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April 23, 2002
Norman Madarasz
French Presidential Elections
Absenteeism and Le Pen
Dr. Susan
Block
Bernard
Parks, Goodbye:
A Farewell to My Chief
Joan Smith
Who Will Rid Us of
These Pedophile Priests?
April 22, 2002
CounterPunch
Wire
EPA
Ombudsman Resigns
in Protest
Dave Marsh
DeskScan: What's Playing
at My House This Week
Ron Jacobs
A20
in DC: Taking the
Message to the Beast's Belly
Kathy Kelly
An Open Letter to
Israeli Soldiers
Irit Katriel
Word
Games and Body Bags
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
We Come for Peace
Daniel
Bar-Tal
Is
There a Way Out?
Occupation, Terror
and Understanding
David Wilson
A Week of Coups, But Now
The Freedom Train Hits Town
Shaik
Ubaid
Today
I Was a Palestinian
April 21, 2002
Michelle Campos
Suckered Again in Israel
Mike Leon
200,000
in DC Protest Say:
"We Are All Palestinians Today"
C.G. Estabrook
Sex and Power in Catholicism
Kathy
Kelly
Gimme
Some Truth Now
A Walk Through Jenin
April 20, 2002
Philip Farruggio
Drowning in a Sea of Apathy
Kristen
Schurr
Leaving
Nablus
Bernard Weiner
Israel and the Intifada
for Dummies
Jean-Guy
Allard
A
Coup Signed by Otto Reich
Chris Floyd
The "Grandeur" That Was Rome:
A Letter from the Front
April 19, 2002
Eric Flint
Free
the Books!
David Krieger
A Peace Proposal:
Bring in the Children
Jeff Paterson
Advice
to Recruits from
a Gulf War Vet
Jeffrey St. Clair
From Sen. "Lunkhead" to
Bush Energy Czar: A Year in the Life of Spencer Abraham
April 18, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
Latin
America's Dilemma:
The Propaganda of Otto Reich
Sam Bahour
Bush is Playing Russian
Roulette with Palestinians
M. Shahid
Alam
A
Colonizing Project
Built on Lies
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
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Five
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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 New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
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
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April 23, 2002
American Journal
The Loneliest Road
By Alexander Cockburn
AUSTIN, Nevada: Late in the evening in back-road America you
tend to pick the motels with a few cars marked in front of the
rooms. There's nothing less appealing than an empty courtyard,
with maybe Jeffrey Dahmer or Norman Bates waiting to greet you
in the Reception office. The all-night clerk at the Lincoln motel
(three cars out front) in Austin, Nevada, who checked me at
around 11.30 pm a few nights ago told me she was 81, and putting
in two part-time jobs, the other at the library, to help her
pay her heating bills since she couldn't make it on her Social
Security.
She imparted this info without self-pity
as she took my $29.50, saying that business in Austin last fall
had been brisk and that the 57 motel beds available in the old
mining town had been filled with crews laying fiber-optic cable,
along the side of the road, which in the case of Austin meant
putting it twenty feet under the graveyard which skirts the road
just west of town.
Earlier that day, driving from Utah through
the Great Basin along US-50, billed as "the loneliest road".
I'd seen these cables, blue and green and maybe two inches in
diameter sticking out of the ground on the outskirts of Ely,
as if despairing at the prospect of the Great Salt Lake desert
stretching ahead, through league after league of sagebrush.
So we can run fiber optic cable through
the western deserts but not put enough money in the hands of
81-year olds so they don't have to pull all-night shifts clerking
in motels. What else is new? At least the lady in Austin was
spry and interested in life, refreshed by her intermittent naps
on the couch in the sitting room off the reception office, dipping
into her book, with the motel cat to keep her company, across
the road from the International café which serves good
breakfasts and decent drinks from a magnificent wooden bar that
came round the Horn from Europe back in Austin's mining heyday
in the 1870s.
People who drive or lecture their way
through the American interior usually notice the same thing,
which is that you can have rational conversations with people
about the Middle East, about George W. Bush and other topics
certain to arouse unreasoning passion among sophisticates on
either coast. Robert Fisk describes exactly this experience in
a recent piece for The Independent, for which he works as a renowned
reporter and commentator on mostly Middle Eastern affairs.
Fisk claims on the basis of a sympathetic
hearing for his analysis unsparing of Sharon's current
rampages on campuses in Iowa and elsewhere in the Midwest
that things are changing in Middle America. After twenty-five
years of zig-zagging my way across the states I can't say I agree.
It's always been like that, and even though polls purport to
establish that 90 per cent of all Middle Americans claim to have
had personal exchanges with Jesus and reckon George W. to be
the reincarnation of Abe Lincoln, the reality is otherwise. Twenty
years ago Fisk would have met with lucid views in Iowa on the
Palestinian question, plus objective assessments of the man billed
at that time as Lincoln's reincarnation, Ronald Reagan.
Some attitudes do change. White people
are more afraid of cops than they used to be. A good old boy
in South Carolina I've bought classic cars from for quarter of
a century was a proud special constable back in the early Eighties.
These days if a police cruiser passes him on the highway, he'll
turn off at the next intersection and take another road. Reason:
a few years ago a couple of state cops had stopped him late at
night, frisked him, accused him of being drunk. This profoundly
religious Baptist told them truthfully he'd never consumed alcohol
in his life. Then they said he must be a drug-dealer. He reckons
the only reason they didn't plant some cocaine in his car was
that he told them to check him out with the local police chief,
an old friend.
I know from the stats that a lot of Americans
are poor, so how come I'm often the only fellow on the road,
or in town, in an old car aside from some of the Mexican field
workers in California for whom such cars are home?. Most everyone
seems to be in a late-model pick-up, an SUV, or at least a nice
new Honda Civic. I know, I know. The poor are out there, lots
of them, but the whole place just doesn't seem to feel as poor
as it often did in the early Eighties, in the Bush recession.
Then day after day you could drive through towns that felt like
graveyards, with no prospect of fiber optic cable running under
them.
Take Grants on 1-40 in New Mexico, west
of Albuquerque, which became the nation's self-proclaimed "uranium
capital" in the Fifties after Paddy Martinez heard descriptions
of what uranium ore looked like and led the mining prospectors
to the yellow rocks he'd been looking at down the years. The
mines closed and I recall from the early 1980s Grants looking
looked sadly becalmed, with its Uranium Café and souvenir
motels from the great days of Route 66. The audio in the Mining
Museum still speaks plaintively about radiation's bad rep, despite
the fact that in modest amounts it's good for you and there was
much more of it around when the world was young.
Well, 66 Nostalgia is still strong in
Grants, to the advantage of Bob and Mei Rasmussen, out of the
Bay Area, who run the Sands Motel and who recently hosted a Route
66 concert in their parking lot (all profits to the local food
bank), in which Bob hopes one day to park a Buick Electra 1963
convertible, if anyone wants to sell him one at a reasonable
price. (Nonetheless I had the strong impression that Mrs Rasmussen
was eager to return to San Francisco, where more of her Chinese
compatriots reside.) But aside from the Lee Ranch coal mine
the juice in Grants's economy now comes in large part from three
prisons, one fed, one state and one private.
No wonder people are nervous of cops.
There are so many prisons the cops can send you to. So many roads
where a sign suddenly comes into view, advertising Correctional
Facility and warning against hitchhikers. I was driving through
Lake Valley in eastern Nevada along highway 93, with Mount Wheeler
looming to the east. Listening to the radio and Powell's grotesque
meanderings I was thinking, Why not just relocate the whole West
Bank to this bit of Nevada where the Palestinians could have
their state at last, financed by a modest tax on the gambling
industry. The spaces are so vast you wouldn't even need a fence.
Then reality returned in the form of the usual sign heralding
a prison round the next bend.
West along US-50 from Austin I came to
Grimes' Point, site of fine petroglyphs. A sign informed me that
"The act of making a petroglyph was a ritual performed by
a group leader. Evidence suggests that there existed a powerful
taboo against doodling." What evidence? A shaman's club
embedded in the skull of a mere scratcher? The graffiti problem.
Some things never change. On the other hand, some do. Many thousands
of years ago those northern Paiute or cognate inquilines chiselling
the rocks were on beachfront property, the edge of a vast sea.
The nearby Naval Air Station at Fallon was underwater. The world
was warmer then, and we're heading that way once more, from natural
causes.
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