SLOUCHING TOWARD REVOLUTION?

by Lisa Barr

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 6, 2011 Washington D.C. Freedom Plaza

Walking away from the metro stop for the White House, Thomas Jefferson’s letter to George Logan (November 12, 1816) rattled in my brain:

“I hope we shall...crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and to bid defiance to the laws of our country.”  

Two monuments to our nation’s mistaken path appeared--Woodrow Wilson Plaza and the Ronald Reagan Reagan International Trade Center Building.  

But in the distance, drums sounded.

Freedom Plaza. 

Veterans for Peace were pounding a huge drum with a Native American motif on its face.  

Sanity.

The ‘drums of peace’ helped me arrive at the nascent demonstration area.  I was reminded of 19th century Scottish journalist Charles McKay:  “Men go mad in herds, but only come to their senses one by one.”  Journalists are taught that it is the demonstrators who are crazy.  This is a tendency which must be disabused by all who have worked in any corporate newsroom.

For, upon arrival this morning, as at other such demonstrations, a feeling of safety washed over me--even as I had just walked amid a ‘security’ grid that was quickly beginning to surround the area of 13th and 14th Streets and Pennsylvania Avenue.  Not to be hyperbolic, but Joan Didion’s ‘Salvador’ always comes to mind at such events.  So many questions fill the brain:

Is this what those working for human rights in San Salvador felt like, after the junta killed union organizer Gilbert Soto, among others, in 1981?  

How can D.C. residents live here--knowing that protesters are regularly flanked by what appear to be steroid-fueled ‘undercover’ agents for a police state we are told must remain secret?

I remembered the night before, at 10 p.m. in the same place.   Amid streetlight, a circle of  30 of us sat on the ground listening to the organizers--who were listening to--us!--the newly arrived, non-D.C.  activists and independent journalists who had answered their call to “Stop the Machine, Create A New World.”  Their event would start in fewer than 12 hours and they still needed help painting signs to avoid the professed media ‘confusion’ about what the Wall Street occupation wanted to accomplish. 

“We want to thank Occupy Wall Street,” began a laughing attorney and activist Kevin Zeese.  Zeese and other activists planning the “Stop the Machine” action see themselves not as leaders but organizers who can vanish into the background of a people’s movement that is growing simultaneously and organically in a manner which clearly delights them.  

I had interviewed Zeese, Margaret Flowers, and Dennis Trainor a few weeks before for indy media pieces run on, among other places, Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox radio show.  Since then, Zeese’s crew of activists--including Zeese and Flowers--had dropped everything to help advise the Occupy Wall Street movement.  Zeese and crew hadn’t seen the “Occupy” movement coming--but they welcome and assist it.  Their gentle steering is helping the Occupy movement avoid pitfalls common to such movements--such as wireless bills amassing tens of thousands of dollars in less than a week, or the surprise arrival of tens of thousands of dollars overnight into a PayPal account.  

The corporate media fears the current uprisings.

They don’t know how to report on protest because they have been taught for generations to trivialize and ignore it.  

So--for any corporate media lackeys ‘slumming’ on this site--here’s a broadcast news-style summary of the demands Zeese and others spent the past 6 months formulating. 

*Ending corporate rights and notions that money equals speech;

*Ending wars and militarism;

*Supporting human rights that end exploitation of all peoples;

*Guaranteeing worker rights and jobs;

*Real transparency for government and accountability to international law;

*Barrier-free elections;

*Ending private-for-profit prisons and starting evidence-based drug laws;

*Universal Health Care;

*Education as a right through university or vocational training

*Safe, affordable housing rights for all;

*Environmental policies that create a non-carbon-based energy economy;

*Ending policies fostering the huge wealth divide for finance and the economy;

*The creation of systems protecting the land and water to create a sustainable food network

and

*Affordable, clean, convenient public transit system for all--including safe spaces for pedestrian, non-automobile travel. 

I believe that reads very well for broadcast--and, as an unemployed mass media academic am available as a voice coach for any media worker stumbling over Stop the Machine’s solution-based demands.   However, any media worker wanting to read such a list of demands, or get them placed in digital print for broadcast on today’s mass media would no doubt need to lobby (or trick):

 a supervisor--such as an editor, a producer, or 

a peer--such as a videographer or an editor.

I know this, as only a refugee from the corporate news media can know this.  But even corporate media lackeys know enough to admire Edward R. Murrow, who famously said  “A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.”  Murrow famously challenged the status quo in his journalism--not every day--but when the moment presented itself.

This is that moment. 
 It is not exaggerating to say that news workers will, in the days to come, distinguish themselves as either relevant to solving the huge problems of the day, or true enemies of a sane path out of today’s morass. 

As organizer and indy media activist Dennis Trainor explains, “It’s a statistical certainty that empires will end.  Right?  So, the scary thing for me--and sometimes this comes off as hyperbolic--but the scary thing for me is how do you bring down an empire smoothly in the post-nuclear era.  Right now I don’t see our government  letting someone else up on the hill.  We’re playing a game of king of the hill--and we have to figure out a way, gently, to bring this thing down in a safe landing.”  

Zeese believes this is a historical moment, and notes that such pronouncements are, or course made after-the-fact.  “There is a lot of power we have--that we have been told we don’t have!  We can look at Cindy Sheehan sleeping outside George Bush’s ranch and reigniting the anti-war movement.  We can look at the refusal to sit in the back of the bus.  You can look at sitting at a lunch counter.  There’s 3 examples, sitting on sleeping outside and sitting at a lunch counter.”

I reflected upon his words of encouragement as I sat on a ledge in Freedom Plaza this morning.  Only about 50 people had arrived.  Below, on the sidewalk, a red-clad Washington D.C. worker pushed a trash cart.    The African American man stopped working his broom when I asked him if he’d be joining us.  “I gotta work,”  he said, smiling.  Dr. Margaret Flowers smiled and said, “Come after work.”  He paused.  “How long you gonna be here?”  Not missing a beat, she chirped, “It’s our new home.”  He laughed and continued cleaning the street.  

As I bundled up my computer to find a wireless cafe--in the manner of all non-corporate media workers and volunteers--I saw the bottom of the “Stop the Machine” event flyer.   A Frederick Douglas quote providing U.S. citizens even today a roadmap to sanity:

“Power concedes nothing without a demand.  It never did and it never will.”

Lisa Barr is a mass media academic and independent journalist whose work is available at www.hegemonicseam.blogspot.com  Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox Radio featured her pre-event report on Stop the Machine Create a New World at:  http://sheehan.streamguys.org/SoapboxInternet09252011.mp3   

Cuba In Focus WBAI Includes My Piece on This Year's Caravan Aug 25th

Sally O'Brien's show is in its 22nd year.  She is an amazing producer and editor.
http://archive.wbai.org/show1.php?showid=thurs8pm9pm

My piece, discussing this year's caravan aired August 25th.  The jist: I spent 9 days in Cuba with the Caravanistas who made the journey to Cuba.  Many thanks to the anonymous facebook friends who paid IFCO's funding arm the fees to send me on this trip.  You know who you are and I love you.
I hope you enjoy the piece.  It was an honor to be part of Sally O'Brien's show.  If you donate to WBAI--please mention Cuba in Focus
 If you donate to WBAI--please mention Cuba in Focus
http://wbai.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=9805&Itemid=136

To Cuba. With baggage. And love. "Love is our License."

McAllen, Texas

The Pastors for Peace (PFP) 22nd annual Friendshipment is gathering at the U.S./Mexican border, readying to defy the ridiculous cold war relic known as the Cuba embargo.   Passed in 1961, the ban on trade with Cuba was invigorated or intensified to cruel effect by everyone from Jesse Helms(R) to Paul Toricelli(D). 

But, no matter.

Nearly 100 Caravanistas in over 130 U.S. and Canadian cities have raised their voices at fundraisers with “Lucius Walker! Vive! Vive! Vive!” in a show of solidarity with his ideals.

They’ve successfully completed the U.S. and Canadian legs of this year’s caravan.  

They’ve garnered public support and nearly one hundred tons of humanitarian supplies via U.S. church potlucks and fundraisers.  

They’ve amassed phone trees to lawyers, journalists, political representatives and activists--just in case.

So, of course, the disinformation campaign cannot be far behind.  

This year’s first salvo reeked like a July 4th cherry bomb dud.  

  Or an exploding cigar?

What a stinker headline for Miami Herald editor Juan O. Tamayo’s article, “Wikileaks: Cable Says Peace Group’s Leader Threatened Student.”

  The punctuation of that headline in an otherwise ‘balanced’ article was strategically distracting.     

     At least the article explained how the Cuban program provided an estimated 10,000 medical students--mainly from Latin America and Africa-- with free education and training plus free room and board. But Mr. Tamayo, appointed to the position of Associate Professor in the University of Miami’s Cuba Institute in 2009, certainly knows more.  

Certainly he knows that over one hundred U.S. citizens have also benefitted from Cuba’s training.  

Certainly he knew he was omitting from his article the fact that these underprivileged, yet deserving U.S. residents return to the states to provide free health care in ‘shock-doctrined’ cities like downtown Detroit.  

Assisting the “...struggles of oppressed peoples for justice and self-determination” is the mission of the umbrella group over PFP --The Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization.  IFCO runs a friendly but determined operation with a professional press office that issues many quotable statements. 

Such as this one:

“...The caravan will travel to Cuba via Mexico, without asking for or accepting a US government license, as a peaceful, disciplined act of civil disobedience against the blockade and travel ban, and as ambassadors for a ‘people-to-people’ foreign policy based on mutual respect. 

  According to IFCO board president Rev. Thomas E. Smith, “The current licensing system is both immoral and illegal, because it requires people of faith to submit their acts of conscience and friendship to government licensing, and violates our right to freedom of religious expression, political thought, association and travel.”...” 

Pretty quotable, right?  Certainly the news media won’t be strangers. The story of this year’s caravan is particularly compelling.  

It is the first such journey without its founder.  Reverend Lucius Walker, who died of a heart attack this fall at the age of 80, was honored earlier this year in Havana by Cubans who “Did not want to imagine a world without (him).” 

I wish I’d met Rev. Walker.  He was a reverend even an atheist could love with quotes like this one:  “The bible says feed the hungry, clothe the poor.  It doesn’t say to starve the Communists.”

U.S. domestic poverty, is increasingly, obviously just as planned as is overseas poverty. 22-year-Caravanista Lisa Valanti says that’s what the successful Cuba revolution shows. “I think that the reason why U.S. citizens are the only people in the world who cannot experience Cuba--is it would instantly reveal to them that their government has been lying to them, since--forever! In other words, Cuba has been so demonized by the propaganda in this country that when you go to Cuba, it’s very obvious that none of that is correct.”

And that’s why U.S. journalists aren’t allowed to show U.S. citizens evidence of Cuba’s success--in spite of the U.S. blockage.  

Usually.

So, thank goodness for the interactive aspect of the online Miami Herald that allowed the comments of Juan McAuliff below Tamayo’s ‘duck and cover’ era relic.   McAuliff, of the Fund for Reconciliation and Development helped level the gatekeeping playing field on the “Walker threatened a student” meme with--reality.  

His comment below the online article began: 

“We obviously don’t know what (Rev.) Lucius Walker said or what the student told the USINT staff person.  We do know that Mr. Parmly carried out the overly hostile policy of the Bush Administration in Cuba and he and his staff were regarded with justified suspicion.”

   

The real attacker was a nameless bureaucrat.  We don’t know who produced a cable of what appears to be fiction--or over-reaction--from an also unnamed U.S. medical student.  

But certainly we can guess the motive.  Consider the block-buster article of acclaimed FBI whistle-blowing agent (and Time Magazine Co-Woman of the Year) Coleen Rowley.  “How Top Secret America Misfires: The case for a 21st Century Church Commission,” explains the bankrupt and dangerous method for advancing within the FBI after 9/11.

  

Read it and weep.  And wonder:  “Can the same generation that guffawed at the film, “Reefer Madness” while in high school and college really approve of a points system that rewards our top law enforcement agents for opening bogus ‘terrorist threat’ files?”  Take another Lunesta and call me in the morning--unless you’re on my crisis phone tree.

But, seriously--has the U.S. learned nothing in 60 years?  

Perhaps not, if we have journalists and editors who produce incomplete stories like the one accusing Rev. Walker of intolerance at best.  Perhaps it’s no wonder the headline writer got it wrong. There apparently were no phones or email connections working over the July 4th holiday in Miami. No way to ask for a comment from Pastors for Peace, or a different opinion from those who actually were familiar with Rev. Walker, such as Mr. McAuliff, who continued: 

“...“We also know that the U.S. under Bush treated Cuban medical personnel serving in third countries as targets for defection.  The Obama administration, to its shame, has not terminated this policy of encouraging defections from humanitarian assistance groups.”

Lucius Walker was doing more than humanitarian work.  He was performing the vital role of a true diplomat.  He was trying to head problems off at the pass in a very tense environment.  

A more accurate headline would have read: “Opportunistic Bureaucrat Smears Latter Day Freedom Rider.”

For the Freedom Rider gene is exactly what invigorated Lucius Walker’s work.  James Farmer’s group of multi-racial, multi-gendered, multi-creed challengers of Jim Crow was a model for later movements, such as the Venceremos Brigades, the Yankee Sandinistas, Pastors for Peace, Cindy Sheehan’s “For What Noble Cause?” crusade, and the Gaza Flotilla(s).  Disinformation campaigns from U.S. corporate media has accompanied official D.C. denouncements of each such humanitarian effort.  

Remember Farmer’s comments to a skittish Kennedy Administration official:

“My objective is not just to make a point, but to bring about a real change in the situation.  We will continue the Ride until people can sit wherever they wish on buses and use the facilities in any waiting room available to the public.  Please tell the attorney general that we have been cooling off for 350 years.  If we cool off any more, we will be in a deep freeze.  The Freedom Ride will go on.”

Images of the Freedom Riders’ state-sanctioned pummeling shamed and embarrassed U.S. politicians and businessmen.  The same courageous and open spirit empowered a variety of movements, as a mature Bernardine Dohrn acknowledged for PBS decades later:  

“I like the bridges that have been built between the feminists and the gay and the environmental movements. All the progeny of the Sixties. All the many movements that have happened since then are now part of a kind of a big tent of anti-globalization and anti-empire. So it’s a different world, but trying to act on your principles, trying to use humor, trying to tweak power, trying to be willing to take the consequences of what you believe in.”

The progress Dohrn noted came in spite of massive campaigns of government disinformation, deceit, and worse aimed at humanitarian activists.  For instance, passage of the civil rights laws was relatively quickly followed by the conspiracy to kill Rev. Martin Luther King.

  That conspiracy seemingly encouraged the FBI to ramp up Cointelpro hounding and/or annihilation of the Black Panthers, starting with Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. 

We must never forget the law enforcement abuses of King and Hampton’s non-Panther allies--some of whom included the earliest Cuban solidarity activists to venture to Cuba for a look-see after the revolution, such as a young Bernardine Dohrn. Such disruption tactics continued despite Congressional investigation and denunciation in the form of the Church Committee hearings and the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Kangaroo court trials of activists including Assata Shakur (periodically a hot potato exile in Cuba) wrongly excluded testimony from Frank Church and others about Cointelpro continuing its illegal work into the 1980s and beyond.

Despite admitted, continued, and wrongful government infiltration of such groups as the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), the Central American solidarity movement remained vibrant and varied through the 1980s.  Pax Christi, Sister Cities programs, plus various nuns and ‘Yankee Sandinistas’ openly fundraised in churches across the U.S. to bolster the rebels fighting the U.S. funded slaughter of the El Salvadoran death squad junta.  The movement also helped counter the murderous U.S.-funded Contras’ destruction.  

Pastors for Peace emerged from that moment.  

On a fact-finding mission in 1988, Rev. Walker was wounded by a Contra attack on the Bluefields ferry.  Unlike the 2 Nicaraguans who died, Walker defied the common wisdom of not-seeking-emergency-room-aid-lest-the-Contras finish-the-botched deed in the E.R..  Walker lived.  And he wondered about his attackers, according to the accurate portion of his sanitary, dry New York Times obituary last Fall:

“...Mr. Walker’s first thought, he said, was that he was hit by a bullet paid for by his own country. He called his second thought a prophetic vision: he would form an organization of pastors to fight, or at least clean up after, what he called American imperialism....”

A week later, the Times printed the following correction:

“...An obituary last Sunday about the Baptist minister and political activist Lucius Walker referred incorrectly to a 1988 incident in Nicaragua in which Mr. Walker and others were wounded and two people were killed. The delegation led by Mr. Walker was attacked by contra rebels — not by soldiers of the Nicaraguan government, which was not supported by the United States at that time....”

Really. With a straight face?  

Certainly Times editors knew, or should have known-- courtesy of many books 32 years after the incident--that Walker had not been attacked by anyone other than the Contras. Walker had discussed this attack many times and he was prolificly quoted by those following the Central American solidarity movement about the events of August 2, 1988:

  “...My daughter Gail and I were among 200 civilians on a boat on the River Escondido in Nicaragua, which was viciously attacked by the contras.  Two Nicaraguans died and 29 passengers were wounded.  That night in the hospital, while I was being teated for a bullet wound, I prayed to God seeking spiritual guidance to find an appropriate response to that act of terrorism.  The inspiration that God gave me was to create Pastors for Peace to take caravans of material aid to the victims of U.S. aggression.”  

The U.S. journalism profession’s indifference and recklessness with the facts about Cuba and its supporters is, at least, consistent.  Times journalists, and many others, failed to challenge in a timely manner the Reagan Administration officials who had dared blame U.S. aid workers for their own murders. The family and friends of Ben Linder toured the U.S. after Reagan Administration officials said Linder deserved his destiny for constructing low-head hydro-electric generation capacity in El Cua, Nicaragua. Even Florida Senator Connie Mack accused Linder’s mother of “politicizing this situation,” adding “I don’t want to be tough on you, but I really feel you have asked for it.”

Linder’s family and supporters embarked upon a national tour of media outlets that largely failed to get his story properly told.  Imagine if Elliot Abrams and Marlin Fitzwater’s similar contempt for Linder had been countered with any regularity by this quote from the engineering graduate:

“..."It’s a wonderful feeling to work in a country where the government’s first concern is for its people, for all its people."

Why is it so hard for U.S. news media workers to print such statements?  

Consider Otto Reich’s late 1980s visit to NPR--a place he called the “Little Havana on the Potomac.  Solomon and Lee note that Reich bragged at having visited large and medium market radio, television, and newspaper outlets around the country. He proudly took credit for the firing, reassignment--or change in tone and content--of particular journalists whose coverage did not spout the White House’s admitted propaganda tactics.  The idea was, he said later, to paint “Black Hats” on the Sandinistas and “White Hats” on the (El Salvador) Junta. 

This is the opposite of public service. So, of course, it’s a good living off U.S. tax dollars. George (Shrub) Bush made sure of that with his 2004 recess appointment of Reich as Latin America State Department envoy.  Now Reich works for Honduras (post-coup, of course) as a lobbyist. 

No doubt Reich remains a quotable and perhaps off-the-record source for journalists ‘covering’ Latin America. 

We may not be able to follow the bread crumbs from Reich’s NPR visit to sell the ‘Bad Sandinista/‘Good Death Squads’ meme to the July 5th hit piece on Rev. Walker in the Miami Herald.  But there seems to be a chill in the air.  How does that work?  Consider the NPR producer commenting that, after Reich’s visit, news personnel would question news text about Central America, asking, “What would Otto (Reich) think?” 

It is important to see and acknowledge that the same Cointelpro tactics, the same media smear jobs get applied to: the Freedom Riders; the Venceremos Brigade(s); the anti-Vietnam war movement; the Central American Solidarity movement(s) and on and on--including the Pastors for Peace Caravan.  

Was the Miami Herald piece just sloppy journalism or a strategic hit piece?  Will border bureaucrats test the resolve of the group now that its charismatic leader is dead?”

Predictions are the aid will go through as usual.  But, the ‘reverse border challenge’ in which aid from Cuba flows back to the U.S., is perhaps the real challenge to U.S. hegemony.  Help from Cuba is an image from which the U.S. recoils--even in real ‘third world’ moments like Katrina.  The Cuban doctors offered for New Orleans did not ponder the U.S. refusal before heading, and without much attention in the U.S. news media, to assist people in the Pakistan earthquake.  

What the U.S. could learn from Cuba is immense. 

Not only is health care universal and free (remember the 9/11 firefighters without insurance being treated in Havana in “Sicko”).  Education is free.  They grow their own food in phenomenally productive organic gardens.  In fact, Havana grows its own, healthy food within its city limits on converted patches of lawn.  Rent the documentary “Blocqeo” for more propaganda-bashing images you will not see or hear about in the U.S..   

Educate yourself.  And speak up.  Recommend people learn from Cubans.  IFCO Board of Directors President Reverend Tom Smith encouraged Houston caravan supporters to speak about Cuba at any opportunity. “Don’t be silent,” he said. 

For silence can kill a movement.  It can also kill the spirits of those with whom the movement interacts.  I’m reminded of the way U.S. activists abandoned Nicaragua precisely as the Chamorro government set out to reprivatize its hard reclaimed commons.  I remember seeing Luce Ortiz (not her real name) around the same time Bob Hercules’ telling documentary (“Did They Buy It?”) premiered. I asked her why there were, all of a sudden, so few Central American solidarity events in Gainesville for me to cover.  “Good question,” she responded, not a little bitter.  

News from her family in Nicaragua was bleak. Her sister, an ardent Sandinista, had recently wrapped herself in a blanket so as not to leave a mess, sat in the family bathtub, and shot herself in the head.  ‘Luce’ blamed the return of hopelessness in the face of an erosion of a revolution’s victories and the rapid re-privatization of Nicaragua’s commons. 

And isn’t that exactly what Washington’s 50-year campaign against Cuba seeks--a defeat at the macro and micro levels of the longest sustained rebellion against all the things which have killed U.S. agriculture, manufacturing, and any sense of an egalitarian culture?  It certainly seems the real goal is the defeat of any U.S. aspirations toward free education, free health care, and affordable, healthy food.   

Seen in this light, the Pastors for Peace 20 year campaign is more of a threat to the U.S. military industrial complex hegemony than: the Freedom Riders gave Bull Connors; Cindy Sheehan gave (and gives) George Bush and his successor, or the Gaza Flotilla gives Israeli and AIPAC buffoons.  

Washington challenged PFP’s resolve in 1993 and 1996 at the border.  Faced with, respectively, a 23-day hunger strike and a 93 day hunger strike, the Clinton Administration backed down and the aid rolled through the checkpoints.  In 1996, the seizure of 400 computers so enraged the European solidarity community that Cuba had received 1400 computers even before Washington finally relented. 

This year’s 100 caravanistas are a nearly equal mix of vetaran blockade breakers and new, young, eager faces. The group’s call and response chant has developed in honor of the 63rd birthday (July 16) and words of Assata Shakur.  The chant rises three times from a whisper to a joyful shout:

“It is our duty to fight!

It is our duty to win!

We must love and protect one another!

We have nothing to lose but our chains!” 

Imagine what U.S. citizens could learn from Cubans about adapting to the new reality staring us down an oil pipeline that is unsustainable in ways practical and moral.  The U.S. endgame oil wars can never end ‘terror’ but they can and are ripping what remains of the ‘American’ social fabric.  Just this month, the figurehead of the party LBJ linked forever with the “War on Poverty” offered to end a central piece of the New Deal.  

Cuba provides a redemptive example.  

Their people can model behavior we already need. The lesson they can teach is how to take care of one another without engaging in cruelty and denial. In Cuba, food rationing during the ‘special period’ after Soviet oil stopped arriving at the island nation was the only thing between Ethiopia-style famine and the new reality of cooperative organic gardens, thinner waistlines, and healthier people. 

That new reality is what Pastors for Peace is hoping to experience in Cuba yet again.  But getting there means leaving from any country other than the U.S.A.. If the caravan members are hassled going or coming, we will know the lessons of Cuba are something Washington doesn’t want explored.  

How interesting that a religious group is behind a political lesson.  As Obery Hendricks explains in “The Politics of jesus: Rediscoving the true revolutionary nature of jesus’ teachings and how they have been corrupted:

“...Although...Jesus explains...that economic injustice will not be vanquished he was not suggesting that the victory will be accomplished by supernatural means.  By highlighting in Matthew 20:13-16 the practice of those in control to isolate and punish spokespersons in order to intimidate workers and discourage them from actively opposing their mistreatment, Jesus demonstrates the need for workers to stand together in solidarity.”

This atheist Caravanista embed notes that the biblical scholar said nothing about borders standing between workers.  

Onward to Tampico!

 

“Imagine!” The Military Industrial Complex Extolled in Upstate New York

        Driving down the mountain to town New Year’s Eve from my house outside Oneonta, I had no idea I would encounter the war machine’s cheerleaders.  I had no idea those cheerleaders included those I consider my ‘liberal’ friends from the local Unitarian Universalist church.   I had merely planned to give my newly adopted guard dog a needed exposure to the non-alcoholic revelers of “First Night.”  I wanted to test his ability to assess threats.  

As I approached an organizational table,  the dog was pulling at his lead less and less often.  Good.  I picked up a printed program.  The event’s admission button logo was at the top. It was pretty.  I couldn’t afford the 15 dollar price tag, so I decided to just hang around the free Main Street area.  The logo was:  2011 Imagine! Oneonta.”  Below that title  was the heading,”REASONS TO BELIEVE:  12 Reasons to Celebrate 2010.”  

But, off to the side, where I’d expected to see the lyrics for John Lennon’s anti-war song, “Imagine”--was something quite incongruent with the event’s title.  In a box was a 1950s cereal box style ‘hero’ article about the event’s Grand Marshal, a young lad named ‘Sergeant Richard McVinney’ who works, it said, in something antiseptically labeled  ‘military intelligence’.  

An unrepentant spy for the U.S. attack on the people of Afghanistan was headlining for an event named for a song written by the murdered husband of local resident Yoko Ono.  He had already served as a role model for the youngsters during the parade that kicked off at 5 p.m..

This event, near as I can tell, was put together chiefly by Korean War veterans and their non-military age cohorts.  The organizer is a friend from my local Unitarian Universalist Church, within which I used to sing in the choir.  Near as I can tell, the organizers are, unfortunately, ignorant of the relatively recent coalescing of anti-war “Winter Soldiers” from the Vietnam and Oil War eras.  

I will detail my conversations with these friends, while juxtasposing the  difference between the missing “Imagine” lyrics with what those who attended Oneonta’s First Night read in the event’s program.  The program’s information will, no doubt, be printed in the local newspaper, which sports a far-right, pro-war, anti-Palestinian, yet award-winning editorialist perspective that increasingly outplays the liberal, anti-war, anti-Zionist perspective you might expect to find in a college town like Oneonta.

The failure to acknowledge John Lennon’s song lyrics at an event which played upon that song’s name as we head into the lame duck period of the Obama presidency is significant:  We live in an empire that is failing due to the quiet acceptance of what former President Dwight Eisenhower called the Military Industrial Complex.  The failure to acknowledge this in a town whose mayor is a former local college president is similarly profound.  But, consider this:  Yoko Ono has a place nearby and is seen periodically frequenting downtown businesses.  The tragedy of this omission becomes more apparent, I believe if we parse out the difference between “Imagine” the song and “Imagine” the First Night program.

Lennon’s “Imagine” lyrics:  

Imagine there's no heaven

It's easy if you try

No hell below us

Above us only sky

Imagine all the people

Living for today

Autobiography of Sgt. Richard McVinney:

I graduated from Oneonta High School in 2002 and the State University at Albany in 2006 with dual Bachelor’s degrees in Sociology and U.S. History.  

Lennon:  

Imagine there’s no countries

It isn’t hard to do

Nothing to kill or die for

Sgt. Richard McVinney:

I enlisted in the Army in October 2008, after graduating from Basic Combat Training at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma and Advanced Individual Training at Goodfellow Air Force Base in San Angelo, Texas.  

I don’t know if Sgt. McVinney got to know the locals in either of the places he listed in the program there.  I know both places, having worked as a television journalist and weekend news director in Lawton, Oklahoma--home to Ft. Sill--and having participated in a Houston Police fundraising bike-ride to San Angelo while news director and morning anchor at a radio station in Houston.  Both Lawton and San Angelo town leaders had long ago surrendered their entire souls to the Military Industrial Complex.  If you’re not a military officer, or doing work for the military installation brass, you don’t have a very high standard of living or very much status in either town.  The lesson to up-and-coming soldiers--go-along-to-get-along in both towns.  I suspect it was much the same on base for Sgt. McVinney.  

Lennon:

And no religion too

Imagine all the people

Living life in peace

Sgt.  Richard McVinney:

I am stationed at Charlie Company, 224th Military Intelligence Battalion (Aerial Exploitation) at Hunter Army Airfield in Savannah, GA.  

Lennon:  

You may say I'm a dreamer

But I'm not the only one

I hope someday you'll join us

And the world will be as one 

Sgt. Richard McVinney:

I was the Battalion Soldier of the Quarter runner-up for the 2nd and 3rd quarters of 2010 before being promoted to the rank of Sergeant on May 1, 2010.

Let me interrupt this little exercise to note:  McVinney ENLISTED, he was not DRAFTED into the military machine after it became widespread knowledge, to those actively seeking such information, that the military was killing and torturing civilians for the LIE that Iraq had anything at all to do with the attacks on the World Trade Center that killed a fraction of the civilians we had, by that point killed in Iraq.  I have not spoken with the young man.  I choose to hope that perhaps he’d bought then-candidate Barack Obama’s promise to close Guantanamo and restore ‘honor’ to our armed forces’ efforts.  I don’t blame him for being ignorant about how he’s being manipulated.  When I worked in the towns that trained him in military ways, he was not yet born.  This was before the FCC’s requirement for nearly hourly radio news in the U.S. was ended,. Before 5,000 local radio news jobs were lost--people who may have played snippets of “Imagine” in newscasts covering anti-war demonstrators that are all but ignored these days.

Lennon:  

Imagine no possessions

I wonder if you can

Sgt. Richard McVinney:  

On May, 2010 I deployed to Kandahar, Afghanistan.  

Apologies for another interruption.  Perhaps Sgt. McVinney was also unaware, when he deployed two years after enlisting, of the fact that military people have an obligation to disobey unlawful orders.  Perhaps he did not know that, two years earlier, soldiers of conscience from the Iraq invasions and occupations had coalesced with Vietnam era “Winter Soldiers” to speak out against the atrocities that were and remain the U.S. military’s standard operating procedures.  These are not shrill ‘anti-veteran‘ peace activists my friend imagined.  The words of my friend, and formerly frequent anti-war source Scott Camil of Gainesville’s Veterans for Peace regarding the Winter Soldier renaissance (available at http://www.vetspeak.org/Article-Camil.html) address this phenomenon most accurately:

“...I was one of the Vietnam Veterans who testified at the first WSI.  I went there supporting the war but believing the public had a right to the truth.   During the course of 3 days, the environment allowed me to grow personally and politically.  During my interviews with the filmmakers, I was asked questions in a non-threatening manner that I had never been asked and had never thought about before.  The process of thinking about the questions and giving honest answers allowed me to come to the realization that the war was wrong. I also made the decision to join with the other veterans there to help turn VVAW into a national organization known as VVAW, Inc. and to work against the war...."  

For 24 years, Camil and the Gainesville VFP chapter have staged a sort of religious event, an anti-war, pro-holiday Winter Solstice Fundraiser.  This year it was at Gainesville’s First Unitarian Universalist Church.  It is, for many of us, a profound, perhaps religious experience.

Sgt. Richard McVinney:  

I was a member of Task Force Odin/Task Force Destiny of the 101st Airborne division, as the Kandahar Intelligence Fusion Center ‘Guardrail‘  Noncommissioned Officer in charge.  

Lennon: 

 No need for greed or hunger

A brotherhood of man

Sgt. Richard McVinney:

The mission of Task Force Odin/Task Force Destiny is “ISR”-Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance.

Lennon:  

Imagine all the people

Sharing all the world

Sgt. Richard McVinney:

I returned from my 6-month deployment on November 10, 2010 and was recognized as (t)he 224th Military Intelligence Battalion (Aerial Exploitation) Noncommissioned Officer of the quarter for the 1st quarter of fiscal year 2011.

Again, let’s stop.  McVinney seems like an honest young lad.  These are honest words.   “Aerial Exploitation” says it all about an illegal war of aggression.  The troubling part is that it’s said without apology.  Also, the fact that the military is taking the fiscal year into account when passing out awards reinforces, for me, the notion that this war,  in particular, is really all about money.  The fact that McVinney graduated at all from Oneonta High during a time of record dropouts tells me he was an achiever at an early age.  I’m thinking Babbit in military fatigues.  I’m wondering if he’ll soon have any regrets.

Lennon:  You may say I'm a dreamer

Sgt. Richard McVinney:

I was also recently nominated for the command Sergeant Major Douglas Russell Award which recognizes outstanding achievement by junior Noncommissioned Officers within the Military Intelligence branch.

Okay, now that little auto-biographical nugget gave me what Ry Cooder calls ‘chicken skin’, because it reminded me of the Washington Post series “Top Secret America.”  If you haven’t read the Dana Priest/Richard Arkin series published this summer, then put it on your New Year’s list of must-reads.  They detail how nearly a million non-government employees have acquired clearance to top secret documents in a time of unprecedented and deep spying upon their fellow Americans.  It’s reminiscent of Sara Diamond’s dissertation turned best-seller of 1989, "Spiritual Warfare: The Politics of the Christian Right."

Before noticing the program or it’s theme, I’d unwittingly committed a gaffe by forgetting that my friend had supported Oneonta’s new ‘military monument walkway’ that, to my mind, limited traffic, parking, and therefore access to the formerly very public, very pro-union, pro-immigration messages in Oneonta’s Neahwa Park.  It’s even more difficult now to get near the replica of the statue of liberty placed by some no-doubt very anxious Italian immigrants.  And it’s even harder than ever to get near the plexi-glass encased little red caboose where the International Brotherhood of Brakemen--forerunner to all train unions had organized in the Oneonta yards.

“Veterans like it, Lisa.  We need to be supportive of them even if we’re against the war.”  Was that my friend talking--a person who’d attended at least two School of the Americas protests?  After praising all the effort her husband had given to First Night, I excused myself for a walk down the cozily closed off Main Street with my dog.  Later, I noticed the program, and gently asked my friend, “Doesn’t this glorify war?  Aren’t we all disgusted and opposed to this mess by now?”  

My friend smiled and reminded me that her husband was a veteran (of Korea).  I objected to being put on the defensive like that.  I smiled back.  “This man,”  I said, pointing to McVinney’s uniformed, beret-wearing, smiling photo, “he’s responsible for the deaths of perhaps untold numbers of Afghanistan residents.”  “Yes,” she said, smiling.  “But, you need to be careful with that, Lisa,”  she said.  I was told that one of the volunteers has a husband ‘hovering’ near death due to shrapnel injuries incurred in--you guessed it--Afghanistan.

Lennon: 

But I'm not the only one

I put my dog back in the car and wandered back to the main stage.  I felt less lonely, and less confused in the crowd that gathered to watch a group of fire-dancing gymnasts.  I offered my phone to a father whose young daughter wanted to stay--she needed to tell her mother they wouldn’t be home before midnight and lacked a cellphone.  Oneonta’s Cosmic Karma fire performers, are, according to their business cards, “fully insured” and, by all appearances, incredibly physically fit.  They dress as anarchist travelling waifs (yet without the politics).  They were quite a contrast to their fleshy, stupid-looking age-cohorts from Job Corps.  The fire workers had the crowd’s attention, but it was the Job Corps kids who were in charge.  

I apparently was the only person alarmed at seeing people monitoring the crowd while wearing army fatigues draped with reflective vests.  My liberal, Korean war era friends and neighbors had organized a superb event.  No doubt the Job Corps ‘police’  had saved the town some dough by freeing up Oneonta’s finest for other tasks.

Cosmic Karma interrupted their show to let a bagpipe and drum troop bumped from a different venue hold forth.   

After the Hobart Fire Department Scottish Band ended a military standard, I hid behind some revelers and yelled, “End the War in Iraq!  End the War in Afghanistan!”   A few people turned around.  No one objected.  But, the current mayor, the former President of Hartwick College (which is where the Harvard crowd sends under-achieving off-spring for a nearly guaranteed degree), moved over to where the noise had erupted.  I briefly adjuncted once at Hartwick when Dick Miller had been in charge.  His honor now looked me up and down.   Yes, I  was the loudmouth.  I later noticed the Korean war era Job Corps supervisor eyeing me.  Hell, I thought, someone needed to speak for peace.  Did the job corps guy suspect it was me?  It was time to get my dog home.   The fireworks were about to start at 10:11 p.m. --nice timing for baby boomers and WW2 babies who love their rack time.  I needed to tell my friends that I’d seen the former Vets for Peace President they know from Sharon Springs, New York.  Maybe then my complaints would resonate and I’d seem less ‘radical’ to them.   Elliot Adams had chained himself by the neck to the White House fence two weeks earlier.  National Public Radio didn’t mention the protest in any cohesive manner.  Scott Camil had called the coverage “a news blackout.”  The ignored event had at least five irresistibly easy news angles :

*Angle 1:  The same Vietnam War medal of honor winners who’d thrown their medals back at Richard Nixon’s White House were now peppering the White House fence with postcards showing a faceless U.S. soldier holding a gun near the face of a screaming little girl.  The toddler was covered in blood.  A caption read:  “This little girl’s family was just killed by U.S. forces.”  A red headline labeled the scene “Peace on Earth?”  and a slight smaller headline, also blood red, said, “This is what your wars do.”  

*Angle 2:  An Afghanistan War report promised by Obama for release later in the day would be other than reality-based.  Veterans for Peace national President Michael Ferner said Obama’s report should be balanced with comments from an IVAW Winter Soldier.  Michael Prysner, who served in Iraq, said that active-duty military in all branches should refuse their orders in these illlegal wars.  He said the real enemy of soldiers is not poor people living in deserts and caves but rich people in America who deny citizens jobs, health care, and education.

The group marched one half block in silent formation after hearing speakers, mainly veterans from the Iraq/Afghanistan Wars and the Vietnam Wars explain how the wars are hurting Afghanistan, American, and Iraq citizens.  

*Angle 3:  Pentagon Papers whistleblower and former Marine Daniel Ellsberg told a crowd of 500 anti-war veterans and their supporters outside the White House that Julian Assange and Bradley Manning should be treated as heroes, not criminals.  Ellsberg joined a group of over 130 people, mainly veterans, but including former FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley and retired CIA analyst and whistleblower Ray McGovern in being arrested for civil disobedience outside the White House fence.

*Angle 4:  At least twenty of the 500 anti-war veterans and supporters outside the White House were from peace groups targeted by what United for Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) organizer Joe Lombardo called a return to McCarthyism by the Obama Justice Department.  Lombardo noted that the number of grand jury subpoenas issued to peaceful anti-war activists in Minneapolis and Chicago is increasing.   He said that Muslim groups UNAC works with have already been told they will also be called before grand juries, and said, the Muslims need protection and support from peace activists.

*Angle 5:  Amid a campaign to persuade President Obama to pardon political prisoner and native people’s activist Leonard Peltier, a spokesman for Friends of Peltier  noted the snowstorm descending upon the anti-war veterans and said that in Indian way, the snow means a time to make new tracks.  “It’s time for Obama to make new tracks, said Delaney Bruce.  She read a statement from Leonard Peltier which called the U.S. Constitution these days just another broken treaty to accompany the 500 plus treaties the U.S. broke with native peoples.

My Oneonta friends hadn’t known about the protest.  How could they--it received no coverage of any length.  CNN gave it 500 words focusing upon Daniel Ellsberg and the Julian Assange ‘debate’ and the Washington Post offered up a photo and a blogger’s opinion piece a day later.  I told him that anti-war veterans from the Vietnam and Iraq/Afghanistan eras said we need to take to the streets to end these wars.  He smiled.  What could he say--in the middle of an event which, like it or not--glorified these wars?  

Perhaps this was an event that the community needed to get its First Night back.  But, did it need to so in such a pro-war manner?  I don’t believe my friends understand the full ramifications of what they did.  After all, there were no anti-Korean war songs allowed on U.S. radio.  In fact, the only anti-Korean War song I’m aware of is David Rovics’ Korea, written in 2004.  I wondered how my friends would receive its lyrics:

Fifty years ago today we stood in rubble

The sun rose each morning through the smoke

Your planes flew above us looking for something left to bomb

Our factories, our schools lied ravaged and broke

And now you wonder why there is this anger

As we remember all too clearly a time that we once knew

When every home and every dam and so many, many people

Were flattened to the ground by the things you had to do

(Chorus)

When Korea was just another name

For bombs falling from the sky

And home was just another word

For this place where people die

Fifty years ago today you killed my mother

I've lived my whole life and I never knew

The love she might have given, the joy she might have felt

To sit in the garden where her grandchildren grew

And now you wonder why we might feel attacked

You wonder at the stand our leaders take

But it was you, I remember, who gave us this lesson

Of the sound of a city when it breaks

(Chorus)

Fifty years ago today you killed my father

He was shooting at your planes when he died

Just one of how many million dead soldiers

Fighting and falling side by side

And now you wonder at what you call an evil axis

You throw words that someday will explode

We remember the last time you said these things

When crater was another word for road

(Chorus)

My friend was never approached by anti war activists in the gentle manner Scott Camil noted was key to his epiphany.  I wondered whether it is too late to approach the Korean war generation--a group which, I’ve noticed in New York and Illinois college towns reflexively accuses today’s anti-war activists of being ‘anti-veteran’ in their first breath.  

Lennon:

I hope someday you'll join us

And the world will live as one

Later, as I lay in bed, the year became 2011.  I reflected upon this year’s Veterans For Peace concert in Gainesville-- ending as it traditionally does with a group-sing of Lennon’s “Imagine.”  That couldn’t happen in Oneonta right now.  I don’t think it could happen in Macomb, Illinois, either.  But, I wondered about another of the more popular songs at the Solstice concert.  It concerns a group of WWI soldiers who realized, during the holiday season, that they were being used as pawns for empire to savage people who were not their enemy for any good reason.  The real enemy was the people who called and supported the war.   

The difference between the Gainesville event produced by Vietnam War era veterans and the one produced by the Oneonta Korean War veterans strikes me as a wide chasm that I am unable to cross right now.  Perhaps this video of “Christmas in the Trenches” will help explain that the ‘enemy’ of the U.S. warrior  and bureaucrat is not the  anti-war activist, but the Military Industrial Complex decried by the man who was president when the cereal boxes extolled ‘manly’ heroes.  I pick this song to highlight, because Imagine came at a time of the evening when voices weren’t their best.  And, the same notion that Lennon wrote and sang about predates him. 

I wish my friends who resurrected First Night peace.  I’ll no doubt lose their friendship and a few others in Oneonta after this is published.

           But, I’ll gain some new ones, I imagine.

This is the link to the Winter Solstice Video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1-nA_LO11g