This Can't Be Happening!

 
“Blows that don’t break your back make it stronger.”
– Anthony Quinn in Omar Mukhtar, Lion of the Desert
 

For years, I’ve been working either in the journalism realm or as an antiwar veteran activist expressing the core idea that the United States of America is an “empire,” that its militarist foreign policy is “imperialistic” and that many of our perennial and current problems are rooted in the reality that, as an imperial nation, like many empires in history, we’re overextending ourselves and destroying something that is dear to all American citizens who love this country.

When I wrote guest opinion pieces for the Philadelphia Daily News, a good-natured debate developed between me and the paper’s regular columnist, Stu Bykofsky. I don’t mean to pick on Stu, but his position was classic empire denial. He would argue we weren’t an empire because US troops didn’t look or act like Roman legions. He seemed to feel that Americans were always good and always intervened around the world to slay monsters or help the benighted peoples of the world. Unlike the Brits, we did not exploit the wogs while we played cricket and drank gin and tonics on the verandah. Of course, he’s right that the nature of empire has evolved with the times. But for me the argument was all semantics. It seems hard to claim that the United States is not an empire or that its imperial drive — with some 700 military bases around the world — has not led to a problem of overextension that plays to the detriment of US citizens at home.

The other night, I stumbled on the 1981 film epic Omar Mukhtar, Lion of the Desert. Mukhtar was a simple village teacher of the Koran in Libya who turned out to be a natural military genius; he brilliantly fought an occupying Italian army from 1911 to 1931. Italy had taken Libya from the declining Turkish empire. Once Benito Mussolini rose to power in 1922, the occupation became a powerful drive to establish “the fourth shore,” the name given to Italy’s ambitions to re-create a new Roman Empire in North Africa.

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Above, General Graziani (Oliver Reed) readies his troops to brutally attack a Libyan village. The real Graziani in the inset photo. Below, Quinn as Mukhtar with the boy who ends up with his glasses; the real Mukhtar before he is hung, and his hanged body.

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Anthony Quinn plays Mukhtar in the three-hour film, which to my surprise is a well written, acted and filmed cinematic gem. Like The Battle of Algiers, the film offers serious insights for a western audience. When the film was released, following the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the Iranian hostage crisis, it bombed. It only recouped $1 million in box office receipts on the $35 million it cost to make; the fact the $35 million was put up by Muammar Gaddafi also contributed to the film’s doom. As one commentator noted, this was only five years after the demoralizing end of the Vietnam War, and most Americans tended to identify with the fascist Italian imperialists in the film, not with the Libyan insurgent heroes.

There is a massive deception campaign in the US, and in its global propaganda, which seeks to portray the United States as a poor set-upon nation that would like world peace but just has to keep a military stationed around the globe to “police” all the world’s “trouble spots.”

In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

That truth is that the US is the biggest war-monger the world has ever known.

Defending US empire around the globe at a cost of $1.3 trillion a year

The United States never misses an opportunity to castigate other countries for “uncivilized” behavior, and certainly there is enough of that to go around almost anywhere you look in the world. But there’s plenty of it here in the U.S. too.

Just consider the case of Terry Williams.

Williams, a 47-year-old black man, has spent almost 30 years on Pennsylvania’s crowded death row while lawyers appealed his death penalty for two murders committed back when he was a 17 and 18-year old boy. Now he’s about to be killed by the state for those crimes.

At the time he was tried and convicted, although it was known to prosecutors that his two victims were adult men who had forcibly raped Williams when he was as young as 13, and that he had been a victim of sexual abuse since he was six, the jury was not informed about any of this. In recent years, a number of the 12 jurors who originally convicted him and sentenced the teenager to death have now said that had they known about the abuse he suffered — particularly at the hands of the two men he later killed — they would have decided the case differently, and certainly would not have voted for the death penalty. Even the wife of one of his victims has pleaded with the state to spare him.

Nevertheless, the state’s governor, Tom Corbett, a hard-on-crime Republican who, prior to being elected to the state’s top post, served as attorney general, making him the state’s top lawyer, had no hesitation in signing his death warrant earlier this month, with an Oct. 3 execution date.
Terry Williams as a young teen and as he looks now awaiting execution after 30 years on Pennsylvania's death row

The situation in the Middle East has reached a dangerous point, to be sure, but there are also signs that a sea change may be taking place here in the US which could herald a whole new relationship between the US, Israel and the rest of the Arab and Islamic world.

The problem is that so much is in flux at the moment, with a civil war building in Syria, a confrontation looming between Israel and Iran, and with hot-heads in many Islamic countries attacking US embassies in the region, that the deeper change is not easy to see. There are also many opportunities for things to blow up in the next few weeks or month.

One thing is clear though: Israel’s blow-hard right-wing prime minister, the US-raised zionist Benjamin Netanyahu, openly trying to topple Obama, has propelled Israel directly into US politics, and has also been trying to push the US into a war against Iran, and he’s been doing all this in a manner so clumsy and overt that he may have fundamentally undermined the long-standing “special relationship” between the US and Israel.

As the long-respected American newspaper of American Jewish opinion, the Jewish Daily Forward, editorialized a few days ago:

It’s difficult to recall a time when an Israeli prime minister has inserted himself into a presidential election campaign in the way that Benjamin Netanyahu has. It’s even harder to recall a time when a trusted ally openly urged the American president to undertake a questionable, unpopular and highly risky war. We sure hope Netanyahu knows what he’s doing, because the stakes for him — and for the two nations he professes to care about the most — could not be higher.
 

The editorial goes on to note:
 

He may be overplaying his hand. Americans are deeply wary of another military involvement in the Muslim world. Most Americans oppose a military strike against Iran. Most even oppose coming to Israel’s aid should it be attacked by Iran. A recent poll by the nonpartisan Chicago Council on Global Affairs posed this hypothetical situation: Israel attacks Iran, Iran retaliates and and the two nations go to war. Only “38 percent say the United States should bring its military forces into the war on the side of Israel. A majority (59%) says it should not,” the poll showed.

Israeli PM Netanyahu and US President Obama: not BFFs

New York City — Is there anything less threatening than a morbidly obese cop on a motor scooter?

Okay, 25 morbidly obese cops on motor scooters–that’s even more unthreatening. When I’m out in the streets chanting, “Show me what a police state looks like! THIS is what a police state looks like!” I think I have a right to be oppressed by proper storm troopers who have spent enough time at the gym to bristle instead of sag. They don’t have to be television actors or anything, but as a taxpayer, am I getting my money’s worth when I’m being beaten and arrested by a parade of fried dumplings?

I’m going to be fair here and admit that I did see a morbidly obese cop on a motor scooter run over somebody’s foot last fall. That was moderately threatening until the ambulance arrived.

Note to Mayor Bloomberg: Is this why you banned the 32 oz. Big Gulps? All the guards at your cement bunker on East 79th Street were getting diabetes?

Note to Commissioner Kelly: Make your cops get off the motor scooters and chase those anarchists on foot. It’s good exercise. You might lose some anarchists, but think how much less embarrassing it will be to display fewer bulges in blue uniforms the next time Obama ties up midtown for a fundraiser.

At least 60% of the NYPD looks like the governor of New Jersey. Where is your pride?

It must be uncomfortable to have a hundred pounds of potbelly squeezing like toothpaste out the edges of those bullet-proof vests. They aren’t fooling anyone, using those vests like girdles.

It’s probably even more uncomfortable to work for a mayor who is cutting your pension while claiming you as a soldier in his “personal army.” That would be the same mayor who was worth $5 billion in 2002 when he was first elected mayor and promised to work full time in office. Now he’s worth $23 billion. How many cops on scooters made $18 billion while working full-time for the city?

At the next big general assembly of Occupy Wall Street, I’m going make a motion that we have no demonstrations at all for the next three years and let the NYPD just waste away from lack of exercise. It’s hard to believe those guys have done anything since the last big OWS demonstration on May 1 except eat Big Macs and play with their gadgets from the Department of Homeland Security. Who will protect the ruling class and harass black teenagers when everyone in the NYPD has occluded arteries?

Such were my thoughts on Monday morning, the first birthday of Occupy Wall Street. I was with about 800 people of the Strike Debt branch of OWS who gathered at 55 Water Street, an unloved and unused Vietnam memorial with no grass in the tradition of Zucotti Park before the original occupation. The future of parks under late-stage capitalism: Nothing that requires maintenance, even for the casualties of empire.

One of New York's Fattest rolls along to protect Wall Street's Fat Cats from Occupy activists

 
A review of:
NOT THE ISRAEL MY PARENTS PROMISED ME
By Harvey Pekar and J.T. Waldman
With an epilogue by Joyce Brabner
Hill and Wang, 2012
$24.95. $14.67 on Amazon
 

Harvey Pekar, who died in 2010, was a major player in the elevation of comics into a respectable medium for telling human stories. His famous American Splendor comic featured Pekar as an existential everyman/curmudgeon finding stories in chance meetings in the grocery line, in his mundane, day-to-day life as a file clerk in a Cleveland VA office or in his celebrated appearances on the David Letterman show. His image has been drawn by dozens of cartoonists in a range of styles, most notably by the famous R. Crumb. A feature film was made about Pekar’s life and work called American Splendor. The hybrid narrative/documentary film won an Oscar for its screenplay.

The Israel book, the real Harvey Pekar and R. Crumb's version

Pekar has a strong following and is still publishing graphic narratives from beyond the grave. The new comic titled Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me is an example of his post-mortem work. (A second graphic tale written by Pekar — Harvey Pekar’s Cleveland — has also been published this year. It was illustrated by Joseph Remnant.)

The 172-page graphic narrative on Israel was conceived and written by Pekar and later illustrated by Philadelphia artist J.T. Waldman, whose other work includes a highly regarded graphic narrative of the Biblical Esther story called Megillat Esther. Bruce Farrar on Amazon’s website writes of this book: “A daring and imaginative interpretation of scripture in a graphic novel is JT Waldman’s version of the Scroll of Esther, the story behind the Purim festival. …This is a cup that runs over its brim with delights, wonders, and mysteries.”

Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me is comprised of three interwoven narrative lines. First, there’s Pekar’s story raised in Cleveland by a father who owned and operated a small grocery store and a mother who was a devoted Marxist; both parents were strong Zionists. Second, there’s Pekar’s telling of Jewish history from Abraham to the Crusades to the British Mandate to the founding of Israel. The third narrative thread is based on the time Waldman met Pekar and drove him around Cleveland before Pekar died.

Just because someone has the ability to do something, does not mean he or she should do it.

We have two examples of such a situation before us at the moment: President Barack Obama and Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett.

Here in Pennsylvania, Terry Williams, a man who has been living on death row for three decades after being convicted murdering two men when he was only 17 and 18, is slated to be executed October 3. He has exhausted his appeals and his family, his attorney, and even the wife of one of the men he killed, are asking the state’s governor and former attorney general, Republican Tom Corbett, to grant him clemency. Why? Williams was repeatedly raped by his two victims, beginning when he was only a 13-year-old boy. It’s ironic that the same Gov. Corbett who turned a blind eye to Penn State serial boy rapist and football coach Jerry Sandusky is now, at least so far, allowing this obscene execution to go forward. Corbett signed the death warrant for Williams’ execution early this month.

Then we have President Obama. Last fall he signed into law the Constitution-shredding National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which includes a provision allowing the military, inside the United States, to arrest and detain indefinitely without trial American citizens. He initially assured the public that he would not use that tyrannical power as president. Not wanting to trust that all presidents would say the same thing, a group of journalists and other plaintiffs then filed suit in federal court, claiming the law was unconstitutional (the sixth amendment to the Constitution, part of the Bill of Rights, guarantees to all people — not just citizens — the right to a “speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury”). Two days ago, Federal District Judge Katherine Forrest (an Obama appointee to the bench) issued a permanent injunction in New York declaring that the provisions of the NDAA which allow for the kidnapping and indefinite detention without charge of American citizens were permanently enjoined because they were unconstitutional. That could have been the end of it, but late yesterday, after newspaper deadlines had passed and after the evening news programs had run, the White House appealed that ruling. The president who says he would never use this horrific law is fighting in court to overturn the decision declaring it unconstitutional!

What hope and change?

The back of a man’s head spoke to me
On a metro-bus in Chicago,
A little bald spot with a shine.

Did you know, it said,
That the back of a man’s head is innocent?
No matter what the rest of the man has done,
Is doing, or thinking. . .
The crown comes out first
And is therefore the wisest. . .

(It paused, thoughtfully, as the bus lurched.)

. . .But the back is like the dome
Of a smooth stone pushing up in a field
That knows everything.

It’s a good thing I don’t have lips
Or I would never stop begging the face
To turn around. You see,
I know how the world rushes in,
And how it fills in.
I am the rudder,
The tail of this kite!

I have known Nick Bryant since 1995. He was new to New York from Minnesota then, and looking to make a jump from reporting for a science news service to writing for a mass audience. I noticed that he was persistent and ethically motivated and I thought, “He might be a good reporter.” We got to be friends, and had many long discussions about the nature of evil, which was his preferred subject matter as he tried to make a move into general circulation magazines. When he wasn’t chasing doctors at AIDS conferences, he was chasing outlaw bikers and Satanists.

On one such foray in 2002, he stumbled on a scandal that I had never heard of. The scandal centered around the Franklin Community Federal Credit Union, which was created to serve a poor black neighborhood in Omaha, Nebraska. During the 70s and 80s, its manager, a man named Larry King (not the talk show host), ran the Franklin as a Ponzi scheme and looted over $40 million, which he spent on an opulent lifestyle and Republican fundraising. King sang the National Anthem at the Republican convention in 1984 and served on several committees of the National Black Republican Council. He had a townhouse in Washington, DC, where he threw parties with many prominent guests. In August 1988, he threw a $100,000 party at the Republican convention, and appeared in a video in which he and Jack Kemp urged blacks to vote for George H. W. Bush. In November 1988, his Ponzi scheme crashed and the Franklin was shut down by the National Credit Union Association and the FBI.

All run-of-the-mill scandal stuff, and uncontroversial in the basic facts, except that as King was climbing into the upper levels of the national Republican hierarchy, Omaha was boiling over with rumors that he was also running a pedophile ring, pandering children out to rich and powerful men in Omaha, even flying the children to Washington, Los Angeles and New York for orgiastic, abusive parties with even richer and more powerful men.

Larry E. King

This article was first published on the website of PressTV

Just looking at the video images of the two conventions — the Republican one last week in Tampa, Florida, and this week’s Democratic convention in Charlotte, NC — one can see the fundamental contrast between the rank-and-file of the two parties.

They are really and truly different cohorts.

Scanning the Republican delegates and convention-goers in Tampa, one labors mightily to find even one black face, or even an obvious brown latino face or an asian face. It is a white, and predominantly male, crowd that one sees. It is also an angry crowd, cheering at the venom spewed against Democrats, welfare recipients, immigrants and others who are not part of the “real America,” of allegedly self-reliant white men.

The GOP is a party of white, angry, greedy people and leaders who egg them on. The Democratic party is a party of people who care for others, but its leaders mostly don’t.