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May 2, 2002
CounterPunch
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Rep.
Dick Armey Calls for Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians
Rami Kaplan
Israeli Soldiers Resisting
the Occupation:
Why We Refuse to Fight
Carol
Norris
Subterranean
Mini-Nuke Blues
Bernard Weiner
A Peek Inside Colin Powell's Personal
Diary
May 1, 2002
Badiou,
Michel, Lazarus
French
Elections:
What is to be Done?
Baruch Kimmerling
The Battle of Jenin as
an Inter-Ethnic War
Edward
Hammond
Hiding
History:
NAS Suppresses Chem/Bio War Documents
Kristen Schurr
Inside Gaza
Sam Bahour
Corporate
America and
the Israeli Occupation
Jacques Ranciere
Prisoners of the Infinite
April 30, 2002
Mike Leon
Chomsky,
Letters to the Writer and the Peace Movement
Dave Marsh
The FBI and the Music
Industry: Paying the Cost to Feed the Boss
Steen
Sohn
Something
Rotten in Denmark:
New Danish Government's Alliance with Far Right
Desmond Tutu
Apartheid in the Holy Land
Christopher
Reilly
Kissinger:
the Wanted Man
April 29, 2002
Larry Hales
At the Church of the Nativity
Michael
Colby
The
Times Does Brockovich:
Ralph Nader with Cleavage?
CounterPunch Wire
Bank Robs Publisher,
Vows to Repeat
Gavin
Keeney
So
Long, Frank O. Gehry?
April 28, 2002
Michael Neumann
The Jewish Left and Palestine
April 27, 2002
Dr. Susan
Block
Adelphia
Going Down:
Cover Ups, Censorship
and Naughty Accounting
Jordy Cummings
Stuck Inside the Journalism School
Pyramid
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Set
This Flag on Fire!
April 26, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
Act
Now to Stop the Killing
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Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Anti-Bribery
Law Takes a Hit
Tariq Ali
Letter to a Young Muslim
April 25, 2002
Francis
A. Boyle
Home
Brew? Biowarfare,
Terror Weapons and the US
Adam Federman
"And the Earth Wept"
Bush at Saranac Lake
Stanton
and Madsen
US
Media Interests:
Champions of Profit, Propaganda and Puffery
Aaron Hawley
Cop a Buzz Day in Vermont:
Education v. Incarceration
David
Vest
Code
Red: Politics and Wordplay at the Vatican
Bernard Weiner
Time Out! A Pause for Longer-Range
Thinking
Rep. Dennis
Kucinich
Standing
with the Peace Movement
April 24, 2002
David Vest
State of Politics in France:
Code Bleu
Jean Fallow
A20
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Cops Get Rough, Again
Kevin Alexander Gray
Help Save the Life of an Innocent Man:
Ask for Clemency for Ricky Johnson
Tanya
Reinhart
Jenin,
the Propaganda Battle
Todd May
Drowning Children, Palestinians and American
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Alexander
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The
Loneliest Road
Nir Rosen
The Broken Home:
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Mokhiber
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A
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April 23, 2002
Brian Wood
Where Is the Aid for the Victims in
Jenin?
John Chuckman
I,
George:
Gomer as Claudius
Norman Madarasz
French Presidential Elections
Absenteeism and Le Pen
Dr. Susan
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Bernard
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Joan Smith
Who Will Rid Us of
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April 22, 2002
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DeskScan: What's Playing
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A20
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Kathy Kelly
An Open Letter to
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Irit Katriel
Word
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Rep. Cynthia McKinney
We Come for Peace
Daniel
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Is
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Occupation, Terror
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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
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Gimme
Some Truth Now
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May
4, 2002
Let this be a lesson to you all: Don't try to
con teenagers when it comes to spring break. It can be done,
of course, but the consequences are bound to be unspeakably harsh.
This winter when we were all sitting
around the table in our house in Oregon City, facing the prospect
of six more months of gloom and rain, the four of us decided
that an escape to someplace sunny, dry and hot in April might
recharge us, making it possible to trundle on through the sunless
Oregon spring.
For years, I've wanted to spend some
time in the Mojave desert. I've driven across its basins and
mountains many times, but always on the way to or from someplace
else. There was a spot on the map that had long intrigued me:
Twentynine Palms, California, a small desert town at the northern
entrance to Joshua Tree National Park. I suggested this as a
potential destination. Apparently, when I said Twentynine Palms,
our kids, aged 19 and 17, heard Palm Springs, that sprawling
cancer of a city 50 miles to the south. They were enthused for
once and, ridiculously, I did nothing to discourage their fantasy.
Dumb move on my part.
We flew from Portland to Sacramento to
Ontario, California. I detest airplanes and this was the first
time I'd flown since 9-11. The rest of the family, frequent fliers
all, had already become inured to the groping searches, the demands
to remove shoes (which in our son Nat's case could, depending
on the shoes, be noxious event in itself), the ceaseless checking
for photo ID, the seizure of knitting (though not crochet) needles
and nail clippers. As it turned out, self-consciously liberal
Portland conducted the most intrusive searches of the three cities,
with the lines slushing forward at the pace of the Wisconsin
Glaciation.
Having arrived bleary-eyed at PDX three
hours early, I had a chance to watch dozens of searches and try
to make sense out of who was being singled out and why. By and
large the pat-downs at the gate seemed to be dictated by a simple
quota system-ten to twelve individuals per flight, roughly twice
as many men as women. (Nat and I were searched four times in
four flights. Our daughter Zen once. Kimberly not at all.)
A demographic note. In Portland, nearly
all of the people charged with doing the searches were black;
most of us being searched were white. It was a fetching irony,
and a situation that might do more than anything else to instill
popular resentment toward the relentless incursions of the Surveillance
State. There's nothing like a good strip search to convince even
the most stalwart Republican that perhaps Ashcroft has gotten
a little carried away.
I'd say one out of four passengers who'd
been selected for inspection huffed, pouted and acted indignant,
many of them snapping at the searchers with boisterous declarations
of their patriotism. And, for the most part, the searchers kept
their cool, trying to keep the searchees calm enough so that
they wouldn't be booted from the airport as, to give an old phrase
new meaning, "flight risks". Many of them snickered,
shook their heads and imparted knowing winks to their colleagues.
One could easily imagine situations where blacks who objected
to similar searches by cops on the shoulder of, say, the New
Jersey Turnpike ended up being hauled off to jail or to the morgue.
Ontario was a different story. The searches
here were more cursory. Instead, this rather puny airport had
opted for a robust show of military force, with more than a dozen
(all white, as far as I could tell) national guard troops prowling
the corridors in full combat gear, including M-16s, giving young
women the once over. It had the creepy atmosphere of the airport
in Buenos Aires during the height of the Dirty War.
From Brand
Hell to the Devil's Garden
We headed east on Highway 10 out of Ontario. This
must be one of the blandest roads in America: a smog-drenched
corridor of car lots, cloned subdivisions, billboards promoting
phone sex and Indian casinos-the latter day rubble of the California
dream.
The monotony is broken only by the brooding
hulk of the San Bernardino Mountains and by Cabazon, home of
the giant truckstop dinosaurs featured in PeeWee's Big Adventure
and the Desert Hills Premier Outlet Mall.
If you thought we'd drive right past
Cabazon, you don't know our daughter, who as a taskmaster would
shame even merciless old Ward Bond from Wagon Train, the sixties
tv western sponsored by the Borax Company, the mining conglomerate
that has done more than just about anyone to ravage the outback
of the Mojave.
This may be the world's hautiest outlet
fashion mall. It's an orgy of brand retailing wrapped in a kind
of faux-Venetian architecture. The stores hawk discards from
an array of designers, from Donna Karan and Gucci to Barney's
of New York and Versace. In the Giorgio Armani Exchange a near
brawl broke out among about 20 Japanese teens, each fighting
for possession of as many of the impossibly tight tops as they
could grab. Still, most people seemed mainly interested in toting
around a bag with some elite store's name and brand on it. Others,
quite sensibly, headed straight for the Godiva Chocolatier.
The whole scene is so overwhelming that
it's possible to imagine that even Naomi
Klein-the Boadacea of the battle against Brand Culture-might
feel faint at the prospect an afternoon trolling the aisles.
I finally took refuge in the Bose speaker store, found a cd by
The Kinks and cranked up You
Really Got Me loud enough to awaken the San Andreas Fault.
About 20 miles outside of Cabazon we
came to the junction of I-10 and Highway 62. In the notch between
these roads, there's a patch of Sonoran desert known as the Devil's
Garden. By most accounts, it was once to the world of American
cacti what the Hoh Valley is to temperate rainforests: the most
exuberant expression of the biome on the continent.
In 1906, George Wharton James, in his
book Wonders of the Colorado Desert, described the strange cactus
jungle this way: "When we find ourselves on the mesa, we
begin to understand why this is called by the prospectors 'the
devil's garden.' It is simply a vast, native, forcing ground
for thousand varieties of cactus. They thrive here as if specially
guardedI know of no place where so many are to be found as in
this small area near the Morongo Pass."
Twenty-five years later it would all
be gone, plundered by Los Angeles real estate developers--the
great barrel cacti and ocotillo uprooted for replanting in the
obligatory cactus gardens that adorned nearly every house in
southern California.
The passing of seventy years has done
little to restore the damage. There should be a sign somewhere
commemorating this spot as one of the great battlefields in the
history of environmentalism, the Antietam of the desert preservation
movement.
The cause of the desert was taken up
by one of the great unsung heroes of the environmental movement,
Minerva Hamilton Hoyt. Hoyt wasn't a female John Muir. She wasn't
a mountaineer or a desert rat. She was an LA socialite.
Hoyt proved to be tenacious, visionary
and connected. She soon got FDR's ear, and more importantly,
face time with his Interior Secretary, the original Harold Ickes.
Ickes pere was a titan of his time, nothing like his son, Harold
Jr., the weasely hatchet man of the Clinton White House. Ickes
took Hoyt's maps and within three months had withdrawn from private
looting more than a million acres of land from Morongo Pass east
to the Colorado River, then still a river in flow as well as
name.
Over the years the mining firms and ranchers
and Pentagon whittled away at the monument, seizing anything
of commercial or strategic value. In 1993 when Clinton and Dianne
Feinstein pushed through the California Desert Protection Bill,
creating Joshua Tree and Mojave national parks, it turned out
to be a far cry from the original vision hatched by Hoyt and
Ickes. The deal was another Clintonesque win-win gesture, designed
to grab headlines but save precious little.
Highway 62 is a 175-mile-long arc of
road cutting through the heart of the Joshua tree country from
Palm Springs to the Colorado River town of Earp, at the foot
of the Whipple Mountains. The road climbs up out of the carbon
monoxide-glutted haze of the Coachella Valley past the shadow
of Mt. San Gorgonio onto what the locals call the Hi Desert and
we know as the southwestern tip of the Mojave. We moved quickly
past the towns of Morongo Valley, Yucca Valley and Joshua Tree,
increasingly inhabited by the service workers for Palm Springs,
who have been priced out of the absurdly inflated land values
in Coachella Valley.
The original Highway 62, now buried under
asphalt and the ubiquitous DelTaco drive-thrus, was known during
the prohibition era as the Bootlegger's Highway. At night, giant
Joshua trees (including the largest known tree in existence)
were soaked with kerosene and lit on fire, like giant tiki torches,
to mark the perilous path to John Shull's place near Indian Cove
canyon. Shull was the clubfooted genius of Mojave moonshine,
whose potent concoctions found their way to the speakeasies and
casting rooms of LA.
It was after nine when we finally pulled
in at the Inn at 29 Palms, a small resort, perched on the edge
of a fan palm oasis, consisting of about a dozen nicely kept
adobes built in the 1920s. There were immediate remonstrations
from the backseat. Apparently, this wasn't exactly (or even remotely)
the kind of spring break getaway our kids had in mind. Their
worst fears were confirmed by the hotel: no phone, out of cell
range, no video games, no nearby shopping district and a television
the size of a cantaloupe.
Revenge would be swift and unsparing
and it would come in the form of Palm Springs.
Windmills and
Liberace's Bathroom
Kimberly and I awoke early to golden sunshine,
the insistent call of a Scott's oriole and unremitting demands
for reparation.
"Yes?" I say.
"Time to go."
I was being double-teamed now. Even Nat,
once a reliable hiking companion, had defected.
"Go? Go where?"
"Palm Springs."
"Good lord. Why?"
"There's nothing happening here."
"Precisely."
"There's nothing to do."
"Take a hike. Read Twain. Bask in
the sun."
"You won't let us. Skin cancer,
remember?"
Check-mated again. Palm Springs it was.
Of course, this elegant bit of sophistry
didn't stop Zen from trying to attain in a matter of five days
the same bronze tones Georgia O'Keefe acquired after a period
of 60 years of sustained exposure to desert sun. She got the
requisite tan, a kind of living proof for her running mates back
in soggy Eugene that she had made a desert pilgrimage, and, after
day three, a nasty case of sun poisoning, which, naturally, didn't
deter her in the least from two more days of noon-to-dusk broiling.
Palm Springs has been a spring break
haven ever since Troy Donahue stripped his shirt off and presided
over a poolside rave-up in Palm Springs Weekend. But I blame
our kids' obsession with the place all on Carson Daley and those
MTV spring break hot tub shows. And why not.
From the west, the entrance to Palm Springs
is heralded by a sprawling wind farm, operated by the Wintec
Corporation. Simply put: it's a blight masquerading as an example
of enlightened environmentalism. More than 4,000 wind mills clot
the San Gorgonio Mountain pass, blotting the scenery for miles,
and shredding untold thousands of migrating birds. Perhaps only
the pesticide-sated waters of the Salton Sea, forty miles to
the south, present a more lethal hazard to our avian cousins
in this region.
Some of the windmills are 150-feet tall,
armed with blades half the length of a football field. When fully-deployed,
the three twirling arms of the windmills look like nothing so
much as Mercedes-Benz hood ornaments. It's certainly appropriate.
By some accounts, the Coachella Valley boasts more Benz's per
capita than any other conclave of fat cats in North America.
First Palm Springs, then the Nuclear
Test Site in Nevada. The radioactive wastes of the NTS are slated
to become the next big windfarm. In a deal hatched between the
DOE and Siemens Energy, and brokered by Nevada Senator Harry
Reid, the blast site windfarm will consist of the 325 turbines
whizzing out 260 megawatts of electricity.
There we have it. Windmills are a greenwashed
form of political pork, big capital-intensive projects that spurt
lots of money into the accounts of energy conglomerates (even
nuclear firms), and keep people wired into the current utility
system. Under green energy marketing, the energy brokers and
utilities can even con consumers into paying more for each kilowatt
of wind power, a feel-good green premium.
You can drive down the fog-curtained
Oregon coast and find more solar panels than you'll ever see
here in the valley of perpetual sun, a place that could easily
disconnect entirely from the power grid.
But it's all about growth. Even the windmill
power plant is getting into the real estate development business.
Here's how Wintec describes their new Green Mall project: "Most
of the property has never been developed. A small portion of
the property is improved with large utility grade wind turbine
generators which have already become a large tourist attraction.
The property is visited by several thousand tourists per can
safely share the property, each complimenting the other. The
property is well situated in the emerging commercial/industrial
sector of the City of Palm Springs and enjoys a tremendous competitive
advantage for commercial mall development."
Shopping malls on previously undeveloped
desertthat's the kind of environmentalism that would have made
Sonny Bono gleam with pride.
Of course, in a perverse way the contamination
of what the landscape ecologists call the "viewshed"
of the Coachella Valley may be all for the good, the dispensation
of a kind of historical and ecological justice on the perpetrators
of so much destruction and misery (not mention horrid cinema).
After all, Palm Springs was always the favored desert colony
of Hollywood's most noxious right-wingers and their allies in
the world of big business: Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Walter Annenberg,
Frank Sinatra, Sonny Bono. Some of these early pioneers still
survive deep into their dotage, such as the awful Hope, who seems
to exist on some far-out kind of life-support system reminiscent
of the devices in Frederic Pohl's Gateway series of SF novels.
Call it the mummification effect, where the process of decay
unfolds so slowly it's ever so difficult to detect the living
from the dead.
Palm Springs (and its associated enclaves,
Cathedral City, Desert Springs, Palm Desert and Rancho Mirage)
is like a Chinese box of private enclosures, restaurants, bars,
resorts, condos, spas, plastic surgeons, sex clubs. But at the
heart of it all is, of course, the golf course.
Palm Springs is the Luxor of the hacking
classes. There are at more than 100 courses in and around the
city, all of them prodigious consumers of water, piped in from
the poor Colorado River or sucked out of the Palm Springs aquifer.
Back in 1987 (the most recent full-blown study I could come across),
Palm Springs' links soaked up a more than 130,000,000 gallons
of water on an average summer day. It's certainly much more than
that now, with a new 18-hole course being bulldozed into the
desert nearly every year.
In the arid West, turf watering accounts
for up to 60 percent of urban water use. To keep its course a
shimmering, almost surreal green, the Palm Springs Country Club
extracts 430 million gallons of water from the aquifer every
year-that's five times the average for golf courses nationwide-and
enough water to meet the daily needs of 11,000 people (and untold
humpback chubs, the great, now vanishing fish of the Colorado).
Tiger Woods has a lot of explaining to
do. After Woods does his penance for being a frontman for sweatshops,
he needs to account for his shameless promotion of Palm Springs
as a golfing Mecca for millionaires. Woods used to mouth pieties
about bringing public golf courses back to urban neighborhoods
and chafe about country clubs that catered only to whites. Now
he pimps for one of the most exclusive-and exclusively white-enclaves
in America, hawking courses that are built and maintained on
the backs of Mexican immigrant labor. These workers are paid
so stingily that they could toil for a month and not afford the
green fees for a single round at many of the elite clubs.
Rarely have so many billions been mustered
to so little purpose. There are few public spaces in Palm Springs,
and its outliers, that aren't solely geared toward channeling
you into retail outlets or overpriced restaurants. We tried to
eat on the cheap. But it was impossible to get away with a lunch
for less than $50. Those producers at CBS should forget about
using remote places like the Marquesas Islands as a setting for
Survivor and instead hand the contestants $100 and see if they
could survive in Palm Springs for two weeks-they'd make the Donner
Party look like a bunch of vegans.
The art museum is decidedly third-rate
and the city's buildings fall victim to the same kind of civic-ordered
mundaneness that destroyed Santa Fe and dozens of other towns
across the New West. To find interesting architecture here you've
got to venture up into the side canyons and foothills of Mount
San Jacinto, and peer with binoculars into gated communities
looking for the odd house designed by a Neutra, Venturi or Schindler,
though in the case of Neutra this is becoming an uncertain propositon.
Around the time we were visiting Palm Springs, Neutra's famous
Maslon House, built there in 1963, was being sold to a Mr Richard
Rotenburg, who promptly tore it down. The former owner could
have attached a preservation easement to the deed, but that might
have lowered the value of the lot.
There are better ways to quench the voyeuristic
impulse. Go to the bookstore and pick up two indispensable guides
to the sleazier side of the valley, Jack Titus's Palm Springs
Close Up and Ray Mungo's Palm
Springs Babylon, which provide vivid accounts of the
political, financial and sexual escapades of the city.
Palm Springs is where Nixon came to lick
his wounds after resigning the presidency, Mamie Eisenhower to
get tanked and Betty Ford to dry out. It's also where JFK had
his fateful assignation with Marilyn Monroe on March 25, 1962,
at Bing Crosby's estate.
It wasn't supposed to come down that
way. Frank Sinatra, who had shuttled dozens of starlets to the
Kennedy brothers, had been expecting JFK to make his house a
presidential getaway. Indeed, Sinatra had sunk a lot of cash
into a new security system and a helicopter pad just for Kennedy's
benefit. Then pious Bobby intervened, citing Sinatra's fruitful
relationship with Sam Giancana, among other mobsters. Sinatra
fumed and shifted his loyalties to the Republicans. In 1969,
he hosted Spiro Agnew, who, upon arriving in town, announced
to the press corps: "It's nice to be in Palm Beach."
One redeeming virtue of old Palm Springs
is that it served as a relatively safe harbor for many Hollywood
gays, from Rock Hudson to Liberace, who partied at places like
the Desert Palm Inn and the New Lost World Resort (formerly Desi
Arnez and Lucille Ball's compound), which has become one of the
most opulent gay and lesbian getaways on the planet. (Of course,
the city was also a refuge of last resort for wealthy butchers,
such as the family of the Shah of Iran. But out here that just
comes with the territory.)
If gays were tolerated, the same can't
be said for other oppressed classes, such as Jews and blacks.
Until the early Fifties Jews were permitted to stay in only one
hotel in town and that one discreetly identified them with a
"J" beside their names in the desk ledger. Blacks were
simply not welcome at all, except as golf caddies, as Jack Benny
discovered when he tried to book a room for his partner Rochester.
But the great Palms Springs dream is
distilled to its essence in this passage from Mungo describing
The Cloisters, Liberace's house: "The house is across the
street from a Catholic church, Our Lady of Solitude, where sandwiches
are passed out daily to the homeless who loiter in the vicinity.
Inside, Liberace's toilet is a throne, with armrests and a high
back done up in red velvet. The shower curtain features replicas
of Michelangelo's David, while the wallpaper is decorated with
Greek couples fucking in every imaginable position. There is
a Gloria Vanderbilt suite, a Rudolph Valentino room (Liberace's
middle name was Valentino, and the Great Lover was an early Palm
Springs celebrity who made several pictures here in the twenties),
a room wallpapered in tiger skin, a Marie Antoinette suite, a
bath with mirrored walls and ceiling and a pool-sized Jacuzzi,
and a collection of strange bric-a-brac and junk no thrift could
unload, including plastic birthday cakes and a life-sized stuffed
male doll with erect penis. Into this world he introduced his
young escorts, took his pills and kept his cranky mother."
Yes, those were the halcyon days; it's
all been downhill since.
High
and Dry in the Mojave Continued
Part Two: The Oasis of Mara
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