thing left
Keep them on the hook with insupportable debt
See the paid-off local bottom feeders
Passing themselves off as leaders
Kiss the ladies shake hands with the fellows
And it’s open for business like a cheap bordello
And they call it democracy
And they call it democracy
And they call it democracy
And they call it democracy
See the loaded eyes of the children too
Trying to make the best of it the way kids do
One day you’re going to rise from your habitual feast
To find yourself staring down the throat of the beast
They call the revolution
IMF dirty MF
Takes away everything it can get
Always making certain that there’s one thing left
Keep them on the hook with insupportable debt
And they call it democracy. . . .
“CALL IT DEMOCRACY,” 1985
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/61.
I still consider “Call It Democracy” one of the more pertinent songs I’ve written. Sadly, the subject matter has not passed its “sell-by” date. The video turned out pretty well too, with delightful images such as a map of Latin America being fed into a meat grinder and coming out a Coke bottle. It got a lot of play in Canada, and in fact won an award, but MTV refused to show it because it included the logos of certain offending corporate entities. No doubt altruistically and in the interests of media integrity, they had a policy of not displaying companies’ symbols except as advertising. After that, MTV got into “lifestyles” and seemed to stop showing videos that had no sexual content.
Rumours of Glory Page 29