Below you’ll find a gaggle of reader responses to pieces I’ve sent out over the last month that provoked, instructed, or amused me. But let me start with an update: some further thoughts from Dr. David Hilfiker, the poverty doctor and author of Urban Injustice, whose two reports from Iraq I put out in December. (You can find them by clicking on the December “older posts” on the right of the Tomdispatch website and then scrolling down to “Letter from Iraq: the radioactive battlefield” and “Letter from Iraq: biological warfare.”) This passage comes from an email to friends sent on his return from Iraq. I thought it impressively reflected his down-to-earth approach to our troubled world.
“The task at this moment is to do our best to stop this war that seems more and more inevitable. Several of the people I talked to in Iraq said that the only force that could stop the war was the American people themselves, and I think they’re right. I know that most of us feel pretty helpless to do anything right now. Yes, there are some major demonstrations planned (for instance Saturday January 18) that many of us will participate in. But as I’ve thought about what we should be doing now, I think the key is education. Each of us wants to do something big, something that will stop this war. And that task can feel overwhelming. But perhaps each of us can agree to do something small, talking to a few people, sending an e-mail to our e-mail list, writing a local paper, leading an evening’s discussion at church on the situation in Iraq, asking teachers in local high schools if you can come in and talk with classes, sending an invitation to friends to come to your house to talk about the issue. If we think of the many ways we can educate our friends and our neighbors, we’ll find a few that seem doable for us personally. The overwhelming sense that I return with is that once people understand the issues they will be against any war and against the sanctions. So, in addition to our demonstrations and political actions, lets take the time to educate people so that they really do understand.
“This is our Vietnam, folks. Let’s do what we can to stop it, to shorten it, or at least to make our fellow citizens aware of its devastation.”
(By the way, if you want to read a more formal and grandiose version of this, look at the most recent column of the Guardian’s George Monbiot, “Act now against war,” on what the British antiwar movement should do at this moment. “This,” he begins, “will be a war without even the flimsiest of pretexts: an unprovoked attack whose purpose is to enhance the wealth and power of an American kleptocracy.” To read Monbiot click here)
The playwright Bernard Pomerance sent me the following reflections in response to a piece I sent out by Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano. They seem apt at a time when the words “empire” and “America” are suddenly being fused in the media and more or less given our blessing:
“Eduardo G first made me think about empire. This was about 1970, with Open Veins of Latin America, which my then father-in-law translated.
In 1997, PBS aired a kind of celebration of the Lewis and Clark corps of discovery’s voyage up the Missouri. What was striking was that the word empire was not mentioned, at least in my recollection. The terrible E-word, now on everyone’s lips. Manifest Destiny was the American word for what was known as Empire everywhere else in the world in an age of empires. The point has always been that we have been an empire from the beginning; that our liberation from British colonial status, our founding as a Republic, our self-proclaimed and comforting designation as “an experiment in Democracy,” our slow and reluctant extension of rights within that democracy, our absorption of the truly miserable of Europe, has served to disguise the fact that the coming together of America after 1787 bears no relationship to nation-making anywhere anytime in the world, and every conceivable relationship to empire building.“Admiral Mahan in the l890’s (as chronicled by Edmund Wilson in Patriotic Gore) introduced the concept of American empire, as a byproduct of lobbying for a two-ocean navy. McKinley swooned, [Teddy] Roosevelt salivated. Thereafter, our concept of ourselves has always been misconceived as having manifest-destinied a continent, and upon reaching the surf of the Pacific, proceeded naturally on, with our White Fleet, our great sea power to guard our trade routes.
“This is our Vietnam, folks. Let’s do what we can to stop it, to shorten it, or at least to make our fellow citizens aware of its devastation.”
(By the way, if you want to read a more formal and grandiose version of this, look at the most recent column of the Guardian’s George Monbiot, “Act now against war,” on what the British antiwar movement should do at this moment. “This,” he begins, “will be a war without even the flimsiest of pretexts: an unprovoked attack whose purpose is to enhance the wealth and power of an American kleptocracy.” To read Monbiot click here)
The playwright Bernard Pomerance sent me the following reflections in response to a piece I sent out by Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano. They seem apt at a time when the words “empire” and “America” are suddenly being fused in the media and more or less given our blessing:
“Eduardo G first made me think about empire. This was about 1970, with Open Veins of Latin America, which my then father-in-law translated.
In 1997, PBS aired a kind of celebration of the Lewis and Clark corps of discovery’s voyage up the Missouri. What was striking was that the word empire was not mentioned, at least in my recollection. The terrible E-word, now on everyone’s lips. Manifest Destiny was the American word for what was known as Empire everywhere else in the world in an age of empires. The point has always been that we have been an empire from the beginning; that our liberation from British colonial status, our founding as a Republic, our self-proclaimed and comforting designation as “an experiment in Democracy,” our slow and reluctant extension of rights within that democracy, our absorption of the truly miserable of Europe, has served to disguise the fact that the coming together of America after 1787 bears no relationship to nation-making anywhere anytime in the world, and every conceivable relationship to empire building.“Admiral Mahan in the l890’s (as chronicled by Edmund Wilson in Patriotic Gore) introduced the concept of American empire, as a byproduct of lobbying for a two-ocean navy. McKinley swooned, [Teddy] Roosevelt salivated. Thereafter, our concept of ourselves has always been misconceived as having manifest-destinied a continent, and upon reaching the surf of the Pacific, proceeded naturally on, with our White Fleet, our great sea power to guard our trade routes.
“The E-word is still forbidden as to the making of America. General Nelson Miles, something of a forerunner of Douglas MacArthur, married a niece of William Tecumseh Sherman. Amateur soldier, civil war hero, insatiably ambitious, he shouldered himself into the surrender of Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce, was in the immediate vicinity when Crazy Horse surrendered and was killed, received the surrender of Geronimo and then promptly tried to have him killed by subordinates while being brought back to Arizona. It was under his inept and egotistical command that the slaughter at Wounded Knee took place. In a word, Miles was the final military executor of Manifest Destiny. Promoted (due to incessant nagging) in 1895, to General in Chief of the Armed Forces, with a small breather to open fire on the Pullman Strikers, killing twelve, he was the commander of all American forces at the time of the Spanish-American war, personally grabbed credit for Puerto Rico, and put half of the American Army in the Philippines under Arthur MacArthur, Douglas’s dad, to secure the islands against Aguiinaldo’s forces. I think the reason I go on about him is that in his person one sees the congruence between Manifest Destiny and Empire, and the natural segue from one to the other.
“Our problem here is a fundamental misconception about how we began and how we continued: we did not begin only as a doughty little democracy; we began as the child of British empire, under a new republican form of government which included slaveholding and early forms of ethnic-cleansing, and we continued westward as the heirs of the British, French, Spanish and Russian empires in North America. We are serial imperialists. No wonder no one can quite make peace with Jefferson, who set the thing in motion.
“All the Americas of course were fundamentally founded on ethnic cleansing, either of the literal kind or of the cultural kind promoted by the churches to insure more souls for heaven, and not incidentally, with any luck, a docile, menial labor force for the friars’ fields and the viceroy’s building projects. In this time and these circumstances, perhaps some greater clarity as to our origins may be called for, as the need for our present course to be explained becomes more desperate. One wonders, and one hopes.”
Wally Katz, who teaches history and humanities at Dowling College, wrote me the following in response to an end of the year Ruth Rosen column I liked from the San Francisco Chronicle, which discussed whether war might ever be banished. She cited the ending of slavery and the peacefulness of the European continent, home of two world wars, as hopeful precedents. Wally responded grimly enough to give me pause:
“Yes, Tom, but slavery, at least in the United States, only ended with the hell of the Civil War and Europe required Gotterdammerung in order to evolve into a union of democratic nations. Which means, to get beyond our empire, we must await what ghastly fate for the twenty-first century? Hold on for dear life.”
Here are two responses to my New Year’s comments on media coverage. David Milton, author of the forthcoming book Lincoln’s Spymaster, emphasized something I also have noted recently — that the large coastal dailies, at least, are getting anxious and so their front pages have more material that passes for what I might call news:
“I must say I enjoyed reading the New York Times this morning. Lula da Silva, Castro, Chavez, Mbeki and thousands of ordinary people with banners of Che celebrating in Brazil, South Korea defecting from the American imperial embrace, civilized prisons in Finland, American TV programs declining on global TV, the exposure of Pentagon lying on testing of missile defense, stocks still in the doldrums, and the new photogenic Republican leader devoted to the program of opposing abortion. This might just be the year when they all fall flat on their faces. Keep up your information war.”
I must admit I like the idea that we’re in an “information war,” that many of us are now beginning, however modestly, the process of taking back The Word from the rightwing after two decades in which their “think tanks,” backed by immensely wealthy beer-makers, have set every agenda in sight.
Sandy Close, who runs Pacific News Service in San Francisco, sent me her thoughts on media coverage. They are, in a sense, a metaphor in themselves. She suggests connecting “dots” that we hardly know are there — and those of us of a certain age sense what she means when she says that, as we face our children’s “individual” problems in the world, it’s hard not to think that we’re facing the world’s despair and futurelessness writ small:
“My own sense of the void in media coverage is that we have no ideas to help explain where we’re going in the world, nor metaphors other than the ‘war on terror’ that express those ideas. I have no idea, for example, how to connect the homicide rates in our cities to the war in Iraq; my son’s depression to the state of the economy; the fact that country music led the charts in 2002 to plummeting birthrates in advanced societies. I know there are connections, but no one is making them that I can see.
“Why do you think we have no alternative language right now to describe what’s happening to us, to America, and to the world, nothing other than what the Bush administration proclaims? I wonder whether 9/11 traumatized intellectuals in America. We have not yet figured out how to interpret this event and what it suggests about America’s role in the world.
“By the way, I would have added Putin and Chechnya to the list of missing-in-writing (MIW). Their ‘Oklahoma City’ goes almost unreported in American media.”
Howard Dratch, filmmaker and producer of On Company Business, a documentary history of the CIA, offered the following comments:
” I agree with you that ‘It’s about the oil, stupid’ — apropos of which, unless I’ve missed an article or two, you have not sent out much about what is going on in Venezuela. What caught my attention recently was a report that the upper class opponents of the currently elected President were staging an enormous march of the pots and pans in the capital. The same technique was organized by the CIA as part of their larger modus operandi to overthrow Goulart in Brazil in 1964 and Allende in Chile in 1973. Chavez [President of Venezuela] has called it a coup disguised as a strike. What’s different this time is the international solidarity coming from Brazil and other quarters. It’s an interesting unfolding situation, worthy of attention.”
And, of course, he’s right. Perhaps I simply feel less knowledgeable when it comes to Latin America.
Finally, I offer the following wry observation from Jonathan Schell on the front page New York Times story about American plans for occupying Iraq which I commented on and sent out just the other day:
“The following line jumped out at me from the Times story: ‘Much also depends on whether the arriving American troops would be welcomed or shot at, and the Central Intelligence Agency has been drawing up scenarios that range from a friendly occupation to a hostile one.’ It’s those words ‘friendly’ and ‘hostile’ which struck me — as in friendly or hostile corporate takeover. A capitalist with deep pockets espies a company that has rich assets but is badly managed, launches a takeover, dismisses the management, and sells off the assets–usually, by the way, firing a lot of people in the old company.”