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Recent Stories
March 26, 2003
Bruce Jackson
A Battlefield from Hell
Pablo
Mukherjee
Watch Their Lips
David Krieger
Shock But Not Awe
Linda
Heard
Winning Hearts and Minds Bush-Style
Imad Jadaa
The Beautiful Face of America
Adam
Engel
Buckets of Blood
Patrick Cockburn
Kurds Unimpressed
David
Lindorff
POWs, Torture and Hypocrisy
Robert Fisk
The Coup That Didn't Happen
April
Hurley, MD
A Doctor's Outrage in Baghdad
Gloria Bergen
Chretien's Shame
Reema
Abu Hamdieh
The Smell of Death Surrounds Me
March 25, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Life During Wartime
Gary
Leupp
What Democracy Looks Like: the Streets
of Cairo
Bill and Kathleen
Christison
An Interview with Hanan Ashrawi
Bruce
Jackson
Why Protest? Why Write?
Uri Avnery
Bitter Rice: Thoughts and Warnings on
the War
Jason
Leopold
Blood Indicator: Casualties and the Stock
Market
Ralph Nader
A Pre-emptive War on a Defenseless Country
March 24, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
Ominous Signs
David
Lindorff
Peacekeepers at Ground Zero
Diane Christian
Blood Sacrifice
Kathy
Kelly
The Morning After Shock and Awe
John Stanton
US Bombs Iran
Wayne
Madsen
How to Live with a Rogue Superpower
Anthony Gancarski
Iraq and the Death of the West
David
Vest
Earth vs. Bush
Ahmad Faruqui
The Liberation of Iraq in Perspective
Robert
Fisk
We Bomb, They Suffer
March 22 / 23, 2003
Edward Said
The Other America
Saul Landau
The Threats of Empire
Kathleen and Bill Christison
On the Road in the West Bank
Joanne Mariner
Suing Seymour Hersh
Ann Harrison
The Battle of San Francisco
Robert Fisk
A Cauldron of Fire
Hani Shukrallah
The Gates of Hell
Chris Floyd
Memory Lane
Kathy Kelly
Imagine Chicago Under This Kind of Attack
Ramzi Kysia
Bombing Away a Chance for Joy
Linda Heard
Baghdad Burns While Bush Does Lunch
Bradley Burston
Could the US be at War for Years?
Salvador Peralta
Mass Murder as Liberation?
Tom Gorman
Now That's a Coalition!
Jorge Mariscal
Johnny Mack, When Are You Coming Back?
Cindy Milstein
The Grassroots Go Global
Josh Frank
Blocking Portland's Bridges
Elaine Cassel
The Case of Elizabeth Smart: Kidnapping and Insanity
Gordon Solberg
Drowning in Niceness: the Lessons of Elizabeth Smart
Tom Crumpacker
Getting to Know the Real Havana
Poets' Basement
Dobie, Guthrie, Alam, Wechsler
March 21, 2003
Ben Tripp
Blood for Oil:
the Exchange Rate
Cathy Breens
Report from Baghdad: Mothers, Kids and Crash Kits
Scott Handleman
Fourth
Generation Protesting: Shutting Down San Francisco
Vanessa Jones
Paint Them
Red
Brian J. Foley
Patriotic Protest
for Professors
Zoltan Grossman
After Saddam, a War on Iraqi Rebels?
Philip S. Golub
Inventing Demons
Richard Lichtman
On the Current Experience of Terror
Milan Rai
Blitz-Coup
Pepe Escobar
A Cheap Family Farce
Floyd Rudmin
The Nightmare at the Back Door: Nuclear Plant's as Terror Targets
Chris Floyd
See Rome (poem)
Website of the War
Iraq
Body Count
March 20, 2003
Stephen Banko
I Was a Soldier
Once
Kevin Alexander Gray
How Did We Become
an Outlaw Nation?
Shane Claiborne
Nomadic
Solidarity: Glimpses of Life in Baghdad on the Eve of War
Kathy Kelly
Waiting on the Baghdad Skies to Crack
Anthony Gancarski
Michelle
Makin's "Liberty Shields"
Rahul Mahajan and Robert Jensen
Myths and
Facts About the War on Iraq
Jason Leopold
Cheney's
Lies About Halliburton and Iraq
Ron Jacobs
If War is Business as Usual, There Should be No Business as Usual
Chuck O'Connell
Predictions About the Iraq War
Douglas Herman
US Air Force Veteran on the Coming Air Campaign
Ralph Nader
Come On Democrats,
Stand Up for Peace
William Hughes
War is Theft
Sima Saeedi
Dispatch from
Iran
Hammond Guthrie
John Philip Sousa
Website of the Day
Iraq
Body Count
Hot Stories
Gore Vidal
The Erosion
of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach Bush:
A Draft Resolution
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March
28, 2003
A
Road Trip in Wartime
By DANIEL WOLFF
[My thirteen year-old son and I drove from New York to Memphis and
back during the first week of the war.]
Thursday,
March 20.
We
will see almost no TV, get most of our news from local papers in the
towns we pass through and from the radio. We can bring in National Public
Radio stations almost wherever we go, including the long stretch of
Highway 81 that cuts south through Pennsylvania Dutch country. NPR’s
coverage of the war is intelligent, exhaustive, and very carefully modulated.
It reminds me of the prose in the higher-end garden catalogues or on
the packaging of gourmet foods. The overwhelming impression is that
a smart person is talking; so much so that you forget, sometimes, that
they’re trying to sell you something.
This
first day, the news is mostly about the war not going according to plan.
There’s been tactical bombing of Baghdad instead of “shock
and awe.” The NPR journalists keep repeating that the military
is not following the script; isn’t it odd they’re not following
the script; what does it mean that they’re not following the script?
It’s raining hard and the landscape is brown and gray, except
for the hex signs painted on the barns.
In
Roanoke, Virginia, there’s a peace vigil at the downtown war monument.
Most of the people holding candles are gray-haired, but there are some
teenagers, too. It’s the 20 to 40 year-olds who seem to be missing.
A woman tells us that, yes, the city is probably mostly pro-war. Still,
about but one out of five cars honks or waves their support. There are
no hecklers, no police, and none of the tingling sensation I’m
used to at a demonstration about to get dangerous --just thirty or so
people standing among the marble slabs engraved with the names of Roanoke’s
war dead.
Our
motel clerk is a black woman in her twenties. She checks us in with
a cell phone cradled by her ear; someone’s on hold. The war comes
up as she hands us our key, and she is adamant. “We should get
out of there. We got no business there.” Does she have friends
serving? “Friends of friends. And we got no business there.”
It’s not only clear to her, but it’s a position she’s
ready and willing to volunteer to strangers.
Friday, March 21.
We’re
below the Mason-Dixon line and climbing through the mountains of West
Virginia to Tennessee. My prejudice is to expect the South to be adamantly
and visibly pro-war. On empty hilltops over the fields where cows graze,
the owners have often erected three plain wooden crosses, the middle
one painted white. And there are military bases all through this area.
But the American flags are few and far between, much fewer than after
9-11. There are “Support Our Troops” signs here and there
and yellow ribbons, but not many.
Bristol
is where the famous Bristol sessions took place: the first commercial
recordings of country music including the Carter Family and the singing
brakeman, Jimmie Rodgers. If you cross Main Street from the side with
the antique shops filled with confederate flags to the side with the
amateur geek show that includes a chick with two heads in formaldehyde,
you’re crossing from West Virginia to Tennessee. Today, the streets
are busy with trailers and motorcycles pulling into town for the NASCAR
race on Sunday.
On
the Tennessee side of the street, there’s a repair shop with a
line of antique jukeboxes, pinball machines, and some video games in
the window. The owner’s a lanky man with gray-hair and glasses,
probably in his seventies. He asks how things are in New York. I’m
cautiously non-committal: folks are worried. “I’m worried
we’re going to end up looking like Hitler,” he volunteers.
I can’t quite believe he’s said that --not on this sunny
Main Street in this quiet store. He goes on that he served in World
War Two: 1943 in Italy, 1945 in France.
He
can’t understand why France isn’t supporting us: “We
spilled more blood there than they got red wine.” But he also
doesn’t understand what we’re doing there, and he’s
most worried about what’s going to happen after we win. “Everyone’s
going to be blaming us, they’re gonna want to get back at us,
and what’ll we have gained?” He shakes his head.
We get to Nashville at dusk, and it’s packed with tourists for
the NCAA basketball game. Here, among the well-fed and slightly tipsy
crowd, there are some “These Colors Don’t Run” t-shirts.
We overhear a middle-aged man with a shaved head tell his friend, “Just
because I have this haircut doesn’t mean I’m a bigot.”
The
radio tells us that the first strikes may not have killed Saddam Hussein.
On the other hand, the video of him on Iraqui TV doesn’t prove
he’s alive. The local paper profiles families with sons and daughters
in the military and editorializes for supporting the troops. There are
also good-sized articles covering the anti-war protests both here and
overseas. Nashville has the largest Kuwaiti population in the U.S.
Saturday,
March 22
We’ve
been stopping at little towns all along the way, wandering through flea
markets where folks are selling their children’s toys, used clothes,
old records. Now, we drop into Jackson, Tennessee, and the main street
is empty but clean. It’s hard to judge the economy from the outside,
but there are lots of trailer parks and small factories, and the car
washes are busy. The downtown pawnshop is full of stereo equipment,
guitars, toolboxes and power drills.
NPR
interviews various experts, from retired generals to people from think
tanks, and they all agree on the good news that the troops are progressing
faster than expected towards Baghdad. We are progressing to Memphis
and arrive there early enough in the afternoon to tour Graceland. It’s
a small house.
Tonight,
outdoors, to a crowd of some 1200, George Clinton and P- Funk play a
long and inspired concert. The Memphis crowd comes ready to party. There
are young white professionals, drunk and feeling each other up; middle-aged
black couples doing the funky two-step; here and there a blitzed freak
jumping up and down in place. Clinton wanders out an hour into the set.
He’s a big, gray-haired man who lets his dreadlocks grow down
to his shoulders.
As
well as singing, cueing the band, and signaling for solos from the fifteen
or sixteen musicians and singers who drop in and out, he seems most
interested in the crowd’s hand clapping. He calls for it, sets
the beat, and then listens attentively, his sunglasses pushed up on
his head. It’s as if the clapping were the true measure of the
music. Among his many chants is “Free your Mind and your Ass will
follow.” The power of the groove to do that -- to free people
-- is apparently best gauged by hand clapping.
We
don’t know how long the concert eventually lasts, but as we get
ready to leave --3 and a half hours into the music --the band bumps
into “One Nation Under A Groove,” and it really does seem
that way. P-Funk’s crazy-ass dream to unite us around James Brown
riffs, throaty girl-singers and wailing guitar seems to have worked.
The open air space just off Beale Street moves as one kinky, thousand-piston
machine. Clinton announces, “This is America,” and we believe.
Sunday,
March 23, 2003
West
Memphis, Arkansas at noon is the exact physical manifestation of a hangover.
It’s sleepy and flat with boarded-up yellow-brick buildings and
hand-painted signs announcing barber shops and discount meat. The radio
says we’re experiencing setbacks. Again, NPR’s experts seem
mostly shocked, almost angry, that the assault isn’t going forward
according to plan. One of our own, a black Muslim sergeant, has apparently
fragged a tent full of his fellow officers. Iraqis capture an Army maintenance
unit with twelve missing or captured, and citizens in the southern cities
instead of welcoming our troops are resisting. As we cross the Mississippi,
headed back east, NPR runs a long piece on the history of Iraq.
Asked
what most surprised her in doing the research, the reporter says she
wasn’t aware how much Saddam Hussein was created and supported
by the U.S.
We
drive up through Tennessee and into Kentucky. It sounds like many of
the captured and the dead are either from around here or were stationed
nearby. The parents of a missing woman soldier explain that she joined
the army after high school because she couldn’t find any work
in her small Kentucky hometown.
In
a motel run by a Pakistani couple (their daughter practices cricket
out on the driveway), we watch the Oscars. We count the number of celebrities
who speak either against the war or for peace. Then Michael Moore wins
and begins his speech denouncing the election results, shaking his finger
into the camera, and shouting “Shame on you, Mr. Bush” as
the music rises to drown him out.
It’s
offensive. I’m a little surprised at my reaction, but it’s
offensive. Moore looks big and soft and self-involved: a man who is
always talking about himself no matter what. Part of it is the contrast
to what we’ve been seeing. From town to town, most of the people
we’ve talked to seem thoughtful and quietly concerned. They want
the country to be a decent place, believe it is, and can’t quite
fit this war into that picture. They aren’t “radicals”
or liberals; they’re worried. And everywhere there seems to be
a sadness. There’s no sadness in Michael Moore’s speech,
only Michael Moore.
Monday,
March 24
A long
day’s drive through Kentucky and West Virginia to Maryland. At
some point in the dry hills, we switch over to AM radio and get G. Gordon
Liddy’s program. He is lecturing his listeners on the right way
of dealing with the anti-war protestors in San Francisco. He recalls
with approval how, during the Vietnam War, the Justice Department was
prepared to defend its building with machine guns. His rant seems as
out of place as Michael Moore’s was. The Kentucky Folk Art Center
in Morehead features a lot of Judgment Day scenarios: bright red devils
pitchforking sinners into hell (a brightly painted tire rim). But fierce
and absolute as much of the art is, it’s filled with humor.
Now, the radio says that the cities we had captured in southern Iraq
aren’t actually secure. A sandstorm has slowed troops outside
of Baghdad. Instead of the single news event --a war --it has become
a series of complicated stories. The experts are still eager to give
their opinions, but you can almost hear them running out of certainty.
It hasn’t been a week yet, and the war’s gone on too long.
In
a bar in Frostburg, Maryland, CNN is playing on one television set while
a sit-com plays on another. A thin, unsmiling girl (21?) tends bar.
All of her customers are men. They talk about the pick-up they’re
selling, the motorcycle they’re racing, the loan they’re
trying to take out on the house. One guy keeps feeding quarters into
the pool table, playing by himself and rolling his eyes at the ceiling:
“I ain’t been able to shoot anything since yesterday.”
Every once in a while, when the announcer’s voice gets more insistent,
people will look up at the news. It’s mostly a clip of two American
prisoners of war, repeated over and over.
Occasionally,
there’s a tank on a desert, lights flaring over a city, a woman
in a veil. But nobody’s bleeding, nobody’s dead. The men
look for a moment, then go back to talking and drinking. Draft beer
is fifty cents.
Tuesday,
March 25
It’s
stifling in the Pennsylvania Dutch family restaurant, and we leave before
ordering. “Smells like old people,” my son says. Instead,
we eat sandwiches by the bank of a stream in Bloomsbury, New Jersey.
We’ve stopped listening to the news much, shifting to a books-on-tape
“Spoon River Anthology.” My son’s favorite part is
where an old woman goes crazy and burns down their house, dancing on
the lawn as the flames leap up.
At
home, we’re road numb and glad to be back. We’ve covered
something close to 2500 miles.
Six
day’s worth of e-mails includes lots of denunciations of George
Bush: pictures of him looking simple, jokes, messages from friends saying
he’s various kinds of idiotic. Maybe I’m just tired, but
I skip over a lot. The president seems mostly beside the point: a face
on which to hang a policy. It’s the country we’re talking
about.
Daniel
Wolff lives in New York. He is the author of You
Send Me, the acclaimed biography of the great Sam Cooke and Memphis
Blues Again, an exquisite collection of Ernest Withers photographs
of Memphis and its streets, people and musicians. He can be reached
at: ziwolff@optonline.net
Yesterday's Features
Pablo
Mukherjee
Watch Their Lips
David Krieger
Shock But Not Awe
Linda
Heard
Winning Hearts and Minds Bush-Style
Imad Jadaa
The Beautiful Face of America
Adam
Engel
Buckets of Blood
Patrick Cockburn
Kurds Unimpressed
David
Lindorff
POWs, Torture and Hypocrisy
Robert Fisk
The Coup That Didn't Happen
April
Hurley, MD
A Doctor's Outrage in Baghdad
Gloria Bergen
Chretien's Shame
Reema
Abu Hamdieh
The Smell of Death Surrounds Me
Website of the War
Iraq
Body Count
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