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June 24, 2002
Ben Sonnenberg
Ted
Hughes' Spell
June 22/23, 2002
Douglas Valentine
Sex,
Drugs & the CIA
June 21, 2002
Norman Madarasz
Brazil
Over England:
The Gaucho's Wild Ride
John Borowski
Stossel
and Disney's Crimes Against Nature
Chris Floyd
Southern
Cross: The US Takes Aim at Brazil
David Martin
Of Lies
and Oil: an interview with Rahul Mahajan
James T. Phillips
Serbian
Reservations:
Kosovo 2002
June 20, 2002
Chris Kromm
The South
at War: a Tour of the US Military/Industrial Complex
Jacob Levich
The War
on Terror is
Not a Suicide Pact
Mark Weisbrot
What
are They Doing to Argentina?
Jeffrey St. Clair
and Alexander Cockburn
Fire
Walk With Me:
Terry Lynn Barton and the Flames of Colorado
June 19, 2002
Gary Leupp
Red Targets in Terror War
Lenni Brenner
The Road
Forward for the
Palestinian Movement
Bernard Weiner
Inside
Cheney's Diary:
Cakewalking Through Minefields
Alexander Cockburn
The
Incredible Shrinking President
June 18, 2002
David Vest
Raise the
White Flag in Terror War?
Ben White
Is It Possible
to "Understand" the Rise in "Anti-Semitism"?
Edward Said
Palestinian
Elections Now
June 17, 2002
Jack McCarthy
Watergate
and All That
Philip Farruggio
A Maximum
Wage Law
Ron Sullivan
Law
and Orders:
The Assault on Trial by Jury
Rev. Charles Booker-Hirsch
Taking
on the School
of the Americas
Joan Smith
G.W. Bush:
The Man is Stupid
Dave Marsh
Corporate
Buy Outs and the Decline of Teen Jive
Robert Jensen
Rhetoric
Distorts Realities
June 15 / 16, 2002
Tanweer Akram
A Review
of Noam Chomsky's 9-11
Daniel Wolff
The Day
They Shot a Wolf in the Ghetto and What It Meant
Ralph Nader
A Corporate
Crime State
David Vest
Have You
Been Serviced?
Karl Kraus
A Minor
Detail
Alexander Cockburn
The
Terrorism of Everyday Life
June 14, 2002
Mark Weisbrot
US Trade
Policy:
"Do as We Say, Not as We Did"
Starhawk
The Boy Who Kissed the Soldier
David Krieger
Farewell
to the ABM Treaty
Tom Turnipseed
The Fear Factor to Promote
War and Trample Truth
Steve Perry
How the
Bush Adminstration Buried Coleen Rowley
June 13, 2002
Linda Belanger
Israeli-Palestinian
Conflict:
The Story Behind the Headlines
Amira Hass
Indefinite
Siege
Mokhiber / Weissman
Time to Put Lives Over Patents
Robert Fisk
Bush's Weird
War
Stanton / Madsen
Democracy
in Crisis:
What is to be Done?
Roldan Tomasz Suárez
Venezuela:
Five Facts
About the Coup
June 12, 2002
Fran Shor
Dirty Bombs, Blowback
and Imperial Projections
Dave Marsh
Shelley
Stewart, Radio and the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement
Chris Floyd
Murder, Inc.
June 11, 2002
Omar Barghouti
On Dance, Identity and War
Robert Fisk
The Bush
Afghan Gang:
Murderers, Gangsters, Stooges
Minerva Wright
The Donkeys of the Holy Land
David Krieger
Stopping
a Nuclear War
in South Asia
June 10, 2002
Jeffrey St. Clair
Executioner's Last Songs
June 8/9, 2002
Gavin Keeney
Mademoiselle
M.
Or Getting Screwed in Paris
Susan Davis
Sleepless
in the Suburbs
Curing Insomnia: a new use for The Nation?
George Sunderland
"Send
in the Weekly
Standard": The Screaming Pundits Assault Corps
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
(Click Here to Order from CounterPunch
Online at 20% Off Amazon.com's price!)
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TO
COUNTERPUNCH
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Published March 15, 2002
Read Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
Buy
This Explosive
New Book at an
Amazing Discount!
Reviews of Gore:
a User's Manual
|
June 24,
2002
Cheney Does
Oregon
Portland Gets Dicked
by David Bates
On two occasions, I have found myself directly
beneath the underbelly of presidential power. The first was
last summer in Austin, when His Fraudulency and a couple of
military choppers flew toward Dallas. I recall speculating at
the time that this was the closest I was likely to get to a
living U.S. President without having to subject myself to metal
detectors, Secret Service agents, etc.
The second was Sunday afternoon in downtown
Portland. Across the river, my partner and I had just spent
90 minutes at an east-side library branch listening to a Texas
political science professor discuss how the enlightened environmental
policies of Gifford Pinchot under Teddy Roosevelt had, over
the next hundred years, lurched to the right and mutated into
the ecological troglodytism supervised by Bush and Cheney.
We decided to cap the afternoon off with
a trip to Powell's City of Books. Driving back downtown by way
of Highway 84 was out: a police officer had blocked the westbound
on-ramp. All three lanes heading into the heart of the city
were empty. A traffic accident, we thought. We headed south
and got on Burnside.
We crossed the river and hadn't gone
more than a few blocks into downtown when it became clear that
something was up. The side streets on our left that pointed
at the city's heart were cordoned off with yellow tape and metal
barricades. Cops stood in the intersections. Patrol cars were
parked everywhere, lights flashing.
We parked a few blocks north of the store
and headed up Tenth Street. By the time we reached the store,
another element introduced itself: The pounding thud of a helicopter.
A crowd had gathered on the corner, in front of the store, straining
to see from what direction the noise was coming. Meanwhile,
Burnside had been flushed of all traffic.
It finally appeared from behind the roof-line
and was directly overhead. It was not a TV helicopter. It was
an Army chopper, a big one. I don't know much about aircraft,
but I can tell you it appeared to be built for more than simply
keeping an eye out from above. This thing, from what I could
tell, was armed.
I asked a woman if she knew what the
commotion was, and it wasn't more than a minute after she said
it was for Dick Cheney's motorcade than it came roaring down
Burnside.
It was led by Portland police officers
on motorcycles, more police officers in patrol cars, the limousine,
black unmarked cars with tinted windows, more cops in cars,
and more on motorcycles. Oh yes . . . and an ambulance. The
Dick Cheney Heart Attack Brigade, no doubt. God save him if he
should ever keel over. If he died, they'd put Bush in charge.
I looked up again at the chopper. Would
all this have been necessary if September 11 had not happened?
Hell, would it have been necessary if Bush and Cheney had actually
WON the election?
It occurred to me that this might be
the closest I'd ever get to the oily Cheney. I wondered how
to make the most efficient use of the occasion. My mind raced.
What to do? I had no placard or loudspeaker, and yet for just
a second, I would be even closer than Indiana environmentalist
John Blair got in February before the cops hauled him away for
carrying an anti-Cheney sign. For a brief, exhilarating moment,
I stood poised on the curb, prepared to Express Myself to the
Vice President of the United States with the most appropriate,
non-verbal sentiment I could think of: my middle finger.
I did not extend it.
Blair's experience back in February,
recounted here at CounterPunch, did not come immediately to
mind. But I looked at all those cops, all those armored cars,
and that deafening chopper, and I thought better of it. And,
only seconds after Cheney had passed, I regretted it.
I regret that I cannot report to you
today what it's like to be arrested, or even questioned by a
police officer for flipping off the Vice President of the United
States. Of course, I can't guarantee that I would have been
arrested, but I sure as hell can't say that I wouldn't have.
Can I?
At 10th Street, the motorcade peeled
off to the right toward the Benson Hotel. Cheney was in town
to lend his fundraising prowess to Oregon's senior senator,
Gordon Smith, a millionaire Republican who has already amassed
roughly $4 million for campaign against a Democrat who has barely
topped $700,000. His itinerary, according to news reports,
will include meetings with $10,000 donors over breakfast and
a separate "photo reception" for $5,000 donors.
Not since watching the towers fall had
I felt that kind of dread and sickness in my gut. Not since
I'd heard Donald Rumsfeld insist last winter that the United
States was "bombing targets in Kabul" without bombing
Kabul itself had I been as angry.
An hour or so later, two young women
outside Powell's were providing an outlet for the citizenry's
frustration. They identified themselves as artists who were
asking downtown folk for their thoughts. They provided a scrap
of paper, and I provided a thought:
"Vice President Dick Cheney's motorcade
through downtown Portland this afternoon was an offensive and
frightening display of American imperialism and militarism.
Such a thing should not be necessary in a society that calls
itself free and democratic."
My partner and I headed up Tenth to grab
a bite. In my Powell's bag was a copy of Aime Cesaire's "Discourse
on Colonialism," which struck me as an appropriate
purchase for the day. The first three lines, I think, are worth
repeating and thinking about deeply.
"A civilization that proves incapable
of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization."
"A civilization that chooses to
close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization."
"A civilization that uses its principles
for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization."
David Bates
is an Oregon-based writer. He can be reached at david@onlinemac.com
Today's
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