A Colossal Wreck

by Alexander Cockburn

  But now Grant’s very achievements have turned back on her. The Boston Globe ran a story on Grant. The high school had recommended her as demonstrating unusual determination in overcoming obstacles. (Such obstacles did not, in the school’s mind, include Grant’s matricide, of which it was ignorant.) Publication brought a slew of newspaper clippings about the murder case, which had been widely publicized in South Carolina at the time. These clippings were sent anonymously to the Globe, and also to Harvard, which lost no time in snatching back the invitation of early admission.

  A spokesman for the university, Joe Wrinn, says that such an offer had been made under the Early Action program for exceptional applicants but had been rescinded “after careful consideration of new information that was not disclosed at the time of the application.” Grant’s lawyer says Gina thought the records of the case were sealed. When the Globe’s reporter asked her about her mother, she’d answered that her death was a very painful matter she didn’t want to discuss.

  Thus the new Harvard rule. Murderers—even those who’ve passed through the legal system and emerged the other end—need not apply.

  Now consider the case of Héctor Gramajo. At the time Grant was having that terminal confrontation with her mother, Gramajo was defense minister of Guatemala. He has superintended the counter-insurgency program of the early 1980s, during the presidency of Rios Montt, in which many thousands of Mayan Indians were slaughtered. Indeed, Gramajo was key in designing the entire program to eliminate all opposition, using tactics including massacres, selective murders, disappearances and torture.

  Nor was he ashamed of his role. In a 1991 article in a Harvard journal called International Review Gramajo was quoted by Wellesley professor Schirmer as telling her that he was personally “in charge of” a commission that devised the 70%/30% civil affairs program. “You don’t need to kill everyone to complete the job,” Gramajo confided. “We instituted civil affairs which provide development for 70% of the population while we kill 30%.” Schirmer asked him how he came up with the numbers and Gramajo answered, “One said 30% just for the sake of saying it. We said 30% so that the repression would be less.”

  As he once told another interviewer, “I consider myself a product of the American educational system … since the beginning of my basic training.” And indeed he had been part of a US Early Action program to pick out young comers, shuttling them north to attend military schools.

  Gramajo’s final year as defense minister did nothing to diminish his blood-spattered reputation. A dozen or so university students were kidnapped and tortured and their bodies dumped in various parts of Guatemala City. In November Sister Dianna Ortiz was kidnapped, tortured, raped and thrown into a pit with dead bodies and rats. Her life was only spared when it was discovered she was an American.

  By now Gramajo’s name had figured in innumerable human rights reports, no doubt part of the “General Gramajo file” considered by Harvard, when its Kennedy School granted him a Mason fellowship. It is not known whether Gramajo made full disclosure of his past on the entry form. Harvard had been advised of Gramajo’s suitability by the US Agency for International Development. Gramajo was clearly being groomed as a presidential candidate in the 1995 elections.

  He stayed a year at Harvard, studying public policy and graduating in 1991 in a ceremony marred only by the serving on him of a civil suit brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), seeking millions in damages for the torture and killing of nine Mayan Indians. A separate suit served a week later stated he was responsible for the abduction of Sister Ortiz.

  A federal judge in Boston is now considering a motion for a default judgment, brought by the CCR.

  April 20

  Guilford—Here I am in the middle of the southern Vermont countryside, in a friend’s farmhouse. No one around, and not a sound. Makes you realize how busy the Northern California country is. No matter where you are, there’s always a chainsaw, some four-wheeler stuck, a dope grower peering at you from behind a tree. Something.

  Here, it’s as if everyone’s at work in town—which they are, or down in New York—and the countryside has been put away in mothballs till the summer. Very odd. Of course I may be more than usually sensitive to this because it’s the empty farmhouse of my pal Andrew Kopkind who died last year and I haven’t been here in ten years.

  I began my tour for my new book, The Golden Age Is in Us, last night in Amherst with a crowd of 200. A young man came up and informed me that when the Pentagon wished to summon its “secret strategic reserve” (I suppose them to be the elite commandos) it would get NPR to play the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

  “Doesn’t this allow the possibility of confusion?” I said to the young man. “I mean, there are many people at NPR who might play the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth not knowing it’s a secret code. Are there standing orders at NPR not to play Beethoven’s Fifth until they get an order from the Pentagon? And are the people in the elite reserve commandos the sort of people likely to listen to NPR, or are they ordered to listen by the Pentagon, which means the NPR’s audience consists of commandos, which means the conservatives should support it.” The young man looked depressed, so I felt sorry for him and said maybe there was something in it. He looked at me pityingly and said perhaps it was better for my peace of mind that I didn’t know certain things.

  April 23

  I drive to Storrs, in western Connecticut, where there’s a big state campus and a good bookstore. After a talk and some book signing I have dinner with a jolly crew which includes a funny woman named Leslie Brody who recounts her time as deputy minister of education in the White Panther Party. At one point she traveled to Paris to confer with the North Vietnamese, but misread the map of the metro and was late for her appointment. The North Vietnamese seemed put out, and would only talk in general terms about art and gardening.

  Also at the dinner was Mary Gallucci, whose grandfather won the triple jump—hop, skip and jump—at the Intercalated Olympic Games of 1906. He was Irish, but since Ireland was still a colony, the British flag was raised during the medal-giving ceremony. He then swarmed up the flagpole and substituted the Irish flag, which was a pretty heavy thing to do in 1906.

  April 24

  Hartford—Visited Mark Twain’s house. The old boy lived in great, albeit rather heavy Victorian style. In the bookshop is the Paige compositor, the linotype machine in which he invested heavily and which bankrupted him. This—the last extant example—is a colossal piece of equipment, about fifteen feet long.

  Twain loved type, having started hand-setting when he was thirteen. By the 1890s a skilled compositor could handset and justify about 1,500 characters per hour. The Paige compositor could manage 12,000. But the inventor mimed the human hand-setting, and the Paige was mechanically baroque. The Mergenthaler Linotype appeared on the market at almost the same time and finished off the Paige in no time. Twain declared bankruptcy in 1894, and wrote Tom Sawyer and Pudd’nhead Wilson to start working off the debts, which he finished doing in 1898.

  Declining industrial cities always do well in terms of affordable spaces and reasonable cheap housing. I give a talk in a former typewriter factory, now called Real Artways, run by my friend Will Wilkins and devoted to avant-garde events. I remember a story Forest, the chap who fixes my manual typewriters in Eureka, once told me. The Underwood factory in Hartford had a metal pressing shop where ropes affixed to the workers’ elbows dragged their arms back as the press came down, ensuring they wouldn’t be mangled. The factory had visitor tours. Then someone took a photo and in the end a Soviet newspaper printed it with the caption, “American workers chained to their work bench.” Tours were canceled forthwith.

  May 10

  It was when the Challenger blew up on national television in 1986 that the idea of counseling children in the wake of such disasters seems to have caught on.

  Of course it must have been horrifying for the students of Christa McAuliffe to see the explosion and know th
eir teacher had died. Maybe they needed a quiet word. But children across the country? And what did the shrinks tell them? That O-rings freeze, presidential schedules require timely lift-off, accidents happen, it’s time to move on? In my experience kids are pretty realistic and most times rather enjoy a good disaster. They can take it.

  Maybe these occasional lapses into child counseling at moments of high national drama occur as substitutes for all the times children face mundane evil, and learn to accept it as part of the normal order of things, with no counselor at hand.

  Take the case of eight-year-old Marisa Means. Her dad Bill had been encouraged by his company, Structural Dynamics Research Corp., to bring her to the office as part of “Take Our Daughters to Work Day” celebrated on April 27 last. So Bill and Marisa arrived at company premises some fifteen miles east of Cincinnati, Ohio, and went to his office. Not long thereafter Bill, a systems engineering manager who had been with the company for two years, was called in by his supervisor and fired. Next thing they knew, Bill was clearing his office in front of his daughter and then the two were escorted off the premises.

  Later, a company flack, Donald Newman, said the timing had been “regrettable.”

  What Marisa saw was not the work of a paranoid mass murderer as in Oklahoma, nor the frailty of equipment and judgment as with the Challenger. She saw a banal evil: the company that had invited her to bring a pack lunch and spend the day with her dad at work kicked him out. She saw her father humiliated and she’ll probably carry the memory for the rest of her days.

  May 17

  Detroit—The “Gun Stock ’95” rally held at Freedom Hill, in Macomb County, on a gusty Saturday in mid-May had been advertised to me by local leftists as a potential mini-Nuremberg of a far-right crowd. I drove north from Detroit expecting to find grim-jawed Patriots toting awesome armament and mustered in their camos in defense of the Second Amendment.

  The right of the people to bear arms most certainly was upheld with lusty cascades of rhetoric, but the mood was amiable and the crowd of some 2,500 keenly enjoyed the speeches. No guns were visible and camo was forbidden. Discreet ribbons identified Patriots. The most bellicose-looking creature was a rather weary Doberman Pinscher, Brutus, wearing a collar of M-60 bullets. Photographers from as far afield as France, hungering for images of Angry White Rightists, fell upon Brutus with cries of joy.

  As I came in, a man from Putting People First was lashing away at Jeremy Bentham, the English utilitarian, as part of a multi-pronged assault on environmentalists. The environmentalists, the speaker shouted, “make no moral distinction between a rat and a human being.” The blame for this appalling down-grading in the status of the “the most magnificent of all creatures ever to walk the face of the planet, MAN” was duly traced to Bentham who—though the speaker did not quote him directly—declared about animals in 1780 that “The question is not, Can they reason? Nor, Can they talk? But, Can they suffer?” Bentham said that as with human slaves, animals should not be tormented.

  As the crowd—many of them young autoworkers from the plants around the region—followed with commendable attention, the speaker showed how Benthamite thought led to Nazism: “Among civilized states the Germans were the first to end vivisection. Hitler treated his dog better than the Jews. And they call us Nazis!”

  Of course if anyone in that crowd had kicked poor old Brutus, the Doberman, on the grounds that Bentham was wrong and dogs don’t suffer, he would have been torn limb from limb.

  I toured the book and pamphlet tables. They contained a variety of alluring material, starting with a thick, spiral bound volume, entitled Lethal Laws, subtitle, Documentary Proof: Enforcement of “Gun Control” Laws Clears the Way for Governments to Commit Genocides. This extremely interesting history ($25.00 list price, knocked down for yours truly to $15 because “the press needs to know”) of attempted and actual genocides, starting with assaults on Japanese Americans in World War II, had as its tightly argued premise the proposition that” ‘gun control’ is the key to genocide … genocides occur when leaders with ‘sure cures’ for ‘national problems’ ram new ideas down the citizens’ throats … ordinary technologies expand government power over citizens.” The three authors, Jay Simkin, Aaron Zelman and Alan Rice, identify themselves as members of Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership (America’s Aggressive Civil Rights Organization), headquartered in Milwaukee.

  On the main stage, the organizer of the event, Michael Sessa, an intense man in his forties, tried to abbreviate the lengthy speech he had, he told me later, sat up all night preparing. He was kind enough to hand it over. Most of it could have been delivered by a leftist in the late ’60s without changing a comma. The name Martin Luther King, mentioned at the Gun Stock rally by one of the speakers, got a cheer. (So, it should be added, did the names of Detroit policemen involved in the fatal beating of a black man.)

  Back in Detroit leftist friends berated me for taking too friendly an attitude to the afternoon’s proceedings. I told them we should have had our booths and literature up at the event, assuming the organizers would have let us. What’s always missing from the populist-right analysis is who actually runs the world. They say “the Masons,” or the “the Jews,” or some other preferred candidate. But they always miss out on the corporations. Show them the Fortune 500 and they look blank.

  But these young workers should be getting decent radical analysis and some respectful attention. Tell someone he’s a Nazi long enough, and he may just become one, just for the hell of it and as a way of saying F— you to the powers-that-be.

  June 21

  A few years ago, my daughter and I visited the Huntington Library near Pasadena, California. Halfway down the spacious public gallery, replete with its Gutenberg Bible, Shakespeare folios, early maps, and other testaments to the rise of capitalism, there is a case containing a scrap of paper on which is a letter written by Andrew Jackson. The note is an injunction to massacre. He commands General John Coffee to destroy the Creek Indians in Tallahatchie, in the Mississippi Territory, and “under a discreet officer … to envelop any Indians that may be spying on the south east bank … you will in performing this service keep the greatest order and observe the greatest circumspection.” Coffee descended upon the Creek Indians, murdered the braves, 186 in all, and captured eighty-four women and children. President Jackson adopted one of the orphans. There, in the case in the Huntington Library, is the order, with deletions and rephrasings scored on it by Jackson. Down the years it has carried the testament of individual responsibility and, though the author did not see it that way, individual guilt. It is not a record that, in the age of electronic, industrialized consciousness, would have survived.

  June 28

  This year is the 325th anniversary of the day when the jurors in the trial of William Penn refused to convict him of violating England’s Conventicle Act (which declared as seditious any religious meeting outside the sanction of the Church of England) despite clear evidence that he had openly preached a Quaker sermon. The judge promptly incarcerated four of these jurors and they spent nine weeks in jail, after which their release and exoneration established forever as English and American legal doctrine that it is the right and responsibility of the trial jury to decide both on matters of fact and the validity of the law in the specific case before it. These rights are enshrined in the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Amendments, along with other rights enumerated in or implied by the Constitution.

  Since I started to write about the Fully Informed Jury Association (FIJA), it’s been somewhat demoralizing to discover how many liberals and leftists actually fear juries, and think our affairs would be better conducted without them, preferring panels of “experts” or “qualified” persons passed through all the usual filtration systems to produce people of conventional thought and moral posture.

  I’m just about ready to junk the whole left/right taxonomy as useless and indeed an active impediment to thought and action. Why should we be dominated by a political label
ing system based on where people sat in the Constituent Assembly in Versailles in 1789 with factions gathered to the right and to the left of the President’s desk?

  July 5

  I talked today to M. I. “Red” Beckman, who once wrote a little book, The Church Deceived, which contains anti-Semitic passages. A reporter in the Wall Street Journal, Wade Lambert, charged that such writings by Beckman somehow compromised FIJA, of which he is an active member.

  I talked with Beckman on the phone at some length. His central focus seemed to be the government’s abuse of power via the IRS, which he termed a “terrorist” organization. A Christian, he thinks all organized religions and governments use people ruthlessly. He says many adherents of Judaism are slaves of Satan, but he says the same of adherents to other religions, particularly those assenting to a 501(c)(3) relationship with the state. He was against the Vietnam War. He says the pendulum swung too far to the left and people like him are working to stop it swinging too far to the right. He says Hitler was a criminal, Reagan was a criminal. He thinks … But, so far as FIJA is concerned, what Beckman thinks and says is not the point. To denounce FIJA because Beckman supports jury nullification is like denouncing the Fifth Amendment because Communists used it in the ’50s.

  All over America constituencies written off as hopelessly uneducable have been abandoned to their own resources to deal with American capital moving abroad. The “farm crisis,” “oil politics,” NAFTA, the IMF and the World Bank can produce simultaneously militias in America and Chiapas. The “left” should get off its high horse and re-examine the real-life grass-roots’ resourcefulness in America; to acknowledge that abandoned constituencies have fallen back on the Bill of Rights, and that this turns out to be a pretty good compass; and to think about joining in the defense of the jury.