We Hold These Truths

Regardless of Trump's actual chances to be elected President of the United States, his candidacy offers an opportunity to revisit and restate certain values implicit in the American form of government--or more accurately, forces such an effort.  In particular, it's an opportunity to reclaim from the rabid right a living connection to the Founders and the founding documents of the US.  That connection was eloquently and meaningfully expressed for example, at the end of 1941.

On December 15, 1941, all the radio networks in the US carried an original drama called "We Hold These Truths," to mark the 150th anniversary of the Bill of Rights. The program had been commissioned by the Office of Education and scheduled some time before, but its air date turned out to be just 8 days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and a week after the US officially entered World War II.

All four radio networks carried it simultaneously--the first time that had happened-- probably in part because President Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke at the end of it. It was heard by an estimated 63 million Americans:the largest radio audience on record, almost half the US population at the time.

This one-hour program, included above, is as alive and compelling today as it was in 1941.  Not only because of its excellent production values, but because it speaks to us today, especially in the fog of Trump.

 The on-air talent included Jimmy Stewart (already in uniform), Walter Huston, Lionel Barrymore, Edward G. Robinson and other stars of the day.  New music was written for the program, played by an orchestra conducted by Leopold Stokowski.

But the most important participant was Norman Corwin, its producer and writer.  His name is not much remembered, though he influenced many younger writers and journalists, and was a major influence on these times. Working for CBS radio, he wrote and produced at least 60 programs during the war years, most of them dealing one way or another with the moral issues of the war.  He was called the poet laureate of radio drama for his powers of expression, in a medium that lived on words.

Corwin later recalled the freedom he had working for CBS.  Once a topic was agreed upon, he never had to describe the approach he would take or submit a script in advance.  One assumes this was the case with "We Hold These Truths."

Corwin's work was so esteemed and so popular that several series of his programs bore his name.  His scripts were reprinted in magazines, and his radio plays were adapted into stage plays across America.

In his wartime dramas Corwin returned, over and over, to two primary issues that were on a lot of minds during World War II.  The first had to do with the reasons that soldiers (American and Allies) were fighting and dying..  The second was related--the conviction that this war could not end up being a repeat of World War I in leading to an even worse war in a generation, that it had to end by establishing a lasting peace through universal rights and global cooperation.

In this broadcast, Corwin was connecting the ideas behind the Bill of Rights with the primary aims for Americans fighting World War II.

Despite the fact that a few Founders had speaking parts, "We Hold These Truths" was not a mealy-mouthed historical pageant for radio.  When some of the 13 states refused to ratify the Constitution until a Bill of Rights was added, Congress assembled to produce those ten amendments.  Corwin did not express the reasons for these amendments through the voices of statesmen, let alone lawyers.  He didn't present arguments, explanations, abstractions.  Some of those reasons were expressed in common sense terms by ordinary people, as they did their jobs.  But some weren't expressed in words at all.

They were expressed in cries of pain, moans and screams.  They were expressed on behalf of people garroted, guillotined, lynched, hanged, burned, shot and slaughtered for suspicions and allegiances based on religious belief, political activities, ethnicity and race. In perhaps his boldest move, Corwin included Jesus Christ among these victims, crucified "because rulers didn't allow free speech, executed over an issue of the rights of man."

The most impassioned speech of the program--not at all in the magisterial tones for which he would later be known--was delivered by the young Orson Welles, describing the final result: the Bill of Rights.  In part (uncertainly transcribed from the broadcast) :

"The Congress of the 13 states, instructed by the people of the 13 states, threw up a bulwark, wrote the hope and made a sign for their posterity against the bigots, the fanatics, bullies, lynchers, race haters, the cruel men, the spiteful men, the sneaking men, the pessimists, the men who give up fights that have just begun.  The Congress wrote a ten part epic of amendments."   

This obviously contains contemporary 1941 issues that the Founders wouldn't have expressed in this way. Corwin often railed against the "America First" Nazi sympathizers who saw the Nazis as the wave of the future and opposed the US entering the war (just as he would defend the 'premature anti-Fascists' targeted by Ray Cohn and the 1950s blacklisters), and some of the language is directed at them.  But a lot of it pertains to contemporary 2016 issues, too.

It is well to remember that for all the other reasons and motives unpacked by historians of our age, a guiding impulse in the Bill of Rights was to protect all by protecting everyone against tyranny, and that the "everyone" these rights apply to has broadened to include, by now, just about everyone-- in law if not in practice--225 years after the Bill of Rights.

That broadening process was well underway in 1941, and so it was broadly believed--from FDR to soldiers that Corwin met in the US and abroad--that the US was fighting to defeat tyranny, and the rule of bigotry, race-hating, fanaticism, state bullying and cruelty.  In the modern world, these were represented as the ideology and machinery of Fascism.

In 1941 the US was a country made up largely of immigrants and especially the children and grandchildren of immigrants. There were wide differences between the richest and poorest, urban and rural, and according to regions.  Though the cultures and ethnicities prevalent then didn't include many well represented in 2016, the country was still "multi-cultural," if only because European countries and cultures were more distinct in 1941, with many religious denominations etc. within them.  So universal rights resonated. Equality was crucial.  At the end of this broadcast, FDR used the word "liberty" over and over.

The titanic effort--beyond what most Americans today can even imagine-- to defeat Hitler and Mussolini in World War II was to defeat what they did and would do, to prevent them from imposing racism, state censorship and dictatorship on a conquered America but also to rid the rest of at least western civilization from these threats and this rule.  This was understood as patriotism in 1941, as coming directly from the Founders and the Bill of Rights.

(Of course, it was not understood that way by everyone.  In an essay that accompanies the script of a later program, Corwin references a Republican "smear campaign with nonaccidental anti-Semitic overtones" conducted against a union leader who supported FDR, during World War II.)

So when Trump is likened to Hitler and Mussolini, this is why.  These truths may not be so self-evident these days, but there does seem to be a residual instinct that overrides some political polarization and partisanship when these rights are overtly threatened, by "a racist bully."

Opposition to such Trumpeting is often expressed in political  terms (it offends certain segments of the electorate), or because it's said too bluntly in a socially unacceptable vocabulary and tone.  But the threat behind these words is the same as presented by Fascist governments with their armies in 1941, and the same as policies inflicted on people through the ages by kings and warlords, churches and governments, which motivated the Bill of Rights.  The threat is to human liberty for each and therefore all, and to the commonwealth and the nation as established in the Constitution and its ten epic amendments.

Follow the Money

President Obama spoke to a labor union audience in Toledo on Monday.  He noted how at the GOPer convention, speakers demonized union workers, and especially the unionized government workers, and even more especially, teachers.  But their opposition to unions is not about economics, he said, it's about politics.

More specifically it's about the economics of politics.  Rachel Maddow again made the case that GOPers try to destroy unions and drive down union membership because only the big labor unions can even compete with corporations and the megarich in providing financing to political campaigns.  If GOPers can destroy unions, they destroy the Democratic party.

The numbers drive the policies, but they extend beyond opposing unions.  They help explain GOP virulence against government workers, because with the decline in private sector unions, the public sector is a major source of unionized workers.  GOP governors and legislators have driven the decline in state workers that continues to drag down the employment numbers.  While private sector employment grows, it is offset every month by lost public sector jobs.

There are other ramifications that drive other policies.  Unions (far more than entrepreneurial business) have provided support for newcomers who start low in the labor market to work their way into the middle class.  Unions were crucial to the generations of immigrants who came to America in the first half of the 20th century--like the ones extolled by GOPer convention speakers.  They were Polish, Italian, Irish, etc.  They were the ones who sacrificed, who bled, in the battle to unionize major industries, and eventually they were the ones who benefited--along with their descendants now in suburbia.

GOPers continue to oppose unions even in those older industries (opposition that President Eisenhower said in the 1950s was "stupid") and even rolling back hard-won union rights and programs. 

But those industries have declined, and unions have declined for jobs now held by those former ethnics--now simply identified and self-identified as white people.  Unions have again become crucial to those comparatively fewer workers who start at the bottom, who now come from different countries, and are classified racially as African American, Latino and Asian.

There's another component to this.  While many unions championed civil rights, and equal hiring rights, it has been the public sector that has provided jobs without prejudice based on race, gender or partner preference.  That's partly because of Civil Service and other means that make qualifications strictly based on exam results or other measures of merit.  But it also because those public sector unions are the most diversified, with a higher proportion of women and racial and other minorities. 

So in attacking immigrants (meaning principally Latinos), attacking women's rights and harking back to a time when women were necessarily more dependent, and even attacking public education itself, the GOP is trying to deny the Democrats the means to sustain itself as a party, financially and otherwise, while appeasing its incredibly shrinking base.

Longterm it's a losing strategy, unless the GOP can lock up the process now, with unlimited money and official voter suppression.  In the now, it is cruel, biased, cynical and ultimately harmful not only to the people under attack, but to the country as a whole, and the country's future. 

In pursuing these policies, the GOP is helping to drive U.S. education, health care, income mobility, etc. down further and further in the ranks of the industrialized nations.  The U.S. is losing competitive ground because of this, and because the GOP privileges its fossils and their fossil fuel industries over the industries of the future that other countries are very busy developing, and creating a perhaps insurmountable lead.  By going so far as to deny the science of the climate crisis, GOPers are wounding the world's future--which they may be surprised to learn necessarily includes the U.S.--and specifically destroying this country's unique ability to lead, or even to participate.

All so some billionaires can hug their money tighter, pile it higher, and provide themselves with fancier graves.            

Ripples of Hope: RFK in Capetown June 6, 1966

June 6 is an important date in the history of Robert F. Kennedy, for two reasons. I will emphasize the first: June 6, 1966.

Partly for his support of independence movements in Africa as U.S. Attorney-General, and partly because of President John F. Kennedy’s opposition to South Africa’s racist policies, Robert F. Kennedy—then junior Senator from New York—was invited to speak at the annual Day of Affirmation held by the National Union of South African Students, an organization dedicated to the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Kennedy’s acceptance set off a domestic firestorm in the U.S. William Loeb, publisher of the right-wing newspaper, the Manchester Union Leader in New Hampshire, wrote:

“Bobby Kennedy is the most vicious and most dangerous leader in the United States today. It would make no more sense to us for South Africa to admit Bobby Kennedy...than it would to take a viper into one’s bed.”

Loeb’s editorial reminds us that right wing vituperation is not new. It also reminds me of something Robert Kennedy said on another occasion: “What is objectionable, what is dangerous about extremists, is not that they are extreme, but that they are intolerant. The evil is not what they say about their cause, but what they say about their opponents.”

Lyndon Johnson’s White House also opposed the trip. LBJ considered RFK a dangerous political rival. Though the white South African government granted RFK a visa, no government ministers would greet him. The government especially disapproved of the organization he would address, and two weeks before he arrived, the head of NUSAS was banned from political and social activity for five years. Visas to 40 U.S. print and TV reporters requesting to cover the event were denied.

RFK and his entourage landed in Johannesburg, South Africa on June 4, 1966. A loud, demonstrative crowd was at the airport, part of it protesting his presence, part of it welcoming him.

During his several days in South Africa, RFK met with or spoke to a number of groups, and he was typically forthright. He met with white businessmen in Pretoria, who justified apartheid and authoritarian rule because they were “beleaguered” by the majority black population. RFK wondered who was more beleaguered—the businessmen smoking cigars and sipping brandy after dinner, or the now-banned Ian Robertson, head of NUSAS, or the famed writer Alan Paton, whose passport was revoked because of his opposition to apartheid, or Albert Lutili, then president of the African National Congress and winner of the 1960 Nobel Peace Prize, who was confined to the immediate vicinity of his rural home.

(During his trip, RFK met with each of them: Robertson, Paton and Lutili.)

He spoke to a group of white university students, and asked them why blacks weren’t allowed to vote or to worship in their churches. “What the hell would you do if you found out that God is black?”

Before an audience of 10,000 at the University of Natal, RFK observed, “Maybe there is a black man outside this room who is brighter than anyone in this room. The chances are that there are many.”

At another university he faced a questioner who claimed that blacks were too barbarous to be given political power. RFK responded:

“It was not the black man in Africa who invented and used poison gas and the atomic bomb, who sent six million men and women and children to the gas ovens, and used their bodies as fertilizer.”

RFK went to Soweto, the black township, and spoke several times, standing atop his car, on the steps of a church, in a school playground. In another city, he stopped to be greeted by a group of Africans, and sang “We Shall Overcome” with them.

His popularity, particularly with young South Africans—of all races—increased daily on his visit. His presence energized and encouraged the anti-apartheid movement. Once he left, the South African government would not permit him to return. He was called a Communist, as he also was by some in the U.S.

But the highlight of the trip was the address he was invited to give, which some believe is his greatest speech. He spoke to a young audience of some 15,000 on the Day of Affirmation: June 6, 1966.

He began by talking about a country:

"settled by the Dutch in the mid-seventeenth century, then taken over by the British, and at last independent; a land in which the native inhabitants were at first subdued, but relations with whom remain a problem to this day; a land which defined itself on a hostile frontier; a land which has tamed rich natural resources through the energetic application of modern technology; a land which once the importer of slaves, and now must struggle to wipe out the last traces of that former bondage."

And then employing the humorous but meaningful irony so characteristic of JFK and RFK (and their speechwriters), he said:

"I refer, of course, to the United States of America."

But this was not simply a rhetorical ploy, for this was a description of South African as well as American history. Throughout the first part of his speech, he continued to describe the American ideals of racial equality, and the difficulties America historically had in living up to them. In explaining those ideals, his audience naturally applied them to their own country.

For example, he spoke about freedom of speech, but also “the power to be heard, to share in the decisions of government which shape men’s lives....
Therefore, the essential humanity of man can be protected and preserved only where government must answer -- not just to the wealthy, not just to those of a particular religion, not just to those of a particular race, but to all of the people."

He related the struggle of African Americans in America to other prejudices, felt by immigrants including his own ancestors:

"Even as my father grew up in Boston, Massachusetts, signs told him: "No Irish Need Apply." Two generations later President Kennedy became the first Irish Catholic, and the first Catholic, to head the nation; but how many men of ability had, before 1961, been denied the opportunity to contribute to the nation's progress because they were Catholic or because they were of Irish extraction? How many sons of Italian or Jewish or Polish parents slumbered in the slums -- untaught, unlearned, their potential lost forever to our nation and to the human race? Even today, what price will we pay before we have assured full opportunity to millions of Negro Americans? "

He praised Martin Luther King, and the goal of non-violent social change. He talked about historical and contemporary evils, and issued a call to conscience:

"These are different evils, but they are the common works of man. They reflect the imperfections of human justice, the inadequacy of human compassion, the defectiveness of our sensibility toward the sufferings of our fellows; they mark the limit of our ability to use knowledge for the well-being of our fellow human beings throughout the world. And therefore they call upon common qualities of conscience and indignation, a shared determination to wipe away the unnecessary sufferings of our fellow human beings at home and around the world."


He then made this directly relevant to his audience, the youth of South Africa:

"It is these qualities which make of our youth today the only true international community. More than this, I think that we could agree on what kind of a world we would all want to build. It would be a world of independent nations, moving toward international community, each of which protected and respected the basic human freedoms. It would be a world which demanded of each government that it accept its responsibility to insure social justice. It would be a world of constantly accelerating economic progress -- not material welfare as an end in/of itself, but as a means to liberate the capacity of every human being to pursue his talents and to pursue his hopes. It would, in short, be a world that we would all be proud to have built."

He sharpened the message:

"Our answer is the world's hope: It is to rely on youth. The cruelties and the obstacles of this swiftly changing planet will not yield to obsolete dogmas and outworn slogans. It cannot be moved by those who cling to a present which is already dying, who prefer the illusion of security to the excitement and danger which comes with even the most peaceful progress.

This world demands the qualities of youth; not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the life of ease..."

But by having talked so much about America, he also blunted the criticism that he was urging another country to realize ideals that his own people had not fully met. The rest of his speech instead was about making common cause with everyone working for social and political justice. It was about how to create change:

"Few will have the greatness to bend history, but each of us can work to change a small portion of the events, and then the total -- all of these acts -- will be written in the history of this generation."

After noting the examples of the Peace Corps and the Resistance to the Nazis in Europe, he said this, the most-quoted part of the speech:

"It is from numberless diverse acts of courage such as these that the belief that human history is thus shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance."

But there was more. In a few words he defined the true Kennedy legacy, the necessary fusion of ideals and realism to create a better future:

"The second danger is that of expediency: of those who say that hopes and beliefs must bend before immediate necessities. Of course, if we must act effectively, we must deal with the world as it is. We must get things done. But if there was one thing that President Kennedy stood for that touched the most profound feeling of young people around the world, it was the belief that idealism, high aspirations, and deep convictions are not incompatible with the most practical and efficient of programs -- that there is no basic inconsistency between ideals and realistic possibilities, no separation between the deepest desires of heart and of mind and the rational application of human effort to human problems.

It is not realistic or hardheaded to solve problems and take action unguided by ultimate moral aims and values, although we all know some who claim that it is so. In my judgment, it is thoughtless folly. For it ignores the realities of human faith and of passion and of belief -- forces ultimately more powerful than all of the calculations of our economists or of our generals. Of course to adhere to standards, to idealism, to vision in the face of immediate dangers takes great courage and takes self-confidence. But we also know that only those who dare to fail greatly, can ever achieve greatly.

It is this new idealism which is also, I believe, the common heritage of a generation which has learned that while efficiency can lead to the camps at Auschwitz, or the streets of Budapest, only the ideals of humanity and love can climb the hills of the Acropolis. "

Rising to the challenge, in July 1966 the National Union of South African Students came out explicitly against apartheid.

This was June 6, 1966. Two years later to the day, Robert F. Kennedy died from wounds inflicted by an assasin’s bullet two days before. He had just won the California primary for the U.S. presidency in 1968. He would be going to the Democratic convention in Chicago with the most votes, but not yet enough to assure the nomination. Looking tired and a little haunted, he ended his victory speech with the exhortation, “Now on to Chicago, and let’s win there,” flashing a peace sign and the Kennedy smile.

But before this exhortation, his last public words that night of June 4, 1966 were these: “We are a great country, an unselfish country and a compassionate country. And I intend to make that my basis for running."

[A version of this was on the rescued list at Daily Kos.]

Shut It Down

"Few people would have imagined the U.S. government, even in the pursuit of national security, would ignore basic human rights principles by holding hundreds of men indefinitely without due process or the rule of law," a spokeswoman for Amnesty International said. "It is time to close Guantanamo and return America to leading the world on human rights again."

"The rules that were used to put them there have not been rescinded by the United States. They are still in place," Katherine Newell Bierman, Human Rights Watch counter-terrorism counsel, told Reuters. "I don't think any government should have that much power to act on a whim. They can make mistakes, they can do things that are flat out wrong," said Newell Bierman, who is writing a report on Guantanamo's operations.

Eat My Idealism

Anyone who advocates for elements of a better future, whether real (in the present, somewhere) or as yet only imagined, risks being called utopian, idealistic, new agey, not to mention pitifully deluded. Holding hands and singing Kumbayah seems to be the insult of the age. But in fact advocating for a better future is utterly pragmatic. If we don't make civilization better, if we don't get better ourselves, civilization is doomed, and soon.

Not everyone accepts this premise, and frankly, a lot of people don't care. They're so disenchanted with things as they are (even if they repress that despair by adopting "survival-of-the-greediest and most violent" views that would scandalize Social Darwinists) that they'd probably welcome the end of civilization. Given the decadent state of things, many of us have those kinds of feelings. But a few minutes contemplation of all the innocent suffering that might entail, and all the needless waste of the sacrifices made, should bring us back to trying our best.

What is additionally interesting is that some of the most "idealistic" attempts to make things better come from people who've endured more than most hardnosed pragmatic critics, in parts of the world where suffering is far worse and more widespread than nearly anywhere in North America, at least for now.

So when a real, large-scale effort to make healthy food a right, and to make that right real, comes from Brazil, it doesn't require a Vangelis soundtrack. Six years ago, activists in the fourth largest city in Brazil declared that right, and now it is becoming a widespread reality.

Their innovations, coordinated by a new city office of food security, range from twenty-five fair-price produce stands supplied by local farmers to open-air restaurants serving 12,000 subsidized meals daily to city-sponsored radio broadcasts leading shoppers to the lowest-priced essentials.

These and many more city-led initiatives to end hunger consume only 1 percent of Belo's budget, but they're working. Hard evidence is the city's infant death rate, a widely accepted measure of hunger, which fell an astonishing 56 percent over the first decade of these efforts. Belo's approach has inspired multiple right-to-food initiatives nationwide as part of President Lula's Zero Hunger Program.

As author Francis Moore Lappe reminds us, the UN Declaration of Human Rights made access to food a human right in 1948. International efforts to make it real in the 90s and so far in this century have resulted in, among other things, 187 nations signing on to voluntary plans and "twenty-two countries have enshrined the right to food in their constitutions, either for all citizens or specifically for children."

The nasty, brutish secret is that it's long been possible to feed the world, to eradicate poverty, end the diseases that kill and maim the most people in the world, and to do so with little inconvenience, let alone sacrifice, by the comparatively rich, and with less ecological destruction than is now visited upon the planet. Safe drinking water for all is also possible, if somewhat more difficult, and with some lead time and a lot of organization, so is adequate energy. But food, water and minimal preventive health care plus a few inexpensive medicines are supremely possible, and would make a vast difference.

The rest of Lappe's piece is about the real politik realization of these universal rights, which involves political power. Hunger strikes for food may be necessary, but that doesn't make them any less absurd. There is no point in arguing about whether we can get better, only whether we should. And if we should, then we try to figure out how to proceed. And proceed.

Billions to Billionares? This Time Maybe a Good Thing

Before his excellent chat with Al Gore on the Climate Crisis, Jon Stewart and Melissa Bee of the Daily Show had some fun with the announcement that Warren Buffett is donating $31 billion to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It sounds so preposterous to begin with, it hardly needs skilled embellishment to get a laugh: one of the richest humans alive who is not Bill Gates decides to give away a huge fortune, who does he give it to? Bill Gates.

But I watched Bill and Melinda Gates with Warren Buffett on the Charlie Rose show, and I have to say it actually makes a lot of sense. So say what you will about Bill Gates and his empire, or Buffett and his investments, or even Charlie getting so cosy with corporate titans, I have to give these people their props. The Gates Foundation is doing good work, work that no one else is doing, and they're doing it well.

Their work is split between world health and U.S. education. In the poorest areas of the world, they target AIDS and diseases and conditions that kill and maim millions of people, mainly children, that are the result of poverty. Because the victims are almost exclusively poor people in poor places, drug companies have no profit incentive to develop medicines and vaccines. The Gates Foundation works with drug companies, governments and other nonprofits, not to just throw money at problems, but to solve those problems.

Among their domestic educational efforts is the support of public libraries. They must have foreseen the rolling eyes this might inspire: shades of Andrew Carnegie and using ill-gotten gains for some symbolic and self-aggrandizing philanthopy, instead of paying workers a living wage. Aside from the other side of this argument (that millions of workers' sons and daughters started on the road to knowledge and a better life in thousands of Carnegie libraries), it is a brave act to set yourself up for that kind of criticism with such an apparent parallel. But more than in any time since Carnegie's bequests jump-started the idea as well as reality of public libraries in America, these valuable institutions in every community really need the help just to survive.

And Mr. & Mrs. Gates don't just sign checks or hold meetings in their Home of Tomorrow. They go where the aid goes, to work out the best way to deliver it, to see if it is working . Once again, it's easy to make fun of wealthy celebs who get their photos taken with starving babies in their arms, but there is a real tradition of this kind of work--I think of Ingrid Bergman as well as Angelina Jolie--and it does help in many ways. But it sounds like the Gates are doing more than photo ops, and more often. It makes me wonder, who among us would really go back to the poorest parts of Bangladesh repeatedly? How many of us would go even once?

So check out the Foundation's site. Buffett's 31 billions (or however much it turns out to be, since Buffett said a bunch of it is in stocks) will at least be well spent to build a better future, which is more than we can say for the billions Bush and his buddies are burning.

San Diego demonstration today.

Defiance at Maximum Security High

Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Roy Romer Tuesday declared all high schools in the district on "lockdown," which a newspaper (the NewStandard) pointed out is "a term originating in and usually limited to the prison industry."

Nevertheless, over 8,500 students walked out in Los Angeles County alone - thousands more joined walk outs in neighboring Riverside, Orange and San Diego Counties. Thousands of other students in the Bay area, as well as Nevada, Arizona, Utah and Texas have also left school in protest. When the lockdown proved more effective in LA high schools, grade school students started walking out in protest.

These were among the growing protests against the Republican immigration bills in Congress. All demonstrations, including the largest ever seen in Los Angeles, have been peaceful. But students report being roughed up in their own high schools by police in riot gear.

Meanwhile, Homeland Security is putting the finishing touches on its immigrant detention centers on U.S. soil, where entire families may be sent, for the first time since foreign nationals, immigrants and native-born Americans of Japanese and Italian extraction were imprisoned in North America during World War II.

This is the future according to Bush and his corporate dictatorship.

Protest demonstrations are planned in other U.S. cities in the coming days and weeks.

Make It News

All doom and gloom around here, never any good news? Well, sometimes you have to make the good news.

Half a million (by conservative police estimate) did in Los Angeles Saturday. They marched in protest to the laws Republicans are proposing on immigration, including a provision that would make it a felony for anyone to feed the hungry if they happened to be illegal immigrants. This racist law is also the latest manifestation of Republican class warfare. People have marched against it in Chicago, Phoenix and other cities, but it took the sight of at least 500,000 in Los Angeles---the largest protest in southern CA history---to get the media's attention.

Half a million march against GOP immigration bill in Los Angeles Saturday.

Among other outrages, the bill would make
helping your neighbor a crime, if you help a
family found illegal.

Perspectives

Nobel Literature Prize Speech: The Search For Truth Can Never Stop

from Nobel Prize Speech by Harold Pinter

In 1958 I wrote the following: 'There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.'

I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?

Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The search is your task. More often than not you stumble upon the truth in the dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or a shape which seems to correspond to the truth, often without realising that you have done so.

But the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.

I have often been asked how my plays come about. I cannot say. Nor can I ever sum up my plays, except to say that this is what happened. That is what they said. That is what they did.
Most of the plays are engendered by a line, a word or an image. The given word is often shortly followed by the image. I shall give two examples of two lines which came right out of the blue into my head, followed by an image, followed by me.

I always start a play by calling the characters A, B and C. It's a strange moment, the moment of creating characters who up to that moment have had no existence. What follows is fitful, uncertain, even hallucinatory, although sometimes it can be an unstoppable avalanche.

The author's position is an odd one. In a sense he is not welcomed by the characters. The characters resist him, they are not easy to live with, they are impossible to define. You certainly can't dictate to them. To a certain extent you play a never-ending game with them, cat and mouse, blind man's buff, hide and seek. But finally you find that you have people of flesh and blood on your hands, people with will and an individual sensibility of their own, made out of component parts you are unable to change, manipulate or distort.

So language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you, the author, at any time.

But as I have said, the search for the truth can never stop. It cannot be adjourned, it cannot be postponed. It has to be faced, right there, on the spot.

Political theatre presents an entirely different set of problems. Sermonising has to be avoided at all cost. Objectivity is essential. The characters must be allowed to breathe their own air. The author cannot confine and constrict them to satisfy his own taste or disposition or prejudice. He must be prepared to approach them from a variety of angles, from a full and uninhibited range of perspectives, take them by surprise, perhaps, occasionally, but nevertheless give them the freedom to go which way they will. This does not always work. And political satire, of course, adheres to none of these precepts, in fact does precisely the opposite, which is its proper function.

Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of this territory since the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.

As every single person here knows, the justification for the invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein possessed a highly dangerous body of weapons of mass destruction, some of which could be fired in 45 minutes, bringing about appalling devastation. We were assured that was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq had a relationship with Al Quaeda and shared responsibility for the atrocity in New York of September 11th 2001. We were assured that this was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq threatened the security of the world. We were assured it was true. It was not true.

The truth is something entirely different. The truth is to do with how the United States understands its role in the world and how it chooses to embody it.

Everyone knows what happened in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe during the post-war period: the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought. All this has been fully documented and verified.

But my contention here is that the US crimes in the same period have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognised as crimes at all. I believe this must be addressed and that the truth has considerable bearing on where the world stands now. Although constrained, to a certain extent, by the existence of the Soviet Union, the United States' actions throughout the world made it clear that it had concluded it had carte blanche to do what it liked.

Direct invasion of a sovereign state has never in fact been America's favoured method. In the main, it has preferred what it has described as 'low intensity conflict'. Low intensity conflict means that thousands of people die but slower than if you dropped a bomb on them in one fell swoop. It means that you infect the heart of the country, that you establish a malignant growth and watch the gangrene bloom. When the populace has been subdued – or beaten to death – the same thing – and your own friends, the military and the great corporations, sit comfortably in power, you go before the camera and say that democracy has prevailed. This was a commonplace in US foreign policy in the years to which I refer.

The tragedy of Nicaragua was a highly significant case. I choose to offer it here as a potent example of America's view of its role in the world, both then and now.

The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.

Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn't know it.
It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them.

You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

The United States no longer bothers about low intensity conflict. It no longer sees any point in being reticent or even devious. It puts its cards on the table without fear or favour. It quite simply doesn't give a damn about the United Nations, international law or critical dissent, which it regards as impotent and irrelevant. It also has its own bleating little lamb tagging behind it on a lead, the pathetic and supine Great Britain.

What has happened to our moral sensibility? Did we ever have any? What do these words mean? Do they refer to a term very rarely employed these days – conscience? A conscience to do not only with our own acts but to do with our shared responsibility in the acts of others? Is all this dead?

Look at Guantanamo Bay. Hundreds of people detained without charge for over three years, with no legal representation or due process, technically detained forever. This totally illegitimate structure is maintained in defiance of the Geneva Convention. It is not only tolerated but hardly thought about by what's called the 'international community'.

This criminal outrage is being committed by a country, which declares itself to be 'the leader of the free world'. Do we think about the inhabitants of Guantanamo Bay? What does the media say about them? They pop up occasionally – a small item on page six. They have been consigned to a no man's land from which indeed they may never return.

At present many are on hunger strike, being force-fed, including British residents. No niceties in these force-feeding procedures. No sedative or anaesthetic. Just a tube stuck up your nose and into your throat. You vomit blood. This is torture. What has the British Foreign Secretary said about this? Nothing. What has the British Prime Minister said about this? Nothing. Why not? Because the United States has said: to criticise our conduct in Guantanamo Bay constitutes an unfriendly act. You're either with us or against us. So Blair shuts up.

The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law. The invasion was an arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public; an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading – as a last resort – all other justifications having failed to justify themselves – as liberation. A formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands and thousands of innocent people.

We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it 'bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East'.

How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought.

Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice.

Death in this context is irrelevant. Both Bush and Blair place death well away on the back burner. At least 100,000 Iraqis were killed by American bombs and missiles before the Iraq insurgency began. These people are of no moment. Their deaths don't exist. They are blank. They are not even recorded as being dead. 'We don't do body counts,' said the American general Tommy Franks.

Early in the invasion there was a photograph published on the front page of British newspapers of Tony Blair kissing the cheek of a little Iraqi boy. 'A grateful child,' said the caption. A few days later there was a story and photograph, on an inside page, of another four-year-old boy with no arms. His family had been blown up by a missile. He was the only survivor. 'When do I get my arms back?' he asked. The story was dropped.

Well, Tony Blair wasn't holding him in his arms, nor the body of any other mutilated child, nor the body of any bloody corpse. Blood is dirty. It dirties your shirt and tie when you're making a sincere speech on television.

The 2,000 American dead are an embarrassment. They are transported to their graves in the dark. Funerals are unobtrusive, out of harm's way. The mutilated rot in their beds, some for the rest of their lives. So the dead and the mutilated both rot, in different kinds of graves.

Here is an extract from a poem by Pablo Neruda, 'I'm Explaining a Few Things':

And one morning all that was burning,
one morning the bonfires
leapt out of the earth
devouring human beings
and from then on fire,
gunpowder from then on,
and from then on blood.
Bandits with planes and Moors,
bandits with finger-rings and duchesses,
bandits with black friars spattering blessings
came through the sky to kill children
and the blood of children ran through the streets
without fuss, like children's blood.
Jackals that the jackals would despise
stones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out,
vipers that the vipers would abominate.

The United States possesses 8,000 active and operational nuclear warheads. Two thousand are on hair trigger alert, ready to be launched with 15 minutes warning. It is developing new systems of nuclear force, known as bunker busters. The British, ever cooperative, are intending to replace their own nuclear missile, Trident. Who, I wonder, are they aiming at? Osama bin Laden? You? Me? Joe Dokes? China? Paris? Who knows? What we do know is that this infantile insanity – the possession and threatened use of nuclear weapons – is at the heart of present American political philosophy. We must remind ourselves that the United States is on a permanent military footing and shows no sign of relaxing it.

Many thousands, if not millions, of people in the United States itself are demonstrably sickened, shamed and angered by their government's actions, but as things stand they are not a coherent political force – yet. But the anxiety, uncertainty and fear which we can see growing daily in the United States is unlikely to diminish.

A writer's life is a highly vulnerable, almost naked activity. We don't have to weep about that. The writer makes his choice and is stuck with it. But it is true to say that you are open to all the winds, some of them icy indeed. You are out on your own, out on a limb. You find no shelter, no protection – unless you lie – in which case of course you have constructed your own protection and, it could be argued, become a politician.

Captain Future's Log

Resurgent Racism

Apparently touched off by events surrounding the catastrophe in New Orleans, a sudden and alarming firestorm of resurgent racism is raging. Several prominent Republicans have made racist statements in just the past few days, and there is growing evidence that stories of violence in New Orleans were exaggerated, and apparently believed because of racist assumptions.

On Wednesday, the right wing morals czar Bill Bennett said on his radio show, , "I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime you could - if that were your sole purpose - you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down." While this would be morally reprehensible, he added, it would have that effect.

On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal printed an oped piece by Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve, which repeated racist stereotypes about African Americans as shiftless and criminal, “looters and thugs,” and referred to black women in New Orleans as “inert women doing nothing to help themselves or their children.”

But an oped that no one would print was by historian Rick Perlstein, which maintained that tales of rampant violence in New Orleans were inflated versions of the same racist tales that followed earlier hurricane disasters in that city. “That struck me as an important topic, the sort of thing we keep historians around for, but clearly the nation's op-ed page editors thought hysteria and reawakened racism were better for circulation,” says the American Prospect blog. (Blogger Atrios also weighed in on this story.)

Yet on Thursday, the New York Times printed a front page story headlined “Fear Exceeded Crime’s Reality in New Orleans.” The story said, “In an interview last week with The New York Times, Superintendent Compass said that some of his most shocking statements turned out to be untrue. Asked about reports of rapes and murders, he said: ‘We have no official reports to document any murder. Not one official report of rape or sexual assault.’

While there was some violence and some looting (some by police officers), the Times concluded as Louisiana papers had that rumor and the propensity to believe that blacks would engage in large-scale savagery fueled the rumors into gaudy stories that became accepted as fact by major news media.

The fact that in the early 21st century such racism is still so prominent is more than shocking. It is a threat to all of us. As African Americans know all too well, as long as other races are afraid and ready to believe that they are violent criminals, all African Americans are in danger of preemptive violence. Any violence invariably involves innocent bystanders and threatens the civic order.

That after decades of people of all races working side by side in every profession and job, the racial stereotypes propounded by Murray and his ilk are astonishing, but they also clearly threaten all of us. They drive a wedge between us---a politically useful wedge, because once We are separated from Them, then We are easy marks for contributions to candidates who will protect Us against Them.

The growing divide between rich and poor in America adds even more fear. The working poor are the service workers of the tourism and hotel industry in New Orleans, for example, but their lives outside of their smiling subservience are invisible to the likes of Murray and Bennett. Nor does it matter much to them or their theories that the majority of poor are white.

Last week, columnist Paul Krugman asked why every European country has provided health care for all its citizens, and the U.S. has not. His answer was startling: because the European countries are largely one race, and it is easier for them to identify with others who can’t afford expensive care---except for circumstances, they might be that person. But in America, the health care crisis is perceived to be a problem for primarily the poor, conceptualized by comparatively rich whites as black people, and therefore not people they identify with---not Us. But Them.

There are holes in his argument, but just enough substance to be striking and apt. Who gets to be one of Us is very important in America. And race is undoubtedly a factor.

Though it is not yet mentioned very much, it could well be a factor in Iraq. In Vietnam, the racial component was overt---The enemy were not only Communists, they were slopes, the 60s equivalent of slanty-eyes, or Asian. Now the term for the Evil Doers is “Muslim” but it’s clear from racial incidents that targeted anyone with dark hair and darker than fair skin after 9-11 that there is a racist component, even if coded this time.

Maybe that component is part of what makes it so apparently easy for American soldiers and mercenaries to objectify prisoners in Iraq and Guantanamo, to commit tortures and dehumanize people to produce the kind of pictures from Abu Ghirab that the U.S. government went to great lengths to suppress, but which a judge ruled Thursday must be made public.

There is no question of excusing violence, or evading reality. There is the revelation of hidden racism---the jumping to conclusions, giving credibility for stories of violence based on race-- that has now become public. That prominent Republicans are promulgating it now is perhaps a sign of their desperation, either losing their control or as a cynical exploitation of their true believers, making sure that although their support is diminishing, that the core supporters stay---that it’s very clear who is Us and who is Them.

We have a lot of work to do just to begin meeting the challenges of the future. But if we don't become truly We, if we can't accept diversity and deal with its ordinary or temporary difficulties, we will self-destruct, and lose the survival value of more perspectives, as well as much intelligence, strength, wisdom, beauty---so much of who We are.

Widespread Hunger Strike at Guantánamo

By NEIL A. LEWIS New York Times [excerpts, emphasis added]

A hunger strike at the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has unsettled senior commanders there and produced the most serious challenge yet to the military's effort to manage the detention of hundreds of terrorism suspects, lawyers and officials say.

As many as 200 prisoners - more than a third of the camp - have refused food in recent weeks to protest conditions and prolonged confinement without trial, according to the accounts of lawyers who represent them. While military officials put the number of those participating at 105, they acknowledge that 20 of them, whose health and survival are being threatened, are being kept at the camp's hospital and fed through nasal tubes and sometimes given fluids intravenously.

One law enforcement official who has been fully briefed on the events at Guantánamo said senior military officials had grown increasingly worried about their capability to control the situation. A senior military official, also speaking on the condition of anonymity, described the situation as greatly troublesome for the camp's authorities and said they had tried several ways to end the hunger strike, without success.

The comments of the officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity, probably because their accounts conflict with the more positive descriptions in official military accounts, generally mirrored the statements of lawyers for the detainees, who have received their information from face-to-face interviews with their clients.

Clive Stafford Smith, a British lawyer for several of the detainees, said he was visiting some of his clients in August when the most recent strike began. He said that a detainee, Omar Deghayes, told him that the strike was largely to protest their long imprisonment without being charged with any crime as well as the conditions of their confinement.

He said that Mr. Deghayes, a Libyan who has lived in London, told him: "Look, I'm dying a slow death in this place as it is. I don't have any hope of fair treatment, so what have I got to lose?"

Captain Future's Log

Bye, Bye Times Columnists

We come not to bury the New York Times columnists but to praise them. Well, some of them.

But though we praise we also bid a fond farewell. The Times columnists are disappearing as we speak behind the veil of a $49.95 a year subscription fee ($39.95 if you act today! And I do mean today!)

The Captain considered coughing up the dough. But the price is high, and seems even higher when it includes paying for celebrated columnist you don't want. It's too much like cable TV. Since health insurance is unaffordable, and gasoline is getting there, this seems not a hard decision. If a sad one.

I might even pay something if there was some choice-- a menu system, for instance. Paul Krugman is the closest to being essential. It's nice to read Frank Rich summing things up on Sunday. I'd be happy to select Bob Herbert, Nicholas Kristof and John Tierney.

But I refuse to pay for the easy arrogance of Thomas Friedman; I'll contentedly skim David Brooks for free but exercise my right under capitalism to refuse to pay for it, and even though I might agree fairly often with Maureen Dowd's politics, I can't stand the idea of reading her column, and I have not done so for years. So contributing to her upkeep with additional funds is out of the question.

So I bid farewell, at least until this particular experiment in cable net journalism fails, with a few excerpts from the Last Free Columns we poor folks will see.

From Frank Rich (I'll provide the link, but hurry!), writing about Bush and the week in Katrina zone:

Like his father before him, Mr. Bush has squandered the huge store of political capital he won in a war. His Thursday-night invocation of "armies of compassion" will prove as worthless as the "thousand points of light" that the first President Bush bestowed upon the poor from on high in New Orleans (at the Superdome, during the 1988 G.O.P. convention). It will be up to other Republicans in Washington to cut through the empty words and image-mongering to demand effective action from Mr. Bush on the Gulf Coast and in Iraq, if only because their own political lives are at stake.

It's up to Democrats, though they show scant signs of realizing it, to step into the vacuum and propose an alternative to a fiscally disastrous conservatism that prizes pork over compassion. If the era of Great Society big government is over, the era of big government for special interests is proving a fiasco. Especially when it's presided over by a self-styled C.E.O. with a consistent three-decade record of running private and public enterprises alike into a ditch.

What comes next? Having turned the page on Mr. Bush, the country hungers for a vision that is something other than either liberal boilerplate or Rovian stagecraft. At this point, merely plain old competence, integrity and heart might do.


And here is Nicholas Kristof doing what these columnists do best: highlighting an outrage that got by everybody else. In this case, Bushcorps adding to its astonishing record of denying global warming (and forcing others to do so), refusing to sign a nuclear proliferation treaty (and destroying this year's conference), and refusing to be subject to the International Court and other tribunals, effectively shortcircuiting the international rule of law.

This time they've almost outdone themselves. They've refused to condemn genocide.

Here's Kristof:

President Bush doesn't often find common cause with Cuba, Zimbabwe, Iran, Syria and Venezuela. But this month the Bush administration joined with those countries and others to eviscerate a forthright U.N. statement that nations have an obligation to respond to genocide.

It was our own Axis of Medieval, and it reflected the feckless response of President Bush to genocide in Darfur. It's not that he favors children being tossed onto bonfires or teenage girls being gang-raped and mutilated, but he can't bother himself to try very hard to stop these horrors, either.

It's been a year since Mr. Bush - ahead of other world leaders, and to his credit - acknowledged that genocide was unfolding in Darfur. But since then he has used that finding of genocide not to spur action but to substitute for it.

Mr. Bush's position in the U.N. negotiations got little attention. But in effect the United States successfully blocked language in the declaration saying that countries have an "obligation" to respond to genocide. In the end the declaration was diluted to say that "We are prepared to take collective action ... on a case by case basis" to prevent genocide.

That was still an immensely important statement. But it's embarrassing that in the 21st century, we can't even accept a vague obligation to fight genocide as we did in the Genocide Convention of 1948. If the Genocide Convention were proposed today, President Bush apparently would fight to kill it.

Oh well. The Captain will just have to write his own opinions. They will be available here, of course. And as always, for free.

Bush's Bolton Bringing Chaos to the World Summit

From "World summit on UN's future heads for chaos/ UK leads last minute effort to rein in US objections "by Ewen MacAskill, diplomatic editor

Saturday September 10, 2005 The Guardian [excerpts]

The British government is mounting a huge diplomatic effort this weekend to prevent the biggest-ever summit of world leaders, designed to tackle poverty and overhaul the United Nations, ending in chaos.

The Guardian has learned that Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, has made a personal plea to his American counterpart, Condoleezza Rice, for the US to withdraw opposition to plans for wholesale reform of the UN. He has asked Ms Rice to rein in John Bolton, the US ambassador to the world body.

Mr Bolton has thrown the reform negotiations into disarray by demanding a catalogue of late changes to a 40-page draft document which is due to go before the summit in New York on Wednesday.

The British government, in a rare divergence from the US, is fully behind [UN Secretary General Kofi] Annan's reforms and fears the summit will fail to build on the agreements on aid reached at the G8 summit at Gleneagles.

Aid agencies and other international groups monitoring the talks expressed fears yesterday that ambitious goals on aid, protection of civilians and curbs on the arms trade will be lost.
Nicola Reindrop, head of the New York office of Oxfam International, said: "Negotiations are on the verge of collapse."