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Today's
Stories
October
3 / 5, 2003
Bruce
Jackson
Addio
All Armi
October
2, 2003
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
What's
So Great About Gandhi, Anyway?
Amy Goodman
/ Jeremy Scahill
The
Ashcroft-Rove Connection
Doug Giebel
Kiss and Smear: Novak and the Valerie Plame Affair
Hamid
Dabashi
The Moment of Myth: Edward Said (1935-2003)
Elaine Cassel
Chicago Condemns Patriot Act
Saul Landau
Who
Got Us Into This Mess?
Website of the Day
Last Day to Save Beit Arabiya!
October 1, 2003
Joanne
Mariner
Married
with Children: the Supremes and Gay Families
Robert
Fisk
Oil,
War and Panic
Ron Jacobs
Xenophobia
as State Policy
Elaine
Cassel
The
Lamo Case: Secret Subpoenas and the Patriot Act
Shyam
Oberoi
Shooting
a Tiger
Toni Solo
Plan Condor, the Sequel?
Sean Donahue
Wesley
Clark and the "No Fly" List
Website of the Day
Downloader Legal Defense Fund
September
30, 2003
After
Dark
Arnold's
1977 Photo Shoot
Dave Lindorff
The
Poll of the Shirt: Bush Isn't Wearing Well
Tom Crumpacker
The
Cuba Fixation: Shaking Down American Travelers
Robert
Fisk
A
Lesson in Obfuscation
Charles
Sullivan
A
Message to Conservatives
Suren Pillay
Edward Said: a South African Perspective
Naeem
Mohaiemen
Said at Oberlin: Hysteria in the Face of Truth
Amy Goodman
/ Jeremy Scahill
Does
a Felon Rove the White House?
Website
of the Day
The Edward Said Page
September 29, 2003
Robert
Fisk
The
Myths of Western Intelligence Agencies
Iain A. Boal
Turn It Up: Pardon Mzwakhe Mbuli!
Lee Sustar
Paul
Krugman: the Last Liberal?
Wayne Madsen
General Envy? Think Shinseki, Not Clark
Benjamin
Dangl
Bolivia's Gas War
Uri Avnery
The
Magnificent 27
Pledge
Drive of the Day
Antiwar.com
Recent
Stories
September
26 / 28, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Alan
Dershowitz, Plagiarist
David Price
Teaching Suspicions
Saul Landau
Before the Era of Insecurity
Ron Jacobs
The Chicago Conspiracy Trial and
the Patriot Act
Brian
Cloughley
The Strangeloves Win Again
Norman Solomon
Wesley and Me: a Real-Life Docudrama
Robert
Fisk
Bomb Shatters Media Illusions
M. Shahid Alam
A Muslim Sage Visits the USA
John Chuckman
American Psycho: Bush at the UN
Mark Schneider
International Direct Action
The Spanish Revolution to the Palestiniana Intifada
William
S. Lind
How $87 Billion Could Buy Some Real Security
Douglas Valentine
Gold Warriors: the Plundering of Asia
Chris
Floyd
Vanishing Act
Elaine Cassel
Play Cat and Moussaoui
Richard
Manning
A Conservatism that Once Conserved
George Naggiar
The Beautiful Mind of Edward Said
Omar Barghouti
Edward Said: a Corporeal Dream Not Yet Realized
Lenni Brenner
Palestine's Loss is America's Loss
Mickey
Z.
Edward Said: a Well-Reasoned Voice
Tanweer Akram
The Legacy of Edward Said
Adam Engel
War in the Smoking Room
Poets' Basement
Katz, Ford, Albert & Guthrie
Website
of the Weekend
Who the Hell is Stew Albert?
September
25, 2003
Edward
Said
Dignity,
Solidarity and the Penal Colony
Robert
Fisk
Fanning
the Flames of Hatred
Sarah
Ferguson
Wolfowitz at the New School
David
Krieger
The
Second Nuclear Age
Bill Glahn
RIAA Doublespeak
Al Krebs
ADM and the New York Times: Covering Up Corporate Crime
Michael
S. Ladah
The Obvious Solution: Give Iraq Back to the Arabs
Fran Shor
Arnold and Wesley
Mustafa
Barghouthi
Edward Said: a Monument to Justice and Human Rights
Alexander Cockburn
Edward Said: a Mighty and Passionate
Heart
Website
of the Day
Edward Said: a Lecture on the Tragedy of Palestine
September 24, 2003
Stan Goff
Generational
Casualties: the Toxic Legacy of the Iraq War
William
Blum
Grand Illusions About Wesley Clark
David
Vest
Politics
for Bookies
Jon Brown
Stealing Home: The Real Looting is About to Begin
Robert Fisk
Occupation and Censorship
Latino
Military Families
Bring Our Children Home Now!
Neve Gordon
Sharon's
Preemptive Zeal
Website
of the Day
Bands Against Bush
September
23, 2003
Bernardo
Issel
Dancing
with the Diva: Arianna and Streisand
Gary Leupp
To
Kill a Cat: the Unfortunate Incident at the Baghdad Zoo
Gregory
Wilpert
An
Interview with Hugo Chavez on the CIA in Venezuela
Steven
Higgs
Going to Jail for the Cause--Part 2: Charity Ryerson, Young and
Radical
Stan Cox
The Cheney Tapes: Can You Handle the Truth?
Robert
Fisk
Another Bloody Day in the Death of Iraq
William S. Lind
Learning from Uncle Abe: Sacking the Incompetent
Elaine
Cassel
First They Come for the Lawyers, Then the Ministers
Yigal
Bronner
The
Truth About the Wall
Website
of the Day
The
Baghdad Death Count
September
20 / 22, 2003
Uri Avnery
The
Silliest Show in Town
Alexander
Cockburn
Lighten
Up, America!
Peter Linebaugh
On the Bicentennial of the Execution of Robert Emmet
Anne Brodsky
Return
to Afghanistan
Saul Landau
Guillermo and Me
Phan Nguyen
Mother Jones Smears Rachel Corrie
Gila Svirsky
Sharon, With Eyes Wide Open
Gary Leupp
On Apache Terrorism
Kurt Nimmo
Colin
Powell: Exploiting the Dead of Halabja
Brian
Cloughley
Colin Powell's Shame
Carol Norris
The Moral Development of George W. Bush
Bill Glahn
The Real Story Behind RIAA Propaganda
Adam Engel
An Interview with Danny Scechter, the News Dissector
Dave Lindorff
Good Morning, Vietnam!
Mark Scaramella
Contracts and Politics in Iraq
John Ross
WTO
Collapses in Cancun: Autopsy of a Fiasco Foretold
Justin Podur
Uribe's Desperate Squeals
Toni Solo
The Colombia Three: an Interview with Caitriona Ruane
Steven Sherman
Workers and Globalization
David
Vest
Masked and Anonymous: Dylan's Elegy for a Lost America
Ron Jacobs
Politics of the Hip-Hop Pimps
Poets
Basement
Krieger, Guthrie and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Ted Honderich:
Terrorism for Humanity?
September
19, 2003
Ilan Pappe
The
Hole in the Road Map
Bill Glahn
RIAA is Full of Bunk, So is the New York Times
Dave Lindorff
General Hysteria: the Clark Bandwagon
Robert Fisk
New Guard is Saddam's Old
Jeff Halper
Preparing
for a Struggle Against Israeli Apartheid
Brian J. Foley
Power to the Purse
Clare
Brandabur
Hitchens
Smears Edward Said
Website of the Day
Live from Palestine
September
18, 2003
Mona Baker
and Lawrence Davidson
In
Defense of the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions
Wayne
Madsen
Wesley
Clark for President? Another Neo-Con Con Job
Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Wesley Clark and Waco
Muqtedar Khan
The Pakistan Squeeze
Dominique
de Villepin
The
Reconstruction of Iraq: This Approach is Leading Nowhere
Angus Wright
Brazilian Land Reform Offers Hope
Elaine
Cassel
Payback is Hell
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Leavitt
for EPA Head? He's Much Worse Than You Thought
Website
of the Day
ALA Responds to Ashcroft's Smear
September 17, 2003
Timothy J. Freeman
The
Terrible Truth About Iraq
St. Clair / Cockburn
A
Vain, Pompous Brown-noser:
Meet the Real Wesley Clark
Terry Lodge
An Open Letter to Michael Moore on Gen. Wesley Clark
Mitchel Cohen
Don't Be Fooled Again: Gen. Wesley Clark, War Criminal
Norman Madarasz
Targeting Arafat
Richard Forno
High Tech Heroin
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Website of the Day
The Ultimate Palestine Resource Site!
September 16, 2003
Rosemary and Walt Brasch
An
Ill Wind: Hurricane Isabel and the Lack of Homeland Security
Robert Fisk
Powell
in Baghdad
Kurt Nimmo
Imperial Sociopaths
M. Shahid Alam
The Dialectics
of Terror
Ron Jacobs
Exile at Gunpoint
Christopher Brauchli
Bush's War on Wages
Al Krebs
Stop Calling Them "Farm Subsidies"; It's Corporate
Welfare
Patrick Cockburn
The
Iraq Wreck
Website of the Day
From Occupied Palestine
The Great Alejandro Escavedo Needs Your Help!
September 15, 2003
Stan Goff
It Was
the Oil; It Is Like Vietnam
Robert Fisk
A Hail of Bullets, a Trail of Dead
Writers Bloc
We
Are Winning: a Report from Cancun
James T. Phillips
Does George Bush Cry?
Elaine Cassel
The Troublesome Bill of Rights
Cynthia McKinney
A Message to the People of New York City
Matthew Behrens
Sunday Morning Coming Down: Reflections on Johnny Cash
Uri Avnery
Assassinating
Arafat
Hammond Guthrie
Celling Out the Alarm
Website of the Day
Arnold and the Egg
September 13 / 14, 2003
Michael Neumann
Anti-Americanism:
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Jeffrey St. Clair
Anatomy of a Swindle
Gary Leupp
The Matrix of Ignorance
Ron Jacobs
Reagan's America
Brian Cloughley
Up to a Point, Lord Rumsfeld
William S. Lind
Making Mesopotamia a Terrorist Magnet
Werther
A Modest Proposal for the Pentagon
Dave Lindorff
Friendly Fire Will Doom the Occupation
Toni Solo
Fiction and Reality in Colombia: The Trial of the Bogota Three
Elaine Cassel
Juries and the Death Penalty
Mickey Z.
A Parable for Cancun
Jeffrey Sommers
Issam Nashashibi: a Life Dedicated to the Palestinian Cause
David Vest
Driving in No Direction (with a Glimpse of Johnny Cash)
Michael Yates
The Minstrel Show
Jesse Walker
Adios, Johnny Cash
Adam Engel
Something Killer
Poets' Basement
Cash, Albert, Curtis, Linhart
Website of the Weekend
Local Harvest
September 12, 2003
Writers Block
Todos
Somos Lee: Protest and Death in Cancun
Laura Carlsen
A Knife to the Heart: WTO Kills Farmers
Dave Lindorff
The Meaning of Sept. 11
Elaine Cassel
Bush at Quantico
Linda S. Heard
British
Entrance Exams
John Chuckman
The First Two Years of Insanity
Doug Giebel
Ending America as We Know It
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Blank Check Military
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Website of the Day
A Woman in Baghdad
September 11, 2003
Robert Fisk
A Grandiose
Folly
Roger Burbach
State Terrorism and 9/11: 1973 and 2001
Jonathan Franklin
The Pinochet Files
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Postcards to the President
Norman Solomon
The Political Capital of 9/11
Saul Landau
The Chilean Coup: the Other, Almost Forgotten 9/11
Stew Albert
What Goes Around
Website of the Day
The Sights and Sounds of a Coup
September 10, 2003
John Ross
Cancun
Reality Show: Will It Turn Into a Tropical Seattle?
Zoltan Grossman
The General Who Would be President: Was Wesley Clark Also Unprepared
for the Postwar Bloodbath?
Tim Llewellyn
At the Gates of Hell
Christopher Brauchli
Turn the Paige: the Bush Education Deception
Lee Sustar
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
Elaine Cassel
McCain-Feingold in Trouble: Scalia Hogs the Debate
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Hammond Guthrie
When All Was Said and Done
Website of the Day
Fact Checking Colin Powell
Hot Stories
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
William Blum
Myth
and Denial in the War on Terrorism
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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Weekend
Edition
October 3 / 5, 2003
Carovane 2003
"Addio
Alle Armi"
By BRUCE JACKSON
Carovane is an Italian word that means exactly
what it means in English absent the final e. It is also the name
of an event that has taken place each of the last four Septembers
in Piacenza, a provincial capital on the river Po, about 40 miles
southeast of Milan. Each year's Carovane has a theme, which links
most, but not all, the events and performances taking place within
it. The theme of this year's Carovane, which ran September 6-14,
was Addio alle armi, which is the Italian translation of the
title of Hemingway's novel, A Farewell to Arms.
Piacenza's relation to this question
is not abstract. In World War II four thousand of its citizens
were killed or lost--a huge number for a town so small. Parts
of the city were destroyed by Allied bombs, though you have to
look carefully now to know that. Most of the reconstruction is
seamless. It's only anachronisms--like a 1950s date on the rose
window of a Romanesque church--that reminds you that bad things
happened here. Otherwise, Piacenza is like many other Italian
towns that have layered modern life onto medieval architecture.
High fashion shops line the medieval streets and sometimes it
seems half the people you see are leaning into their cell phones.
There aren't many cars--you can only drive in the old town if
you live there or if you're delivering something, and for that
you need a special permit--and it's not uncommon to see a businessman
in suit and tie bicycling by, his fine leather briefcase on a
rack over his rear wheel or dangling from the hand that's not
steering the bike. Most people walk wherever they're going. You
can walk a diagonal from one side of the low ruins of the medieval
wall still surrounding the old part of town to the other in twenty
minutes or so.
A few Carovane events took place in nearby
towns, or in a local theatre when it rained, and some photo exhibits
were set in a local museum, but most took place outdoors in Piacenza's
piazza Duomo--the large square in front of the town's 12th  century
Romanesque cathedral. The Duomo has terrific bells that ring
the hour and the quarters. The bells often went off while someone
was talking. Some speakers talked right through them. Others
patiently waited for the hours to finish their toll.
Everything in Carovane was free. Some
people seemed to attend every session from morning until midnight.
Others wandered in and out. I saw people going by with packages,
on their way home from shopping, or carrying briefcases, who
would hear what was coming from the loudspeakers and would sit
down and never rise until the session ended. Was the ice cream
melting in that sack? Had the lawyerly-looking guy missed an
appointment?
Many cities in the US occasionally use
public spaces for concerts. Buffalo, where I live, has a rock
concert on the green space by its downtown library every Thursday
in the summer, and jazz concerts several summer Sunday afternoons
on the steps of its Albright-Knox Art Gallery. But I don't know
any city (or university either) in the U.S. that turns one of
its primary public spaces into a week-long forum for the open
exchange of ideas--people talking about hard stuff, and other
people giving that talk the kind of attention it requires. A
living agora.
There were panels, lectures, speechifying,
a literary award ceremony, two firebreathing performances by
a street priest famous for working with drug addicts and lately
for campaigning against the Mafia, concerts, poetry readings,
public interviews of writers, dramatic presentations. There was
a heavy concentration of writers and artists from South and Central
America, many of whom had been political prisoners and exiles,
and there were writers from Africa, North America and Europe
as well. There was the great Argentine novelist Mempo Giardinelli,
the famous Uruguyan singer Daniel Viglietti, the Somali novelist
Nuruddin Farah, the Chilean human rights writer Patricia Verdugo.
There were maybe a hundred participants and performers in all,
plus dozens of students and other young people who worked as
translators, gofers and drivers. Nobody got paid for anything.
Every day at noon, Fahrenheit 451, a terrific bookstore on piazza
Duomo and one of Carovane's sponsors, sponsored an open reception
at noon. Participants, staff and townspeople would hang out and
fall into conversations.
One of the websites describes Carovane
as "il Festival di Letteratura, Musica, Teatro e Impegno
Civile"--the festival of literature, music, theatre and
civil engagement. There are plenty of festivals that celebrate
literature, music and theatre, but I don't know any other that
puts civil engagement as an art of equivalent value. By their
categories, Foucault taught us, you shall know them. That fourth
term didn't only rationalize all the journalists and political
writers at Carovane; it also said that Carovane was about art
that was engaged, and that these actions of the mind and heart
had more in common that you might suspect.
"Just tell them
what happened at Attica"
I was there because my friend Alessandro
Portelli--professor of American Studies at University of Rome
and one of the editors of Acoma, Europe's best American studies
journal--suggested they invite me to talk about the September
1971 violence in New York's Attica prison. I asked him what in
particular he thought I ought to talk about. "Just tell
them what happened at Attica and whatever else you think they
should know. They want you to speak on September 11," Sandro
said. "The day about Chile, Attica, the World Trade Center."
I was happy to be invited but I thought
maybe I should tell Sandro or the Carovane organizers that the
massacre at Attica prison happened the morning of September 13,
not September 11. It ended an uprising by prisoners that had
begun September 9. September 11 was the perfect middle of that
grim affair. But I didn't. When it comes to senseless slaughters
like that, what difference does a day or two make?
So I pulled together some notes and printed
13"x19" enlargements of 15 Polaroid photographs taken
by New York State Police photographers during and after the September
13, 1971, massacre at Attica prison. But I didn't know how any
of what happened at Attica would fit Carovane 2003.
Parochial school
Other than conversations with specific
people, about which I'll have more to say in a while, the main
thing I got out of the week I spent in Piacenza was an appreciation
for how parochial and reactive American political discourse has
become these past two years. It's not just that almost no Americans
are capable of speaking any language but their own or reading
books or newspapers in any language other than their own--though
there is that. Rather, it's that when we talk about political
matters our thoughts rarely go beyond our Atlantic and Pacific
shores or our Mexican and Canadian borders. If we think about
other countries it's in terms of whether they're for us or against
us, with us or with some vague Them. Hardly anyone who spoke
at Carovane parsed the world so such simplistic, narrow terms.
The U.S. political agenda these past
two years has been nurtured and driven by September 11, 2001.
It justifies, excuses and displaces everything. The flagging
and defensive Bush administration took brilliant sustenance from
it and has never looked back. They have waged two wars halfway
around the world, gotten a lapdog Congress to pass without taking
time to read the text the vicious and repressive PATRIOT-USA.
They have passed a tax cut that cynically maims the poor and
further enriches the rich. They have turned the Statue of Liberty
on her head, pulled her skirts over her eyes and gangbanged her,
all in the name of the ever-amorphous war on International Terrorism.
Those of use who haven't mindlessly followed
along have spent our time trying to find ways to undo the damage
they have done and have kept on doing, which means we're caught
in their damned manipulative, opportunistic and jingoistic trap
anyway. If we spend all your time opposing something, that doesn't
leave time for much of anything else. It's the same agenda, only
the signs are changed.
And most of the time we're just talking
to ourselves. For people who get daily briefings and kisses on
the ear from God, mere editorials, petitions, phone campaigns
and demonstrations don't count for much. Congress called John
Ashcroft in to chastise him for converting the Justice Department
into the SS and he sat there with his born-again grin until the
congressmen finished what they had to say, then he apologized
for nothing but instead demanded increased powers of inspection,
control, detention and punishment. And not one congressman had
the cojones to say, "Weren't you listening to a word we
said, you fundamentalist lunatic?" Instead they thanked
him for his testimony and off he went.
Another September
11
In the U.S., the date September 11 immediately
invokes memories of the destruction of the World Trade Center,
the fire at the Pentagon, and the downed passenger plane in a
Pennsylvania field. But that date has a more distant and complex
resonance elsewhere in the world, especially in Central and South
America, where the year more likely to go with September 11 is
1973--the day the Salvador Allende government in Chile was destroyed
by the golpe, the coup d'etat, supported and in large part underwritten
by the U.S. government. Augusto Pinochet, the general who betrayed
Allende, was Chile's president through 1990 and commander in
chief of the armed services until 1998. He ordered the slaughter
of more than 3000 of Allende's supporters and the torture of
thousands more. During his 35 years of power, which the US never
contested, uncounted numbers of Chileans were forced into long
and bitter exile.
There were a lot of people who took part
in Carovane who had spent time in prison, exile or had lost members
of their families because of U.S. meddling. Almost everyone who
talked about Chile '73 mentioned that Allende had been elected
president in a free and open election. The Chilean extreme right
wing and the U.S. government didn't like the idea that a socialist
had been elected legally, but most Chileans were perfectly comfortable
with it, until the CIA began destabilizing the Chilean economy.
What right, they asked, did the U.S. have to first try to prevent
Allende from becoming president and then, after he was elected,
work very hard and in collaboration with the most evil political
elements in the country, to destroy him and his presidency?
It's not like that happened only once
and only in that place. The US has a long history (largely unknown
to most Americans) of meddling, undermining, oppressing and killing.
When our presidents wax moralistic, few people beyond our shores
assume sincerity. I met no one at Carovane there who didn't think
Saddam evil and worthy of replacement; neither did I meet anyone
there who believed for a moment that it was Saddam's evil or
the possibility of weapons of mass destruction that drew the
US and British military into that war.
That said, I must say what anyone who
has taken part in any international political conference or symposium
is always struck anew by: nations aren't people and no sane persons
assume they are. I didn't meet anyone there who was angry at
you or me. At worst, it was a sadness for us; at best, a curiosity
about how we were coping.
Attica
Attica, though it is like that huge never-healing
wound of Philoctetes, seemed to pale beside the litany of political
murders and betrayals I heard through that week. I listened to
survivors of and commentators on what happened in Argentina and
Chile and other sites of war. I thought about the atrocities
committed abroad now by the Bush administration and the mutilation
of our system of justice by them and by sheep-like congressmen.
And Attica seemed a minor incident.
Thirty-nine men were shot to death in
Attica's D-yard by New York State Police and various unnamed
volunteers in Attica yard that bloody Monday morning in 1971,
29 of them convicts, the other 10 hostages. At first the state
lied about the hostage deaths, claiming the convicts had slashed
their throats and stuffed their dead mouths with their amputated
genitals. That lie was printed by the New York Times and most
other newspapers around the country, and some people still believe
it.
And then I understood that Attica wasn't
minor at all, that there was indeed a lesson in Attica that was
central to the week's discussion. It wasn't about the murders
and the lies and the political coverup, but rather about the
convicts' civil rights trial, Al-Jundi et al v. Rockefeller et
al, filed in federal court in 1974 on the last day before the
statute of limitations expired and not resolved until the summer
of 2000, 26 years after the filing and 29 years after the killings
and tortures. It was the longest running civil rights trial in
American history. The State of New York poured undisclosed millions
of dollars into its defense. Year by year more and more of the
plaintiffs died. No doubt some of the state's attorneys hoped
that by the time it got near resolution all of them would be
dead.
But the convicts and their attorneys,
working most of the time with little or no money, pressed on.
Two of the lead plaintiffs--Akil al-Jundi and Herbert X. Blyden--said
the same thing to me: the money damages meant nothing to them.
What mattered was getting the story told, and the federal court
was the only place they could force the officials who had hidden
things and lied about them for so many years to answer questions
and deal with evidence. The judge who controlled the case, a
political associate of Rockefeller, seemed to fight them at every
step, but they kept on, and finally they won. They won.
And that was what Attica had in common
with the good people who did not give up in Chile and Argentina,
and that is the lesson it has for us in America now.
So, after long and complex speeches introducing
my subject by Gianni Mina (editor of the highly-regarded Italian
quarterly Latinoamerica), and my friend Alessandro Portelli,
I threw away the notes I had prepared and just told the story
of Attica: how the takeover happened, how Rockefeller's passion
to be president led him to order the slaughter, how the state
police came in shooting even though they couldn't see who they
were shooting at, the tortures, the coverup, and then the long
and difficult civil rights trial.
At the end, I said this,
Let me tell you what I think are the
four things that came out of Attica that I think are useful.
First, Attica made prisons visible. It
took the trial to do it, but they did it. Long-hidden photographs
like those [they had posted the 15 prints I'd brought with me
on a board in the middle of the piazza], testimony, many other
things came out that never would have come out previously.
The second thing is, Attica made violence
specific. Those other deaths I mentioned earlier, those millions
and millions are impossible to conceive. I don't know what to
do with a million dead people or two million dead people or a
hundred thousand dead people. But I know the name of every man
who died in the Attica yard.
Because death is never general. Death
is always specific.
The third thing is, because of Attica
there has not been one prison riot in the United States that
has been resolved by gunfire since September 13, 1971.
And finally, this: the civil rights trial
took 29 years but they won. The state and their lawyers had infinitely
more money but the convicts never gave up and they won. They
were threatened, they were pressured, they were poor, they were
sick, they were powerless. They never gave up, and they won.
Because of them we know those secrets the state wanted kept dark.
Because they never gave up, and they won. They had justice on
their side and they knew it and that is what kept them going.
I think about that when I look at what
George Bush and his people have done to America and the world.
I think: they have power, they have money, but we have justice
on our side. Like the convicts of Attica, we must never give
up. And we will win. If not today, tomorrow. If not tomorrow,
next year. If not us, our children. We must never give up. And
that for me is the lesson of Attica.
That is indeed the lesson of Attica,
but it's a lesson I only realized I knew after listening to those
accounts of exile, repression, torture, prison, persistence,
and bravery from so many of the participants in Addio alle armi.
I needed the distance and the complex company to see the parallel
of Attica and the inevitable transience of Bushism.
Three old jarheads
and a stranger's cigar
I remember two nights there in particular.
Sunday, my first night there, I fell
in with Wayne Smith, a retired US career diplomat who had been
a key member of Carter's team trying to normalize relations with
Cuba ("If we'd had just a little more time...") and
Sam Hamill, poet, translator and publisher, more widely known
of late for organizing poets against Bush's war.
We had been taken to dinner in the nearby
town of Pianello Val Tidone. The restaurant had no signs: we
went in by one unmarked door on a small sidestreet and came out
another unmarked door on a totally different sidestreet. There
were no menus either. They just brought platters of food and
bottles of wine until we couldn't eat or drink any more.
Then we sat in the piazza and talked.
Sam told us about fleeing Mormon Utah at 15, being a street kid
on drugs, then joining the Marines and discovering his pacifism
while he was stationed in Japan. Wayne said that the Marines
had gotten him out of Texas and that he had been a Marine drill
instructor. They bonded for a moment over that long-ago youthful
coincidence, then I said that I'd been in the Marines too. "You
too?" one of them said. Wayne's wife Roxy said "Did
you go through San Diego or Parris Island?" I said I'd gone
through Parris Island. "Well, then," Roxy said. We
all laughed at the absurdity of it: three ageing ex-jarhead pacifists
with the wives of two of them in a piazza in northern Italy,
courtesy of the managers of Addio alle armi.
I asked Wayne why the Cuban situation
was so recalcitrant. "It's not," he said, "it's
the White House that's recalcitrant, them and their neo-con advisers."
There is little opposition to reestablishing full relations in
Congress, he told me, and American public opinion was strongly
for it. Even the Cuban community in south Florida had shifted
toward normalization. "Most everybody sees that it makes
economic and social sense, except for the White House. But Castro's
no help now either. I don't think he cares any more. He's the
only national leader I've ever met who doesn't give a damn how
he goes down in history. History is of no interest to him whatsoever.
I think he figures that the next guy will put it all together
and that's fine with him." Wayne and Roxy talked about having
been in Havana when Castro took over in January 1959.
The five of us told stories, drinking
local vino rossi frissante while an 80-year-old jazz singer named
Nicola Arigliano sang what seemed a perfect blend of Frank Sinatra
and Tony Bennett. Then he drifted: he sang Tennessee Ernie Ford's
"Sixteen Tons." The five of us joined in, not the least
bit in tune, having a fine time anyway.
The other night was later in the week.
The Duomo was chiming midnight and I was starting back to the
hotel from the restaurant in the piazza where we'd eaten outside
at huge tables. I was thinking about something the Somalian novelist
Nuruddin Farah had said earlier: "War is a river of fire."
He'd been talking about water in Africa, then he talked about
war, and then he said that astonishing line. I visualized a golden
snaking river, coursing through broad landscapes, forming tributaries
and streams, all of them consuming everything they touched.
Mempo Giardinelli caught up with me and
said "It's too early. You can't go to bed yet. Let's go
for a drink and talk." Bjorn Larsson, a Swedish novelist,
and Feli Carman, an Argentine married to an artist who lives
in Piacenza and who had been translating some of the sessions,
were with us. "We'll go to that great Irish bar Wayne and
I went to the other night," Mempo said.
We walked four or five blocks and found
the place, "The Bonnie Prince Charlie."
"That's not an Irish bar,"
I said.
"Bonnie Prince Charlie was Scotch,"
Bjorn said.
"It doesn't make any difference,"
Mempo said.
"It does in Great Britain,"
Feli said.
"What matters is that it's closed,"
Mempo said.
"I know a nice place," Feli
said.
"Is it far?" Mempo said.
"Nothing in Piacenza is far,"
she said.
We walked on through the narrow rain-slick
cobblestone streets. The street ended, became a wide stairway
maybe eight or ten steps deep, at the base of which was a patio,
beyond which it morphed into a street again. On the patio were
three tables, each with a large market umbrella. Three men sat
in huddled conversation at the table on the right. A man sat
alone at the far table. The table on the left was empty, and
that was where we sat.
The light rain fell, stopped, then started
again, but the umbrella covered us perfectly. A waiter came out
of the bar and handed us a list of things that might be ordered.
The man at the far table got up and left. His shoes made light
tapping sounds on the cobblestones, then faded into silence before
he turned out of sight at the next corner.
Mempo wanted a bourbon, I think because
he'd been around so many North Americans that day. He ordered
Jack Daniels. Bjorn and I ordered Talisker. Feli had water. Other
than our conversation, I heard no other sounds save the low unintelligible
murmur of the three men at the table behind me.
We talked about writing and politics.
I told them what Faruddhin had said about war being a river of
fire and we talked about the difficulty of getting it right and
the pleasure when you do. After a while, the waiter brought us
another round and I asked if the bar might have any cigars for
sale. I knew it didn't; I was just hoping. In France and Spain
bars and restaurants sometimes have them, but in Italy you can
get them only at the tobacco stores. "Tabac," he said,
pointing down the street. I said that the tabac wouldn't be open
until the next day. He shrugged and went back inside.
We resumed talking. Then--maybe a minute
later--a hand came over my shoulder and in it was a short conical
cigar. I turned and saw that it was one of the three men at the
other table. He pointed to a man the far side of his table. "From
him," he said.
"Toscano," the man on the far
side of the table said. A cigar from Tuscany. "Strong."
He tapped his chest with the thumb side of his fist.
"Benissimo," I said. "Grazi."
"Prego," he said. They went
back to their conversation and we went back to ours, while the
light rain continued to fall on the umbrellas covering them and
us, Mempo with his Jack Daniels, Bjorn and I with our Taliskers,
Feli with her water. I smoked my strong Tuscan cigar. Mempo smoked
his cigarettes. The three men at the table behind us continued
their murmured conversation. I turned one time and caught the
eye of the man on the far side of the other table, nodded to
tell him that it was a very good cigar, and thanked him again.
He gestured back that he was pleased I enjoyed it. Mempo, Bjorn,
Feli and I continued telling stories and talking about politics
and writing, about freedom and exile, about jail and the sea,
and then, after a while, it was time to go.
Bruce Jackson,
SUNY Distinguished Professor and Samuel P. Capen Professor
of American Culture at University at Buffalo, edits the web journal
BuffaloReport.com.
His most recent book is Emile
de Antonio in Buffalo (Center Working Papers). Jackson
is also a contributor to The
Politics of Anti-Semitism. He can be reached at: bjackson@buffalo.edu
Weekend
Edition Features for Sept. 26 / 28, 2003
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