If you read no more than this first sentence, go to http://kalw.org/ and click on “Listen Now.”
In late 2001, I listened anxiously to radio and television
broadcasts, eager to hear someone articulate the thoughts swimming around in my
head. Like a full moon, the advent of
war addles the brain of a nation, exciting its animal spirits, and at the end
of 2001 not a word of dissent or argument against the brilliant rising orb of
battle could be heard on any major news source, including PBS and NPR, both of
which seem in ordinary times to be critical of the established consensus. I was appalled by the American response to Al Qaeda’s
attack: rather than dignify the killers by treating them as a political force,
we should have branded them as common criminals, as mass murderers, and begun a
global police action to bring them to trial.
By deciding instead to treat them as “enemy combatants”, we gave them
legitimacy and in a sense created an enemy when we could have shown them to be
nothing more than blood-thirsty thugs.
I was also appalled, and not only that but deeply ashamed, by
the hypocrisy of the position America took.
The primary reason that the United States has never signed any international
agreements to combat terrorism and has refused to join the World Court is that
we ourselves are a terrorist state. No
definition of terrorism can be drafted that does not include activities in
which the United States in involved every day.
Before we carry on about the evil of ending thousands of “innocent lives”,
we should remember Hiroshima and Dresden, we should see in our minds the flash
of light over Nagasaki and smell the Napalm as it settles on the jungle canopy
in Laos and Viet Nam.
If we had hunted down bin-Laden and the rest to bring them
before a court of law (rather than to murder them in cold blood), we would have
restored the high moral ground that we staked out at the end of World War Two,
when the United States had conquered the world and chose not to crucify its
enemies, as Rome had done, but to establish a court of law in Nuremberg, to provide those enemies with defense counsel,
and to try each on the merits of his or her case. We sought not to eradicate those who had
fought against us but to reconcile them to a place in a new world society
ordered by laws.
It can be argued that the first President Bush, the last
president who had been part of the generation that fought World War Two, was
also the last who believed in and lived under the laws of that social and
political order. That war was fought
because Saddam Hussein had violated the sovereignty of Kuwait and had to be
forced back within the boundaries of the Iraqi state as internationally defined. It was no mistake that the first President
Bush ended the war at that moment. He
should not, as his son believed, have continued into Iraq to eliminate Hussein
because to do so would make us guilty of
the same crime that he had committed.
When his son decided on going to war in Afghanistan and
later in Iraq, the fascist control of the public debate in this country shut
out any who would argue against going to war.
Almost any, that is, because in Congress there was one voice raised in
opposition. Out of 535 members of congress,
only the Representative from Oakland and Berkeley, California, Barbara Lee,
cast a vote against war. (Can you
imagine the courage it took to stand alone at that moment, when the
lycanthropic nation sat baying at the moon for raw, bloody meat?) And it was at that time that I found at last
one voice amongst all the broadcast media which had not fallen into goose-step
with the march toward war: That one
voice was KALW, “your local radio station.”
This afternoon I awoke to a musical piece consisting of the
voices of homeless women over 50, sampled and mixed with a female choir singing
one woman’s statement “It’s hard to leave your stuff.” I learned that what I was hearing is part of
the soundtrack for a dance piece to be premiered tomorrow night on the wall of
Hastings Law School in the Tenderloin. The
dancers will be suspended by harness and rope from the top of the 30-storey
building and will dance in the air on the side of the building. I saw the dance company perform a piece about
Niagra Falls on the wall of the Renoir Hotel over a year ago, while homeless
myself, and I will be at the premier tomorrow night. I will also be at the reception preceding the
performance to hear a discussion by homeless people, their advocates, and
service providers, and to listen to a performance by a choir made up of people
affected by homelessness.
The dance piece concerns the lives of older homeless women
and is entitled “Multiple Marys and
Invisible Jane.”
Thank you, KALW.
