Author: John Grant

At a birthday dinner with friends last night, the Israeli assault on Gaza came up. One friend said having to helplessly watch the violence infuriated him and made him ill. Another said it made him want to cry.

I said there was something in this kind of asymmetrical bloodshed that our mainstream media and most Americans willfully avoid thinking about. That’s the humanity of the suicide bomber. Our TV correspondents are so jaded by violence they report X number of human beings were blown to pieces by a suicide bomber. The term has come to represent an inhuman archetype of pure evil. The human being is lost.

I said to my friends, at least we should appreciate — I added the word “respect” — a man or woman willing to sacrifice his or her life for a cause. Even if we oppose that cause. We honor men who jump on grenades to save their buddies and people who pursue an action beneficial to comrades that any sane, rational person would see as suicidal. In traditional Japanese culture, suicide was an honorable act to atone for shame; kamikaze pilots were treated like royalty before they set off on their final missions. Of course, the men on the US destroyers and cruisers they sank did not share the same cause and, thus, did not share in that honoring. Israelis honor the suicide pact of 960 rebels under assault by a Roman legion atop the mesa known as Masada over 2000 years ago.

At this point, another friend spoke up in a disturbed tone. She said she knew someone killed by a suicide bomber. “And I don’t appreciate what you just said.” I may have made things worse by replying: “You don’t understand my point. Actually, I’d be fine with shooting suicide bombers. But, of course, they’re already dead.”

Lieutenant Hador Goldin, an Israeli bomb going off in Gaza and the remains of a suicide bomber

 
So let’s get this straight: As a military veteran peace activist for over 30 years, I condemn the delivery of bombs to kill people and destroy things by F16s, drones and suicide bombers. This is in the spirit of the famous scene from the film The Battle of Algiers in which a guerrilla leader has been captured by the French military and is presented to the French press for questioning. (This, of course, would never happen under today’s rigid regimes of secrecy.) A reporter asks him how he can justify satchel charges detonated in public cafes attended by French civilians. He smiles and says, “We’ll gladly trade our satchel charges for your jet bombers any day.”

War is the abandonment of morality to expediency. And whether or not Americans know it, they are morally up to their necks in the atrocity going on in Gaza.

Those of us on the left are frustrated, angry and overwhelmed with a sense of impotence in the face of the violence in Gaza. Those who defend the grotesquely asymmetrical assault seem callous and close-minded around the idea that military might makes right. The UN says 75 to 80 percent of the 1600 dead Gazans are civilians, many of them children. Israelis say it is only 50 percent. There have been 59 Israelis killed, the majority of them IDF soldiers.

Gazan forces reportedly captured a 22-year-old IDF lieutenant, Hadar Goldin. A New York Times writer described such captives as the Gazan’s “most powerful weapon.” In fact, captured Israelis are so politically potent the official IDF policy permits shooting at a fleeing vehicle that contains a captured Israeli. Again, in pursuit of their cause, better a dead IDF soldier than a captive one. (Late note: The Israeli military says Goldin is dead and buried. A Hamas element told the Times Goldin may have been killed by Israeli forces firing on Goldin’s captors.)

In Spanish, the word hondura means “depth; profundity.” The related word hondo means “deep, low; bottom.” Hondon means “dell, glen, deep hole.” An example given in my dictionary is meterse en honduras, “to go beyond one’s depth.”

I imagine some gold-seeking Spanish conquistador in the 16th century passing through the isthmus and, with a bit of cruel wit, calling the place where he stood The Hole. Sort of like when I was in the Army, Fort Hood, Texas, was known as “the asshole of the world.” In Honduras, my imaginary conquistador no doubt left a lieutenant with troops enough to turn the residents into slaves before he moved his entourage on to the more appealing Costa Rica.

Honduras is the saddest basket case in the Western Hemisphere, and the behemoth to the north has done everything in its power to keep poor Honduras in the basket case category. Technically, Honduras is a sovereign nation; but in reality it is a vassal state of the United States. Maybe more like a flea-ridden junkyard dog resigned to being kicked.

The US Border Patrol at work and children who want to live
 

In 1935, two-time Medal of Honor winner and retired Marine General Smedley Butler famously wrote the following in an essay for the socialist magazine Common Sense:
 

I spent 33 years and four months in active military service, and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. … I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. … Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents. 

      When lo! An angel called him out of heaven,
      Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad, . . .
      But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
      And half the seed of Europe, one by one.
                 -Wilfred Owen
 

The New York Times recently ran a five-page section of essays on the 100th anniversary of the start of World War One. Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated on June 28, 1914, causing Austria-Hungary to declare war on Serbia. Germany sided with Austria-Hungary and European allies sided with Serbia. Thus, one of the cruelest, bloodiest and most corrupt wars was let loose in the world. It did not end until November 1918 and included 17 million deaths, 10 million of them European young men in uniform.

A.O.Scott writes about the sense of innocence and expectant glory at the beginning of the war. Books like Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet On The Western Front and Robert Graves’ Goodbye To All That speak of the horrors of the everyman in the trenches. It was a war created by vainglorious, corrupt and short-sighted leadership. Beside bad leadership at the top, what stands out about World War One is how the war was fought by ordinary men who did the bleeding and the suffering, and how many of them came home to write eloquently about their disillusion.

Dead man carried from the field in WWI; a US soldier in Iraq.
 

“[A]s the war unfolded, a new attitude was taking shape that was rooted in the soldiers’ experiences,” writes Edward Rothstein. “It has had an enduring influence on how war itself is often thought about — with complicated consequences.” World War One seemed to generate poets like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. Owen’s great poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” is about witnessing a young soldier without a mask dying from gas.
 

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

(The old lie: It is sweet and glorious
to die for your country.)

“[T]his is history written from ‘below’ — through the lens of ordinary participants, not political leaders or military strategists,” writes Rothstein.

 
I don’t believe in the dogmatic postulates of Marxist revolution. I don’t accept that we are living in a period of proletarian revolutions. Reality is telling us that every day. But if I am told that because of that reality you can’t do anything to help the poor, then I say, “We part company.”
                            -Hugo Chavez, 2004
 
The hypocrisy of the government of the United States seems to know no limits. The current posture it’s taking toward the elected government of Venezuela is simply shameful.

Secretary of State John Kerry and two powerful US Senators are threatening economic sanctions unless the duly elected Venezuelan government changes its tune in on-going talks between itself and a collection of disgruntled right-wing parties and business elements. The headline in the New York Times reads: “Kerry Calls on Venezuela To Talk with Opposition.” What it should have read was: “Kerry Threatens Venezuela With Sanctions: Do It Our Way, Or Else.”

The headline misleads because talks are already in process mediated by representatives from Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador and the Roman Catholic Church. Venezuela is talking; the opposition just hasn’t gotten what it or the US wants — hence the threats. Encouraging fair diplomatic talks is a good thing; but threats of an economic attack? The hypocrisy is laughable.

Secretary of State John Kerry, Hugo Chavez and President Nicolas Maduro

Can you imagine John Kerry threatening Israel with economic sanctions if it did not “demonstrate good-faith actions” or “honor the dialogue process” or “restore the civil liberties of [Palestinian] leaders who have been unjustly imprisoned.” Kerry’s Israel/Palestine diplomacy crashed and burned last month, and as most of the world knows, the Israeli decision to pursue new West Bank settlements in the midst of the talks had a lot to do with their demise. The Israelis failed miserably at “good faith actions.” So why not economic sanctions against Israel? You gotta be kidding.

The American right will say such a comparison is preposterous because Palestinians represent a different case from the opposition elements in Venezuela. And, of course, that’s true. They are different: Palestinians are a poor, beaten-down people with zero clout in the halls of the US government, while the Venezuelan opposition includes the wealthiest, most comfortable and fat-cat Venezuelans who have a direct line into the office suites of the US government, especially the State and Defense Departments.

 
    Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
    Everybody knows that the captain lied …
    Everybody knows the deal is rotten
    Old Black Joe’s still pickin’ cotton
    For your ribbons and bows
            - Leonard Cohen
 

In honor of our Supreme Court I’ve decided to start this piece with a prayer.

Great Spirit of our imagination, have mercy on us stupid, hypocritical bipeds, especially those exceptional examples in black robes who decide whether an armed police officer can strip-search us in public or whether a one-hundred dollar bill has a conscience. Do all you can, Mighty Great One, to allow at least a little light and compassion into the hidden, dark recesses of their august institution.

Amen.

Now we can get on with this humble, scribbled note from underground.

Considering his appointment history in conjunction with his opinions and voting record concerning affirmative action, if Clarence Thomas had any sense of human decency … No wait a minute. … Given the facts of his career, if Clarence Thomas had any honor, a backbone or a pair of independent-minded balls, he’d stop whining about affirmative action and resign.

The scene of the crime: Barbara and George Bush; Clarence and Virginia Thomas and Justice Byron White
 

The Supreme Court’s recent banning of affirmative action in a case from Michigan should remind everyone how really offensive the Thomas appointment was and how it smells worse as time goes by. Thomas notoriously sits among his eight colleagues and does not ask questions, which suggests he lacks the intellectual confidence to swim with the big fish on the court. On top of that, he’s a virtual intellectual drone of Antonin Scalia. According to a recent study on Supreme Court justices and political bias, Thomas is the most conservative justice on the court — even more so than his master Scalia. In an insightful article called “The Last Confederate Is Clarence Thomas”, attorney Charles Pierce describes Thomas’ legal philosophy as a bizarre retrograde advocacy of States Rights over the US Constitution reminiscent of pre-Civil War times. Thomas is, he writes, a “staggering political and historical contradiction. He is the last, and the truest, descendant of John C. Calhoun.”

(I realize the use of the word “master” for Justice Scalia may bother some. For example, I can hear Sean Hannity fulminating how it’s “racist” to use plantation terminology. The fact is, unlike Hannity and friends, I don’t speak in dog whistle language and prefer a French horn.)

The reason Thomas should resign is simple: He consistently argues and votes against affirmative action while he is arguably one of the most flagrant and, certainly, the most controversial, case of affirmative action in American history. Thomas decrying affirmative action is like Macbeth opposing murder.

 
I met Janet Burroway when I was a Vietnam veteran on the GI Bill at Florida State University and I signed up for a creative writing workshop she was just hired to teach. She was a worldly, published novelist seven years older than me. She had just left an oppressive husband, a Belgian, who was an important theater director in London where she’d been to parties with the likes of Samuel Beckett. I graduate in 1973, and in a turn of events that still amazes me, I asked her out and ended up living with her for a couple years. She had two beautiful boys, Tim, 9, and Toby, 6, who I grew to love.

The cover of Losing Tim; and Tim, Janet Burroway and Toby in England circa 1971

Cut to 2004. Even as a kid, Tim had a hard-headed moral code about what was right and wrong. As he grew into manhood, he became enamored of all things military; he loved guns. He had a career in the Army as a Ranger, where all his evaluations suggest a stellar soldier. He reached captain, but a promise to his wife and other reasons led him to resign his commission in the active Army. He worked in the Army reserves for a while in places like Bosnia. Contacts led him to civilian jobs in the military contractor world in Africa and Iraq, where he ended up running de-mining operations and training de-miners for RONCO Consulting Corporation.

By Spring 2004, he decided to resign from RONCO. He visited his mother in Tallahassee, then flew to Namibia, northwest of South Africa, to be with his wife Birgett, a white Namibian he’d met during an assignment in Africa where she worked for the UN. Birgett had an adolescent son from a previous relationship. They had a one-year old daughter.

The details are not absolutely clear. Tim was certainly disillusioned from his experiences in Iraq and was apparently sinking into depression. For reasons only he could know, one afternoon he put a nine-millimeter pistol to his head and, in front of Birgett, shot himself dead at age 39.

 
    One way to win the game is by making up at least part of the rules, something the rich do.
                    -From “Winning the Game” by Rubem Fonseca
 
 
RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL — The sun was going down and the wide boulevard Rua Rio Branco was jam-full of screaming humanity backed up with banging drums and all sorts of waving signs and banners. It was a large unruly demonstration on the 1st of April recognizing the 50 year anniversary of the 1964 coup that led to over 20 years of brutal military rule in Brazil. The anniversary has been discussed in newspapers and in various forums in Rio leading up to this date.

Remembering the coup has become all wrapped up with the controversy over urban renewal efforts and costly construction projects associated with the June World Cup matches and the 2016 Olympics. Many in Brazil would prefer resources be used to improve education, medical care, transportation and other infrastructure areas. It’s an eternal political struggle, especially in a place like Brazil, between the top and the bottom of society.

A writer colleague and I are in Rio focusing on this historical moment and what it might mean for the future of Brazil. The military government of the coup years featured all the usual incidents of beatings, tortures, disappearances and murders. The only thing that can be said of the Brazilian dictatorial period is that it was not as severe or as rotten as the one in neighboring Argentina, where they famously cleansed themselves of left-leaning individuals by kicking their naked, dead bodies like garbage out of planes over the Atlantic.

The usual image of Rio de Janeiro, the famous Copacabana Beach

In the case of the Brazilian military dictatorship, after 20 years of governing it decided in the 1980s that it was tired of running things from out front and was ready to install a democratic government. Naturally, before it did that it self-established all sorts of amnesty programs for its generals and the torturers and killers who did their bidding. Those amnesties are now controversial, and young people have taken up painting signs on walls announcing that a torturer lives here. Sort of like identifying child molesters in US communities.

Cinelandia Plaza is the site of a famous cinema theater known as The Odean, which on April 1st was running a series of Brazilian films focused on the culture’s African roots. The Plaza is surrounded by open-air restaurants and impressive buildings. When the moving mass of pissed-off humanity reached the Plaza, darkness had fallen and the dynamic became a cat-and-mouse game between cops from the Policia Militar dressed like Darth Vader’s raiders and a rambunctious assemblage of youth, many with gas masks and willing to taunt the highly disciplined cops. Someone powerful had clearly made it known to these cops that there would be no “incidents” this night — or else. For instance, the well-protected cops received a few large rocks lobbed into their huddled midst without any kind of retaliation.

 
For all practical purposes, John McCain is the equivalent in our culture to those ancient robed ayatollahs in Iran we damn for standing in the way of democratic change.

The 77-year-old McCain parlayed his suffering as a Vietnam War POW into one of the more durable political careers in Washington. In his heart, he may feel he should be President of the United States instead of his 2008 opponent Barack Obama. Thanks to all this political history and current US cultural realities, McCain plays the role of a wise, spiritual “ayatollah” of militarism. Instead of peace-making and the progressive change that would strengthen the nation from the bottom up, we get elite militarist braggadocio that strengthens the top ranks of an already top-heavy order and ratchets up costly war fever.

Senator John McCain

For many, McCain’s old-warrior message is mythic and laden with spiritual gravitas. Like the ayatollahs do on the international stage, McCain takes the pulse of our imperial culture, then assumes a hard and fast line that intensely polarizes conditions and, in doing so, taps into all the usual American symbols of exceptionalism. He just did this masterfully in a New York times op-ed that plays shamelessly to the far-right imperial class.

It also ratchets up a condition of belligerence and reminds me of the slogan from Veterans For Peace that always resonates with me at times like this: “Wars are easy to start and very difficult to stop.” As we know, that was true in Vietnam, in Iraq and in Afghanistan. None of those adventures ended well or in our favor. All that this kind of easy militarization of an international problem does is, one, appease hyperventilating militarists and, two, slow the demonized enemy down a little.

Chances are the exact same less-than-perfect ending of such military adventures could have been reached through diplomacy. The militarist right will, of course, chuckle confidently that this is naive liberalism, even appeasement. The trouble is a diplomatic alternative entails some element of humility, which is unknown to the elite militarist class. So the diplomatic option never is given a chance to work. It’s damned without ever being tested.

 
[Listen to John Grant discuss this piece with Dave Lindorff on the new Progressive Radio Network program “ThisCantBeHappening!” archived here.]
 

Making political sense out of the events in Ukraine and Crimea has become great sport. Does it mean a new Cold War? Is Vladimir Putin a better, more “potent” man than Barack Obama? Who has bigger balls?

We’re naturally reminded of those twisted times when the post-World War Two imperial United States stood toe-to-toe with the imperial Soviet Union. It was Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev fighting for the souls of smaller, peripheral nations like Vietnam, where, in lieu of direct confrontation, Indochinese peasants were slaughtered in the millions and 58,000 Americans died.

Today is different. The Cold War is over. The Soviet Socialist Empire is gone. The American Capitalist Empire remains. We’re told ad nauseum it’s all because of Ronald Reagan. Most Americans have internalized the imperial reality as The Myth of American Exceptionalism and accept the nation’s natural right to intervene anywhere on the globe. Though the weaponry has significantly advanced, the rhetoric hasn’t changed much from the days of Theodore Roosevelt, who wrote in 1910 in his little book called American Problems about “The Management of Small States Which Are Unable to Manage Themselves.”

President Obama under a painting of the ballsy Teddy Roosevelt, and TR's book cover — with fasces

He emphasized that the United States had no interest in “interfering” with poor countries. “The needs of civilization and humanity are sufficiently met by protecting them from outside aggression.” We need to protect them from others.

That, of course, is the reason we interfered in the lives of the Vietnamese for 30 years once Truman betrayed our Vietnamese ally and handed their country back to the French in 1945. Of course, Truman did it to “protect” the Vietnamese from communists. If you watched Rachel Maddow’s recent MSNBC documentary on why the Bush regime, lies aside, really invaded and occupied Iraq, it’s the same theme. We invaded Iraq for oil. But not for ourselves. No. So “he” wouldn’t control the oil. He being Saddam Hussein. We did it for the Iraqi people. Two oilmen who somehow got into the White House sent American soldiers to kill and die to gain control of Iraqi oil. There’s no argument on that score anymore. Like the peace movement said from the beginning, it was War For Oil. Of course, while Bush overthrew the Saddam government, he also empowered the seventy percent Shiite element aligned with his bitterest enemy, Iran.

 
It was to be expected. A famous person’s death by heroin overdose becomes a catalyst for today’s equivalent of the lynch mob. Leading the pack, Bill O’Reilly immediately and aggressively called for heads to roll. Soon, four people were arrested in Manhattan for allegedly selling the drugs to the Academy Award winning actor.

“Selling narcotics is a violent crime,” O’Reilly declared. He cited CNN’s Ashleigh Banville who that day said, “…the guy who gave an addict the drug that killed him deserves to go away for life.”

.

[The haunting portrait of Philip Seymour Hoffman, at left, affects a daguerreotype plate circa the late 1800s. It was taken by photographer Victoria Will at the Sundance Film Festival two weeks prior to Hoffman’s death on February 2nd.]

Hoffman’s tragic death immediately mobilized drug warmongers to beat their drums for the usual reaction of police, courts and prisons. Outcries like O’Reilly’s were predictably vengeful and directed at demonizing drug dealers as disgusting pariahs who must be purged from the company of good, law-abiding citizens.

Fox News house liberal Alan Colmes stood up to O’Reilly’s vigorous bluster and responded rationally. He compared the selling of heroin that leads to an overdose like Hoffman’s to the person selling a gun to a suicide.

“That’s crazy!” hollered O’Reilly.

But is it any more crazy than this: The New York Times just ran an editorial about a study on prescription testosterone drugs like Androgel, made by the huge pharmaceutical Abbvie. Use of Androgel doubles the odds of a heart attack for men over 65, and it triples the risk of an attack in middle-aged men with a history of heart disease. If instead of the problems he self-medicated for Hoffman had suffered from “low T” and had been obsessed enough with jacking up his masculinity to rub Androgel into his armpit, given his lifestyle, he could well have fallen prey to a fatal heart attack. Would these lynch-mob talking heads, then, be calling for the marketing chief of Abbvie to get life in prison?

No need to answer that. Everybody already knows the answer:

If your drug connection has an MD and your dealer is a legitimate pharmacy, you’re OK, since the source of the drug is on the New York Stock Exchange and makes an outrageous profit. If your free private enterprise entrepreneur is a self-made small businessperson providing substances that aren’t tested by the FDA “nanny state” and that don’t come with a yard-long sheet of cautions, then we’re gonna call down some well-armed, high-testosterone nannies on that small businessperson. Presuming, as in this case, your corpse was once a celebrity beloved for providing insight into troubled souls. If you were a nobody, then it’s a Darwinian plus. That’s how it works.