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CounterPunch
January
29, 2003
American Diary
Yes,
That Really Was the President of the United States; Remember
Patton!; CounterPunch Airstreams Across the Rockies; Rave On,
Walt Whitman
by ALEXANDER COCKBURN
One has to go back to the lesser Roman emperors
of the second century to find an imperial suzerain as dismal
as Bush. Tuesday's was surely the worst State of the Union address
to Congress in the past thirty years, as the commander-in-chief
stumbled through a thicket of brazen fictions towards the proposed
rendez-vous with destiny of February 5, the day Secretary of
State Colin Powell is scheduled to make his way to the United
Nations to present the administration's latest "intelligence"
confection on the topic of Saddam's deceits.
If you want to get a taste of how these
ramshackle "intelligence" reports are assembled, take
a look at "Apparatus of Lies: Saddam's Disinformation and
Propaganda, 1990-2003", recently issued by the White House
and invoked Tuesday night by the 43rd President.
By a way of illustrating the all-round
deviousness of Saddam's propaganda machine, the White House document
cites on page 23 the Pakistani news outlet Inqilab as having
reported on January 27, 1991, that "The American pop star
Madonna was in Saudi Arabia, entertaining US troops." The
White House comments triumphantly: "Madonna never went to
Saudi Arabia." Moral: if Saddam can lie about Madonna, he
can certainly bring the Big One out of some bunker in Tikrit
and drop it on Jerusalem.
Bush's speech, if one can dignify same
with a word intended to designate ordered rhetoric, was a backhanded
compliment to David Frum, the former White House speech writer
who was fired last year after his wife proudly disclosed that
he had invented the phrase "Axis of Evil". No such
exciting phrases adorned Bush's second State of the Union address.
In the first half of the address Bush stumbled through his prescriptions
to make the rich richer with the timbre of an inexperienced waiter
reciting the Daily Specials. He even blew the opening and most
outrageous lie of all, that "We will not pass along problems"
to future generations, a pledge launched amid a vista of red
ink as far as the eye can see, as those future generations pick
up the tab for Bush's hand-outs to the super-rich today, to the
arms companies, the drug industry and other prime contributors.
The assembled hacks and pundits of the
Fourth Estate made haste to praise Bush for his impassioned resolve,
but across the country and around the world the speech was a
bust. Next morning CNN went searching for Hails to the Chief
in a diner somewhere along the Atlantic seaboard, but the increasingly
frayed reporter could only elicit grumbles about Bush's unconvincing
performance on the economy and on why exactly the US had to go
to war with Iraq. In Tokyo the Nikkei sank abruptly, followed
by falls on exchanges as they came on line in every time zone.
On the likelihood of a US attack on Iraq I've tended to be a
maybe-not type of guy. But now, after all the hoopla and the
build-up, how can G. Bush not launch his attack in Baghdad? He's
got no Exit strategy, even as he and the mad Rumsfeld shove their
feet ever deeper into their mouths. Suppose the troops all come
home with not a missile or a bullet fired? Won't there be pressing
questions to the effect of: What was all that about? Then people
will look around and start noticing the mess the homeland is
getting itself into on the economic front.
But is it really feasible to imagine
the War Party flouting the opinions of the UN, of NATO, of much
of the Congress and the huge slice of the American public opposed
to unilateral action without clear evidence that Iraq is a clear
and present threat? Only 29 per cent support the What-the-Hell,
Let's-Go-It-Alone path.
The coverage of anti-war protests round
the world on January 18 has been scandalously bad. Many reporters
and editors opted for demure phrases such as "tens of thousands",
which scarcely does justice to turn-outs in excess of quarter
of a million. Friends of mine at the demonstration in Washington
DC said the one last October was double that of the first, in
the spring of 2002, and that the January 18 demo had doubled
the crowd in October, giving a rough Jan 18 total of 300,000
(the estimate of a cop who'd been at all three). There were anywhere
from 50,000 to 200,000 people in San Francisco, and 20,000 in
downtown Portland. There were big demonstrations in Montreal,
Toronto, Vancouver, Edmonton and Halifax and others in France,
Japan, Pakistan, Britain, Sweden, Syria, Belgium, Egypt, Lebanon,
New Zealand.
Footnote: At the December meeting in
London of Iraqi exiles one Iraqi opponent of the war listened
in amazement as some Iraqis deeply involved in Washington's plans
calmly agreed that a casualty rate of around 250,000 to 500,000
Iraqis was acceptable.
Patton: Fury
Mounts
Spending last weekend with friends in
Landrum, right on the North/South Carolina line, I found the
death of the Smoaks' dog was still very much on folks' minds,
and not just because Saluda, where the Smoaks live, was just
up Interstate 25 from Landrum, north towards Asheville. You'll
recall that the Smoaks family was stopped on Jan 1 on I-40 by
a posse of four police cruisers. Then while handcuffed, prostrate
and imploring the berserk cops to shut their car's doors so the
dogs wouldn't jump out, the Smoaks endured the sight of their
dog Patton having its head blown off by a shotgun blast.
Patton's killing is becoming as big an
issue among the Live Free or Die crowd as the killing of Randy
Weaver's wife by an FBI sniper, one of the demonstrations of
cop clout that sent the late Timothy McVeigh burrowing into his
recipe book for fertiliser explosives.
Sitting with friends in Bo's Fish Camp
in Inman, S.C. eating broiled flounder and hush puppies, I listened
to expert dissection of why the cops' version didn't stand up.
For example, the bulldog mixed breed had jumped from the car
and gone past the first deputy. It seems that if Patton had been
harboring aggressive intentions, he'd have gone for the first
cop in his path.
A few days later The Tennessean ran a
story on computer enhancement of the video of the episode recorded
by one of the police cruisers. The Cookeville cop who killed
Patton didn't shout "get back!" before firing, as he
and another officer wrote in police reports. Instead, Officer
Eric Hall yelled as he fired the shotgun. Nor was there barking
on the audio track. Two officers said in their reports that the
dog barked before advancing on Hall. Pamela Smoaks can be heard
warning the police that Patton was not dangerous, saying, "That
bulldog is not mean. He won't hurt you," about 20 seconds
before Hall fired. The audio portion of the video was analyzed
by Doug Mitchell, an associate professor in the department of
recording industry at Middle Tennessee State University, at The
Tennessean's request.
Airstreaming
Across America
I was in South Carolina to haul a 1968
22-foot Airstream back to California behind my Ford 350 one-ton.
Interstate 40 would have been a logical route west but out of
respect for the late Patton, the bulldog martyr to cop violence,
I headed north from Knoxville into Kentucky. Rolling out of Lexington
towards St Louis at dusk I could see graceful horses nibbling
at the snow covered pastures as the sunset turned the western
sky red.
All the way across the Great Plains I
listened to radio reports of the cold about to roll down out
of Canada. There's nothing between you and the North Pole out
there on the prairie. "Not even a tree to hide behind,"
as one 19th century pioneer homemaker plaintively wrote home
to her European mother as she and her family cowered in their
sod cabin amid the terrible blizzards of 1886 and 1887 that finished
off the cattle boom and sent Teddy Roosevelt scuttling east from
his ranch on the Little Missouri.
The snow and ice finally caught up with
me 100 miles east of Denver where I sat in the lobby of a Comfort
Inn listening to a Cherokee Christian denounce the mean-spirited
arrogance of the millionaires of Jackson Hole, whence he had
just driven as he headed home to Atlanta. His main business was
the mass production of diapers, but as an expert die maker he
was also producing high end western chandeliers, the metal cut
with water jet and ruby dust and selling at $45,000 a pop.
I ground my way up into the Rockies in
low gear and burst into sunshine somewhere just short of the
Eisenhower tunnel, at 10,000 feet. A few miles further on I caught
sight of a dejected human settlement south of the interstate
that at first glance resembled miners' houses in some old photo
of coal country in Appalachia. Then I realized that these were
the condominia of Vail where huddled but well-fed masses of ski
people and snow-boarders were praying for snow.
Downtown Salt Lake City reminds me of
Moscow: big, fifties- style buildings, wide boulevards (as stipulated
by Brigham Young, who said a waggon should be able to turn round
on one), and at the heart SLC's answer to the Kremlin in the
form of the Mormons' Temple. SLC's substantial gay and lesbian
population was up in arms about legal threats to the status of
their civil marriages. The next day, amid the bare expanses of
the great salt lake, a taxi with a For Hire sign bowled by, followed
shortly thereafter by a white stretch limo. The answer to the
puzzle came a few miles later at the Nevada line and the gambling
town of Wendover, with the first slots and blackjack tables available
for gamblers since they left Colorado.
The weather gods stayed kind. I left
Winnemucca at 5am, and five hours later went over the Donner
Pass in 60 degree weather. I stopped at the summit and was gazing
down on Donner Lake wondering whether the cannibals had seasoned
their ribeyes, when a woman climbed out of her pick-up, said
she was a hippy, liked Airstreams and asked Would I care to share
"a bowl" with her. She didn't look like a narc and
anyway, why would a narc bother with a Airstream type? But it
seemed early in the day for marijuana which I don't greatly care
for anyway. Besides, I still had a couple of hundred miles of
northern California mountains to get across.
The bowl-offerer pointed out the Blue
Star memorial put up at the Donner summit by some California
garden clubs in honor of America's fallen warriors. She added
a few uncomplimentary words about G. Bush. I was home by midnight,
a week after leaving South Carolina. Along the way, two people
offered to buy the Airstream. No one I met was keen on war with
Iraq. The mayor of Salt Lake City said publicly it's a lousy
idea, as did the entire city council of Chicago, with one dissenting
voice. Mostly the local papers were filled with stories about
state budget crises. After all, only two states are solvent:
New Mexico and Wyoming, courtesy of their natural gas. Texas
has a deficit of around $9 billion this year, $11 billion next,
in part the long shadow of Bush's favors to the rich down there
when he was governor.
The night after I got home my friend
and neighbor Joe Paff strongly recommended an amazing poem by
Walt Whitman, written just after the Civil War, titled "Respondez!".
It makes Ginsberg's Howl sound like some uplifting jingle on
the back of a corn flakes packet:
Respondez! Respondez! /
(The war is completed the price is paid the title
is settled byond recall;) /
Let there be money, business, imports, exports, custom, /
authority, precedents, pallor, dyspepsia, smut, ignorance, unbelief!
/
Let judges and criminals be transposed! /
Let the slaves be masters! Let the masters be slaves! /
Let all the men of These States stand aside for a few smouchers!
/
Let the few seize on what they choose! /
Let the rest, gawk, giggle, starve, obey! /
Let shadows be furnished with genitals! /
Let substances be deprived of their genitals! /
Jeffrey
put it up on this site a couple of days ago.
Also in the poem is the line, "Let
him who is without my poems be assassinated!" Lucky for
Whitman he didn't live in the dawn of the 21st century. Most
likely the feds would lock him up as an Enemy Combatant. The
First Lady certainly wouldn't ask Walt to that jamboree of loyal
poets she's currently organizing.
I used to think W's better half, Laura,
would save the day and command her dismal partner to knock off
the war talk. But she looked wan and defeated on Tuesday night,
even she looked adorable in those hot photos with the Scotty,
featured in every checkout counter in every supermarket in America,
next to the Star's story about Joe Millionaire who maybe has
a gay page in his resume.
Now that's news!
Yesterday's
Features
Walt Whitman
Respondez!
Respondez!
Jennifer Berkshire
Porto
Alegre Diary 3: Lula, Savior or Sell Out?
Chris Floyd
Street
Legal
Linda Heard
Are You a Friend of Freedom?
Agustín Velloso
Santisteban
Spain
and the War on Iraq
Rich Procter
We Can Stop This War
A National Rifle Association of Peace
Saul Landau
A Guide to Bush's Political Bipolar Disorder
Ralph Nader
Protecting Public Education from Corporate Tax Giveaways
Robert Fisk
The Human Cost of War
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January 25
/ 26, 2003
Ron Jacobs
Iraq
War as Football Game
Bill and Kathy
Christison
Too Many Smoking Guns: Israel, American Jews and the War on Iraq
Chris Clarke
Collateral Damage: Draft Resistance and the Peace Mvt.
Bruce Jackson
Killing an Oak Tree: a Gratuitous Death
Jennifer Berkshire
Porto Allegre Diary II: Building the Party, Lula Style
Forrest Hylton
Left Turns in South America
Edward Said
When Will Arabs Resist?
William A.
Cook
Israeli
Democracy: Fact or Fiction?
Anthony Gancarski
America Never Was America to Me
Subcomandante
Marcos
Zaps to Basques: Lighten Up!
Ellen Cantarow
Music Lives in Palestine
Marta Russell
Extinguishing Frida Kahlo
Adam Engel
Man in the Black Suit: a novelini
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
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