Here, on the Other Side of the Ring of Fire
by: Alexander Cockburn, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed
Americans read the increasingly panic-stricken reports of deepening catastrophe at Fukushima 1, speed to the pharmacy to buy iodine and ask, "It's happened there; can it happen here?"
Along much of California's coastline runs the "ring of fire," which stretches round the Pacific plate, from Australia, north past Japan, to Russia, round to Alaska, down America's West Coast to Chile. 90 percent of the world's earthquakes happen round the ring.
The late great environmentalist David Brower used to tell audiences, " Nuclear plants are incredibly complex technological devices for locating earthquake faults."
Halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles is the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, planned in 1968 when no one knew about the Hosgri fault, part of the ring of fire, a few miles offshore. Further inquiry established that there'd been a 7.1 earthquake 40 years earlier, offshore from the plant, completed in 1973. The power company -- Pacific Gas and Electric -- said it would beef up defenses. In their haste, the site managers reversed the blueprints for the new earthquake proofing of the two reactors, and so the retrofit wasn't a total success.
They recently discovered yet another fault and are now worried about "ground liquefaction" in the event of a big quake. In 2008, there was a terrorist attack by jellyfish, which blocked the cold water intake, and the plant was shut down for a couple of days.
Head south another 150 miles, and we get to the San Onofre plant, right on the shoreline. In fact, I've swum in its shadow, in waters highly esteemed by anglers because fish gather there, enjoying the elevated water temp; some also claim the fish there get bigger, faster. There are storage ponds for spent fuel in a decommissioned unit in a spherical containment of concrete and steel with the smallest wall being 6 feet thick, just about the same as the ruptured containment at one of the Fukushima units.
The power company says San Onofre is built to withstand a 7.0 quake. There is a 25-foot sea wall, which is just over half the height of the walls that crumbled like sand last week along Japan's northeast coast. San Onofre is seawater cooled. Environmentalists don't care for that, so they plan to build two cooling towers the other side of Interstate 5, California's main north-south road, thus immune to jellyfish attack, but open to other methods of assault.
The Uniform California Earthquake Rupture Forecast figures the probability of an earthquake 6.7 or higher is 67 percent for Los Angeles, 63 percent for San Francisco. Up where I live, in the Cascadia subduction zone, we have a 10 percent possibility of an 8- or 9-force quake.
There are robust souls who look on the bright side. Some of them are in the pay of the nuclear industry -- President Obama for example, who took plenty of money from the nuclear industry for his presidential campaign, and in his State of the Union address last January reaffirmed his commitment to "clean, safe" nuclear power, about as insane a statement as pledging commitment to a nice clean form of syphilis. This week, Obama's press spokesman confirmed that nuclear energy "remains a part of the President's overall energy plan."
The United States produces more nuclear energy than any other nations. It has 104 nuclear plants, many of them old, many prone to endless shutdowns, all of them dangerous.
The benchmark catastrophe amid peacetime nuclear disasters remains the explosion in the fourth reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power station on April 26, 1986, in the Ukraine. In 2009, the New York Academy of Sciences published "Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment," a 327-page volume by three scientists -- Alexey Yablokov and Vassily and Alexey Nesterenko -- the definitive study to date. In the summary of his chapter "Mortality After the Chernobyl Catastrophe," Yablokov says flatly, "The calculations suggest that the Chernobyl catastrophe has already killed several hundred thousand human beings in a population of several hundred million that was unfortunate enough to live in territories affected by the fallout."
Set Fukushima next to Chernobyl and its ongoing lethal aftermath. Think of Southern California or North Carolina. Nuclear expert Robert Alvarez, who advised President Clinton on nuclear matters, writes this week that a single spent fuel rod pool -- as in Fukushima (or Diablo Canyon or San Onofre) -- holds more cesium-137 than was deposited by all atmospheric nuclear weapons tests in the Northern Hemisphere combined, and an explosion in that pool could blast "perhaps three to nine times as much of these materials into the air as was released by the Chernobyl reactor disaster."
In the past few years, there's been an explicit political trade-off here in the U.S. and in Europe, too, between the nuclear industry and many green organizations and prominent environmentalists, fixated solely on the increasingly disheveled hypothesis of humanly caused global warming. When the House of Representatives (though not the U.S. Senate) voted for a climate bill in 2009, the inclusion of a clean-energy bank to provide financial backing for new energy production, including nuclear, was part of the bargain.
This shameful pact has got to end. Nuclear power is over, or should be. Look at the false predictions, the blunders, the elemental truth that Nature bats last and that human folly and greed are ineluctable ingredients of man's condition. There's no middle ground.
Alexander Cockburn is co-editor with Jeffrey St. Clair of the muckraking newsletter CounterPunch. He is also co-author of the new book "Dime's Worth of Difference: Beyond the Lesser of Two Evils," available through www.counterpunch.com.
Friday, March 18, 2011
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Tell Congress: No more taxpayer $ for more nuclear power
From: Nuclear Information and Resource Service
The situation at the Fukushima nuclear site in Japan continues to deteriorate. We are now looking at the very real possibility--even likelihood--of multiple reactor meltdowns coupled with multiple failures of irradiated fuel pools. Our thoughts and prayers go out to the people of Japan at this hour.
We are posting updates as fast as we can obtain reliable information on our website: www.nirs.org. Please check often for new information.
The lesson of this catastrophe is clear: we must end use of nuclear power.
And that must start with the prevention of any new nuclear reactors. It is outrageous that the Obama Administration continues to say nuclear power will be part of its "clean energy" strategy. How anyone can view the images coming from Japan and continue to claim nuclear power is somehow "clean" is beyond our ability to comprehend.
If ever there was a time for Congress to hear our voice, it is now.
Click here to take action or go to www.nirs.org.
The situation at the Fukushima nuclear site in Japan continues to deteriorate. We are now looking at the very real possibility--even likelihood--of multiple reactor meltdowns coupled with multiple failures of irradiated fuel pools. Our thoughts and prayers go out to the people of Japan at this hour.
We are posting updates as fast as we can obtain reliable information on our website: www.nirs.org. Please check often for new information.
The lesson of this catastrophe is clear: we must end use of nuclear power.
And that must start with the prevention of any new nuclear reactors. It is outrageous that the Obama Administration continues to say nuclear power will be part of its "clean energy" strategy. How anyone can view the images coming from Japan and continue to claim nuclear power is somehow "clean" is beyond our ability to comprehend.
If ever there was a time for Congress to hear our voice, it is now.
Click here to take action or go to www.nirs.org.
Friday, March 4, 2011
Arcata's Law Unconstitutional
Contending that Arcata’s panhandling ordinance is unconstitutional, resident Richard Salzman informed the City Council that he intends to file a lawsuit unless the ordinance is amended.
As written, the ordinance makes it a crime to merely hold up a sign asking for money. By denying citizens constitutional right of free speech, Salzman contends the City Council overstepped its authority.
“If first they silence the poor and the homeless, and I say nothing, who will speak up when they try to silence me?” Salzman asked.
He noted that the section of the ordinance against “aggressive panhandling,” including blocking one’s path, any physical contact or yelling, would be left unchallenged by this legal action.
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February 14, 2011
Susan Ornelas, Mayor
Michael Winkler, Vice-Mayor
Shane Brinton, Council Member
Alexandra Stillman, Council Member
Mark Wheetley, Council Member
Randy Mendosa, City Manager
Nancy Diamond, Esq., City Attorney
City of Arcata
736 F Street
Arcata, CA 95521
Re: Unconstitutional Panhandling Ordinance enacted April 16, 2010, as Arcata Municipal Code [AMC] Sections 4280-4282.
Dear City Council, City Manager and City Attorney:
Please take notice that Mr. Richard Salzman, a resident of, and taxpayer within, the City of Arcata, has retained the undersigned to bring an action against the City of Arcata to declare its panhandling ordinance unconstitutional and to enjoin the City from any further enforcement of said ordinance. The purpose of this letter is to invite the City to amend its panhandling ordinance as set forth herein, and thereby avoid the expense, uncertainty and unpleasantness of contested litigation.
Specifically, Mr. Salzman contends that AMC Sections 4282B, 4282C, 4282D, 4282E, 4282F and 4282G are unconstitutional. The overall impact of these sections is to criminalize begging in most of the City where it would be fruitful to beg. Begging is a charitable solicitation. The First Amendment clearly protects charitable solicitations. No distinction of constitutional dimension exists between soliciting funds for oneself and for charity. The fact that a beggar keeps the money she receives does not strip the speech of First Amendment protection. A speaker’s rights are not lost merely because compensation is received; a speaker is no less a speaker because she is paid to speak.
To be lawful, the ordinance must serve a compelling interest that is narrowly drawn to achieve its end. The City’s compelling interest, if one exists, is well-served by the ordinance’s ban on aggressive panhandling, to which Mr. Salzman does not take exception. Mr. Salzman objects to the near-total ban on begging in public fora, the justification for which can be little more than avoiding “annoyance” to the public, hardly a compelling interest in First Amendment jurisprudence. Moreover, the ordinance’s ban on begging is not “narrowly tailored;” indeed, it is embarrassingly broad. To achieve the City’s goal of criminalizing the speech of a few beggars, the City has criminalized all solicitations for money. A girl scout cannot sell cookies on the City’s streets. Nor may any charity solicit money in most of the City. A beggar cannot even hold a sign up to ask for money; a more clearly content-based restriction on speech is difficult to imagine.
The City’s attempt to justify these draconian restrictions on speech under the so-called “captive audience rule” is unavailing. The City’s expansion of that concept to include almost all public space within the City perverts the intent of the rule and strikes at the very heart of discourse in a democratic society- the right to communicate with one’s fellow citizens on the public commons.
Other constitutional concerns are implicated in the City’s ordinance. The criminalization of solicitation implicates equal protection concerns, to wit, the ordinance targets the First Amendment rights of the City’s poorest and most downtrodden residents, while it remains legal to accost members of the public to ask the time of day, or to sign a petition. The complexity of the ordinance, with its crazy patch-work of places where it is illegal to beg, implicates notice and due process concerns. A reasonable citizen of the City lacks adequate notice as to where she may beg and where she may not beg. Likewise, the ordinance’s definition of “panhandling” leaves questions unanswered: Is a check or credit card transaction on the City’s streets illegal, or just a cash transaction? This renders the ordinance subject to challenge for vagueness.
Mr. Salzman would prefer to resolve this matter without litigation, and to that end, invites the City and its attorneys to meet with the undersigned to work toward resolution of the issues raised herein.
Respectfully,
Peter E. Martin
--
Read article in Arcata Eye
and post on Humboldt Herald.
Link to JPR radio show on subject (starts at 30:min mark):
http://podcastdownload.npr.org/anon.npr-podcasts/podcast/172/510073/134265248/JPR_134265248.mp3?_kip_ipx=898705313-1299267811
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Save Public Broadcasting
Public Broadcasting Zeroed Out in House Budget Bill
Continuing Resolution Eliminates the Corporation for Public Broadcasting
The House Appropriations Committee has the full list of recommended spending cuts which includes the elimination of funding for public broadcasting. The House leadership said that debate on the measure (H.R. 1) will begin Tuesday 02/15.
Please contact your representatives in Congress now and urge them to stand up for public broadcasting funding. It is going to take hundreds of thousands of Americans calling and writing Congress to get this critical funding back into the budget proposal. Visit: 170MillionAmericans.org for more information.
Continuing Resolution Eliminates the Corporation for Public Broadcasting
The House Appropriations Committee has the full list of recommended spending cuts which includes the elimination of funding for public broadcasting. The House leadership said that debate on the measure (H.R. 1) will begin Tuesday 02/15.
Please contact your representatives in Congress now and urge them to stand up for public broadcasting funding. It is going to take hundreds of thousands of Americans calling and writing Congress to get this critical funding back into the budget proposal. Visit: 170MillionAmericans.org for more information.
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Moyers speech: Facts Still Matter...
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Bill Moyers: "Facts Still Matter ..."
Monday 14 February 2011
by: Bill Moyers, t r u t h o u t | Speech
History Makers is an organization of broadcasters and producers from around the world concerned with the challenges and opportunities faced by factual broadcasting. Bill Moyers was the keynote speaker at the 2011 convention on January 27, 2011, in New York City.
Thanks to all of you for your welcome - and for the chance to be here among so many kindred spirits. Your dedication to factual broadcasting, to our craft and calling; your passion for telling stories that matter; for connecting the present to the past, has created a community whose work is essential in this disquieting time when "what is happening today, this hour, this very minute, seems to be our sole criterion for judgment and action." It is a sad world that exists only in the present, unaware of the long procession that brought us here. As Milan Kundera’s insight reminds us, the struggle against power "is the struggle of memory against forgetting."
I talked about this gathering when I was in California this past weekend and spent time with a good friend and supporter of my own work on television, Paul Orfalea. He's the maverick entrepreneur who founded Kinko's in a former hamburger stand with one small rented Xerox copier and turned it into a business service empire with more than two billion dollars a year in revenue. After selling Kinko's, Paul became one of the most popular, if unorthodox, teachers of undergraduates at the University of California/ Santa Barbara. When I told him what I would be doing today he applauded and understood immediately the importance of what you do. He described to me how he teaches history "backwards" to college students who have learned little about the past in high school, don't know that the past is even alive, much less that it lives in them and question its value today. He hands his students a contemporary story from some daily news source, tells them to begin with the "now" of it and to then walk the trail back down the chronology to trace the personalities, circumstances and choices that made it today's news. Their assignment, in effect, is to begin at the entrance to the cave and rewind Ariadne's thread in the opposite direction, back to the deep origins of the story. In an era marked by the lack of continuity and community between the generations, this strikes me as an inspired way to stretch young imaginations across the time zones of human experience.
And it's, of course, what you do so often in your work. No one I know does it more effectively than "Frontline." and I was pleased to learn that you are honoring its executive director, David Fanning, who is a genius, in my book, at story telling grounded in fact and presented with perspective. Over the past quarter century, I have been privileged to collaborate occasionally with David. But beyond my own personal and professional gratitude to him, all of us who produce current affairs and history programming know that he has kept the bar high while producing a body of work unequaled since Fred Friendly. Most of you are too young to have seen the whole arc of David's extraordinary career or to have known Fred Friendly's work. But some of us can never forget we're standing on the shoulder of those two giants.
I also had the privilege of witnessing Fred in action. When he was president of "CBS News" and I was the White House press secretary, he would come down from New York on the shuttle and slip in the back door of the White House and along the hall past the Cabinet Room to the private entrance to my office for an hour-or-so chat. I had done some preliminary work at the Office of Education on the future of public television in 1964, and we were soon talking about the medium's future; he was a true believer in television "that dignifies instead of debases" and of the importance "of at least one channel free of commercials and commercial values." Little did we know at the time that he would soon quit the job he relished as president of the news division that he and Edward R. Murrow had built. The two of them created "See It Now" and "CBS Reports," which set the standard for investigative reporting and documentaries of unprecedented power and impact. One of their collaborations was the famous documentary on the demagogic and dangerous Senator Joseph McCarthy. They made the brilliant decision to let McCarthy speak for himself, an entire broadcast's worth of his bullying words and techniques. McCarthy obligingly hanged himself on national television, far more effectively and fatally than anyone else's words could. His own words had turned Americans against his demagoguery - something for which the right to this day has never forgiven what they denounced as the "Communist Broadcasting System." Watching that documentary over and again, I realized that it is through such unhurried honoring of reality that we can approach the myriad and messy truths of human experience. For lasting effect, those truths cannot be forced into the mind of the public; they must be nurtured.
Fred never wanted to leave CBS, but in 1966, when the network refused to carry Senate hearings on the Vietnam War, choosing instead to run a repeat of "I Love Lucy," he resigned, became the media adviser to the Ford Foundation and was the prime mover in the creation of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. He became our Johnny Appleseed, persuading the foundation to put its money - millions of dollars - where his mind was.
I had left the White House by then to be publisher of Newsday and would soon join public television as anchor of a weekly broadcast. Fred's first teaching assistant, Martin Clancy, was my star producer. It was usually one of Fred's people who taught me the most about our craft - how it was possible through the coupling of word and image to come close to the verifiable truth and an honest accounting of reality. Fred played a critical role in my life when, after stints at both CBS and PBS, I had to choose between the two. I had found it increasingly difficult at the network to do the work I most wanted to do, but was reluctant to take off the golden handcuffs and leap into the world of independent production. I went over to see Fred at the foundation and there was nothing subtle in his advice. He said, "You're never going to do the work you most want to do until you do it for yourself." So, I followed him overboard.
Fred was right, as he so often was: independence meant the best hope for me to pursue journalism as a mission. Perhaps, we were naïve, but in those days many of us still assumed that an informed public is preferable to an uninformed one. Hadn't Thomas Jefferson proclaimed that, "Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government"? And wasn't a free press essential to that end?
Maybe not. As Joe Keohane reported last year in The Boston Globe, political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency "deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information." He was reporting on research at the University of Michigan, which found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in new stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts were not curing misinformation. "Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger."
I won't spoil it for you by a lengthy summary here. Suffice it to say that, while "most of us like to believe that our opinions have been formed over time by careful, rational consideration of facts and ideas and that the decisions based on those opinions, therefore, have the ring of soundness and intelligence," the research found that actually "we often base our opinions on our beliefs ... and rather than facts driving beliefs, our beliefs can dictate the facts we chose to accept. They can cause us to twist facts so they fit better with our preconceived notions."
These studies help to explain why America seems more and more unable to deal with reality. So many people inhabit a closed belief system on whose door they have hung the "Do Not Disturb" sign, that they pick and choose only those facts that will serve as building blocks for walling them off from uncomfortable truths. Any journalist whose reporting threatens that belief system gets sliced and diced by its apologists and polemicists (say, the fabulists at Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and the yahoos of talk radio.) Remember when Limbaugh, for one, took journalists on for their reporting about torture at Abu Ghraib? He attempted to dismiss the cruelty inflicted on their captives by American soldiers as a little necessary "sport" for soldiers under stress, saying on air: "This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation ... you [ever] heard of need to blow some steam off?" As so often happens, the Limbaugh line became a drumbeat in the nether reaches of the right-wing echo chamber. So, it was not surprising that in a nationwide survey conducted by The Chicago Tribune on First Amendment issues, half of the respondents said there should be some kind of press restraint on reporting about the prison abuse. According to Charles Madigan, the editor of the Tribune's Perspective section, 50 or 60 percent of the respondents said they "would embrace government controls of some kind on free speech, particularly when it has sexual content or is heard as unpatriotic."
No wonder many people still believe Obama was born in Kenya, not Hawaii, as his birth certificate shows; or that he is a Muslim, when in fact he is a Christian; or that he is a socialist when day by day he shows an eager solicitude for corporate capitalism. Partisans in particular - and the audiences for Murdoch's Fox News and talk radio - are particularly susceptible to such scurrilous disinformation. In a Harris survey last spring, 67 percent of Republicans said Obama is a socialist; 57 percent believed him to be a Muslim; 45 percent refused to believe he was born in America; and 24 percent said he "may be the antichrist."
The bigger the smear, the more it sticks. And there is no shortage of smear artists. Last year, Forbes Magazine, obviously bent on mischief, allowed the right-wing fantasist Dinesh D'Souza to tar Obama with a toxic brew so odious it triggered memories of racist babble - a perverted combination of half-baked psychology, biology and sociology - that marked the heyday of the Ku Klux Klan. Seizing upon the anti-colonial views of Obama's Kenyan father, who had deserted the family when the boy was two years old and whose absence from his life Obama meditated upon in his best-selling book "Dreams of My Father," D'Souza wrote that, "Incredibly, the US is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation's agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son."
In a sane political world, you might think at least a few Republican notables would have denounced such hogwash by their own kind for what it was. But no. Newt Gingrich, once their speaker of the House, whose own fantasies include succeeding Obama in the White House, set the tone by praising D'Souza's claptrap as the "most profound insight I have read in the last six years about Barack Obama." D'Souza, said Gingrich, has made a "stunning insight" and had unlocked the mystery of Obama. I could find only one conservative who stood up against this trash. David Frum, the former speechwriter for George W. Bush, wrote on his blog: "The argument that Obama is an infiltrating alien, a deceiving foreigner - and not just any kind of alien, but specifically a Third World alien - has been absorbed to the very core of the Republican platform for November 2010." Once again, the right-wing media machine had popularized a false narrative and made of it a destructive political weapon.
Disinformation is not unique to the right, of course. Like other journalists, I have been the object of malevolent assaults from the "9/11 truthers" for not reporting their airtight case proving that the Bush administration conspired to bring about the attacks on the World Trade Center. How did they discover this conspiracy? As the independent journalist Robert Parry has written, "the truthers" threw out all the evidence of al-Qaeda's involvement, from contemporaneous calls from hijack victims on the planes to confessions from al-Qaeda leaders both in and out of captivity that they had indeed done it. Then, recycling some of the right's sophistry techniques, such as using long lists of supposed evidence to overcome the lack of any real evidence, the "truthers" cherry-picked a few supposed "anomalies" to build an "inside-job" story line. Fortunately, this Big Lie never took hold in the public mind. These truthers on the left, if that is where GPS can find them on the political map, are outgunned, outmatched and outshouted by the media apparatus on the right that pounds the public like drone missiles loaded with conspiracy theories and disinformation and accompanied by armadas of outright lies.
George Orwell had warned six decades ago that the corrosion of language goes hand in hand with the corruption of democracy. If he were around today, he would remind us that "like the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket," this kind of propaganda engenders a "protective stupidity" almost impossible for facts to penetrate.
But you, my colleagues, can't give up. If you do, there's no chance any public memory of everyday truths - the tangible, touchable, palpable realities so vital to democracy - will survive. We would be left to the mercy of the agitated amnesiacs who "make" their own reality, as one of them boasted at the time America invaded Iraq, in order to maintain their hold on the public mind and the levers of power. You will remember that in Orwell's novel "1984," Big Brother banishes history to the memory hole, where inconvenient facts simply disappear. Control of the present rests on obliteration of the past. The figure of O'Brien, who is the personification of Big Brother, says to the protagonist, Winston Smith: "We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves." And they do. The bureaucrats in the Ministry of Truth destroy the records of the past and publish new versions. These in turn are superseded by yet more revisions. Why? Because people without memory are at the mercy of the powers that be; there is nothing against which to measure what they are told today. History is obliterated.
The late scholar Cleanth Brooks of Yale thought there were three great enemies of democracy. He called them "The Bastard Muses": Propaganda, which pleads sometimes unscrupulously, for a special cause at the expense of the total truth; sentimentality, which works up emotional responses unwarranted by, and in excess of, the occasion; and pornography, which focuses upon one powerful human drive at the expense of the total human personality. The poet Czeslaw Milosz identified another enemy of democracy when, upon accepting the Noble Prize for Literature, he said "Our planet that gets smaller every year, with its fantastic proliferation of mass media, is witnessing a process that escapes definition, characterized by a refusal to remember." Memory is crucial to democracy; historical amnesia, its nemesis.
Against these tendencies it is an uphill fight to stay the course of factual broadcasting. We have to keep reassuring ourselves and one another that it matters and we have to join forces to defend and safeguard our independence. I learned this early on.
When I collaborated with the producer Sherry Jones on the very first documentary ever about the purchase of government favors by political action committees, we unfurled across the Capitol grounds yard after yard of computer printouts listing campaign contributions to every member of Congress. The broadcast infuriated just about everyone, including old friends of mine who a few years earlier had been allies when I worked at the White House. Congressmen friendly to public television were also outraged, but, I am pleased to report, PBS took the heat without melting.
But shining the spotlight on political corruption is nothing compared to what can happen if you raise questions about corporate power in Washington, as my colleague Marty Koughan and I discovered when we produced a program for David Fanning and "Frontline" on pesticides and food. Marty had learned that industry was attempting behind closed doors to dilute the findings of the American Academy of Sciences study on the effects of pesticide residues on children. Before we finished the documentary, the industry somehow purloined a copy of our draft script - we still aren't certain how - and mounted a sophisticated and expensive campaign to discredit our program before it aired. Television reviewers and editorial pages of key newspapers were flooded with propaganda. Some public television managers were so unnerved by the blitz of misleading information about a film they had not yet broadcast that they actually protested to PBS with letters that had been prepared by the industry.
Here's what most perplexed us: the American Cancer Society - an organization that in no way figured in our story - sent to its 3,000 local chapters a "critique" of the unfinished documentary claiming, wrongly, that it exaggerated the dangers of pesticides in food. We were puzzled. Why was the American Cancer Society taking the unusual step of criticizing a documentary that it had not seen, that had not aired and that did not claim what the Society alleged? An enterprising reporter named Sheila Kaplan later looked into those questions for the journal Legal Times. It turns out that the Porter Novelli public relations firm, which had worked for several chemical companies, also did pro bono work for the American Cancer Society. Kaplan found that the firm was able to cash in some of the goodwill from that "charitable" work to persuade the compliant communications staff at the Society to distribute some harsh talking point about the documentary before it aired - talking points that had been supplied by, but not attributed to, Porter Novelli. Legal Times headlined the story "Porter Novelli Plays All Sides." A familiar Washington game.
Others also used the American Cancer Society's good name in efforts to tarnish the journalism before it aired, none more invidiously than the right-wing polemicist Reed Irvine, who pumped his sludge through an organization with the Orwellian name Accuracy in Media. He attacked our work as "junk science on PBS" and demanded Congress pull the plug on public broadcasting. Fortunately, PBS once again stood firm. The documentary aired, the journalism held up and the publicity liberated the National Academy of Sciences to release the study that the industry had tried to cripple.
However, there's always another round; the sharks are always circling. Sherry Jones and I spent more than a year working on another PBS documentary called "Trade Secrets," a two-hour investigative special based on revelations - found in the industry's own archives - that big chemical companies had deliberately withheld from workers and consumers damaging information about toxic chemicals in their products. These internal industry documents are a fact. They exist. They are not a matter of opinion or point of view. They state what the companies knew, when they knew it and what they did with what they knew (namely to deep-six it) at peril to those who worked with and consumed the potentially lethal products.
The revelations portrayed deep and pervasive corruption in a major American industry and raised critical policy implications about the safety of living under a regulatory system manipulated by the industry itself. If the public and government regulators had known what the industry knew about the health risks of its products when the industry knew it, America's laws and regulations governing chemical manufacturing would have been far more protective of human health. But the industry didn't want us to know. That's what the documents revealed and that was the story the industry fought to keep us from telling.
The industry hired as an ally a public relations firm in Washington noted for using private detectives and former CIA, FBI and drug enforcement officers to conduct investigations for corporations under critical scrutiny. One of the company's founders acknowledged that corporations may need to resort to "deceit" and other unconventional resources to counter public scrutiny. Given the scurrilous campaign that was conducted to smear our journalism, his comments were an understatement. To complicate matters, the Congressman, who for years had been the single biggest recipient of campaign contributions from the chemical industry, was the very member of Congress whose committee had jurisdiction over public broadcasting's appropriations. As an independent production firm, we had not used public funds to produce the documentary. But even our independence didn't stop the corporate mercenaries from bringing relentless pressure on PBS not to air the broadcast. The then president of PBS, Pat Mitchell, stood tall in resisting the pressure and was vindicated: one year later, The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences awarded "Trade Secrets" an Emmy for outstanding investigative journalism.
Now, you can understand how it is that journalism became for me a continuing course in adult education. It enabled me to produce documentaries like "Trade Secrets" and out-of-the-box series like "Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth." It enabled me to cover the summits of world leaders and the daily lives of struggling families in Newark. It empowered me to explain how public elections are subverted by private money, and to how to make a poem. Journalism also provided me a passport into the world of ideas, which became my favorite beat, in no small part because I never met anyone - philosopher or physicist, historian, artist, writer, scientist, entrepreneur or social critic - who didn't teach me something I hadn't known, something that enlarged my life.
Here's an example: One of my favorite of all interviews was with my sainted fellow Texan, the writer and broadcaster John Henry Faulk, who had many years earlier, been the target of a right-wing smear campaign that resulted in his firing by CBS from his job as a radio host here in New York, one of the low moments in that network's history. But John Henry fought back in court and won a landmark legal victory against his tormentors. After he returned home to Texas, I did the last interview with him before his death in 1990. He told me the story of how he and his friend Boots Cooper were playing in the chicken coop when they were about 12 years old. They spied a chicken snake in the top tier of nests, so close it looked like a boa constrictor. As John Henry put it, "All our frontier courage drained out our heels - actually it trickled down our overall legs - and Boots and I made a new door through that henhouse wall." Hearing all the commotion Boots' momma came out and said, "Don't you boys know chicken snakes are harmless? They can't harm you." And Boots, rubbing his forehead and behind at the same time, said, "Yes, Mrs. Faulk, I know that, but they can scare you so bad, it'll cause you to hurt yourself." John Henry Faulk told me that's a lesson he never forgot. Over and again I've tried to remember it, too, calling on it to restore my resolve and my soul.
I've had a wonderful life in broadcasting, matriculating as a perpetual student in the school of journalism. Other people have paid the tuition and travel and I've never really had to grow up and get a day job. I think it's because journalism has been so good to me that I am sad when I hear or read that factual broadcasting is passé - that television as a venue for forensic journalism is on its way out and that trying to find out "what really happened" - which is our mandate - is but a quaint relic in an age of post-structuralism and cyberspace. But despite all our personal electronic devices, people are watching more television than ever. Much of this programming is posted online; I believe at least half the audience for my last two weekly series on Friday night came over the weekend via streaming video, iPods and TIVO. I was pleased to discover that the web sites most frequented by educators are those of PBS and that our own sites were among the most popular destinations. That's what keeps us going, isn't it? The knowledge that all the bias and ignorance notwithstanding, facts still matter to critical thinking, that if we respect and honor, even revere them, they just might help us right the ship of state before it rams the iceberg.
That's why, on balance, I count WikiLeaks a plus for democracy. Whatever side you take on the controversy, whether or not you think this information should be disclosed, all parties - those who want it released and those who don't - acknowledge that information matters. Partly because I grew up in the south and partly because of my experience in the Johnson White House, I'm on the side of disclosure, even when it hurts. The truth about slavery had been driven from the pulpits, newsrooms and classrooms during the antebellum days; it took a bloody civil war to drive the truth home. At the Johnson White House, we circled the wagons and grew intolerant of news that didn't conform to our hopes, expectations and strategies for Vietnam, with terrible, tragic results for Americans and Vietnamese, north and south. I say: "Never again!"
Here's a sidebar: I remember vividly the day President Johnson signed the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA): July 4, 1966. He signed it "with a deep sense of pride," declaring in almost lyrical language "that the United States is an open society in which the people's right to know is cherished and guarded." That's what he said. The truth is, the president had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the signing ceremony. He hated the very idea of journalists rummaging in government closets, hated them challenging the authorized view of reality, hated them knowing what he didn't want them to know. He dug in his heels and even threatened to pocket veto the bill after it reached the White House. Only the courage and political skill of a Congressman named John Moss got the bill passed at all and that was after a 12-year battle against his Congressional elders, who blinked every time the sun shined on the dark corners of power. They managed to cripple the bill Moss had drafted and, even then, only some last-minute calls to LBJ from a handful of influential newspaper editors overcame the president's reluctance. He signed "the f------ thing," as he called it and then, lo and behold, went out to claim credit for it.
It's always a fight to find out what the government doesn't want us to know. The official obsession with secrecy is all the more disturbing today because the war on terrorism is a war without limits, without a visible enemy or decisive encounters. We don't know where the clandestine war is going on or how much it's costing and whether it's in the least effective. Even in Afghanistan, most of what we know comes from official, usually military, sources.
Thus, a relative handful of people have enormous power to keep us in the dark. And when those people are in league with their counterparts in powerful corporations, the public is hit with a double whammy. We're usually told the issue is national security, but keeping us from finding out about the danger of accidents at chemical plants is not about national security; it's about covering up an industry's indiscretions and liabilities. Locking up the secrets of meetings with energy executives is not about national security; it's about hiding confidential memos sent to the White House showing the influence of oil companies on policies of global warming We only learned about that memo from the Bush White House, by the way, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act.
Consider WikiLeaks, then, to be one big FOIA dump. Were some people in high places embarrassed? Perhaps. They did squeal, but I don't think they were stuck.
And even so, we learned some important things from WikiLeaks. For example, as Reza Alsan writes in The Atlantic, the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, may not be as fanatical as we think he is; the diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks portray him as "a moderate reformer who'd like to cut deals with the West, but can't because hard-liners are calling the shots." One of them even slapped Ahmadinejad across the face when, at a high-level meeting. he proposed that the government allow more personal and press freedom at the height of the 2009 public protests in Iran. Such information can help us evaluate the incessant demands of neoconservative warmongers - the very people who rode the circuit with news of "weapons of mass destruction" in an effort to build support for invading Iraq - that we use military force against Iran to eliminate its nuclear capacity.
There are other uses of the disclosures from WikiLeaks admirably compiled by Greg Mitchell in the current edition of The Nation, where the one-time editor of Editor and Publisher performed an important public service by culling the gold from the dust.
I will close with an urgent appeal to you about one fight we won't win unless all of us join it. I'm sure everyone here agrees that we will eventually be moving to the web, all of us and that "free, instant, worldwide connectivity" is the future. But I'm sure you know that this incredible, free, open Internet highway is at risk, that corporations are on the brink of muscling their way to the front of the line. Media companies want the power to censor Internet content they don't like, to put toll booths on the web so they can charge more for the privilege of driving in the fast lanes, to turn it into a private preserve.
You may have heard that last month the FCC decided to protect free/open Internet access only on landline connections, not wireless - which is to say, there's no net neutrality in most of the online world. As Jenn Ettinger of the nonpartisan, nonprofit Free Press reported in Yes! magazine just two days ago:
The rules that the FCC passed in December are vague and weak. The limited protections that were placed on wired connections, the kind you access through your home computer, leave the door open for the phone and cable companies to develop fast and slow lanes on the Web and to favor their own content or applications.
Worse, the rules also explicitly allow wireless carriers ... to block applications for any reason and to degrade and de-prioritize websites you access using your cell phone or a device like an iPad.
Perhaps the FCC is biding its time, waiting to see how things develop technologically, with the current FCC chair seemingly more open to citizen input than was his predecessor. Or, again, maybe the landline regulation was meant simply to get media reformers off the commission's back. We can't relax our vigilance. In Ettinger's words:
The FCC still has the opportunity to put in place a solid framework that would put the public interest above the profit motive of the phone and cable companies that it is supposed to regulate. And the FCC should take immediate steps to close the loopholes it created, to strengthen its rules and to include wireless protections. The fight is far from over. We can work to change the rules, demand better oversight and consumer protections and make sure that the big companies can't pad their bottom lines on the backs of their customers.
In this effort, we have a strong ally in FCC commissioner Michael Copps, who. on my broadcast last year, spelled out how "our future is going to ride on broadband. How we get a job is going to ride on broadband. How we take care of our health. How we educate ourselves about our responsibilities as citizens ... And it's absolutely imperative that we have a place, that we have a venue to go to, to make sure that that Internet is kept open ... That's our decision to make as a people, as citizens: who's going to control this ultimately?"
With all the media consolidation that's happening today, the web may be the last stand of independent factual broadcasters like you. The stakes are high and we have come to the decisive round. I'll leave you with a story Joseph Campbell told me years ago for my series "The Power of Myth." It seems a fellow rounding the corner saw a fight break out down the block. Running up to one of the bystanders, he shouted: "Is this a private fight or can anyone get in it?"
The Internet fight for democracy is a public fight. Come on in!
Bill Moyers: "Facts Still Matter ..."
Monday 14 February 2011
by: Bill Moyers, t r u t h o u t | Speech
History Makers is an organization of broadcasters and producers from around the world concerned with the challenges and opportunities faced by factual broadcasting. Bill Moyers was the keynote speaker at the 2011 convention on January 27, 2011, in New York City.
Thanks to all of you for your welcome - and for the chance to be here among so many kindred spirits. Your dedication to factual broadcasting, to our craft and calling; your passion for telling stories that matter; for connecting the present to the past, has created a community whose work is essential in this disquieting time when "what is happening today, this hour, this very minute, seems to be our sole criterion for judgment and action." It is a sad world that exists only in the present, unaware of the long procession that brought us here. As Milan Kundera’s insight reminds us, the struggle against power "is the struggle of memory against forgetting."
I talked about this gathering when I was in California this past weekend and spent time with a good friend and supporter of my own work on television, Paul Orfalea. He's the maverick entrepreneur who founded Kinko's in a former hamburger stand with one small rented Xerox copier and turned it into a business service empire with more than two billion dollars a year in revenue. After selling Kinko's, Paul became one of the most popular, if unorthodox, teachers of undergraduates at the University of California/ Santa Barbara. When I told him what I would be doing today he applauded and understood immediately the importance of what you do. He described to me how he teaches history "backwards" to college students who have learned little about the past in high school, don't know that the past is even alive, much less that it lives in them and question its value today. He hands his students a contemporary story from some daily news source, tells them to begin with the "now" of it and to then walk the trail back down the chronology to trace the personalities, circumstances and choices that made it today's news. Their assignment, in effect, is to begin at the entrance to the cave and rewind Ariadne's thread in the opposite direction, back to the deep origins of the story. In an era marked by the lack of continuity and community between the generations, this strikes me as an inspired way to stretch young imaginations across the time zones of human experience.
And it's, of course, what you do so often in your work. No one I know does it more effectively than "Frontline." and I was pleased to learn that you are honoring its executive director, David Fanning, who is a genius, in my book, at story telling grounded in fact and presented with perspective. Over the past quarter century, I have been privileged to collaborate occasionally with David. But beyond my own personal and professional gratitude to him, all of us who produce current affairs and history programming know that he has kept the bar high while producing a body of work unequaled since Fred Friendly. Most of you are too young to have seen the whole arc of David's extraordinary career or to have known Fred Friendly's work. But some of us can never forget we're standing on the shoulder of those two giants.
I also had the privilege of witnessing Fred in action. When he was president of "CBS News" and I was the White House press secretary, he would come down from New York on the shuttle and slip in the back door of the White House and along the hall past the Cabinet Room to the private entrance to my office for an hour-or-so chat. I had done some preliminary work at the Office of Education on the future of public television in 1964, and we were soon talking about the medium's future; he was a true believer in television "that dignifies instead of debases" and of the importance "of at least one channel free of commercials and commercial values." Little did we know at the time that he would soon quit the job he relished as president of the news division that he and Edward R. Murrow had built. The two of them created "See It Now" and "CBS Reports," which set the standard for investigative reporting and documentaries of unprecedented power and impact. One of their collaborations was the famous documentary on the demagogic and dangerous Senator Joseph McCarthy. They made the brilliant decision to let McCarthy speak for himself, an entire broadcast's worth of his bullying words and techniques. McCarthy obligingly hanged himself on national television, far more effectively and fatally than anyone else's words could. His own words had turned Americans against his demagoguery - something for which the right to this day has never forgiven what they denounced as the "Communist Broadcasting System." Watching that documentary over and again, I realized that it is through such unhurried honoring of reality that we can approach the myriad and messy truths of human experience. For lasting effect, those truths cannot be forced into the mind of the public; they must be nurtured.
Fred never wanted to leave CBS, but in 1966, when the network refused to carry Senate hearings on the Vietnam War, choosing instead to run a repeat of "I Love Lucy," he resigned, became the media adviser to the Ford Foundation and was the prime mover in the creation of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. He became our Johnny Appleseed, persuading the foundation to put its money - millions of dollars - where his mind was.
I had left the White House by then to be publisher of Newsday and would soon join public television as anchor of a weekly broadcast. Fred's first teaching assistant, Martin Clancy, was my star producer. It was usually one of Fred's people who taught me the most about our craft - how it was possible through the coupling of word and image to come close to the verifiable truth and an honest accounting of reality. Fred played a critical role in my life when, after stints at both CBS and PBS, I had to choose between the two. I had found it increasingly difficult at the network to do the work I most wanted to do, but was reluctant to take off the golden handcuffs and leap into the world of independent production. I went over to see Fred at the foundation and there was nothing subtle in his advice. He said, "You're never going to do the work you most want to do until you do it for yourself." So, I followed him overboard.
Fred was right, as he so often was: independence meant the best hope for me to pursue journalism as a mission. Perhaps, we were naïve, but in those days many of us still assumed that an informed public is preferable to an uninformed one. Hadn't Thomas Jefferson proclaimed that, "Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government"? And wasn't a free press essential to that end?
Maybe not. As Joe Keohane reported last year in The Boston Globe, political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency "deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information." He was reporting on research at the University of Michigan, which found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in new stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts were not curing misinformation. "Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger."
I won't spoil it for you by a lengthy summary here. Suffice it to say that, while "most of us like to believe that our opinions have been formed over time by careful, rational consideration of facts and ideas and that the decisions based on those opinions, therefore, have the ring of soundness and intelligence," the research found that actually "we often base our opinions on our beliefs ... and rather than facts driving beliefs, our beliefs can dictate the facts we chose to accept. They can cause us to twist facts so they fit better with our preconceived notions."
These studies help to explain why America seems more and more unable to deal with reality. So many people inhabit a closed belief system on whose door they have hung the "Do Not Disturb" sign, that they pick and choose only those facts that will serve as building blocks for walling them off from uncomfortable truths. Any journalist whose reporting threatens that belief system gets sliced and diced by its apologists and polemicists (say, the fabulists at Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and the yahoos of talk radio.) Remember when Limbaugh, for one, took journalists on for their reporting about torture at Abu Ghraib? He attempted to dismiss the cruelty inflicted on their captives by American soldiers as a little necessary "sport" for soldiers under stress, saying on air: "This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation ... you [ever] heard of need to blow some steam off?" As so often happens, the Limbaugh line became a drumbeat in the nether reaches of the right-wing echo chamber. So, it was not surprising that in a nationwide survey conducted by The Chicago Tribune on First Amendment issues, half of the respondents said there should be some kind of press restraint on reporting about the prison abuse. According to Charles Madigan, the editor of the Tribune's Perspective section, 50 or 60 percent of the respondents said they "would embrace government controls of some kind on free speech, particularly when it has sexual content or is heard as unpatriotic."
No wonder many people still believe Obama was born in Kenya, not Hawaii, as his birth certificate shows; or that he is a Muslim, when in fact he is a Christian; or that he is a socialist when day by day he shows an eager solicitude for corporate capitalism. Partisans in particular - and the audiences for Murdoch's Fox News and talk radio - are particularly susceptible to such scurrilous disinformation. In a Harris survey last spring, 67 percent of Republicans said Obama is a socialist; 57 percent believed him to be a Muslim; 45 percent refused to believe he was born in America; and 24 percent said he "may be the antichrist."
The bigger the smear, the more it sticks. And there is no shortage of smear artists. Last year, Forbes Magazine, obviously bent on mischief, allowed the right-wing fantasist Dinesh D'Souza to tar Obama with a toxic brew so odious it triggered memories of racist babble - a perverted combination of half-baked psychology, biology and sociology - that marked the heyday of the Ku Klux Klan. Seizing upon the anti-colonial views of Obama's Kenyan father, who had deserted the family when the boy was two years old and whose absence from his life Obama meditated upon in his best-selling book "Dreams of My Father," D'Souza wrote that, "Incredibly, the US is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation's agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son."
In a sane political world, you might think at least a few Republican notables would have denounced such hogwash by their own kind for what it was. But no. Newt Gingrich, once their speaker of the House, whose own fantasies include succeeding Obama in the White House, set the tone by praising D'Souza's claptrap as the "most profound insight I have read in the last six years about Barack Obama." D'Souza, said Gingrich, has made a "stunning insight" and had unlocked the mystery of Obama. I could find only one conservative who stood up against this trash. David Frum, the former speechwriter for George W. Bush, wrote on his blog: "The argument that Obama is an infiltrating alien, a deceiving foreigner - and not just any kind of alien, but specifically a Third World alien - has been absorbed to the very core of the Republican platform for November 2010." Once again, the right-wing media machine had popularized a false narrative and made of it a destructive political weapon.
Disinformation is not unique to the right, of course. Like other journalists, I have been the object of malevolent assaults from the "9/11 truthers" for not reporting their airtight case proving that the Bush administration conspired to bring about the attacks on the World Trade Center. How did they discover this conspiracy? As the independent journalist Robert Parry has written, "the truthers" threw out all the evidence of al-Qaeda's involvement, from contemporaneous calls from hijack victims on the planes to confessions from al-Qaeda leaders both in and out of captivity that they had indeed done it. Then, recycling some of the right's sophistry techniques, such as using long lists of supposed evidence to overcome the lack of any real evidence, the "truthers" cherry-picked a few supposed "anomalies" to build an "inside-job" story line. Fortunately, this Big Lie never took hold in the public mind. These truthers on the left, if that is where GPS can find them on the political map, are outgunned, outmatched and outshouted by the media apparatus on the right that pounds the public like drone missiles loaded with conspiracy theories and disinformation and accompanied by armadas of outright lies.
George Orwell had warned six decades ago that the corrosion of language goes hand in hand with the corruption of democracy. If he were around today, he would remind us that "like the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket," this kind of propaganda engenders a "protective stupidity" almost impossible for facts to penetrate.
But you, my colleagues, can't give up. If you do, there's no chance any public memory of everyday truths - the tangible, touchable, palpable realities so vital to democracy - will survive. We would be left to the mercy of the agitated amnesiacs who "make" their own reality, as one of them boasted at the time America invaded Iraq, in order to maintain their hold on the public mind and the levers of power. You will remember that in Orwell's novel "1984," Big Brother banishes history to the memory hole, where inconvenient facts simply disappear. Control of the present rests on obliteration of the past. The figure of O'Brien, who is the personification of Big Brother, says to the protagonist, Winston Smith: "We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves." And they do. The bureaucrats in the Ministry of Truth destroy the records of the past and publish new versions. These in turn are superseded by yet more revisions. Why? Because people without memory are at the mercy of the powers that be; there is nothing against which to measure what they are told today. History is obliterated.
The late scholar Cleanth Brooks of Yale thought there were three great enemies of democracy. He called them "The Bastard Muses": Propaganda, which pleads sometimes unscrupulously, for a special cause at the expense of the total truth; sentimentality, which works up emotional responses unwarranted by, and in excess of, the occasion; and pornography, which focuses upon one powerful human drive at the expense of the total human personality. The poet Czeslaw Milosz identified another enemy of democracy when, upon accepting the Noble Prize for Literature, he said "Our planet that gets smaller every year, with its fantastic proliferation of mass media, is witnessing a process that escapes definition, characterized by a refusal to remember." Memory is crucial to democracy; historical amnesia, its nemesis.
Against these tendencies it is an uphill fight to stay the course of factual broadcasting. We have to keep reassuring ourselves and one another that it matters and we have to join forces to defend and safeguard our independence. I learned this early on.
When I collaborated with the producer Sherry Jones on the very first documentary ever about the purchase of government favors by political action committees, we unfurled across the Capitol grounds yard after yard of computer printouts listing campaign contributions to every member of Congress. The broadcast infuriated just about everyone, including old friends of mine who a few years earlier had been allies when I worked at the White House. Congressmen friendly to public television were also outraged, but, I am pleased to report, PBS took the heat without melting.
But shining the spotlight on political corruption is nothing compared to what can happen if you raise questions about corporate power in Washington, as my colleague Marty Koughan and I discovered when we produced a program for David Fanning and "Frontline" on pesticides and food. Marty had learned that industry was attempting behind closed doors to dilute the findings of the American Academy of Sciences study on the effects of pesticide residues on children. Before we finished the documentary, the industry somehow purloined a copy of our draft script - we still aren't certain how - and mounted a sophisticated and expensive campaign to discredit our program before it aired. Television reviewers and editorial pages of key newspapers were flooded with propaganda. Some public television managers were so unnerved by the blitz of misleading information about a film they had not yet broadcast that they actually protested to PBS with letters that had been prepared by the industry.
Here's what most perplexed us: the American Cancer Society - an organization that in no way figured in our story - sent to its 3,000 local chapters a "critique" of the unfinished documentary claiming, wrongly, that it exaggerated the dangers of pesticides in food. We were puzzled. Why was the American Cancer Society taking the unusual step of criticizing a documentary that it had not seen, that had not aired and that did not claim what the Society alleged? An enterprising reporter named Sheila Kaplan later looked into those questions for the journal Legal Times. It turns out that the Porter Novelli public relations firm, which had worked for several chemical companies, also did pro bono work for the American Cancer Society. Kaplan found that the firm was able to cash in some of the goodwill from that "charitable" work to persuade the compliant communications staff at the Society to distribute some harsh talking point about the documentary before it aired - talking points that had been supplied by, but not attributed to, Porter Novelli. Legal Times headlined the story "Porter Novelli Plays All Sides." A familiar Washington game.
Others also used the American Cancer Society's good name in efforts to tarnish the journalism before it aired, none more invidiously than the right-wing polemicist Reed Irvine, who pumped his sludge through an organization with the Orwellian name Accuracy in Media. He attacked our work as "junk science on PBS" and demanded Congress pull the plug on public broadcasting. Fortunately, PBS once again stood firm. The documentary aired, the journalism held up and the publicity liberated the National Academy of Sciences to release the study that the industry had tried to cripple.
However, there's always another round; the sharks are always circling. Sherry Jones and I spent more than a year working on another PBS documentary called "Trade Secrets," a two-hour investigative special based on revelations - found in the industry's own archives - that big chemical companies had deliberately withheld from workers and consumers damaging information about toxic chemicals in their products. These internal industry documents are a fact. They exist. They are not a matter of opinion or point of view. They state what the companies knew, when they knew it and what they did with what they knew (namely to deep-six it) at peril to those who worked with and consumed the potentially lethal products.
The revelations portrayed deep and pervasive corruption in a major American industry and raised critical policy implications about the safety of living under a regulatory system manipulated by the industry itself. If the public and government regulators had known what the industry knew about the health risks of its products when the industry knew it, America's laws and regulations governing chemical manufacturing would have been far more protective of human health. But the industry didn't want us to know. That's what the documents revealed and that was the story the industry fought to keep us from telling.
The industry hired as an ally a public relations firm in Washington noted for using private detectives and former CIA, FBI and drug enforcement officers to conduct investigations for corporations under critical scrutiny. One of the company's founders acknowledged that corporations may need to resort to "deceit" and other unconventional resources to counter public scrutiny. Given the scurrilous campaign that was conducted to smear our journalism, his comments were an understatement. To complicate matters, the Congressman, who for years had been the single biggest recipient of campaign contributions from the chemical industry, was the very member of Congress whose committee had jurisdiction over public broadcasting's appropriations. As an independent production firm, we had not used public funds to produce the documentary. But even our independence didn't stop the corporate mercenaries from bringing relentless pressure on PBS not to air the broadcast. The then president of PBS, Pat Mitchell, stood tall in resisting the pressure and was vindicated: one year later, The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences awarded "Trade Secrets" an Emmy for outstanding investigative journalism.
Now, you can understand how it is that journalism became for me a continuing course in adult education. It enabled me to produce documentaries like "Trade Secrets" and out-of-the-box series like "Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth." It enabled me to cover the summits of world leaders and the daily lives of struggling families in Newark. It empowered me to explain how public elections are subverted by private money, and to how to make a poem. Journalism also provided me a passport into the world of ideas, which became my favorite beat, in no small part because I never met anyone - philosopher or physicist, historian, artist, writer, scientist, entrepreneur or social critic - who didn't teach me something I hadn't known, something that enlarged my life.
Here's an example: One of my favorite of all interviews was with my sainted fellow Texan, the writer and broadcaster John Henry Faulk, who had many years earlier, been the target of a right-wing smear campaign that resulted in his firing by CBS from his job as a radio host here in New York, one of the low moments in that network's history. But John Henry fought back in court and won a landmark legal victory against his tormentors. After he returned home to Texas, I did the last interview with him before his death in 1990. He told me the story of how he and his friend Boots Cooper were playing in the chicken coop when they were about 12 years old. They spied a chicken snake in the top tier of nests, so close it looked like a boa constrictor. As John Henry put it, "All our frontier courage drained out our heels - actually it trickled down our overall legs - and Boots and I made a new door through that henhouse wall." Hearing all the commotion Boots' momma came out and said, "Don't you boys know chicken snakes are harmless? They can't harm you." And Boots, rubbing his forehead and behind at the same time, said, "Yes, Mrs. Faulk, I know that, but they can scare you so bad, it'll cause you to hurt yourself." John Henry Faulk told me that's a lesson he never forgot. Over and again I've tried to remember it, too, calling on it to restore my resolve and my soul.
I've had a wonderful life in broadcasting, matriculating as a perpetual student in the school of journalism. Other people have paid the tuition and travel and I've never really had to grow up and get a day job. I think it's because journalism has been so good to me that I am sad when I hear or read that factual broadcasting is passé - that television as a venue for forensic journalism is on its way out and that trying to find out "what really happened" - which is our mandate - is but a quaint relic in an age of post-structuralism and cyberspace. But despite all our personal electronic devices, people are watching more television than ever. Much of this programming is posted online; I believe at least half the audience for my last two weekly series on Friday night came over the weekend via streaming video, iPods and TIVO. I was pleased to discover that the web sites most frequented by educators are those of PBS and that our own sites were among the most popular destinations. That's what keeps us going, isn't it? The knowledge that all the bias and ignorance notwithstanding, facts still matter to critical thinking, that if we respect and honor, even revere them, they just might help us right the ship of state before it rams the iceberg.
That's why, on balance, I count WikiLeaks a plus for democracy. Whatever side you take on the controversy, whether or not you think this information should be disclosed, all parties - those who want it released and those who don't - acknowledge that information matters. Partly because I grew up in the south and partly because of my experience in the Johnson White House, I'm on the side of disclosure, even when it hurts. The truth about slavery had been driven from the pulpits, newsrooms and classrooms during the antebellum days; it took a bloody civil war to drive the truth home. At the Johnson White House, we circled the wagons and grew intolerant of news that didn't conform to our hopes, expectations and strategies for Vietnam, with terrible, tragic results for Americans and Vietnamese, north and south. I say: "Never again!"
Here's a sidebar: I remember vividly the day President Johnson signed the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA): July 4, 1966. He signed it "with a deep sense of pride," declaring in almost lyrical language "that the United States is an open society in which the people's right to know is cherished and guarded." That's what he said. The truth is, the president had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the signing ceremony. He hated the very idea of journalists rummaging in government closets, hated them challenging the authorized view of reality, hated them knowing what he didn't want them to know. He dug in his heels and even threatened to pocket veto the bill after it reached the White House. Only the courage and political skill of a Congressman named John Moss got the bill passed at all and that was after a 12-year battle against his Congressional elders, who blinked every time the sun shined on the dark corners of power. They managed to cripple the bill Moss had drafted and, even then, only some last-minute calls to LBJ from a handful of influential newspaper editors overcame the president's reluctance. He signed "the f------ thing," as he called it and then, lo and behold, went out to claim credit for it.
It's always a fight to find out what the government doesn't want us to know. The official obsession with secrecy is all the more disturbing today because the war on terrorism is a war without limits, without a visible enemy or decisive encounters. We don't know where the clandestine war is going on or how much it's costing and whether it's in the least effective. Even in Afghanistan, most of what we know comes from official, usually military, sources.
Thus, a relative handful of people have enormous power to keep us in the dark. And when those people are in league with their counterparts in powerful corporations, the public is hit with a double whammy. We're usually told the issue is national security, but keeping us from finding out about the danger of accidents at chemical plants is not about national security; it's about covering up an industry's indiscretions and liabilities. Locking up the secrets of meetings with energy executives is not about national security; it's about hiding confidential memos sent to the White House showing the influence of oil companies on policies of global warming We only learned about that memo from the Bush White House, by the way, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act.
Consider WikiLeaks, then, to be one big FOIA dump. Were some people in high places embarrassed? Perhaps. They did squeal, but I don't think they were stuck.
And even so, we learned some important things from WikiLeaks. For example, as Reza Alsan writes in The Atlantic, the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, may not be as fanatical as we think he is; the diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks portray him as "a moderate reformer who'd like to cut deals with the West, but can't because hard-liners are calling the shots." One of them even slapped Ahmadinejad across the face when, at a high-level meeting. he proposed that the government allow more personal and press freedom at the height of the 2009 public protests in Iran. Such information can help us evaluate the incessant demands of neoconservative warmongers - the very people who rode the circuit with news of "weapons of mass destruction" in an effort to build support for invading Iraq - that we use military force against Iran to eliminate its nuclear capacity.
There are other uses of the disclosures from WikiLeaks admirably compiled by Greg Mitchell in the current edition of The Nation, where the one-time editor of Editor and Publisher performed an important public service by culling the gold from the dust.
I will close with an urgent appeal to you about one fight we won't win unless all of us join it. I'm sure everyone here agrees that we will eventually be moving to the web, all of us and that "free, instant, worldwide connectivity" is the future. But I'm sure you know that this incredible, free, open Internet highway is at risk, that corporations are on the brink of muscling their way to the front of the line. Media companies want the power to censor Internet content they don't like, to put toll booths on the web so they can charge more for the privilege of driving in the fast lanes, to turn it into a private preserve.
You may have heard that last month the FCC decided to protect free/open Internet access only on landline connections, not wireless - which is to say, there's no net neutrality in most of the online world. As Jenn Ettinger of the nonpartisan, nonprofit Free Press reported in Yes! magazine just two days ago:
The rules that the FCC passed in December are vague and weak. The limited protections that were placed on wired connections, the kind you access through your home computer, leave the door open for the phone and cable companies to develop fast and slow lanes on the Web and to favor their own content or applications.
Worse, the rules also explicitly allow wireless carriers ... to block applications for any reason and to degrade and de-prioritize websites you access using your cell phone or a device like an iPad.
Perhaps the FCC is biding its time, waiting to see how things develop technologically, with the current FCC chair seemingly more open to citizen input than was his predecessor. Or, again, maybe the landline regulation was meant simply to get media reformers off the commission's back. We can't relax our vigilance. In Ettinger's words:
The FCC still has the opportunity to put in place a solid framework that would put the public interest above the profit motive of the phone and cable companies that it is supposed to regulate. And the FCC should take immediate steps to close the loopholes it created, to strengthen its rules and to include wireless protections. The fight is far from over. We can work to change the rules, demand better oversight and consumer protections and make sure that the big companies can't pad their bottom lines on the backs of their customers.
In this effort, we have a strong ally in FCC commissioner Michael Copps, who. on my broadcast last year, spelled out how "our future is going to ride on broadband. How we get a job is going to ride on broadband. How we take care of our health. How we educate ourselves about our responsibilities as citizens ... And it's absolutely imperative that we have a place, that we have a venue to go to, to make sure that that Internet is kept open ... That's our decision to make as a people, as citizens: who's going to control this ultimately?"
With all the media consolidation that's happening today, the web may be the last stand of independent factual broadcasters like you. The stakes are high and we have come to the decisive round. I'll leave you with a story Joseph Campbell told me years ago for my series "The Power of Myth." It seems a fellow rounding the corner saw a fight break out down the block. Running up to one of the bystanders, he shouted: "Is this a private fight or can anyone get in it?"
The Internet fight for democracy is a public fight. Come on in!
Friday, February 4, 2011
Reagan at 100 - The Truth vs. The Myth
Tear Down This Myth
Wednesday 28 January 2009
by: Will Bunch, t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Last week didn't only mark the inauguration of Barack Obama. January 20, 2009, was also a less noticed anniversary - marking 20 years to the day that the 40th president, Ronald Reagan, said his final goodbye to the Oval Office. During those two decades since, the world evolved, and the man who some called a Great Communicator and others called a "Teflon president" passed away - yet, watching last year's presidential race unfold, you might have been excused if you'd thought Reagan was somehow on the ballot. In debates and in countless TV ads - mainly but not exclusively on the GOP side - a return to Reagan-era orthodoxy in tax cuts or building up the military remained on the front burner of US politics. This, even as the American economy was collapsing from the weight of rising debt, unfettered greed on Wall Street and shortsighted energy policies - all of which trace back to the 1980s and Reagan's toxic legacy.
The fact that the myth of Ronald Reagan - promoted and perverted by a modern generation of neoconservatives - persists even with the start of the Obama administration, makes it clear that this warped legend won't die - unless we work to combat it, That's why I wrote "Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future." The book has just been released by Free Press and one can receive news by joining the official Facebook group here.
Here's an excerpt from chapter one of the book:
It was Ronald Reagan himself who, as the spotlight faded on his presidency in 1988, tried to highlight his eight-year record by reviving a quote from John Adams, that "facts are stubborn things." The moment became quite famous because the then-77-year-old president had botched it, and said that "facts are stupid things." The tragedy of American politics was that just two decades later, facts were neither stubborn nor even stupid - but largely irrelevant.
Any information about Iran-Contra or how the 1979-81 hostages were released (Rudy Giuliani had falsely claimed during the 2008 race they were freed when "the Gipper" looked Iranian leaders in the eye) that didn't fit the new official story line was being metaphorically clipped out of the newspaper and tossed down "memory hole" - the fate of any information that would have undercut Reagan's image as an all-benevolent Big Brother still guiding the conservative movement from above.
A more factual synopsis of the Reagan presidency might read like this: That Reagan was a transformative figure in American history, but his real revolution was one of public-relations-meets-politics and not one of policy. He combined his small-town heartland upbringing with a skill for story-telling that was honed on the back lots of Hollywood into a personal narrative that resonated with a majority of voters, but only after it tapped into something darker, which was white middle class resentment of 1960s unrest.
His story arc did become more optimistic and peaked at just the right moment, when Americans were tired of the "malaise" of the Jimmy Carter years and wanted someone who promised to make the nation feel good about itself again. But his positive legacy as president today hangs on events that most historians say were to some great measure out of his control: An economic recovery that was inevitable, especially when world oil prices returned to normal levels, and an end to the Cold War that was more driven by internal events in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe than Americans want to acknowledge.
His 1981 tax cut was followed quickly by tax hikes that you rarely hear about, and Reagan's real lasting achievement on that front was slashing marginal rates for the wealthy - even as rising payroll taxes socked the working class. His promise to shrink government was uttered so many time that many acolytes believe it really happened, but in fact Reagan expanded the federal payroll, added a new cabinet post, and created a huge debt that ultimately tripped up his handpicked successor, George H.W. Bush. What he did shrink was government regulation and oversight - linked to a series of unfortunate events from the savings-and-loan crisis of the late 1980s to the sub-prime mortgage crisis of the late 2000s.
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 papered over some less noble moments in foreign policy, from trading arms for Middle East hostages to an embarrassing retreat from his muddled engagement in Lebanon to unpopular adventurism in Central America. The Iran-Contra scandal that stemmed from those policies not only weakened Reagan's presidency when it happened, but it arguably undermined the respect of future presidents for the Constitution - because he essentially got away with it. Over the course of eight years, the president that some want to enshrine on Mount Rushmore rated just barely above average for modern presidents in public popularity. He left on a high note - but only after two years of shifting his policy back to the center, seeking peace with the Soviets than confrontation, reaching a balanced new tax deal with Democrats and naming a moderate justice to the Supreme Court. It was not the Reaganism invoked by today's conservatives.
There has always been a place for mythology in American democracy - the hulking granite edifices of the Capitol Mall in Washington are a powerful testament to that - but this nation has arguably never seen the kind of bold, crudely calculated and ideologically driven legend-manufacturing as has taken place with Ronald Reagan. It is a myth machine that has been spectacularly successful, launched in the mid-1990s when the conservative brand was at low ebb.
The docudrama version of the Gipper's life story, successfully sold to the American public, helped to keep united and refuel a right-wing movement that consolidated power while citing Reaganism - as separate and apart from the flesh-and-blood Reagan - for misguided policies from lowering taxes in the time of war in Iraq to maintaining that unpopular conflict in a time of increasing bloodshed and questionable gains.
Just a quick footnote: In the early days of the Obama administration, the Reagan myth looms larger than ever. Although the new Democratic regime seems likely to reverse course in some areas like global warming, in other areas they are continuing to fight the Reagan legend, not just from GOP members of Congress, but also from the Beltway punditocracy. This is especially true in the areas of taxes, where conservatives want to weigh any economic stimulus plan more heavily to tax cuts - despite a golden opportunity to create "green jobs" and undo the neglect of key infrastructure projects like mass transit, neglect that began in the 1980s. In the end, the path to America's future still requires clearing away some of the brush from the past.
--------
Will Bunch is author of the new book "Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future," published by Simon & Schuster's Free Press. He is the senior writer for the Philadelphia Daily News and author of its popular blog Attytood; his articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, The American Prospect, American Journalism Review, and elsewhere.
Wednesday 28 January 2009
by: Will Bunch, t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Last week didn't only mark the inauguration of Barack Obama. January 20, 2009, was also a less noticed anniversary - marking 20 years to the day that the 40th president, Ronald Reagan, said his final goodbye to the Oval Office. During those two decades since, the world evolved, and the man who some called a Great Communicator and others called a "Teflon president" passed away - yet, watching last year's presidential race unfold, you might have been excused if you'd thought Reagan was somehow on the ballot. In debates and in countless TV ads - mainly but not exclusively on the GOP side - a return to Reagan-era orthodoxy in tax cuts or building up the military remained on the front burner of US politics. This, even as the American economy was collapsing from the weight of rising debt, unfettered greed on Wall Street and shortsighted energy policies - all of which trace back to the 1980s and Reagan's toxic legacy.
The fact that the myth of Ronald Reagan - promoted and perverted by a modern generation of neoconservatives - persists even with the start of the Obama administration, makes it clear that this warped legend won't die - unless we work to combat it, That's why I wrote "Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future." The book has just been released by Free Press and one can receive news by joining the official Facebook group here.
Here's an excerpt from chapter one of the book:
It was Ronald Reagan himself who, as the spotlight faded on his presidency in 1988, tried to highlight his eight-year record by reviving a quote from John Adams, that "facts are stubborn things." The moment became quite famous because the then-77-year-old president had botched it, and said that "facts are stupid things." The tragedy of American politics was that just two decades later, facts were neither stubborn nor even stupid - but largely irrelevant.
Any information about Iran-Contra or how the 1979-81 hostages were released (Rudy Giuliani had falsely claimed during the 2008 race they were freed when "the Gipper" looked Iranian leaders in the eye) that didn't fit the new official story line was being metaphorically clipped out of the newspaper and tossed down "memory hole" - the fate of any information that would have undercut Reagan's image as an all-benevolent Big Brother still guiding the conservative movement from above.
A more factual synopsis of the Reagan presidency might read like this: That Reagan was a transformative figure in American history, but his real revolution was one of public-relations-meets-politics and not one of policy. He combined his small-town heartland upbringing with a skill for story-telling that was honed on the back lots of Hollywood into a personal narrative that resonated with a majority of voters, but only after it tapped into something darker, which was white middle class resentment of 1960s unrest.
His story arc did become more optimistic and peaked at just the right moment, when Americans were tired of the "malaise" of the Jimmy Carter years and wanted someone who promised to make the nation feel good about itself again. But his positive legacy as president today hangs on events that most historians say were to some great measure out of his control: An economic recovery that was inevitable, especially when world oil prices returned to normal levels, and an end to the Cold War that was more driven by internal events in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe than Americans want to acknowledge.
His 1981 tax cut was followed quickly by tax hikes that you rarely hear about, and Reagan's real lasting achievement on that front was slashing marginal rates for the wealthy - even as rising payroll taxes socked the working class. His promise to shrink government was uttered so many time that many acolytes believe it really happened, but in fact Reagan expanded the federal payroll, added a new cabinet post, and created a huge debt that ultimately tripped up his handpicked successor, George H.W. Bush. What he did shrink was government regulation and oversight - linked to a series of unfortunate events from the savings-and-loan crisis of the late 1980s to the sub-prime mortgage crisis of the late 2000s.
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 papered over some less noble moments in foreign policy, from trading arms for Middle East hostages to an embarrassing retreat from his muddled engagement in Lebanon to unpopular adventurism in Central America. The Iran-Contra scandal that stemmed from those policies not only weakened Reagan's presidency when it happened, but it arguably undermined the respect of future presidents for the Constitution - because he essentially got away with it. Over the course of eight years, the president that some want to enshrine on Mount Rushmore rated just barely above average for modern presidents in public popularity. He left on a high note - but only after two years of shifting his policy back to the center, seeking peace with the Soviets than confrontation, reaching a balanced new tax deal with Democrats and naming a moderate justice to the Supreme Court. It was not the Reaganism invoked by today's conservatives.
There has always been a place for mythology in American democracy - the hulking granite edifices of the Capitol Mall in Washington are a powerful testament to that - but this nation has arguably never seen the kind of bold, crudely calculated and ideologically driven legend-manufacturing as has taken place with Ronald Reagan. It is a myth machine that has been spectacularly successful, launched in the mid-1990s when the conservative brand was at low ebb.
The docudrama version of the Gipper's life story, successfully sold to the American public, helped to keep united and refuel a right-wing movement that consolidated power while citing Reaganism - as separate and apart from the flesh-and-blood Reagan - for misguided policies from lowering taxes in the time of war in Iraq to maintaining that unpopular conflict in a time of increasing bloodshed and questionable gains.
Just a quick footnote: In the early days of the Obama administration, the Reagan myth looms larger than ever. Although the new Democratic regime seems likely to reverse course in some areas like global warming, in other areas they are continuing to fight the Reagan legend, not just from GOP members of Congress, but also from the Beltway punditocracy. This is especially true in the areas of taxes, where conservatives want to weigh any economic stimulus plan more heavily to tax cuts - despite a golden opportunity to create "green jobs" and undo the neglect of key infrastructure projects like mass transit, neglect that began in the 1980s. In the end, the path to America's future still requires clearing away some of the brush from the past.
--------
Will Bunch is author of the new book "Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future," published by Simon & Schuster's Free Press. He is the senior writer for the Philadelphia Daily News and author of its popular blog Attytood; his articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, The American Prospect, American Journalism Review, and elsewhere.
Friday, January 21, 2011
John Ross, 1938-2011, Beat Poet, Revolutionary Journalist
This Sunday on KHSU at Sista's Place 2:30-4:pm, Sista Soul rebroadcast parts of a 1993 show that she did with John Ross as guest host. It is John exactly as we know and love him.
You can listen online at : khsu.streamguys.net/10030.mp3
There will be a memorial for John Ross in Humboldt County sometime in March. A notice will go out on the Redwood Progressive listserve, if you are not already, you can become a subscriber here: http://ourhumboldt.org/cgi-bin/dada/mail.cgi/list/progressive/
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Counterpunch
All the Right Enemies
A Farewell to the Utterly Unique John Ross
By FRANK BARDACKE
Jan 17th 2011
John’s gone. John Ross. I doubt that we will ever see anyone remotely like him again.
The bare bones, as he would say, are remarkable enough. Born to show business Communists in New York City in 1938, he had minded Billie Holliday’s dog, sold dope to Dizzy Gillespie, and vigiled at the hour of the Rosenberg execution, all before he was sixteen years old. An aspiring beat poet, driven by D.H. Lawrence’s images of Mexico, he arrived at the Tarascan highlands of Michoacan at the age of twenty, returning to the U.S. six years later in 1964, there to be thrown in the Federal Penitentiary at San Pedro, for refusing induction into the army.
Back on the streets of San Francisco eighteen months later, he joined the Progressive Labor Movement, then a combination of old ex-CPers fleeing the debased party and young poets and artists looking for revolutionary action. For a few years he called the hip, crazy, Latino 24th and Mission his “bio-region,” as he ran from the San Francisco police and threw dead rats at slumlords during street rallies of the once powerful Mission Coalition.
When the not so ex-Stalinists drove him and others out of P.L. (“break the poets’ pencils” was the slogan of the purge) he moved up north to Arcata where he became an early defender of the forest and the self-described town clown and poet in residence. From there it was Tangier and the Maghreb, the Basque country, anti-nuke rallies in Ireland, and then back to San Francisco, where he finally found his calling as a journalist. “Investigative poet” was the title he preferred, and in 1984, he was dispatched by Pacific News Service to Latin America, where he walked with the Sendero Luminoso, broke bread with the Tupac Amaru, and hung out with cadres of the M-19.
In 1985, after the earthquake, he moved into the Hotel Isabela in the Centro Historico of Mexico City, where for the next 25 years he wrote the very best accounts in English (no one is even a close second) of the tumultuous adventures of Mexican politics.
During the Mexican years, he managed to write nine books in English, a couple more in Spanish, and a batch of poetry chapbooks, all the while he was often on the road, taking a bus to the scene of a peasant rebellion or visiting San Francisco or becoming a human shield in Baghdad, or protecting a Palestinian olive harvest from marauding Israeli settlers.
He died this morning, a victim of liver cancer, at the age of 73, just where he wanted to, in the village of Tepizo, Michoacan, in the care of his dear friends, Kevin and Arminda.
That’s the outline of the story. Then there was John. Even in his seventies, a tall imposing figure with a narrow face, a scruffy goatee and mustache, a Che T-shirt covered by a Mexican vest, a Palestinian battle scarf thrown around his neck, bags of misery and compassion under his eyes, offset by his wonderful toothless smile and the cackling laugh that punctuated his comical riffs on the miserable state of the universe.
He was among the last of the beats, master of the poetic rant, committed to the exemplary public act, always on the side of the poor and defeated. His tormentors defined him. A sadistic prison dentist pulled six of his teeth. The San Francisco Tac Squad twice bludgeoned his head, ruining one eye and damaging the other. The guards of Mexico’s vain, poet-potentate Octavio Paz beat him to the ground in a Mexico City airport, and continued to kick him while he was down. Israeli settlers pummeled him with clubs until he bled, and wrecked his back forever.
He had his prickly side. He hated pretense, pomposity and unchecked power wherever he found it. Losing was important to him. Whatever is the dictionary opposite of an opportunist—that’s what John was. He never got along with an editor, and made it a matter of principle to bite the hand that fed him. It got so bad, he left so few bridges unburnt, that in order to read his wonderful weekly dispatches in the pre-internet years, I had to subscribe to an obscure newsletter, a compilation of Latin American news, and then send more money to get the editors to send along John’s column. [John had a relationship lasting many years with CounterPunch, publishing hundreds of dispatches, with only trifling hiccups with the editors. AC/JSC.]
He had his sweet side, too. He was intensely loyal to his friends, generous with all he had, proud of his children, grateful for Elizabeth’s support and collaboration, and wonderful, warm company at an evening meal. When my son, Ted, arrived in Mexico in 1990, John helped him get a job, find a place to live, introduced him around, and became his Sunday companion and confidant, as they huddled in front of John’s 11-inch TV watching the weekly broadcasts of NBA games.
He was a great, true sports fan, especially of basketball. One of the last times I saw him was at a friend’s house in San Francisco, in between radiation treatments, watching a Warriors game on a big screen TV, smoking what he still called the “killer weed.” Joe and I listened to him recount NY Knicks history, the origin of the jump shot, and Kareem’s last game, which somehow led to a long complaint about kidneys for sale in Mexico that had been harvested in China out of the still warm body of some poor, rural immigrant who had been legally executed for jaywalking in Beijing.
The very last time I had the pleasure of his company was at breakfast in Los Angeles when Ted and I saw him off on his last book tour, promoting El Monstruo, his loving history of Mexico City. He was in great form. His cancer was in remission—a “cancer resister,” he called himself—and he entertained us with a preview of his trip: long, tiresome Greyhound rides, uncomfortable couches, talks to tiny groups of the marginalized, the last defenders of lost causes without the money to buy his books. It would be a losing proposition, like so many of his others, all of which secure his place among the angels.
Frank Bardacke taught at Watsonville Adult School, California’s Central Coast, for 25 years. His history of the United Farm Workers and Cesar Chavez, Trampled in the Vintage, is forthcoming from Verso. He can be reached at bardacke@sbcglobal.com
http://www.counterpunch.org/bardacke01182011.html
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The Nation
Rebel Journalist John Ross, the Master of Speaking Truth to Power, Is Dead
John Nichols | January 18, 2011
When the brave and brilliant journalist John Ross was offered official honors by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 2009—for telling "stories nobody else could or would tell"—he refused the recognition. He then recalled having run unsuccessfully for the board in the "Summer of Love" year of 1967—with a perfect think globally, act locally slogan: "Rent Control Now! Out of Vietnam!"—demanded his election filing fee back and complained about how when he had appeared before the board in the 1960s and 1970s as a tenant rights organizer "certain disgruntled board members would signal San Francisco County deputies to throw a hammerlock on me, drag me out of the chambers, and book me at the so-called Hall of Justice on charges of disturbing the peace."
As another fine reporter, San Francisco Bay Guardian editor Tim Redmond recalled , "Typically, when people are honored by the supervisors, they thank the board, praise the wonders of this city and politely and meekly receive their award. Not John Ross. The half-blind, half deaf rabble rouser made a short statement in which he managed to insult city government, denounce the entire process of giving out awards and demand that the board reject the Muni fare hike. Then he read a poem denouncing the "motherfuckers" who are driving poor people out of the Mission."
On a roll, Ross recounted repeated clashes with authorities, in San Francisco, Baghdad and Palestine. He put them all in the context of his practice of journalism—not the drab stenography to power practiced by so many reporters, but the vibrant speak-truth-to-power reporting and activism that saw Ross repeatedly risk his life to tell great stories and to demand that political and economic elites respond.
"Life, like reporting, is a kind of death sentence," Ross told the supervisors. "Pardon me for having lived it so fully."
As epitaphs go, that is a good one for Ross, who died this week in Mexico, where he had for five decades chronicled the struggles of indigenous people and the poor for justice. The activist author who in 1995 received the American Book Award for his groundbreaking book Rebellion from the Roots: Zapatista Uprising in Chiapas (Common Courage Press), died Monday at age 72 after a last battle with liver cancer.
In addition to the American Book Award, Ross collected the Upton Sinclair Award in 2005 for his epic tome Murdered By Capitalism: 150 Years of Life and Death on the American Left (Nation Books). His editor, Carl Bromley, recalls that, "I worked with John for seven years, on three books. It was an extraordinary education for me. I took the greatest pride when Thomas Pynchon faxed the office with a huge endorsement for John's book, Murdered By Capitalism." Pynchon described the book as "a ripsnorting and honorable account of an outlaw tradition in American politics, which too seldom gets past the bouncers at the gateway of our national narrative."
Ross also penned books of poetry and, as a child of the Beat Generation and the jazz clubs of 1950s New York, some of the most politically informed cultural writing of our time. His 2009 book, El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City (Nation Books), was part people's history, part love letter to the city where Ross lived on and off for decades. "Of all his books, I think El Monstruo, his last, was my favorite of his, an extraordinary, phantasmagoric personal history of Mexico City, told over the last 5 million years," says Bromley. "I rate him with Galeano."
There is so much more to be said about the remarkable Ross, but he was a wordsmith. So let's give him the last word.
Here, in full, is his statement from 2009 to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors:
Forty years ago when I would appear before this honorable board as an organizer for the Mission Tenants Union to protest the devastation of working class housing in our neighborhood, certain disgruntled board members would signal San Francisco County deputies to throw a hammerlock on me, drag me out of the chambers, and book me at the so-called Hall of Justice on charges of disturbing the peace.
To prevent a repeat of these painful events, I ask my companeros and companeras to join me at the podium today and watch my back.
Punishment for the commission of the crime of independent journalism can be harsh. I have danced with death throughout my checkered career—May 1st 1986, the 100th anniversary of International Workers Day on the streets of Santiago Chile when I inadvertently walked into one of Pinochet's machine guns; climbing into a guerrilla camp in the Cauca Valley of Colombia; at the end of a road to a Waste Management toxic incinerator above Playas de Tijuana where some company goon took 13 potshots at my person—when I called the Examiner for whom I then slaved, I was told to forget all about it.
Death was on our plate when we set out for Baghdad to place our bodies between Bush's bombs and the Iraqi people in March 2003 and when I went picking olives with Palestinian farmers in the Nablus Valley where Israeli settlers beat me within an inch of my life.
Life like reporting is a kind of death sentence. Pardon me for having lived it so fully.
I have mulled too long about whether or not to accept an honor from a city that has become nothing less than a sanctuary for the rich. This was once a sanctuary city for the refugees of U.S. wars in Latin America—now the indocumentados are being rousted, jailed, and sent back to their devastated home countries from right here in Sanctuary City. I have debated receiving an honor from a city where greedy landlords bleed their tenants dry, a city that pushes the poor into the street and treats the homeless like so many cockroaches, a city where the police continue to run riot in neighborhoods of color—a few weeks ago, recuperating from liver cancer chemotherapy I was slammed twice in the chest and threatened with being sent back to hospital by a Mission District cop while I witnessed a rough arrest on Valencia and 24th—you can read all about it in my citizens' complaint recently reprinted in the Bay Guardian.
How can I accept an honor from a city that cloaks itself in rampant hypocrisy and the fake green of filthy lucre?
The truth is I cannot. Thanks anyway.
Hell, I don't even live here anymore. For the past 25 years, I have been an expat holed up in the Centro Historico of Mexico City, an exile from the racist social and economic policies of the United States of North America.Instead of drawing up hollow proclamations "honoring" derelict beat poets and wild parrots, the Board of Supervisors would do well to honor the poor and working class citizens of this city who struggle daily to survive here in this lap of luxury by making San Francisco a place where they can still live. One place to start is by nullifying the outrageous Muni fare hikes that will soon come before you.
There is one more thing you can do for me today. In 1967, I ran for the Board of Supervisors under the banner of "Rent Control Now! Out of Vietnam!" We paid our registration fee and five days later I was attacked by the SFPD after an anti-police brutality rally at the old Mission station—I eventually lost my left eye as a result of this attack. The notoriety attracted the interest of a candidate with a similar name—Tom Ross—who had me barred from the ballot after he discovered that I was an ex-felon—I was the first U.S. citizen to be sent to federal prison for refusing induction in the Vietnam-era military. When we demanded our filing fee returned the county registrar refused. On election day, people who voted for me were arrested for tampering with the voting machines.
I want my filing fee back. With interest.
As a veteran San Francisco performing poet, I am obligated to leave the Board with a poem from a recent collection "Against Amnesia."
RONCO Y DULCE
Coming out of the underground
On the BART escalator,
The Mission sky
Is washed by autumn,
The old men and their garbage bags
Are clustered in the battered plaza
We once named for Cesar Augusto Sandino.
Behind me down below
In the throat of the earth
A rough bracero sings
Of his comings and goings
In a voice as ronco y dulce
As the mountains of Michoacan and Jalisco
For the white zombies
Careening downtown
To the dot coms.
They are trying to kick us
Out of here
Again
They are trying to drain
This neighborhood of color
Of color
Again.
This time we are not moving on.
We are going to stick to this barrio
Like the posters so fiercely pasted
To the walls of La Mision
With iron glue
That they will have to take them down
Brick by brick
To make us go away
And even then our ghosts
Will come home
And turn those bricks
Into weapons
And take back our streets
Brick by brick
And song by song
Ronco y dulce
As Jalisco and Michaocan
Managua, Manila, Ramallah
Pine Ridge, Vietnam, and Africa.
As my compa QR say
We here now motherfuckers
Tell the Klan and the Nazis
And the Real Estate vampires
To catch the next BART out of here
For Hell.
Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/blog/157839/rebel-journalist-john-ross-master-speaking-truth-power-dead
Links:
http://www.johnross-rebeljournalist.com/
http://www.sfbg.com/politics/2009/05/13/john-ross-takes-no-prisoners
http://www.amazon.com/Rebellion-Roots-Indian-Uprising-Chiapas/dp/1567510426/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1295386511&sr=1-1
http://www.wtop.com/?nid=389&sid=2237821
http://www.amazon.com/Murdered-Capitalism-Memoir-American-Nation/dp/1560255781/ref=pd_sim_b_3
http://www.amazon.com/El-Monstruo-Dread-Redemption-Mexico/dp/1568584245/ref=pd_sim_b_5
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/nationnow/id399704758?mt=8
http://www.thenation.com/blog/157839/rebel-journalist-john-ross-master-speaking-truth-power-dead#post-your-comments
----
Village Voice
New York Legends
John Ross, 1938-2011, Beat Poet, Revolutionary Journalist
By Tom Robbins, Tue., Jan. 18 2011
John Ross -- beat-era poet and revolution-championing journalist -- died this week in Mexico of liver cancer. He was 72 --- or was it 73? The Associated Press says the former,Counterpunch's Frank Bardacke, another veteran of the Bay Area left, says the latter. Whatever, the age matters less than the life lived, and Ross got the most out of whatever years he had.
He was mainly a West Coast phenomenon these past few decades, but Ross's roots were here in the Village where he was a true child of the early beat era. But even if the name is new to you, John Ross's passing is worth noting if only to confirm that these marvelous characters once walked the earth, and their kind is not likely to pass this way again.
For starters, there were Ross's travels with Latin American revolutionaries, including the secretive Zapatistas of Chiapas province in Mexico whose story he told in "Rebellion From the Roots," which won an American Book Award in 1995.
Then there's his autobiography, "Murdered by Capitalism: A Memoir of 150 Years on the American Left," Nation Books, 2004. Thomas Pynchon, whose praise is almost as hard to find as his picture, dubbed it "a rip-snorting and honorable account of an outlaw tradition in American politics which too seldom gets past the bouncers at the gates of our national narrative."
In between there was poetry and politics, and lots of it. The poems were published in ten little chapbooks (Bomba! was his most recent), and read aloud alongside Lawrence Ferlinghetti, both in Mexico City and at City Lights in San Francisco.
That was his Village roots showing through. Ross did his first public poetry reading as a teenager from the stage of the Half-Note, after Charles Mingus had finished playing. Backstage at Town Hall, he sold a joint to Dizzy Gillespie. He helped Max Gordon book Jack Kerouac into a disastrous week-long gig at the Village Vanguard, and did promo for one of the Voice's first events - a Billie Holiday concert at the old Loew's Sheraton on Seventh Avenue. Lady Day arrived hours late. Ross was thrilled because he got to hold her tiny dog.
As for the politics, it earned him a year in the federal can for refusing induction into the army in 1964,one of the first to take that ultimate stand. He later hooked up with the then pro-poet and pro-Maoist Progressive Labor Party and ran for election in 1967 to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors on its ticket. When police broke up a rally during that summer of love, Ross caught a nightstick in the face leaving him with an eye injury from which he never fully recovered. Years later, he caught another beating, this time from Israeli settlers when he tried to help Palestinian farmers pick olives from their own fields in Nablus.
He tried to put himself in harm's way again in 2006, when he went to Iraq on the eve of the war where he tried to serve as a "human shield." Saddam's minders considered him a threat and booted him from the country. A year ago, as John Nichols writes in The Nation, where Ross was a contributor, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors - now loaded with sympathizers - tried to honor Ross. Nothing doing. He denounced them as toadies who were throwing poor people out of the Mission.
John Ross. Live like him.
http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2011/01/john_ross_1938-.php
---
Mobylives
Hail & Farewell: John Ross
20 January 2011
Our friend and colleague Carl Bromley, the editorial director ofNation Books, wrote to us yesterday with the news that John Ross had died Monday the 17th. He was 72. The activist journalist, poet, and novelist, described in Tim Redmond‘s San Francisco Bay Guardian eulogy as an “uncontrollable shit disturber,” had lived in Mexico City as a self-described “exile from the racist social and economic policies of the United States of North America.”
Ross wrote his own epitaph, and that of the noisy and violent form of political life which he advocated, in Murdered by Capitalism: A Memoir of 150 years of Life and Death on the American Left, “… a highly idiosyncratic account of industrial trade unionism, the socialist, communist, and anarchist movements, government repression …”
On the book’s cover is an endorsement by Thomas Pynchon, a friend from Ross’s Humboldt County days: “A ripsnorting and honorable account of an outlaw tradition in American politics which too seldom gets past the bouncers at the gateways of our national narrative.”
In his July 2004 Harper’s Magazine review (subscription only), the late John Leonarddescribed the then sixty-six-year-old author as a “Huck Finn/Holden Caulfield/Dennis the Menace/Weatherman wannabe and subversive journalist … who’s been on the losing side of every cause since the Spanish Civil War.” According to Carl, who published three of Ross’s more than twenty books, Ross loved it.
Ross began writing for the San Francisco Bay Guardian in 1984 and is credited with being the first American to report the 1993 Zapatista rebellion, in the Anderson Valley Advertiser. After reporting on the deadly 1985 earthquake in Mexico City, Ross made his home there, at the Hotel Isabel. In 1995, Ross won the American Book Award forRebellion from the Roots: Indian Uprising in Chiapas. In 2003, he volunteered as human shield in Baghdad, protecting Iraqi civilians from attack; according to Redmond in his Bay Guardian remembrance, Ross signed his emails, “John Ross, humanshield”
Redmond also reported Ross’s refusal, in 2009, to be honored by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors:
“Typically, when people are honored by the supervisors, they thank the board, praise the wonders of this city and politely and meekly receive their award. Not John Ross. The half-blind, half deaf rabble rouser made a short statement in which he managed to insult city government, denounce the entire process of giving out awards and demand that the board reject the Muni fare hike. Then he read a poem denouncing the “motherfuckers” who are driving poor people out of the Mission.”
In this Democracy Now! appearance from April 2010, Ross talks about life in his adopted city, the subject of his last book, El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City “a phantasmagoric retelling” of “4,000,000,000 years of history,” reviewed by Iain Sinclairas “Coruscating and necessary. Here is one of those rare books that convinces from the first sentence: a writer embedded in his writing, wholly present in the subject, leading us with savage grace to the heart of the beast.”
Ross is survived by his son, Dante A. Ross, a daughter, Carla Ross-Allen, and a granddaughter, Zoe Ross-Allen, as well as a stepdaughter, Dylan Melbourne and her daugther Honore, as well as a sister, Susan Gardner.
Let Redmond have the last word:
When John Ross left Terminal Island, the federal prison in Los Angeles, after serving a couple of years for refusing the Vietnam draft, the warden shook his head and said: “Ross, you never learned how to be a prisoner.”
I’m not writing the epitaph for whatever gravestone he has or doesn’t have, wherever it might be in the world, but that’s what I’d put on it: “John Ross, 1938-2011. Never learned how to be a prisoner.”
http://mhpbooks.com/mobylives/?p=27075
----
John Ross, author, poet, journalist, dies
John Coté, S.F. Chronicle
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
John Ross, an author, poet, liberal activist and journalist who toiled against perceived injustice from the jungles of Chiapas, Mexico, to the baked streets of Baghdad, died Monday of liver cancer at Lake Patzcuaro in Mexico. He was 72.
"The word 'passionate' is overused a lot these days - but he was," said Mary Jo McConahay, a friend and former colleague of Ross' at Pacific News Service in San Francisco.
Mr. Ross was jailed for refusing to be drafted in the Vietnam War era, was the first person to chronicle in English the pending uprising of indigenous Zapatistas in Mexico's Chiapas state, and went to Iraq on the eve of the U.S. invasion in 2003 to serve as a human shield, although Iraqi officials forced him and other volunteers out of country.
In refusing a commendation at San Francisco's Board of Supervisors in May 2009 because the city "has become nothing less than a sanctuary for the rich," Mr. Ross said he had faced "one of (Augusto) Pinochet's machine guns" in Chile in 1986; climbed into a guerrilla camp in the Cauca Valley of Colombia; and been shot at 13 times by "some company goon" when he went to investigate a toxic incinerator in Tijuana, Mexico.
"Life, like reporting, is a kind of death sentence," he told the board. "Pardon me for having lived it so fully."
His reporting appeared in the San Francisco Examiner, CounterPunch, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Pacific News Service, Pacifica Radio, LA Weekly and others, including the Mexico City daily La Jornada.
A young member of the Beat generation, Mr. Ross authored 10 chapbooks of poetry and 10 books of fiction and nonfiction. He received the American Book Award in 1995 for "Rebellion From the Roots: Zapatista Uprising in Chiapas" and the Upton Sinclair Award in 2005 for "Murdered By Capitalism: 150 Years of Life and Death on the American Left."
Bruce Brugmann, editor and publisher of the Bay Guardian, called him "a terribly unusual talent."
"If you sent him over to City Hall, you'd get a helluva story," Brugmann said. "It wouldn't be on some measure. He wouldn't cover the hearing. He wouldn't cover the vote. He'd have something lyrical that would get to the political point."
Born in New York City on March 11, 1938, to parents who were committed leftists, Mr. Ross grew up in Greenwich Village surrounded by jazz, Beat poetry, abstract expressionist painting and radical politics, according to his biography.
By age 18, Mr. Ross was reading his poems in Greenwich Village bars accompanied by renowned bass player Charles Mingus, according to his official biography. In 1957, he followed the trail other Beat writers had cut to Mexico City, then lived in an indigenous community in the Michoacan state.
He returned to United States in the early 1960s, was jailed for refusing to be drafted, and was sent to a federal lockup. When he was released after about two years, he went to San Francisco, where he became a community activist in the Mission District for housing, civil rights and other issues.
Mr. Ross ran for the Board of Supervisors in 1967 under the slogan "Rent Control Now! Out of Vietnam!" But five days after paying his registration fee, Mr. Ross said he was attacked by San Francisco police at an anti-police brutality rally, and suffered injuries he says resulted in him losing use of his left eye. Ross said he was then barred from the ballot over his draft-dodging conviction. The county registrar refused to refund his candidate filing fee.
"I want my filing fee back - with interest," Mr. Ross, in a good-humored tone, told the Board of Supervisors 42 years later when May 12, 2009, was declared John Ross Day. He is survived by his sister, Susan Gardner; children, Dante Ross of New York and Carla Ross-Allen of New York; and one grandchild, Zoe Ross-Allen.
Memorial services will be announced at a later date.
E-mail John Coté at jcote@sfchronicle.com.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/01/19/BA4N1HA7Q8.DTL
--
You can listen online at : khsu.streamguys.net/10030.mp3
There will be a memorial for John Ross in Humboldt County sometime in March. A notice will go out on the Redwood Progressive listserve, if you are not already, you can become a subscriber here: http://ourhumboldt.org/cgi-bin/dada/mail.cgi/list/progressive/
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Counterpunch
All the Right Enemies
A Farewell to the Utterly Unique John Ross
By FRANK BARDACKE
Jan 17th 2011
John’s gone. John Ross. I doubt that we will ever see anyone remotely like him again.
The bare bones, as he would say, are remarkable enough. Born to show business Communists in New York City in 1938, he had minded Billie Holliday’s dog, sold dope to Dizzy Gillespie, and vigiled at the hour of the Rosenberg execution, all before he was sixteen years old. An aspiring beat poet, driven by D.H. Lawrence’s images of Mexico, he arrived at the Tarascan highlands of Michoacan at the age of twenty, returning to the U.S. six years later in 1964, there to be thrown in the Federal Penitentiary at San Pedro, for refusing induction into the army.
Back on the streets of San Francisco eighteen months later, he joined the Progressive Labor Movement, then a combination of old ex-CPers fleeing the debased party and young poets and artists looking for revolutionary action. For a few years he called the hip, crazy, Latino 24th and Mission his “bio-region,” as he ran from the San Francisco police and threw dead rats at slumlords during street rallies of the once powerful Mission Coalition.
When the not so ex-Stalinists drove him and others out of P.L. (“break the poets’ pencils” was the slogan of the purge) he moved up north to Arcata where he became an early defender of the forest and the self-described town clown and poet in residence. From there it was Tangier and the Maghreb, the Basque country, anti-nuke rallies in Ireland, and then back to San Francisco, where he finally found his calling as a journalist. “Investigative poet” was the title he preferred, and in 1984, he was dispatched by Pacific News Service to Latin America, where he walked with the Sendero Luminoso, broke bread with the Tupac Amaru, and hung out with cadres of the M-19.
In 1985, after the earthquake, he moved into the Hotel Isabela in the Centro Historico of Mexico City, where for the next 25 years he wrote the very best accounts in English (no one is even a close second) of the tumultuous adventures of Mexican politics.
During the Mexican years, he managed to write nine books in English, a couple more in Spanish, and a batch of poetry chapbooks, all the while he was often on the road, taking a bus to the scene of a peasant rebellion or visiting San Francisco or becoming a human shield in Baghdad, or protecting a Palestinian olive harvest from marauding Israeli settlers.
He died this morning, a victim of liver cancer, at the age of 73, just where he wanted to, in the village of Tepizo, Michoacan, in the care of his dear friends, Kevin and Arminda.
That’s the outline of the story. Then there was John. Even in his seventies, a tall imposing figure with a narrow face, a scruffy goatee and mustache, a Che T-shirt covered by a Mexican vest, a Palestinian battle scarf thrown around his neck, bags of misery and compassion under his eyes, offset by his wonderful toothless smile and the cackling laugh that punctuated his comical riffs on the miserable state of the universe.
He was among the last of the beats, master of the poetic rant, committed to the exemplary public act, always on the side of the poor and defeated. His tormentors defined him. A sadistic prison dentist pulled six of his teeth. The San Francisco Tac Squad twice bludgeoned his head, ruining one eye and damaging the other. The guards of Mexico’s vain, poet-potentate Octavio Paz beat him to the ground in a Mexico City airport, and continued to kick him while he was down. Israeli settlers pummeled him with clubs until he bled, and wrecked his back forever.
He had his prickly side. He hated pretense, pomposity and unchecked power wherever he found it. Losing was important to him. Whatever is the dictionary opposite of an opportunist—that’s what John was. He never got along with an editor, and made it a matter of principle to bite the hand that fed him. It got so bad, he left so few bridges unburnt, that in order to read his wonderful weekly dispatches in the pre-internet years, I had to subscribe to an obscure newsletter, a compilation of Latin American news, and then send more money to get the editors to send along John’s column. [John had a relationship lasting many years with CounterPunch, publishing hundreds of dispatches, with only trifling hiccups with the editors. AC/JSC.]
He had his sweet side, too. He was intensely loyal to his friends, generous with all he had, proud of his children, grateful for Elizabeth’s support and collaboration, and wonderful, warm company at an evening meal. When my son, Ted, arrived in Mexico in 1990, John helped him get a job, find a place to live, introduced him around, and became his Sunday companion and confidant, as they huddled in front of John’s 11-inch TV watching the weekly broadcasts of NBA games.
He was a great, true sports fan, especially of basketball. One of the last times I saw him was at a friend’s house in San Francisco, in between radiation treatments, watching a Warriors game on a big screen TV, smoking what he still called the “killer weed.” Joe and I listened to him recount NY Knicks history, the origin of the jump shot, and Kareem’s last game, which somehow led to a long complaint about kidneys for sale in Mexico that had been harvested in China out of the still warm body of some poor, rural immigrant who had been legally executed for jaywalking in Beijing.
The very last time I had the pleasure of his company was at breakfast in Los Angeles when Ted and I saw him off on his last book tour, promoting El Monstruo, his loving history of Mexico City. He was in great form. His cancer was in remission—a “cancer resister,” he called himself—and he entertained us with a preview of his trip: long, tiresome Greyhound rides, uncomfortable couches, talks to tiny groups of the marginalized, the last defenders of lost causes without the money to buy his books. It would be a losing proposition, like so many of his others, all of which secure his place among the angels.
Frank Bardacke taught at Watsonville Adult School, California’s Central Coast, for 25 years. His history of the United Farm Workers and Cesar Chavez, Trampled in the Vintage, is forthcoming from Verso. He can be reached at bardacke@sbcglobal.com
http://www.counterpunch.org/bardacke01182011.html
---
The Nation
Rebel Journalist John Ross, the Master of Speaking Truth to Power, Is Dead
John Nichols | January 18, 2011
When the brave and brilliant journalist John Ross was offered official honors by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 2009—for telling "stories nobody else could or would tell"—he refused the recognition. He then recalled having run unsuccessfully for the board in the "Summer of Love" year of 1967—with a perfect think globally, act locally slogan: "Rent Control Now! Out of Vietnam!"—demanded his election filing fee back and complained about how when he had appeared before the board in the 1960s and 1970s as a tenant rights organizer "certain disgruntled board members would signal San Francisco County deputies to throw a hammerlock on me, drag me out of the chambers, and book me at the so-called Hall of Justice on charges of disturbing the peace."
As another fine reporter, San Francisco Bay Guardian editor Tim Redmond recalled , "Typically, when people are honored by the supervisors, they thank the board, praise the wonders of this city and politely and meekly receive their award. Not John Ross. The half-blind, half deaf rabble rouser made a short statement in which he managed to insult city government, denounce the entire process of giving out awards and demand that the board reject the Muni fare hike. Then he read a poem denouncing the "motherfuckers" who are driving poor people out of the Mission."
On a roll, Ross recounted repeated clashes with authorities, in San Francisco, Baghdad and Palestine. He put them all in the context of his practice of journalism—not the drab stenography to power practiced by so many reporters, but the vibrant speak-truth-to-power reporting and activism that saw Ross repeatedly risk his life to tell great stories and to demand that political and economic elites respond.
"Life, like reporting, is a kind of death sentence," Ross told the supervisors. "Pardon me for having lived it so fully."
As epitaphs go, that is a good one for Ross, who died this week in Mexico, where he had for five decades chronicled the struggles of indigenous people and the poor for justice. The activist author who in 1995 received the American Book Award for his groundbreaking book Rebellion from the Roots: Zapatista Uprising in Chiapas (Common Courage Press), died Monday at age 72 after a last battle with liver cancer.
In addition to the American Book Award, Ross collected the Upton Sinclair Award in 2005 for his epic tome Murdered By Capitalism: 150 Years of Life and Death on the American Left (Nation Books). His editor, Carl Bromley, recalls that, "I worked with John for seven years, on three books. It was an extraordinary education for me. I took the greatest pride when Thomas Pynchon faxed the office with a huge endorsement for John's book, Murdered By Capitalism." Pynchon described the book as "a ripsnorting and honorable account of an outlaw tradition in American politics, which too seldom gets past the bouncers at the gateway of our national narrative."
Ross also penned books of poetry and, as a child of the Beat Generation and the jazz clubs of 1950s New York, some of the most politically informed cultural writing of our time. His 2009 book, El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City (Nation Books), was part people's history, part love letter to the city where Ross lived on and off for decades. "Of all his books, I think El Monstruo, his last, was my favorite of his, an extraordinary, phantasmagoric personal history of Mexico City, told over the last 5 million years," says Bromley. "I rate him with Galeano."
There is so much more to be said about the remarkable Ross, but he was a wordsmith. So let's give him the last word.
Here, in full, is his statement from 2009 to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors:
Forty years ago when I would appear before this honorable board as an organizer for the Mission Tenants Union to protest the devastation of working class housing in our neighborhood, certain disgruntled board members would signal San Francisco County deputies to throw a hammerlock on me, drag me out of the chambers, and book me at the so-called Hall of Justice on charges of disturbing the peace.
To prevent a repeat of these painful events, I ask my companeros and companeras to join me at the podium today and watch my back.
Punishment for the commission of the crime of independent journalism can be harsh. I have danced with death throughout my checkered career—May 1st 1986, the 100th anniversary of International Workers Day on the streets of Santiago Chile when I inadvertently walked into one of Pinochet's machine guns; climbing into a guerrilla camp in the Cauca Valley of Colombia; at the end of a road to a Waste Management toxic incinerator above Playas de Tijuana where some company goon took 13 potshots at my person—when I called the Examiner for whom I then slaved, I was told to forget all about it.
Death was on our plate when we set out for Baghdad to place our bodies between Bush's bombs and the Iraqi people in March 2003 and when I went picking olives with Palestinian farmers in the Nablus Valley where Israeli settlers beat me within an inch of my life.
Life like reporting is a kind of death sentence. Pardon me for having lived it so fully.
I have mulled too long about whether or not to accept an honor from a city that has become nothing less than a sanctuary for the rich. This was once a sanctuary city for the refugees of U.S. wars in Latin America—now the indocumentados are being rousted, jailed, and sent back to their devastated home countries from right here in Sanctuary City. I have debated receiving an honor from a city where greedy landlords bleed their tenants dry, a city that pushes the poor into the street and treats the homeless like so many cockroaches, a city where the police continue to run riot in neighborhoods of color—a few weeks ago, recuperating from liver cancer chemotherapy I was slammed twice in the chest and threatened with being sent back to hospital by a Mission District cop while I witnessed a rough arrest on Valencia and 24th—you can read all about it in my citizens' complaint recently reprinted in the Bay Guardian.
How can I accept an honor from a city that cloaks itself in rampant hypocrisy and the fake green of filthy lucre?
The truth is I cannot. Thanks anyway.
Hell, I don't even live here anymore. For the past 25 years, I have been an expat holed up in the Centro Historico of Mexico City, an exile from the racist social and economic policies of the United States of North America.Instead of drawing up hollow proclamations "honoring" derelict beat poets and wild parrots, the Board of Supervisors would do well to honor the poor and working class citizens of this city who struggle daily to survive here in this lap of luxury by making San Francisco a place where they can still live. One place to start is by nullifying the outrageous Muni fare hikes that will soon come before you.
There is one more thing you can do for me today. In 1967, I ran for the Board of Supervisors under the banner of "Rent Control Now! Out of Vietnam!" We paid our registration fee and five days later I was attacked by the SFPD after an anti-police brutality rally at the old Mission station—I eventually lost my left eye as a result of this attack. The notoriety attracted the interest of a candidate with a similar name—Tom Ross—who had me barred from the ballot after he discovered that I was an ex-felon—I was the first U.S. citizen to be sent to federal prison for refusing induction in the Vietnam-era military. When we demanded our filing fee returned the county registrar refused. On election day, people who voted for me were arrested for tampering with the voting machines.
I want my filing fee back. With interest.
As a veteran San Francisco performing poet, I am obligated to leave the Board with a poem from a recent collection "Against Amnesia."
RONCO Y DULCE
Coming out of the underground
On the BART escalator,
The Mission sky
Is washed by autumn,
The old men and their garbage bags
Are clustered in the battered plaza
We once named for Cesar Augusto Sandino.
Behind me down below
In the throat of the earth
A rough bracero sings
Of his comings and goings
In a voice as ronco y dulce
As the mountains of Michoacan and Jalisco
For the white zombies
Careening downtown
To the dot coms.
They are trying to kick us
Out of here
Again
They are trying to drain
This neighborhood of color
Of color
Again.
This time we are not moving on.
We are going to stick to this barrio
Like the posters so fiercely pasted
To the walls of La Mision
With iron glue
That they will have to take them down
Brick by brick
To make us go away
And even then our ghosts
Will come home
And turn those bricks
Into weapons
And take back our streets
Brick by brick
And song by song
Ronco y dulce
As Jalisco and Michaocan
Managua, Manila, Ramallah
Pine Ridge, Vietnam, and Africa.
As my compa QR say
We here now motherfuckers
Tell the Klan and the Nazis
And the Real Estate vampires
To catch the next BART out of here
For Hell.
Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/blog/157839/rebel-journalist-john-ross-master-speaking-truth-power-dead
Links:
http://www.johnross-rebeljournalist.com/
http://www.sfbg.com/politics/2009/05/13/john-ross-takes-no-prisoners
http://www.amazon.com/Rebellion-Roots-Indian-Uprising-Chiapas/dp/1567510426/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1295386511&sr=1-1
http://www.wtop.com/?nid=389&sid=2237821
http://www.amazon.com/Murdered-Capitalism-Memoir-American-Nation/dp/1560255781/ref=pd_sim_b_3
http://www.amazon.com/El-Monstruo-Dread-Redemption-Mexico/dp/1568584245/ref=pd_sim_b_5
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/nationnow/id399704758?mt=8
http://www.thenation.com/blog/157839/rebel-journalist-john-ross-master-speaking-truth-power-dead#post-your-comments
----
Village Voice
New York Legends
John Ross, 1938-2011, Beat Poet, Revolutionary Journalist
By Tom Robbins, Tue., Jan. 18 2011
John Ross -- beat-era poet and revolution-championing journalist -- died this week in Mexico of liver cancer. He was 72 --- or was it 73? The Associated Press says the former,Counterpunch's Frank Bardacke, another veteran of the Bay Area left, says the latter. Whatever, the age matters less than the life lived, and Ross got the most out of whatever years he had.
He was mainly a West Coast phenomenon these past few decades, but Ross's roots were here in the Village where he was a true child of the early beat era. But even if the name is new to you, John Ross's passing is worth noting if only to confirm that these marvelous characters once walked the earth, and their kind is not likely to pass this way again.
For starters, there were Ross's travels with Latin American revolutionaries, including the secretive Zapatistas of Chiapas province in Mexico whose story he told in "Rebellion From the Roots," which won an American Book Award in 1995.
Then there's his autobiography, "Murdered by Capitalism: A Memoir of 150 Years on the American Left," Nation Books, 2004. Thomas Pynchon, whose praise is almost as hard to find as his picture, dubbed it "a rip-snorting and honorable account of an outlaw tradition in American politics which too seldom gets past the bouncers at the gates of our national narrative."
In between there was poetry and politics, and lots of it. The poems were published in ten little chapbooks (Bomba! was his most recent), and read aloud alongside Lawrence Ferlinghetti, both in Mexico City and at City Lights in San Francisco.
That was his Village roots showing through. Ross did his first public poetry reading as a teenager from the stage of the Half-Note, after Charles Mingus had finished playing. Backstage at Town Hall, he sold a joint to Dizzy Gillespie. He helped Max Gordon book Jack Kerouac into a disastrous week-long gig at the Village Vanguard, and did promo for one of the Voice's first events - a Billie Holiday concert at the old Loew's Sheraton on Seventh Avenue. Lady Day arrived hours late. Ross was thrilled because he got to hold her tiny dog.
As for the politics, it earned him a year in the federal can for refusing induction into the army in 1964,one of the first to take that ultimate stand. He later hooked up with the then pro-poet and pro-Maoist Progressive Labor Party and ran for election in 1967 to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors on its ticket. When police broke up a rally during that summer of love, Ross caught a nightstick in the face leaving him with an eye injury from which he never fully recovered. Years later, he caught another beating, this time from Israeli settlers when he tried to help Palestinian farmers pick olives from their own fields in Nablus.
He tried to put himself in harm's way again in 2006, when he went to Iraq on the eve of the war where he tried to serve as a "human shield." Saddam's minders considered him a threat and booted him from the country. A year ago, as John Nichols writes in The Nation, where Ross was a contributor, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors - now loaded with sympathizers - tried to honor Ross. Nothing doing. He denounced them as toadies who were throwing poor people out of the Mission.
John Ross. Live like him.
http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2011/01/john_ross_1938-.php
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Mobylives
Hail & Farewell: John Ross
20 January 2011
Our friend and colleague Carl Bromley, the editorial director ofNation Books, wrote to us yesterday with the news that John Ross had died Monday the 17th. He was 72. The activist journalist, poet, and novelist, described in Tim Redmond‘s San Francisco Bay Guardian eulogy as an “uncontrollable shit disturber,” had lived in Mexico City as a self-described “exile from the racist social and economic policies of the United States of North America.”
Ross wrote his own epitaph, and that of the noisy and violent form of political life which he advocated, in Murdered by Capitalism: A Memoir of 150 years of Life and Death on the American Left, “… a highly idiosyncratic account of industrial trade unionism, the socialist, communist, and anarchist movements, government repression …”
On the book’s cover is an endorsement by Thomas Pynchon, a friend from Ross’s Humboldt County days: “A ripsnorting and honorable account of an outlaw tradition in American politics which too seldom gets past the bouncers at the gateways of our national narrative.”
In his July 2004 Harper’s Magazine review (subscription only), the late John Leonarddescribed the then sixty-six-year-old author as a “Huck Finn/Holden Caulfield/Dennis the Menace/Weatherman wannabe and subversive journalist … who’s been on the losing side of every cause since the Spanish Civil War.” According to Carl, who published three of Ross’s more than twenty books, Ross loved it.
Ross began writing for the San Francisco Bay Guardian in 1984 and is credited with being the first American to report the 1993 Zapatista rebellion, in the Anderson Valley Advertiser. After reporting on the deadly 1985 earthquake in Mexico City, Ross made his home there, at the Hotel Isabel. In 1995, Ross won the American Book Award forRebellion from the Roots: Indian Uprising in Chiapas. In 2003, he volunteered as human shield in Baghdad, protecting Iraqi civilians from attack; according to Redmond in his Bay Guardian remembrance, Ross signed his emails, “John Ross, humanshield”
Redmond also reported Ross’s refusal, in 2009, to be honored by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors:
“Typically, when people are honored by the supervisors, they thank the board, praise the wonders of this city and politely and meekly receive their award. Not John Ross. The half-blind, half deaf rabble rouser made a short statement in which he managed to insult city government, denounce the entire process of giving out awards and demand that the board reject the Muni fare hike. Then he read a poem denouncing the “motherfuckers” who are driving poor people out of the Mission.”
In this Democracy Now! appearance from April 2010, Ross talks about life in his adopted city, the subject of his last book, El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City “a phantasmagoric retelling” of “4,000,000,000 years of history,” reviewed by Iain Sinclairas “Coruscating and necessary. Here is one of those rare books that convinces from the first sentence: a writer embedded in his writing, wholly present in the subject, leading us with savage grace to the heart of the beast.”
Ross is survived by his son, Dante A. Ross, a daughter, Carla Ross-Allen, and a granddaughter, Zoe Ross-Allen, as well as a stepdaughter, Dylan Melbourne and her daugther Honore, as well as a sister, Susan Gardner.
Let Redmond have the last word:
When John Ross left Terminal Island, the federal prison in Los Angeles, after serving a couple of years for refusing the Vietnam draft, the warden shook his head and said: “Ross, you never learned how to be a prisoner.”
I’m not writing the epitaph for whatever gravestone he has or doesn’t have, wherever it might be in the world, but that’s what I’d put on it: “John Ross, 1938-2011. Never learned how to be a prisoner.”
http://mhpbooks.com/mobylives/?p=27075
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John Ross, author, poet, journalist, dies
John Coté, S.F. Chronicle
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
John Ross, an author, poet, liberal activist and journalist who toiled against perceived injustice from the jungles of Chiapas, Mexico, to the baked streets of Baghdad, died Monday of liver cancer at Lake Patzcuaro in Mexico. He was 72.
"The word 'passionate' is overused a lot these days - but he was," said Mary Jo McConahay, a friend and former colleague of Ross' at Pacific News Service in San Francisco.
Mr. Ross was jailed for refusing to be drafted in the Vietnam War era, was the first person to chronicle in English the pending uprising of indigenous Zapatistas in Mexico's Chiapas state, and went to Iraq on the eve of the U.S. invasion in 2003 to serve as a human shield, although Iraqi officials forced him and other volunteers out of country.
In refusing a commendation at San Francisco's Board of Supervisors in May 2009 because the city "has become nothing less than a sanctuary for the rich," Mr. Ross said he had faced "one of (Augusto) Pinochet's machine guns" in Chile in 1986; climbed into a guerrilla camp in the Cauca Valley of Colombia; and been shot at 13 times by "some company goon" when he went to investigate a toxic incinerator in Tijuana, Mexico.
"Life, like reporting, is a kind of death sentence," he told the board. "Pardon me for having lived it so fully."
His reporting appeared in the San Francisco Examiner, CounterPunch, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Pacific News Service, Pacifica Radio, LA Weekly and others, including the Mexico City daily La Jornada.
A young member of the Beat generation, Mr. Ross authored 10 chapbooks of poetry and 10 books of fiction and nonfiction. He received the American Book Award in 1995 for "Rebellion From the Roots: Zapatista Uprising in Chiapas" and the Upton Sinclair Award in 2005 for "Murdered By Capitalism: 150 Years of Life and Death on the American Left."
Bruce Brugmann, editor and publisher of the Bay Guardian, called him "a terribly unusual talent."
"If you sent him over to City Hall, you'd get a helluva story," Brugmann said. "It wouldn't be on some measure. He wouldn't cover the hearing. He wouldn't cover the vote. He'd have something lyrical that would get to the political point."
Born in New York City on March 11, 1938, to parents who were committed leftists, Mr. Ross grew up in Greenwich Village surrounded by jazz, Beat poetry, abstract expressionist painting and radical politics, according to his biography.
By age 18, Mr. Ross was reading his poems in Greenwich Village bars accompanied by renowned bass player Charles Mingus, according to his official biography. In 1957, he followed the trail other Beat writers had cut to Mexico City, then lived in an indigenous community in the Michoacan state.
He returned to United States in the early 1960s, was jailed for refusing to be drafted, and was sent to a federal lockup. When he was released after about two years, he went to San Francisco, where he became a community activist in the Mission District for housing, civil rights and other issues.
Mr. Ross ran for the Board of Supervisors in 1967 under the slogan "Rent Control Now! Out of Vietnam!" But five days after paying his registration fee, Mr. Ross said he was attacked by San Francisco police at an anti-police brutality rally, and suffered injuries he says resulted in him losing use of his left eye. Ross said he was then barred from the ballot over his draft-dodging conviction. The county registrar refused to refund his candidate filing fee.
"I want my filing fee back - with interest," Mr. Ross, in a good-humored tone, told the Board of Supervisors 42 years later when May 12, 2009, was declared John Ross Day. He is survived by his sister, Susan Gardner; children, Dante Ross of New York and Carla Ross-Allen of New York; and one grandchild, Zoe Ross-Allen.
Memorial services will be announced at a later date.
E-mail John Coté at jcote@sfchronicle.com.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/01/19/BA4N1HA7Q8.DTL
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