Wars
of the Laptop Bombers
Today's
Stories
January 22
/ 24, 2005
Alexander Cockburn
Prince
Harry's Travails
January 21,
2005
Dave Lindorff
A
Great American Journalist:
John L. Hess (1917-2005)
Sharon Smith
The
Anti-War Movement and the Iraqi Resistance
Don Santina
Baseball, Racism and Steroid Hysteria
Ron Jacobs
Locked Out and Pissed Off: Protesting the Bush Inauguration
Kurt Nimmo
The Problem with Mike Ruppert
Don Monkerud
Once They Were Cults: Bush's Faith-Based Social Services
Alan Farago
Swimming Home from the Galapagos
Derek Seidman
An
Interview with Army Medic and Anti-War Activist Patrick Resta
January 20,
2005
Paul Craig
Roberts
Dying
for Sycophants
William Cook
The
Bush Inauguration: A Mock Epic Fertility Rite
Joshua Frank
The Democrats and Iran: Look Who's Backing Bush's Next
Eric Ruder
Why Andres Raya Snapped: Another Casualty of Bush's War
Mike Whitney
Coronation in a Garrison State
Robert Jensen
A Citizens Oath of Office
Peter Rost
Bush Report on Drug Imports: Good Data, Bad Conclusions
David Underhill
Is It Torture Yet?: the Eclectic Fool Aid Torture Test
James Reiss
Adieu, Colin Powell: Pea Soup in Foggy Bottom
CounterPunch
Staff
Voices
from Abu Ghraib: the Injured Party
How
the Press & the CIA
Killed Gary Webb's Career
January 19,
2005
Marta Russell
Social
Security Privatization & Disability: 8 Million at Risk
Mike Ferner
Marines
Stretching Movement: Protesting Urban Warfare in Toledo
Nancy Oden
The
Nuremberg Principles, Iraq and Torture
Tony Paterson
A Catalogue of British Abuses in Iraq
Dave Lindorff
Bush's Divide-and-Conquer Plan to Destroy Social Security
Doug Giebel
BS and CBS: When 60 Minutes Helped Promote WMD Fantasies
Alexander Cockburn
Will
Bush Quit Iraq?
January 18,
2005
Paul Craig
Roberts
How
Americans Were Seduced by War: Empire and Militant Christianity
Jennifer Van
Bergen
Federal
Judge: Abu Ghraib Abuses Result of Decision to Ignore Geneva
Conventions
Douglas Lummis
It's a No Brainer; Send Graner: a Rap for Our Time
Ron Jacobs
Syria Back in the Crosshairs?
Seth DeLong
Enter the Dragon: Will Washington Tolerate a Venezuelan-Chinese
Oil Pact?
Lance Selfa
Stolen Election?: Most Democrats Didn't Even Bother to Inquire
Paul D. Johnson
Mystery Meat: a Right-to-Know About Food Origins
Elisa Salasin
An Open Letter to Jenna Bush, Future Teacher
January 17,
2005
Heather Gray
Misconceptions
About King's Methods for Social Change
Robert Fisk
Hotel Room Journalism: the US Press in Iraq
Dave Lindorff
What the NYT Death Chart Omitted: Civilians Slaughtered by US
Military
Jason Leopold
Sam Bodman's Smokestacks: Bush's Choice for Energy Czar is One
of Texas's Worst Polluters
Gary Leupp
A Message from the Iraqi Resistance
Douglas Valentine
An Act of State? the Execution of Martin Luther King
Harvey Arden
Welcome to Leavenworth: My First Encounter with Leonard Peltier
Greg Moses
King
and the Christian Left: Where Lip Service is Not an Option
January 15
/ 16, 2005
James Petras
The
Kidnapping of a Revolutionary
Robert Fisk
Flying Carpet Airlines: My Return to Baghdad
Ron Jacobs
Unfit for Military Service
Brian Cloughley
Smack Daddies of the Hindu Kush: Afghanistan's Drug Bonanza
Fred Gardner
The Allowable-Quantity Expert
Dr. Susan Block
The Counter-Inaugural Ball: Eros Day, 2005
John Ross
Zapatista Literary Llife
Suzan Mazur
Unspooking Frank Carlucci
M. Shahid Alam
America's New Civilizing Mission
Frederick B. Hudson
Jack Johnson's Real Opponent: "That I Was a Man"
Mike Whitney
Bush's Grand Plan: Incite Civil War in Iraq
Tom Crumpacker
A Constitutional Right to Travel to Cuba
Bob Burton
The Other Armstrong Williams Scandal
John Callender
La Conchita and the Indomitable 82-Year Old
Lila Rajiva
Christian Zionism
Saul Landau
An Imperial Portrait: a Visit to Hearst's Castle
Doug Soderstrom
A Touch of Evil: the Morality of Neoconservatism
Poets' Basement
Davies, Louise, Landau, Albert, Collins and Laymon
January 14,
2005
Robert Fisk
"The
Tent of Occupation"
Lee Sustar
Bush's Social Security Con Job
José
M. Tirado
The Christians I Know
Dave Zirin
The Legacy of Jack Johnson
Sheldon Rampton
Calling John Rendon: a True Tale of "Military Intelligence"
Tracy McLellan
Under the Influence
Yves Engler
The Dictatorship of Debt: the World Bank and Haiti
Tom Barry
Robert
Zoellick: a Bush Family Man
Website of
the Day
Ryan for the Nobel Prize?
January 13,
2005
Mark Chmiel
/ Andrew Wimmer
Hearts
and Minds, Revisited
Joe DeRaymond
The Salvador Option: Terror,
Elections and Democracy
Greg Moses
Every Hero a Killer?...Not
Dave Lindorff
The Great WMD Fraud: Time for an Accounting
Jorge Mariscal
Dr. Galarza v. Alberto Gonzales: Which Way for Latinos?
Christopher Brauchli
Gonzales and the Death Penalty: the Executioner Never Sleeps
Gary Leupp
"Fighting
for the Work of the Lord": Christian Fascism in America
January 12,
2005
Robert Fisk
Fear
Stalks Baghdad
Josh Frank
The
Farce of the DNC Contest
Jack Random
Casualties
of War: the Untold Stories
John Roosa
Aceh's Dual Disasters: the Tsunami and Military Rule
Carol Norris
In the Wake of the Tsunami
Mike Whitney
Pink Slips at CBS
Alan Farago
Can
the Everglades be Saved?
Paul Craig
Roberts
What's
Our Biggest Problem in Iraq...the Insurgency or Bush?
January 11,
2005
Tom Barry
The
US isn't "Stingy"; It's Strategic: Aid as a Weapon
of Foreign Policy
James Hodge
and Linda Cooper
Voice
of the Voiceless: Father Roy Bourgeois and the School of the
the Americas
Linda S. Heard
Farah Radio Break Down: Joseph Farah's Messages of Hate and Homophobia
Derrick O'Keefe
Electoral Gigolo?: Richard Gere and the Occupied Vote
Gila Svirsky
A Tale of Two Elections
Harry Browne
Irish
"Peace Process", RIP
January 10,
2005
Ramzy Baroud
Faith-Based
Disasters: Tsunami Aid and War Costs
Talli Nauman
Killing
Journalists: Mexico's War on a Free Press
Uri Avnery
Sharon's Monologue
Dave Lindorff
Tucker
Carlson's Idiot Wind
Dave Zirin
Randy
Moss's Moondance
Dave Silver
Left Illusions About the Democratic Party
Charles Demers
Plan Salvador for Iraq: Death Squads Come in Waves
William A.
Cook
Causes
and Consequences: Bush, Osama and Israel
January 8 /
9, 2005
Alexander Cockburn
Say,
Waiter, Where's the Blood in My Margarita Glass?
John H. Summers
Chomsky
and Academic History
Greg Moses
Getting Real About the Draft
Walter A. Davis
Bible Says: the Psychology of Christian Fundamentalism
Victor Kattan
The EU and Middle East Peace
John Bolender
The Plight of Iraq's Mandeans
Robert Fisk
The Politics of Lebanon
Fred Gardner
Situation NORML
Joe Bageant
The Politics of the Comfort Zone
Mickey Z.
I Want My DDT: Little Nicky Kristof Bugs Out
Ben Tripp
CounterClockwise Evolution
Ron Jacobs
Elvis and His Truck: Out on Highway 61
Saul Landau
Sex
and the Country
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
Time to End the Blackout
Ellen Cantarow
NPR's Distortions on Palestine
Richard Oxman
Bageantry Continued
Poets' Basement
Gaffney, Landau, Albert, Collins
January 7,
2005
Omar Barghouti
Slave
Sovereignty: Elections Under Occupation
Kent Paterson
The Framing of Felipe Arreaga: Another Mexican Environmentalist
Arrested
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Old
Vijay Merchant and the Tsunami
David Krieger
Cancel the Inauguration Parties
Gideon Levy
New Year, Old Story
Dave Lindorff
Ohio Protest: First Shot Fired by Congressional Progressives
Christopher
Brauchli
Privatizing the IRS
Roger Burbach
/ Paul Cantor
Bush,
the Pentagon and the Tsunami
January 6,
2005
Brian J. Foley
Gonzales:
Supporting Torture is not His Greatest Sin
Greg Moses
Boot
Up America!: Gen. Helmly's Memo Leaks New Bush Deal
Petras / Chomsky
An
Open Letter to Hugo Chavez
Alan Maass
The Decline of the Dollar
Dave Lindorff
Colin Powell's Selective Sense of Horror
Jenna Orkin
The EPA and a Dirty Bomb: 9/11's Disastrous Precedent
P. Sainath
The
Tsunami and India's Coastal Poor
January 5,
2005
Alan Farago
2004:
An Environmental Retrospective
Winslow T.
Wheeler
Oversight
Detected?: Sen. McCain and the Boeing Tanker Scam
Jean-Guy Allard
Gary Webb: a Cuban Perspective
Fred Gardner
Strutting, Smirking, As If The Mad Plan Was Working
David Swanson
Albert Parsons on the Gallows
Richard Oxman
The Joe Bageant Interview
Bruce Jackson
Death
on the Living Room Floor
January 4,
2005
Michael Ortiz
Hill
Mainlining
Apocalypse
Elaine Cassel
They
Say They Can Lock You Up for Life Without a Trial
Yoram Gat
The
Year in Torture
Martin Khor
Tragic
Tales and Urgent Tasks from the Tsunami Disaster
Gary Leupp
Death
and Life in the Andaman Islands
January 3,
2005
Ron Jacobs
The
War Hits Home
Dave Lindorff
Is
There a Single Senator Who Will Stand Up for Black Voters?
Mike Whitney
The Guantanamo Gulag
Joshua Frank
Greens and Republicans: Strange Bedfellows
Maria Tomchick
Playing Politics with Disaster Aid
Rhoda and Mark
Berenson
Our Daughter Lori: Another Year of Grave Injustice
David Swanson
The Media and the Ohio Recount
Kathleen Christison
Patronizing
the Palestinians
January 1 /
2, 2005
Gary Leupp
Earthquakes
and End Times, Past and Present
Rev. William
E. Alberts
On "Moral Values": Code Words for Emerging Authoritarian
Tendencies
M. Shahid Alam
Testing Free Speech in America
Stan Goff
A Period for Pedagogy
Brian Cloughley
Bush and the Tsunami: the Petty and the Petulant
Sylvia Tiwon
/ Ben Terrall
The Aftermath in Aceh
Ben Tripp
Requiem for 2004
Greg Moses
A Visible Future?
Steven Sherman
The 2004 Said Awards: Books Against Empire
Sean Donahue
The Erotics of Nonviolence
James T. Phillips
The Beast's Belly
David Krieger
When Will We Ever Learn
Poets' Basement
Soderstrom, Hamod, Louise and Albert
December 23,
2004
Chad Nagle
Report
from Kiev: Yushchenko's Not Quite Ready for Sainthood
David Smith-Ferri
The
Real UN Disgrace in Iraq
Bill Quigley
Death
Watch for Human Rights in Haiti
Mickey Z.
Crumbs
from Our Table
Christopher Brauchli
Merck's Merry X-mas
Greg Moses
When
No Law Means No Law
Alan Singer
An
Encounter with Sen. Schumer: a Very Dangerous Democrat
David Price
Social
Security Pump and Dump
Website of the Day
Gabbo Gets Laid
December 22,
2004
James Petras
An
Open Letter to Saramago: Nobel Laureate Suffers from a Bizarre
Historical Amnesia
Omar Barghouti
The Case for Boycotting Israel
Patrick Cockburn / Jeremy Redmond
They Were Waiting on Chicken Tenders When the Rounds Hit
Harry Browne
Northern Ireland: No Postcards from the Edge
Richard Oxman
On the Seventh Column
Kathleen Christison
Imagining
Palestine
Website of the Day
FBI Torture Memos
December 21,
2004
Greg Moses
The
New Zeus on the Block: Unplugging Al-Manar TV
Dave Lindorff
Losing
It in America: Bunker of the Skittish
Chad Nagle
The View from Donetsk
Dragon Pierces
Truth*
Concrete
Colossus vs. the River Dragon: Dislocation and Three Gorges Dam
Patrick Cockburn
"Things Always Get Worse"
Seth DeLong
Aiding Oppression in Haiti
Ahmad Faruqui
Pakistan and the 9/11 Commission's Report
Paul Craig
Roberts
America
Locked Up: a System of Injustice
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
Click
Here for More Stories.
|
Weekend Edition
January 22 / 24, 2005
The Folk-Histories of John Ross
A
Spectre is Haunting the American Left...Thank God
By
JUSTIN TAYLOR
There are things that are theorems
and things that are rags; they'll go by like Euclid, arm in arm
with the spirit of anarchy. Here and there will flit little harlots.
Many are clowns. But many are of the highest respectability.
Some are assassins.
Charles Fort, The
Book of the Damned
Remember thee? Ay, thou poor
ghost, while memory holds a seat /
In this distracted globe.
-Hamlet, 1.5.95-7
"Do you know how depressing
it is to always be on the losing side?" writes John Ross
in Murdered
by Capitalism: A Memoir of 150 Years of Life and Death on the
American Left. Yes, in fact I do. And so does he. But Ross
asks the question intending to trigger that stock response, just
so he can jolt the reader out of it. It's not so much that John
Ross doesn't see the temptation to resort to the standard self-pitying
Leftist Christ-pose, it's just that he doesn't see the point.
Ever the irreverent roustabout, Ross usually manages to sidestep
whininess, a trait which tends to cripple the work of more than
one radical writer.. Even when he's talking about hard times
or tragedy, and many of these stories either end or begin with
events so horrific you want to throw down the book, Ross is writing
an affirmation of the unkillable urge for freedom that
grows in every society, in every oppressed class, and of the
heroism of the all-too-killable individuals who made their way
into immortality by tending to and fanning that flame.
In a swirl of personal memoir
and history, including both official and not-so-official accounts,
Ross tells the story of his own lifelong affiliation with the
Left while also giving voice to history's radicals: outlaws,
activists, the occasional villain. The first and most oft-recurring
voice is that of E.B. Schnaubelt, brother of Rudolph "Haymarket"
Schnaubelt, and the man whose epitaph reads "Murdered by
Capitalism." From the depths of his grave in Trinidad, California,
Schnaubelt tells his story to Ross, who eggs him on by pouring
bottom-shelf booze and blowing pot-smoke into the earth where
Schnaubelt lies.
When Ross gets lost telling
stories about himself the ghost of Schnaubelt starts to get pissed
off. The less-than-political anecdotes cover his enviably misspent
youth in the West Village, his various love affairs and involvement
with the Beats, the heyday of the American counterculture, and
so on. At first I was siding with the defensive Ross, who appeases
the ghost and then continues with another personal story. After
a while, I started to take the ghost's side.At least I kept reading.
Schnaubelt's ghost gets so mad at Ross that he won't talk to
him anymore.
So Ross hops on a Greyhound.
(Almost blind from head injuries sustained in various encounters
with cops, he doesn't drive). He goes to Waldheim, the cemetery
just outside of Chicago where dozens of heroes and anti-heroes
of the American Left are buried. Lucy Parsons, Emma Goldman,
Voltairine de Cleyre, Dr. Ben "King of the Hobos" Reitman,
Irving Abrams, Elizabeth Gurley  Flynn, William
Z. Foster, and more, are each given a chance to tell their own
story. Even the hated late senator Joseph McCarthy dials in briefly.
He gleefully explains to the radical bunch that he's wire-tapped
all their graves from his grave in Appleton, Wisconsin. Joe Hill,
naturally, graces us with a song.
As the ghosts' testimonials
pile up, contradictory accounts emerge. The revenants interrupt
one another, bicker back and forth over particulars and policy,
and generally act like the iron-willed, ideologically bent, imperfect
human beings that they each, in all probability, actually were.
At first I didn't get why Ross was doing that; it seemed like
a whole lot of unnecessary self-flagellation, and in some sense
disrespect to those whom the American Left would claim as their
hallowed dead. But Ross is on to something with this tactic.
The title of the section wherein the phantasm chorale attempts
its dissonant music is "The Death of Dogma." It's not
enough for the Left to come up with its own mythology, Ross seems
to be saying, equal perhaps in stature to that of the Establishment
but equal also in its divorce from historical reality. Ross goes
beyond the "warts and all" approach to unromantic historicizing:
he shows us the gaps in the teeth and the cracks in the bones
(to say nothing of the spelling and grammar problems). His argument
is that the flaws of any given individual, group, or movement
are not cause for excoriation or white-washing, but for its sober
and honest inclusion in the annals of folk-history as exactly
what the way things really were.
Now, with that said, understand
my emphasis on "folk" in folk-history. Ross is telling
stories that have been ignored, rewritten, peripherized, misunderstood,
and/or generally neglected for so long that it will probably
never be possible to say what really and truly took place. (Of
course, this is the case with mainstream Establishment history
also, just nobody says so.) Instead, Ross embraces the slippage
points, the gaps in the record, the conflicting accounts, and
gives us a colloquy of anecdote, hearsay, opinion, and sentiment
that tells a larger truth than any pseudo-objective account would
have. Who really threw that bomb at Haymarket Square in 1886?
Is that really E.B. Schnaubelt buried in that grave, and if not,
to whose specter has Ross been shotgunning hits from his pin
joints? Ross is brave enough to pose these questions without
solid answers waiting for him; then he looks for those answers.
Finally, and most important, he's perfectly and perfunctorily
willing to admit when he doesn't find anything conclusive.
Charged by the ghost of Lucy
Parsons to deliver a kiss to Schnaubelt, Ross treks back across
the country to Trinidad, CA to make amends with his dead buddy.
After delivering Lucy's kiss, and holding a three-day drunken
vigil before the Murdered by Capitalism cenotaph (in a driving
rain no less!), Schnaubelt's spirit revives like a deranged Sleeping
Beauty or Snow White. But the ghost has deteriorated somehow,
grown wild and half-mad since Ross last spoke with it. Ross draws
it back to a state of composure by telling more about his own
lifelong dedication to the Left.
"Kaboom!," the final
section of the book, is, as you might have guessed, about bombings.
"It's in the blood," Ross writes of our under-publicized
national pastime. "Americans are convinced that they have
a constitutional right to bear bombs." But for all his veneration
of the dead Leftists and frequent recitation of the annals of
the "propaganda of the deed," Ross finally throws his
lot in with the pacifists. In a chapter entitled "Good Bombs,
Bad Bombs" Ross concludes by saying "the only good
bomb is a bad bomb."
Having run with the Zapatistas
in Mexico and served in Operation Human Shield in Iraq in 2003,
if Ross is less than a studious historian he at least suffers
from no ossification of street-cred. Doubtless parts of the book
will begin to grate on you-I personally grew tired of Ross's
cheesy jokes-but then again I'm fairly agnostic when it comes
to the whole Beat scene, so maybe others prefer this kind of
fare. And in the end, I'm glad this book exists. Much like the
lives and times it chronicles, Murdered by Capitalism is a far
cry from infallible. But it is extraordinary and a lot of fun.These
are the things that make it worthy.
Justin Taylor can be reached at: justindtaylor@gmail.com
|