This Can't Be Happening!

(This article is Part III of journalist Ridenour’s political autobiography, Solidarity and Resistance: 50 Years With Che. Click here for Part I and here for Part II)
 

Grethe Porsgaard and I fell in love, in 1979. She was from Denmark and vacationing in Los Angeles. I traveled to her homeland, in 1980, where we married. At my behest, we made a go of it in her country. A major factor in that decision was that my former wife had taken our children, whose upbringing we had been sharing, from me, and had turned them against me. It would have been a negative way to begin a new love life living close to that madness. Although Grethe and I ended our marriage after several years, we remain friends.

In the first years in Denmark, I worked at odd jobs and wrote freelance, while also participating in Central America solidarity activities. In the course of that work, I met an El Salvadoran guerrilla leader in Copenhagen while he was on tour for the FMLN. We agreed that I would travel clandestinely to El Salvador where I would accompany guerrillas in the countryside, with the goal of writing a book.

This project led to my first visit to Cuba, in the autumn of 1987. My first book, Yankee Sandinistas: interviews with North Americans living & working in the new Nicaragua, had just been published by Curbstone Press in the US. At the recommendation of Cuba’s embassy personnel in Copenhagen, I offered it to Cuba’s foreign book publisher, Editorial José Martí, to publish a Spanish translation.

In a few days, the publishing house director told me that they wished to publish my book and had assigned a translator to it. Delighted, I signed a formal contract. Later, I saw Fidel hold a four-hour speech in the convention center and hung on to every word. It was true what was said about his abilities as a speaker: he was the world’s greatest orator. And what a memory he had! He could start off somewhere and go around the world describing how it was and how it is, and do so without notes or even water, and seemingly all in one long breath.

Just the year before, the government had launched a period of “Rectification of Errors and Negative Tendencies” as a response to economic and political stagnation. The leadership now realized that copying the Soviet Union’s Economic Management and Planning System for 15 years had been a mistake. Rectification was aimed at diversifying domestic production, reducing dependency on the mono-culture export of sugar, stemming market-economy tendencies, and emphasizing volunteer labor.
Author Ron Ridenour burns his US Passport in front of US Special Interests Section building in Havana

Two veteran friends of mine will be on one of the ships planning to leave Athens next week to challenge the Israeli sea blockade of Gaza. The Israeli government, after attacking a previous flotilla in May 2010 and killing nine people, has said it will use violence if necessary to prevent the ships from entering what any reasonable person by now should agree are Palestinian waters.

This confrontation should not be necessary. The Israeli military occupation over Palestinian life should have been eased and sovereign rights established for Palestinians long ago. The crisis of Palestinian status has reached the level of a disaster, and like the creation of Israel itself it is more than a Jewish problem: It is a world problem.

The flotilla as an act of civil disobedience is occurring at a time Israel/Palestine peace talks are dead in the water and the fledgling coalition of Fatah and Hamas is planning in September to seek recognition of Palestine as a sovereign state from the UN General Assembly, the very same body that recognized Israel in 1947. The US doesn’t want this to happen because, if the past is a guide, it will feel it has to reject the Palestinian request. Since the US is only one of many equal votes in the General Assembly — versus the Security Council where its veto rules — a US vote supporting Israeli intransigence will do nothing but be galling for much of the world.

Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, left, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

At a time when people in the Middle East and North Africa are in the streets seeking new governing relationships and United States citizens of both parties are becoming fed up with foreign wars, the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman is acting like a dangerous, petulant child covering its eyes to make the real world go away.

 
A boy is traveling
in the back seat of the family car,
a beige Rambler
driven by God
(who, just for now,
is his mother and father).
The boy is looking out the window
ecstatically
at everything that passes
along the road of life.
It is a smooth ride
because the tires are barely touching the asphalt.
It’s all geared to the silken smoothness
of the boy’s vision of things passing.
When they stop
they will be in Florida;
all the orange juice you can drink
for 25 cents!
It will be like a dream.
He will learn to dive
at his uncle Bill’s
from a half-kneel,
like praying.
In a very short time
the boy will see everything
he needs to make sense of life,
of heaven,
of the universe. . .
And he must pay attention, as
very soon,
his hands will be on the wheel,
driving his parents home.
 
1962 Rambler Cross-Country Wagon

Let me state from the outset: I have no problem with soldiers who inflate or embellish their war stories, any more than I am bothered by anybody who likes to spice up the tale of a youthful exploit.

It’s different though, when exaggerations our outright fictions are exploited for personal gain, like what Connecticut’s Attorney General Richard Blumenthal successfully campaigned for the US Senate on the outrageous claim that he was a Vietnam War combat veteran, when he really wasn’t.

My grandfather, William Lindorff, earned a Silver Star in World War I, where he was an ambulance driver on the front lines in France. My father, a Marine in World War II, says that his dad never once talked about that medal. Now, I’d say that’s a real hero.

David Christian, on the other hand, who ran twice unsuccessfully for a seat in Congress in Pennsylvania, has talked a lot about his own heroism as a soldier in Vietnam. In fact he’s written (with author William Hoffer), a book about his exploits, titled Victor Six. A cover blurb from the Philadelphia Inquirer touts him (perhaps a bit excessively, given Marine Gen. Smedley Butler’s unparalleled two Congressional Medals of Honor), as “this country’s most decorated war hero.”

I’m not going to challenge Christian’s tales of his heroic actions in Nam, where his website claims he won two Silver Stars, but some of his other stories, particularly one  he recently told to blustery conservative radio talk-show host and local newspaper columnist Michael Smerconish, do merit a little examination, and raise questions about what Stephen Colbert would call his general “truthiness.”
David Christian, Michael Smerconish and Kevin Ferris

“Pakistan must do more.”

That statement by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has become a laugh line in Pakistani drawing rooms.
The 9/11 attacks resulted in 2,996 deaths — 246 on the planes,2606 in towers and on ground, 126 at the Pentagon. The attacks justified an invasion of Afghanistan, the Iraq War and also attacks on the America’s “ally in war on terror,” Pakistan.

The US has come a long way since. The policy of extrajudicial killings survived the Bush/Cheney era and has intensified from an estimated 45 attacks under Bush to 200 under Obama.

Few of those killed in these attacks have been militants. Most have been civilians. Indeed, according to the New American Foundation, only 2% of deaths have been of militants. But hey, that’s ok. That’s why the term “collateral damage” was coined, right?

The Pakistan Army has been engaged in a non-conventional war since 2001, resulting in millions being displaced and in civil amenities being destroyed. Yet there is now increasing pressure from the US on Pakistan to have out army target the region of our own country called North Waziristan.

Pakistan, the US says, needs to “do more.”

Or else!

In an article carried by the Pakhtoonistan Gazette on 10th April 2011, Muhammad Tahir comments on a White House report claiming that Pakistan has no “clear path” to defeat militants on its soil.

My humble submission, dear readers, is: Neither does the USA.

However, Pakistan needs to “do more.”
US drone attacks in Pakistan are killing mostly civilians, plus any lingering affection for America

Some years ago, I was photographing a constitutional law professor for a magazine article on his book, and while I composed my shots I employed the usual half-minded topical banter to keep things on course. The professor was pretty progressive and knew I was a veteran antiwar activist. I was muttering something about constitutional rights.

In the lens, I noticed him chuckling at something, so I pulled my eye away from the camera and looked at him. He was grinning now.

“John, you know they abrogated the Constitution long ago,” he said, his tone a bit patronizing but also mixed with camaraderie and humor.

“Oh, yeh!” I said. “I forgot about that.” We both laughed, and I went on with the shoot.

I couldn’t help thinking about that conversation as I read the story in The New York Times about the new powers being given to individual FBI agents to snoop on citizens they subjectively deem dangerous.

Is the FBI giving its agents too much rope to follow their inner Harry Callahan?

As a veteran anti-war activist and blogster critical of my government, I took this news somewhat personally, since, according to the Times report, without getting permission or making a report, FBI agents could sneak around the back of my house at night and fish through my garbage cans. They could do this if they thought there might be information in those cans useful to intimidate me to snitch on someone. (For the record, I’m not uncomfortable with an FBI agent going through the rancid chicken parts and feces from our cat’s litter box. I have nothing to hide.)

Apparently, individual FBI agents are also now empowered to meddle with me and other writers on this blog in ways I can only imagine — if they deem that necessary. It has to do with the blogosphere and the First Amendment. According to the Times, the new rules clarify for agents just who is a “legitimate member of the news media” on the internet and who is not. The Times reports that “prominent bloggers would count, but not people who have low-profile blogs.” I presume “count” means that a blog is deemed to have First Amendment rights.

As a boy I knew old Lonnie Chase, who clammed for a living in the waters of Cape Cod.  Not known for his erudition, his words were short and pithy.  I remember his response to my question regarding the weather. After gazing skyward, seeming to be pondering the clouds,  he would always answer, “Might rain, then ‘gin, might not.”
 


Was Lonnie being a wise man  or a fool?  I choose the first.  From sitting hours in his dingy in the bay, he had learned to trust ambiguity.  For him, there was something controlling the weather that was unpredictable, something his Indian blood told him was beyond our understanding. 
 

Lonnie had never gone to school, and he couldn’t even write his name, yet he was a superb craftsman of small boats.  I marveled at his obese frame as he’d sit by the stove chewing tobacco, a spittoon beside him, as he and his friend Long John discussed things beyond the ability of a ten-year-old boy to grasp.  A few adults sensed his worth as a member of the local community, but thanks to his unkempt ways, most characterized him as a local one-man blight on the neighborhood.
 

There are others who are more famously hard to characterize when it comes to wisdom. Take Einstein, whose often peculiar and errant behavior also included a strong display of wisdom.  I had once thought of writing that knowledge and wisdom were mutually exclusive, the one being occluded by the other, but Einstein gives the lie to such an assertion.
 


In his case we have the element of genius, of course.  But van Gogh, also a genius, demonstrates that genius and wisdom don’t necessarily go hand in hand.  
 
 How about wisdom and age, then, which is really the subject of this article?
Sidharta: A wise man or a fool?

Federal Judge Filipe Restrepo, a man with a solid history as a defender of civil liberties and civil rights, and a defense attorney by training and private practice experience, seems sadly to have gotten a bit thin-skinned and power-happy after donning the robes of a federal judge.

As my colleague Linn Washington wrote earlier this week, the judge lost it when Hampton Coleman had the effrontery to write a 28-word letter to Restrepo questioning the judge’s integrity and his commitment to “blind justice,” and warning that “we the people” would be “watching and listening very carefully” to the judge.

In response to that angry but innocuous letter (prompted by Coleman’s feeling that the judge had been unfair to his nephew, a detective who had brought a racial harassment case against his employer, the Montgomery County, PA district attorney), Judge Restrepo dispatched two members of the US Federal Marshals Service to make an early morning visit to Coleman. At Coleman’s house, they reportedly accused him of sending a “threatening” letter to the judge, and warned him not to send any more. (As Washington recounts, when Coleman asked the marshals about his First Amendment rights, they told him the Constitution was “an old document” and that it was “irrelevant.”)

I would argue that when a federal judge thinks that receiving a letter from a citizen telling him to honor the Constitution and warning him that the public will be “watching and listening” to his actions in court constitutes a possible criminal act that calls for a threatening home visit by US Marshals, that judge has himself become a threat to a free society.

Interestingly, another of my colleagues here at ThisCantBeHappening!, John Grant, says that a PDF file put out by Judge Restrepo’s own office says that “Judge Restrepo permits correspondence with the Court on all matters.”

Fair enough! I am calling for our readers here at ThisCantBeHappening! to take him up on that invitation, and to let the judge know in no uncertain terms that it’s not just Hampton Coleman who is going to be watching and listening to his actions and decisions on the federal bench here in Philadelphia. We are Hampton Coleman!

“A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

This 1954 quote from Albert Einstein hangs on the wall in my house. It seems to me truth distilled down to its most humble and indisputable essence. The more I read it, the more fundamental and inescapable its wisdom seems.

While we feel like “a part limited in time and space,” that sense of being apart is, Einstein says, a delusion upon which collectives, nations and empires are built. And, by extension, how wars are fomented and maintained.

We all naturally gravitate to these delusional human prisons. To a certain extent, they’re unavoidable. In my mind, they dovetail with the classic definition of tragedy as a case of someone or some group meeting a destructive or fatal end rooted in their own decisions. “[T]hey die and are not happy through their own efforts … as a condition contained in the effort,” says Oscar Mandel in A Definition Of Tragedy.

Humans gather and foist notions upon themselves that they are “exceptional” or “the chosen people” or “beloved of God” or just richer and more powerful and more deserving than some other people whose prison is constructed of very different delusions, in some cases based on being victimized. Religions are notorious for maintaining delusional prisons in this respect.

A few weeks ago I was accused by a left-leaning, pro-Palestinian activist of spouting simplistic, “new age” ideas. Certainly Einstein’s view of humanity’s place in the universe can easily be ridiculed as New Age. And, like anything, Einstein’s idea might even be used to create a separate clique of superior initiates – a secular-humanist cult.

The fact even Einstein might be the root of some delusional prison does not mean the point Einstein is trying to make in this quote is not serious and is somehow out-to-lunch. To me — a 25-year veteran peace activist – what he says is the crux of all serious peace-making in the world. It’s also the bane of intractable international conflicts like the one in the Middle East.

A Palestinian and an Israeli face-to-face

My relationship with Israel and its policies reaches back to late 1967 following the June Six-Day War. I remember standing outside a bunker in a firebase west of Pleiku, Vietnam, discussing with a Jewish soldier in my unit the wisdom of the Israeli settlement movement being established in the just-conquered West Bank. As best I can recall, the conversation went like this:

“That land belongs to Jews and to Israel,” he said. He may have referred to the West Bank area as the Biblical Judea and Samaria.

“It also belongs to the people who live there,” I said.

“They were about to attack Israel, and they lost the war. Israel has the right to settle the area.”

“Sending in settlers is nuts. You know down the line it’s all gonna come back and bite Israel. It’ll end up just like here – an occupation.”

My Jewish friend would have none of it, of course. Like many Jews, he was locked deep in that Einsteinian prison of delusion that says Jews and Israel are justified in doing whatever they do because of security and because of the holocaust in Europe and their long, terrible history of being oppressed and fragmented as a people. Israel is about being tough and no longer being a chump in the world. Plus, Zionist Jews made the desert bloom.

Hampton Coleman, a military veteran, felt secure in his constitutional free speech rights until a few weeks ago when three U.S. Marshals showed up at his Delaware home issuing demands Coleman considered threats.

Those U.S. Marshals, two male and one female from Philadelphia, came to Coleman’s home last month accusing him of sending a threatening letter to a federal magistrate judge.

“Why would I put my name and address on a letter containing a threat? I’m not crazy,” Coleman said during a recent interview.

Those Marshals warned Coleman to not send any more letters to U.S. Magistrate L. Felipe Restrepo.
Coleman claims the Marshals service is overreacting to his three-sentence, 28-word letter voicing concern about bias he felt Restrepo had exhibited in a race discrimination case handled by that judge, who ordinarily has a reputation for fairness.

Coleman attended an April 2011 hearing in that case.

Coleman said when he asked the three Marshals about his supposed Constitutional right to freedom of speech, “one of the marshals said “that’s an old document.” Coleman said that response startled him implying that the U.S. Constitution is “irrelevant.”

The five freedoms guaranteed in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution include barring the federal government from “abridging the freedom of speech” and from blocking “the right of the people…to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Coleman’s chilling encounter with those Marshals comes at a time when some experts and individuals across America are raising alarms about actions by governmental entities which are eroding Constitutional rights under the cloak of counterterrorism. Recent actions include revelations about surveillance of activists by FBI agents, court rulings limiting Bill of Rights protections and recent congressional renewal of the rights- curtailing Patriot Act.

Persons attempting “to exercise their rights will often be forced to defend themselves against an increasingly inflexible and uncompromising government,” warns John W. Whitehead of The Rutherford Institute, a civil liberties organization, in a recent commentary.
The First Amendment: Just "an old document"?