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Today's
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March 9, 2004
Ben Tripp
Word Up! Let's Have a Conversation
Saul Landau
Will the Filthy Rich Dump Bush?
March 8, 2004
Amy Goodman
An
Interview with Aristide
Eric Ruder
An Interview
with Robert Fatton on the Coup in Haiti
Robert Jensen
The Presidential Library Terrorist
Connection
Mike Whitney
Expel the US from the Security Council
Jason Leopold
How Cheney Helped Cover Up Pakistan's
Nuclear Proliferation
Mazin Qumsiyeh
Why is Apartheid Touted as a Solution?
Kevin Alexander Gray
The Legacy of Strom Thurmond
Derek Seidman
Radical Continuity: an Interview with Paul Buhle
Steve Perry
Kerry Fiddles While He Could be Burning Bush
Website of the Day
Patriot
Act Game
March 6 / 7, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Understanding the World with
Paul Sweezy
Robert Pollin
Remembering Paul Sweezy
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Politics of Timber Theft
Tom Reeves
Bush's Mass Deportations: 63,000 and Counting
Charles Lewis
Who Mugged Howard Dean in Iowa:
Kerry, Torricelli and a Mysterious Frontgroup
Tom Jackson
My Breakfast with Sen. Judd Gregg
Kurt Nimmo
Is Venezuela Next?
Alan Cisco
A Report from Caracas
Jack Random
Haitian Democracy be Damned
Colin Piquette
Oh, Canada: the Coup Coalition
Lee Sustar
Labor's State of Emergency
William D. Hartung
Iraq and the Costs of War
David Sally
Rebuilding
Amérique
Mark Scaramella
When God Mooned Moses: Test Your Bible Knowledge
Mickey Z.
What We Can Learn from Ashcroft's Gallbladder
Ron Jacobs
Politics and Baseball
Dave Zirin
The Longest Jump: the Blackballing of Phil Shinnick
Poets' Basement
John Holt and Larry Kearney
Website of the Weekend
National Day of Action for Rachel Corrie
March 5, 2004
Chris Floyd
Uncle
Sugar: How the WMD Scam Put Money in Bush Family Pockets
Ron Jacobs
Chaos
Reigns: Haiti and Iraq
Lisa Viscidi
Guatemalan
Refugees: a Difficult Return
Yves Engler
Canada and the Coup in Haiti
Mike Legro
Those Bush Ads: Some Dead Bodies Are Worth More Than Others
Javier Armas
A Night of Inspiration: Oakland Benefit for Grocery Workers Strike
Bennett Hoffman
"Who Cares About Haiti, Anyway?"
Bill Christison
Faltering Neo-Cons Still Dangerous
Website of the Day
Haiti Support Group
March 4, 2004
Diane Christian
Sex
and Ideals
Sen. Robert Byrd
Stop the Stonewalling, Mr. President: Fairy Tales, Bush and the
9/11 Commission
Norman Solomon
Assuming the Right to Intervene: The US Press and Haiti
Jack Brown
A Fragrant Saga of Mexico's Greens
Hal Cranmer
The
John Kerry Experience
David Lindorff
Greenspan's Pension
Sam Smith
The Election is Over, We Lost
Christopher Brauchli
Goin'
to the Chapel: The Gay and the Dead
Brian D. Barry
The "Perfect" World of E-Voting: A Computer Scientist
Reports from the Polling Booth
Richard Oxman
Arsonists for Haiti?
Peter Phillips
Haitian
Fantasies: Mainstream Media Fails Itself, Again
Tariq Ali
Notes on Anti-Semitism, Zionism and
Palestine
Website of the Day
What If Boeing Ads Told the Truth?
March 3, 2004
Heather Williams / Karl
Laraque
Marines
Retake Haiti
Jack McCarthy
Guy's
Our Guy: "I am the Chief. My Hero is Pinochet."
Robert Sandels
The
Purloined Label: The Struggle Over the Havana Club Trademark
Juliana Fredman / James Davis
Israeli Organized Crime
JG
The Yuppie Silence on Haiti
Emilio Sardi
The
Colombia/US Free Trade Deal: It's About More Than Trade
Alan Farago
Swimming in Sewage
Mike Whitney
"Blood
Will Have Blood": 143 Murdered in Liberated Iraq
CounterPunch Wire
Nader's Legislative Record in the 1960s
Steve Perry
Kerry
Advisory: Remember Lena Guerrero
Nelson George/ Marcus Miller
Miles Davis & Hip Hop: a Conversation
Website of the Day
$10,000 Is Yours for the Taking: The USS Liberty Challenge
March 2, 2004
William Blum
If Kerry's
the Answer, What's the Question?
Conn Hallinan
Haiti:
the Dangerous Muddle
JoAnn Wypijewski
The Bravo
H-Bomb Test: One WMD They Couldn't Hide
Mike Whitney
Regime Change in Haiti: the Bush Dominos Keep Falling
Ra Ravishankar
Afghanistan, the Liberation That Isn't: an Interview with Mariam
from RAWA
Dan Bacher
Merle Haggard & the Politics of Salmon: "Clearcutting
is Rape"
Greg Moses
Oscar White
Brandy Baker
Mel Gibson's Minstrelsy Show
Little Tucker Carlson
What I Did on My Vacation
Robert Fisk
All This
Talk of Civil War, Now This
Merle Haggard
Kern River
Website of the Day
Rebel Edit
March 1, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Morris
Thanks War Criminal in Front of Billions
Richard Oxman
Oscar's
Obit: Thanking Bob McNamara
Elaine Cassel
Writing and Reading as "Terrorism"
Mickey Z
Thomas Friedman's Education
Mike Whitney
George Will and Anti-Semitism: a Cul-de-Sac of Prejudice
Heather Williams
Haiti
as Target Practice: How the US Press Missed the Story
Cathy Crosson
Chanson d'amour haïtienne
Website of the Day
God Hates Shrimp
February 28 / 29, 2004
Stephen Green
Serving
Two Flags: Neo-Cons, Israel and the Bush Team
Gary Leupp
Another Senseless Bush Battle: Defining and Protecting Marriage
William A. Cook
Israel:
America's Albatross
Ron Jacobs
Kucinich: Good Fight; Wrong Battlefield
Ben Tripp
A Nosegay of Posies: Queer Weddings at Last!
Leilla Matsui
Dances with Crucifixes
Mike Whitney
Dismantle
the Military Goliath
Yoel Marcus
Down and Out in the Hague
Uri Avnery
The Dancing Bear
Linda S. Heard
Britons and Americans Condemned to a Hobson's Choice
Al Krebs
Unmasking a Secret American Empire: Land, Water & Cotton
Stan Cox
Life (Pat. Pend.): Genetic Commandeering
JG
The Haiti Boomerang: "After The Looting & Pillaging,
Your Hunger Will Remain"
Rick Giombetti
Censorship at the Seattle P-I on Forced Psychiatry
Keith Hoeller
The Bankruptcy of Mental Health Insurance Parity
Dave Zirin
Colorado Football: Buffalo Swill
NADERAMA
Alan Maass
Nader and the Politics of Lesser
Evils
Michael Donnelly
Regime
Rotation: Anybody But Bush...Again?
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Exeunt Serenaders; Enter Nader
Doug Giebel
So Nader's Running? Get Over It
Bruce Jackson
An Open Letter to Naderites
CounterPunch Wire
Stalinists for Kerry! and Other Roars from the Crowd
Poets' Basement
Davies, Scarr, Kearney & Albert
February 27, 2004
Thomas C. Mountain
A
White Jesus During Black History Month?
Laura Carlsen
Americans
Abroad: Bush is Persona Non Grata
John B. Anderson
Nader's Campaign Brings Back Memories: Creating an Open Electoral
Process
Jason Leopold
Spying
on Kofi Annan
John Chuckman
Nader,
Risk and Hope
Standard Schaefer
An
Interview with Michael Hudson on Putin's Russia
Ray McGovern
Punished
for Honest Intelligence
Saul Landau
The
Haiti Redux
Website of the Day
Bush: Why I'm Running for Re-election
February 26, 2004
Brandy Baker
Is Nader
on to Something?
Jacques Kinau
AEI
to Colombia: "Can't Give You Anything But Guns, Baby"
Norman Solomon
Bugging Kofi Annan: UN Spying
and the Evasions of US Journalism
Greg Weiher
A Purloined Letter: the Zarqawi Gambit
Walt Brasch
Janet Jackson, Bush & No. 542: There are No Halftime Shows
in War
Shadi Hamid
The Music World Explodes in Anger
Norman Madarasz
As Canadian as Corruption
Chris Floyd
Bullets and Ballots
Virginia Tilly
The
Deeper Meaning of the Wall
Amy Goodman / Jeremy
Scahill
Haiti's
Lawyer Says US is Arming Haiti's Anti-Aristide Paramilitaries
Website of the Day
Clear Channel Sucks
February 25, 2004
Dr. Susan Block
Saddam's
Sex Therapist and the Rape of Free Speech
Bruce Anderson
Treacherous Bastards: The Greens and the Dems and Nader
Ron Jacobs
Our Power is on the Streets and
in Our Hearts
Mike Whitney
Bush
and Gay America: the Politics of Duplicity
Sam Husseini
Jesus in 100 Words
John L. Hess
Kick Off or Flub?
Sam Hamod
Bush's Newest Red Herring
Cockburn / St. Clair
Winning
with Nader
Website of the Day
VotePact
February 24, 2004
Ralph Nader
Why
I'm Running for President
Greg Moses
Rally
the Mob! Bush, Gay Marriage and the Constitution
Douglas O'Hara
The
Merchants of Fear: Smearing Nader
Phillip Cryan
Frozen in Time: The WSJ's Paranoid
Lens on Latin America
David Lindorff
John Kerry's China Connection
Jason Leopold
Cheney's Shame: Halliburton Faces New Charges
Gary Younge
Haiti: Throttled by History
Kromm, Masri & Purohit
Why No Democracy in Iraq?
Steve Perry
Tangled Up in Red and Blue: Beware the Electoral College
February 23, 2004
Neve Gordon
Israel's Apartheid Wall on Trial
at The Hague
Kurt Nimmo
Richard Perle, Executioner: "Heads Should Roll"
Jonathan Franklin
US Soldier Seeks Refugee Status in Canada
Al Krebs
The Liberal "Intelligentsia" v. Nader
Josh Frank
Nader's Nadir? Not a Chance
Bruce Jackson
Nader, Another View: "He's as Evil as Bush"
Gary Leupp
A Misguided
Attack, The Passion, Rabbi Lerner and the Gospels
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
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
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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March
8, 2004
A Great Journalist, Killed in Haiti
In
Memory of Ricardo Ortega
By DANIEL ESTULIN
This is the last time we saw him alive, an average
size man with a microphone, gazing out from the screen, meeting
our eyes, but unable to recognise them, to help and to comfort
because he is only a photographed figure and cannot see beyond
the flat world which contains him. He is alive because he moves
and because he speaks, because he was alive when the film was
taken; but also dead--photographed people always are, already
a memory.
As I struggle to hold back tears I keep
reminding myself that these pages are a revindication of decency
at the expense of cruelty and chance. The main theme is not political
nor is it an outspoken criticism of totalitarianism but rather
the beating of a man's loving heart--and it is for the sake of
this theme that I wrote this and it should be read.
Ricardo Ortega was pronounced clinically
dead on March 7, 2004. It was supposed to have been his last
afternoon as himself, as Auden said of the day Yeats died: "he
became his admirers". He became a memory; disappeared into
his name. It is one of the mysteries of death that it should
seem to make so little difference to all but those close to the
person. What has changed? There will be no more reports, interviews,
books, jokes, walks, talks from that source. But what if the
life and its memory we lost is already deep and rich, enough
for our lifetime? What more do we want? Most will not be able
to meet the person, the reporter, the journalist, the foreign
correspondent they probably should not have met anyway. Such
deaths are like the deaths of acquaintances we have not seen
for ages, would never have seen again. A scarcely perceptible
shift in what was already an absence. Except for us, in Spain,
this man was ours. This person was not a person for us, not merely
a reputation either. His name stood for habits of decency, ways
of looking and thinking; they altered the colour of mind of those
who watched and listened to him. This life of his cannot be changed
by his death. Time in this context is a matter not of the clock
but of chance and temperature.
I start with these mementoes because
I am about to talk about what was to become a short while later,
a fictional and a metaphorical death, and I want to give physical
death its due--a mark of piety towards what is actually irreplaceable,
untransferable in those lives now gone.
Like the rest of us, people die at least
twice. Once physically, once notionally; when the heart stops
and when forgetting begins. The lucky ones, the great ones, are
those whose second death is decently, perhaps indefinitely postponed.
But I want to shield Ricardo from this untimely, terrible death
which momentarily was forced on him by his executioners. I will
weave him into this essay, thus his death could only be unmasked
as a fiction, as a fragment of faith. Death reveals that there
has been no life, only a dream of life.
It is possible to see people as neither
dead nor alive, neither a second self nor a textual performance,
but as mere paper. Sheets of paper are often what we mean by
the person, and all we mean, or in any case, can mean. I guess
the ruffians missed the joke and as a result Ricardo Ortega...
lived. The joke I mean refers to the life of honorable, dignified
journalism, their independent career in the world, their ability
to stand up for themselves, cause trouble. And it also reminds
us of our muddle, of our eagerness to leap from text to the man,
to forget the works for the person, thereby courting a kind death
of the text, as if only the personal mattered to us.
We always remember such events, but I
intend to construct them obliquely, as a form of duelling with
history: let this essaic memorial be an answer to what Ricardo
Ortega's family couldn't bear to think of.
To write is not to be absent but to become
absent; to be someone and then go away, leaving traces. The text,
any text, is a will, we are present at its reading. The will
is where the dead are most alive; a functional autobiography,
immortality secured in the quarrels of others.
If we think of people as desired and
reconstructed, we are reminding ourselves of their human history
and their personal style. Style in most cases is going to be
an act, a perceived public performance. So the subject of a memorial
would be the person we create from our listening to the man,
a critical analysis although not (we hope) a falsehood. The very
notion of the mask implies the face. The metaphor of the second
self is an attempt to take us away from all this, to bury the
person in mystery, and leave the bad guys only with the words.
But I also think that we have to be prepared for the ghosts,
for the unruliness of the mystery.
Some deaths are mere slips or illusions.
Do we need conclusive evidence that Ricardo Ortega existed? Do
we need conclusive evidence that he was who he was? We don't
doubt our own sense of our existence, but I clearly feel that
we need to prove our past to others, since our earlier life,
must seem unreal to them, a fancy, a legend. The evidence for
this past's reality is the fondness and specificity of the text
itself: conclusive. But the near-death of Ricardo Ortega, his
rescue at the hands of memory and patience, are alarming brushes
with the brutal violence of history, reminders of the appalling
variety of ways in which real lives can be lost.
Perhaps a real life is not an existence,
however solid and undeniable, but the best or most memorable
moments of a existence, instants of exaltation or insight, timed
when the self is most itself: real life rather than mere living.
Perhaps now we can approach one of the
most subtle suggestions of the writer--what is real is the life
we lead when we lose ourselves, when we abandon or are driven
from the rational fiction of our identity; when we fall in love,
and especially when we fall deeply, hopelessly, brutally, stupidly
in love.
There is another possibility: that the
real life of a Spanish journalist, as of anyone who has succumbed
to what I call the "strange habit of human death",
is just the life we shall never see again, the life that was
once secret and is now lost. Memory in this sense is not a quest
for truth but a refusal of death. The refusal is vain in the
literal sense, since nothing will bring this person back. Beyond
all easy spiritualism, the dead do speak, they counsel us through
memory, through our late but often luminous understanding of
what they would have said.
For Ricardo to live, the real has to
be refracted. The inevitable refraction is a disappointment to
our dream of an uncomplicated, unmediated truth, an easily accessible
real life, but there is no opposition between reality and refraction.
Ricardo Ortega, a Spanish journalist
with Antena 3TV, of course, is a metaphor for fear, an image
of the reason Aristide cannot return to Haiti. There is superstition
in such abstinence, but there is also an understanding that language,
like love and like death, alters us and affirms us, clings to
us and explores us; that it involves the irrevocable, and makes
us who we are.
My refracting images, a promise of connection
with a scared child of a slained man, itself a small monument
to the fragility of hope and loyalty, was a feat of generous
imagination, a willingness to learn whatever love teaches, and
a reminder of the deep and often grotesque indirection of oracles.
They don't speak, as Heraclitus said, they give signs. What the
small child has learned through the magic of turning back the
clock is that the soul is but a manner of being--not a constant
state--that any soul may be yours if you find and follow its
undulations.
These thematic designs should be the
true purpose of autobiography. My thematic design--stands a pattern
of redemption of loss, and perhaps the only redemption of loss
there is. Loss is irredeemable, it goes on and on, an endlessly
discomposed face in the mirror.
We, the people of Spain, didn't love
Ricardo Ortega in order to lose him, any more than Aristide loved
his country because he had lost it. But WE both loved them most
deeply in our loss.
You may feel that there is an implication
that loss may actually be sought, although not perversely, not
for its own sake. A loss is a reality displaced; reality is a
rehearsal for dream. Regret is a fulfilment rather than an accident.
Happiness and harm, at this level, are
only stories, a matter of guesses and wishes; and both are easily
contradicted by actuality at any given moment. Doom and harm,
by the way, are ways of making things ethically sound, of making
them match our supposedly sensible assessment.
Biography...one's memory...it is a rescue
of the real from the uses the imagination might find for it.
If we ask about the purpose of a biography, we can also ask about
its audience. There is an intimacy here, but it is the intimacy
of a text, of reading, you can share my feelings as long as you
don't invade them.
Ricardo's life was not a masterpiece
but it may have been something more precious...
Time and space--the tricks of the damage-strewn
world, the pile of debris we call history; but they also represent
his successes. They are his successes. Like Time they sustain
the magic that makes it vanish.
Daniel Estulin
is a political commentator living in Madrid, author of four books
on communication skills. He can be reached at: d.estulin@ctconsultoria.com
Weekend
Edition Features for March 6 / 7, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Understanding the World with
Paul Sweezy
Robert Pollin
Remembering Paul Sweezy
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Politics of Timber Theft
Tom Reeves
Bush's Mass Deportations: 63,000 and Counting
Charles Lewis
Who Mugged Howard Dean in Iowa:
Kerry, Torricelli and a Mysterious Frontgroup
Tom Jackson
My Breakfast with Sen. Judd Gregg
Kurt Nimmo
Is Venezuela Next?
Alan Cisco
A Report from Caracas
Jack Random
Haitian Democracy be Damned
Colin Piquette
Oh, Canada: the Coup Coalition
Lee Sustar
Labor's State of Emergency
William D. Hartung
Iraq and the Costs of War
David Sally
Rebuilding
Amérique
Mark Scaramella
When God Mooned Moses: Test Your Bible Knowledge
Mickey Z.
What We Can Learn from Ashcroft's Gallbladder
Ron Jacobs
Politics and Baseball
Dave Zirin
The Longest Jump: the Blackballing of Phil Shinnick
Poets' Basement
John Holt and Larry Kearney
Website of the Weekend
National Day of Action for Rachel Corrie
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