I spoke at our own little rally in my local town of Eureka, California. My neighbor Ellen Taylor decided to spice up the proceedings by having a guillotine on the platform, right beside the Eureka Courthouse steps. It’s in the genes. Her father was Telford Taylor, chief US prosecutor at Nuremberg.
When she told me about the plan for the guillotine, I wasn’t sure it was a good idea. But Ellen said she wanted to reach out to new constituencies beyond the committed left, and what better siren call than the swoosh of the “Avenging Blade”?
A hundred years ago people liked to stress the similarities of the American and French Revolutions. Mark Twain composed the most passionate defense of the Terror ever written, in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. But then, after 1917, the French Revolution was seen as the harbinger of Bolshevik excess and it grew less popular.
Up on the platform I took the guillotine issue head on. Only 666 aristocrats had been topped in Paris in what is now the Place de la Concorde; 1,543 throughout France. The reward: a decisive smack on the snout of the land-holding aristocracy; durable popular power for peasants, workers, and the petit-bourgeois: M. le patron and M. le proprietaire stepped into history.
There’s no sign of populism in any energetic form. The anger is formulaic.
October 28
Just how funny was that story of the man in Fairfax County, Virginia, who got up early on the morning of October 19 and walked naked into his own kitchen to make himself a cup of coffee? The next significant thing that happened to twenty-nine-year-old Eric Williamson was the local cops arriving to charge him with indecent exposure. It turns out that while he was brewing the coffee, a mother who was taking her seven-year-old son along a path beside Williamson’s house espied the naked Williamson and called the local precinct, or more likely her husband, who happens to be a cop.
“Yes, I wasn’t wearing any clothes,” Williamson said later, “but I was alone, in my own home and just got out of bed. It was dark and I had no idea anyone was outside looking in at me.”
The story ended up on TV, starting with Fox, and in the opening rounds the newscasters and network blogs had merciless sport with the Fairfax police for their absurd behavior. Hasn’t a man the right to walk around his own home (or, in this case, rented accommodation) dressed according to his fancy? Answer, obvious to anyone familiar with relevant case law: absolutely not.
Peeved by public ridicule, the Fairfax cops turned up the heat. The cop’s wife started to maintain that she first saw Williamson by a glass kitchen door, then through the kitchen window. Mary Ann Jennings, a Fairfax County Police spokeswoman, stirred the pot of innuendo: “We’ve heard there may have been other people who had a similar incident.” The cops are asking anyone who may have seen an unclothed Williamson through his windows to come forward, even if it was at a different time. They’ve also been papering the neighborhood with fliers, asking for reports on any other questionable activities by anyone resembling Williamson—a white guy who’s a commercial diver and who has a five-year-old daughter, not living with him.
I’d say that if the cops keep it up, and some prosecutor scents opportunity, Williamson will be pretty lucky if they don’t throw some cobbled-up indictment at him. Toss in a jailhouse snitch making his own plea deal, a faked police lineup, maybe an artist’s impression of the Fairfax Flasher, and Williamson could end up losing his visitation rights and, worse comes to worst, getting ten years plus being posted for life on some sex-offender site.
You think we’re living in the twenty-first century, in the clinical fantasy world of CSI? Wrong. So far as forensic evidence is concerned, we remain planted in the seventeenth century with trial by ordeal, such as when they killed women as witches if they floated when thrown into a pond.
Let’s head north from Fairfax County to Massachusetts, home of the witch trials. How about if you’re white in Boston (wise decision), weigh yourself in your own bedroom with no clothes on and … But let my Boston friend pick up the story, because it happened to him:
It was the early ’90s. Early on Xmas eve two burly cops pushed into our house and invaded our bedroom—no warrant. They only backed off after they realized that the scale in our bedroom where I weighed myself was in front of a window. To see me there the born-agains who moved in next door (actually on the far side of a vacant lot separating us) had to keep a tight watch since it does not take long to weigh oneself.
My girlfriend was dressing in the bedroom and my mom and stepdaughter were visiting. By the time the cops understood that I had been weighing myself every morning, the paddy wagon was there ready to take me away.
I would have sued them but I was running for Congress at the time. The cops liked my opponent, a right-wing pro-lifer, and I have always thought that had something to do with their moral diligence that day. One of the cops, the chief, later resigned in a corruption scandal.
November 24
No one told us it would be boring, but it is—the Obama presidency. Having an adulterer and a moron at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for eight years apiece, plus Dick Cheney down the corridor, spoiled us. Which side of Bill’s head did Hillary hit with the lamp? Would George fight his way to the end of the sentence in his daily battles with the English language?
These days tranquility reigns—or seems to—in the Obamas’ private quarters. Senior White House staffers remain loyal and tight-lipped. Small wonder Jay Leno’s nightly show is sagging. There was nothing to make jokes about, at least until Sarah Palin went on her book tour.
Politics is getting duller by the day, too, as the idealists watch their expectations trickling all too swiftly through the hourglass. What’s left? Enforcing private coverage and savaging the Medicare Advantage plans of low-income seniors. Obama has dipped below 50 percent in public approval, which—so the pollsters tell us—is nothing particularly unusual for a new President at this stage of the game. What’s going to stop him sliding down more?
But lo! There’s light a little way up the tunnel: the upcoming trial in the shadow of Ground Zero of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four alleged co-conspirators, the best news for the print press since Monica Lewinsky. Ahead lie months of searing headlines and bloodcurdling editorial howls for vengeance in the New York Post and the Daily News.
The scenario envisaged by Obama, Emanuel and Attorney General Eric Holder is presumably that sometime before the election of 2012, KSM will be ushered into an execution chamber, thus vindicating Obama’s oft-advertised commitment to track down the perps of 9/11 and kill them. So eager was Obama to underline this point that while in Asia he declared that those offended by the trial will not find it “offensive at all when he’s convicted and when the death penalty is applied to him.” This remark came after his assertion that the trial would be “subject to the most exacting demands of justice.” Realizing that the latter remark might be construed by some pettifogging civil libertarians as prejudicial to a fair trial, Obama then added piously that he was “not going to be in that courtroom. That’s the job of the prosecutors, the judge and the jury.”
It’s certain that the legal team mustered to defend KSM and the other four will be reviewing mountains of documents amassed by the prosecution, setting forth the evidentiary chain that led to the indictments of the Ground Zero Five. Of course, most of these will no doubt be classified top secret, to be reviewed by defense lawyers only under conditions of stringent security; but it’s a safe bet that enough will be leaked to portray the Bush administration and Republicans in general in a harshly unflattering light, with Bush and Cheney ignoring profuse indications of the unfolding conspiracy.
There are those who gravely lament the impending spectacle, ranging from pinkos raising wussy concerns about secret witnesses and confessions extorted under torture, to the right blaring that KSM and the others will defile the Foley courtroom with their filthy Muslim diatribes. Bring them on, say I. The show trial is as American as cherry pie, as the former Black Panther H. Rap Brown—currently serving life without the possibility
of parole in the supermax in Florence, Colorado—famously said about violence.
American political life is at its most vivid amid show trials. Their glare discloses the larger political system in all its pretensions. At the very least we need the drama to help us get through what is looking more and more like the bland, respectable corporate rule of the Eisenhower years.
2010
January 8
Connoisseurs of the ritual known as “accepting full responsibility” will surely grade Obama a mere B for his performance Thursday at his White House press conference. “Ultimately, the buck stops with me,” Obama said, apropos Terror’s near Christmas Day miss on Northwest Flight 253. “As President, I have a solemn responsibility to protect our nation and our people, and when the system fails, it is my responsibility.”
First strike against Obama’s speech writer is the weasel-use of “ultimately,” not to mention the mawkish use of “solemn.” Second strike is his habitual dive into “systemic failure,” as he termed it earlier in the week. Everyone knows that systemic failure spells out as “No one is to blame. This is bigger than all of us.” That’s the phrase’s singular beauty.
I give John Brennan low marks too. “I told the President today I let him down,” said Obama’s top counterterrorism aide, who followed his boss at the press briefing. Okay so far. Exciting, even. In medieval Japan he would have stuck a sword in his stomach at this point. Not Brennan. “I am the President’s assistant for homeland security and counterterrorism and I told him I will do better and we will do better as a team.”
February 5
If you want to draw a line to indicate when history took a great leap forward, it could be February 1, 1960, when four black students from the Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina sat down at a segregated lunch counter in Woolworth’s department store in Greensboro, North Carolina. Three months later, the city of Raleigh, NC, eighty miles east of Greensboro, saw the founding of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), seeking to widen the lunch-counter demonstrations into a broad, militant movement. SNCC’s first field director was Bob Moses, who said that he was drawn by the “sullen, angry and determined look” of the protesters, qualitatively different from the “defensive, cringing” expression common to most photos of protesters in the South.
In contrast to that time, here are two important reminders about political phenomena peculiar to America today, which help explain the decline of the left: the first is the financial clout of the “nonprofit” foundations, tax-exempt bodies formed by rich people to dispense their wealth according to political taste. Much of the “progressive sector” in America now owes its financial survival—salaries, office accommodation, etc.—to the annual disbursements of these foundations which cease abruptly at the first manifestation of radical heterodoxy. In other words, most of the progressive sector is an extrusion of the dominant corporate world, just as are the academies, similarly dependent on corporate endowments.
A second important reminder concerns the steady collapse of the organized Leninist or Trotskyite left which used to provide a training ground for young people who could learn the rudiments of political economy and organizational discipline, find suitable mates, and play their role in reproducing the left, red diaper upon red diaper, tomorrow’s radicals, nourished on the Marxist classics. Somewhere in the late 1980s and early ’90s, coinciding with collapses further East, this genetic strain shriveled into insignificance.
An adolescent soul not inoculated by sectarian debate, not enriched by the Eighteenth Brumaire and study groups of Capital, is open to any infection, such as 9/11 conspiracism and junk-science climate catastrophism substituting for analysis of political economy at the national or global level.
February 10
There used to be a time when the CIA would go berserk at the merest suggestion that its executive actions included torture and assassination. This modesty has long gone but even so, it was astonishing to hear the Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, blithely tell a Senate committee this week that “Being a US citizen will not spare an American from getting assassinated by military or intelligence operatives overseas if the individual is working with terrorists and planning to attack fellow Americans.” Blair added helpfully that “If we think direct action will involve killing an American, we get specific permission to do that.”
Does that mean the President or one of his cabinet members issued an okay for the FBI to riddle Detroit Imam Luqman Ameen Abdullah on October 28, 2009, with twenty-one bullets, some of them aimed at his testicles and at least one in his back? They say the Imam was handcuffed after this lethal fusillade.
February 22
Thirty years ago, driving across the hill country in the South, every fifty miles I’d pick up a new Pentecostal radio station with the preacher screaming in tongues in a torrent of ecstatic drivel—“Miki taki meka keena ko-o-ola ka”—the harsh consonants rattling the speakers on my Newport station wagon. I had a friend, a “shouter,” whose trailer featured by way of cultural uplift only the Bible and a big TV set tuned to the Christian Broadcasting Network, on which Pat Robertson used to denounce New Age paganism on an hourly basis.
Last time I visited, a few months ago, my friend’s nice home still featured the Bible. Next to it was a thick manual of astrological guidance—could Geminis pair up with Scorpios with any hope of success, and kindred counsel—and he and his wife surfed through a big menu of channels. Out on the highway my radio picked up Glenn Beck spouting drivel, but the old Pentecostalists had vanished from the dial. These days, my friend told me, he and his wife didn’t tithe to any particular church and pastor. “All crooks,” he said dryly. They stay home and hold their own Sunday service there.
James Cameron gives us Avatar and the planet Pandora, which is Gaia brought to life in the most savage denunciation of imperial exploitation, explicitly American, ever brought to screen. Now a huge hit, Avatar is the most expensive anti-war film ever made (at $200 million, about half the cost of a single F-22). “It is nature which today no longer exists anywhere,” a peppery German called Marx wrote in 1845. But Rousseau is having his revenge on Karl.
The night I went to Avatar the audience cheered when Pandora, as a single Gaian organism, puts Earth’s predatory onslaught to flight and man’s war machines are crushed by natural forces. Against Genesis and the Judeo-Christian tradition, pagan mysticism is carrying the day, at the level of fantasy, as it is in those astrological manuals down in the Bible belt.
March 4
Joe Stack wrote: “I saw it written once that the definition of insanity is repeating the same process over and over and expecting the outcome to suddenly be different. I am finally ready to stop this insanity. Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let’s try something different; take my pound of flesh and sleep well.”
Stack was now thirty words from the end of his life. He continued: “The communist creed: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. The capitalist creed: From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed. Joe Stack (1956–2010).”
Then, on February 18 this year, the computer software engineer climbed into a Piper Cherokee plane and flew it into the IRS building in Austin, Texas. When the smoke cleared and the fires had been put out, the IRS counted many injured and one dead, Vernon Hunter, a sixty-eight-year-old Vietnam veteran on the edge of retirement.
Later that day, Stack’s thirty-six-paragraph suicide note surfaced on the internet. Though opaque in its recitation of his precise personal grudges with the tax man, as a farewell blast at the system it was eloquent on the essentials of the American Way: “When the wealthy fuck up, the poor get to die for the mistakes.”
Such a system, Stack correctly emphasized, is predicated on “two interpretations for every law; one for the very rich, and one for the rest of us …” What to do? “Violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer.” From several Republican politicians, hoping to harness the huge head of po
litical steam building up in a society facing mass unemployment for years to come, Stack’s last flight got astonishing respect. “It’s sad the incident in Texas happened,” said Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa, “but by the same token, it’s an agency that is unnecessary. And when the day comes when that is over and we abolish the IRS, it’s going to be a happy day for America.”
March 31
Marijuana was by no means the first boom crop to delight my home county of Humboldt, here in Northern California, five hours’ drive from San Francisco up Route 101. Leaving aside the boom of appropriating land from the Indians, there was the timber boom, which crested in the 1950s when Douglas fir in the Mattole Valley went south to frame the housing tracts of Los Angeles.
In the early 1970s new settlers—fugitives from the ’60s and city life—would tell visiting friends, “Bring marijuana,” and then disconsolately try to get high from the male leaves. Growers here would spend nine months coaxing their plants, only to watch, amid the mists and rains of fall, hated mold destroy the flowers.
By the end of the decade the cultivators were learning how to grow. There was an enormous variety of seeds—Afghan, Thai, Burmese. The price crept up to $400 a pound, and the grateful settlers, mostly dirt poor, rushed out to buy a washing machine, a propane fridge, a used VW, a solar panel, a 12-volt battery. Even a three-pound sale was a relatively big deal.
The 1980s brought further advances in productivity through the old Hispanic/Mexican technique of ensuring that female buds are not pollinated, hence the name sin semilla—without seeds. By 1981 the price for the grower was up around $1,600 a pound. The $100 bill was becoming a familiar local unit of cash transactions. In 1982 a celebrated grow in the Mattole Valley yielded its organizer, an Ivy League grad, a harvest of a thousand pounds of processed marijuana, an amazing logistical triumph. Fifteen miles up the valley from where I write, tiny Honeydew became fabled as the marijuana capital of California, if not America.
A Colossal Wreck Page 50