Of Mule and Man

by Mike Farrell

  Pulling up into the hills on the other side of this broad valley, there’s a phenomenal area that looks like a giant’s playground; instead of regular hills made up of solid masses of dirt and impacted stone, these are great piles of rounded rocks that look like some huge kid played with them, rolled them around and stacked them. It’s really quite spectacular.

  Entering New Mexico, it’s dry and flat and windy as hell, with giant dust devils hundreds of feet high off to the side of the road twirling like brownish-red mini-cyclones. I note the political tone down here, writ large on a huge billboard that says, ONE NATION—UNDER GOD.

  After some miles I feel the need for a bathroom break. A couple of squares have disappeared by now, but there’s no apparent need for gas, so I park by a truck stop. Inside, as I walk toward the restroom, three guys, two older and one younger, are behind the counter having a spirited conversation, with the young one saying, “It’s comin’, I’m just waitin’ for it.” The older of the three says, “These earthquakes and these storms …” I want to stop and listen, but can’t, so go on into the men’s room and wonder what they’re talking about. When I come out, the young one is saying, “McCain’s just gonna keep doin’ the same thing.” The older one seems to be in agreement and adds, “Yeah, I don’t know if Obama can do everything he says he will, but I’m willing to roll the dice.”

  Grinning with surprise, I go out, fire up the mule, get back on the highway and turn on the radio. Only a few stations are coming in, but I find the dulcet tones of Rush Limbaugh and listen for as long as I can stand it. Clear Channel then provides The Choirboy, Sean Hannity, telling me they’re “putting the Stop Hillary Express to bed and ratcheting up the Stop Obama Express.” I consider calling him about the guys at the truck stop, but decide not to bother.

  The wind blows us through Las Cruces and over the border into Texas and on to El Paso. Looking off to the south as you near the city, the incredible poverty of Juárez, Mexico is just a stone’s throw away, right down below the highway and across the Rio Grande. It’s dramatic, and heartbreaking.

  Pulling into the downtown hotel I see that there are still four little squares on the gas gauge. All the way from Phoenix with a stopover in Tucson and here we are in El Paso with gas to spare. This mule is skittish and contrary, but damn, it’s practical.

  EL PASOANS

  AGAINST THE DEATH PENALTY

  Michigan abolished capital punishment in 1847. When Carol Tures moved with her family from Michigan to El Paso, she was dismayed to find out that Texas carries out more executions each year than any other state in the U.S. In 2000, she called a series of meetings where people could hear speakers and discuss the issue. Before long, the audience became an organized group under the name El Pasoans Against the Death Penalty.

  In the ensuing years, the group has sponsored several major events in cooperation with the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. One of these was “Journey of Hope,” featuring talks by family members of murder victims and of persons who have been executed. Another was “Music for Life,” part of a statewide tour in which Sara Hickman from Austin entertained audiences with her songs and moved them with her simple testimony. The group has also distributed literature to people reporting for jury duty and has remembered murder victims, offenders, executioners, and their families in monthly vigils in front of the county courthouse. Its most recent undertaking is “Birthday Cards for Death Row,” based on a project begun by Betsey Wright of Arkansas. Carol Tures and her family left Texas recently, and now her work continues both in El Paso and in Nashville, Tennessee.

  The book event at Barnes & Noble here is a tonic. This whole celebrity thing continues to boggle my mind. Pulling into a strange city, knowing no one, and having a large group of strangers waiting, apparently happily, to see you is … well, it’s hard to explain how it feels. Men and women, young and old, a mix of ethnicities, and they’re all there with smiles on their faces. I’m reminded of the guy who once asked me, “How does it feel to have half a relationship formed with millions of people?” It feels good, very good, but it carries with it a certain responsibility. Clearly it’s about M*A*S*H. We have in common a love for this show that became a social phenomenon and I’m happy to carry the banner for its message. But the embrace of it—and of me—the sense of personal relationship and appreciation, is almost overwhelming at times.

  So I thank them for coming and talk a bit about the book, about my personal journeys and how my sense of social responsibility and the extraordinary luck I’ve had in my career intertwine, and then ask what questions they might have. This evening’s group is again a mix of people with different concerns, but a couple of them stand out. A young woman is here after driving, as I have, from Tucson. Her mother, she says, was upset about missing me there, so she’s here to get me to sign a book for her mother and one for her father and is then going to drive all the way back. A bit stunned at this, but happy to oblige, I wanted to write something about the extraordinary lengths she’d gone to, but she wouldn’t let me. She said she didn’t want them to know she’d come all the way down here because she thought they’d be mad. Despite my protests, she took the two books and left to make the drive back. Amazing!

  Then there was a question about the hope of meeting Shelley, which allowed me to apologize and explain her absence. This is followed by a voice from the back of the crowd, a Latino man who asks with a grin, “Did you ever live in San Diego?” Seeing something in his eyes, I said, “Not since I joined the Marines and went through boot camp there.” And he said, “I know, I was there with you.” He came up and produced a photo I hadn’t seen in fifty years, a group shot of all of us in Platoon 374 at MCRD, the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego. What an incredible hoot! After Arturo and I talked for a bit, the young woman from Tucson was back, saying she’d called her brother and he was mad because she didn’t get a book for him, so she needed a third. And now, she said, she was “busted” because her folks knew about her jaunt, so she wanted a picture with me to be able to show them.

  This crowd was wonderful. We laughed and talked about all kinds of things. But this life is hard, sometimes, to square with reality. People reach out in the most incredibly generous ways, wanting to say hello, to express gratitude for what the show meant to them, to know a little something about what I’m doing and why I do it. It is deeply touching and so very humbling.

  People from the El Pasoans Against the Death Penalty cosponsored this event. A woman from an antipoverty organization came. Two doctors and a nurse brought their sons to meet me because of what M*A*S*H meant to them. A man asked about the political scene and if I’d be willing to say who I was supporting for president. I said I wasn’t sure it would be appropriate to say my candidate’s name, but I could say it was very prominent in the news and that it isn’t McCain and it isn’t Clinton.

  DAY FOUR

  Tuesday, May 13, 2008

  CITY OF ORIGIN: EL PASO, TX

  CITY OF DESTINATION: SANTA FE, NM

  MILES TRAVELED: 328

  TRAVEL DAY

  An easy day, travel only. Mule and I just have to get to Santa Fe, New Mexico, for a bookstore event tomorrow night. Heading back into New Mexico on 10W, I decide to stop in Las Cruces and try to look up my old friend Blair, one of the guys from school who was in the club with Rick and me.

  The wind is up again today and Las Cruces is covered with a cloud of brown dust. I call Blair hoping to see him for an hour or so, but get a machine. I leave a message explaining that I’m just passing through and hope to catch him, then drive around the city for a bit to see if he’ll call back, eventually scouting out a health food store where I pick up lunch. After another call and still no Blair, we hightail it up Interstate 25 North toward Santa Fe where I’m invited to stay with Eugenie and Bobby, friends from Los Angeles who have a home north of town.

  This is new territory for me, never having driven up through the center of New Mexico before, and I’d been warned by a woman in El Paso th
at it was “desolate.” Sparsely populated, certainly, and flat as hell for a while, but the terrain is covered with scrub brush and doesn’t seem any more desolate than the desert we’ve pushed through for the past few days. The wind keeps the dust flying and pushes Mule around a bit, but other than being attacked by the biggest tumbleweed I’ve ever seen there’s nothing out of the ordinary. Mule behaves well as we climb gradually toward what look, through the dust, to be rolling hills.

  Sean Hannity’s nonsense helps pass the time as he exchanges what seems to be a new mantra with each caller: “You’re a great American, Sean!” “You’re a great American, Jack,” or Bill, or Steve, or Zeke. (No, no Zekes.) The women callers seem to uniformly express how fearful they are at the possibility of an Obama presidency, while the men, after assuring each other they are “great Americans,” complain to Sean about McCain’s apostasy. It seems he has betrayed the movement by admitting that there may be something after all to this global warming business.

  Between the “Stop Obama Express” and what now appears to be the “Get McCain Back on the Tracks” campaign, Sean’s got a lot of work to do. But he’s up to it, Great Americans. With righteousness in his heart and God on his side, he’ll steer this country back to the legitimate Reagan-loving conservative cause. Sean is very strong in defense of the much-misunderstood George W. Bush, who will, “mark my words,” be vindicated in the future; he’ll go down in history as the president who protected us from terrorism, built up our defenses and put America back into a forward-leaning posture in the world.

  Not only that, but in response to another Great American who described himself as a “charter member” of Rush’s Operation Chaos, Hannity pays tribute to Limbaugh’s genius (urging his dittoheads to cross over and vote for Hillary in the “Democrat” primaries to keep stirring the pot and create continuing havoc for them, maybe even to the point of causing “riots in the streets of Denver” during the “Democrat” convention), saying Chaos was the best thing he’s ever done and claiming the strategy was responsible for Hillary Clinton’s win in Indiana.

  Having heard as much as I can stand, I hit the “off” button and pay attention to the alternating hills and arroyos we’re crossing as we climb, noting in particular the wind- and water-scoured cliff faces that lead up to the now-more-numerous New Mexican mesas. Not desolate at all, but rather majestic testimony to the forces of nature and the passage of time.

  As I near Albuquerque, Blair calls. He’s sorry we missed each other, but he’s been with his wife Sylvia in the hospital where she’s being treated for an intestinal problem. She’ll be okay, he’s been assured, so we catch up a bit and promise to connect next time—hopefully at the reunion in July.

  Once in Santa Fe I connect with Eugenie and Bobby. He meets me at a turnoff north of the city and leads me down a steep, twisting dirt road into the “hollow” where I’m quickly sheltered in the embrace of their fabulous adobe home.

  DAY FIVE

  Wednesday, May 14, 2008

  CITY: SANTA FE, NM

  VENUE: COLLECTED WORKS BOOKSTORE

  SPECIAL GUESTS

  Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson and Valerie Plame

  Today was a dream—the first part almost literally. After spending the evening catching up with Bobby and Eugenie—both are successful writer/producers in television and longtime friends who come to their gorgeous Santa Fe “getaway” as often as they can—I turn in kind of late, only to awaken with a start at the thought that I might have forgotten a radio interview scheduled for the first thing in the morning. Leaping out of bed to check the multipage itinerary (complete with names, dates, places, bookstores, hotels, motels, directions …), I find that I’m right. I’m to do a Santa Fe Public Radio interview at 8:30 in the morning and it’s about 2 a.m. and I have no alarm clock and I don’t want to wake Eugenie and Bobby and … Shit! What the hell do I do?

  Okay, okay, don’t panic. Just think! Well, there is one thing … Years ago I learned a trick: envision a big clock and carefully set the hands to the time you want to wake up and you’ll wake up at that time. Uh-huh. Well, hell, it won’t hurt to try. But what if my body/mind is still on Pacific time? God … Anyway, I set the clock in my brain and just force myself to believe I’ll wake up … maybe I’ll have to pee. Something.

  An hour or two later there’s a hell of a rainstorm—maybe a hailstorm— whatever, it’s loud and it wakes me. Great. Now it’s 4 a.m. At this rate I’ll either sleep till noon or be so groggy from lack of it that I’ll be a flaming idiot on the radio …

  My eyes pop open again! It’s 5 a.m. This is torture. Open the curtains, maybe the light will wake me in spite of the clouds.

  Argh! I’m awake! What time? It’s 7:15. Amazing. It sort of worked. Or something worked. Stagger into a cold shower, throw on some clothes— forget about shaving, this is radio—and head to the car. The steep, winding gravel road I followed Bobby down last night looks very different from this angle. Still steep and winding, but there are turns I don’t remember …

  Finally, the highway; then the run into Santa Fe. The interview is to be done at the Santa Fe Baking Company, so I prowl the streets and finally find it. Looking around, I see a lot of people eating or having coffee, but no sign of a radio station.

  A big, friendly guy seems to be running things, so I ask if I’m in the right place. “Sure,” he says, and points to the corner of the room. “Mary-Charlotte is right over there.” And right he is. Sitting in a corner of this bustling place is a pretty young woman, Mary-Charlotte Domandi, wearing a pair of headphones and talking to a man across from her who is also wearing headphones.

  Turns out I’m early, so I order a smoothie and sit down. Mary-Charlotte looks up, sees me, waves, and goes back to her conversation.

  Once it’s my turn, the headphones on and the noise of this happy and popular restaurant blocked out, the interview is great. She’s very bright, says she loves the book and, from the questions in the ensuing half-hour conversation, has clearly read it. In all, it’s a delight. I’m sure glad I woke up.

  I’ve often thought a job like hers would be fun. Meeting all kinds of different people speaking to all kinds of different issues from all kinds of perspectives has to be both challenging and exciting, not to mention enlightening.

  Already in town, I decide to find the Collected Works Bookstore and nose around a bit. Nice people. It’s one of those places that reeks of a love of books, making you feel good when you walk in the door.

  After a walk around the plaza that gives me a sense of the place—the covered boardwalks and old adobe-style buildings transport you to another time—I head back out to Bobby and Eugenie’s to clean up and get ready for the day.

  Midday I call Joe. Joe Wilson, the former ambassador who blew the Bush administration out of the water by exposing W’s now-infamous sixteen-word State of the Union lie—the claim that Saddam was trying to get yellowcake from Africa to make nuclear weapons—is a friend. Filmmaker Robert Greenwald and I first got in touch with him in the early pre–Iraq War days when we were organizing Artists United to Win Without War, and our relationship has grown ever since. Joe and his wife Valerie Plame Wilson, the once-covert CIA agent who was outed and had her career destroyed by the Bush-Cheney-Rove-Libby-etc. axis as payback for Joe’s humiliating them, now live in Santa Fe, and Joe is to introduce me tonight at the bookstore.

  He invites us over, so I get ready for the event, since I’ll ride with Joe and Valerie to the bookstore later. Then Eugenie, Bobby and I head back to the city and up to the Wilsons’ place, where the five of us sit and gab for an hour. Eugenie and Valerie have been in touch by phone and e-mail. Bobby has not met either of them, so it’s a treat to bring them all together. The Wilsons are very impressive, quite wonderful hosts, and they are certainly, in the parlance of the day, a “power couple.” But they’re also very easy to be with and full of interesting experiences and views. Valerie, a gorgeous blonde, is so sweet and disarming it’s sometimes hard to envision her in the lif
e she describes (to the degree the CIA allowed her to do so) in her book. (The CIA’s redactions in the book are outrageous, clearly an attempt to stifle her, so it was perfect that she had the journalist Laura Rozen fill in the blanks and make the government’s ham-handed censors look stupid.) She spends a lot of time on the public-speaking circuit these days. Joe, still fit and looking very much the only-slightly-more-mature version of the Southern California surfer he was before launching a twenty-plus-year career in the diplomatic corps, is an eloquent and riveting speaker and remains very much in the struggle to change the political dynamic in this country. To top it all off, they are the actively devoted parents of a couple of kids, beautiful, spirited eight-year-old twins.

  Joe has been a loyal supporter of Hillary Clinton’s campaign and isn’t yet ready to throw in the towel, remaining in the “anything can happen” mode, but he’s realistic enough to be able to read the tea leaves. His primary concern is the election of a president who will commit to the reestablishment of the Constitution; he and Valerie are both willing to lend their considerable energies to seeing that happen.

  Eugenie and Bobby take off. She’s been preparing food all day (a great cook, she’s creative and thoughtful, taking care to have plenty for a vegetarian—even a vegan!) and is getting set for all of us to have dinner at their place after the bookstore event. Bobby will meet us there, along with Gary, another writer and old friend who is their neighbor.

  AMBASSADOR JOSEPH C. WILSON

  Over the past thirty-plus years that I have been involved in foreign policy and American politics, one of the most consequential changes I have experienced has been the growth of Nongovernmental Organizations (NGOs), Private Voluntary Organizations (PVOs), and political activist groups more generally. Their impact on political decisions and policy directions cannot be underestimated.