Just As I Thought (31 page)

Meanwhile, in the rest of the country, hundreds of meetings, vigils, sit-ins, teach-ins were occurring. By early March 1991, over 3,500 actions had taken place and over 4,000 arrests had been made. In our valley (between New Hampshire and Vermont) perhaps a dozen small towns held regular vigils. A newspaper advertisement was signed by 1,100 people. Who were they? The women and men who drove in and out of dirt roads were probably 1960s folks, now forty or so, with kids—or not—also Vietnam vets. But the signers were often old budget enemies from town meetings, people seen only at the dump or recycling center—or in church. We were amazed—What? She signed! That one! But this was before the war … Vigils continued through the weeks of the war. We are going back now to the signers. What will we find?

Full-page advertisements were taken out by SaneFreeze and the Ad Hoc Committee, which also organized teach-ins. Communications from other parts of the country tell the same story—sometimes more original. Seven or eight men and women from Oakland traveled the train system singing funny anti-Bush lyrics. They were applauded and cursed. Here are some quotes from Lucy Lippard’s report in
Z
of artists’ and just plain creative people’s responses to the prospects of war and to the war itself:

Our street theater piece “The Bushes Take You For A Ride” has George and Barbara in a red cardboard car running out of gas and being “serviced” by a soldier/gas pump—GI José. A hose from his red satin heart is administered by a “Plasmaco nursery” representing Petroleum Multinational. When the soldier collapses, the audience is solicited for more volunteers.

Two of Boulder’s most effective cultural groups are satirical. LISP (Ladies in Support of the President) is “an organization of patriotic God-fearing
LADIES
who deplore nasty war protests” and offer “George is not a Wimp” buttons. An offshoot of the local Queer Cosmos, these men in drag haunt recruitment centers and plead prissily at rallies for “all you homosexuals and commies to please go home.” A long-standing socialist feminist group (with anti-racist “Klarette” performances and a public “Sodomy Patrol” among their past credits) are polling crowds.

GRIT (Gulf Response Information Team, “a very private research group”) are sending the results to the President. Their questions begin straight, sucking people in, and end with outrageous ones, like “In order to support our troops, how many casualties from your family would be acceptable? (a) 1 (b) 2 (c) 3 or more (d) all of them.”

Small groups like GRIT, and individual artists, can be less intimidating and attract less hostility and more dialogue than massive demonstrations, which serve another purpose. For instance, playwright Art Mayers patrolled Maine’s state capitol building, in Arab headdress and gas mask dripping blood, muttering over and over, “the horror of it, the horror of it.” He was eventually arrested for “terrorizing children,” but the charges were dropped.

When I stopped at the office of the War Resisters League to pick up some flyers, they were receiving as many as ninety calls a day asking for military counseling, from reservists as well as active-duty men
and
women. A high-school kid who had just enlisted was speaking to Peter Jamieson, a Vietnam vet (he’s a counsellor). Michael Marsh, who has organized the work in this office, is down at Camp LeJeune, North Carolina, where seven Marine COs are being court-martialed on charges of desertion. I was given a sheet of paper listing fifteen resisters. In Germany there are American soldiers at U.S. bases who are resisting deployment. A Military Counseling Network has been in place since early autumn—the American Friends Service Committee, the War Resisters League, and the Central Committee of Conscientious Objectors were major networkers.

A fine project (which, with more money, could have got under way earlier) was MADRE’s tour of Women of Courage. MADRE, whose major political work had been about Nicaragua, especially the women, their hospitals, and day-care centers, had undertaken to send about twenty women from different Middle Eastern countries on tour through the United States and Canada. While one group spoke in New England, others were in Toronto—and in California cities. Women from Iraq, Turkey, Palestine, Egypt, and Israel were in the group, I heard. Each city or two visited had to add an American mother whose son or daughter was in the desert.

*   *   *

In going over material I’d gathered for this chapter, I found something I’d written to a friend I work and think with at the very beginning of January 1991:

Another thing I worry about: Resistance to this war is great. So—if we
do
go to war, it will take a lot of hardworking repression to keep that anger in check or turn it around. We better watch out for it. It will only
start
with the suppression of information from the front and continue by hiding our regional and town actions from one another till we think we or our villages or our families are alone.

This is exactly what happened: the pools. According to the Fund for Free Expression, of the 1,400 journalists in the Persian Gulf only 192—including technicians and photographers—were placed in press pools with combat forces. Journalists “apprehended or threatened with detention or detained include E. Schmitt and Kifner of
The New York Times,
Gughliotti of
The Washington Post,
King and Bayles of the Associated Press … These are people who did try to break free of government censors…” “A French TV crew was forced at gunpoint by U.S. marines to give up videotape it had shot of U.S. wounded in the battle to retake the Saudi town of Khafji.”

Almost overnight, once the war started, the silence began. Having lived for sixty-eight years, a surprising number of them in some political consciousness, I must report that I’ve never experienced the kind of repression that set in once the air war started. It was not like the McCarthy period—that is, there were no personal direct attacks on well-known people of that kind. It was as though a great damp blanket had been laid over our country with little pinholes for American flags to stick up into the public air.

Here is another paragraph from the February 27, 1991, report of the Fund for Free Expression:

There have been several instances of retaliation against journalists who have questioned the propriety of the war. After he wrote approvingly of an antiwar march,
San Francisco Examiner
associate editor and columnist Warren Hinckle was put on a partially paid three-month leave. “I take the position that I was censored,” Hinckle says. The editor of the Kutztown, Pennsylvania,
Patriot
was fired after he wrote an editorial calling for peace.
Village Voice
national affairs editor Dan Bischoff was canceled as a guest on the CBS news “Nightwatch” program. The Pentagon refused to provide anyone to appear on the program if the
Voice
was to be represented among the participants. The program’s producer recalls a Pentagon representative as objecting on the grounds that “if someone from
The Village Voice
is on, that raises the possibility that there will be a discussion of the merits” of the lawsuit filed by the
Voice
and other media organizations challenging the Pentagon press restrictions. The Public Broadcasting System postponed a rebroadcast of a Bill Moyers “Frontline” program on the Iran–Contra affair because, according to an internal PBS memo, the program’s raising of “serious questions about then–Vice President Bush’s involvement and actions” make it “journalistically inappropriate” during the war against Iraq, because “the program could be viewed as overtly political by attempting to undermine the President’s credibility.”

FAIR—Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting—offered the following report on February 22:

About 1.5 percent of nightly news programs … were identified as antiwar protests. Only one leader of a peace organization was quoted in broadcasts surveyed. Seven Super Bowl players were sought out to comment on the war. Half of all sources were connected to U.S. or Allied governments, 3 in 10 from the military.

Another report on television—this time by three academic researchers, Sut Jhally, Justin Lewis, and Michael Morgan—revealed that there was a correlation between knowledge—information—and opposition to the war. Television viewing was broken down into three groups. The longer people looked at television, the less they knew. The short-time viewers were not well informed, but much better informed than the others. After some protests followed FAIR’s exposés, certain programs like the
MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour
(daily) finally allowed Noam Chomsky, Erwin Knoll, and Edward Said to speak their dissenting views.

It’s not as though media workers on our side didn’t fight back. Paper Tiger/Deep Dish produced a Gulf Crisis TV series—seen on Public Access channels and finally PBS (Public Broadcasting). Tapes were used in university teach-ins.

*   *   *

When peace people (organizers) talked critically of the period, they varied—widely. Frances Crowe, in western Massachusetts, “found a huge antiwar movement waiting to be organized. After ten years of trying to organize around the Middle East, people are ready and willing to learn about the region.” Susan Akram asks, “How did the peace movement get so isolated?”

*   *   *

I’ve tried to describe in these few pages something about what has been happening in the last months in my country. I’ve left out a lot—by necessity.

If you were part of these events, if you were working in your community, you had a sense of excitement, action, momentum, but at the same time, listening to radio, television news, or reading the daily press darkened you into an unimaginable despair. Not only the sense of a vast damp blanket over the country, but also it seemed that half your neighbors not only didn’t know but
wanted not to know,
because if a bit of news squeaked through (the bombing of the Baghdad shelter), there were cries of “Treason!” (the photographers, the anchormen, the television station).

One of the responses to this war that grieved me particularly was the failure of American Jews to see how bad this war was for Israel, how dangerous, how destructive it
had
to be for the hopes for peace and a decent relationship with Palestinians—how it set all that struggle back years and years.

*   *   *

So the war ends—and doesn’t end. It never ended for the Vietnamese—all these embargoed years. Not for the Panamanians either, who are worse off than ever. Not for the Middle East, where, as I write, hundreds of thousands of Kurds running, fighting, encouraged by Bush’s rhetoric of rebellion, are being slaughtered by Iraq’s helicopters and starved and frozen in their tracks. Thousands of Iraqis dead, injured, leave the countryside and the destroyed cities in grief and turmoil. We’ve learned that
only 7 percent
of our thousands of sorties were so-called smart bombs. The rest were the usual stupid carpet bombs, cluster bombs, etc., used for civilians, ground armies, the earth …

Israelis and Palestinians hate each other more than ever—both people having been driven mad: the Israelis by Europeans fifty years ago; the Palestinians by Israelis today. The Palestinians running from the country, Kuwait, which we liberated so that it could continue along its glowing golden road. The oppression of Palestinians in the occupied territories is worse than ever, partly because they made the wrong (foolish) decision to agree with Saddam Hussein, partly because Israel was planning to make it tougher to be a Palestinian anyway.

Why were Bush and friends so determined to jam this war down the originally disinterested throats of allies—the UN and the United States—the American citizenry? We learned—little by little. First everyone said Oil! Of course. Then we learned that we used very little of Kuwait’s oil. So we understood next it was about hegemony—that is, being in charge of everyone else’s oil. A major purpose was the great Pentagon need to try out all the new, so far unused trillion dollars’ worth of airware. How would they perform? Many years ago, in 1969, a North Vietnamese said to me as I was leaving Hanoi, “Please tell the great American scientists to stop using us as their laboratory. Your napalm
does
work. So does your improved white phosphorus.” Our government also wanted to teach an important lesson: It was possible to move over 400,000 troops in a few weeks halfway round the fattest part of the earth.

It was also a major necessity to wipe out the historical memory of the 1960s, which moved more powerfully than is usually perceived into the 1970s with the rise of the women’s movement, the anti-nuclear-power movement, and the science of ecology with its working arm, environmentalism.

I am reminded of a statement made by Donella Meadows at a Dartmouth teach-in. She explained that there was alternative energy for everything in normal comfortable American life—television, air conditioners, light, heat, cars. There was only one enterprise that required such massive infusion of energy for which no alternative to oil could work—and that was war. A tank, she said, could move only seventeen feet on a gallon of gasoline. So this is the final purpose. This has been a war to maintain turmoil in the world (particularly in the Middle East). This has been a war to ensure that Americans can continue to make war, and like it.

—1991

Connections

This is called an oration, which inhibited me a little bit until I realized it just meant I was going to talk.