At the end of the Vietnam War, I was actively involved in the Stop-the-Draft movement. I’ve done a full 180-degree turn today. My change of heart started when I ran into Bill Walton at a Timberwolves game, around the time the Iraq War was getting underway. I’ve known Bill since the late 1970s, before his Portland Trail Blazers won the NBA title, because we used to train together at LaPrinzi’s Gym when I lived in Portland during my wrestling years. Suddenly Bill Walton—the ultra-hippie, ultra-anti-war guy—looked at me and said: “We’ve got to get the draft back.” I was floored. “Bill, you’re advocating reinstating the draft?!” I said.
“That will stop the war,” he said. It hadn’t dawned on me until then. As long as we have a professional military, it’s not going to touch that many Americans whose attitude is, “Well, they all volunteered, they’re there because they want to be.” The fact is, a professional military is now the strong arm of our president and corporate America, and the gun can be pulled out of the holster far too easily. It creates an atmosphere where the majority of the fighting men are poor people. Trying to improve in the military is their only way of getting a college education down the line. The rich kids, even a great majority of the middle class kids, are not serving.
I’m okay with a professional military during peacetime, but the moment a vote to go to war occurs, the draft should automatically be reinstated. We need to make war as difficult as we can to declare. You’ve got to bring the war home. I don’t care what anybody says, the country isn’t feeling enough pain. It should not be only the service people and their families, it should be us as a nation. The professional military is, in its own way, an anesthetic, a painkiller.
Headline: JESSE VENTURA HELPS LAUNCH ORGANIZATION ‘OPERATION TRUTH’
Former Gov. Jesse Ventura, who during his time in office diligently avoided commenting on military decisions, joined the fray over the war in Iraq on Tuesday.
“Now that I’m a civilian, I’m here to speak out that I think the current use of the National Guard is wrong,” Ventura said Tuesday.
Ventura is serving as an advisory board member for a new group called Operaton Truth, a nonprofit organization set up “to give voice to troops who served in Iraq.”
Emphasizing that he is an independent, not a Republican or Democrat, Ventura said the National Guard was designed to protect the homeland, not fight overseas.
—Associated Press, August 25, 2004
The reality is, a “backdoor draft” already exists through the military’s use of multiple deployments. More than 85,000 troops have been kept on in Iraq, beyond their agreed-upon term of service. We haven’t managed to really begin rebuilding New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. That’s what the National Guard ought to be doing, instead of being forced to remain in Iraq doing a mission they were never trained for! These are not frontline combat units. Why else is the National Guard being used so extensively, other than to fight the war on the cheap? Why doesn’t Bush transfer the regular soldiers from Germany, and let the Guard man the bases there? None of it makes sense.
If I ever became president, I’d push with every ounce of power I had for Congress to pass something else into law: Every elected federal official must predesignate an individual in their immediate family who has to begin military service—the moment that official casts an affirmative vote toward going to war. This could be a grandchild, a niece or nephew, but someone. It doesn’t mean they necessarily go to the war zone. What it does mean is that they and their family experience some personal discomfort because of this decision. Going to war should bring difficulty, especially to those who are the orchestrators or the authorizers. Right now, it’s far too easy for them to go on TV with their bleeding hearts and give standing ovations to our service personnel. War should not be laissez-faire. If you’re not willing to send someone from your family, how can you be so willing to send someone else’s?
I don’t pretend to know what we should do to get out of this quagmire. A pull-out of our troops by a certain specific date? Probably. I do think the greatest challenge facing our country is renewing our credibility internationally. Other nations now view us as an imperialist power who, if you cross us, will invade you. Until George Bush became president, this was not something that ever concerned them. They could fear us for economic manipulation or sanctions, sometimes for an off-the-books military or CIA operation. But not invasion. I don’t believe ruling by fear is the sign of a great nation. Most of the world now sees us as no more than an arrogant bully.
Through all this, I’m not trying to say that terrorism isn’t a real threat. There are certainly elements of the Arab and Muslim world that need to be dealt with; hard-core fanatics whose entire mission in life is to destroy us and what we stand for. But I feel very strongly that, in many ways, the terrorists are winning. Not so much on the battlefield, but in that their ultimate goal is to change America. They’re very patient. Whether the change takes two years or fifty, they would deem themselves successful.
The fact is, the Bush administration hasn’t uncovered a single al-Qaeda “sleeper cell” yet inside our borders. The only terrorist convicted since 9/11 is the shoe bomber—even though, in the name of prevention, thousands of Arab and Muslim immigrants have been singled out for FBI interviews and mandatory registration and detention. I saw a cartoon in the Minneapolis paper recently. It had Bush lecturing Castro about continuing sanctions against Cuba because of human rights violations, while Bush stood there next to Guantanamo. The point was well-taken: at Guantanamo, people are being held against their will, without trials, without any human rights. How can one guy accuse another of something he’s doing, too?
I would rather face the terrorists than lose my civil liberties. If protecting our safety means taking away our Bill of Rights, then could I be so crass and bold as to scream “Give me liberty or give me death”? Once freedom is gone—the bedrock foundation that built our country—what’s left to stand for and believe in? Maybe we’ve forgotten the words of James Madison: “If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.”
To me, the most frightening part of Michael Moore’s movie Fahrenheit 9/11 was the moment he walked into the office of Congressman Conyers to confront him about the Patriot Act. “With your voting record, Congressman, how could you have possibly voted for this?” Moore cried, or something to that effect. Then Conyers grabbed him by the elbow and said, in essence, “Sit down here, young man, there’s something you need to know. Michael, we don’t read any of the bills that we vote on!” Call me naïve, but when I heard that, I almost tipped over in my chair. In other words, they’re told how to vote? It’s all pressure from their party to say yea or nay?
The Patriot Act was rushed into law in those first scary weeks after 9/11. Most people don’t know that its official title was: “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act.” Hence, USA PATRIOT Act. I hesitate to mention this but, after the Reichstag fire in Germany in 1933, Hitler pushed through legislation equally quickly called “The Law To Remove the Distress of the People and State.” That has a little pithier, but eerily similar, ring to it.
The Patriot Act is 342 pages long. It alters some fifteen different statutes, most of which got passed after abuses of surveillance power by the FBI and CIA came to light in the mid-seventies. It’s almost as if somebody had it all ready to be unveiled, but just had to wait for the right moment—a Reichstag fire, a Pearl Harbor type event, to make it a reality.
What does the Patriot Act enable, inside all that fine print? Oh, things like a secret court that meets whenever it chooses to approve undercover surveillance on both foreigners and Americans. Violations of various parts of the Bill of Rights, like illegal search and seizure, indefinite time in jail without a trial, seizure of private property.
And when the Patriot Act came up for reauthorization in 2007, the Democratic Congress fell hook, line, and sinker for White House propagan
da. Some aspects give the federal government even broader power than before. The homes, offices, and phone records of Americans can now come under surveillance without a warrant. We can be spied on overseas. The Fourth Amendment is basically gutted.
The New York Times reported, in 2007, that the Pentagon and the CIA are now using a little-known power—known as “national security letters”—in order to get access to the banking and credit records of thousands of Americans. Banks, according to a new book I read called The Terror Conspiracy by Jim Marrs, already have what’s called “Know Your Customer” programs. These are designed to profile people and report any potentially deviant banking behavior to the feds. Like if you sold a car you didn’t need and put the cash into your bank account, the bank computer might not like it—and here come the agents to your doorstep!
In the wake of the Patriot Act, there’s also a national database and ID system waiting to happen. All the easier for “Big Brother” to keep track of you. Not a surprising development in a world where John Ashcroft could say he wanted the power to take away constitutional rights from U.S. citizens and even be able to place them as “enemy combatants” in internment camps.
Such camps, by the way, are already in place. Saying these kinds of things, sometimes I wonder if one of the bunks might already have my name on it. In October 2006, when the Republicans still controlled Congress, Bush signed a bill weakening two laws that have been around for well over a century. One of them was the Posse Comitatus Act, first enacted after the Civil War to maintain a line between civil and military government. The other was the Insurrection Act of 1807, which limited how far a president could go in using the military to enforce the laws. Without any hearings or public debate, without consulting a single governor, the revised laws make it a whole lot easier for Bush—or any future president—to override local control and declare martial law. Basically, the military can now be used as a domestic police force to respond to a terrorist attack, a natural disaster, an outbreak of infectious disease, or any “other condition.”
Didn’t our forefathers rebel against much milder forms of oppression than this?
Everyone should read the minority report The Constitution in Crisis, written under Congressman Conyers, when the Republicans still controlled both houses. It’s out in paperback, and it’s a review of all the constitutional violations that have occurred under the Bush administration. Many of these pertain to the lead-up to the Iraq War. Did you know we started bombing Iraq long before the invasion, when the excuse was that Iraq was supposedly violating “no-fly zones?” The report details how many pounds of bombs we dropped.
George Bush violated the Constitution by going to war under false premises. He and others in his administration did everything they could to ensure that the American people were misled. What are the Democrats going to do now, nothing? For fear of being called unpatriotic?
What’s gone down here is ten times worse than happened between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. Yet the Republican House successfully impeached Clinton over his personal conduct. I want to know whether, if George Bush cheated on Laura and then lied to Congress about it, that would rise to the impeachment level. Yet sending the country into war under false premises does not?
By the time he leaves office, Bush will have spent more than a trillion dollars on his military adventures. While more than twenty retired American generals have come out strongly opposed to what we’re doing in Iraq, our veterans are receiving shameful treatment. In the course of this war, more than 20,000 soldiers have been discharged with so-called “personality disorder,” meaning that they’re often being denied disability and medical benefits.
Now I ask you: Who are the real dysfunctional personalities here? Maybe a president who thinks he’s getting messages straight from God? Or a vice president so delusional he believes we can “bunker-bust” Iran’s supposed nuclear sites without opening up a whole new front in this madness?
George Bush came into office with a balanced budget and a manageable national debt. In his first six-plus years, he virtually bankrupted the country, and now we’re nine trillion bucks in hock. That may not be an impeachable offense, but it sure seems like a committable one. And I think you can guess where the man ought to be committed.
CHAPTER 15
Musing in Baja on Changing the System
“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
—George Orwell
In a way, here in Baja, I’m now living the life that many of us dream about—being away from the rat race. My life is far more spiritual. By that, I mean waking up in the morning and sitting on my deck and watching the sunrise. That’s something I never did in the United States. I was a night person my entire career as a wrestler and afterward. I’d generally not go to bed before midnight, and I luckily had jobs that allowed me to sleep until I woke up—because I’ve never liked using an alarm clock. But down here, when it’s dark I sleep, and when it’s light I’m awake.
My typical day, I get up at dawn and, once the sun comes up, I feed Dexter and do a little bit of reading. I keep up with when low tide is. Then I generally go out and run on the beach for over an hour. I’m not saying I go fast anymore, but I’m running in the sand and burning calories. That’s what’s important, and I’m slimming down quite substantially. When I come back to the house, Terry and I will usually have something to eat and I’ll read some more. Afternoons could be anything—ATVs, scuba diving, swimming. Or just laying in my hammock drinking imported water from Italy. Hey, can it get any better than this? The great thing is, there’s no pressure. To do anything. At this point in my life, I’m enjoying that very much.
As you get older, you start to think about mortality. I’ve also really enjoyed spending time away from humanity. Maybe it sounds self-centered, but I’ve spent my whole life in front of crowds and now I’m at the point where I don’t want to see them anymore.
Even before we left Minnesota and began the long drive south, I played a lot of golf and, for the most part, stayed to myself. I made very few public appearances, because I wanted to remain out of the limelight. To a point, I was able to, until the media got pictures of me with the crazy beard. I’d actually started with four of those Fu Manchu-type strings—kind of like Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow—but as they grow longer, they tend to get more and more narrow, so I ended up with just one. Eating soup became a problem. I had to tuck it in like a tie, inside my shirt, whenever I sat down to eat. I’m a great believer that you don’t eat with etiquette, you eat to satisfy your hunger. How it gets from Point A to Point B doesn’t matter, as long as it gets there. My daughter calls me “the barbarian” at the dinner table. Anyway, I shaved off the beard right before we decided to come to Baja.
I find that living here more than rejuvenates me; it saves me. Bringing Terry down here has made a world of difference in her life, too. She’s healed dramatically from the illness that plagued her the whole time I was governor. She’s not been under any pressure. We can relax together and simply be.
And it’s given me a lot of opportunity to think. To reflect upon the past, consider what’s going on in the present, and meditate on the future. What’s happening to America grieves me. I feel somewhat like an outcast from my own nation, that I have to come down to Mexico to get my thoughts together and find out what my next move will be. Maybe I’m just quietly re-rallying my spirits in a foreign country. By the time I’ve gotten this book off my chest, I think I’ll know what to do. And I’m hoping you, the reader, will learn some things not only about what I’ve gone through, but also about what’s happening to our democratic process—and what we need to be doing, all of us, the American people, to get back on track.
TERRY: I remember when he gave his speech to the National Press Club in Washington, not long after the election. It was like the first time I saw him give the State of the State address. I couldn’t believe that this was the same guy who would wear huge sunglasses and have purple hair and fea
ther boas all over him, strutting around and acting like a maniac. It wasn’t that I thought he wasn’t a smart person. It’s just that he was such a statesman—and that he had the ability to enthrall, in that media world and among other politicians. He held them in the palm of his hand. It was absolutely wonderful for me to see that. I was so amazed at him, and I had so much respect for him. I felt so lucky to be a part of this. I really did. I was so glad that he did it.
In our country, there is a certain ruling class that won’t give up the power. Who they are exactly, I’m not sure. I can call them the Democrats and Republicans, but I don’t know for sure if it’s them or the corporate powers: is it actually the Carlyle Group that controls things? There was a ripple of fright that what happened in Minnesota could be a trend. Maybe the fact that I inspired voters to turn out was something the two parties do not necessarily want to have happen.
Our federal electoral system is bankrupt. I see Florida as having been stolen by the Bush people in the 2000 election. I feel the same way as a friend of mine, whom I admire as being one of the best attorneys in America. That’s a gentleman named Vincent Bugliosi, who prosecuted Charles Manson. Vince has tried 106 felony cases and gotten convictions on 105 and, like he says, that other guy was probably innocent. After the 2000 election debacle, Vince came out and said: “The Supreme Court should all be put in prison for what they did.”
Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! Page 27