Author: John Grant

 
“In order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we’ve had to kill people.”
-Ted Kaczynski, The Unabomber Manifesto, 1995
 

April 19, 2013, is a date to remember, not so much for the killing and capture of two “terrorists,” but as a milestone in the rise of the 21st century American surveillance police state.

A well-oiled fusion of federal, state and local police authorities went through hundreds of hours of surveillance video and employed all sorts of secret technological and human assets to quickly identify the perpetrators of the crime that captivated the nation’s imagination. Then, thanks to a carjack victim who apparently escaped, the nation witnessed a daylong, blow-by-blow media account of one of the most oppressive manhunts in history. A major northeastern metropolitan area was completely shut down in what amounted to a state of martial law.

Two scenes from 4/19 in Watertown, Massachusetts

After Tamerlan Tsarnaev had been killed and his brother Dzhokhar captured, instead of a “perp walk,” TV watchers were given a triumphalist parade of all the gathered police and FBI vehicles with lights still flashing. The vehicles passed one-by-one through a gauntlet of relieved Watertown residents who began to spontaneously applaud, cheer, grin, pump their fists in the air and even thrust delighted, giggling babies into the air.

Sitting at home bouncing around between MSNBC, CNN and Fox News, by that point I would not have been surprised to see local suburban police units touring my neighborhood in a sympathetic triumphalist procession with the lights on their squad cars and SUVs blazing and my neighbors cheering.

But then the internet conspiracy theorists went into rabid mode certain the federal government had done the bombing, while their counterparts, nationalist war-lovers, began to work feverishly to link the bombers to some large and menacing Muslim threat of suitable grandeur for such a magnificent display of surveillance police power.

Just another day in America, circa 2013.

 
I write a lot of critical things about militarism, our unnecessary wars and our growing surveillance/police state. So it was heartwarming to watch the videos and listen to the stories from the Boston Marathon bombing about civilian “first-responders” who chose not to flee but to wade into a very messy situation.

It’s clear that quick action by some very ordinary citizens — people without badges or weapons — made the difference between three dead and seven or eight dead. For me, such civilian involvement in incidents like this presents a model for an alternative to the malignant post-911 world we now live in. Driven by fear, suspicion and secrecy, officialdom and police agencies have too often become remote agencies of great suspicion themselves.

It’s true the FBI and the immense fusion of surveillance, police and military elements that effectively declared martial law in Boston did run to ground the bombers in incredibly short time. Very impressive. It’s the collateral damage that scares me, the passivity of those without badges, uniforms and weapons in the face of an arrogant blitzkrieg of police and military self-aggrandizement and mission overkill.

We would all benefit if the impulse toward secrecy was discouraged and more information could be shared with the American public. This doesn’t mean an FBI or police investigation should be transparent and media TV trucks should follow cops doing their investigative work. It would require citizens to step up more. What this means is, for the good of the nation, police agencies need to be more vulnerable, since much of what is made secret is not for security reasons but to avoid embarrassment and to cover up unpleasant or even illegal activity by authorities.

The story of my friend Carlos Arredondo is a case in point.

Carlos Arredondo, with hat, and others rush Jeff Bauman to an ambulance as Carlos pinches the femoral artery

Carlos is a much-touted hero in the Boston bombing for his quick and unflinching intervention that saved the life of a man who would have very quickly bled to death from devastating wounds to his legs. I know Carlos through Veterans For Peace. Ever since his Marine son Alexander was killed in Iraq in 2004, Carlos has dedicated his life to working for peace. As if the loss of one son was not tragedy enough, a second son committed suicide due to depression connected to the loss of his brother in Iraq.

I’ve talked with Carlos several times here and there across the country where he would appear with a pick-up truck and trailer assembly festooned with antiwar statements, large posters of his son Alex and many American flags. Carlos is a strong, humble Costa Rican man with a wonderful Spanish accent. He’s now an American citizen. Looking at his truck and trailer, some might see Carlos as an eccentric; but for me and many others his warm humanity always trumped any suggestion of eccentricity. Carlos is a man with a huge heart, a beautiful man caught up in the meat-grinder of a dark and ugly political period. More important, he’s also a very social being who refuses to remain silent or apart from others.

So it was not surprising that Carlos waded into the horrific scene and helped out. As Carlos was headed home afterwards, his sweat shirt soaked with blood, a You Tube video shows him telling a young woman on the street what just happened. His hands are visibly shaking from the experience he had just undergone. Here’s a radio interview with Carlos.

 
“The elite always has a Plan B, while people have no escape.”
– Ahmad Saadawi
 

Last month when the tenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq was the big buzz in the mainstream press I was overcome with the urge to write a we-told-you-so essay in which “we” would be the peace movement. You know, those tens of millions of people who took to the street on February 15, 2003 to tell our government not to invade Iraq because it was a wrong-headed and stupid idea.

That would be the same peace movement that’s now barely on life support while the war movement that so dishonestly brought you the Iraq War — and the Vietnam War before that — is doing just fine, thank you. In fact, it’s looking toward a bright and shining future when human troops will meld with technology. Lethal remotely-controlled drones are only a primitive beginning. Futurists like Ray Kurzweil see us approaching a condition when the rate of technological change will exponentially become a line on a chart going up like a rocket. And we can be sure our military will be on the darkest edge of this change.

Plan B: War meets the Singularity Moment

Kurzweil is an evangelist for such a future. In his book The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, he writes adoringly about “the law of accelerating returns” and “the singularity” that will be achieved at the top of the rocketing curve of accelerating technological change. We’re now in the “knee” of that curve that, he predicts, will soon turn vertical, as technological change “explodes with unexpected fury.”

Tragically, in this kind of mad rush to the future, history becomes a bummer for losers.

Sean Hannity grinned and seemed to bounce up and down like he was plugged into an electric socket as he ripped into Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president who had just succumbed to cancer. Hannity was joined in his death gloat by Michelle Malkin, one of the more delightfully odious voices on the far right.

They had no interest at all to understand who this dead guy had actually been in life. Their escalating duet was so full of hate-fueled fantasy it was laughable. The Venezuela under Chavez that Malkin described through her trademark snarling lips was a vision of North Korea, not a place in South America with Carter-approved free elections.

Three faces of Hugo Chavez, with an image of the beloved South American liberator Simon Bolivar

The mainstream US media was not much better. A Time magazine obit was headlined: “Death of a Demagogue.” NBC’s Brian Williams, the picture of perfect middle-brow authority, put it this way: “The words ‘Venezuelan strongman’ so often preceded his name, and for good reason.” Williams ended his obit by saying, “All this matters a lot to the US, since Venezuela sits on top of a lot of oil and that’s how this now gets interesting for the United States.”

Williams’ assumptions were rooted in the much-reinforced, traditional North American view of las Americas that reduces poor nations south of the border — except of course those with lots of oil — to Henry Kissinger’s status as easily-ignored because they aren’t part of something called “the arc of history,” which strangely seemed to coincide with Europe and the United States.

 
“The experience we have of our lives from within, the story we tell ourselves about ourselves in order to account for what we are doing, is thus a lie — the truth lies rather outside, in what we do.”

Slavoj Zizek

 
Soldiers and veterans from Iraq, Afghanistan and other wars are killing themselves, according to Sixty Minutes, at a rate of 22-a-day. For any fair-minded person whose mind is not locked into a dehumanized state of war-justifying numbness, that is both incredible and unacceptable.

The Sixty Minutes story focused on Clay Hunt, an otherwise strong and attractive 26-year-old Iraq/Afghan Marine veteran who shot himself. His devastated parents and his closest war-buddy were interviewed, each revealing great pain and the deepest of human bonds with the man. Agonizing self-blame was expressed along with the tears.

Clay Hunt and mourning soldiers in Iraq

The question hovering over the story was: Why did he do it? He had undertaken important humanitarian work in Haiti following the earthquake there; he was smart, physically healthy and beloved by women; he seemed a guy ready to grab the world by the tail and accomplish important things.

To everyone from the reporter to the relatives and friends it was a perplexing mystery. Why did he do it? Post Traumatic Stress Disorder was appropriately mentioned; survival guilt was discussed. Video of Hunt in Haiti showed him saying that as a Marine he felt he had done a lot of good in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then he added that he had seen and done “horrible” things.

“But that’s war,” he told the person filming him on a truck in Haiti. In Haiti, he said, he felt he could do good without being shot at or having to kill anyone.

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COMMEMORATE THIS!
A short narrative film on history and the Vietnam War

In The New York Times February 6th on pages 20 and 21, across from each other, there were two tragic stories centered around the themes of sex, race and power. You might call them love stories, though they were definitely not Hallmark card or Harlequin romances.

The vast amounts of popular romance-focused drama we absorb through TV and movies in this culture tends to keep to narrow parameters, generally avoiding love stories that are too complicated, challenge established cultural assumptions or that threaten some area of middle-brow decorum or corporate sponsorship. These love stories are all of that.

One of these stories was sketched out in the obituary for Essie Mae Washington-Williams, the daughter of a 20-year-old Strom Thurmond and Carrie Butler, an 18-year-old African American maid in his family’s home in Aiken, South Carolina back in the 1920s.

Essie Mae Washington-Williams and her daughter, Wanda Williams-Bailer, and Strom Thurmond

Thurmond became a bulwark for southern racism as the governor of South Carolina, then a segregationist independent candidate for President in 1948 and, finally, he spent decades in the US senate. He lived to the ripe old age of 100. In all those 80 years since conceiving Ms Washington-Williams he never publicly recognized his daughter. Her mother died at age 38, the same year Thurmond ran for President. Washington-Williams was raised by an uncle and aunt in Pennsylvania. She never repudiated her biological father and met with him many times in private. He sent her money now and then and once responded to a Father’s Day card by writing:

“Dear Essie-Mae, Thank you for your fond remembrance on Father’s Day. Affectionately, Strom Thurmond.”

 
The Pentagon — and the United States government in thrall to it — is congratulating itself on overcoming a hurdle that other nations have long gotten beyond or never faced in the first place. Feminists and progressives sympathetic to women’s rights are expected to be delighted that women can now officially be assigned to combat roles in the US military. The overcoming of this great hurdle follows a long tradition, in that the Pentagon’s self-congratulatory run around the field operates to distract Americans from arguably the most critical problem relevant to their future.

Happy women geared up in Afghanistan 2010

America is a hugely powerful nation caught in the headlights of history. We desperately need to forge a new social contract to accommodate an inevitable future of diminishing resources and comforts. But, at the same time, we’re a nation that desperately wants to hold onto the sense of “exceptionalism” preached to its citizens incessantly.

We fear real change like it was some kind of plague.

The fact is, women have served in combat roles since the beginning of time. Many European nations are quite comfortable with women in their ranks; Israel and Canada currently come to mind. Women have certainly operated in harm’s way as spies from Mata Hari to Valerie Plame. Muammar Ghaddafi had a special unit of armed women to guard him.

In the so-called developing world, Vietnam is a great example. If we recall, Vietnam won a long, cruel war to overcome an American invasion. They thoroughly employed women as combatants, many of these women now heroes of their nation. I met such a female Vietcong officer in Alaska in 2005. It’s possible a male could have kicked her ass and might have been better suited to haul a 300-pound wounded male comrade from the battlefield, the big test much touted right now by opponents of women in combat. But all that misses the point entirely.

 
Since gun control is such a hot topic, the elite think tank the Project For a New American Decade (PNAD) has come up with a modest proposal to add to the national conversation. We think it’s worth a try.

First, we do the obvious, most sensible things: we establish universal background checks and dignified mental health services for those who exhibit a need for it. The third leg of the current gun control imbroglio — banning AR-15s — is a bit trickier.

When our beloved founding fathers walked this land, a lunatic with a gun had to dick around for five minutes to re-load his musket in order to shoot more than one six-year-old. Something like an AR-15 with a 30-round magazine would have been science fiction to them. So, I propose we make AR-15 assault rifles and extended ammo magazines illegal and set up an obligatory buy-back of the weapons with certain incentives to sweeten the deal.

As the first incentive, everyone who obeys the law and turns in an AR-15 gets an ounce baggie of the finest, most mellow marijuana known to man and a weekend get-away at selected resorts around the nation. There will be great gourmet food, hands-on sex therapists of one’s gender preference, a little Sandbox 101 emphasizing the need for social cooperation, and continuous showings of the The Big Lebowski. (In order to facilitate this incentive the federal government will have to quit trampling on State’s Rights and allow free private enterprise to work in the marijuana market.)

'Nam vet Walter Sobchak having a PTSD moment and his pal The Dude mellowing out

Of course there will be recalcitrants. This is America and we’re a nation founded on recalcitrance. So for those determined to disobey the new law and not participate in the buy-back, an Option B will be offered. Instead of the soothing ganja, the outlaws get a free bottle of the finest tequila, and instead of a resort get-away, the activities will be brought right to their residences. Instead of The Big Lebowski, they get noise, lots of it.

 
Those that respect the law and love sausage should watch neither being made.
– Mark Twain
 
In the spirit of Twain’s famous metaphor, Joe Biden is a mighty gifted sausage maker. The vice president is the man of the hour, the Obama administration’s legislative deal-maker on the fiscal cliff and leader of forging gun-control legislation following the Newtown massacre. Biden is the LBJ of the Obama White House when it comes to dealing with Congress as that institution sinks ever deeper into an historic nadir of national trust.

Ever since he showed his political pugilistic skills with Paul Ryan in the VP debate following President Obama’s dull performance in the first presidential debate, Biden has moved to a position reminiscent of Cheney’s with George Bush.

“Joe” is always billed as an ordinary working class guy. On the campaign trail, the youthful 70-year-old flirtatiously nuzzles motorcycle mamas at lunch cafes. Last week, he amused the pundits by spouting corny jokes or wisecracks with everybody at a photo-shoot for new congress members being sworn in. As Maureen Dowd points out, the VP is comfortable in the halls of Congress and he is not afraid of letting his sub-conscious free-associate and have a little fun. He’s the politician you’d like to have a beer with. Michael Smerconish on MSNBC gushed, “Praise Biden for showing how it’s done, how to be a pol.”

VP Joe Biden in the limelight December 31st

On the other hand, this would-be working-man-of-the-people was re-elected US senator from the Moneybags Corporate State of Delaware for over 36 years, a period known for the inexorable slow demise of labor unions. Ponder that for a while and you realize what a brilliant and accommodating man Biden must be.

Joe Biden has been making sausage for over a third of a century. Among his list of successes is the current Drug War and the current Counter-Terrorism War, both of which are now interlocking to become one long, bi-partisan war without end. While Biden may scrap with Republicans, he is a classic Cold War Liberal in the Hubert Humphrey mode, pushing moderately progressive legislation while reinforcing the pillars of imperial militarism and the burgeoning police-state that is post-9/11 America.