The Most Revolutionary Act (excerpt Chapter 1)
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“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
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The Most Revolutionary Act
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