Jello shots: Political punk
Jello Biafra takes verbal aim
go to article

The Sacred Seed
go to article

Activist summit takes place in Summertown, TN
go to article

Warning to Bush from contrite cold war veteran

By Fiachra Gibbons

Cannes, May 23— Robert McNamara, the US defense secretary during the Cuban missile crisis and the first phases of the Vietnam war, has warned of the folly of American involvement in Iraq.

McNamara, a hate figure to the anti-war movement in the 1960s who rarely airs his views in public, delivered the shot across the bows of the Bush administration in the documentary The Fog of War, which has been premiered at the Cannes film festival.

“If we can’t persuade our allies and other comparable nations, we had better examine our reasoning,” he said in the documentary. “What makes us omniscient?”

To his critics, McNamara was a cold war warrior, “an intercontinental ballistic missile machine on legs,” an arrogant “automaton,” a man often condemned as a warmonger who applied the cool corporate efficiency he had learnt running Ford to opposing the Soviets.

But the person that emerges from Errol Morris’s film is a different character — reflective, emotional, and contrite, constrained by duty and loyalty from speaking out. “A lot of people think I’m a son of a bitch,” he admitted on film. “I have made mistakes. Every military commander will admit he has made mistakes, that he has killed people unnecessarily. Those that don’t are lying.”

But, he added, when “someone like me makes mistakes you risk destroying nations. Remember, one man still has his finger on the button.”

McNamara, now 84, revealed that like President Kennedy he wanted to pull American advisers out of South Vietnam, and advised Lyndon B. Johnson to do so after Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. But Johnson, whom he served until his resignation in 1968 — by which time 25,000 US troops had been killed - overruled him and called him defeatist.

He stopped short of blaming LBJ for the disaster. “I’d rather be damned if I don’t say,” he said. Later, in previously unaired White House tapes, he endorsed LBJ’s decision. “If Kennedy had lived he would have made a difference.”

The biggest lesson of Vietnam, he argued, was that the US had to learn to empathize with its enemies. “We didn’t know the Vietnamese enough to empathize with them. We didn’t see that they saw us as just replacing the French as the colonial power. We were fighting the cold war, but to them it was a civil war. That was our mistake.”

McNamara said he had agreed to unburden himself to Morris, best known for Mr. Death and The Thin Blue Line, because he thought his role in life was now “to try to understand, learn the lessons, and pass them on.”

He has also cast fresh light on the Cuban missile crisis, when nuclear apocalypse was avoided by what he calls “muddle” and blind luck as much as JFK’s leadership. He gives most of the credit for averting such disaster to a former US ambassador to Moscow, Llewellyn Thompson, who had the temerity to contradict Kennedy at the pivotal moment of the 11-day crisis, in October 1962.

General Curtis LeMay, the hawkish head of the joint chiefs of staff, who pushed for a final showdown with the Soviets, emerges as one of the key influences in McNamara’s life. Gen. LeMay, the man on whom Dr. Strangelove was apparently based, was his commanding officer in the second world war. McNamara helped him devise “more efficient” means of saturation incendiary bombing.

McNamara claimed that if the US had lost the war he and Gen. LeMay would have been prosecuted for war crimes. “Why was it necessary to bomb Japan with atom bombs when we were burning the place down? Killing 50% to 90% of the population of 67 Japanese cities and then dropping atom bombs is not proportional.”

About Vietnam, where he noted “two or three times as many bombs were dropped during [Operation] Rolling Thunder than on western Europe during the second world war,” he was less clear. “Never answer the question that is asked of you, but the question you wished was asked of you,” he said. “I think that’s a pretty good rule.”

And in another hark back to the McNamara bogeyman of old, he said: “In order to be good you have to engage in evil sometimes.”

The place of the US in the world has become the dominant theme of the festival, with the two films tipped for the Palme d’Or on Sunday both dealing with it.

The main character in Canadian director Denys Arcand’s The Barbarian Invasion believes that in the wake of Sept. 11 the “American empire will have to push back a stream of barbarian attacks.”

Meanwhile, Lars von Trier’s Dogville has been accused by one American critic, Todd McCarthy of Variety, of advocating the “immediate annihilation” of the US. “This is, in short, his J’accuse directed towards an entire nation!” he wrote. “But then political enlightenment is not to be expected from a man who maintains that ‘I don’t see [America] as less evil than the bandit states it has recently fought’.”

Source: Guardian (UK)

back to top

Jello shots: Political punk
Jello Biafra takes verbal aim

By Phil Cauthon

Like his name, Jello Biafra is at once comical and very, very disturbing.

Biafra (born Eric Boucher, renaming himself after a Nigerian civil war that claimed more than a million lives, mostly women and children) is a master of mixing humor with a portentous political commentary seldom found in mainstream media.

His stage show — which he calls “info-tainment” — falls somewhere between Noam Chomsky and Jon Stewart. More light-hearted than Michael Moore, far more shocking than Bill Maher. Similar politics to all of the above.

Before turning prolific political iconoclast, Biafra built his name as the frontman for the seminal punk band, The Dead Kennedys. In 1987, the band was thrust into the role of First Amendment champion when its “Frankenchrist” album (specifically the album art by H.R. Giger entitled “Penis Landscape”) was challenged in court as “distribution of harmful matter to minors.” This, the first case where a musical recording faced such criminal charges, resulted in a hung jury but also a dissolved Dead Kennedys.

Biafra took the change in stride, initially by appearing on talk shows such as “Oprah” to discuss free speech opposite Tipper Gore, and eventually by releasing a dozen solo spoken-word albums. Over the years, he’s spoken at Kansas University, at the Opera House (now Liberty Hall), as well as at the River City Reunion in 1987 alongside Allen Ginsberg, Keith Haring, Timothy Leary, and William S. Burroughs.

In talking with Biafra, it’s clear he has at least some appreciation for Lawrence (he casually mentions The Love Garden and The Outhouse, for example), but he’s decidedly short when asked to elaborate.

“Let’s do some other questions, I’m not coming up with much here,” he says, laughing.

Actually, Biafra just seems reluctant to offer anything quotable that’s off-topic. But when asked about something on-topic, Biafra instantly taps a seemingly endless train of thought...

Lawrence.com: How are we doing in the war on terrorism?

Jello: I think we’re losing, and we’re losing badly, because the worst terrorists in the world right now are our own government. And the rest of the world knows it. The so-called blow-back from this is going to haunt us for years to come. We’ve probably burned more bridges with our allies and friends over this than even during the Vietnam War.

You can’t really win a war until you’ve secured the peace and in Afghanistan we didn’t even bother. Bush’s proposed budget for 2004 doesn’t include a single dollar for rebuilding Afghanistan. I’m sure that’s lost among people in the know in the Middle East about what our real plans for Iraq are. The longer we stay in Iraq, the more likely it is to turn into a relationship similar to that between the Israelis and the Palestinians. I’m sure they’re jubilant at getting rid of Saddam Hussein, but they don’t really want us there either. And I doubt they have any plans for true democracy in Iraq because guess who’d get elected: Islamic fundamentalist parties who would mainly run on a platform of how much they hate Americans.

You know, what we’re walking into is a situation where we’re going to have more and more suicide bombers and more and more people enlisting in organizations like Al-Qaida in other parts of the world and possibly our own soil again. We have planted the seeds for the next Osama bin Laden. And the next. And the next. That’s what really terrifies me about how just flat out stupid the Bush administration is.

So do you think the Bush administration lied about rebuilding Iraq?

We WILL rebuild the oil infrastructure. And some of the people that have gotten quite a chunk of change from the goodie bowl is Dick Cheney’s old firm, Haliburton, who also took over $28 billion directly from Saddam Hussein to put his oil infrastructure back together after the Gulf War. At the time they were happy to do business with Saddam their CEO was Dick Cheney.

As far as the Bush mob is concerned, this whole thing is a scam. They’re not interested in liberating Iraq at all, they’re just interested in putting up more military bases and drumming up more work for their corrupt corporate friends.

Why are we putting so many bases in Kuwait, Saudia Arabia, Iraq, Turkey, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and up into Uzbekistan and beyond, when we only use a small portion of the Persian Gulf oil in our own country? It’s because we want to have other country’s oil supplies by the nuts so they can’t — you know, as a certain deputy defense secretary put it back in the first Gulf War — so other countries don’t “aspire to a greater regional or global role” than we have in mind for them. This was Paul Wolfowitz, who like Bush weaseled out of fighting in the Vietnam War. It’s amazing that almost every single person running this war for the Bush mob is a chicken hawk ... Powell on the other hand has seen the real thing, but is involved in some very dirty aspects and apparently helped cover up the infamous My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War, the worst documented atrocity committed by American troops ...

The study that I was quoting earlier about the desire to achieve a status in the world where nobody else even aspires to have any say in how the world is run — this was a study done at the behest of Bush’s father in 1991, and even daddy Bush dismissed it as lunacy — was written by Paul Wolfowitz and Louis Libby, another chicken hawk who is now Cheney’s chief of staff. Even though Bush’s father rolled his eyes at it and nobody took it much seriously at that time, then general Colin Powell did and defended it before a House committee, saying “I want to be the bully on the block.”

Where do you find things like that? Surely it wasn’t in the mainstream media?

They are printed in some media, just not our commercial-controlled media. Ever since the Reagan administration deregulated corporate take-over laws, our commercial mass media has slowly but surely merged into bigger and bigger corporate conglomerates often owned by very corrupt, lawless corporations that (the media) USED TO help police by reporting their misdeeds. For example, NBC is owned by General Electric, one of the world’s largest arms manufacturers and nuclear power people. This gives General Electric executive editorial control over NBC news. At ABC people have to answer to Mickey Mouse. And let’s not even get into Fox News.

The worst form of censorship in this country now is not Tipper Gore or Jerry Falwell or John Ashcroft or even the recently deposed Kansas State Board of Education. It’s the deliberate omission of important facts and issues from the mass media (that) most people believe is telling them the truth. Forget Fox News, CNN and NPR might as well be stenographers for the Pentagon at this point. Maybe we should give them cheerleading uniforms.

It’s important that people develop their own media literacy and get their information from other places ...

What did you think of the reaction to Michael Moore’s performance at the Oscars?

I never watch the Oscars, I mean, why bother? But I was staying with some friends in Los Angeles and there was Michael Moore on the stage and I thought, OK Michael, don’t let us down. And he sure didn’t! That was the greatest thing to happen to the Oscars possibly ever.

I applaud people who use rare opportunities in the corporate controlled mass media to break through the party line and the corporate agenda like that.

Michael Moore has recently sent out a letter claiming that interest in “Bowling for Columbine” and his book “Stupid White Men” — which everyone should read — has actually gone up significantly after he spoke out on the Oscars.

It’s also been alleged that the booing going on was actually from people on the upper balcony and then people down below boo-ed them; and that CNN actually turned UP the boo’s when they mixed the sound for their own news cast on the matter.

He also claims that sales of Dixie Chicks albums have gone up, too.

Maybe it’s just that the bad publicity is better than no news at all?

Well, however you want to slant things. Right now they’re trying to slant it so that anyone who questions the Bush administration for any reason at all is automatically unpatriotic. That’s the same McCarthy-ite bullying (that) they used to ram through the Patriot Act, which did to The Constitution what those terrorists did to the World Trade Center.

And now, when was the last time you saw anything on CNN or MSNBC about Patriot Act 2 that’s floating around Congress now? Ashcroft has written up a new one that calls for rounding up and expelling from the country American citizens who criticize the Bush administration and support organizations that the government doesn’t like ...

They may hide behind the Bible and the dollar sign, but these guys are out-and-out Nazis and it’s about time somebody in the mainstream media pointed that out ...

Questioning and opposing our government’s policies is not unpatriotic. Right now it’s the most patriotic thing an American can do.

My attitude towards the biased news coverage is — don’t hate the media, become the media, even if it means going one-on-one with people you know at home, at work, at school, in your family, explaining why the world is wrong. If we don’t do it, who will? The easiest way to get through even to someone with a big flag on their SUV, is just to point out that the war on terrorism is poor military strategy. As I said earlier, all we’re accomplishing every time we blow people up in the Middle East is planting the seeds for the next Osama bin Laden, more al-Qaidas, more suicide bombers, thus making our own country and our own lives less and less and less safe.

Actually I’ve presented just that point to (many people) and their response is that they hate us anyway so we’ve got to do something about it.

Will killing people get people in other countries to hate us LESS? I don’t think so! Exhibit A: our big kick-ass victory in Bush’s daddy’s Gulf War was directly responsible for Sept. 11th. Osama bin Laden has said that that event and the fact that we used Saudi soil to kill other Muslims led him to refocus Al-Qaeda to target Americans more than Israelis or the Saudi royal family.

That was our end reward for Gulf War No. 1: all those innocent people killed on Sept. 11th. It may not happen again right away but it’s sure as hell gonna’ happen unless we rethink our policies and stop treating the rest of the world as our own little slave plantation to make sure we don’t have to pay too much money for oil or running shoes.

It’s obvious that you think about these things all the time. How do you keep it from just totally depressing you?

I would get more depressed but I’m very grateful that I’m able to channel my feelings on this into my performances. I have an outlet for my feelings and views and it helps bring other people together and realize that there’s hundreds of people in the same room that hate Bush as much as they do.

Do you attempt to organize people to put their thoughts into action?

I’m not the world’s greatest organizer. What I do is provide what I guess you’d call “info-tainment.” I try to let my sick sense of humor be up front so people don’t get bored after awhile. Even if people already agree with what I have to say, I give them more brain food and ammunition. And hopefully inspire people in their own personal way to get off their butts and start fighting corporate dictatorship.

You know, the ongoing corporate coup that’s shredding our Constitution in this country ...

Some of the best ways to fight back against corporate power is something people can do individually without having to go to a bunch of meetings and getting their head cracked at demonstrations. Just take a long, hard look at how much of your money is going to these corporations. DON’T GIVE YOUR MONEY TO CHAIN STORES! Don’t give your money to chain restaurants. Put your money back into the places that actually are part of the community instead.

Who’s going to have a better selection of music: Wal-Mart or Love Garden? Think of all the benefits of supporting community businesses. It’s so easy to pull your money away from these corporate thugs as an individual. For Christ’s sake! Does Coca-Cola taste half as good as it did when you were a kid? Doubtful.

What do you think of Ozzy Osbourne these days? He used to be right there with the Dead Kennedys as Tipper’s cited example for why some censorship is necessary.

I guess what’s left of Ozzy’s mind is laughing all the way to the bank right now. I still have to thank him and respect him for those early classic Black Sabbath albums ... it helped pave the way for a lot of my favorite music today.

Although I don’t think it’s too cool that a lot of the lesser known bands on the second stage of Ozzfest apparently don’t get paid a dime. That ain’t cool.

Source: lawrence.com Photo courtesy panorama.no

back to top

The Sacred Seed

By Katy Salmon

Nairobi, Kenya, May 24 (IPS)— Bespectacled 73-year old Rebeka Njau may have shrunk with age, her slow, cautious steps evidence of her body’s frailty, but she still burns with more passion and vigor than most women half her age.

“I want people to be free. I want children to be free. I want them to express themselves. That’s what is in my book - freedom. Be free to express yourself!” she proclaims.

Njau launched her second novel, The Sacred Seed, in Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, last week.

“I want women to read (The Sacred Seed) and liberate themselves. You should have your own identity. Be what you want to be. Be yourself. Don’t be like anybody else,” she exhorts.

“I ... blame men in a way but a woman has a big part to play to liberate herself.

“If women are different and they want to assert themselves and say, ‘This is what I believe in,’ if the man is reasonable, he will listen,” she insists.

It is 28 years since Njau released her first highly-acclaimed novel, Ripples in the Pool, which won the East African Writing Committee Prize. The pool in the book symbolizes the tragedy that befalls several elite urbanites — a thief, a prostitute, a hospital assistant - who return to their village hoping to change it.

The Sacred Seed is also a powerful social commentary, using nature to draw parallels with our own contemporary problems.

The heroine, Tesa, is a talented music teacher who is raped by a corrupt president, Dixon Chinusi. She leaves the city to seek help from a traditional woman with special powers.

The woman gives her a gourd seed and asks her to plant it as a symbol of wisdom, hope, and courage. From the seed, an Eden-like grove blossoms with “springs of cool water. sparrows hopping from branch to branch. the sweet fragrance of sweet-smelling flowers.”

It becomes a sanctuary where men and women go to get spiritual nourishment and healing.

“I welcome The Sacred Seed because of the boldness with which Rebeka attempts to tackle sensitive issues close to my heart, like gender violence, manifested in rape,” says Njau’s childhood friend and pioneering educationalist Eddah Gachukia.

Njau also takes a swipe at other contemporary controversies, such as corrupt religious leaders who build a church on land from which people have been forcibly evicted and give the front row seats to their political allies.

“African writing should be serious and inspiring,” says Njau, a former English and History teacher. “It must be functional and not just literature for art’s sake. Our literature must speak about our daily lives, social and economic ills.”

Njau has always been motivated to write about people who are unjustly treated — often women.

Her play, The Scar, printed in 1960, was inspired by a story she heard of a father who was dividing up his assets among his children on his death bed. The man insisted on giving his daughter, who had had a baby outside marriage, a share of his inheritance.

“Her brothers felt bad. They said, ‘It is unfair. This woman should be married to the man that gave her the baby,’” Njau recalls.

“When the father died they started quarrelling among themselves,” she continues. “The mother was so upset that she committed suicide.

“When I heard this story I was so upset. I felt, ‘This is terrible. How? What’s the difference between the girl and the boys?’”

She attributes her crusade for sexual equality to her mother.

“I come from a family of seven brothers and five sisters. My mother treated us all the same way. I was brought up to feel I am a human being. I have a brain as good as man’s. So I was brought up to feel free, to express myself.

“When I got married, my husband was intimidated by my feelings of being free. He didn’t like it. It was like being in a new world that I didn’t know.

“If you have ideas, if you are a woman, they don’t want to listen to you. They think you are crazy. A woman is not supposed to behave like that. I say, ‘No I have to be myself,’” she says defiantly.

It is not just women who have been inspired by Njau’s work. Her nephew, Binyavanga Wainaina, winner of last year’s Caine Prize for African Literature, says she gave him the strength to follow his heart.

“I think I knew what I wanted to do from a very early age. But then when I looked around, I didn’t see how it was possible,” he says.

“But the lifestyle that Auntie Rebeka lived offered me possibilities. There was somebody doing it. It was always good to have somebody who has been there to give you a guiding light,” he says.

back to top

Activist summit takes place in Summertown, TN

By Gretchen Davidson

May 26 (AGR)— The Communities Conference and Activist Summit took place on The Farm in Summertown, Tennessee May 23-25. The Farm is an intentional community that was founded in the late 1960s by group of people looking to create a more sustainable and community-oriented way of life. The conference participants, about 150 in number, were largely members of intentional communities throughout the United States.

Intentional communities use their way of life as their main form of activism, taking themselves out of the mainstream culture of work, money, and consumption. In one workshop, titled “Living in Community as a Form of Activism,” Sky Blue, a member of Twin Oaks community in Louisa, VA, asked “How do we view the current culture?” The overwhelming response was critical, citing consumerism, a culture of fearing each other, and loss of community as major problems in today’s world.

Workshop participants agreed that creating alternative cultures becomes activism as these communities serve as an example of how life can be lived and because the day to day activities of sharing, egalitarian decision-making, and environmentally sustainable living are radical themselves.

For example, Twin Oaks community is a member of the Federation of Egalitarian Communities (FEC), which “share…values of cooperation, equality, income-sharing, nonviolence, and environmental responsibility” according to their literature. “By pooling our resources, we are each able to consume dramatically less than the average American while enjoying a comfortable standard of living” the Twin Oaks brochure states, summing up how living alternative lifestyles can make a deep impact on American society.

Workshops on community tackled important issues such as conflict-resolution and meeting facilitation, land trusts, children and education, income and business, beliefs and agreements, and the cycles of community.

Other highlights of the weekend included natural building workshops conducted on The Farm’s eco-village. Straw-bale building and permaculture are just a few of the techniques that the eco-village specializes in. Participants were able to take a tour of The Farm that included viewing a straw bale house inhabited by one of the families there.

The Farm community is also famous for its pioneering midwives spearheaded by Farm founder Ina May Gaskin, who is “known throughout the world for her efforts to empower midwives, mothers, and babies.” Gaskin held a workshop alerting participants to the frightening rise in maternal mortality in the United States.

According to Gaskin, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) reports vastly inaccurate statistics due to a lack of physicians reporting maternal deaths or admitting their causes. Gaskin cited unnecessary cesarean sections and routine medical interventions as major factors endangering mothers in childbirth.

Gaskin, a midwife herself, has been sewing a quilt to honor American mothers who have died in childbirth. The Motherhood Remembrance Quilt Project’s aim is to “honor these women who have died of pregnancy-related causes during the past nearly twenty years, and to draw attention to the rising maternal death rate.”

Another organization that was represented at the conference was Code Pink, a women’s group, which has a chapter here in Asheville. Code Pink is made up of “unreasonable women” who come together to advocate non-violence and to protest US military aggression abroad. Elizabeth Barger, Code Pink founder, spoke at the conference and reminded women of the importance of “keeping the revolution connected.”

More Than Warmth is a “global children’s education project” founded by Judy Meeker, an original Farm community member. Meeker works in public schools having American children design and sew quilts for children in countries that have been ravaged by US military intervention.

During one workshop Meeker recalled pictures she received of children in Iraq who had been blinded by depleted uranium used by the US military during the first Gulf War. These children are an example of who the quilts are sent to. Meeker’s goal is to “foster compassion between children from different cultures” and “create a forum allowing American students to process international events.”

Many other organizations and communities were represented at the conference including the Sirius Community in Western Massachusetts, Moon Shadow outside Chattanooga, TN, NORML, CampHill, EarthHaven, and more. More information about intentional communities can be found at www.ic.org or visit The Farm online at www.thefarmcommunity.com.

back to top