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Talkin’ Woodstock nation blues:
‘Days of Rage’ revisited
“We are stardust...and we’ve got to get ourselves
back to the garden...”
—Woodstock, by Joni Mitchell
By Eamon Martin
Woodstock, New York, Nov. 10 (AGR) — About one-hundred-and-fifty
graying boomers jammed themselves into the standing-room-only Woodstock
Community Center last night. The occasion? Not so clear. What was clear
was that it was one week after the elections, George W. Bush was STILL
president, and these folks were clearly unhappy about it. Oh, the humanity.
Here they were, almost forty years after they’d announced the Dawning
of the Age of Aquarius — the “don’t trust anyone over
thirty” crowd, the anti-establishment left, some of whom undoubtedly
had their brains bashed in outside the ‘68 Democratic National
Convention — now reduced to bemoaning the crushing failure of the
Democratic Party establishment. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
There was no less a ‘60s countercultural icon than Ed Sanders of
The Fugs, leading the gathered flock of withering hippies and regional
Democratic party officials in a small assortment of half-hearted, parodied
patriotic hymns. To his left, Free Speech TV pioneer Dee Dee Haleck,
hard at work camcording these important proceedings. In front of me,
a star-struck boomer couple excitedly pointing out in hushed tones to
themselves that standing before us in the audience was the son of former
Weather Underground leader Jeff Jones.
After Sanders’ pathetic sad clown routine, featured speaker Joel
Kovel thrust into a RIVETING, SOUL-STIRRING lecture, which immediately
galvanized the throng of easily excitable and testy boomers into a mad,
frothing rage! Suddenly, fold-up chairs were being flung across the
room, torches were lit, with the mob busting out of the rec center soon
after, smashing everything in sight while demanding justice in a veritable
geriatric recreation of the Days of Rage! Ahhh! Ahhh! RAHHHHH!!! When
the dust settled, all that remained in the parking lot outside were
the burned out husks of Benzes, Saabs, Beamers, and, yes, SUVs, sabotaged
in an inspired orgy of self-loathing.
Well, not really. Let’s go back to the beginning of that last sentence:
After Sanders’ pathetic sad clown routine, featured speaker Joel
Kovel delivered a long-winded, incoherent, mumbling rant about how those
dumb cluck “cracker confederate” red states let us all down
again, and by gum, we’ve just got to try even harder to educate
those ignorant bastards until they finally come around to realize how
much more intelligent, enlightened and morally superior everybody in
this room was.
After Kovel finally managed to pry himself away from the spotlight,
it was time for the main event: the open mic. One by one, demoralized
Dems and defected Greens offered barely audible, bitter testimonials
ad nauseum about stolen votes and dumb Republicans. Many of their statements
were repetitious and at times astoundingly identical, verbatim. It all
had that feel of an oversized Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, teeming
well beyond a capacity crowd in which the depraved and self-indulgent
fight for their chance to hear themselves speak in an enabling, supportive
environment. No one seemed to be listening to each other. Much intolerant
chatter about intolerance was the spit that seemed to hold it all together.
One aging local Dem —who’d recently made local papers for
punching a fellow party member in the face— expressed his outrage
that the Republicans had successfully co-opted Christianity itself,
when “we all know” what party really represents the true principles
of Jesus.
Another inspired episode of confusion centered around one woman’s
insistence that people “contact Conrad Kerry, John’s brother,
and tell him to get his brother to unconcede.”
“It’s Cameron!” another woman with a thick Bronx accent
interrupted.
“Call Conrad —”
“It’s Cameron! His name is Cameron! I already called him.”
“Call Conrad...” This exchange continued for a few minutes
until an anxious contingent in the audience shouted at the women to
“move on!”
Next, a pony-tailed tirade about the Carlyle-Bush-Enron connection followed
by a churchmouse’s whispered reading of the Fourteen-Point Indicator
for Societal Fascism.
Then the mic was passed to me. This is more or less what I said: “I’m
visiting from one of those ‘cracker confederate’ states you
referred to and, honestly, I’m offended. If I can implore the people
in this room to do anything tonight it would be to ask themselves a
simple, six-word question, and answer it as honestly as you can: ‘How
could WE — LET this happen?’ I really think that underneath
all of the anger and rancor that I’m hearing here tonight, you
will find this nagging question. We all have to take responsibility
for this situation, like it or not. Condescending attitudes are not
enough anymore. You’ve alienated your traditional constituency.
THAT’s why this election was so close, regardless of how much chicanery
or fraud might have occurred. You want to complain about a vote count?
Now? You had your chance and you blew it. Four years ago there were
massive reports of ballot tampering, voter intimidation and disenfranchisement.
Where were you then? The Dems sent Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton down
to Florida to calm things down. That’s what happened. If this election
proved anything its that ‘Democrats – good,’ ‘Republicans
– bad’ isn’t working anymore. The two-party charade is
a divide and conquer shell game and it should be done with. Its over.
Its finished. And yet you want a president who doesn’t even want
to be president! If you want to be effective and make social change
happen, again, please ask yourself that question I asked earlier, and
then make a decision. Because there’s only two ways out from here:
electoral reform or revolution. Thanks.”
Ostensibly advertised as a post-election strategy session for the concerned
citizen, this post-hippie pow wow did eventually come up with some answers
of their own: “go to blackboxvoter.org.,” “don’t
trust the media,” “demand a recount,” and “come
back next week.”
What I had really wanted to ask was: “OK. Let’s see a show
of hands. Who here has ever taken LSD? Come on, don’t be bashful,
we’re among friends here. Alright. Now let me get this straight
— you think that you’re going to mobilize an effective, grassroots
inquisition into the vote count, Kerry will come out ahead, and then
he’ll suddenly change his mind and say: ‘Wow. Gee, thanks
everybody. On second thought, I guess I will be president?’ Alright,
who’s trippin’ now?”
What a sad spectacle it was, all of these well-meaning but wayward,
reformed bohemians grasping in collective denial at the shreds of the
posterboard Anybody But Bush strategy laying in tatters all around them,
and wanting so badly to piece them all back together.
What to make of all this crap — some ultimate fruition of that
fabled ‘60s narcissism? I felt bad for them.
It reminded me of another flashback I had a little over a week before.
Back in the earlier days of my political education I once had an influential
college professor who loved to frequently boast that he had been a radical
campus veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. Now, two days prior
to Election ‘04, this same man, now retired, was on a rampage,
incensed that his beloved school, SUNY New Paltz, had the audacity to
afford Ralph Nader a chance to speak that day on campus. It was Halloween,
and for this professor it was as if Nader was coming to town dressed
as The Bogeyman himself to scare people like him with the prospect of
“manipulating” young impressionable minds with bad voting
schemes. After all, New Paltz had just won a SUNY-wide MTV get-out the-vote
contest for most new registrants in which they were rewarded with a
musical performance by some remnants of the Grateful Dead.
Nevermind that NY had long been declared a solid Kerry state by an overwhelmingly
safe margin.
The professor, a registered Green who had transformed into a “Progressive
for Kerry” harassed the school faculty, disrupted local Green meetings,
and eventually Nader’s appearance in embarrassing displays of vulgarity
and spittle. Particularly wounded and incensed that New Paltz Mayor
Jason West had been recently awarded the “Mario Savio Young Activist
Award,” this ex-free speech advocate fired an angry, 2000-word
letter to the local newspaper in protest over West’s dangerous
criticisms of the two party duopoly.
I imagined my old teacher ripped up inside, perhaps like many of those
present at this meeting, forced into the insufferable position of pulling
a lever for a candidate and a party he knows is an insufficient political
response to a devastating scenario. Like them, I imagine he has maybe
even rewritten his personal mythology, a romanticized revision of those
radical days of yesteryear in which he was “young, naïve,
and idealistic.” And isn’t it always easier to scapegoat the
oppressed, unwashed masses you once purported to defend, than to confront
the terrifying conclusion that you gave up, bought in, or sold out long
ago, and the price was so many more dead bodies...including perhaps,
those of your children?
Hey, look over there! It’s your surviving blue state Dem, NY Senator
Charles Schumer, and its just been announced that Guantanamo torture
fixer Alberto Gonzalez has been nominated to replace outgoing US Atty.
General John Ashcroft. What do you have to say, Chuck? The choice is
“encouraging.”
Who’s “young, naïve, and idealistic” now? And still
the question lingers... “How could WE — LET this happen?”
Let them drink sand!
By Alexander Cockburn
Nov. 14 — The United States is bringing “democracy”
to Iraq on the same terms that the Russians imposed its federal mandate
on Chechnya, a region which has Iraq’s future written in its rubble.
The advocates of intervention in Iraq, the epigones of Wolfowitz , should
take a walk through Grozny, and measure against its ruins the fate of
their proclaimed ambition to bring democracy to Fallujah and other cities
in Iraq.
In the waning weeks of the US election campaign the antiwar movement
here in the US, was largely corralled into the Kerry campaign and strangled
by the bizarre contradiction of supporting a candidate whose “peace
plank” was continuing war. Will it now turn out that for many Kerry
supporters their interest in the US war on Iraq was in fact mostly its
utility as a rationale for attacking Bush? Now that the race is over,
will they forget the war along with Kerry’s disastrous campaign?
If there is anything that should fuel the outrage of the antiwar movement,
it is surely the destruction of Fallujah and the war crimes being inflicted
by US commanders on its civilian population, who are now being denied
the most basic and essential source of life, water.
This is not the first time that US forces have cut water supplies, something
explicitly forbidden under Article 14 of the second protocol of the
Geneva Conventions, which reads as follows:
“Starvation of civilians as a method of combat is prohibited. It
is therefore prohibited to attack, destroy, remove or render useless
for that purpose, objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian
population such as food-stuffs, agricultural areas for the production
of food-stuffs, crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies
and irrigation works.”
Back in 1991 the US war planners targeted and destroyed the infrastructure
of Baghdad’s water supplies, and the sanctions thereafter denied
new equipment necessary to repair it. In consequence civilians, particularly
babies and young children died in vast numbers.
Here at CounterPunch we are in receipt of a compelling dossier of the
denial of water to Iraqi civilians, assembled by Cambridge Solidarity
with Iraq (CASI), whose briefing may also be studied at http://www.casi.org.uk/.
Water supplies to Tall Afar, Samarra and Fallujah have been cut off
during US attacks in the past two months, affecting up to 750,000 civilians.
This appears to form part of a deliberate US policy of denying water
to the residents of cities under attack. If so, it has been adopted
without a public debate, and without consulting Coalition partners.
It is a serious breach of international humanitarian law, and is deepening
Iraqi opposition to the United States, other Coalition members, and
the Iraqi interim government.
On Sept. 19, the Washington Post reported that US forces “had turned
off” water supplies to Tall Afar “for at least three days.”
Turkish television reported a statement from the Iraqi Turkoman Front
that “Tall Afar is completely surrounded. Entries and exits are
banned. The water shortage is very serious.” Al-Manar television
in Lebanon interviewed an aid worker who stated that “the main
problem facing the people of Tall Afar and adjacent areas is shortage
of water.” Relief workers reported a shortage of clean water. Moreover,
the Washington Post reports that the US army failed to offer water to
those fleeing Tall Afar, including children and pregnant women.
“Water and electricity [were] cut off” during the assault
on Samarra on Oct. 1, according to Knight Ridder Newspapers and the
Independent. The Washington Post explicitly blames “US forces”
for this. Iraqi TV station Al-Sharqiyah reported that technical teams
were working to “restore the power and water supply and repair
the sewage networks in Samarra.” Al Jazeera interviewed an aid
worker who confirmed that “the city is experiencing a crisis in
which power and water are cut off,” as well as the commander of
the Samarra Police, who reported that “there is no electricity
and no water.”
On Oct. 16 the Washington Post reported that “Electricity and water
were cut off to the city [Fallujah] just as a fresh wave of strikes
began Thursday night, an action that US forces also took at the start
of assaults on Najaf and Samarra.” Residents of Fallujah have told
the UN’s Integrated Regional Information Networks that “they
had no food or clean water and did not have time to store enough to
hold out through the impending battle.” The water shortage has
been confirmed by other civilians fleeing Fallujah, Fadhil Badrani,
a BBC journalist in Fallujah, confirmed on Nov. 8 that “the water
supply has been cut off.”
In light of the shortage of water and other supplies, the Red Cross
has attempted to deliver water to Fallujah. However the US has refused
to allow shipments of water into Fallujah until it has taken control
of the city.
According to the Cambridge dossier, the information reported above is
more widely known in Iraq than in the US and UK, and has had become
a significant political issue.
Condemnations of the tactic have been issued by several major Iraqi
political groups. On Oct. 1 the Iraqi Islamic Party issued a statement
criticizing the US attack on Fallujah which “cut off water, electricity,
and medical supplies,” and arguing that such an approach “will
further aggravate and complicate the security situation.” It also
called for compensation for the victims.
Three days later Muqtada al-Sadr criticized both the denial of water
to Samarra, and the lack of international outrage at it: “They
say that this city is experiencing the worst humanitarian situations,
without water and electricity, but no-one speaks about this. If the
wronged party were America, wouldn’t the whole world come to its
rescue and wouldn’t it denounce this?”
Source: CounterPunch
A distant mirror of holy war
By Norman Solomon
Nov. 11-- On the surface, the most prominent headline on the
New York Times front page Nov. 10 was simply matter-of-fact: “In
Taking Fallujah Mosque, Victory by the Inch.” Yet it’s not
mere happenstance that US forces have bombed many of Fallujah’s
mosques.
For public consumption, US military officers — like their civilian
bosses and US journalists — usually discuss this war in secular,
even antiseptic terms. When the Times quoted Marine battalion commander
Gary Brandl in another front-page story, on Nov. 6, the lieutenant colonel
sounded straightforward: “We are going to rid the city of insurgents.
If they do fight, we will kill them.”
However, on the same day, the Associated Press reported that the same
Lt. Col. Brandl said: “The enemy has got a face. He’s called
Satan. He’s in Fallujah, and we’re going to destroy him.”
That statement by Brandl — an officer with 800 soldiers under his
command — caused a bit of stir in some Internet circles. But mainstream
US media outlets scarcely noted his holy-warrior declaration. Most news
outlets ignored it entirely.
Providing a fuller, more revealing quote from Lt. Col. Brandl, the Sunday
Times of London included a lead-in sentence: “The Marines that
I have had wounded over the past five months have been attacked by a
faceless enemy. But the enemy has got a face. He’s called Satan....”
In other words, Satan started this conflict. And we — the anti-Satan
forces — fully intend to finish it by destroying him.
Sounds very fundamentalist.
Sounds a lot like Osama bin Laden.
In public-relations terms, the colonel was a tad off-message. Except
for occasional lapses, the rhetoric from Washington stops short of proclaiming
a crusade against Islamic devils. And the US news coverage rarely fails
to detour around the US side of the jihad equation.
During a real holy war, of course, the fire and brimstone is not just
figurative. Dominating the top half of the New York Times front page
on Nov. 10 was a full-color picture with stunning hues and brilliant
composition, over this caption: “Marines tried to take cover after
a phosphorous round, set off to help provide cover for tanks, rained
down on the unit. No one was seriously hurt.” An article inside
mentioned that the phosphorous broke “into a hundred flaming pieces
... burning backpacks and gear but seriously hurting no one.” Reassuring.
Meanwhile, a Washington Post article provided more graphic – though
sketchy — information about phosphorous. “Some artillery guns
fired white phosphorous rounds that create a screen of fire that cannot
be extinguished with water,” the Post explained more than 20 paragraphs
into the story. “Insurgents reported being attacked with a substance
that melted their skin, a reaction consistent with white phosphorous
burns.”
The Post quoted hospital physician Kamal Hadeethi: “The corpses
of the mujahadeen which we received were burned, and some corpses were
melted.”
But such melting of human flesh is an abstraction in US media, as it
is apt to be for holy warriors. On NBC’s “Today” show
Nov. 9, a network correspondent in Baghdad mentioned phosphorous shells
just long enough to say that they are “meant to burn through metal
bunkers.” Presumably a description of effects on human beings would
not have gone well with viewers’ breakfasts.
A live report from a CNN correspondent in Fallujah, on Nov. 8, was similarly
circumspect: “Tanks have been blasting away inside the city, and
shells filled with phosphorous — shells to hide the movement of
the Marines inside the city — have been exploding overhead.”
The CNN reporter added that, along with gunfire from the city, “We
have also heard, even from our distance about two kilometers away, chants
of ‘Allah Akbar’ going up from the insurgents, the chants
of ‘God is great’ going up from the insurgents.”
Lt. Col. Brandl, like his commander in chief, would doubtless scorn
such prayerful chants as satanic. The holy warriors from the US are
blessed with superior military strength, which includes the capacity
to melt human flesh ... and to drop large quantities of cluster bombs
— one of the most inhuman weapons on the planet — from sleek
A-10 jets flying over Fallujah. Children often pick up not-yet-exploded
cluster bombs because they look like toys.
At the outset of the new assault, US forces captured Fallujah’s
general hospital. “In terms of the information war, the hospital
was indeed the most strategic of targets,” international correspondent
Pepe Escobar writes. “During the first siege of Fallujah in April,
doctors told independent media the real story about the suffering of
civilian victims. So this time the Pentagon took no chances: no gory,
disturbing photos of the elderly, women and children ... the civilian
victims of the relentless bombing.”
From Fallujah, on Nov. 9, journalist Fadhil Badrani — a resident
of the city who reports for the BBC World Service — said that “a
medical dispensary in the city center was bombed.” He added: “I
don’t know what has happened to the doctors and patients who were
there. It was last place you could get medical attention because the
big hospital on the outskirts of Fallujah was captured by the Americans
on Monday. A lot of the mosques have also been bombed. For the first
time in Fallujah, a city of 1,200 mosques, I did not hear a single call
to prayer this morning.”
While the US media are downplaying the available information about Iraqi
people suffering in Fallujah, many Arabic-language outlets have a different
news agenda. Escobar reports in the Nov. 11 edition of Asia Times Online:
“The main story playing in the Arab world in the past 24 hours
is that of Mohammed Abboud — who saw his nine-year-old son bleed
to death of shrapnel wounds when his house in Fallujah was hit because
he could not venture out to go to a hospital. Abboud had to bury his
son in his own garden.”
As the United States government terrorizes and murders in the name of
fighting terrorism and murder, the message from Washington is that its
holy war of might is unquestionably right. On the Nov. 10 front page
of the New York Times, a dispatch from Fallujah reported: “Nothing
here makes sense, but the Americans’ superior training and firepower
eventually seem to prevail.” People in the US are encouraged to
understand that Allah may be great, but the red-white-and-blue God is
surely greater.
Source: commondreams.org
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