Stuart Jeanne Bramhall's Blog: The Most Revolutionary Act , page 1392
April 13, 2013
Provocative Documentary By Woody Harrelson
Ethos
Peter McGrain 2011
Film Review
The hour-long documentary Ethos, narrated by actor/activist Woody Harrelson, is now available free online.
In my opinion, it has powerful take home lessons for Americans across the political spectrum. Largely because it addresses what I view as the two main obstacles to political change in the US 1) the immense power private banks enjoy via their control over the money supply and 2) the enormous power the corporate media exerts over public information. Much of this is elucidated through excellent cameo interviews with prominent dissidents such as Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, Howard Zinn, Edward Said, Cynthia McKinney, Norman Solomon, Benjamin Barber and Chalmers Johnson.
The main goal of the film is to clearly articulate the current political crisis Americans face in the 21st century, which it does by exploring the historical context in which the crisis has developed. The documentary describes a number of significant historical events that are usually omitted from history textbooks.
It starts out with a general overview of the ways in which corporations have steadily increased their control over our supposedly democratic government.
There is special emphasis on the power private banks wield by controlling the money supply. Harrelson starts back in 1910 with the secret “conspiracy” by J.P. Morgan and other major bankers to create the Federal Reserve. Contrary to popular belief, the Fed isn’t a branch of the federal government. What it is, in essence, is a cartel of private banks.
Harrelson also devotes a long section to the use of the corporate media to manipulate public opinion and instigate Americans’ overwhelming drive to consume. He begins by describing the work, in the early 20th century, of Edward Bernays. Bernays, considered the father of the public relations industry, held the view common to many corporate elites that the wider public must be controlled because they’re incapable of meaningful participation in democratic government. Bernays perfected the technique of manipulating unconscious fears and desires, not only to help corporations sell people stuff they don’t need, but to assist government in social control.
In the final part of the film, Harrelson reveals how the Bush administration used the science of public relations to 1) convince the American people of the need for the US to invade and occupy Iraq and Afghanistan and 2) generate sufficient fear in the population to pass legislation stripping Americans of most civil liberties guaranteed in the Bill of Rights.
photo credit: rick via photopin cc
Crossposted at Daily Censored
April 12, 2013
Combating Education’s Shock Doctrineers
Guest post by Dr Danny Weil
(In this final of 6 guest posts, Weil describes the need for direct action in fighting Wall Street’s effort to end public education as we know it.)
The shock doctrineers have moved stealth like, quickly and quietly, under the auspices of democratic change, crisis and benevolent largess clothed in frothy rhetoric when in fact their aims are malevolent and their largess the result of looted monies from both worker exploitation, in the case of say, Bill Gates, and/or debt income in the case of Lumina and Sallie Mae (http://www.minyanville.com/business-news/politics-and-regulation/articles/SLM-NNI-CIT-Sallie-Mae-SLM/5/31/2012/id/41365).
They have used religious reactionaries who do not even want knowledge of the human body to be taught to students, let alone critical thinking/reasoning, to drum up support for their plans and herd the masses under the guise of faith-based charity and similar schemes (http://www.dailycensored.com/high-school-teacher-in-idaho-under-investigation-for-saying-vagina-during-anatomy-lesson-and-encouraging-critical-thinking-on-climate-change/).
If students, faculty, working people, the disabled and indeed the majority of us who seek to create school as a ‘home for the mind’, are to beat them at their offensive game, then we must wake up and see how they operate. This will take meticulous and arduous critical analysis for they far outnumber us in both capital to assure their plans are put in place, and access to the microphone of a deracinated culture from which they operate, celebrate and broadcast their rancid strategies. And they are moving fast now, not just here in the US but all over the world (http://www.dailycensored.com/lumina-foundation-pushing-privatization-of-education-in-mexico/).
They are smart, ruthless and own the armed forces and the police who work to assure there will be no resistance to their plans.
Simply signing petitions, writing letters to corporate newspapers or calling on corporate democrats to step up to the plate and such, will never work. In fact, it is a strategy that is playing right into the neo-enclosure colonist’s hands, for this is the exertion that the new Masters want the working class to engage in – to come to the throne with petitions, handwringing and pleas while the masters yawn, host large country club dinners to create more havoc, secretly bivouac in fancy hotels to launch new neo-enclosure plans and move quickly across the terrain, saddled up with a lynch posse for anything public, be it schools or hospitals.
No, now is the time to create working class and community ties that can then be harnessed to the development of class-based organization and development of political parties and massive resistance. Only with direct action can we hope to win. For as Chris Hedges and other notable scholars and activists have noted, liberalism is dead and I would add, it is the real problem.
Only a mobilized class-conscious-left has the chance to take on these hoaksters and hustlers who seek to reduce humanity to robotization and create the oppressive Brave New World where we become “Insolvent Green’. Getting rid of the road dogs, the surplus population no longer needed under capitalism, is their goal and they will use any force to accomplish it for they know angry and class-conscious masses are the biggest threat to their dominance.
Once again, the plans for the wholesale privatization of education and elimination of educational opportunities for American students, is clear in the Lumina report, of which there are many:
If we are to create an environment that can stand up to these disastrous “shock doctrineers” in an Age of Irrationality and an environment of ignorance, we must understand how social class works and what is in store for all of us if we fail. This means understanding how the bankrupt and debt ridden capitalist class operates maliciously worldwide to seed and then harvest a new world of both manipulation and repression. Without a clear understanding of the historical as it exists in the present moment, we will find our contemporary life littered with a growing surplus population that must be manipulated and eventually repressed — a future owned and harnessed by ‘them’.
This then is our mission: education, mobilization and tying our understanding and our wakening lives to clear organizational goals that stand up to the farce being perpetrated in the name of freedom.
City College of San Francisco is in progression and their efforts are a site for growing resistance and understanding. Now is the time to turn up the volume, organize communities of power and enlightenment and begin the long, arduous march towards creating a better world. We either accomplish this feat, or we enter the new Digital Dark Ages.
photo credit: Son of Groucho via photopin cc
Reposted from Daily Censored
Dr. Danny Weil is an investigative journalist, author and public interest attorney who practiced public interest law for more than twenty years and has been published in a case of first impression in California . He now lives in Ecuador .
January 18, 2012
Sequel to Battle for Tomorrow
I have just started the sequel to Battle for Tomorrow, which came out last April and won a 2011 NABE Pinnacle Achievement Award.
In the sequel (which doesn't have a title yet), Ange is 17. She has just left Occupy Wall Street and is squatting in a vacant commercial building in Brooklyn with some homeless teenagers.
This is from Chapter 1:
Ange’s skin crawled the first time Phillip put the M16 in her arms. She felt herself recoil at the cold , unnatural smoothness of the metal and the sour, burnt smell. He left her alone with Roger, a middle age pot bellied man who wore large square framed glasses, an olive drab down vest and a red checked hunting cap. The rifle was heavy, and Ange cradled it in both arms as he showed her a YouTube video of a twenty year old girl disassembling an M16/A2. He pointed to something on his laptop screen.
“You see the time on that? One point one three minutes.” He showed the video again. The woman, pretty as opposed to glamorous, had wavy shoulder length black hair. She was dressed in jeans and a plain white tee shirt. She looked white, though there were two mixed race men in uniform shirts on either side. Ange assumed they were local police or sheriffs. The woman looked up at one of them triumphantly as she laid the last part on the table. It was clear they were timing her.
Roger put a large glossy black and white on the table in front of her. It showed all the parts, obviously in the order in which they were removed. “You start by removing the magazine.” He had her turn the gun over and showed her how to undo the catch that released it. “Put it on the table now, like the photo.” He gestured with his head. He started the video again and paused it. “Watch how she releases the upper receiver to remove the charging handle and BCG.” He started the video again. “Now watch how she disassembles the BCG.” Copying the woman on the video, Ange laid out all the parts and looked up at Roger.
“Now put them back in. In the same order you removed them.”
After repeating the disassembly and reassembly five times, he had her practice, loading, unloading, clearing the chamber, and operating the safety. After an hour, Phillip came back with a pair of ear protectors and took her to the firing area. Tall, mixed race and in his early forties, Phillip wore his hair in dreds and wore faded jeans and a heavy woolen pee jacket like the ones they sold in army surplus stores. He showed her exactly where to put her feet and how to position her left arm and right hand to center the weight against her left shoulder.
“Did you ever play tennis?” he asked. Phillip, who grew up in Haiti spoke fluent English with a marked French accent. She nodded. “Playing tennis well isn't merely about hitting the ball, is it? The first thing you learn is to position your legs and body. This is no different.”
In the sequel (which doesn't have a title yet), Ange is 17. She has just left Occupy Wall Street and is squatting in a vacant commercial building in Brooklyn with some homeless teenagers.
This is from Chapter 1:
Ange’s skin crawled the first time Phillip put the M16 in her arms. She felt herself recoil at the cold , unnatural smoothness of the metal and the sour, burnt smell. He left her alone with Roger, a middle age pot bellied man who wore large square framed glasses, an olive drab down vest and a red checked hunting cap. The rifle was heavy, and Ange cradled it in both arms as he showed her a YouTube video of a twenty year old girl disassembling an M16/A2. He pointed to something on his laptop screen.
“You see the time on that? One point one three minutes.” He showed the video again. The woman, pretty as opposed to glamorous, had wavy shoulder length black hair. She was dressed in jeans and a plain white tee shirt. She looked white, though there were two mixed race men in uniform shirts on either side. Ange assumed they were local police or sheriffs. The woman looked up at one of them triumphantly as she laid the last part on the table. It was clear they were timing her.
Roger put a large glossy black and white on the table in front of her. It showed all the parts, obviously in the order in which they were removed. “You start by removing the magazine.” He had her turn the gun over and showed her how to undo the catch that released it. “Put it on the table now, like the photo.” He gestured with his head. He started the video again and paused it. “Watch how she releases the upper receiver to remove the charging handle and BCG.” He started the video again. “Now watch how she disassembles the BCG.” Copying the woman on the video, Ange laid out all the parts and looked up at Roger.
“Now put them back in. In the same order you removed them.”
After repeating the disassembly and reassembly five times, he had her practice, loading, unloading, clearing the chamber, and operating the safety. After an hour, Phillip came back with a pair of ear protectors and took her to the firing area. Tall, mixed race and in his early forties, Phillip wore his hair in dreds and wore faded jeans and a heavy woolen pee jacket like the ones they sold in army surplus stores. He showed her exactly where to put her feet and how to position her left arm and right hand to center the weight against her left shoulder.
“Did you ever play tennis?” he asked. Phillip, who grew up in Haiti spoke fluent English with a marked French accent. She nodded. “Playing tennis well isn't merely about hitting the ball, is it? The first thing you learn is to position your legs and body. This is no different.”
September 16, 2010
Chapter 1 of a new book (novel) that I'm working on
Ange never had any doubt the blue line would be there. The flu like fullness in her head and chemical feeling in her stomach were too familiar. Part of her wanted to pretend otherwise. To believe a miracle was still possible. That she would get her period and just be more careful next time.
After undergoing her first abortion at thirteen, she was totally prepared to make her own arrangements. Even at sixteen, her family was irrelevant. Unlike the majority of her classmates at Garfield High School, she wouldn’t face parental displeasure, shame or even disappointment. What she couldn’t bear was handing herself over to adults she didn’t respect and who didn’t respect her. To be subjected to hours of inane questions and advice. Moreover they would feel entitled to be patronizing and condescending. From her past experience at Aurora Medical Center, she was resigned to their inability to see her for what she was. All they would see was a naïve teenager who had foolishly engaged in unprotected intercourse.
The clinic would insist on repeating her pregnancy test before they did anything. Ange, however, was savvy enough to know she had a right to demand a blood pregnancy. Not only was this more reliable, but it would produce a result within a few hours. They would also harangue her about being tested for HIV and being swabbed for gonorrhea and Chlamydia. She was determined not to tell them that her partner was a twenty three year nursing student and clean. She had learned to treat all her relationships with adults like a chess game. If she told them about Reuben, this would only lead to more questions. And they would think they had scored points by getting into her head at all.
All adults in the so-called helping profession were like that. You could almost see them adding up points in their head. Eventually they reached some magic number and decided they knew you better than you knew yourself.
The clinic would be the smaller hurdle. By this point, Ange had effectively dispatched dozens of social workers from welfare and Child Protective Services. The secret was to listen passively to the lectures, give non-committal shrugs to all their questions and to finish with: “Thank you. Can I go now?” She could read their fury in their body language – none of them were immune – but only the frankly incompetent ones ever vented it.
Handling Reuben would be much more difficult. She was determined he would pay for the abortion because it was his fault. There was no fucking way it would come out of the $1,500 she had saved for the first and last month on a studio, her one and only life goal. She was pretty confident of pulling it off by telling him she knew about Sophie. She had reconciled herself six weeks earlier to ending her relationship with him Reuben. At the same time she was too furious with him to do it without making a scene – and determined not to give him the satisfaction of seeing her lose control.
The clinic was a forty five minute bus ride from the three bedroom house on 45th and Wallingford that her mother inherited when her grandmother died. Too angst ridden to sleep, she was up at 5:30 and showered and dressed in a black turtleneck and her best black cords by 6:15. Her plan was to arrive a little before nine when they opened the doors and persuade the receptionist she was too upset to wait for an appointment. It took her five minutes to apply a thin thread of eye liner under each eye and to put her jewelry in. She put on her full regalia, as Reuben called it – four double loops around the outer lobe of her left ear, three on the right with a pewter ear cuff, a tiny silver loop through her right eyebrow and a tongue stud.
She loved the way her friend Katherine had cut her hair. Prior to her first abortion, she had shoulder length blonde hair and spent $25 a month on cosmetics. After her Aunt Beverley came to live with them she dyed it jet black and wore it in a shag or pixie cut. Katherine insisted it was still too long, but Ange was frightened that a shorter cut would make her look too masculine. Nevertheless her friend’s skillful tapering on the top and at the back gave it an extra fullness that softened her square jaw lined much better than a longer cut that lay flat against her skull.
As she studied her reflection she marveled at how pretty she looked since making herself over as a punk. What she liked best about the new look was that for the first time in her life her outward appearance perfectly matched the person inside. She no longer saw a naïve party girl looking back at her. She saw a woman – one that was assertive, confident and self-sufficient and in no mood to be pushed around.
Finishing in the bathroom, Ange headed for the kitchen, which was at the back of the house, and put two pieces of twelve grain bread into the toaster while she boiled water in the electric kettle and set up her mother’s single cup drip cone on her mug with a new filter and two scoops of her mother’s French roast coffee. Ange’s taste for coffee, which up until four months ago had seemed nasty and bitter, was newly acquired. While she waited for the water to filter through, she buttered the toast with a thin sliver of margarine and placed them on a saucer on the tray Patricia kept in the center of the kitchen table. Then she took the tray and knocked softly on the door to her mother’s bedroom, which was between Ange’s room and the bathroom.
Without waiting for an answer, she opened the door and set the tray on the antique wooden hospital tray stand just inside the door, which she wheeled to the head of her mother’s bed. Then she crossed the room to open both sets of the floor length reddish brown thermal drapes that she hated. Angie’s mother had a large electric bed with a remote control that allowed her to adjust its height and to elevate the head of the bed herself. Diane had suffered her stroke, which left her paralyzed on the left side and virtually unable to speak, a week after Ange’s thirteenth birthday. After spending three months in a rehabilitation center in Mountlake Terrace, she came home and went through nine different caregivers in twelve weeks. Every time an agency nurse failed to show up on time or quit without giving notice, it became Ange’s responsibility to feed, toilet, transfer and bathe her mother, as well as tracking down Diane’s elusive case manager to get a new caregiver assigned.
Whether the stress of this immense responsibility was directly or indirectly related, suddenly Ange found herself pregnant. Ange was too naïve at the time to recognize what happened as date rape. The boy was never prosecuted. Fortunately Diane’s sister Beverley still lived in Seattle then. After scheduling and paying for Ange’s first abortion, she moved in with them.
***
That had lasted exactly three months. Ange, who knew it was down to her that Bev had left, would give anything to take that summer back to live over again. It was only after her aunt moved halfway around the world that Ange recognized that Bev was the only adult other than her grandmother to genuine care for her. But by then it was too late.
It had all started with a comment her aunt made about Ange trying to become her mother. There was no need for her to explain what she meant by this. Prior to her stroke Diane was almost a caricature of the ideal of American beauty promoted by TV advertisers. Her whole life was focused on perfecting her appearance to maximize male attention.
Before Bev came to live with them, Ange had no adult women to compare her mother to. However after her aunt moved in, Ange became acutely aware how shallow and superficial Diane was compared to Bev and her grandmother – who were both self-sufficient, free thinking feminists. Infuriated at being compared to someone Ange never felt close to and was convinced didn’t love her, Ange lashed out at Bev, rebelling at the firm limits her aunt tried to set for her. Diane, who was always exclusively focused on her own needs, had always allowed Ange to do as she pleased. After two months of dealing with Ange’s angry tirades and verbal abuse, Bev quit her job and K-Mart and returned to Africa to start a rural development project in the Congo.
***
After opening the drapes Ange approached her mother, who was curled up on her right side. Even without make-up, which Irene applied first thing every morning, Diane was much closer to Angie’s ideal of beauty than she herself was. In fact for years she believed this – her basic ugliness - was why her mother couldn’t love her. As far back as Ange could remember, her mother was always complaining that Ange’s, nose was too thick, her jaw too square and her eyes too small and close together.
Although she was pushing 45, Diane still had a heart shaped baby doll face and fine, perfectly proportioned features. Ange always felt she looked prettiest when she was asleep because the scowl lines disappeared when her forehead relaxed. Ange had never seen Diane’s natural hair color but assumed it would be mostly gray now, as her grandmother had been totally gray at 40. Angie remembered her mother’s hair as auburn before her stroke. Prior to her stroke, Diane dyed it auburn. However for the last six months, since Irene had been borrowing a DSHS van to take her to the beauty college, it had been copper blond with whitish blond streaks and styled in a trendy razor cut that covered her ears and jaw line like a veil.
Ange grasped her mother firmly by the shoulder and felt a slight shudder. Diane hated being woken early, but it was too risky to let her wake up in an empty house. There was a 911 autodial set on her speaker phone. The last time Ange left before Irene arrived, her mom had called the police and Ange nearly ended up in a foster home.
“I have to leave early, mom. We have debate practice. I can’t wait for Irene to get here.” It was a lie, but a guilt-free one. Ange knew Bev had made Diane cry when she told her about the first pregnancy. Ange had enough problems coping with her own extremes of emotion without being lumbered with her mom’s. “Do you want to use the commode before I leave?”
There was a large black leather armchair to the left of the bed, where Diane spent most of her day. To the right of the armchair was a commode with a stainless steel frame and a seat cover that was originally yellow but had degraded over time to dingy white with pink streaks. To the left, immediately next to the bed, was a large oak bedside table fitted with three shelves for books, magazines, DVDs and videotapes. On top of the table was a small cut glass Tiffany lamp, along with a speaker phone, the remote for the bed and the remote for the TV and DVD/video player which was at the foot of the bed on a lightweight TV stand on wheels that Reuben had rigged up with a pulley and loop of clothesline. By pulling on the rope with her left hand, Diane could wheel the stand close enough to either the head of the bed or the armchair to insert her own DVDs and videos.
Her mother lifted her head, which waggled ever so slightly. The movement, which would have been imperceptible to a stranger, meant “no.” Angie cocked her head towards the armchair. “Do you want me to help you transfer?” Diane bobbled her head again. She wanted Ange to transfer her.
Ange pulled the covers back that Diane had clutched around her shoulder and bent over to enable her mother to reach her good left arm around her neck. Then Angie lifted her by the shoulders while her mother slowly rotated her left hip. The physical intimacy was the hardest part for Ange. Prior to her stroke, Diane had been prone to melodramatic displays of affection to demonstrate some hypothetical mother-daughter bond which Ange didn’t feel and didn’t believe her mother felt, either.
Once Ange had positioned her, she handed her both remotes and the rope Reuben had attached to the TV stand and wheeled the tray stand with Diane’s breakfast into position across the armchair. Then she checked the catheter bag, which was only half full, kissed her mother on the forehead and left.
***
She caught the 44 to Aurora and hurried up a long flight of concrete stairs to the 45th Street overpass, where she waited for the six to Aurora Village. With no trees or homes to block the stiff wind off Puget Sound, it seemed at least five degrees colder on top of the overpass. She huddled behind the bus shelter to protect herself from the wind and mentally kicked herself for making such a mess of her life. Although she was still very grateful to Reuben for opening up a totally new world for her, she no longer had any doubt the relationship was over. Not only had he cheated on her, but Ange believed he had done so due to the impasse in their own relationship. Ange was ready to branch out and excel in new areas, and Reuben could only full love her as his political protégée.
Furious with herself for being in this predicament at all, she tortured herself with questions about where she had gone wrong. Was she wrong to sleep with Reuben at all? Should she have seen this coming? She had sworn off boys after Bev left, who ironically had far more influence over her in Africa than in Seattle. Determined to prove her wrong – that Ange was nothing like her mum - she cut off her blond curls, dyed the inch long spikes that remained jet black, got extra piercings for her ears, eyebrow and tongue, and took to wearing black lipstick and nail polish and staying up all night crying to Pearl Jam and other EMO music. A deeply superstitious part of her 13 year old personality believed the punishment for wild behavior and if she stayed home after night and did all her homework she could keep it from happening again. However this only worked because she allowed the rebellious part of herself to compensate by transforming her physical being into a spiky haired, multiply pierced Goth. For the sake of all her teachers and counselors who decided they could tell all they needed to know about teenagers from their appearance.
***
She had first met Reuben at Leavenworth Summer, a special social studies camp her world history teacher nominated her for summer before her sophomore year. Reuben, a freshman at UW, was one of the counselors. Ange was surprised to hear an older girl in her Spanish class, who also attended, refer to it as “Commie” Camp. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the conversion of China to capitalism, Ange thought it unlikely there were any communists left anywhere in the world, much less in the US.
To her surprise it was the high point of her adolescence. Angie, who had never been east of Carnation, was instantly enchanted by the high Cascades site chosen for the camp, which reminded her of the alpine shots in Heidi and the Sound of Music. She had expected to be surrounded by a bunch of geeks and nerds, but for the most part the other campers looked exactly like the jocks and preppie types at Garfield. Unlike the camps Ange attended as a child, the campers were mainly left to their own devices. While there were a number of early morning hikes and campfire sing alongs, there was little organized daytime activity except for a morning and afternoon film series and discussion groups the campers mainly organized an ran themselves. They all seemed to spend most of their time in the canteen, which had an espresso machine and sold lattes, cappuccinos and hot chocolate at a $2 discount.
Ange, who felt extremely intimidated by the other campers, was more an observer than a participant. She was used to being around adolescents who talked about music they downloaded on their ipods. She had no idea how to relate to teenagers who were more interested in discussing the war in Iraq and the government bailout of two mortgage companies with names that sounded like grunge groups.
Concerned that Ange was having a hard time, the third day of camp Reuben invited her to drive to Leavenworth with him for a latte. "I just want you to know," he said as they got in the car together, "that I'm not hitting on you. This isn't about that."
It was the last thing she expected to hear from a member of the opposite sex. However the next thing he said was even more mind blowing. "You seem very different from the other campers, Ange," he said. "I can't quite put my finger on it. But I get the sense your parents never talk about politics at home. That all this is quite new for you."
Ange heard the implied question in his statement. Fortunately Reuben didn't expect her to answer and changed the subject. There was no way she was going to discuss her relationship with Diane with a total stranger, no matter how nice he was.
He went on to tell her about a film they were showing that afternoon called Who’s Counting by a NZ woman named Marilyn Warring. “We’re having a special type of discussion group afterwards called a fishbowl. The women who never say very much will sit in the center and talk about feminism, while the men and talkative women sit in a circle around them and listen. I’m sure you know what feminism is, don’t you?”
Ange nodded. “My grandmother was a strong feminist, but my mother always felt she was too extreme. She hated the way she was always at meetings instead of taking care of her kids.”
***
Ange thorough enjoyed the Marilyn Waring film, which focused mainly on the vast amount of work women performed in different societies that was unpaid and thus wasn’t counted as economically productive. She made the immediate connection with the hundreds of hours she had spent looking after her mom. One of the school counselors had called her a “young carer” and tried to send her to a “young carer” support group.
Reuben put Ange and four other girls who rarely spoke in the center of the fishbowl. As with Ange, it was their first time at Leavenworth Summer, as well as the very first time anyone asked them to discuss their own feelings and values – as opposed to those of their parents and the kids they hung out with. In fact that was the first thing they agreed on – they weren’t really sure how they felt about feminism or the other political topics the other campers discussed because no one had ever asked them before.
Instead of talking about feminism, the assigned topic, Ange and her fellow introverts started talking about housework and chores, focusing on the awful drudgery of doing dishes and cleaning toilets and shower stalls.
“I’m never getting married or having children,” Ange volunteered. “I was leaning that way before, but now I’m absolutely sure. I know a scam when I see one, and women are no longer compelled to take on that kind of unpaid work if they don’t want to.”
Three of the other girls were quick to agree. The fourth, who was two years older, wasn’t so sure. She thought that maybe Marilyn Waring was right – that society could change so that women could be valued or even paid for unpaid work. “Good childrearing is important for the whole society, even for people who choose not to have them.”
It had never occurred to Ange before that society might be as responsible as parents for the way children turned out. This, in turn, led to the though that possibly Ange wasn’t solely and individually responsible for the unhappiness in her life.
***
Reuben continued to call and text her after she returned to Seattle. He took her to other political films and lectures, as well as to meetings of a group called Socialist Action that previously she had no idea existed. In September of her junior year he invited Ange to her first protest march. Then in February, a few weeks after she turned 16, they became lovers.
After undergoing her first abortion at thirteen, she was totally prepared to make her own arrangements. Even at sixteen, her family was irrelevant. Unlike the majority of her classmates at Garfield High School, she wouldn’t face parental displeasure, shame or even disappointment. What she couldn’t bear was handing herself over to adults she didn’t respect and who didn’t respect her. To be subjected to hours of inane questions and advice. Moreover they would feel entitled to be patronizing and condescending. From her past experience at Aurora Medical Center, she was resigned to their inability to see her for what she was. All they would see was a naïve teenager who had foolishly engaged in unprotected intercourse.
The clinic would insist on repeating her pregnancy test before they did anything. Ange, however, was savvy enough to know she had a right to demand a blood pregnancy. Not only was this more reliable, but it would produce a result within a few hours. They would also harangue her about being tested for HIV and being swabbed for gonorrhea and Chlamydia. She was determined not to tell them that her partner was a twenty three year nursing student and clean. She had learned to treat all her relationships with adults like a chess game. If she told them about Reuben, this would only lead to more questions. And they would think they had scored points by getting into her head at all.
All adults in the so-called helping profession were like that. You could almost see them adding up points in their head. Eventually they reached some magic number and decided they knew you better than you knew yourself.
The clinic would be the smaller hurdle. By this point, Ange had effectively dispatched dozens of social workers from welfare and Child Protective Services. The secret was to listen passively to the lectures, give non-committal shrugs to all their questions and to finish with: “Thank you. Can I go now?” She could read their fury in their body language – none of them were immune – but only the frankly incompetent ones ever vented it.
Handling Reuben would be much more difficult. She was determined he would pay for the abortion because it was his fault. There was no fucking way it would come out of the $1,500 she had saved for the first and last month on a studio, her one and only life goal. She was pretty confident of pulling it off by telling him she knew about Sophie. She had reconciled herself six weeks earlier to ending her relationship with him Reuben. At the same time she was too furious with him to do it without making a scene – and determined not to give him the satisfaction of seeing her lose control.
The clinic was a forty five minute bus ride from the three bedroom house on 45th and Wallingford that her mother inherited when her grandmother died. Too angst ridden to sleep, she was up at 5:30 and showered and dressed in a black turtleneck and her best black cords by 6:15. Her plan was to arrive a little before nine when they opened the doors and persuade the receptionist she was too upset to wait for an appointment. It took her five minutes to apply a thin thread of eye liner under each eye and to put her jewelry in. She put on her full regalia, as Reuben called it – four double loops around the outer lobe of her left ear, three on the right with a pewter ear cuff, a tiny silver loop through her right eyebrow and a tongue stud.
She loved the way her friend Katherine had cut her hair. Prior to her first abortion, she had shoulder length blonde hair and spent $25 a month on cosmetics. After her Aunt Beverley came to live with them she dyed it jet black and wore it in a shag or pixie cut. Katherine insisted it was still too long, but Ange was frightened that a shorter cut would make her look too masculine. Nevertheless her friend’s skillful tapering on the top and at the back gave it an extra fullness that softened her square jaw lined much better than a longer cut that lay flat against her skull.
As she studied her reflection she marveled at how pretty she looked since making herself over as a punk. What she liked best about the new look was that for the first time in her life her outward appearance perfectly matched the person inside. She no longer saw a naïve party girl looking back at her. She saw a woman – one that was assertive, confident and self-sufficient and in no mood to be pushed around.
Finishing in the bathroom, Ange headed for the kitchen, which was at the back of the house, and put two pieces of twelve grain bread into the toaster while she boiled water in the electric kettle and set up her mother’s single cup drip cone on her mug with a new filter and two scoops of her mother’s French roast coffee. Ange’s taste for coffee, which up until four months ago had seemed nasty and bitter, was newly acquired. While she waited for the water to filter through, she buttered the toast with a thin sliver of margarine and placed them on a saucer on the tray Patricia kept in the center of the kitchen table. Then she took the tray and knocked softly on the door to her mother’s bedroom, which was between Ange’s room and the bathroom.
Without waiting for an answer, she opened the door and set the tray on the antique wooden hospital tray stand just inside the door, which she wheeled to the head of her mother’s bed. Then she crossed the room to open both sets of the floor length reddish brown thermal drapes that she hated. Angie’s mother had a large electric bed with a remote control that allowed her to adjust its height and to elevate the head of the bed herself. Diane had suffered her stroke, which left her paralyzed on the left side and virtually unable to speak, a week after Ange’s thirteenth birthday. After spending three months in a rehabilitation center in Mountlake Terrace, she came home and went through nine different caregivers in twelve weeks. Every time an agency nurse failed to show up on time or quit without giving notice, it became Ange’s responsibility to feed, toilet, transfer and bathe her mother, as well as tracking down Diane’s elusive case manager to get a new caregiver assigned.
Whether the stress of this immense responsibility was directly or indirectly related, suddenly Ange found herself pregnant. Ange was too naïve at the time to recognize what happened as date rape. The boy was never prosecuted. Fortunately Diane’s sister Beverley still lived in Seattle then. After scheduling and paying for Ange’s first abortion, she moved in with them.
***
That had lasted exactly three months. Ange, who knew it was down to her that Bev had left, would give anything to take that summer back to live over again. It was only after her aunt moved halfway around the world that Ange recognized that Bev was the only adult other than her grandmother to genuine care for her. But by then it was too late.
It had all started with a comment her aunt made about Ange trying to become her mother. There was no need for her to explain what she meant by this. Prior to her stroke Diane was almost a caricature of the ideal of American beauty promoted by TV advertisers. Her whole life was focused on perfecting her appearance to maximize male attention.
Before Bev came to live with them, Ange had no adult women to compare her mother to. However after her aunt moved in, Ange became acutely aware how shallow and superficial Diane was compared to Bev and her grandmother – who were both self-sufficient, free thinking feminists. Infuriated at being compared to someone Ange never felt close to and was convinced didn’t love her, Ange lashed out at Bev, rebelling at the firm limits her aunt tried to set for her. Diane, who was always exclusively focused on her own needs, had always allowed Ange to do as she pleased. After two months of dealing with Ange’s angry tirades and verbal abuse, Bev quit her job and K-Mart and returned to Africa to start a rural development project in the Congo.
***
After opening the drapes Ange approached her mother, who was curled up on her right side. Even without make-up, which Irene applied first thing every morning, Diane was much closer to Angie’s ideal of beauty than she herself was. In fact for years she believed this – her basic ugliness - was why her mother couldn’t love her. As far back as Ange could remember, her mother was always complaining that Ange’s, nose was too thick, her jaw too square and her eyes too small and close together.
Although she was pushing 45, Diane still had a heart shaped baby doll face and fine, perfectly proportioned features. Ange always felt she looked prettiest when she was asleep because the scowl lines disappeared when her forehead relaxed. Ange had never seen Diane’s natural hair color but assumed it would be mostly gray now, as her grandmother had been totally gray at 40. Angie remembered her mother’s hair as auburn before her stroke. Prior to her stroke, Diane dyed it auburn. However for the last six months, since Irene had been borrowing a DSHS van to take her to the beauty college, it had been copper blond with whitish blond streaks and styled in a trendy razor cut that covered her ears and jaw line like a veil.
Ange grasped her mother firmly by the shoulder and felt a slight shudder. Diane hated being woken early, but it was too risky to let her wake up in an empty house. There was a 911 autodial set on her speaker phone. The last time Ange left before Irene arrived, her mom had called the police and Ange nearly ended up in a foster home.
“I have to leave early, mom. We have debate practice. I can’t wait for Irene to get here.” It was a lie, but a guilt-free one. Ange knew Bev had made Diane cry when she told her about the first pregnancy. Ange had enough problems coping with her own extremes of emotion without being lumbered with her mom’s. “Do you want to use the commode before I leave?”
There was a large black leather armchair to the left of the bed, where Diane spent most of her day. To the right of the armchair was a commode with a stainless steel frame and a seat cover that was originally yellow but had degraded over time to dingy white with pink streaks. To the left, immediately next to the bed, was a large oak bedside table fitted with three shelves for books, magazines, DVDs and videotapes. On top of the table was a small cut glass Tiffany lamp, along with a speaker phone, the remote for the bed and the remote for the TV and DVD/video player which was at the foot of the bed on a lightweight TV stand on wheels that Reuben had rigged up with a pulley and loop of clothesline. By pulling on the rope with her left hand, Diane could wheel the stand close enough to either the head of the bed or the armchair to insert her own DVDs and videos.
Her mother lifted her head, which waggled ever so slightly. The movement, which would have been imperceptible to a stranger, meant “no.” Angie cocked her head towards the armchair. “Do you want me to help you transfer?” Diane bobbled her head again. She wanted Ange to transfer her.
Ange pulled the covers back that Diane had clutched around her shoulder and bent over to enable her mother to reach her good left arm around her neck. Then Angie lifted her by the shoulders while her mother slowly rotated her left hip. The physical intimacy was the hardest part for Ange. Prior to her stroke, Diane had been prone to melodramatic displays of affection to demonstrate some hypothetical mother-daughter bond which Ange didn’t feel and didn’t believe her mother felt, either.
Once Ange had positioned her, she handed her both remotes and the rope Reuben had attached to the TV stand and wheeled the tray stand with Diane’s breakfast into position across the armchair. Then she checked the catheter bag, which was only half full, kissed her mother on the forehead and left.
***
She caught the 44 to Aurora and hurried up a long flight of concrete stairs to the 45th Street overpass, where she waited for the six to Aurora Village. With no trees or homes to block the stiff wind off Puget Sound, it seemed at least five degrees colder on top of the overpass. She huddled behind the bus shelter to protect herself from the wind and mentally kicked herself for making such a mess of her life. Although she was still very grateful to Reuben for opening up a totally new world for her, she no longer had any doubt the relationship was over. Not only had he cheated on her, but Ange believed he had done so due to the impasse in their own relationship. Ange was ready to branch out and excel in new areas, and Reuben could only full love her as his political protégée.
Furious with herself for being in this predicament at all, she tortured herself with questions about where she had gone wrong. Was she wrong to sleep with Reuben at all? Should she have seen this coming? She had sworn off boys after Bev left, who ironically had far more influence over her in Africa than in Seattle. Determined to prove her wrong – that Ange was nothing like her mum - she cut off her blond curls, dyed the inch long spikes that remained jet black, got extra piercings for her ears, eyebrow and tongue, and took to wearing black lipstick and nail polish and staying up all night crying to Pearl Jam and other EMO music. A deeply superstitious part of her 13 year old personality believed the punishment for wild behavior and if she stayed home after night and did all her homework she could keep it from happening again. However this only worked because she allowed the rebellious part of herself to compensate by transforming her physical being into a spiky haired, multiply pierced Goth. For the sake of all her teachers and counselors who decided they could tell all they needed to know about teenagers from their appearance.
***
She had first met Reuben at Leavenworth Summer, a special social studies camp her world history teacher nominated her for summer before her sophomore year. Reuben, a freshman at UW, was one of the counselors. Ange was surprised to hear an older girl in her Spanish class, who also attended, refer to it as “Commie” Camp. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the conversion of China to capitalism, Ange thought it unlikely there were any communists left anywhere in the world, much less in the US.
To her surprise it was the high point of her adolescence. Angie, who had never been east of Carnation, was instantly enchanted by the high Cascades site chosen for the camp, which reminded her of the alpine shots in Heidi and the Sound of Music. She had expected to be surrounded by a bunch of geeks and nerds, but for the most part the other campers looked exactly like the jocks and preppie types at Garfield. Unlike the camps Ange attended as a child, the campers were mainly left to their own devices. While there were a number of early morning hikes and campfire sing alongs, there was little organized daytime activity except for a morning and afternoon film series and discussion groups the campers mainly organized an ran themselves. They all seemed to spend most of their time in the canteen, which had an espresso machine and sold lattes, cappuccinos and hot chocolate at a $2 discount.
Ange, who felt extremely intimidated by the other campers, was more an observer than a participant. She was used to being around adolescents who talked about music they downloaded on their ipods. She had no idea how to relate to teenagers who were more interested in discussing the war in Iraq and the government bailout of two mortgage companies with names that sounded like grunge groups.
Concerned that Ange was having a hard time, the third day of camp Reuben invited her to drive to Leavenworth with him for a latte. "I just want you to know," he said as they got in the car together, "that I'm not hitting on you. This isn't about that."
It was the last thing she expected to hear from a member of the opposite sex. However the next thing he said was even more mind blowing. "You seem very different from the other campers, Ange," he said. "I can't quite put my finger on it. But I get the sense your parents never talk about politics at home. That all this is quite new for you."
Ange heard the implied question in his statement. Fortunately Reuben didn't expect her to answer and changed the subject. There was no way she was going to discuss her relationship with Diane with a total stranger, no matter how nice he was.
He went on to tell her about a film they were showing that afternoon called Who’s Counting by a NZ woman named Marilyn Warring. “We’re having a special type of discussion group afterwards called a fishbowl. The women who never say very much will sit in the center and talk about feminism, while the men and talkative women sit in a circle around them and listen. I’m sure you know what feminism is, don’t you?”
Ange nodded. “My grandmother was a strong feminist, but my mother always felt she was too extreme. She hated the way she was always at meetings instead of taking care of her kids.”
***
Ange thorough enjoyed the Marilyn Waring film, which focused mainly on the vast amount of work women performed in different societies that was unpaid and thus wasn’t counted as economically productive. She made the immediate connection with the hundreds of hours she had spent looking after her mom. One of the school counselors had called her a “young carer” and tried to send her to a “young carer” support group.
Reuben put Ange and four other girls who rarely spoke in the center of the fishbowl. As with Ange, it was their first time at Leavenworth Summer, as well as the very first time anyone asked them to discuss their own feelings and values – as opposed to those of their parents and the kids they hung out with. In fact that was the first thing they agreed on – they weren’t really sure how they felt about feminism or the other political topics the other campers discussed because no one had ever asked them before.
Instead of talking about feminism, the assigned topic, Ange and her fellow introverts started talking about housework and chores, focusing on the awful drudgery of doing dishes and cleaning toilets and shower stalls.
“I’m never getting married or having children,” Ange volunteered. “I was leaning that way before, but now I’m absolutely sure. I know a scam when I see one, and women are no longer compelled to take on that kind of unpaid work if they don’t want to.”
Three of the other girls were quick to agree. The fourth, who was two years older, wasn’t so sure. She thought that maybe Marilyn Waring was right – that society could change so that women could be valued or even paid for unpaid work. “Good childrearing is important for the whole society, even for people who choose not to have them.”
It had never occurred to Ange before that society might be as responsible as parents for the way children turned out. This, in turn, led to the though that possibly Ange wasn’t solely and individually responsible for the unhappiness in her life.
***
Reuben continued to call and text her after she returned to Seattle. He took her to other political films and lectures, as well as to meetings of a group called Socialist Action that previously she had no idea existed. In September of her junior year he invited Ange to her first protest march. Then in February, a few weeks after she turned 16, they became lovers.
June 8, 2010
The Most Revolutionary Act (excerpt Chapter 1)
/TheMostRevolutionaryAct.html)
“The most revolutionary act is a clear view of the world as it really is.”
—Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919)
Part I – My Long Harrowing Journey to Ward 6
What can they do
to you? Whatever they want.
They can set you up, they can
bust you, they can break
your fingers, they can
burn your brain with electricity,
blur you with drugs till you
can’t walk, can’t remember, they can
take your child, wall up
your lover.
from The Low Road by Marge Piercy
CHAPTER 1
“Excuse me, madam. Could you come this way, please? We must ask you to undergo a full body search. You have the right to refuse, but you will not be allowed to board the aircraft unless you consent to a search.”
The Air New Zealand security guard who detained me at the boarding gate was a tall, pretty woman in her early twenties. She wore tiny pearl earrings with pale blue uniform trousers, a plain white short-sleeved blouse, and a matching blue ribbon attached under her collar. Her accent sounded English to my untrained ear, but this was unlikely. The New Zealand dialect is closer to Australian than to British English.
I listened to a number of alternative news broadcasts and was aware the FBI had a no-fly list. Its alleged purpose was to prevent potential terrorists from boarding commercial aircraft. Yet to the best of my knowledge, as of October 2002, only anti-war and environmental activists had been barred from flights they had reserved and paid for. In any case, I assumed the airlines informed passengers they were potential terrorists when they checked in at the ticket counter. After months of nerve-wracking preparations—the legal and financial complications of closing my practice and selling my home—the last thing I expected was to be pulled out of line once boarding started.
Thanks to the Patriot Act enacted shortly after 9-11, I had no legal recourse if the government banned me from flying. For a split second I identified with the helplessness and shame young Palestinians must feel when they exhaust all other alternatives and strap explosives to their chest.
Too frightened to object, I followed the security guard to a dimly lit alcove at the back of the waiting area. It was furnished with an office desk and two plain wooden chairs. “You need to take your coat off, love.” The woman’s tone was apologetic as she helped me out of my gray velveteen jacket. I have white hair now, and my boarding pass designated clearly the fact that I was a doctor. She folded the jacket in half over the back of one of the chairs. “And your belt and shoes.”
She placed my belt and black oxfords on the desk while she passed an electronic wand over my entire body and patted down my breasts, buttocks, and groin. When she finished, she helped me into my jacket and sat me down on one of the chairs. She put my shoes on for me and would have tied them if I let her. Then she handed back my boarding pass and hurried me down the ramp to the waiting plane.
As a fifty four-year-old board-certified psychiatrist, I was fortunate to have options other than blowing myself up. In October 2002 I made the agonizing decision to leave my home, family, and twenty-five-year psychiatric practice to begin a new life in a small Pacific nation at the bottom of the world. Despite being named on the FBI’s no-fly list, I am not and have never been a terrorist. I am not a criminal, either, and have broken no laws. Yet in 1986, for some unknown reason, some faceless higher-up in one of the eleven federal agencies that spy on American citizens decided I posed a threat to national security. Prior to the enactment of the Patriot Act, it was illegal to target US citizens for their political beliefs or activities. Nevertheless, any leftist over fifty can tell you it was a common occurrence as far back as the 1920s for the FBI to target political dissidents for phone harassment and wire-taps, mail intercepts, break-ins, malicious rumor campaigns, false arrest and imprisonment, summary deportation and even extrajudicial murder.
After twenty-three years I am still at a total loss why the government selected me as a target. Although I consider myself a leftist, I am at best a lukewarm radical. I am a physical coward and will go to any extreme to avoid conflict or confrontation. I prefer following to leading. Likewise, wherever possible, I go with the flow and take the path of least resistance.
***
This was my second attempt to emigrate. When I first graduated from medical school in June 1973, I joined the mass migration to Europe by artists and activists disillusioned with the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal—which ultimately forced Nixon to resign the presidency. At the time I was reacting less to large-scale political corruption than to a deep sense of loneliness and alienation. Already at twenty-four, I knew my future life, at least in the US, would be vastly different from that of my parents and grandparents. I saw a rampant consumerism taking over a culture that previously placed great store in human values, such as community and emotional intimacy. The young people around me were totally taken in by the mass marketing of sex and sex appeal in TV programming and advertising. For young men this meant acquiring all the latest status symbols—via bank loans or time payments, as only the department stores offered “charge” cards—that were supposed to make them irresistible to women. This included the latest-model, fastest car on the market, as well as the latest eight track car stereo and other car accessories to go with it, and the latest color TV and stereo hi-fi. While young women felt compelled to diet compulsively, to spend thousands of dollars a year on the newest fashions and hair-dos and hundreds more on make-up, hair, skin, and nail products—or be doomed to spinsterhood.
After eighteen months in England, I decided I was incapable of working the thirty six-hour shifts the National Health Service required of first year house officers. In November 1974, with a profound sense of failure, I returned to the U.S. At twenty-seven, my highest priority was to complete the specialty training I needed to start a practice while I was still young enough to have children. Finding my native country no less alien or devoid of humanistic values than when I left, I fully intended to either return to the U.K. or emigrate to Canada, Australia, or New Zealand once I completed my psychiatric residency. I never dreamed I would wait twenty-eight years.
***
I was a very late bloomer politically. Despite my early disenchantment with the “establishment,” as we called it in the sixties and seventies, it never occurred to me to blame political factors for my chronic sense of loneliness, alienation, and unmet emotional and social needs. At thirty-five, I fell into Marxism almost by accident when Marti, a fellow doctor and feminist in Chico, California, invited me to join the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador. CISPES was a national grassroots organization formed in 1981 to protest Ronald Reagan’s covert war against El Salvador. Marti, who also turned thirty-five that year, was drawn to Marx for exactly the same reason I was—he helped us make sense for the first time of a political system riddled with contradictions. We had just lived through one of the most turbulent decades in U.S. history. Despite living in a so-called democracy, we had watched powerful defense contractors strong-arm Congress into an unpopular, undeclared war in Vietnam. The result was a massive political and military disaster that cost taxpayers billions of dollars and resulted in massive loss of human life.
Despite embracing most Marxist values and principles, I have never accepted the need for violent revolution to overthrow capitalism. In 1983, after moving to Seattle with my two-year-old daughter Naomi, I joined International Socialists Organization. But only after other members assured me workers would bring down capitalism by uniting and refusing to work—that it was only the counter-revolution that was violent. In fact the only virtues I can claim as an activist are single mindedness (my mother called it stubbornness) and my inability to push my knowledge of government crimes and atrocities to the back of my mind.
Although most Americans saw the 2004 photos of U.S. soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, for the most part the images of naked Iraqi prisoners receiving electric shocks, being attacked by dogs, and having water poured down their throats have slipped from conscious awareness. The American public is worn down by the pressures of putting food on the table, keeping up with mortgage and credit-card debt, and finding some way to pay for medical care for themselves and their children. It’s much easier not to think about a horrific act for which they share responsibility, as U.S. citizens and taxpayers, but over which they have no control. In other words to move on.
I can’t move on. The images linger and fester in my head until there is no room for anything else.
“The low road”, from THE MOON IS ALWAYS FEMALE by
Marge Piercy, copyright ©1980 by Marge Piercy. Used by permission
of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.The Most Revolutionary Act: Memoir of an American Refugee
“The most revolutionary act is a clear view of the world as it really is.”
—Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919)
Part I – My Long Harrowing Journey to Ward 6
What can they do
to you? Whatever they want.
They can set you up, they can
bust you, they can break
your fingers, they can
burn your brain with electricity,
blur you with drugs till you
can’t walk, can’t remember, they can
take your child, wall up
your lover.
from The Low Road by Marge Piercy
CHAPTER 1
“Excuse me, madam. Could you come this way, please? We must ask you to undergo a full body search. You have the right to refuse, but you will not be allowed to board the aircraft unless you consent to a search.”
The Air New Zealand security guard who detained me at the boarding gate was a tall, pretty woman in her early twenties. She wore tiny pearl earrings with pale blue uniform trousers, a plain white short-sleeved blouse, and a matching blue ribbon attached under her collar. Her accent sounded English to my untrained ear, but this was unlikely. The New Zealand dialect is closer to Australian than to British English.
I listened to a number of alternative news broadcasts and was aware the FBI had a no-fly list. Its alleged purpose was to prevent potential terrorists from boarding commercial aircraft. Yet to the best of my knowledge, as of October 2002, only anti-war and environmental activists had been barred from flights they had reserved and paid for. In any case, I assumed the airlines informed passengers they were potential terrorists when they checked in at the ticket counter. After months of nerve-wracking preparations—the legal and financial complications of closing my practice and selling my home—the last thing I expected was to be pulled out of line once boarding started.
Thanks to the Patriot Act enacted shortly after 9-11, I had no legal recourse if the government banned me from flying. For a split second I identified with the helplessness and shame young Palestinians must feel when they exhaust all other alternatives and strap explosives to their chest.
Too frightened to object, I followed the security guard to a dimly lit alcove at the back of the waiting area. It was furnished with an office desk and two plain wooden chairs. “You need to take your coat off, love.” The woman’s tone was apologetic as she helped me out of my gray velveteen jacket. I have white hair now, and my boarding pass designated clearly the fact that I was a doctor. She folded the jacket in half over the back of one of the chairs. “And your belt and shoes.”
She placed my belt and black oxfords on the desk while she passed an electronic wand over my entire body and patted down my breasts, buttocks, and groin. When she finished, she helped me into my jacket and sat me down on one of the chairs. She put my shoes on for me and would have tied them if I let her. Then she handed back my boarding pass and hurried me down the ramp to the waiting plane.
As a fifty four-year-old board-certified psychiatrist, I was fortunate to have options other than blowing myself up. In October 2002 I made the agonizing decision to leave my home, family, and twenty-five-year psychiatric practice to begin a new life in a small Pacific nation at the bottom of the world. Despite being named on the FBI’s no-fly list, I am not and have never been a terrorist. I am not a criminal, either, and have broken no laws. Yet in 1986, for some unknown reason, some faceless higher-up in one of the eleven federal agencies that spy on American citizens decided I posed a threat to national security. Prior to the enactment of the Patriot Act, it was illegal to target US citizens for their political beliefs or activities. Nevertheless, any leftist over fifty can tell you it was a common occurrence as far back as the 1920s for the FBI to target political dissidents for phone harassment and wire-taps, mail intercepts, break-ins, malicious rumor campaigns, false arrest and imprisonment, summary deportation and even extrajudicial murder.
After twenty-three years I am still at a total loss why the government selected me as a target. Although I consider myself a leftist, I am at best a lukewarm radical. I am a physical coward and will go to any extreme to avoid conflict or confrontation. I prefer following to leading. Likewise, wherever possible, I go with the flow and take the path of least resistance.
***
This was my second attempt to emigrate. When I first graduated from medical school in June 1973, I joined the mass migration to Europe by artists and activists disillusioned with the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal—which ultimately forced Nixon to resign the presidency. At the time I was reacting less to large-scale political corruption than to a deep sense of loneliness and alienation. Already at twenty-four, I knew my future life, at least in the US, would be vastly different from that of my parents and grandparents. I saw a rampant consumerism taking over a culture that previously placed great store in human values, such as community and emotional intimacy. The young people around me were totally taken in by the mass marketing of sex and sex appeal in TV programming and advertising. For young men this meant acquiring all the latest status symbols—via bank loans or time payments, as only the department stores offered “charge” cards—that were supposed to make them irresistible to women. This included the latest-model, fastest car on the market, as well as the latest eight track car stereo and other car accessories to go with it, and the latest color TV and stereo hi-fi. While young women felt compelled to diet compulsively, to spend thousands of dollars a year on the newest fashions and hair-dos and hundreds more on make-up, hair, skin, and nail products—or be doomed to spinsterhood.
After eighteen months in England, I decided I was incapable of working the thirty six-hour shifts the National Health Service required of first year house officers. In November 1974, with a profound sense of failure, I returned to the U.S. At twenty-seven, my highest priority was to complete the specialty training I needed to start a practice while I was still young enough to have children. Finding my native country no less alien or devoid of humanistic values than when I left, I fully intended to either return to the U.K. or emigrate to Canada, Australia, or New Zealand once I completed my psychiatric residency. I never dreamed I would wait twenty-eight years.
***
I was a very late bloomer politically. Despite my early disenchantment with the “establishment,” as we called it in the sixties and seventies, it never occurred to me to blame political factors for my chronic sense of loneliness, alienation, and unmet emotional and social needs. At thirty-five, I fell into Marxism almost by accident when Marti, a fellow doctor and feminist in Chico, California, invited me to join the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador. CISPES was a national grassroots organization formed in 1981 to protest Ronald Reagan’s covert war against El Salvador. Marti, who also turned thirty-five that year, was drawn to Marx for exactly the same reason I was—he helped us make sense for the first time of a political system riddled with contradictions. We had just lived through one of the most turbulent decades in U.S. history. Despite living in a so-called democracy, we had watched powerful defense contractors strong-arm Congress into an unpopular, undeclared war in Vietnam. The result was a massive political and military disaster that cost taxpayers billions of dollars and resulted in massive loss of human life.
Despite embracing most Marxist values and principles, I have never accepted the need for violent revolution to overthrow capitalism. In 1983, after moving to Seattle with my two-year-old daughter Naomi, I joined International Socialists Organization. But only after other members assured me workers would bring down capitalism by uniting and refusing to work—that it was only the counter-revolution that was violent. In fact the only virtues I can claim as an activist are single mindedness (my mother called it stubbornness) and my inability to push my knowledge of government crimes and atrocities to the back of my mind.
Although most Americans saw the 2004 photos of U.S. soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, for the most part the images of naked Iraqi prisoners receiving electric shocks, being attacked by dogs, and having water poured down their throats have slipped from conscious awareness. The American public is worn down by the pressures of putting food on the table, keeping up with mortgage and credit-card debt, and finding some way to pay for medical care for themselves and their children. It’s much easier not to think about a horrific act for which they share responsibility, as U.S. citizens and taxpayers, but over which they have no control. In other words to move on.
I can’t move on. The images linger and fester in my head until there is no room for anything else.
“The low road”, from THE MOON IS ALWAYS FEMALE by
Marge Piercy, copyright ©1980 by Marge Piercy. Used by permission
of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.The Most Revolutionary Act: Memoir of an American Refugee
The Most Revolutionary Act
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