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THE ABSURD TIMES
News Summary: Hillary Clinton mentioned how sad she was that Bobby Kennedy was assasinated. but that was all the more reason to continue her opposition to Obama.
Scott McClellan released a book telling the truth about the lies and deception the Bush White House used to drag us into an unnecessary and costly war. Since we all know about how he lied about matters and former Press Secretary, the really interesting part of all this has been the comments from various people in the White House. "That isn't the Scott I know" was said by several. "Why didn't he say something then?" was used to attack. The attack I liked the most was that it "sounds like a LEFT-WING BLOGGER!!!" A real zinger, to be sure. We must all be on guard against those LEFT-WING BLOGGERS!!! After all, what is more dangerous to our country that those evil LEFT-WING BLOGGERS!!? The term LEFT-WING BLOGGER in synonymous with heretic during the Spanish Inquisition (for the White House).
But the remark that I found most telling was this "I'm puzzled about this." "I find it puzzling," is a phrase I heard over the media uttered by at least six different people working in the White House. When asked what the Decider's reactions was, one said "He's puzzled." This is appropriate for this White House. It has always been puzzled by any opinion other than theirs, especially those made by LEFT-WING BLOGGERS!!!?
John McCain invited Obama to join him for a visit to the front lines in Iraq. Most strange about this is that he was serious about it. I hope he has the judgment not to go. I'd rather visit Lake Michigan, actually.
Well, let's get on with it and may you be safe from LEFT-WING BLOGGERS!!!
THE ABSURD TIMES
(NO LEFT-WING BLOGGERS ALLOWED)
I was wise enough not to watch any news on Memorial Day, but I do have someone to remember.
After that, I reprint an interview done with Noam Chomsky on the United States of Insecurity.
Just recently, Utah Phillips, folksinger and activist, died at the age of 73. I remember meeting him in Grant Park in Chicago on the 4th of July at the WFMT Folk Festival where he was performing. He was particularly eloquent in contrasting the capitalistic skyscrapers to his left to the open waters of Lake Michigam to his right as representing the sorts of choices our country has before it. This was in 1988, and the choices made are obvious, but there is an opportunity to correct them now.
I had a chance to meet with him after his set and we sat down to talk in the grass. We discovered we had a mutual childhood hero -- Willie Sutton, and most of the time was spent sharing stories about him. He was othe one asked "why do you rob banks?" and answered "because that's where the money is." There is a great deal more, but I had to collect those who came with me and take them home. Otherwise, we couldhave continued for a long time.
Here is a transcript from an interview done on a pirate radio station in 2004:
AMY GOODMAN: Utah Phillips, the legendary folk musician, peace and labor activist, has died. He passed away in his sleep in Nevada City Friday night. He died of congestive heart failure. He was seventy-three years old. A memorial service is being planned for Sunday.
Over the span of nearly four decades, Utah Phillips worked in what he referred to as "the Trade," performing tirelessly for audiences in large and small cities throughout the United States, Canada and Europe. His songs were performed by Emmylou Harris, Waylon Jennings, Joan Baez and Arlo Guthrie. He earned a Grammy nomination for an album he recorded with Ani DiFranco and was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Folk Alliance.
Born Bruce Duncan Phillips in 1935, he later adopted the name "Utah," from where he grew up. The son of labor organizers, Phillips was a lifelong member of the Industrial Workers of the World, known as the Wobblies. As a teenager, he ran away from home and started living as a hobo who rode the rails and wrote songs about his experiences. In 1956, he joined the Army and served in the Korean War, an experience he would later refer to as the turning point of his life. In 1968, he ran for the US Senate on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket.
For the past twenty-one years, he has lived in Nevada City, where he started a nationally syndicated folk music radio show called Loafer's Glory, produced at community radio station KVMR. He also helped found the Hospitality House homeless shelter and the Peace and Justice Center there.
Today we spend the hour hearing Utah Phillips in his own words. In January 2004, I had a chance to sit down with Utah for an extensive interview. We met at the pirate radio station, Freak Radio Santa Cruz, where Utah had come to perform. I began by asking him why he arrived at least a day early to any city or town where he performed.
UTAH PHILLIPS: When you have an engagement, at least in my world, the world that I create for myself, an engagement doesn't begin when you hit the stage and end when you leave the stage. It begins when you hit the city limits, and it ends when you leave the city limits.
There's a whole lot going on in that town. My trade is like being paid to go to schools, and every town is its own teacher. Every town, that's my university. And there are marvels and wonders. There's Hobos from Hell, are from Santa Cruz. They're young people riding on the freight trains, and they're better at it than I ever thought I would be. You've got the Homeless Garden Project. You've got just an enormous rich community here.
I was involved some years ago in helping to organize a street singers' guild in this town, and it-you got to beat the streets and learn from the people, and then you've got to get on their stage and, having done that and been with those people, let that audience know that you're not just doing the show you did in the town the night before, you know. You're no-you've got to know who you're with and where you are. That's very important to me. And they've got to know that I understand that, that I'm really there for them.
AMY GOODMAN: Let's start out where you started out. Where were you born? When were you born?
UTAH PHILLIPS: I was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1935.
AMY GOODMAN: And how did you start on this journey? When did you begin singing, storytelling?
UTAH PHILLIPS: Oh, mercy, I think we're all storytellers, you know. You think of the excuses you told your parents for why you got home late. I just never gave it up.
I got-I left home. I went up to work in Yellowstone National Park during high school. I was going to make some summer money. I went up on the freight trains, and for the first time I rode the freight trains. And I worked on a road rating crew. And at that time, I was playing the ukulele and singing ersatz Hawaiian music-Johnny Noble, things like that, "Lovely Hula Hands," "Malihini Melee."
The other hands working on that crew, a lot of them were old, old alcoholics who could only shovel gravel. But they knew songs. And late at night, you know, there would be a fire. We would live in these clapboard shanties. They sang old songs, Jimmie Rodgers, and they sang old Gene Autry songs, songs I had never heard, but were much closer to the way I was living right there at that time, certainly a lot closer than as Hawaiian music. So they showed me how to turn my ukulele chords into guitar chords and taught me those songs.
And it's right about then I started making songs in that mold, making songs of what I saw in the world around me, but using those tune models and those verse models that had endured for so long and will continue to endure simply because they work. So, you know, I've been making songs and stories for over fifty years now. It's a way of life. It's like breathing.
AMY GOODMAN: War has always seemed to play a major role in defining our times and affected your work, as well. You went to Korea?
UTAH PHILLIPS: Yes, I joined the Army. Like old-as a string fellow said, some people learn things the hard way, but at least then you never forget it. I joined the Army and then got pipelined for Korea. I was there after Panmunjan, you know, after the treaty, right after the treaty there, the truce. Life amid the ruins-I mean, it was absolute life amid the ruins. Children crying-that's the memory of Korea. Devastation. I saw an elegant and ancient culture in a small Asian country devastated by the impact of cultural and economic imperialism. And the impact of an army of young men given unlimited license for excess of every kind, of violence, sexual, booze, what have you, drugs-a blueprint for self-destruction. And I knew that if I endured that, I would perish, I would simply perish.
It was there in Korea in that situation around those kinds of experiences-and I was up-I was up on the Imjin River, and I wanted to swim in it, because I wanted to wash all that away, all that away. And I was told I couldn't swim in the Imjin. And it was the young Korean there, Yoon Suk An [phon.], who explained to me why I couldn't. He said, "When we marry, we move into our grandparents', in with our grandparents, and-but the place is devastated. There's nothing growing. It's all dead. So when the first child comes, somebody has to leave, and it's the old man. The grandfather will leave and go sit on the bank of the Imjin with a jug of water and a blanket until he dies and will roll down into the water." He said, "You can't swim in the Imjin, because those are our elders being carried out to sea."
Well, that's when I cracked. You know, that's when I broke up. I said I can't do this anymore. You know, this is all wrong. It all has to change. And the change has to begin with me. It was right then that I decided that the idea of manhood that I had been given, that blueprint for self-destruction, that my father had lied to me about manhood, my drill instructors, my Army sergeants, my scoutmaster, my gym instructor in high school. They had all lied to me about what manhood was, and it was up to me to begin to figure out what it really meant.
AMY GOODMAN: How did you do it?
UTAH PHILLIPS: Painfully, painfully. It takes a long time to shut up and listen. You know, it takes a long time just to plain shut up and listen. I tell you, what I learned was-I decided that the great struggles, the wars that you're talking about-it could be the Bosnian War, it could be the Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, it could be the Korean War, it could be the Iraqi War, whatever, it doesn't matter-it's all-every-the thing they all have in common is that it's young men with guns doing it to everybody else. Women aren't doing it. Kids aren't doing it. Old people aren't doing it. Disabled people aren't doing it. It's young people with guns, you know, that are doing it to everybody else. And we don't have a problem with violence in the world. We've got a serious male problem. And I bought into it, so I know. And I'm buying myself out of it, you see. It's terribly, terribly important for me for people to understand that and begin to shut up and listen. The most important movement in the world is the feminist movement. If we can really figure out what's going on between men and women, the other problems will take care of themselves. I'm sure of it.
AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Utah Phillips. We're broadcasting on Democracy Now! and doing it at Free Radio Santa Cruz, which is also broadcasting us live, known as Freak Radio. And Utah Phillips is going to be performing tonight before, well, many hundred of people, and he's been in places with a couple of people, he's been singing alone, or he's been singing before thousands, actually just came off of a concert tour with Ani DiFranco?
UTAH PHILLIPS: Oh, no, no. I don't tour anymore because of this congestive heart failure. I only leave town about once a month, if that. Ani and I will share the stage, you know, when we happen to be in the same area. She'll invite me to go and do that. I should mention that tonight I'm not doing this show by myself. It's called a circle of friends. It's like a living room, where some good friends of mine, Bodhi Busick, great guitarist and a fine song maker, and Paul Kamm and Eleanor McDonald, who are up from Nevada County, town I live in, we're going to sit on the stage and share songs and stories together. And that's the way that I want it to be.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I wanted to continue on this idea of confronting violence and how you became a pacifist. When did you-how long were you in Korea?
UTAH PHILLIPS: I was there for eighteen months, and I extended for some months. I can tell you exactly how. I made it back to Salt Lake, and I was going into the post office, and there was an old man sitting under the bush out there, taking on water break. Well, that man was Ammon Hennacy, the great Catholic Worker, one of Dorothy Day's people. And Ammon Hennacy had come to Salt Lake to open the Joe Hill House of Hospitality, one of the Catholic Worker houses. And Ammon took me in. And I was there with Ammon for about eight years at the Joe Hill House.
Ammon came to me one day and said, "You've got to be a pacifist." And I said, "How's that?" He said, "Well, you act out a lot. You use a lot of violent behavior." And I was. You know, I was very angry, very angry person. "And you just act out a lot. And if you brought a lot, you're not any good at it. You're the one who keeps getting thrown through the front door, and I'm tired of fixing the damn thing. You've got to be a pacifist."
He had a more fundamentalist way of looking at it. And I said, "What's that?" He said, "Well, I could give you a book by Gandhi, but you wouldn't read it. So"-but he said, "You've got to look at nonviolence like-your capacity for violence like an alcoholic looks at booze." Alcohol-booze will kill an alcoholic, unless he has the courage to sit in a circle of people that are like that, put his hand up and say, "Hi. My name is Utah. I'm an alcoholic." But then you can-once you own the behavior, you can deal with it. You know, you can have it defined for you by the people whose lives you've messed with, and it's not going to go away. Twenty years sober, you're not going to sit in that circle and say, "Well, I'm not an alcoholic anymore." You're going to put up your hand and say, "My name is Utah. I'm an alcoholic."
He said, "It's the same with violence. You acknowledge your capacity for violence, you see, and you learn how to deal with it every day, every instant, in every situation for the rest of your life, because it's not going to go away. But it will save your life." See, it's a different way of looking at pacifism. I have to be a pacifist, you see.
So I said, "OK, I'll do that, Ammon." And he said, "It's not enough." I said, "Oh." He said, "You were born a white man in mid-twentieth century industrial America. You came into the world armed to the teeth with an arsenal of weapons, the weapons of privilege, economic privilege, racial privilege, sexual privilege. You're going to be a pacifist. You're not just going to lay down guns and fists and knives and hard angry words. You're going to have to lay down the weapons of privilege and go into the world completely disarmed. Well, you try that." I've been at it-Ammon died over thirty years ago, and I'm still at it. But if there's one struggle that animates my life, it's probably that one.
Over the span of nearly four decades, Utah Phillips worked in what he referred to as "the Trade," performing tirelessly for audiences in large and small cities throughout the United States, Canada and Europe. His songs were performed by Emmylou Harris, Waylon Jennings, Joan Baez and Arlo Guthrie. He earned a Grammy nomination for an album he recorded with Ani DiFranco and was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Folk Alliance.
Born Bruce Duncan Phillips in 1935, he later adopted the name "Utah," from where he grew up. The son of labor organizers, Phillips was a lifelong member of the Industrial Workers of the World, known as the Wobblies. As a teenager, he ran away from home and started living as a hobo who rode the rails and wrote songs about his experiences. In 1956, he joined the Army and served in the Korean War, an experience he would later refer to as the turning point of his life. In 1968, he ran for the US Senate on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket.
For the past twenty-one years, he has lived in Nevada City, where he started a nationally syndicated folk music radio show called Loafer's Glory, produced at community radio station KVMR. He also helped found the Hospitality House homeless shelter and the Peace and Justice Center there.
Today we spend the hour hearing Utah Phillips in his own words. In January 2004, I had a chance to sit down with Utah for an extensive interview. We met at the pirate radio station, Freak Radio Santa Cruz, where Utah had come to perform. I began by asking him why he arrived at least a day early to any city or town where he performed.
UTAH PHILLIPS: When you have an engagement, at least in my world, the world that I create for myself, an engagement doesn't begin when you hit the stage and end when you leave the stage. It begins when you hit the city limits, and it ends when you leave the city limits.
There's a whole lot going on in that town. My trade is like being paid to go to schools, and every town is its own teacher. Every town, that's my university. And there are marvels and wonders. There's Hobos from Hell, are from Santa Cruz. They're young people riding on the freight trains, and they're better at it than I ever thought I would be. You've got the Homeless Garden Project. You've got just an enormous rich community here.
I was involved some years ago in helping to organize a street singers' guild in this town, and it-you got to beat the streets and learn from the people, and then you've got to get on their stage and, having done that and been with those people, let that audience know that you're not just doing the show you did in the town the night before, you know. You're no-you've got to know who you're with and where you are. That's very important to me. And they've got to know that I understand that, that I'm really there for them.
AMY GOODMAN: Let's start out where you started out. Where were you born? When were you born?
UTAH PHILLIPS: I was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1935.
AMY GOODMAN: And how did you start on this journey? When did you begin singing, storytelling?
UTAH PHILLIPS: Oh, mercy, I think we're all storytellers, you know. You think of the excuses you told your parents for why you got home late. I just never gave it up.
I got-I left home. I went up to work in Yellowstone National Park during high school. I was going to make some summer money. I went up on the freight trains, and for the first time I rode the freight trains. And I worked on a road rating crew. And at that time, I was playing the ukulele and singing ersatz Hawaiian music-Johnny Noble, things like that, "Lovely Hula Hands," "Malihini Melee."
The other hands working on that crew, a lot of them were old, old alcoholics who could only shovel gravel. But they knew songs. And late at night, you know, there would be a fire. We would live in these clapboard shanties. They sang old songs, Jimmie Rodgers, and they sang old Gene Autry songs, songs I had never heard, but were much closer to the way I was living right there at that time, certainly a lot closer than as Hawaiian music. So they showed me how to turn my ukulele chords into guitar chords and taught me those songs.
And it's right about then I started making songs in that mold, making songs of what I saw in the world around me, but using those tune models and those verse models that had endured for so long and will continue to endure simply because they work. So, you know, I've been making songs and stories for over fifty years now. It's a way of life. It's like breathing.
AMY GOODMAN: War has always seemed to play a major role in defining our times and affected your work, as well. You went to Korea?
UTAH PHILLIPS: Yes, I joined the Army. Like old-as a string fellow said, some people learn things the hard way, but at least then you never forget it. I joined the Army and then got pipelined for Korea. I was there after Panmunjan, you know, after the treaty, right after the treaty there, the truce. Life amid the ruins-I mean, it was absolute life amid the ruins. Children crying-that's the memory of Korea. Devastation. I saw an elegant and ancient culture in a small Asian country devastated by the impact of cultural and economic imperialism. And the impact of an army of young men given unlimited license for excess of every kind, of violence, sexual, booze, what have you, drugs-a blueprint for self-destruction. And I knew that if I endured that, I would perish, I would simply perish.
It was there in Korea in that situation around those kinds of experiences-and I was up-I was up on the Imjin River, and I wanted to swim in it, because I wanted to wash all that away, all that away. And I was told I couldn't swim in the Imjin. And it was the young Korean there, Yoon Suk An [phon.], who explained to me why I couldn't. He said, "When we marry, we move into our grandparents', in with our grandparents, and-but the place is devastated. There's nothing growing. It's all dead. So when the first child comes, somebody has to leave, and it's the old man. The grandfather will leave and go sit on the bank of the Imjin with a jug of water and a blanket until he dies and will roll down into the water." He said, "You can't swim in the Imjin, because those are our elders being carried out to sea."
Well, that's when I cracked. You know, that's when I broke up. I said I can't do this anymore. You know, this is all wrong. It all has to change. And the change has to begin with me. It was right then that I decided that the idea of manhood that I had been given, that blueprint for self-destruction, that my father had lied to me about manhood, my drill instructors, my Army sergeants, my scoutmaster, my gym instructor in high school. They had all lied to me about what manhood was, and it was up to me to begin to figure out what it really meant.
AMY GOODMAN: How did you do it?
UTAH PHILLIPS: Painfully, painfully. It takes a long time to shut up and listen. You know, it takes a long time just to plain shut up and listen. I tell you, what I learned was-I decided that the great struggles, the wars that you're talking about-it could be the Bosnian War, it could be the Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, it could be the Korean War, it could be the Iraqi War, whatever, it doesn't matter-it's all-every-the thing they all have in common is that it's young men with guns doing it to everybody else. Women aren't doing it. Kids aren't doing it. Old people aren't doing it. Disabled people aren't doing it. It's young people with guns, you know, that are doing it to everybody else. And we don't have a problem with violence in the world. We've got a serious male problem. And I bought into it, so I know. And I'm buying myself out of it, you see. It's terribly, terribly important for me for people to understand that and begin to shut up and listen. The most important movement in the world is the feminist movement. If we can really figure out what's going on between men and women, the other problems will take care of themselves. I'm sure of it.
AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Utah Phillips. We're broadcasting on Democracy Now! and doing it at Free Radio Santa Cruz, which is also broadcasting us live, known as Freak Radio. And Utah Phillips is going to be performing tonight before, well, many hundred of people, and he's been in places with a couple of people, he's been singing alone, or he's been singing before thousands, actually just came off of a concert tour with Ani DiFranco?
UTAH PHILLIPS: Oh, no, no. I don't tour anymore because of this congestive heart failure. I only leave town about once a month, if that. Ani and I will share the stage, you know, when we happen to be in the same area. She'll invite me to go and do that. I should mention that tonight I'm not doing this show by myself. It's called a circle of friends. It's like a living room, where some good friends of mine, Bodhi Busick, great guitarist and a fine song maker, and Paul Kamm and Eleanor McDonald, who are up from Nevada County, town I live in, we're going to sit on the stage and share songs and stories together. And that's the way that I want it to be.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I wanted to continue on this idea of confronting violence and how you became a pacifist. When did you-how long were you in Korea?
UTAH PHILLIPS: I was there for eighteen months, and I extended for some months. I can tell you exactly how. I made it back to Salt Lake, and I was going into the post office, and there was an old man sitting under the bush out there, taking on water break. Well, that man was Ammon Hennacy, the great Catholic Worker, one of Dorothy Day's people. And Ammon Hennacy had come to Salt Lake to open the Joe Hill House of Hospitality, one of the Catholic Worker houses. And Ammon took me in. And I was there with Ammon for about eight years at the Joe Hill House.
Ammon came to me one day and said, "You've got to be a pacifist." And I said, "How's that?" He said, "Well, you act out a lot. You use a lot of violent behavior." And I was. You know, I was very angry, very angry person. "And you just act out a lot. And if you brought a lot, you're not any good at it. You're the one who keeps getting thrown through the front door, and I'm tired of fixing the damn thing. You've got to be a pacifist."
He had a more fundamentalist way of looking at it. And I said, "What's that?" He said, "Well, I could give you a book by Gandhi, but you wouldn't read it. So"-but he said, "You've got to look at nonviolence like-your capacity for violence like an alcoholic looks at booze." Alcohol-booze will kill an alcoholic, unless he has the courage to sit in a circle of people that are like that, put his hand up and say, "Hi. My name is Utah. I'm an alcoholic." But then you can-once you own the behavior, you can deal with it. You know, you can have it defined for you by the people whose lives you've messed with, and it's not going to go away. Twenty years sober, you're not going to sit in that circle and say, "Well, I'm not an alcoholic anymore." You're going to put up your hand and say, "My name is Utah. I'm an alcoholic."
He said, "It's the same with violence. You acknowledge your capacity for violence, you see, and you learn how to deal with it every day, every instant, in every situation for the rest of your life, because it's not going to go away. But it will save your life." See, it's a different way of looking at pacifism. I have to be a pacifist, you see.
So I said, "OK, I'll do that, Ammon." And he said, "It's not enough." I said, "Oh." He said, "You were born a white man in mid-twentieth century industrial America. You came into the world armed to the teeth with an arsenal of weapons, the weapons of privilege, economic privilege, racial privilege, sexual privilege. You're going to be a pacifist. You're not just going to lay down guns and fists and knives and hard angry words. You're going to have to lay down the weapons of privilege and go into the world completely disarmed. Well, you try that." I've been at it-Ammon died over thirty years ago, and I'm still at it. But if there's one struggle that animates my life, it's probably that one.
AMY GOODMAN: Utah Phillips, the legendary folk musician, died this weekend at his home in Nevada City, California. We'll come back to this 2004 interview in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: Legendary folk musician and peace and labor activist Utah Phillips died Friday night at his home in Nevada City, California at the age of seventy-three. I interviewed him in 2004 at the pirate radio station Freak Radio in Santa Cruz. I asked him how he got the name Utah.
UTAH PHILLIPS: Well, that comes in the Army. I was from Utah, and nobody ever heard of anybody from Utah. Had mail call out in the street, and they holler out "Utah!" and I'm the guy who says, "Here, sir." So the name, you know, since-it's like calling somebody Tex if they're from Texas or calling them Louise if they're from Louisiana maybe. I don't know. So that name just stuck.
The "U. Utah"-I've always been known as "U. Utah Phillips," and that comes-I guess I can say that now. That's been a closely held secret for years. When I was in Utah there first learning the kind of music I love, my favorite singer was T. Texas Tyler. So my friend, Norman Ritchie, the traveling teenage sage, started calling me U. Utah Phillips. There you go.
AMY GOODMAN: So we're here with U. Utah Phillips. And wars have defined so much. History books define times by war. But resistance is also there, and that's what often goes unchronicled, except with people like you who have been chronicling the resistance movements for a long time. And I was wondering if you could talk about some of the people who you feel have made important differences in activism, in resisting the wars.
UTAH PHILLIPS: Well, for that, I would have to go back to union brothers and sisters. I would have to go back to the Espionage Act in the First World War. In my union, the Industrial Workers of the World, this is my fiftieth year in the IWW, by the way, my proudest association. It is the only organization I've ever been-ever known of that didn't break faith with its elders.
Well, when I hit the road, when I went out to try to find out who I really was, to reconstruct my life, when I left Utah, I found those elders and I sought them out. I never thought I would be able to say this, Amy, but my-most of my elders, most of my great teachers, were born the century before last. [inaudible] born in the 1890s. And I think of Fred Thompson and the elders that I've talked to that went through the First World War as unionists and endured the Espionage Act, endured the enormous persecution, and just kept at it and kept at it. That was an amazing thing, because that was the-one of the effects of the war-and the same thing happened in the Second World War, was to use that super patriotism and to use the enhanced governmental powers to break the back of the labor movement, especially the radical labor movement, the IWW, and pretty damn well, you know, near succeeded. In spite of that, you know, of that terrible oppression and that awful war, we came out of that war with the beginning of the eight-hour day, with mine safety laws, with child labor laws, you know? We were still winning all the time we were losing.
AMY GOODMAN: For young people who've never heard of the Wobblies, or the International Workers of the World, can you explain-
UTAH PHILLIPS: Industrial Workers of the World.
AMY GOODMAN: Industrial Workers of the World-can you explain its origins?
UTAH PHILLIPS: Industrial Workers of the World was started-grew out of the Western Federation of Miners. It started in 1905. The cornerstone of the IWW was the notion that people in the same industry should belong to the same union.
Big Bill Haywood there in Colorado, Big Bill, the true American, he was one of the founders of the IWW. His father rode for the Pony Express. His mother was a forty-niner who got off the wagon train in Salt Lake. Bill was born in Salt Lake. There in Colorado, he'd see how a mine would get struck. So they'd bring in scabs to bring out scab ore, and then it would be transported to the mill on the union train and milled at the union mill. He said all of the people in this industry should belong to one union, because that's union scabbing.
So industrial unionism was born as an alternative to craft unionism, like the AFL, organized bodies of workers fighting against each other. And it wasn't just industrial unionism; it was the One Big Union, the OBU, a union of all skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled workers in one big union, divided up into industrial departments, syndicalists, syndicalism, which would then replace the government; the means of production in the hands of the producers, produced for use instead of profit, create abundance for workers and nothing for parasites; an end to the wage system. Well, like John Greenway called the IWW a banzai charge on capitalism, and that was about right.
Well, of course, the union dwindled, you know, after the First World War, the Palmer Raids, which were so much worse than anything we're experiencing now, but still survived. And now the union is growing, has been growing for quite a long time now.
AMY GOODMAN: The Palmer Raids?
UTAH PHILLIPS: No, the Industrial Workers of the World.
AMY GOODMAN: Right, but the Palmer Raids, if you could say what they were again, for people who-
UTAH PHILLIPS: Oh, Attorney General Palmer, that was the first Red Scare, the first big Red Scare. The Russian Revolution had been accomplished right at the-you know, during the First World War. So the first big Red Scare happened when Attorney General Palmer caused thousands of unionists to be jailed and many, many immigrant workers to be deported without any kind of due process. And it was like an industrial war. And Palmer-they did their best to break up the IWW, but it never succeeded, because we have survived and we have persisted.
AMY GOODMAN: You talk about the Palmer Raids. You talk about the Espionage Act. How do you think the time we're living in now compares?
UTAH PHILLIPS: I think that-I think that it's getting-it can get as bad. I think that we're being frog-marched into a corporate fascist takeover of the country. And no fooling, I think that we're in the Weimar Republic. And that's another thing that I would encourage young people to understand, what-that was Germany before the Second World War, the rise of Hitler, the rise of Nazism. Why didn't people do anything? You know, the big question that young Germans are asking their grandparents: "Why didn't you do something?" Read about the Weimar, compare the rise of fascism in Germany from the 1920s to what's happening right here right now.
The long memory is the most radical idea in America. That long memory has been taken away from us. Listen, you young people I'm talking to, that long member has been taken away from you. You haven't gotten it in your schools. You're not getting it on your television. You're not getting it anywhere. You're being leapfrogged from one crisis to the next. You know, you can't remember what happened last week, because you're locked into this week's crisis.
No, turn that off. You know, walk away from that. Walk out your front door. Go find your elders. Go find your true elders. Go find your people that lived that life, who knew that life and who know that history. And get your hands down into that deep rich stream of our people's history. We divided our culture up into a market for youngers, a market for young adults, a market for young marrieds, a market for older people, you know. It's not that way. And mass media contributed to that by taking the great movements that we've been through and trivializing important events. No, our people's history is like one long river. It flows down from way over there. And everything that those people did and everything they lived flows down to me, and I can reach down and take out what I need, if I have the courage to go out and ask questions. That huge river, you know, it's like tributaries that flow down into the polluted river and purify it and purify it.
AMY GOODMAN: Utah, you're known for telling stories, very-well, really opposite from the mass media world today, where a sound bite is something like eight or nine seconds.
UTAH PHILLIPS: Mm-hmm.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you think that has done to the way people learn and understand?
UTAH PHILLIPS: I think that television has had a serious-we're thinking differently. I'll watch television once a year just to get kind of an idea of what is happening to people's minds, or maybe I want to go see the World Series. The frequency of images is so fast that I can't track it. If I don't-I don't have TV, and I don't like them, so I can't understand how people can watch them. The frequency of the images is just too fast. I can't take it all in. Yeah, it is-you're absolutely right that we're thinking differently. Television alters consciousness. If it didn't, they wouldn't use it. It's intended to alter consciousness.
Me, the last TV set I had, I shot. I don't know what commercial importunement drove me off of the pier, but I hauled it into the backyard. It was up in Spokane, Washington, and I got a-had an old Stevens shotgun. I tied a scarf around it for a blindfold and scotch-taped a cigarette to the front and lit it and let it burn an appropriate amount of time, and then I blew a hole through it with the shotgun. It was out there in the lilac hedge, which grew through it eventually. It was kind of pretty after a while. But I have not-you know, I haven't owned one of those foolish things since.
I think that abandoning children, you know, to a television set-children are born with this bridge between world time and dreamtime. They wander back-and-forth over it at will, and you never know which side of the bridge they're going to be standing at either. You've just got to be willing to stand with them at the dreamtime end of the bridge, instead of jerking them over the bridge into world time on the presumption that facts will save your butt. Have they? Well, they won't.
Kids understand storytelling. They understand stories, and they understand that particular kind of magic. And they also understand innately that all the wonders of the mind need not be explicit. We're robbing children of their imagination. We just said earlier that the glory of radio is that it unlocks the imagination, as my wife said, and television-because you create your own images-and television gives you the images. Also, television is there to say to these kids, see, kids-you can take a coffee can and turn it into a rocket ship, you see? You create the story. If you have the story and you want act out, and then you create the object to act it out. Television turns that around backwards and says you can't have this story unless you buy the object-the exact opposite of what we're born to do. We have to fight like hell to turn ourselves back to our own best natural selves. And that's part of what I'm doing.
AMY GOODMAN: Utah, we're speaking on this weekend that would have been Martin Luther King's seventy-fifth birthday, who came out of a fierce tradition of civil rights protest and human rights activism. A lot of people don't appreciate what that day-to-day organizing and activism is all about. They hear Martin Luther King, it's almost as if he was alone, but he certainly wasn't. And there were so many, like you mentioned Rosa Parks. Rosa Parks, a story, a legend, where we hear about a woman who just got tired and sat down, but of course that was not her story.
UTAH PHILLIPS: No, she was at Highlander School getting her training.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about what Highlander School was?
UTAH PHILLIPS: Oh, good heavens, that Myles Horton-Myles Horton was the world's-the best educator the country ever had. And I knew Myles. He was a fine, remarkable man, good preacher, too. The Highlander principle was that any group of people in the community experiencing a problem, if they sit in a circle and spend a couple of days telling each other their life story, will eventually arrive at a solution to the problem. So the Highlander School was created for people to come together and do that.
So there's food that's prepared for them, a place to stay. And if you run into a knotty problem and you need a lawyer or you need an expert-and, you know, ex is a has-been, a spurt is a drip under pressure-you need an expert come in there, they'll come in and tell you what you want to hear, and then they have to leave. You know how a lawyer can take over a meeting. And then you go back and just use the information, because it's right in the hands of those people to do that.
And that's where Rosa Parks was. Martin Luther King was there. Remember that billboard during the '60s that the John Birch Society put up, said Martin Luther King at a communist training school? That was Highlander that he was at.
And it's-and it was Myles's idea, an extraordinary idea that works. Myles was a great organizer by himself. Myles Horton told me once, he said he was doing an organizing job in a little, small town, a coal mine job, and the thugs were in town, and they were going to try to break the union, you know, pretty violent. The preacher feared for Myles's life and gave him a horse pistol to protect himself, but it was broken, and it didn't have any ammunition. And Myles said he didn't know how use it anyway.
Well, Myles was looking out the front window down on the street from the rooming house, and a big black car pulled up and these three goons got out. And Myles opened the window and, dangling that pistol out the window, said, "Hey, you down there. Let me tell you something." They looked up and said, "Horton, you can't tell us anything." He said, "Oh, yes, I can. You've got to get organized." They said, "What do you mean?" He said, "You're not organized." "What do you mean?" He said, "Well, now, look. You're going to come upstairs and try to kill me. You're going to kick in my door. I'm going to shoot the first one inside the door, and I may get the second one. Third one will get me. But you've got to decide which one's going to come in first. You've got to get organized." Well, they talked to each other for a while and got in the car and drove away. Myles could do that.
One time he-Myles, he did a-he was invited to give a talk on leadership. And he showed up in town, and he couldn't remember where he was supposed to go. He lost the piece of paper. So he walked up to the main part of town, and he saw a bunch of people going into a hall, so he followed them. And he went in there and saw his name on the reader board, and everybody sat down and he sat down. When they were all sat down, he got up and walked to the front onto the stage and said, "Leadership is finding a bunch of people that look like they know where they're going and following them, and when they're all sitting down, stand up and talk to them about leadership."
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about commercial media and what it's done, what radio-that is commercial-record industry, the music industry, how you respond to it. And I also wanted to ask you about Johnny Cash.
UTAH PHILLIPS: Isn't that the little bill changers in public restrooms? Forget it. My brain does that. Listen, I'm a victim of this myself. You know, I'm a bystander. I'm not doing this.
Let's see, you started out with what media has done to people. You know that better than I do. That's why you do what you do. See, you're doing an alternative media. And if we play our cards right and have enough time, then pretty soon it won't be alternative media anymore. But then, we have a thorough understanding-don't we, Amy-that they fight with money and we fight with time, and they're going to run out of money before we run out of time. So we'll just be patient, and you do your work, and I'll do mine, and we'll catch up and overtake them.
It's a damn shame, though, that we have to be alternative. But then, we're in a capitalist environment, we're in a capitalist system that's built on-that's built on the least commendable features of the human psyche, greed and envy, rather than the best. We in community radio, in pirate radio, in alternative music distribution, we reach for the best in people, you know, we don't-not lowest common denominators. And we are building a new world within the shell of the old.
I don't feel pessimistic about that at all. There's simply too many good people right here in this room, too many good people on the street, close to the street, doing too many good things for me to afford the luxury of being pessimistic. I'm going to-I'll tell people that tonight, damn it. I'm glad it came up. If I look at the world from the top down, from FOX, God help me, or CNN or-there ought to be a CNN Anon to ween people from that idiocy. If I look at it from the top down, I get seriously depressed. The world's going to hell in a wheelbarrow. But if I walk out the door, turn all that off, and go with the people, whatever town I'm in, who are doing the real work down at the street level, like I said, there's too many good people doing too many good things for me to let myself be pessimistic about that. I'm hopeful, can't live without hope. Can you?
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: Legendary folk musician and peace and labor activist Utah Phillips died Friday night at his home in Nevada City, California at the age of seventy-three. I interviewed him in 2004 at the pirate radio station Freak Radio in Santa Cruz. I asked him how he got the name Utah.
UTAH PHILLIPS: Well, that comes in the Army. I was from Utah, and nobody ever heard of anybody from Utah. Had mail call out in the street, and they holler out "Utah!" and I'm the guy who says, "Here, sir." So the name, you know, since-it's like calling somebody Tex if they're from Texas or calling them Louise if they're from Louisiana maybe. I don't know. So that name just stuck.
The "U. Utah"-I've always been known as "U. Utah Phillips," and that comes-I guess I can say that now. That's been a closely held secret for years. When I was in Utah there first learning the kind of music I love, my favorite singer was T. Texas Tyler. So my friend, Norman Ritchie, the traveling teenage sage, started calling me U. Utah Phillips. There you go.
AMY GOODMAN: So we're here with U. Utah Phillips. And wars have defined so much. History books define times by war. But resistance is also there, and that's what often goes unchronicled, except with people like you who have been chronicling the resistance movements for a long time. And I was wondering if you could talk about some of the people who you feel have made important differences in activism, in resisting the wars.
UTAH PHILLIPS: Well, for that, I would have to go back to union brothers and sisters. I would have to go back to the Espionage Act in the First World War. In my union, the Industrial Workers of the World, this is my fiftieth year in the IWW, by the way, my proudest association. It is the only organization I've ever been-ever known of that didn't break faith with its elders.
Well, when I hit the road, when I went out to try to find out who I really was, to reconstruct my life, when I left Utah, I found those elders and I sought them out. I never thought I would be able to say this, Amy, but my-most of my elders, most of my great teachers, were born the century before last. [inaudible] born in the 1890s. And I think of Fred Thompson and the elders that I've talked to that went through the First World War as unionists and endured the Espionage Act, endured the enormous persecution, and just kept at it and kept at it. That was an amazing thing, because that was the-one of the effects of the war-and the same thing happened in the Second World War, was to use that super patriotism and to use the enhanced governmental powers to break the back of the labor movement, especially the radical labor movement, the IWW, and pretty damn well, you know, near succeeded. In spite of that, you know, of that terrible oppression and that awful war, we came out of that war with the beginning of the eight-hour day, with mine safety laws, with child labor laws, you know? We were still winning all the time we were losing.
AMY GOODMAN: For young people who've never heard of the Wobblies, or the International Workers of the World, can you explain-
UTAH PHILLIPS: Industrial Workers of the World.
AMY GOODMAN: Industrial Workers of the World-can you explain its origins?
UTAH PHILLIPS: Industrial Workers of the World was started-grew out of the Western Federation of Miners. It started in 1905. The cornerstone of the IWW was the notion that people in the same industry should belong to the same union.
Big Bill Haywood there in Colorado, Big Bill, the true American, he was one of the founders of the IWW. His father rode for the Pony Express. His mother was a forty-niner who got off the wagon train in Salt Lake. Bill was born in Salt Lake. There in Colorado, he'd see how a mine would get struck. So they'd bring in scabs to bring out scab ore, and then it would be transported to the mill on the union train and milled at the union mill. He said all of the people in this industry should belong to one union, because that's union scabbing.
So industrial unionism was born as an alternative to craft unionism, like the AFL, organized bodies of workers fighting against each other. And it wasn't just industrial unionism; it was the One Big Union, the OBU, a union of all skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled workers in one big union, divided up into industrial departments, syndicalists, syndicalism, which would then replace the government; the means of production in the hands of the producers, produced for use instead of profit, create abundance for workers and nothing for parasites; an end to the wage system. Well, like John Greenway called the IWW a banzai charge on capitalism, and that was about right.
Well, of course, the union dwindled, you know, after the First World War, the Palmer Raids, which were so much worse than anything we're experiencing now, but still survived. And now the union is growing, has been growing for quite a long time now.
AMY GOODMAN: The Palmer Raids?
UTAH PHILLIPS: No, the Industrial Workers of the World.
AMY GOODMAN: Right, but the Palmer Raids, if you could say what they were again, for people who-
UTAH PHILLIPS: Oh, Attorney General Palmer, that was the first Red Scare, the first big Red Scare. The Russian Revolution had been accomplished right at the-you know, during the First World War. So the first big Red Scare happened when Attorney General Palmer caused thousands of unionists to be jailed and many, many immigrant workers to be deported without any kind of due process. And it was like an industrial war. And Palmer-they did their best to break up the IWW, but it never succeeded, because we have survived and we have persisted.
AMY GOODMAN: You talk about the Palmer Raids. You talk about the Espionage Act. How do you think the time we're living in now compares?
UTAH PHILLIPS: I think that-I think that it's getting-it can get as bad. I think that we're being frog-marched into a corporate fascist takeover of the country. And no fooling, I think that we're in the Weimar Republic. And that's another thing that I would encourage young people to understand, what-that was Germany before the Second World War, the rise of Hitler, the rise of Nazism. Why didn't people do anything? You know, the big question that young Germans are asking their grandparents: "Why didn't you do something?" Read about the Weimar, compare the rise of fascism in Germany from the 1920s to what's happening right here right now.
The long memory is the most radical idea in America. That long memory has been taken away from us. Listen, you young people I'm talking to, that long member has been taken away from you. You haven't gotten it in your schools. You're not getting it on your television. You're not getting it anywhere. You're being leapfrogged from one crisis to the next. You know, you can't remember what happened last week, because you're locked into this week's crisis.
No, turn that off. You know, walk away from that. Walk out your front door. Go find your elders. Go find your true elders. Go find your people that lived that life, who knew that life and who know that history. And get your hands down into that deep rich stream of our people's history. We divided our culture up into a market for youngers, a market for young adults, a market for young marrieds, a market for older people, you know. It's not that way. And mass media contributed to that by taking the great movements that we've been through and trivializing important events. No, our people's history is like one long river. It flows down from way over there. And everything that those people did and everything they lived flows down to me, and I can reach down and take out what I need, if I have the courage to go out and ask questions. That huge river, you know, it's like tributaries that flow down into the polluted river and purify it and purify it.
AMY GOODMAN: Utah, you're known for telling stories, very-well, really opposite from the mass media world today, where a sound bite is something like eight or nine seconds.
UTAH PHILLIPS: Mm-hmm.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you think that has done to the way people learn and understand?
UTAH PHILLIPS: I think that television has had a serious-we're thinking differently. I'll watch television once a year just to get kind of an idea of what is happening to people's minds, or maybe I want to go see the World Series. The frequency of images is so fast that I can't track it. If I don't-I don't have TV, and I don't like them, so I can't understand how people can watch them. The frequency of the images is just too fast. I can't take it all in. Yeah, it is-you're absolutely right that we're thinking differently. Television alters consciousness. If it didn't, they wouldn't use it. It's intended to alter consciousness.
Me, the last TV set I had, I shot. I don't know what commercial importunement drove me off of the pier, but I hauled it into the backyard. It was up in Spokane, Washington, and I got a-had an old Stevens shotgun. I tied a scarf around it for a blindfold and scotch-taped a cigarette to the front and lit it and let it burn an appropriate amount of time, and then I blew a hole through it with the shotgun. It was out there in the lilac hedge, which grew through it eventually. It was kind of pretty after a while. But I have not-you know, I haven't owned one of those foolish things since.
I think that abandoning children, you know, to a television set-children are born with this bridge between world time and dreamtime. They wander back-and-forth over it at will, and you never know which side of the bridge they're going to be standing at either. You've just got to be willing to stand with them at the dreamtime end of the bridge, instead of jerking them over the bridge into world time on the presumption that facts will save your butt. Have they? Well, they won't.
Kids understand storytelling. They understand stories, and they understand that particular kind of magic. And they also understand innately that all the wonders of the mind need not be explicit. We're robbing children of their imagination. We just said earlier that the glory of radio is that it unlocks the imagination, as my wife said, and television-because you create your own images-and television gives you the images. Also, television is there to say to these kids, see, kids-you can take a coffee can and turn it into a rocket ship, you see? You create the story. If you have the story and you want act out, and then you create the object to act it out. Television turns that around backwards and says you can't have this story unless you buy the object-the exact opposite of what we're born to do. We have to fight like hell to turn ourselves back to our own best natural selves. And that's part of what I'm doing.
AMY GOODMAN: Utah, we're speaking on this weekend that would have been Martin Luther King's seventy-fifth birthday, who came out of a fierce tradition of civil rights protest and human rights activism. A lot of people don't appreciate what that day-to-day organizing and activism is all about. They hear Martin Luther King, it's almost as if he was alone, but he certainly wasn't. And there were so many, like you mentioned Rosa Parks. Rosa Parks, a story, a legend, where we hear about a woman who just got tired and sat down, but of course that was not her story.
UTAH PHILLIPS: No, she was at Highlander School getting her training.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about what Highlander School was?
UTAH PHILLIPS: Oh, good heavens, that Myles Horton-Myles Horton was the world's-the best educator the country ever had. And I knew Myles. He was a fine, remarkable man, good preacher, too. The Highlander principle was that any group of people in the community experiencing a problem, if they sit in a circle and spend a couple of days telling each other their life story, will eventually arrive at a solution to the problem. So the Highlander School was created for people to come together and do that.
So there's food that's prepared for them, a place to stay. And if you run into a knotty problem and you need a lawyer or you need an expert-and, you know, ex is a has-been, a spurt is a drip under pressure-you need an expert come in there, they'll come in and tell you what you want to hear, and then they have to leave. You know how a lawyer can take over a meeting. And then you go back and just use the information, because it's right in the hands of those people to do that.
And that's where Rosa Parks was. Martin Luther King was there. Remember that billboard during the '60s that the John Birch Society put up, said Martin Luther King at a communist training school? That was Highlander that he was at.
And it's-and it was Myles's idea, an extraordinary idea that works. Myles was a great organizer by himself. Myles Horton told me once, he said he was doing an organizing job in a little, small town, a coal mine job, and the thugs were in town, and they were going to try to break the union, you know, pretty violent. The preacher feared for Myles's life and gave him a horse pistol to protect himself, but it was broken, and it didn't have any ammunition. And Myles said he didn't know how use it anyway.
Well, Myles was looking out the front window down on the street from the rooming house, and a big black car pulled up and these three goons got out. And Myles opened the window and, dangling that pistol out the window, said, "Hey, you down there. Let me tell you something." They looked up and said, "Horton, you can't tell us anything." He said, "Oh, yes, I can. You've got to get organized." They said, "What do you mean?" He said, "You're not organized." "What do you mean?" He said, "Well, now, look. You're going to come upstairs and try to kill me. You're going to kick in my door. I'm going to shoot the first one inside the door, and I may get the second one. Third one will get me. But you've got to decide which one's going to come in first. You've got to get organized." Well, they talked to each other for a while and got in the car and drove away. Myles could do that.
One time he-Myles, he did a-he was invited to give a talk on leadership. And he showed up in town, and he couldn't remember where he was supposed to go. He lost the piece of paper. So he walked up to the main part of town, and he saw a bunch of people going into a hall, so he followed them. And he went in there and saw his name on the reader board, and everybody sat down and he sat down. When they were all sat down, he got up and walked to the front onto the stage and said, "Leadership is finding a bunch of people that look like they know where they're going and following them, and when they're all sitting down, stand up and talk to them about leadership."
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about commercial media and what it's done, what radio-that is commercial-record industry, the music industry, how you respond to it. And I also wanted to ask you about Johnny Cash.
UTAH PHILLIPS: Isn't that the little bill changers in public restrooms? Forget it. My brain does that. Listen, I'm a victim of this myself. You know, I'm a bystander. I'm not doing this.
Let's see, you started out with what media has done to people. You know that better than I do. That's why you do what you do. See, you're doing an alternative media. And if we play our cards right and have enough time, then pretty soon it won't be alternative media anymore. But then, we have a thorough understanding-don't we, Amy-that they fight with money and we fight with time, and they're going to run out of money before we run out of time. So we'll just be patient, and you do your work, and I'll do mine, and we'll catch up and overtake them.
It's a damn shame, though, that we have to be alternative. But then, we're in a capitalist environment, we're in a capitalist system that's built on-that's built on the least commendable features of the human psyche, greed and envy, rather than the best. We in community radio, in pirate radio, in alternative music distribution, we reach for the best in people, you know, we don't-not lowest common denominators. And we are building a new world within the shell of the old.
I don't feel pessimistic about that at all. There's simply too many good people right here in this room, too many good people on the street, close to the street, doing too many good things for me to afford the luxury of being pessimistic. I'm going to-I'll tell people that tonight, damn it. I'm glad it came up. If I look at the world from the top down, from FOX, God help me, or CNN or-there ought to be a CNN Anon to ween people from that idiocy. If I look at it from the top down, I get seriously depressed. The world's going to hell in a wheelbarrow. But if I walk out the door, turn all that off, and go with the people, whatever town I'm in, who are doing the real work down at the street level, like I said, there's too many good people doing too many good things for me to let myself be pessimistic about that. I'm hopeful, can't live without hope. Can you?
------------------------------------------------------------------------
United States of Insecurity
Perils and Alternatives in the Post 9-11 World
May 24, 2008 By Noam Chomsky
and Gabriel Matthew Schivone
Source: Monthly Review
Noam Chomsky's ZSpace Page
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Based on an interview with Noam Chomsky conducted by Gabriel Matthew Schivone via telephone and e-mail at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, November 27, 2007 through February 11, 2008. Parts of the text have been expanded by the author.
Based on an interview with Noam Chomsky conducted by Gabriel Matthew Schivone via telephone and e-mail at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, November 27, 2007 through February 11, 2008. Parts of the text have been expanded by the author.
A State of Insecurity in the Post-9/11 World
GMS: In a recent interview, Abdel Bari Atwan, author and editor of the London-based Arabic daily newspaper Al-Quds Al Arabi, said that President Bush is not ending terrorism nor is he weakening it, as is one of his strongest assertions in his so-called "War on Terror", but that now Al-Qa'ida has powerfully developed into more of an ideology than an organization, as Atwan describes, expanding like Kentucky Fried Chicken, opening franchises all over the world. "That's the problem," he says. "The Americans are no safer. Their country is a fortress now, the United States of Security." Is this accurate?
CHOMSKY: Except for the last sentence, it's accurate. There's good reason to think that the United States is very vulnerable to terrorist attacks. That's not my opinion, that's the opinion of US intelligence, of specialists of nuclear terror like Harvard professor Graham Allison, and former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and others, who have warned that the probability of even a nuclear attack in the United States is not trivial. So, it's not a fortress.
One of the things that Bush hasn't been doing is improving security. So, for example, if you look at the government commission after 9-11, one of its recommendations-which is a natural one-is to improve security of the US-Canadian border. I mean, if you look at that border, it's very porous. You or I could walk across it somewhere with a suitcase holding components of a nuclear bomb. The Bush administration did not follow that recommendation. What it did instead was fortify the Mexican border, which was not regarded as a serious source of potential terrorism. They in fact slowed the rate of growth of border guards on the Canadian Border.
But quite apart from that, the major part of Atwan's comment is quite correct. Bush Administration programs have not been designed to reduce terror. In fact, they've been designed in a way-as was anticipated by intelligence analysts and others-to increase terror.
So take, say, the invasion of Iraq. It was expected that that would probably have the effect of increasing terror-and it did, though far more than was anticipated. There was a recent study by two leading terrorism experts (using RAND Corporation government data) which concluded that what they called the "Iraq effect" -- meaning, the effect of the Iraq invasion on incidents of terror in the world -- was huge. In fact, they found that terror increased about seven-fold after the invasion of Iraq. That's quite an increase-a lot more than was anticipated.
Also, the invasion increased the threat of nuclear proliferation-for very good reason. One of Israel's leading historians, Martin van Creveld, discussing the possibility of Iran developing a bomb, pointed out the obvious. He said that, after the invasion of Iraq, if Iran isn't developing a nuclear deterrent, "they're crazy" (that's his word, "crazy"). Why? Because the United States made it explicit that it is willing to invade any country it likes, as long as that country can't defend itself. -It was known that Iraq was basically defenseless. Well, that sends a message to the world. It says, "If you don't obey what the US demands, they can invade you, so you better develop a deterrent."
Nobody's going to compete with the United States in a military capacity. I mean, the US spends as much on the military as the rest of the world combined, and it's far more sophisticated and advanced. So, what they'll do is turn to weapons of the weak. And weapons of the weak are basically two: terror and nuclear weapons.
So, sure, the invasion of Iraq predictably increased the threat of terror and of proliferation, and the same is true of other actions. And we can continue. One of the major parts of the so-called "war on terror" is an effort to carry out surveillance and control of financial interactions which enter into terrorist activities. Well, yeah, that's been going on. But according to the Treasury Bureau [Office of Foreign Assets Control] that's been responsible for it, they're spending far more time and energy on possible violations on the US embargo on Cuba than they are on Al Qa'ida transactions.
Why would elites be making the United States, as you say, more vulnerable to attacks in the future? It doesn't seem reasonable, logically speaking, as educated, sensible, intelligent people, that they'd endanger themselves personally and endanger their families, in the short- or long-term, with raising the threat of terror to manifold levels now. Terror would surely threaten them personally, especially with regard to more attacks being committed inside the U.S. and throughout the world. I mean, isn't there something peculiar in this sort of behavior?
I think there's something pathological about it but it's not peculiar. I mean, if you look at it within the framework of elite perceptions, it has a kind of rationality. Short-term considerations of profit and power quite often tend to overwhelm longer term considerations of security and welfare, even for your own children.
I mean, take environmental concerns. Take, say, lead. It was known in the early 1920s by the huge corporations that were producing lead-based products that lead was poisonous. They knew it. We now know-there's been extensive discussion and revelations-and they knew it right away. But they concealed it. And they paid huge amounts of money and effort and legal maneuvers and lobbying and so on to prevent any constraints on it. Well, you know, those windowsills poisoned with lead paint are going to harm their own children, but the interests of profit overwhelmed it. And that's standard.
And take, say, tobacco. It's been known for decades, from the very beginning, that it's a very poisonous product. That didn't stop the tobacco producers from trying to get everyone possible to smoke. Make women smoke, children and others-even their own. These are conflicting demands of profit and power on the one hand, and care about even your own family on the other hand. And very commonly profit and power win out. I think it's pathological. But it's not a pathology of individuals, it's a pathology of social institutions.
When you say the common loyalty to power and profit among elites superseding any care of other human beings is a "pathology of social institutions" and not individuals, are you referring to certain values of American society?
It is not specific to American society. These are institutional properties of semi-competitive state capitalist societies.
Suppose, for example, that there are three US-based conglomerates that produce automobiles: GM, Ford, Chrysler (no longer). They were able to gain their status through substantial reliance on a powerful state, and they were able to survive the 1980s only because the president, Ronald Reagan, was the most protectionist in post-war history, virtually doubling protective barriers to save these and other corporations from being taken over by more advanced Japanese industry. But they (more or less) survive.
Suppose that GM invests in technology that will produce better, safer, more efficient cars in 20 years, but Ford and Chrysler invest in cars that will sell tomorrow. Then GM will not be here in 20 years to profit from its investment. The logic is not inexorable, but it yields very significant anti-social tendencies.
GMS: In a recent interview, Abdel Bari Atwan, author and editor of the London-based Arabic daily newspaper Al-Quds Al Arabi, said that President Bush is not ending terrorism nor is he weakening it, as is one of his strongest assertions in his so-called "War on Terror", but that now Al-Qa'ida has powerfully developed into more of an ideology than an organization, as Atwan describes, expanding like Kentucky Fried Chicken, opening franchises all over the world. "That's the problem," he says. "The Americans are no safer. Their country is a fortress now, the United States of Security." Is this accurate?
CHOMSKY: Except for the last sentence, it's accurate. There's good reason to think that the United States is very vulnerable to terrorist attacks. That's not my opinion, that's the opinion of US intelligence, of specialists of nuclear terror like Harvard professor Graham Allison, and former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and others, who have warned that the probability of even a nuclear attack in the United States is not trivial. So, it's not a fortress.
One of the things that Bush hasn't been doing is improving security. So, for example, if you look at the government commission after 9-11, one of its recommendations-which is a natural one-is to improve security of the US-Canadian border. I mean, if you look at that border, it's very porous. You or I could walk across it somewhere with a suitcase holding components of a nuclear bomb. The Bush administration did not follow that recommendation. What it did instead was fortify the Mexican border, which was not regarded as a serious source of potential terrorism. They in fact slowed the rate of growth of border guards on the Canadian Border.
But quite apart from that, the major part of Atwan's comment is quite correct. Bush Administration programs have not been designed to reduce terror. In fact, they've been designed in a way-as was anticipated by intelligence analysts and others-to increase terror.
So take, say, the invasion of Iraq. It was expected that that would probably have the effect of increasing terror-and it did, though far more than was anticipated. There was a recent study by two leading terrorism experts (using RAND Corporation government data) which concluded that what they called the "Iraq effect" -- meaning, the effect of the Iraq invasion on incidents of terror in the world -- was huge. In fact, they found that terror increased about seven-fold after the invasion of Iraq. That's quite an increase-a lot more than was anticipated.
Also, the invasion increased the threat of nuclear proliferation-for very good reason. One of Israel's leading historians, Martin van Creveld, discussing the possibility of Iran developing a bomb, pointed out the obvious. He said that, after the invasion of Iraq, if Iran isn't developing a nuclear deterrent, "they're crazy" (that's his word, "crazy"). Why? Because the United States made it explicit that it is willing to invade any country it likes, as long as that country can't defend itself. -It was known that Iraq was basically defenseless. Well, that sends a message to the world. It says, "If you don't obey what the US demands, they can invade you, so you better develop a deterrent."
Nobody's going to compete with the United States in a military capacity. I mean, the US spends as much on the military as the rest of the world combined, and it's far more sophisticated and advanced. So, what they'll do is turn to weapons of the weak. And weapons of the weak are basically two: terror and nuclear weapons.
So, sure, the invasion of Iraq predictably increased the threat of terror and of proliferation, and the same is true of other actions. And we can continue. One of the major parts of the so-called "war on terror" is an effort to carry out surveillance and control of financial interactions which enter into terrorist activities. Well, yeah, that's been going on. But according to the Treasury Bureau [Office of Foreign Assets Control] that's been responsible for it, they're spending far more time and energy on possible violations on the US embargo on Cuba than they are on Al Qa'ida transactions.
Why would elites be making the United States, as you say, more vulnerable to attacks in the future? It doesn't seem reasonable, logically speaking, as educated, sensible, intelligent people, that they'd endanger themselves personally and endanger their families, in the short- or long-term, with raising the threat of terror to manifold levels now. Terror would surely threaten them personally, especially with regard to more attacks being committed inside the U.S. and throughout the world. I mean, isn't there something peculiar in this sort of behavior?
I think there's something pathological about it but it's not peculiar. I mean, if you look at it within the framework of elite perceptions, it has a kind of rationality. Short-term considerations of profit and power quite often tend to overwhelm longer term considerations of security and welfare, even for your own children.
I mean, take environmental concerns. Take, say, lead. It was known in the early 1920s by the huge corporations that were producing lead-based products that lead was poisonous. They knew it. We now know-there's been extensive discussion and revelations-and they knew it right away. But they concealed it. And they paid huge amounts of money and effort and legal maneuvers and lobbying and so on to prevent any constraints on it. Well, you know, those windowsills poisoned with lead paint are going to harm their own children, but the interests of profit overwhelmed it. And that's standard.
And take, say, tobacco. It's been known for decades, from the very beginning, that it's a very poisonous product. That didn't stop the tobacco producers from trying to get everyone possible to smoke. Make women smoke, children and others-even their own. These are conflicting demands of profit and power on the one hand, and care about even your own family on the other hand. And very commonly profit and power win out. I think it's pathological. But it's not a pathology of individuals, it's a pathology of social institutions.
When you say the common loyalty to power and profit among elites superseding any care of other human beings is a "pathology of social institutions" and not individuals, are you referring to certain values of American society?
It is not specific to American society. These are institutional properties of semi-competitive state capitalist societies.
Suppose, for example, that there are three US-based conglomerates that produce automobiles: GM, Ford, Chrysler (no longer). They were able to gain their status through substantial reliance on a powerful state, and they were able to survive the 1980s only because the president, Ronald Reagan, was the most protectionist in post-war history, virtually doubling protective barriers to save these and other corporations from being taken over by more advanced Japanese industry. But they (more or less) survive.
Suppose that GM invests in technology that will produce better, safer, more efficient cars in 20 years, but Ford and Chrysler invest in cars that will sell tomorrow. Then GM will not be here in 20 years to profit from its investment. The logic is not inexorable, but it yields very significant anti-social tendencies.
The Predatory Reach of Private Power
Since the so-called "reconstruction" throughout the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2004, one of the policy-initiatives championed by the Bush Administration right up to the present was the dismantling of the New Orleans public school system. The New York Times reported that, of those who could return, children and families were coming back to a "much different" New Orleans with "a smaller [educational] system dominated by new charter schools", along with the termination of nearly 7000 public school employees. What are the implications of private control of public resources, such as education, in this instance, or healthcare, telecommunications, social security, etc.?
Well, there are actually two components to that, both of them leading themes of the Bush Administration's domestic policies, and of reactionary policies generally. One of them is, to put it simply, to put as many dollars as you can in the pockets of your rich friends: that is, to increase profits for the wealthy-to increase the wealth and power of concentrated, private capital. That's one driving force in the administration's policy. The other is to break down the social bonds that lead to people having sympathy and supportive feelings about one another. That contributes to transferring profit and decision-making into the hands of concentrated private power. A component of that is to undermine the normal relations-sympathy and solidarity-that people have.
Take social security. Social security is based on a bond among people. If you earn a salary today-somebody your age-[young people of twenty or so] you're paying for the welfare and survival of your parents' generation. Well, okay, that's a natural feeling. If you want to increase the control of concentrated private power you have to drive that out of people's heads. You have to create the kind of people that Ayn Rand is talking about, where you're after your own welfare and you don't care what happens to anyone else. You have to think, "Why do I have to care about that disabled woman across town who doesn't have enough food to eat? I didn't do it to her. That's her problem. She and her husband didn't invest properly; she didn't work hard enough, so what do I care if she starves to death?" Well, you have to turn people into pathological monsters who think that way, if you want to ensure that unaccountable, concentrated, private power will dominate the world and enrich itself. So, these things go together.
I don't happen to have children in the local school-I did, but my kids are all grown up. So, if I were to follow this line of reasoning, I would say, "Well, why should I pay taxes? My kids don't go to school; I'm not getting anything out of it. What do I care if the kid across the street doesn't go to school?" You can turn people into pathological monsters who think like that. And eliminating the public school system is one part of it.
The public school system is a sign of solidarity, sympathy and concern of people in general-even if it doesn't benefit me, myself. There's a pathological brand of what's called Libertarianism which wants to eliminate that and turn you into a monster who cares only about yourself. And that's one aspect of undermining democracy, and undermining the attitudes that underlie democracy, namely, that there should be a concern for others and a communal way of reacting to community concerns.
Well, let's consider the elimination of the public school system altogether. Would that imply something like what we see in countries in the Third World, where those who can afford to send their children to school, do, and much of the remaining population simply does not have an education? Is this a direction private power might be moving toward in this country?
There are significant forces driving the country in that direction, quite apart from Bush-style reactionaries seeking to enrich the powerful and let the rest fend somehow for themselves.
Take the reliance for school funding on property taxes. In earlier years, when communities were not so sharply separated between rich and poor, that may have been more or less acceptable. Today it means that the wealthy suburbs have better schools than impoverished urban or rural areas. That's only the bare beginning. Suburban elites who work downtown do not have to pay the taxes to keep the city viable for them; that burden falls disproportionately on the poor. Studies of public transportation have shown that the poorer subsidize the richer and more privileged. And these measures proliferate in numerous ways.
The Iraq War: Responsibility and Resistance
Everywhere from high school and college campuses to bus stops and dinner tables, we hear a lot about what a "quagmire" and "costly mess" Iraq has become for the United States, now being blamed as a Republican war, for how the Bush Administration handled the occupation-that 'it should've been done this or that way'-and 'now that we're there we can't leave, it's our 'responsibility' to fix the problem we made because it'll only get worse if we leave-those people will kill each other', and so on. What do you say to these arguments that seem to interweave with each other? And what would you suggest in terms of what some might call an 'honorable solution'? International measures, immediate withdrawal-both?
The position of the liberal doves during the Vietnam War was articulated lucidly by historian and Kennedy advisor Arthur Schlesinger, when the war was becoming too costly for the US and they began their shift from hawk to dove. He wrote that "we all pray" that the hawks will be right in believing that the surge of the day will work, and if they are, we "may be saluting the wisdom and statesmanship of the American government" in gaining victory in a land that they have left in "wreck and ruin." But it probably won't work, so strategy should be rethought. The principles, and the reasoning, carry over with little change to the Iraq invasion.
There is no "honorable solution" to a war of aggression-the "supreme international crime" that differs from other war crimes in that it encompasses all the evil that follows, in the wording of the Nuremberg Tribunal, which condemned Nazi war criminals to death for such crimes as "pre-emptive war." We can only seek the least awful solution. In doing so, we should bear in mind some fundamental principles, among them, that aggressors have no rights, only responsibilities.
The responsibilities are to pay enormous reparations for the harm they have caused, to hold the criminals responsible accountable, and to pay close attention to the wishes of the victims. In this case, we know their wishes quite well. Poll after poll has yielded results similar to those reported by the military in December, after a study of focus groups around the country. They report that Iraqis from all over the country and all walks of life have "shared beliefs," which they enumerated: The American invasion is to blame for the sectarian violence and other horrors, and the invaders should withdraw, leaving Iraq-or what's left of it-to Iraqis.
It tells us a lot about our own moral and intellectual culture that the voice of Iraqis, though known, is not even considered in the thoughtful and comprehensive articles in the media reviewing the options available to Washington. And that there is no comment on this rather striking fact, considered quite natural.
Is there anyone saying the war was fundamentally wrong?
In the case of Vietnam, years after Kennedy's invasion, liberal doves began to say that the war began with "blundering efforts to do good" but by 1969 it was clear that it was a mistake that was too costly to us (Anthony Lewis, at the critical extreme, in the New York Times). In the same year, 70% of the public regarded the war as not "a mistake" but "fundamentally wrong and immoral." That gap between public and elite educated opinion persists until the most recent polls, a few years ago.
In the media and journals, it is very hard to find any voice that criticizes the invasion or Iraq on principled grounds, though there are some. Arthur Schlesinger, for example, took a very different position than he did on Vietnam. When the bombs started falling on Baghdad he quoted President Roosevelt's condemnation of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor as "a date which will live in infamy." Now, Schlesinger wrote, it is Americans who live in infamy as their government follows the path of fascist Japan. But that was a lone voice among elites.
Dissidents, of course, describe "the supreme international crime" as fundamentally wrong. I haven't seen polls about public attitudes on this question.
What about when it is that people know to undertake more serious or severe resistance efforts after the point at which "the limits of possible protest" are reached? In a letter to George Steiner in the NYR, in 1967, you gave the example of what this might look like, now 60 years ago during the Spanish Civil War, when people found it quite necessary to join international brigades to fight against the army of their own country; or, applied to Vietnam, the possible action one might undertake in such circumstances of travelling to Hanoi as a hostage against further bombing. -That's pretty far-reaching, relatively speaking, to what we see in current resistance efforts today against the war. What's your feeling about the possibilities for such methods today in relation to the Iraq war, border action, or other criminal policy in the Middle East and elsewhere? Do situations have to get worse before people or individuals might deem this sort of action necessary?
In the case of Vietnam, serious resistance began several years after Kennedy's invasion of South Vietnam. I was one of a few people trying to organize national tax resistance in early 1965, at a time when South Vietnam, always the main target, was being crushed by intensive bombing and other crimes. By 1966-67, refusal to serve in the invading army was beginning to become a significant phenomenon, along with support for resistance by organized groups, primarily RESIST, formed in 1967 (and still functioning). By then the war had passed far beyond the invasion of Iraq in destructiveness and violence. In fact, at any comparable stage, protest against the Iraq invasion considerably exceeds anything during the Indochina wars.
As for living with the victims to help them or provide them some measure of protection, that is a phenomenon of the 1980s, for the first time in imperial history, to my knowledge, in reaction to Reagan's terrorist wars that devastated Central America, one of his many horrendous crimes. The solidarity movements that took shape then have now extended worldwide, though only in limited ways to Iraq, because the catastrophe created by Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz and the rest is so extraordinary that it is almost impossible to survive in the wreckage-the main reason why reporting is so skimpy; it is simply too dangerous, unlike earlier wars of imperial aggression.
A Question of Neutrality in the Schools
Let's talk about the role of intellectuals in all of this. Here's a question that might be relevant for students to hear especially: You've suggested that the major inducements to becoming absorbed into the ideology of the overall scholarship in this country, largely subservient to power interests, are the significant rewards in prestige and affluence, as well as access to power and authority. So, what are some of the things you've observed in your own time in the academy as a kind of source of this process in American education?
Educational institutions like universities don't exist in a social vacuum; they rely for their existence on the external resources of the society. They rely on the state and contributions from, basically, the wealthy. And the state and the wealthy sectors are very closely linked. So, the universities are in a certain social system in which they reflect a certain distribution of power. They're embedded in it. And that means the struggle for university independence-or independence of thought, and willingness to challenge-that's a hard struggle. You're struggling against social conditions that militate against it.
And it's true, what you said is correct, there are rewards and privileges that come along with conformity, but there's more to say. There are also punishments and abuse, loss of jobs, and so on, that come from challenging systems of power. Both factors operate. So, yes, there's a constant struggle to try and maintain university independence, and it's a hard one.
Sometimes it's argued that the universities should just be neutral, that they shouldn't take positions on anything. Well, there's merit in that, I would like to see that in some abstract universe, but in this universe what that position entails is conformity to the distribution of external power.
So let me take a concrete case, aspects of which are still very much alive on my own campus. Let's take some distance so we can see things more clearly. Back in the 1960s, in my university, MIT, the political science department was carrying out studies with students and faculty on counterinsurgency in Vietnam. Okay, that reflected the distribution of power in the outside society. The US is involved in counterinsurgency in Vietnam: it's our patriotic duty to help. A free and independent university would have been carrying out studies on how poor peasants can resist the attack of a predatory superpower. Can you imagine how much support that would have gotten on campus? Well, okay, that's what neutrality turns into when it's carried out-when the ideal, which is a good ideal, is pursued unthinkingly. It ends up being conformity to power.
Let's take a current case. Right now there's a lot of concern about nuclear weapons in Iran. Well, again, take my own campus, MIT. In the 1970s Iran was under the rule of a brutal tyrant who the United States and Britain had imposed by force in a military coup overthrowing the democratic government. So Iran was therefore an ally. Well, in the government, people like Henry Kissenger, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and others, were calling for Iran to develop nuclear capacities and nuclear power and so on, which means a step short of nuclear weapons. And my own university, MIT, made an arrangement with the Shah of Iran, the dictator, to train Iranian nuclear engineers. It was the 1970s. There was enormous student protest about that. But very little faculty protest, in fact, the faculty approved it. And it was instituted. In fact, some of the people now running the Iranian nuclear programs are graduates of MIT. Well, is the university neutral in those respects? No, not really; it's conforming to power interests. In this case, to go back to an earlier part of our conversation, they did conform to short-term commitments to power and profit but with long-term consequences that were quite harmful to the very same people who instituted them.
Henry Kissinger, who at least has the virtue of honesty, was asked by the Washington Post why he is now objecting to same Iranian programs that he was instrumental in instituting when he was in office back in the 70s. And he said, frankly, Well, they were an ally then. They needed nuclear power. And now they are an enemy so they don't need nuclear power.
Okay, he's a complete cynic, but he's an honest one, fortunately. But should universities take that position?
By Steady Drips of Water: Activism and Social Change
For the last question I'd like to talk a little about providing alternatives, for people trying to figure out things, searching for answers, seeing through propaganda, developing solidarity, initiating movements. Here's a good quote I came across that might be a good starting point, from the notable novelist E.M Forester, writing at the beginning stages of the Second World War, in 1939, in his essay "What I Believe":
"I do not believe in Belief. But this is an age of faith, and there are so many militant creeds that, in self-defense, one has to formulate a creed of one's own. Tolerance, good temper and sympathy...in a world rent by religious and racial persecution, in a world where ignorance rules, and science, who ought to have ruled, plays the subservient pimp." He repeats: "Tolerance, good temper and sympathy-they are what matter really, and if the human race is not to collapse they must come to the front before long."
What are some of the things he's getting at here that we can discuss in terms of alternatives for the future, and social organization?
I'm often asked questions like that, in maybe a dozen emails a night or in talks and so on, and I'm always at a loss to answer. Not because I can't think of an answer, but because I think we all know the answer. There aren't any magic keys here; there are no mysterious ways of approaching things. What it takes is just what has led to progress and success in the past. We live in a much more civilized world than we did even when Forester was writing, in many respects.
Say, women's rights, or opposition to torture-or even opposition to aggression-environmental concerns, recognition of some of the crimes of our own history, like what happened to the indigenous population. We can go on and on. There's been much improvement in those areas. How? Well, because people like those working in alternative media, or those we never hear about who are doing social organizing, community building, political action, etc., engage themselves in trying to do something about it.
And the modes of engagement are not mysterious. You have to try and develop a critical, open mind, and you have to be willing to evaluate and challenge conventional beliefs-accept them if they turn out to be valid, but reject them if-as is so often the case-they turn out to just reflect power structures. And then proceed with educational and organizing activities, actions as appropriate to circumstances. There is no simple formula; rather, lots of options. And gradually over time, things improve. I mean, even the hardest rock will be eroded by steady drips of water. That's what social change comes to and there are no mysterious modes of proceeding. They're hard ones, demanding ones, challenging, often costly. But that's what it takes to get a better world.
Noam Chomsky is an Institute Professor of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Perhaps one of the most revered thinkers of the twentieth century and tireless advocate for honorable peace and social justice, he lectures and writes widely on American foreign policy and world affairs. His latest books are Interventions (City Lights) and Failed States (Metropolitan Books).
Gabriel Matthew Schivone is an editor of Days Beyond Recall Alternative Media and Literary Journal. His articles, having been translated into multiple languages, have appeared in numerous journals such as Z Magazine, Counterpunch and the Monthly Review, as well as Contre Info (France), and Caminos (Cuba). He is most recently the recipient of the 2007 Frederica Hearst Prize for Lyrical Poetry. He is also an active member of the UA Chapter of Amnesty International, Voices of Opposition (to War, Racism and Oppression), Dry River Radical Resource Center, and Students Organized for Animal Rights.
