Author: John Grant

The New York Times is the best old-style, broad-sheet newspaper in America; it still covers the world with resourceful and enterprising reporters and commentators. But, then, there’s the other New York Times, the imperial rag that prints editorials like the one on August 5 titled “ ‘Dynasty,’ the Nicaraguan Version.” It’s not that Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega is a saint or even a model democrat; it’s that the editorial department and the writer who penned this sloppy embarrassment are still playing a version of the Reagan Cold War game of the 1980s. Those days are over; one hopes for something a bit more worldly.

President Daniel Ortega and his wife Rosario Murillo announcing her vice presidential candidacy

After listing a number of negatives — the popular President Ortega has appointed judges favorable to his rule and has been able to assure a legislature filled with his allies — the editorial tells us how well the Nicaraguan economy is doing, how well the Ortega administration works with investors and international business and how safe the place is compared to its three closest neighbors. This safety is, we’re told, due to a sinister “vast police force.” Reading this, one might forget here in the US we have our own “vast” police and criminal justice problems.

Let’s consider for a moment the interesting fact that Nicaragua is notably “safer” than Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. First off, during the 1980s under President Ronald Reagan the United States of America directly supported, and in some cases actually directed, cruel and bloody wars against armed guerrillas (and the poor in whose name they fought) in these three small, poor nations. It was the Cold War, so these wars were couched in East-West (communist-capitalist) terms, when they arguably were more accurately described as North-South struggles: ie. they were about powerlessness versus power, poverty versus wealth.

In the case of Nicaragua, the US Contra War was a proxy war against a sovereign nation. In 1979, the Sandinista rebels had overthrown a dictatorship run by Anastasio Somoza, junior, whose father Anastasio, senior, had been a US ally. Franklin Roosevelt famously said of Somoza, senior, “Somoza’s a son-of-a-bitch, but he’s our son-of-a-bitch.” In 1956, the father was shot dead eating dinner in a Leon restaurant by a patriotic poet working as a busboy. (Many Nicaraguans aspire to be poets.) Anastasio, junior, took over the family business and ruled as a US ally until 1979, when he fled to Paraguay, where in 1980 his Mercedes was blown apart by an RPG as the climax of a seven-member Sandinista plot called “Operation Reptile.” His unidentifiable remains were buried in Miami following a big funeral of fellow tyrants and right-wing fat cats.

Someone’s crying, Lord, kumbaya
– From the Gullah song meaning, Lord, come by here and help us
 

There was a true kumbaya moment after the Dallas cop massacre similar to the moment after 9/11 when sympathy was expressed for America from many unexpected quarters around the world. That window began to close when US leaders took a hard line and vengefully attacked an un-implicated nation to counter the very sense of vulnerability that moved people of the world to sympathize with us. Similarly, the sympathy for attacked cops in Dallas may be evaporating thanks to a familiar sociological dynamic involving in-group, out-group identification.

Sociologists and psychologists call this “the ultimate attribution error.” As explained in an interesting New York Times article by Amanda Taub, it’s when people “attribute another group’s positive actions to random chance or circumstance but assume that [the other group’s] negative actions reflect the group’s core nature.” That is, in times of stress, people “circle the wagons” around their own kind based on a belief that their motives are human and honorable; those of the projected enemy are the essence of pure evil. “Once you dehumanize them, it’s easier to justify violence,” says Professor John Dovidio of the Inter-Group Relations Lab at Yale.

This can be seen on both sides of the Black Lives Matter versus Blue Lives Matter conflict. For me, it involves anger, laziness and a failure of courage to see or listen to or talk with a perceived enemy. Better to huddle up with your own pack and project your fears on the other guy.

Sean Hannity and a Black Lives Matter protester

As I bounced around cable news in the days following the Dallas cop massacre, no one was worse (maybe I should say “better”) at this than the odious Sean Hannity. (I confess, I’m biased: Sean Hannity is the root of all evil.) Hannity loves to point out his enemy’s shortcomings: that is, for them, examples of bad-cop behavior become an overarching metaphor for all-cops-are-bad and the System is totally based on white supremacy. Good point; that does happen. The trouble is, he then does the same thing ten times over; there’s not a dialogic bone in the man’s body.

 
Kill one person, it’s called murder.
Kill 100,000, it’s called foreign policy.
        - A popular bumper sticker
 
Everybody seems angry and frustrated these days. What’s important is what people do with that anger and frustration. It’s also important to understand the roots of all this anger.

A black preacher who was part of the peaceful Black Lives Matter street protest in Dallas the night when five cops were killed told an MSNBC reporter after the killings he was still angry over the killings by police of black men in the last three days and in previous months. He carried a baseball bat over his shoulder. Likewise, in a separate but related realm, Iraqi exile Sami Ramadani confessed on Amy Goodman’s news program that being asked to comment on the recent Chilcot Report detailing the culpability of the British government for the Iraq War was difficult for him because of the incredible anger the subject incited in him.

These two men are not a problem. They were able to channel their anger into constructive paths, one a preacher/protester, the other a writer/commentator. I share the anger expressed by these men, as I share their devotion to peaceful modes of expression.

The problem we face in this nation comes from another quarter: It comes from those who, for one reason or another, feel compelled to address their frustrations, fears and sense of insulted self-image by using violence. This category involves people of all classes and levels of status. I would put former President George W. Bush and others like him in this category of resorting rashly to senseless violence. The category would also include Jeronimo Yanez, the cop who shot Philando Castile in St. Paul, and Micah Johnson, the military veteran who murdered five cops in Dallas.

Three killers: George W. Bush, Jeronimo Yanez and Micah Johnson

I think I hear someone crying “foul!” Let me explain. First, I include the former president in such a category to make a larger point about the state of America circa 2016. I’m a realist, so I don’t expect Mr. Bush will be arrested anytime soon. The point is to actually think about what it means to kill people and to mourn for loved ones. The killings in Dallas were heart-wrenching; on the media, there were endless references to the mourning families of the killed officers. Again, heart-breaking and infuriating to ponder. But what angers me most is the mourning relatives of undeserving African Americans killed by cops and the hundreds of thousands of relatives of the dead in Iraq whose on-going grief should be on the conscience of George W. Bush and “killers” like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell. The dead in Iraq never seem to get much attention, and the crimes of the ruling class seem to just slip away into some obscure memory hole. The Iraq War opened up a Pandora’s Box and let out a host of horrors. ISIS is one of these horrors. Another is a deepening distrust of government. Official forgetting is epidemic.

The spontaneous, day-long “sit-in” initiated by Congressman John Lewis and others in the House of Representatives echoed Fannie Lou Hamer: “I’m sick ‘n tired of bein’ sick ‘n tired.” At one point Wednesday evening, a Republican House member stood off and shook his fist at an insurgent Democratic speaker focused on reasonable gun legislation. The man simply hollered, “Radical Islam! Radical Islam!” The next morning, Chris Cuomo on CNN debated Republican House member Sean Duffy from Wisconsin on the stand-off. Duffy’s response was this: “The threat is not guns; it’s radical Islamic terrorism!” It has to be one or the other; it can’t be a little of both with a host of other things mixed in.

Fox News studio warriors Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly — and let’s not forget the king of hate sleaze, Donald Trump — work this absolutist line hard. It feels like a matter of life and death for them that they jam someone like Omar Mateen into a box labeled RADICAL ISLAM. The term itself has become magical. If one shuts out everything else but these magical words, we’re led to believe the solution will appear as clear as Jesus rising on the third day. We need to re-invade, re-occupy and re-bomb-the-crap-out-of Sunni Anbar Province in western Iraq and reaching into Syria.

I was in Falluja as a peace activist in December 2003. A blond-haired westerner slunk down in the backseat of a blue Opal with a cracked windshield, I soaked up what I could of normal, on-going life in Falluja. My Iraqi guides were looking for the forward operations base where the son of the man in the front seat drove a fuel truck. While all this arguing goes on, I can’t help seeing that tragic Anbar Province city’s fate hanging in the balance.

Falluja destroyed and a tranquil scene from Lake Habbaniyah
 

Most people don’t know it, but before Falluja became a famous US invasion battle-zone, it was a resort town around the large Lake Habbaniyah. The city was famous for the tastiest kabobs in Iraq. Whenever I hear the militarist right intone their magic words RADICAL ISLAM all I can think of is the famous line from Vietnam, “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” Some 65 percent of the homes in Falluja were destroyed; we lost 95 Americans; many thousands of Iraqis were killed and maimed. The iconic quote from The Battle of Falluja came from a Lt. Col. Gary Brandl: “The enemy has got a face. He’s called Satan. He’s in Falluja. And we’re going to destroy him.” Today, Falluja is a basket-case of pain and desperation.

If our wars were to make killers of all combat soldiers, rather than men who have killed, civilian life would be endangered for generations or, in fact, made impossible.
– J. Glenn Gray, from The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle (1959)
 
I lost myself when we busted down that door.
I lost myself. Please don’t make me tell any more.
– Tom Mullian, from “Private Charlie Mac”
 
Why can’t we all just get along?
– Rodney King
 

According to a New York Times report on Memorial Day, psychologists are re-thinking Post Traumatic Stress and other combat-related issues applied to multi-tour combat soldiers. According to Times writer Benedict Carey, the challenge these days is less emotional healing than how to unlearn the hyper-vigilance and shoot-first, ask-questions-later violence necessary for survival in a combat zone. That is, using the current vogue term, can experienced warriors be adjusted from a wild, adrenaline-fueled state of barbarism to one emphasizing community and civilization?

An aging Stephen Seagal in a new movie, Sniper: Special Ops, and a classic home and family image
 

This is a politically tricky matter, since this sort of question inevitably leads to areas critical of US war policy. It’s notable that the research cited by the May 30 Times story is being done in civilian universities (Harvard, the University of Texas, the University of New Haven, the University of North Carolina) and other civilian research sites — not by the military or the Veterans Administration, federal government agencies naturally reluctant to wade into anything that might be critical of US war policy. The veteran at the center of the Times story is an ex-Ranger whose unit specialized in what the Times reported is sometimes known as “vampire work,” quick raids, often late at night, on high-profile insurgent targets for capture or killing. Just the term “vampire work” suggests the experience being considered is morally ambivalent.

 
The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line.
                                                                        - W.E.B. DuBois
 
While I see his position as one of defending bigotry, I sympathize a bit with North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory when he tells NPR, “Most people had never heard of this issue five months ago.”

I was one of those people. Until quite recently — certainly before Caitlin Jenner and going back to the early 1950s when ex-GI Christine Jorgensen had sex re-assignment surgery — the term transgender meant a person had submitted to hormone treatment and surgery that involved, for a male, cutting off the penis and surgically creating some approximation of a vagina. A male or female who chose to wear clothing of the opposite gender was known as a transvestite. That semantic understanding seems to have gone the way of negro and colored people. It’s now a matter of how one feels inside one’s body. Somewhere in time a semantic shift occurred in the minds of enough people that it has now reached the level of law where we see a classic battle between a reform-minded, liberal federal government and that old standby of conservatives and bigots, states’ rights.

Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, N.C. Governor Pat McCrory and US Attorney General Loretta Lynch
 

In North Carolina, a law known as HB2 was passed that limits protections for LGBT people and requires transgender people to use public bathrooms that correspond with the gender noted by a physician on their birth certificate. That sounds nice and neat — certainly to the conservative and bigoted mind. But what if one was born with real, physical ambiguity down in the pudendum area? Or what if a cocktail of chemical hormones and life experience led someone to see and feel him- or herself differently than the working stiff did who noted an infant’s gender on a birth certificate — or for that matter, feeling different about oneself than the socially- and politically-correct views of certain southern, God-fearing conservatives? What if Norman Mailer, who is dead, was wrong when he wrote that little anti-feminist gem I read titled Prisoner Of Sex? Of course, many of us loved the strutting pugilistic Uncle Norman, especially when he protested the Vietnam War; but, then, Norman was famous for being a magnificent, often drunken, asshole.

 
In the Lenin Barracks in Barcelona, the day before I joined the militia, I saw an Italian militiaman standing in front of the officers’ table. … Something in his face deeply moved me. It was the face of a man who would commit murder and throw away his life for a friend — the kind of face you would expect in an Anarchist, though as likely as not he was a Communist. … I hardly know why, but I have seldom seen anyone — any man, I mean — to whom I have taken such an immediate liking.
                                                                              – The opening of Homage To Catalonia by George Orwell
 

John McCain is certainly an interesting American politician. To be politically correct, maybe I should call him an American “warrior/politician,” since he’s a key leader in the post-911 culture saturated with the warrior-ethos. Last month, this warrior/politician wrote an op-ed in The New York Times that I can’t get out of my mind.

In the piece titled “The Good Soldier,” McCain saluted Delmer Berg whose obituary had run March 2nd in the Times. (Belatedly appreciating the irony, the Times changed the op-ed’s title online to: “John McCain: Salute To a Communist.”) Berg, who died at age 100, was presumably the last living American veteran of the famous Abraham Lincoln Brigade that fought on the Republican side in Spain against a 1936 fascist coup led by the caudillo general Francisco Franco, certainly a warrior/politician of his day. The Republic had been constitutionally set up and its leaders duly-elected after the monarchy collapsed in 1931. The Soviet Union supported the Republican side and Hitler and Mussolini supported the Fascists. The Republican side had a romantic, underdog quality that drew writers and adventures like George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway.

Proud American communist Delmer Berg in 2014 and in 1938 in Spain, second from right in beret

In 1937, Berg was a 21-year-old dishwasher who saw a poster for the Lincoln Brigade and signed up. He soon shipping out to Spain on an ocean liner; he was eventually wounded and sent home. Of the 3000 American volunteers who fought in Spain, around 800 were killed. The Fascists prevailed in 1939. Berg joined the Communist Party in 1943. The Times called him “an unreconstructed communist.” A newspaper in California asked Berg what were the proudest moments of his life; one he said was “when one of my grandsons was valedictorian at his Oregon high school graduation and said in a newspaper interview, ‘My grandfather is my inspiration. He’s a Communist!’ ”

Since the coup, Honduras has become one of the most dangerous places in the world.
                                                                                - Amy Goodman
 
Since a June 2009 coup in Honduras, violence beneficial to rightist power brokers and international corporations — violence directed against activists for the poor and indigenous — has skyrocketed. News of this rarely reaches mainstream America. The real story is that the US government, as in the past, talks pretty but is an accessory in Honduras’ descent into murder.

Murder victim Berta Caceres, co-founder of COPINH, fought for the rights of the poor. Click hereto hear John Grant and PRN.fm ‘This Can’t Be Happening!’ show host Dave Lindorff discuss Clinton’s role in the Honduran coup and Caceres’s murder.

On March 3rd, Berta Caceres, 44, co-founder of COPINH (the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras) and winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize, was assassinated by killers who broke into her home in La Esperanza (in English, Hope) at 1AM. Gustavo Castro Soto, a Mexican environmental activist who witnessed the murder and was himself shot twice, has been refused permission to return to Mexico and is hiding out in the Mexican embassy in Tegucigalpa. The financial officer of COPINH has been interrogated four times at length by police; she told Amy Goodman it’s an effort to suggest the murder was due to internal COPINH politics. A COPINH member was briefly arrested by the police as a suspect, then released. Then, another COPINH activist, Nelson García, was killed last week. Police say Garcia’s killing was an “isolated” act.

“Hundreds of activists have been killed. It’s just a nightmare in Honduras,” says Greg Grandin, a history professor at New York University, referring to the period since the 2009 coup. “The NGO Global Witness declared Honduras the ‘worst country to be an ecologist,’ having ‘a climate of near total impunity’ that contributed to the killing of 109 environmental activists between 2010 and 2015, the highest per capita rate in the world,” says Andrea Lobo, one of many out-of-the-mainstream observers of Honduras’ decent into oppressive violence. (See Amy Goodman and Democracy Now for more on the story.)

Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was President Obama’s secretary of state at the time of the 2009 coup. At dawn on June 28th, a military unit invaded the home of duly elected President Manuel Zelaya, woke him from his bed at gunpoint and flew him to Costa Rica. Ms Clinton and President Obama expressed obligatory regret over the coup, then did absolutely nothing to turn it around. Rumors spread of secret US involvement on a direct or indirect basis. After a brief hiatus, military aid was reinstated in full to the Honduran military. Secretary Clinton publicly called for nations around the world to support the government installed by the coup and pushed preparations for new elections. Ms. Clinton is very skilled at working this kind of political knife-in-the-kidney operation with a bright PR smile, all the time counting on the American people to have little interest in the comings and goings of a place like Honduras. Unlike the SNAFU in Benghazi, her Republican enemies have no interest in criticizing her for running cover for a coup that removed a left-leaning president in Honduras.

 
A new thought occurred to Rami. It soothed him like a gentle caress. Not all men are born to be heroes. Maybe I wasn’t born to be a hero. But in every man there’s something special, something that isn’t in other men. In my nature, for instance, there’s a certain sensitivity. A capacity to suffer and feel pain. Perhaps I was born to be an artist.
                                                                – Amoz Oz, Elsewhere, Perhaps, a 1966 novel of kibbutz life
 

As a writer/photographer and a tax-paying American citizen, a story in the New York Times about Israel’s culture wars made me cringe. It seems the powerful, militarist right in Israel — so committed to expansion and settlements in the West Bank — is now trying to suppress ideas among the nation’s artistic and literary minds.

Albert Camus; the banned novel Borderlife and Amos Oz

Human creativity amounts to an individual human mind with its rich, active sub-conscious engaging in a dialogue with the outer realities of life. The mash-up that results is called Art. It’s a process that’s often infused with a subversive sensibility at odds with established power. In his perfect republic, Plato banned poets. Tyrants throughout history have been threatened by artists and writers. Hitler, of course, gave up on an artistic career in order to rule Germany and the world as his own personal work of art; he had men like Joseph Goebbels to assure artists and writers weren’t a threat. Art that didn’t promote Aryan purity and German superiority was “decadent” and banned; careers were destroyed. The impulse to attack artists and to cut off their patronage and funding is as old as tyranny itself.

It’s the perennial struggle between Power and Truth. In the short-term, Power can, and often does, run over Truth like a tank in the streets; while in the long run, Truth has the tendency to eat away at, and undermine, that Power. It’s at this juncture — when Power has made its play and relegated Truth to writhing in the dust — that the book burners and the state culture warriors begin to attack the arts for disloyalty, a failure of patriotism or in the end with trying to destroy the state.

In the novel Elsewhere, Perhaps, Amos Oz uses a mixture of third person and first person narration that ends up making the kibbutz called Metsudat Ram a character in his story. The character Rami, referenced in the quote at the top, is a sensitive young man. His father is dead and his older brother Yoash was killed in the Suez action. Part of him wants to be a hero like Yoash. He doesn’t want to be a mama’s boy. So he joins the infantry to fight Israel’s enemies. While away, his girlfriend Noga takes up with an older man. Rami’s artistic sensibilities haunt him. In the end, he becomes a synthesis of tough and sensitive and marries Noga.

Philadelphia — A number of things converged to make my New Years special this year. Three of them were good, one was not so good — in fact, it had the sense of a nasty omen for the future.

First I had a great dinner with friends, including several veterans, at a Vietnamese restaurant in Upper Darby owned by a good friend whose father was an officer in the Vietnamese ARVN army in Nha Trang. He jokes he was “born in a bunker.” He’s the epitome of the hard-working Asian, with one daughter who is a highly respected physician, another in college. When talking to Edward I always wonder what his life would have been like if the United States had had the sense to take another course than the one they did at the close of World War Two and, later, following the French defeat. We’ll never know these what-ifs.

The Plowshares group with Agnes Bauerlein at the far left; and Agnes in more recent times
 

Today, I attended a memorial for Agnes Bauerlein, a Dutch-born peace-movement giant here in Philadelphia who recently died. She and her deceased husband, Charlie, a member of our Veterans For Peace chapter in Philly, parented 11 children. I always felt I was one of Agnes’ extended family, in a way one of her and Charlie’s “kids” as well. Agnes troubled her husband Charlie, a successful engineer with his own company, and many in her family, by devoting her life to civil disobedience. She poured blood over plans for bombs and used a hammer to dent parts for atomic bombs at an AVCO nuclear weapons plant she and others got into with fake IDs. What most impressed me was Agnes’s determination in 1991 to travel to Baghdad, where she was during the bombing that went on during the First Gulf War. Some said she was foolish and a little mad. For me, she was a courageous person who nurtured nearly a dozen kids and decided she wasn’t going to shut up and go along quietly when she saw US militarism at work. She saw the bodies of her brother and sister killed by bombs in World War Two, so unlike most of us, she well knew what she was protesting.

Agnes was born and raised in Holland and her family’s house was along the front lines at the end of the war. Her mother said opposing US military policy was wrong, because it was the US military that saved the family from the Nazis. That didn’t trouble Agnes. She blew off the criticism from the political right side of her family and followed her heart with courage and conviction, pretty much like no one else I’ve ever known. Her appeal in the AVCO case was delayed indefinitely and she never did real prison time for that offense. Charlie eventually came around and stood up for Agnes’ actions. He had voted for Reagan, but ended up a deeply committed fighter for peace. Some said, as a man and a husband, he’d lost control of his wife. He said that was nonsense: his wife Agnes had a good, honorable mind of her own and he was fine with that. Devoted Catholics, they both had a strong spiritual life, which fed into their peace work, in Charlie’s case that meant working with the VFP chapter in Philadephia.