Now, Let Us Stand for the Pledge of Allegiance

by Gary Corseri / Dissident Voice

Maybe that’s what it’s all about. … Maybe all that happens is, you get older and you know less.

– Frank Sinatra

Children:

In Amerika today we have two parties … the Fascist Union (also known as the F.U. party) and the Phony Cooperative Baloney party (also known as the P.C.B.).

The F.U. party stands for wholesome, Amerikan values–what we used to call “rugged individualism.” We don’t use this term anymore because today we understand the dangers of “individualism”–especially among the lower classes. We know that smart and crafty people always get together to form cartels, meshing economic, political and social lives to pursue their own best interests—and to hell with everyone else! This is a law of Nature known as “survival of the fittest.” It’s also known as the “invisible hand” of the market. Even the great slave-holder, Thomas Jefferson, understood this when he wrote about “liberty” and the “pursuit of happiness.” Notice that he did not write about “justice” and the “pursuit of truth.” Today we know that “justice” and “truth” are in the eyes of the beholder. Each person has his or her own idea of what those words mean and you can’t run the New World Order with a lot of loose threads hanging out, can you?

The P.C.B.’ers pretend they serve the interests of the “common people.” You can tell how much contempt they have for us right there—we are “common,” but they are not. Well, children, there is nothing “common” about me! And, I hope, nothing “common” about you! I am proud to be part of the crew that powers the ship. Let the captains decide where the ships are going. They have all the information and we couldn’t begin to understand it even if we tried. They tell us what to do and think through the mass media—including education–, and life is certainly a lot easier when you know what to do and think. Don’t be confused by idiots like Michael Moore. There are always some crackpots who believe they’re too good to be conditioned like everyone else. In one of the renegade Moore’s classic movies, Capitalism: A Love Story—a classic example of mis-alignment, one might say—he tries to make a distinction between capitalism and democracy! Yes, you are right to snicker! There really is no distinction. Democracy is rule by the people and the people obviously want capitalism or they wouldn’t keep this system in place year after year, decade after decade—as far back as any of us can remember, even back to the glorious Roman Empire of the sanctioned history books.

To prove that we are a capitalistic democracy we have to put up with the PCB crowd. They like to parade the old platitudes like “fairness,” and “government of the people, by the people, and for the people,” and all that Martin Luther King blather about “all God’s children,” blah, blah, blah … but everyone knows they are “in on the take.” They have to raise huge amounts of money to run their silly campaigns. A lot of them are “filthy rich” themselves and they get into politics as a hobby because they’re not clever enough to make more money and create jobs for the “working poor” they’re always crying over like spilt milk. If, perhaps, they don’t have their own money, they go hat-in-hand to the corporate bosses, cut deals—wink! wink!–, promise “the people” this, that and the other while all the time knowing they can’t or won’t deliver. Sometimes, a PCB’er breaks through. Remember President Obama? Yes, you can “boo”—it’s all right. Some people say now that he actually believed his own rhetoric. “Change we can believe in!” (Yes, you can hiss!) Would someone tell me what the hell that means?

Today we know that the people cannot change anything; only the elite, the elect, the select and the carefully groomed Guardians of the New World Order have the Intelligence necessary to ensure success. They gather Intelligence from everywhere—from every corner of the globe, from every nook and cranny. No one can escape. Resistance is futile. That is why we have these cameras and microphones in the classroom, in the cafeteria, in the halls, in the library, in the lockers, in the gym, etc. … so what we say, what we do, what we think, can be constantly observed, monitored, heard, vetted, discussed, dissected, appraised, and, if need be, corrected. If need be, deleted. Remember the saying: “Our predator drones are ever watchful, vigilant, never sleeping.” (A word to the wise is sufficient!) That is why there are cameras and microphones in your homes, in your computers, in your phones, in the watches you wear, the products you buy … in the streets, in your vehicles … in fact, everywhere. It is all designed to make us better citizens of the glorious New World Order—better soldiers in the armies, better, uncomplaining workers, better consumers of so-called “junk food,” so-called “junk information.” Today we know that the Guardians are watching—and, if they want us to die sooner, well, we should all be prepared to “win one for the Gipper,” stiffen our backbones and do what’s necessary because they see the bigger picture, they know our best interests. It’s because they are watching us—and watching out for us! It’s because they know our hearts and minds and very souls—and what is good and proper for all of us—better than we do.

Now, let us stand for the Pledge of Allegiance.

Gary Corseri has had his work published at Dissident Voice and hundreds of other venues, performed at the Carter Presidential Library, had dramas on Atlanta-PBS and elsewhere. He has taught in prisons and universities. His books include Holy Grail, Holy Grail, A Fine Excess, and Manifestations (edited). He can be reached at: gary_corseri@comcast.net. Read other articles by Gary.

This article was posted on Monday, October 19th, 2009 at 9:00am and is filed under Culture, Humor.

Gore Vidal's United States of fury

At 84, the writer and activist may be confined to a wheelchair, but his rage – at his country, its leaders and citizens – burns as fiercely as ever. Johann Hari watches the sparks fly

Wednesday, 7 October 2009

In Russian, the phrase "gore vidal" means "he has seen grief". As Gore Vidal is wheeled towards me across an empty London hotel lobby, it seems for the first time like an apt translation. In the eight years since I saw him last, he has lost his partner of 50 years, most of his friends, most of his enemies, and the use of his legs. The man I met then – bristling with his own brilliance, scattering witticisms around like confetti – has withered. His skin is like parchment, but the famous cheekbones are still sharp beneath the crags. "It is so cold in here," he says, by way of introduction. "So fucking cold."

Gore Vidal is not only grieving for his own dead circle and his fading life, but for his country. At 83, he has lived through one third of the lifespan of the United States. If anyone incarnates the American century that has ended, it is him. He was America's greatest essayist, one of its best-selling novelists and the wit at every party. He holidayed with the Kennedys, cruised for men with Tennessee Williams, was urged to run for Congress by Eleanor Roosevelt, co-wrote some of the most iconic Hollywood films, damned US foreign policy from within, sued Truman Capote, got fellated by Jack Kerouac, watched his cousin Al Gore get elected President and still lose the White House, and – finally, bizarrely – befriended and championed the Oklahoma bomber, Timothy McVeigh.

Yet now, he says, it is clear the American experiment has been "a failure". It was all for nothing. Soon the country will be ranked "somewhere between Brazil and Argentina, where it belongs." The Empire will collapse militarily in Afghanistan; the nation will collapse internally when Obama is broken "by the madhouse" and the Chinese call in the country's debts. A ruined United States will then be "the Yellow Man's Burden", and "they'll have us running the coolie cars, or whatever it is they have in the way of transport".

A Scotch is fetched for him as he is wheeled into the corner of the bar. "I was like everyone else when Obama was elected – optimistic. Everything we had been saying about racial integration was vindicated," he says, "but he's incompetent. He will be defeated for re-election. It's a pity because he's the first intellectual president we've had in many years, but he can't hack it. He's not up to it. He's overwhelmed. And who wouldn't be? The United States is a madhouse. The country should be put away – and we're being told to go away. Nothing makes any sense." The President "wants to be liked by everybody, and he thought all he had to do was talk reason. But remember – the Republican Party is not a political party. It's a mindset, like Hitler Youth. It's full of hatred. You're not going to get them aboard. Don't even try. The only way to handle them is to terrify them. He's too delicate for that."

When he compares Obama to his old friend Jack Kennedy, he shakes his head. "He's twice the intellectual that Jack was, but Jack knew the great world. Remember he spent a long time in the navy, losing ships. This kid [Obama] has never heard a gun fired in anger. He's absolutely bowled over by generals, who tell him lies and he believes them. He hasn't done anything. If you were faced with great problems in chemistry – to find the perfect gas, to gas a population – you won't know for a long time whether it works. You have to go by what people tell you. He's like that. He's not ready for prime time and he's getting a lot of prime time on his plate at once."

Is there any hope? "Every sign I see is doom. But then people say" – he adopts a whiny, nasal voice – "'Oh Mr Vidal, you're so negative, can't you say something nice about America? It's a wonderful country, everybody wants to live here.' Oh yes? When was the last time you saw a Norwegian with a green card who wanted to come here because of the health service? I'll pay you if you can find one."

But there is, he says with sudden perkiness, some "good news. Afghanistan will be terminal for the American empire, yes. Which is a happy way of looking at it. We'll be out of the empire game, rapidly. But it's too late for the country and the constitution." He raises his drink, and smiles ironically. "To a better republic," he says, and drinks in one long gulp.

I. The death of America

The current spasming death of America was foretold at its birth, Vidal says, and it can only be understood by whirling back there. It has been his mission to explain the past to the "United States of Amnesia," through his novels and essays. When he speaks, he sweeps over two millennia of history – from Caesar to Obama – as if he was there, forever spraying one-liners from the back row. Today, he was stopped time in Philadelphia, at the birth of the republic. "Benjamin Franklin saw all this coming," he says. "I quote him because most Americans don't even know who he was now. You'll have to explain to your readers." Franklin was a writer, scientist and soldier who became one of the founding fathers of the United States. "In Philadelphia in 1781, when the constitution was being put together, he was an observer. He didn't want to have any part of it, and as he was leaving the Constitution Hall in Philadelphia a couple of old ladies said, 'Ah, Mr Franklin, what is going to happen?' He told them: 'Well, you're going to get a Republic, if you can keep it. But every constitution of this sort has failed since the beginning of time due to the corruption of the people.'"

So the American people are corrupt? Americans weren't good enough for America? "Precisely. They were only good enough to be a restive colonial power – or the dregs of one."

Vidal's politics began here – almost. He was born at the United States Military Academy in West Point to a wealthy family at the apex of American power. His grandfather was Thomas Pryor Gore, the Senator for Oklahoma. He was blind, so from the age of five, little Gore was reading letters and books for big Gore and guiding him discreetly through Washington DC parties. The Senator was a populist, fighting to rally the people against the concentrated power of Wall Street and Big Finance. He represented the cotton farmers who emerged battered from the Civil War, only to be destroyed by Wall Street financiers playing roulette with the global cotton price. Yet there was always a strange contradiction to his life: "My grandfather couldn't stand his constituents," Vidal says. "And they loved him for it. Figure that one out."

He was a populist with no faith in the populace – precisely what his grandson has turned into. Gore Vidal shares the populist belief that the people are being shafted by the rich – but he thinks the population is too cretinous and drugged by television and fast food to figure it out. "It is always to be hoped that the people will mysteriously be educated, somehow. Well, that's the link. But the people don't know anything. As soon as we became an empire, we stopped teaching geography in the schools, so nobody would know where anything is. It's not the people's fault – they have been perverted them into imperial ways of thinking so that they would be docile workers and loyal consumers. That was the dream and it has come true."

As a child, Vidal loved spending time with his Senator-grandfather, not least because it meant he could escape for a time from his alcoholic mother Nina. When I raise the topic, he adopts the nasal whine of a mock-interviewer again and says: "'Oh Mr Vidal, your poor mother can't have been as awful as you say [in your memoirs].' She was a lot worse. I don't go after other people's mothers, but my own was quite enough to attack."

She was constantly drunk, and when she wasn't savaging him or threatening suicide, she would tell her son the full details of her life in an obsessive angry blather. When he was 10, "she told me that rage made her orgasmic. I didn't think to ask her if sex did the same." When he appeared on the cover of Time magazine years later, she wrote a long letter to the magazine denouncing him. The magazine headlined it: "A Mother's Love." Vidal seems to have inherited his bitter wit from her. Asked why she didn't marry for a fourth time, she said: "My first husband had three balls, my second two, my third one. Even I know enough not to press my luck." Does he think of her often? "No." He gives me an icy stare. After all these years, can he feel any compassion for her? "No." The ice becomes a glacier.

Does he think, at least, that she shaped his personality? His old friend Kenneth Tynan, the theatre critic, wrote in his diaries: "What superb and seamless armour he wears, as befits one for whom life is a permanent battle for (social and intellectual) supremacy ... Gore could never surrender (ie, expose) himself to anyone." Could his mother's cruelty explain his lifelong sweeping dismissal of everything around him – the constant goring by Gore? As soon as I ask this, I realise how Vidal has changed since I last saw him. Then, he would have responded with a witty put-down, or reasserted his supremacy with an obscure classical reference, quoted in the original Greek. Now he looks a little hurt – his eyes flicker sadly – and he says: "Well, it's the last thing I'd like to think about." Then he is silent. I suddenly feel rude and cruel.

His grandfather became increasingly furious that Franklin Roosevelt was – he believed – dragging the United States into an unnecessary war against Germany and Japan. He was opposed to all foreign wars, which he believed were drummed up by big business to serve their interests. "He thought that no foreign war was worth the life of any American," Vidal says, with a smile of pride. But this – combined with his opposition to the New Deal – meant he was voted out of office. As a little act of revenge, Vidal says he has never visited Oklahoma.

He joined the army at the age of 17, glad to escape his mother. He spent the war posted in Italy and, for three years, Alaska. He is not surprised that this "frozen hell" has produced Sarah Palin, "the latest idol in America's long cult of stupidity". Alaska was, he says, "the place where all the crooks in America went to hide. And they produced her."

He says he realises now that he was part of an army sent to build a global empire by "America's Augustus, Roosevelt". The old America was replaced by a military octopus with a metal arm on every continent, and the old constitution was replaced by a "National Security State. I wouldn't have enlisted if I knew where it was going to lead", he says. "But there it was, and we ended [the war as] an empire and slammed the door behind us. Then we fucked it up."

He left the army with no money. "My father and grandfather, as self-made men, were not going to make any other man. I knew that," he says. So he sat down and wrote a novel about the war called Williwaw. At the age of 20, he was suddenly a hard-boiled realist bestseller. He was lauded as a tough young soldier, and his grandfather talked of setting him up with a Congressional seat – but Vidal wanted to write another, bolder novel, based on the only person he had ever loved. It pulled any hope of a political career down behind him – but made him a defining figure in American life.

II. An Interrupted Love Story

When Vidal was 14, a boy called Jimmy Trimble moved into Vidal's dorm at his Washington boarding school. He was a blond, built jock; Vidal was a bookish intellectual. "His sweat smelled of honey, like that of Alexander the Great," he wrote years later in his memoir, Palimpsest. They fell in lust and perhaps in love, and had sex in the forest at the edge of the school grounds. "It was the first human happiness I had ever encountered," Vidal wrote. He saw Trimble as his other half, the person who finally made him complete. Then Trimble was, at the age of 19, blown up by a hand grenade on the beaches of Iwo Jima.

For years, thoughts of Trimble still made Vidal tremble. I think they still do: his eyes turn distant and a little watery when we talk about him. So he wrote a novel – The City and The Pillar – imagining what would have happened if they had met again after the war. It's a dark, bitter book: the sex is a failure and one kills the other. But in 1950s America, to show two all-American boys – manly, self-assured – having sex was wildly bold. He was subject to a blackout in the "respectable" press and any hope of elected office died, but the book became a best-seller.

Vidal resolved that he would never again find what he had lost with Jimmy: "It would be greedy to expect a repetition. I was aware of my once-perfect luck, and left it at that." He says he had sex with more than a thousand "anonymous youths" by the age of 25. He never saw them twice; he never pretended there was any affection there. He was what they labelled "trade" – he did nothing (deliberately, at least) to please them. He was pleasured; that was all. "When I got too old, I paid for it gladly." After the death of Trimble, he seems to have emotionally cauterised himself. Even his closest friends have said there is an isolation at the core of his character. He once said: "I have known so many people, but it seems I have known nobody at all."

Strangely, though, Vidal has always resisted the idea that he is a "gay" champion. "I never said I was gay, because I don't think anyone is." He says he finds "these restrictions tiresome. In the centuries of Rome's great military and political success, there was no differentiation between same-sexers and other-sexers; there was also a lot of crossing back and forth. Of the first 12 Roman emperors, only one was exclusively heterosexual." The US today is, for all the fussing, full of sodomy, he says. "Did you see [Colonel] Gaddafi [at the UN] complaining that American soldiers have been sodomising Arab boys? I thought, well that's been the case since the very beginning of the republic. They blamed the sodomy on those great forests out there which they said made them horny. There was nothing else to do but bugger boys, they said."

So homosexuality and heterosexuality are fictions? "Yes, of course." He adopts a camp voice and adds: "But it makes a lot of girls happy." Why do so many people believe it to be true about themselves if it's false? "They believe in Jesus, and that's a much bigger fiction, with more money spent on it. Prettier clothes too."

When he was 25, Vidal met a younger man called Howard Austen, and they settled down together, on one condition – they agreed to never have sex, nor be romantic in any way. He and Austen were together for 50 years. He died last year in a hospital in the Hollywood Hills. "He had lung cancer and he wouldn't stop smoking and then it went to his brain and he had brain cancer. That's ... that's what happened," he says. Once, in an essay, he quoted the critic Edmund Wilson, who said of his dead wife: "After she was dead, I loved her." Can he say that of Howard? He affects not to hear. "Now I'm a gimp. I can't walk. I need hospitals. You know I have a knee made out of titanium." He taps his knee. "So you see, I need hospitals." And he looks away, a little absently, as if thinking of something else.

III. Isolation

By his mid-20s, Vidal was a best-selling author, and rich. He rented a property in Guatemala – far from his mother – and settled down to write his next novel. But in that small tropical central American country, he found he was going to have to dramatically reassess the country he had just fought for – and pull his grandfather's abandoned philosophy from the gutter of history.

Just before Vidal arrived, the poverty-wreathed Guatemalan people had elected a left-wing president called Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán. They wanted him to introduce a minimum wage and start taxing the US mega-corporation, the United Fruit Company, that dominated the country's only industry, banana-growing. The outraged United Fruit Company acted to preserve its profits – by getting Washington to topple Árbenz and install a dictator. The phrase "banana republic" entered the language.

"I was astonished," Vidal says. "I had known vaguely about our numerous past interventions in Central America. But that was the past." He discovered that Senator Henry Cabot Lodge was leading the charge, and "I didn't believe it. Lodge was a family friend; as a boy I had discussed poetry with him". He says he realised then he had been fighting "for an Empire, not a republic". His grandfather, he resolved, had been right all along: wars only serve elites.

He rapidly became the leading left-wing critic of American foreign policy. He warned against every war from Vietnam to Iraq, often with extraordinary prescience. At the height of George W Bush's post-9/11 popularity, he said: "Mark my words – he will leave office the most unpopular President in history." His essays on this subject are often great flares of truth and anger. His horror at US foreign policy can be summarised in one little scene. In the 1980s, the Sistine Chapel was being restored, and some VIPs were invited to view it on an elevated platform. He spotted that old serial killer Henry Kissinger inspecting the section depicting Hell, and said: "Look, he's apartment hunting."

Vidal started preaching his grandfather's gospel of isolationism. "I am a patriot of the old republic that has slowly vanished during the expansionist years and disappeared completely in 1950 when the National Security State replaced it," he says. "I want us to go from a wartime economy to a peacetime economy, and restore the constitution. We should leave the world alone, before they make us."

The US is only menaced, he says, because it menaces others. "In geopolitics as in physics, there is no action without reaction." He stirs his Scotch and says: "There was no 9/11. I mean – our policies were such that we were going to have a lot of crazy people out there in the Arab world who were going to try to blow us up, because of crimes they feel we committed against them. Any fool could see it coming. And I'm sufficiently a fool to have seen it."

He sees his job as expressing "the unacceptable obvious", and says he is always ready to "turn the other fist". I tell him that while I agree with many of his criticisms of US foreign policy, it seems that to keep his isolationism pristine and pure, he has to go further than the truth. He has to imply every attack on the United States' power was provoked, and therefore justified – when some were not. He looks coldly at me. "Okay – name one." Pearl Harbour, I say. If the US can be an expansionist empire, so can other countries. The Japanese empire attacked the US, just as the US expansionists attacked Guatemala, Vietnam and others. It was unprovoked aggression.

His face tightens into a scowl. "Roosevelt saw to it that we got that war!" he snaps. "He taunted the Japanese so they would have to hit us, at Pearl Harbour, and they did ... We have conveniently forgotten because we don't teach American history to anybody, but he sent an ultimatum to the Japanese telling them to get out of China, which they'd been trying to conquer for years. He was laying down the law to them, [saying they had to] surrender their rather proud nation's empire. And they said fuck you. And the next thing we knew the fleet was moving towards Pearl Harbour."

That's not how most historians read it – but I move on to an even more contested example. He says the Soviet Empire was "purely reactive" to American power, and only committed atrocities and invasions because the US "goaded them". Can that be true? Couldn't they be independently cruel, just as the US sometimes was? "They had a whole continent to play with, they didn't need any more space," he says, and changes the subject, rather oddly, to talk about the Dutch.

I try to pull him back. Yes, it's clearly the case that 9/11 was in part a blow-back response to US crimes in the Middle East, but he goes much further, and says the Bush administration was "probably" in on it. Where is the evidence for this huge claim? "It would certainly fit them to a T, so you can't blame the rest of us for starting to think on slightly conspiratorial grounds. They did steal the great election of the year 2000 and they somehow fixed the Supreme Court of the United States, that sacred place, and got them to go along with it, with the selection, not the election, the selection of George W Bush as president. He wasn't voted for, people didn't want him. And were somewhat mystified that he ended up with it."

But there was an earlier attack on America that he wants to discuss now – one he says was carried out by a "sane" and "noble" man.

IV. A Noble Boy

On 19 April 1995, a former US soldier called Timothy McVeigh planted a massive truck bomb outside a government building in Oklahoma City, at the heart of Vidal's grandfather's old constituency. Some 168 people died, including a kindergarten full of children. McVeigh wrote to Vidal, saying he had been motivated, in part, by studying his work. He said he believed the US Constitution had been usurped by a National Security State that had to be defeated by force. Vidal wrote back – and they became friends. He started mounting passionate defences of the bomber in public. He says he was not crazy, but "too sane for his place and time".

"He was a dedicated student of the American way, of the Constitution itself," he says. "You should read his writings – they're very good. Particularly on the Posse Comitatus Act of 1876, which forbids the Federal government ever to use its troops against the American people – but which they proceeded to do at Waco [a compound used by a religious cult that was attacked by federal troops in 1993]. They killed more people than he managed to kill when he blew up that building in Oklahoma City. He was a noble boy."

Noble? The man who consorted with far right militia groups and blew up all those children? Vidal scowls again, and almost hisses: "He didn't kill them deliberately! But the American government killed all those people at Waco, men, women and children deliberately! It was his gesture against the government he loathed. You know, he swore to me he had no idea there were children there. He said, 'How would I know? I walked by the place once and I knew that there was some kind of dining room, families might be there, or they might not be there,' and he wasn't counting, he wasn't out for a big count. But he was trying to tell the government – look, you have done this arbitrarily, contrary to the Posse Comitatus Act, contrary to American law, you've killed American citizens. Remember he was an army boy, and he loved it, and he was longing to get back in the army and the army was longing to get him back, he was the best sharpshooter they'd seen in years. But it was not meant to be."

But he knew he would kill scores of innocent people: that was the point. Doesn't that show a callous disrespect for human life? "So did Patton, so did Eisenhower!" he says angrily. "Everybody's rather careless about it once you start getting involved in wars. He saw this as a war to preserve the Constitution! You know what he said? But you don't, so I'm going to tell you. The judge [at his trial] quite liked him, and he was intrigued by the fact that this rather talkative kid who wrote tons of pieces for the press had not defended himself. So he said – Mr McVeigh, could we hear more from you? [McVeigh] said, 'Well, your honour, I will base my case on Justice Brandeis, one of our most brilliant jurists, in his opinion in Olmstead. There, he writes that when government ceases to lead by example and actually provides a bad example, anything can happen. Government is the last teacher. Everything I did, I learned from my government."

When did this happen to Gore Vidal? When did he go from righteous – and right – opposition to atrocities carried out by his own government, to justifying any atrocity against it, no matter how extreme? When I ask him, his scowl turns to a sneer, and he says I am ignorant and clearly haven't read anything. I decide to try a different approach. I ask him – if there were more people like McVeigh, would that be a good thing? There is a crack in his hauteur, and he says: "It strikes me as a perfect nightmare. Of course I don't want more people like McVeigh. Since Americans refuse to think about anything, being incapable I suspect of thought, then they're not going to come to any conclusions except mistaken ones."

I don't understand. I try again and again to tug him back and get him to say whether this means he thinks McVeigh was wrong to plant the bomb. He won't. Finally, he jeers: "You are trying my patience," and defies me – with a long stare – to change the subject.

V. Pale Moonlight

Vidal is one of the last of his generation of American intellectuals standing (or, at least, sitting). I ask him about some of his rivals who have died recently – John Updike, William Buckley, Norman Mailer – and he interrupts. "Updike was nothing. Buckley was nothing with a flair for publicity. Mailer was a flawed publicist, too, but at least there were signs every now and then of a working brain." Then he smiles to himself: "You know, he used the word 'existential' all the time, to the end of his life, and never even learned what it meant. I heard Iris Murdoch once at dinner explain to Norman what existential meant, philosophically. He was stunned."

There is a vulnerability to Vidal now that didn't exist eight years ago. Before, I felt like I was shouting questions up Mount Olympus: he conducted the interview from above and beyond me, impervious to anything I said. Now, when I laugh at his jokes, he looks pleased, and laughs too. When we argue, he looks genuinely thrown, and hurt, and angry. He seems keen to return to the calmer waters of his memories, and we paddle together in his Kennedy anecdotes. Jackie was really secretly in love with Bobby, he says. He used to call Jack the President-erect. Jack once had sex with an actress friend of his in a bath, and suddenly rammed her head underwater, so she would have a vaginal spasm, and he would have an orgasm. "She hates him still," he says. But when I ask him what he made of the late Teddy Kennedy as a person, he snaps: "Who cares what they were like as people? That's just show business."

He has had to abandon his second home in the high hills of Italy, and says he misses it. "Italy is such a civilised country. Unlike America." But is the gap so great? Is Silvio Berlusconi better than Barack Obama? He snaps again: "Who cares? This is showbiz you're worried about. I don't care who's on television telling jokes on the Late Show."

Vidal seems exhausted and alone, living out his days in the Hollywood Hills. After an amazingly full life – "I have tried everything but incest and folk-dancing," he says – he has no more books gestating. He has travelled to London to receive applause on stage for providing the recorded narration for the new production of Mother Courage at the National Theatre, but all his old London friends – Tynan, Tom Driberg, Princess Margaret – are dead. I ask what it's like to be here, and he says: "This isn't a country, it's an American aircraft carrier." He starts to talk about his old friends again. He is swimming with ghosts now – from Jimmy Trimble to Jack Kennedy to his drunken, scolding mother. As he declines, he announces that everything around him is declining – America, literacy, humanity itself.

In one essay, Vidal said the author William Dean Howells at 84 "lived far too long". He quoted a line Howells wrote to Henry James: "I am comparatively a dead cult with my statues cut down and the grass growing over me in pale moonlight." Does he feel this about himself? I stare at him and don't have the heart to ask. He tells me he is unafraid of death. "I'm the least primitive American you're going to meet, and you have to be pretty primitive to believe in hell. To me hell is the United States of today."

After two hours, his carer – a beautiful long-haired French boy who has been reading Céline in the corner of the hotel bar – indicates that our time is up. I tell Vidal I hope I will interview him in another eight years' time. "Another eight years? Oh, the monotony!" he exclaims, and begins to be wheeled away. The last thing I hear him say as he vanishes across the marble lobby is a curse to his carer: "It's still so fucking cold in here!"

Gore Vidal is the narrator for "Mother Courage", which is part of the Travelex £10 season at the National Theatre and continues in the repertoire until 8 December. For tickets go to www.national theatre.org.uk

You can follow Johann Hari on Twitter

Published on Wednesday, October 7, 2009 by Salon.com

The Suffocatingly Narrow Afghanistan 'Debate'

by Glenn Greenwald

Washington Post, September 21, 2009:

McChrystal's assessment, in the view of two senior administration officials, is just "one input" in the White House's decision-making process. The president, another senior administration official said, "has embarked on a very, very serious review of all options."

Associated Press, October 5, 2009:

The White House said Monday that President Barack Obama is not considering a strategy for Afghanistan that would withdraw U.S. troops from the eroding war there.

Apparently, "all options" does not mean "all options." As usual for American wars, examining "all options" means everything other than "ending the war." That's what accounts for this:

If one were to add the various military actions from the last several decades that aren't on this list -- our constant covert wars in Central America; our involvement in the Balkans; our invasions of Somalia, Haiti, Grenada, and Panama, etc. etc. -- that is as pure a picture of a perpetual war state as one can imagine.

Despite that, Obama yesterday met with 30 members of Congress from both parties to discuss the various possibilities for Afghanistan and, according to The New York Times, "some Democrats said they would support whatever he decided." In particular:

"The one thing that I thought was interesting was that everyone, Democrats and Republicans, said whatever decision you make, we’ll support it basically," said Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader.

That's not how things are supposed to work. There's not really any point in having a Congress if its members are simply going to tell the President: "whatever decision you make, we’ll support it basically." That was the same mentality that led House Democrats -- reluctantly, they claimed -- to vote for the war supplemental bill two months ago, appropriating another $106 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan:

In the end, 19 House Democrats backed the bill who had opposed it the first time, although some cited loyalty, not agreement with Obama's plans, as their reason.

"I want to support my president," said Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), who changed her no vote to a yes.

The Times article does note that some Democrats -- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Carl Levin -- expressed strong resistance to any escalation in Afghanistan. But the option which large numbers of Americans support -- withdrawal within a year and, especially, within two years -- is not even part of the debate. It's not even an option that is being examined by the White House's supposedly "comprehensive" review. As a result, the discussion is almost exclusively about tactics (how many troops?; what should they be doing?; how much can we rely on air power?) and almost none about the still-towering mystery of what we're likely to achieve by continuing to occupy that country.

What makes that fact most remarkable is that we're less than a year away from what was alleged to be an extremely close call with full-scale financial collapse. All Serious people are required to proclaim the exploding national debt to be a potentially cataclysmic threat. Here's the uber-Serious Tom Friedman today:

The same is true with America’s debt bomb. To recover from the Great Recession, we’ve had to go even deeper into debt. One need only look at today’s record-setting price of gold, in a period of deflation, to know that a lot of people are worried that our next dollar of debt -- unbalanced by spending cuts or new tax revenues -- will trigger a nonlinear move out of the dollar and torpedo the U.S. currency.

Yet the staggering cost of our ongoing occupations is being funded exactly that way: "unbalanced by spending cuts or new tax revenues." In these two posts -- here and here -- Howie Klein details how Congressional Democrats are now working to ensure that funding for these wars will be exempt from "pay-go" budgte. Their inclusion at least required that Congress, in order to continue to fund these wars, would either have to raise taxes or cut spending elsewhere.

By contrast, exempting war funding from this process would essentially enable Congressional Democrats to fund these wars through a process tantamount to the deceitful Bushian magic trick of appropriating money as part of the "supplemental budget" -- meaning, as Klein put it: "he just printed up hundreds of billions of dollars for all his misadventures without having to raise taxes or cut programs, in effect driving the country towards virtual bankruptcy and leaving the economy in a complete shambles." That was a process which Obama repeatedly condemned, yet Congress is conspiring to essentially replicate it. That, in turn, is all designed to enable the bizarre dynamic where the economic burden of continuing these wars is simply excluded from all discussions.

The great fallacy at the heart of discussions of Afghanistan is this: if one can plausibly argue that a war was originally justified, then that proves that the war should continue even eight years later (there's no need for us to leave because the Taliban let Al Qaeda use that country to attack us in 2001 and therefore it's self-defense). Often, the discussion, for many war supporters, rarely progresses beyond that point. But whether a war is "justified" is a completely separate question from whether it's "wise." Just as was true for Iraq, the supposed "costs" of leaving Afghanistan are endlessly highlighted (the Taliban will return, Al Qaeda will come back, it'll be a brutal and lawless state), while the costs to the U.S. from staying -- and from continuing to be a nation in a state of perpetual war and occupation -- are virtually ignored.

Copyright ©2009 Salon Media Group, Inc.

Glenn Greenwald was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. He is the author of the New York Times Bestselling book "How Would a Patriot Act?," a critique of the Bush administration's use of executive power, released in May 2006. His second book, "A Tragic Legacy", examines the Bush legacy.

Published on Wednesday, October 7, 2009 by TruthDig.com

A War of Absurdity

by Robert Scheer

Every once in a while, a statistic just jumps out at you in a way that makes everything else you hear on a subject seem beside the point, if not downright absurd. That was my reaction to the recent statement of the president’s national security adviser, former Marine Gen. James Jones, concerning the size of the terrorist threat from Afghanistan:

“The al-Qaida presence is very diminished. The maximum estimate is less than 100 operating in the country, no bases, no ability to launch attacks on either us or our allies.”

Less than 100! And he is basing his conservative estimate on the best intelligence data available to our government. That means that al-Qaida, for all practical purposes, does not exist in Afghanistan—so why are we having a big debate about sending even more troops to fight an enemy that has relocated elsewhere? Because of the blind belief, in the minds of those like John McCain, determined to “win” in Afghanistan, that if we don’t escalate, al-Qaida will inevitably come back.

Why? It’s not like al-Qaida is an evil weed indigenous to Afghanistan and dependent on its climate and soil for survival. Its members were foreign imports in the first place, recruited by our CIA to fight the Soviets because there were evidently not enough locals to do the job. After all, U.S. officials first forged the alliance between the foreign fighters and the Afghan mujahedeen, who morphed into the Taliban, and we should not be surprised that that tenuous alliance ended. The Taliban and other insurgents are preoccupied with the future of Afghanistan, while the Arab fighters couldn’t care less and have moved on to more hospitable climes.

There is no indication that any of the contending forces in Afghanistan, including the Taliban, are interested in bringing al-Qaida back. On the contrary, all the available evidence indicates that the Arab fighters are unwelcome and that it is their isolation from their former patrons that has led to their demise.

As such, while one wishes that the Afghan people would put their houses in order, these are not, even after eight long years of occupation, our houses. Sure, there are all sorts of angry people in Afghanistan, eager to pick fights with each other and most of all any foreigners who seem to be threatening their way of life, but why should that any longer have anything to do with us?

Even in neighboring Pakistan, the remnants of al-Qaida are barely hanging on. As The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday, “Hunted by U.S. drones, beset by money problems and finding it tougher to lure young Arabs to the bleak mountains of Pakistan, al Qaeda is seeing its role shrink there and in Afghanistan, according to intelligence reports and Pakistan and U.S. officials. … For Arab youths who are al Qaeda’s primary recruits, ‘it’s not romantic to be cold and hungry and hiding,’ said a senior U.S. official in South Asia.”

It’s time to declare victory and begin to get out rather than descend deeper into an intractable civil war that we neither comprehend nor in the end will care much about. Terrorists of various stripes will still exist as they have throughout history, but the ones we are most concerned about have proved mighty capable of relocating to less hostile environments, including sunny San Diego and southern Florida, where the 9/11 hijackers had no trouble fitting in.

There is a continued need for effective international police work to thwart the efforts of a widely dispersed al-Qaida network, but putting resources into that effort does not satisfy the need of the military establishment for a conventional field of battle. That is the significance of Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s leaked report calling for a massive counterinsurgency campaign to make everything right about life in Afghanistan, down to the governance of the most forlorn village. The general’s report aims not at eliminating al-Qaida, which he concedes is barely existent in the country, but rather at creating an Afghan society that is more to his own liking.

It is a prescription, as the Russians and others before them learned, for war without end. That might satisfy the marketing needs of the defense industry and the career hopes of select military and political aspirants, but it has nothing to do with fighting terrorism. In the end, it would seem that some of our leaders need the Afghanistan battleground more than the terrorists do.

Copyright © 2009 Truthdig, L.L.C.

Robert Scheer is editor of Truthdig.com and a regular columnist for The San Francisco Chronicle.

For Anti-War Protesters, the Cause Isn't Lost But Will D.C. Rally Spark Groundswell?

Published on Wednesday, October 7, 2009 by The Washington Post

For Anti-War Protesters, the Cause Isn't Lost

But Will D.C. Rally Spark Groundswell?

by Eli Saslow

The protesters convened for a final planning meeting, already triumphant, convinced that nine months of preparation was about to pay off. Antiwar organizers who had come to Washington from 27 states exchanged hugs inside a Columbia Heights convention hall and modeled their protest costumes: orange jumpsuits, "death masks," shackles and T-shirts depicting bloody Afghan children. Then Pete Perry, the event organizer, stood up to deliver a welcome speech.

"This is a great moment for our movement," he said. "We are continuing an incredible tradition."

"Like Gandhi," said the next speaker.

"Like Martin Luther King," said another.

A Sunday meeting and a Monday protest -- that was the agenda planned in advance of Wednesday's eighth anniversary of the start of the Afghan war. There had been other protests in Washington over the course of the conflict, dozens of them, but this time organizers believed they could revive the beleaguered antiwar movement, once such a force in U.S. policy. The next 48 hours would put their optimism on trial.

With public opinion polls showing a majority of Americans opposing the war, organizers wanted at least 1,000 people to march through downtown, risk arrest by creating a ruckus at the White House and draw President Obama across the manicured North Lawn to meet with them.

"The goal of this action is to hand-deliver a letter to Obama," Perry reminded the group. "We want a meeting to demand an end to this senseless violence."

It would also set the stage for 42 rallies and protests scheduled to take place Wednesday around the country. After decades of decline in the antiwar movement -- from throngs of half a million to fringe rallies to almost nothing at all -- the job of organizers in Washington was to generate momentum for a historic week.

Their work started Sunday afternoon, when about 50 organizers met to discuss final plans for a rally with a scope to match their ambition. They included veterans and pacifists, hippies and anarchists, feminists and Catholic workers. In total, there were more than a dozen "affinity groups," and each had choreographed its own demonstration for Monday's event. Some protesters would be shackled inside a cage, in solidarity with prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. Some would reenact the deaths of U.S. soldiers near the White House fence. Some would read the names of civilians killed in Afghanistan. Some would carry cardboard coffins.

"We have to be organized, or nobody will hear anything," Perry said.

As the meeting progressed, there were signs of discord. Some groups wanted to chant while they marched to the White House; others argued that a solemn, single-file procession would convey a "better sense of suffering," one protester said. Some wanted to take bathroom breaks during the protest; others argued that participants could wait until they were in jail, after their arrests. Some planned to misidentify themselves to police; others said they would simply refuse to answer questions.

"Lying is dumb," one protester shouted.

"Just because my resistance is different than yours doesn't mean I'm dumb," another yelled back, standing now, clenching his fist. "We are all traveling down our own paths to peace."

* * *

Every faction agreed on at least one goal for Monday's rally, knowing all too well that the survival of the movement depended on it: This was the time to attract new protesters, with the war in Afghanistan continuing to dominate the news and Obama debating his next move. After Sunday's meeting, Perry, the organizer, held a training session for first-time demonstrators in the sanctuary of a church. He arrived prepared for a crowd, with a co-teacher and a thick stack of handouts.

Instead, four people came. Three were experienced activists. Only one was a newcomer. Joan Wages, a mother of two, had driven five hours from Floyd, Va., to attend her first rally. She had voted for Obama but become disillusioned. Now she hoped to set an example for her children by "making my actions consistent with my beliefs," she said.

"I've done a few really little protest things, but that's it," Wages told the instructors. "I really don't know what to expect."

The instructors gave a brief lesson on the history of nonviolent resistance and then read motivational quotes from Buddhist monks. At the end of the class, they asked Wages to hold a make-believe vigil at the White House while the instructors mimicked angry right-wing activists and tried to bait her. Wages closed her eyes, set her hands in prayer and started singing.

"We should run you over with a big war tank!" the instructors yelled.

"We should shoot you with our guns!" they shouted.

Wages continued to sing, undaunted, until the instructors broke from character to applaud.

"You're ready," Perry said.

"Just remember that nonviolence is a way of life," said Susan Crane, the co-instructor.

"And that police officers are our brothers and sisters, too," Perry said.

Wages thanked them and left the training seminar, but she struggled to fall asleep later that night. The session had been helpful in a "philosophical kind of way," she said later, but she still had logistical concerns about Monday's protest. Like: "Who will pick me up from jail?" And: "After we all pretend to die in front of the White House, can I get up and move or does everyone have to stay totally still?"

* * *

The protesters met Monday morning in McPherson Square, a slab of grass in downtown Washington named after a war hero. They had hoped to fill the park, but instead 176 protesters gathered in one corner. The crowd was all familiar faces from the antiwar movement, except for a homeless man sleeping on a bench, a bicyclist eating a scone and a Street Sense newspaper salesman who saw a business opportunity in the gathering.

Eve Tetaz, 78, stood near a small sound stage and zipped up her orange jumpsuit. She had a trial pending from another protest, but she still planned to risk arrest Monday -- something she had done so often that preparing for jail was part of her routine. Phone numbers of fellow protesters were inked on her forearm so she could call from jail. A neighbor in Adams Morgan had agreed to watch her two cats. Her glaucoma medicine was packed underneath her jumpsuit. She wore a heavy sweatshirt that itched in the heat but would make for a fantastic pillow in a cell.

"Jail is a little uncomfortable," Tetaz said, "but so is the dentist."

On the stage in front of her, a rotation of speakers tried to excite the crowd. Two women strummed guitars and sang a folk song. Then a man recited a poem. Then a woman spoke about the persecution of blacks in Southeast Washington. Then another poet, and another singer, and a woman banging a tambourine, and a keynote speaker, and another folk song, this time performed in Hebrew.

"We should be going soon," Tetaz said.

Finally, an organizer stepped to the microphone and told the protesters to form a single-file line for the march to the White House. They were instructed to walk slowly, heads down, in absolute silence.

"A solemn march," the speaker said.

As the group departed, a few protesters smiled and chatted with nearby police officers.

"Please everybody, a solemn march," the speaker reiterated, louder this time. "Solemn. Solemn."

* * *

The protesters arrived at the White House and quickly realized they were entering into a ruckus, not just creating one. A construction crew was at work on Pennsylvania Avenue, removing excess water with two loud industrial vacuums. Smaller protest groups -- one demanding to see Obama's birth certificate, another enraged about health care -- shouted chants of their own. A maintenance worker used a chain saw to trim a tree on the White House grounds. Inside the building, press secretary Robert Gibbs was telling reporters that leaving Afghanistan was "not something that had ever been entertained."

The antiwar group launched into its demonstration, undeterred. One protester pretended to waterboard a war prisoner, screaming, "Tell me your secrets or else" as he poured distilled bottled water onto a friend's face. A woman wore shackles and a black bag over her head, the toenails on her bare feet painted a deep autumn red. Cindy Sheehan, a tireless protester, read from her International People's Declaration of Peace, and then, sensing an inattentive crowd, said, "I am going to skip a couple paragraphs and just go to the end."

The marchers marched, the singers sang, the chanters chanted. Tourists turned their cameras away from the White House to take pictures of the protest.

But there was a problem.

"Why aren't the police doing anything?" one demonstrator asked, referring to the 15 uniformed officers who stood casually in the distance.

The protesters wanted to engage them, so 15 activists wearing orange jumpsuits chained themselves to the White House fence. "Off the fence!" a police officer yelled, but the chains were locked. Five officers rode over on horseback.

Five more put on black gloves and came with wire cutters. Now the Secret Service was clearing the sidewalk, and the Park Police was issuing a warning for the protesters to disperse, then a second, then a third.

"We will have to arrest anyone who does not clear this area immediately," an officer announced over a megaphone.

Sixty-two protesters stood their ground, and the police walked over slowly with plastic handcuffs. Sheehan was arrested at 1:11 p.m., and she smiled as police frisked her. Tetaz, the 78-year-old, was arrested at 1:14, ready for another trip to jail. Wages, the newcomer, pretended to be a dying soldier and remained motionless as she waited for arrest, only to be forcibly removed instead.

Police loaded the protesters onto a Metro bus and drove them away from Pennsylvania Avenue.

Those who had avoided arrest tallied the rally's impact: 62 arrests, 23 others forcibly removed.

"A success," Perry said.

As the protesters walked away from the White House, they made plans to leave for other rallies across the country Wednesday. One was headed to an action in New York, another to Austin and another to San Francisco. Two planned to attend an event in Chicago, where the organizer, John Beacham, expected a big crowd and possibly more arrests. "We think this could be a turning-point kind of moment," he said.

Copyright 2009 The Washington Post

Friends of Leonard Peltier

Friends of Leonard Peltier

SIGN THE CLEMENCY PETITION

Call the White House Comment Line, Too:

202-456-1111 / 202-456-1112.

Mr. President, Free Peltier NOW!

Leonard Peltier

An innocent man, Leonard Peltier was wrongfully convicted in 1977 and has served over 30 years in federal prison despite proof of his innocence—also despite proof that he was convicted on the basis of fabricated and suppressed evidence, as well as coerced testimony.

The United States Courts of Appeal have repeatedly acknowledged investigative and prosecutorial misconduct in this case but, by their decisions, have refused to take corrective action. A model prisoner, Leonard also has been denied fair consideration for parole and Executive Clemency. This is clearly an abuse of the legal standards of American justice.

---

Learn more about the Peltier case.

Watch "Incident at Oglala,"

A Documentary Produced & Narrated by Robert Redford.

(Approximate Runtime: 90 Minutes)

This production was released in 1992. With the exception of the address for the White House, please disregard the information provided at the end of this film.

Download "Incident at Oglala"

Incident at Oglala: The Leonard Peltier Story also is available for purchase from Amazon.com, or you may locate a VHS tape or DVD at your favorite movie rental outlet. In addition, Amazon.com offers the film as part of their video-on-demand catalog.

---

The World

Recognizing that Peltier has been imprisoned for decades for a crime he did not commit, various governments and dignitaries from around the world have called for Leonard's release.

On June 23, 1995, Amnesty International (AI) submitted a letter of concern about the Peltier case to the U.S. Attorney General. With no executive review of the case forthcoming, in 1999, AI called for Peltier's release. Before the U.S. Congress, in 2000, AI issued this statement:

"Amnesty International considers Leonard Peltier to be a political prisoner... Amnesty International believes that Leonard Peltier should be immediately and unconditionally released."

In briefings to the United Nations since 1992, AI has actively pursued Leonard's freedom. AI submitted a briefing to the U.N. Human Rights Committee in February 2006 (updated in early July 2006), in which AI again called for Peltier's release.

After the U.S. Parole Commission denied Peltier parole in August 2009, senior deputy director of Amnesty International-USA, Curt Goering, stated:

“Given that the case against Peltier unraveled years ago, his continued imprisonment is only protracting a grave miscarriage of justice... When you consider the concerns that plague the case... it is unconscionable that Leonard Peltier should continue to suffer behind bars. It is high time for the U.S. government to... right the wrongs of the past.”

And You

"You are the message," Leonard says. And each of us is an "Army of One." This concept, as it touches one's conscience, effectively motivates persons to act as individuals on Leonard's behalf. Now, however, a legion is required. Maybe two. We must be "Leonard's Legions," hundreds of thousands of supporters in solidarity worldwide. We must unite in purpose, speak with one voice: Free Peltier NOW!

Visit us often to learn more about efforts to win Leonard's freedom and find out what you can do to help.

The Economic Revolution Is Already Happening -- It's Just Not on Wall St.

The Economic Revolution Is Already Happening -- It's Just Not on Wall St.

By Maria Armoudian, AlterNet. Posted October 7, 2009.

Thousands of alternatives to the punishing corporate model have sprouted up across the US, building up an alternative economy as Wall St. crumbles.

America is in the midst of a new revolution. But this revolution is quiet, incremental, nonviolent and traveling beneath the mainstream media's radar.

The new American revolution challenges the current notions of dog-eat-dog capitalism -- through the building of a parallel economic system that shares, co-operates, empowers and benefits fellow workers and community members.

Over the past few decades, thousands of alternatives to the standard, top-down corporate model have sprouted up -- worker-owned companies and co-operatives, neighborhood corporations and trusts, community-owned technology centers and municipally owned enterprises.

In fact, today, involvement in these alternative models of business outnumber union membership as the means by which private-sector workers and community members are taking their economics into their own hands. The story is revealed in the 4-year-old book, America Beyond Capitalism, written by University of Maryland political science professor Gar Alperovitz.

Maria Armoudian: How big is this economic movement in the United States?

Gar Alperovitz: It's a huge development. But the president doesn't cover it, and the press, on the surface, is not aware of it.

At the grassroots level, there is a lot of activity that is changing the ownership of wealth and making it benefit neighborhoods, workers, cities and communities, at large. There are 11,000 worker-owned companies in the United States, and more people involved in them than are members of unions in the private sector. There are also 120 million Americans who are members of co-operatives -- a huge number, about a third of the population.

About 20 percent or 22 percent of our energy is done under public utilities of one kind or another. There are another 4,000 or 5,000 neighborhood corporations, in which neighborhoods own productive wealth to benefit the neighborhood. Much of that is related to housing and land development, but also stores, businesses and factories.

One estimate is that there are 4,500 of these. One, called Newark New Communities, does several million dollars a year in business and pours profits back into helping service the neighborhood -- health care and nutrition, education and jobs. So when you really begin to take the lid off of what is emerging in society, there are many forms of decentralized public ownership, social ownership or democratized wealth.

MA: Are there also new developments on the municipal level?

GA: Yes, because of fiscal crises, many cities, even under Republican mayors, are putting cities into enterprises. It was once called municipal socialism, but Republicans call it the "enterprising city," and it includes development of [municipally owned] cable television, Internet services, land and hotels.

Many cities are capturing methane from garbage areas and using it to produce electricity, create jobs and make money. They're dealing with greenhouse gases as an enterprise.

On a larger, regional scale, the Tennessee Valley Authority is a gigantic, ecological operation that controls the river systems and is an energy system. On the state level, Alaska derives a great deal of money from its energy resources, oil. It captures the profits and pays dividends to every Alaskan as a right. In the year 2000, every person in Alaska, as a legal right, received $2,000 [through this process]. So a family of five [together receive] $10,000.

MA: Worker-owned cooperative seem to be the most progressive and democratic models. They're usually nonprofit with profit circulating back to workers and communities, and they practice democracy in the workplace -- one person, one vote. How would you compare this model with other models?

GA: The one-person-one-vote worker co-operatives in the United States are the most democratic, advanced and ideal. But they number at about 500 maximum, maybe 1,000. These co-ops are on the cutting edge of the democratization process and where the learning will be taking place for the rest of the movements. People are experimenting with full democracy and full equality.

Of course, many co-ops are not that kind -- they don't have equal pay and have other differentials. And most of the [for-profit] worker-owned companies in the United States are employee stock-ownership plans, or ESOPs. In many cases, they are not democratic, and have a long way to go.

But as workers get more ownership, they demand more control. And as they participate more, they gain productivity and profits. So a key question is: How do we begin to democratize what is already owned? That is the likely trend.

MA: How might the American models compare to the giant cooperative in the Basque region of Spain -- Mondragon?

GA: Mondragon has over 100,000 workers in a very complicated group of 100 or more integrated co-ops. They pay back loans to a central fund and then build more co-ops in an integrated fashion. In 90 percent of them, the ratios of pay from top to bottom are 4 to 1. In others, it's 9 to 1. Compare that with American corporations, which are 200 or 300 to 1.

These co-ops are highly productive and state of the art with advanced technology, not your corner kind of tiny co-op. In the city of Cleveland, some groups are creating a large-scale Mondragon-type of cooperative. It will include a worker-owned laundry, with high-tech, green advanced technology, a solar-installation cooperative company, a land trust with a large-scale industrial-scale greenhouse and solar and geothermal heating.

They're going online over the next year and will produce 2,000-3,000 heads of lettuce each day. It's linked to the public purchasing of hospitals and universities, which provide some of the contracts for food and laundry. The model makes green jobs and green ownership and shows that worker ownership is practical.

MA: There are advocates who believe that building these types of cooperatives are the single most important form of activism that people can do. Do you agree?

GA: Ultimately there needs to be systemic change. But it is very important, and it's one thing that can be contributed. At this point, two central principles are developing in these "schools of democracy" -- they are changing who gets to own and benefit from capital, and they are changing the participatory process.

And in addition to cooperatives, neighborhood corporations and organizations, cities and land trusts, state pension funds are being used in [socially responsible] ways. These are very American means of decentralizing ownership of productive wealth -- as well as some central forms. We see a picture emerging of an America that is beyond capitalism. These [activities] give us a possible model.

If we build on what we are already doing, make it part of a political program and develop it, we could create something that is far better than what we now have and better than traditional socialist models.

It's time for people working in these sectors of cooperatives, worker ownership, land trusts, neighborhood corporations to begin calling meetings, share what they've learned and establish networks. In many cases they don't do this. People in the specific communities don't even know how much is going on.

Other interesting things are happening in Virginia, the District of Columbia and Maryland where, like in the '60s, people are meeting, reading, thinking and taking action from that. They are staging "action book clubs," where they read a political book and discuss, "What can we do in the direction of building something for the long haul?"

So if you don't like capitalism or state socialism, what do you want? What is your vision, your knowledge and theory? It's time for us to do that again.

MA: Do you have a sense of how this economic movement is impacting our current political and economic system?

GA: It's like what happened with the New Deal and the civil rights movement. A good [part] of the New Deal [began] as experiments of the '20s and '10s. But when the time was right, they became national.

Similarly, in the civil rights movement, the real heroes were those who laid the groundwork in the 1930s and '40s for what came next. That's what is happening at the grassroots level, economically. The most important things pertain to ownership of capital, wealth and assets.

Today, the top 1 percent owns almost 50 percent of the investment capital. The alternative state socialist idea was that the government should own it, but that had real problems with bureaucracy, centralization of power and so forth.

There is another alternative, which is what is emerging now. They are old historic ideas. But just over the last 30 years, these 11,000 companies that are substantially owned by workers have [emerged] from ground zero.

MA: So this movement has increased at a pretty rapid pace since the 1970s?

GA: Yes, amazing, and no coverage of it. Almost at the same pace at which the negatives have gone down, you're seeing the rise of these kinds of companies. They have many trial-and-error-related problems, but on the whole, they're moving towards greater ownership and democratization. They are very good for communities and workers. Because they are owned by the workers, they do not get up and run to get cheaper labor sources, so they keep jobs in local communities.

MA: Some of these employee-owned companies have not performed well -- financially or for their employees. United Airlines was one example of pretty dismal results. How are the others doing?

GA: It's important to know that United is a case study in what you shouldn't do. It was done in the midst of a strike in a very large corporation. That's not the best place to do worker ownership.

Most of the ones that work well are under 1,000 employees. United has numerous reasons why it failed, really, without worker ownership. On balance, the worker-ownership companies, particularly when there's good training, are more profitable; they have higher productivity; better pensions and better working conditions.

So on almost every indicator they are unquestionably equal or better than comparable firms of the same kind in the same field. It's not surprising, because people who have a stake in what they're doing tend to do better at it.

MA: In the face of globalization, how do these alternatives hold up?

GA: I think the globalization argument has been trumpeted in the press. They talk about manufacturing jobs being stolen, etc. That is true. But it is also the case that 90 percent of the American workforce is not involved in manufacturing, and over the next 15 years it'll be 5 percent. That's the trend.

What's really happening is within cities. This is a service economy and a trade, retail and wholesale economy -- that's the real action. It has gone from 40 percent of employment within cities to 50 percent and now closer to 60 percent. There are a lot of things people can do with that.

So the bogeyman of globalization is something we can challenge with stopping the so-called free-trade policies. But there's also a lot that can be done locally and not be put off by the fact that the press concentrates on these scare stories.

MA: You have been somewhat dismissive about the left's emphasis on messaging, ostensibly suggesting that what makes change are serious ideas and a coherent and powerful understanding of what makes sense. Can you elaborate on that?

GA: I don't disagree with better language, political rhetoric and framing. But that's often used as a substitute for programs that are out of date or for not thinking through alternatives.

So if a central issue is how to change the economy's organization, that's not a matter of framing. It's a matter of building up a vision and organizing a long-term strategy.

The framing argument can be positive, but it can also stand in the way of people rolling up their sleeves and getting down to work for the long haul.

MA: Are the alternative models being taught in the business schools yet? If not, how can people learn alternatives to the dominant corporate models?

GA: They aren't being taught yet, although in Cleveland, one of the business schools is beginning to design a course.

We are seeing business schools working on "social enterprise," which is another form of democratized wealth ownership, in this case, usually a nonprofit corporation making money for a public service.

For instance, in Seattle, there is Pioneer Services, which began as a drug-rehabilitation nonprofit. It began training people who had gone through the rehabilitation program, then produced some businesses so they can do their training on the job. They began making money in the businesses to finance their whole program.

I think they're a scale of about $60 million now. It went from 1 percent profits and 99 percent grants to almost 99 percent profits, used for public purposes.

This is now being developed in other parts of the country. Some of the business schools, Harvard and Yale, are teaching these principles in business school, and I think we're going to see them begin moving into the co-op area as more experience develops on the ground.

For people who are interested in doing this, www.community-wealth.org is a tool. There are people who are doing it and help others. That's a major change historically, upon which I think we can really build.

See more stories tagged with: new deal, coops, cooperatives, tennessee valley authorit, community wealth

Maria Armoudian is a Commissioner at the City of Los Angeles and Producer and On-Air Host at KPFK radio station. Her site is Armoudian.com.

Taibbi: Michael Moore Wants Us to Go Kick Ass

Taibbi: Michael Moore Wants Us to Go Kick Ass

Posted by Matt Taibbi, True/Slant at 7:12 AM on October 6, 2009.

If we got up off our chairs and went after the villains that Moore attacks in his latest documentary, everyone would be better off.

That quote is the unintentionally revealing tip of an ego iceberg lying below Moore’s public persona of Mr. Aw-Shucks Everyman. Moore clearly sees himself as a liberal Atlas, shrugging under the weight of a ungrateful world. Yet, for all his self-regard and all the attention his work gets, Moore has really only made two films worth watching in his twenty year career: Roger and Me and Bowling for Columbine. -- via Joseph Childers – Ephemera Etcetera – Liberals to Moore: ‘Thanks, but we got this’ – True/Slant.

The reaction to Michael Moore’s new movie, Capitalism: A Love Story, reinforces a suspicion I started having a few years back: that most of us Americans are much better at being movie and TV critics than we are at being political organizers. When we come out of a film like this, we find ourselves focusing on the flaws in Moore’s moviemaking and not on the film’s content, which just happens to be the reality of our own day-to-day political existences.

We’re not thinking about how to fix our lives, in other words, but how to fix the movie about our lives.

Now, I agree with most of the criticisms of Moore’s new movie. One of my editors at Rolling Stone put it best: “I just wish I could edit him a little.” Moore’s bizarre decision to inject himself into the movie at odd (and sometimes crucial) junctures undermines his ability to be an effective propagandist.

I was particularly struck by the way he very effectively portrayed the sit-down strike at Chicago’s Republic Windows and Doors factory at the end of the movie, i.e. an example of real people with real problems really organizing to lift themselves up a little, and then leaped at the very end of the film to a bizarre non-sequitur in which Moore, a multimillionaire taking care of the artistic problem of how to finish his movie, asked the rest of us to “Join me” (me, Michael Moore) as he unfurled crime scene tape around the Goldman Sachs offices in a purely cinematic action.

I thought that was really strange and I had no idea what the hell he meant. How do I join Michael Moore in this movement? Am I supposed to watch the movie again? Absent of any coherent context or further explanation, the end-of-film injunction was almost comic, sort of like the old, “Me, Al Franken” routines on Saturday Night Live.

But let’s give Michael Moore credit. Most of the movie isn’t about Michael Moore. It’s about what’s happened to this country, how far it’s fallen, in the age of financial deregulation.

Even just looking at the historical context provided by Moore’s own movies, the progression is kind of scary. Back when Moore made Roger and Me, he was describing how blue-collar workers could no longer could find jobs to support themselves. In Bowling for Columbine he talked about the workfare programs we cooked up to keep those ex-employed blue collar workers alive, how brutal and inhumane those programs can be.

In Capitalism: A Love Story we’re now talking about how the compensation for professional jobs we used to consider upper-middle class, like the job of airline pilot, have dropped below subsistence level. This is a portrait of a society steaming toward a feudal structure.

He then shows that the mechanisms we’re supposed to appeal to to correct these problems — the combination of public awareness (i.e. the media) and the elected government (i.e. congress) — have been almost completely corrupted. We have a media that doesn’t pay attention to the fact that airline pilots are giving plasma in order to buy groceries. Even after deadly crashes, they don’t focus on the real causes.

I found most of the content of Moore’s movie horrifying. It was also striking to me that the theme he is addressing here, i.e. the rapid peasant-ization of most of the country, is basically a taboo subject for every other major media outlet in the country. The vast majority of our movies are either thinly-disguised commercials for consumer products (Law Abiding Citizen), remakes of old shows and movies designed to transport us back to the good old days when life was better (i.e. Fame) , or gushy nerf-tripe with no hard edges crafted to serve as escapist fairy tales for stressed-out adults wanting to dream of happy endings (Love Happens).

What we call a “good movie” is usually also escapism, and sometimes even also a nostalgic remake, it just happens to be well-done and expertly directed, with great production values and acting performances (I haven’t seen it yet. but I assume Where the Wild Things Are will fall into this category).

But we’re living in a time of extreme crisis almost nothing on TV or in the movies is designed to get us thinking about how to fix our problems. If anything, most of the stuff on TV is designed to jack up our anxiety level without offering any solutions except the short-term fixes of buying and eating — witness the endless reality shows in which ordinary people slave away and scheme against each other for weeks on end for a 1 in 12 shot at a (pick one) modeling job/date with a non-deformed, non serial-killing person/chance to be shouted at by Donald Trump.

Now that stuff is cynical and monstrous. It is my sincere hope that the people who are producing these programs will someday be tried and executed by war crimes tribunals at the Hague.

At least Michael Moore is getting us talking about the right topics. And while I get that the right way to start a revolution is not to wildly misinterpret the nature of capitalism in a coffeeshop conversation with Wallace Shawn (whose line about the grabber product was the funniest thing in the movie, by the way), well, it’s not really Michael Moore’s job to start a revolution. He probably thinks it is — and this is that “Atlas” complex fellow True/Slant writer Joseph Childers is talking about — but that’s only because nobody else out there, in the major media at least, is doing a freaking thing.

It’s natural for Michael Moore to behave like someone who thinks he’s taking on the world alone. Because he is, sort of. If we want him to stop behaving like this, it’s kind of on us to do something about it. At some point we’re going to have to make a commitment to giving up our escapist entertainments for a while while we fix our actual lives. I’m as guilty as everyone else, spending half my time watching movies and sports. putting off my problems until later. If we all did less of that, my guess is that we might start thinking less like movie and TV critics, and more like citizens — at which point the flaws in Moore’s movies won’t seem so bad at all. We might not even notice them.

Published on Tuesday, October 6, 2009 by CommonDreams.org

We Are Standing Up to the Powers of the World

Let us then ABOLISH ALL NUCLEAR WEAPONS AND ALL WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION and ABOLISH ALL WAR FOREVER AND EVER. AMEN.

by Liz McAlister

Speech given at National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance rally

Phil Berrigan would be 86 today. He disliked celebrations of his birthday. To give him a birthday gift meant using his birthday as the excuse to get something the community might need. But he'd so welcome the gift of this witness against weapons and war and the instruments of mass murder that you enact today. That kind of gift – he loved.

The war we resist today began in 2001; declared as a reaction to 9/11, it was fully prepared for prior to 9/11. In less than a year, Bush was agitating for war in Iraq – searching there for weapons of mass destruction. Three nuns found them in Colorado. Ardeth Platte, Carol Gilbert and Jackie Hudson enacted a Citizens' Weapons Inspection – cutting the fence at the N-8 Missile Silo to expose the presence of a first strike nuclear weapon on high alert.

Their conviction – in the earliest days of the Second Iraq war – was a flagrant miscarriage of justice. The nuns did no sabotage; they did no felony destruction. There was no evidence for either. The judge and prosecutor coddled, coerced and lied to the jury that they might convict with no understanding of what they were convicting the nuns of doing.

For me it was the fall of the other shoe of my beloved Phil Berrigan's dying. We have loved so deeply, worked so hard, conspired, prayed and been through so much together. And we were separated by years of prison. But perhaps their trial and sentencing are a mirror of our times, a mirror into which we must look long and close to better understand the nature of this empire and what we stand for and what we stand against.

What I find myself reflecting on most is the long view – a tough perspective for North Americans who have yet to learn that the quick fix is neither. So I look at the struggle of South Africans against apartheid. It was May 1986. I was sitting on my bed in the Federal Prison in Alderson WV; the radio announced that the struggle against Apartheid in S. Africa was being carried by 9 year olds. It seemed so impossible, so hopeless. Yet, in less than 4 years, on Feb. 11, 1990, Nelson Mandela was released after 27 years in prison; in 4 more years (May 94) he was inaugurated the first black president of South Africa.

And I look at the struggle of the Palestinians whose ties to their land go back centuries and whose children can only see giving their lives in that struggle. And I look at the Colombians and the peasants of Central America who have to renew their strength every day and every generation. And I look at the history of our own country and the struggle of working people and people of color and women. None of these struggles is won – like a ball game; each must be borne daily. Clearly, we don't get everything we struggle for but we have to fight for everything we get. One of the tragedies in this country is the sense that freedom is a possession. We can own it; it can't be taken from us! It has made us the most pathetic and enslaved people of the world.

In his last major talk, Phil pleaded with thousands assembled here in D.C.: Don't get weary! So I want to echo Phil today: Don't get weary in the face of a world that has embraced endless war and bankrupting military spending – ever newer weapons of mass destruction, $12,000 ever second of every day, a world where lies pass for truth, sound bites for wisdom, arrogance for understanding. And don't get weary as citizens of this premeinent rogue state – rife with deceit and treachery where leader follows leader from bad to worse, as though by a malign law of nature. One ruler, evil or stupid or violent, breeds another more evil or stupid or violent. This may explain our periodic nostalgia for the likes of L.B.J.

Social critics, politicians, religionists multiply moral and political confusion. Wearyingly, they advocate verbal drugs, promises of relief, formulas of salvation, invocations to the god of the moment, pointing fingers at enemies – immigrants, the poor in our midst, the axes of evil. Religious, political and military "experts" push their wares: violence, domination, prospering of a few, misery for multitudes.

All of the above are forms of practical idolatry, though they commonly go under more acceptable names like patriotism. All are evidence of the spirit of death at large in our world, hidden persuaders, beckoners of the mighty, urging them to further unconscionable folly. In our day, the same powers legitimate the "law of the land," act as guardian spirits of "justice systems" and world banks and prisons and torture chambers and death rows. They normalize the excesses of the Pentagon, the military budget, the necessity of military intervention. They grease the wheels of the domination system.

We have to be about something utterly different. We have to give the diagnosis of skilled surgeons of the spirit. We have to learn to touch all the places where spirit joins flesh and name them aright. The disease is sin and high crime. The times are circular and closed. The society is ill; its illness is genetic. This analysis, woeful as it is, is a unique gift of people of conscience.

The hope we have to offer is a literal hope against hope, promulgated in the teeth of the worst times. With a sense of lively contempt, it is up to us to shuck off the victim role; cease to be mute, passive, resigned, otherworldly – roles urged (no – imposed) by the culture

Our claims may, at times, seem morbid, curmudgeonly. But we are living a hope that is concrete, of this world, and offered against the despair of present circumstances. I think we can grab it only if we grab the despair and if in that despair we are driven deeper – into - something, somewhere, someone. And, from that geography we are able to hear and realize the promise of justice; the promise of a newness wrought precisely in extremis, in exile, in moments when, it seems, there is little we can do but cling there.

And you know what – it is happening: It is happening here today/ among us. It is happening all over our world. Things are way more dynamic and alive that those in power calculate. Those who believe they are in control are deceived. The good news is that we have not collapsed or imploded with despair at this war! Many of us understand that a deeper resistance is summoned of us. We are trying, praying, working – to be strategic, to be faithful, to be human. And we know that we must keep at it – in all those areas and more.

The powers of death and destruction reign – or so it seems. But they are undone. So, dear friends, let us not be awed by the mayhem with which the powers of this world seeks to bamboozle us. Let us embrace intransigent resistance; let us imagine that a new world is possible. And then let us live as if that new world were indeed among us and so live it into being. Let us then ABOLISH ALL NUCLEAR WEAPONS AND ALL WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION and ABOLISH ALL WAR FOREVER AND EVER. AMEN.

Liz McAlister lives in the Jonah House community in Baltimore, Maryland, which she co-founded in 1973 with Phil Berrigan (1923-2002) and others.