My Living Will - by Paul Rudnick

1. If I should remain in a persistent vegetative state for more than fifteen years, I would like someone to turn off the TV.

2. If I remain motionless for an extended period and utter only guttural, meaningless sounds, I would like a Guggenheim.

3. If I am unable to recognize or interact with friends or family members, I still expect gifts.

4. If I am unable to feed, clean, or dress myself, I would like to be referred to as “Mr. Trump.”

5. Do not resuscitate me before noon.

6. If I do not respond to pinches, pinpricks, rubber mallets, or other medical stimuli, please stop laughing.

7. If I no longer respond to loved ones’ attempts at communication, ask them about our last car trip.

8. Once I am allowed to die a painless and peaceful death, I would like my organs donated to whoever can catch them.

9. If my death is particularly dramatic, I would like to be played by Hilary Swank, for a slam dunk.

10. If there is any family dispute over my medical condition, it must be settled with a dreidel.

11. Even if I remain in a persistent vegetative state for more than fifteen years, that still doesn’t mean bangs.

12. If my doctor pronounces me brain-dead, I would like to see the new Ashton Kutcher movie.

13. If I remain unconscious during a painful, lingering illness, I would like the following life lessons to be published in a book entitled “Tuesdays with Paul”:

i. Treasure every moment.
ii. Love everyone.
iii. If you bought this in hardcover, you’re an idiot.

14. I do not wish to be kept alive by any machine that has a “Popcorn” setting.

15. I would like to die at home, surrounded by my attorneys.

16. If my loved ones insist that the cost of my medical care has become an impossible burden, show them a Polaroid of their “beach shack.”

17. In lieu of flowers or donations, I would prefer rioting.

18. I would like my entire estate to become the property of my cat, Fluffy, who said, “He wouldn’t want to live like this, with that zit.”

19. Assume that, even in a coma, I can still hear discussions about my apartment.

20. If there is any talk of canonizing me, please remember that I have often held the elevator for people who were still getting their mail, that I have twice offered a cab to a woman in a fur coat even though I was totally there first, and that I always waited to make derogatory comments until after the couple with the double stroller was a block away.

21. In the event of an open coffin, I would like smoky evening eyes.

22. At my memorial service, I would like my clergyman to begin his eulogy with the words “I suppose, in a way, we all killed him.”

The New Yorker
April 25, 2005

Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens - Ward Churchill

In the red states, people like the governor of Colorado can’t talk about Ward Churchill without frothing at the mouth like mad dogs, which is more entertainment than a person ought to be allowed to have for free. In a remarkable proof of the inability of the American “Right” to keep anything complicated in their little heads, you’d think Churchill’s essay (and the related book) were exactly four syllables long. (By now you probably know which four.) But if you look up the term “out of context” in the dictionary, it points you to this example. The essay is long and Churchill pulls no punches. “On the Justice of Roosting Chickens” is a brilliant piece of work.


Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens
by Ward Churchill

When queried by reporters concerning his views on the assassination of John F. Kennedy in November 1963, Malcolm X famously—and quite charitably, all things considered—replied that it was merely a case of “chickens coming home to roost.”

On the morning of September 11, 2001, a few more chickens—along with some half-million dead Iraqi children—came home to roost in a very big way at the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center. Well, actually, a few of them seem to have nestled in at the Pentagon as well.

The Iraqi youngsters, all of them under 12, died as a predictable—in fact, widely predicted—result of the 1991 US “surgical” bombing of their country’s water purification and sewage facilities, as well as other “infrastructural” targets upon which Iraq’s civilian population depends for its very survival.

If the nature of the bombing were not already bad enough—and it should be noted that this sort of “aerial warfare” constitutes a Class I Crime Against humanity, entailing myriad gross violations of international law, as well as every conceivable standard of “civilized” behavior—the death toll has been steadily ratcheted up by US-imposed sanctions for a full decade now. Enforced all the while by a massive military presence and periodic bombing raids, the embargo has greatly impaired the victims’ ability to import the nutrients, medicines and other materials necessary to saving the lives of even their toddlers.

All told, Iraq has a population of about 18 million. The 500,000 kids lost to date thus represent something on the order of 25 percent of their age group. Indisputably, the rest have suffered—are still suffering—a combination of physical debilitation and psychological trauma severe enough to prevent their ever fully recovering. In effect, an entire generation has been obliterated.

The reason for this holocaust was/is rather simple, and stated quite straightforwardly by President George Bush, the 41st “freedom-loving” father of the freedom-lover currently filling the Oval Office, George the 43rd: “The world must learn that what we say, goes,” intoned George the Elder to the enthusiastic applause of freedom-loving Americans everywhere. How Old George conveyed his message was certainly no mystery to the US public. One need only recall the 24-hour-per-day dissemination of bombardment videos on every available TV channel, and the exceedingly high ratings of these telecasts, to gain a sense of how much they knew.

In trying to affix a meaning to such things, we would do well to remember the wave of elation that swept America at reports of what was happening along the so-called Highway of Death: perhaps 100,000 “towel-heads” and “camel jockeys”—or was it “sand niggers” that week?—in full retreat, routed and effectively defenseless, many of them conscripted civilian laborers, slaughtered in a single day by jets firing the most hyper-lethal types of ordnance. It was a performance worthy of the nazis during the early months of their drive into Russia. And it should be borne in mind that Good Germans gleefully cheered that butchery, too. Indeed, support for Hitler suffered no serious erosion among Germany’s “innocent civilians” until the defeat at Stalingrad in 1943.

There may be a real utility to reflecting further, this time upon the fact that it was pious Americans who led the way in assigning the onus of collective guilt to the German people as a whole, not for things they as individuals had done, bur for what they had allowed—nay, empowered—their leaders and their soldiers to do in their name.

If the principle was valid then, it remains so now, as applicable to Good Americans as it was the Good Germans. And the price exacted from the Germans for the faultiness of their moral fiber was truly ghastly. Returning now to the children, and to the effects of the post-Gulf War embargo—continued bull force by Bush the Elder’s successors in the Clinton administration as a gesture of its “resolve” to finalize what George himself had dubbed the “New World Order” of American military/economic domination—it should be noted that not one but two high United Nations officials attempting to coordinate delivery of humanitarian aid to Iraq resigned in succession as protests against US policy.

One of them, former U.N. Assistant Secretary General Denis Halladay, repeatedly denounced what was happening as “a systematic program ... of deliberate genocide.” His statements appeared in the New York Times and other papers during the fall of 1998, so it can hardly be contended that the American public was “unaware” of them. Shortly thereafter, Secretary of State Madeline Albright openly confirmed Halladay’s assessment. Asked during the widely-viewed TV program Meet the Press to respond to his “allegations,” she calmly announced that she’d decided it was “worth the price” to see that U.S. objectives were achieved.

The Politics of a Perpetrator Population As a whole, the American public greeted these revelations with yawns.. There were, after all, far more pressing things than the unrelenting misery/death of a few hundred thousand Iraqi tikes to be concerned with. Getting “Jeremy” and “Ellington” to their weekly soccer game, for instance, or seeing to it that little “Tiffany” an “Ashley” had just the right roll-neck sweaters to go with their new cords. And, to be sure, there was the yuppie holy war against ashtrays—for “our kids,” no less—as an all-absorbing point of political focus.

In fairness, it must be admitted that there was an infinitesimally small segment of the body politic who expressed opposition to what was/is being done to the children of Iraq. It must also be conceded, however, that those involved by-and-large contented themselves with signing petitions and conducting candle-lit prayer vigils, bearing “moral witness” as vast legions of brown-skinned five-year-olds sat shivering in the dark, wide-eyed in horror, whimpering as they expired in the most agonizing ways imaginable.

Be it said as well, and this is really the crux of it, that the “resistance” expended the bulk of its time and energy harnessed to the systemically-useful task of trying to ensure, as “a principle of moral virtue” that nobody went further than waving signs as a means of “challenging” the patently exterminatory pursuit of Pax Americana. So pure of principle were these “dissidents,” in fact, that they began literally to supplant the police in protecting corporations profiting by the carnage against suffering such retaliatory “violence” as having their windows broken by persons less “enlightened”—or perhaps more outraged—than the self-anointed “peacekeepers.”

Property before people, it seems—or at least the equation of property to people—is a value by no means restricted to America’s boardrooms. And the sanctimony with which such putrid sentiments are enunciated turns out to be nauseatingly similar, whether mouthed by the CEO of Standard Oil or any of the swarm of comfort zone “pacifists” queuing up to condemn the black block after it ever so slightly disturbed the functioning of business-as-usual in Seattle.

Small wonder, all-in-all, that people elsewhere in the world—the Mideast, for instance—began to wonder where, exactly, aside from the streets of the US itself, one was to find the peace America’s purportedly oppositional peacekeepers claimed they were keeping.

The answer, surely, was plain enough to anyone unblinded by the kind of delusions engendered by sheer vanity and self-absorption. So, too, were the implications in terms of anything changing, out there, in America’s free-fire zones.

Tellingly, it was at precisely this point—with the genocide in Iraq officially admitted and a public response demonstrating beyond a shadow of a doubt that there were virtually no Americans, including most of those professing otherwise, doing anything tangible to stop it—that the combat teams which eventually commandeered the aircraft used on September 11 began to infiltrate the United States.

Meet the “Terrorists” Of the men who came, there are a few things demanding to be said in the face of the unending torrent of disinformational drivel unleashed by George Junior and the corporate “news” media immediately following their successful operation on September 11.

They did not, for starters, “initiate” a war with the US, much less commit “the first acts of war of the new millennium.”

A good case could be made that the war in which they were combatants has been waged more-or-less continuously by the “Christian West”—now proudly emblematized by the United States—against the “Islamic East” since the time of the First Crusade, about 1,000 years ago. More recently, one could argue that the war began when Lyndon Johnson first lent significant support to Israel’s dispossession/displacement of Palestinians during the 1960s, or when George the Elder ordered “Desert Shield” in 1990, or at any of several points in between. Any way you slice it, however, if what the combat teams did to the WTC and the Pentagon can be understood as acts of war—and they can—then the same is true of every US “overflight’ of Iraqi territory since day one. The first acts of war during the current millennium thus occurred on its very first day, and were carried out by U.S. aviators acting under orders from their then-commander-in-chief, Bill Clinton. The most that can honestly be said of those involved on September 11 is that they finally responded in kind to some of what this country has dispensed to their people as a matter of course.

That they waited so long to do so is, notwithstanding the 1993 action at the WTC, more than anything a testament to their patience and restraint.

They did not license themselves to “target innocent civilians.”

There is simply no argument to be made that the Pentagon personnel killed on September 11 fill that bill. The building and those inside comprised military targets, pure and simple. As to those in the World Trade Center . . .

Well, really. Let’s get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire—the “mighty engine of profit” to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved—and they did so both willingly and knowingly. Recourse to “ignorance”—a derivative, after all, of the word “ignore”—counts as less than an excuse among this relatively well-educated elite. To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to others of what they were involved in—and in many cases excelling at—it was because of their absolute refusal to see. More likely, it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I’d really be interested in hearing about it.

The men who flew the missions against the WTC and Pentagon were not “cowards.” That distinction properly belongs to the “firm-jawed lads” who delighted in flying stealth aircraft through the undefended airspace of Baghdad, dropping payload after payload of bombs on anyone unfortunate enough to be below—including tens of thousands of genuinely innocent civilians—while themselves incurring all the risk one might expect during a visit to the local video arcade. Still more, the word describes all those “fighting men and women” who sat at computer consoles aboard ships in the Persian Gulf, enjoying air-conditioned comfort while launching cruise missiles into neighborhoods filled with random human beings. Whatever else can be said of them, the men who struck on September 11 manifested the courage of their convictions, willingly expending their own lives in attaining their objectives.

Nor were they “fanatics” devoted to “Islamic fundamentalism.”

One might rightly describe their actions as “desperate.” Feelings of desperation, however, are a perfectly reasonable—one is tempted to say “normal”—emotional response among persons confronted by the mass murder of their children, particularly when it appears that nobody else really gives a damn (ask a Jewish survivor about this one, or, even more poignantly, for all the attention paid them, a Gypsy).

That desperate circumstances generate desperate responses is no mysterious or irrational principle, of the sort motivating fanatics. Less is it one peculiar to Islam. Indeed, even the FBI’s investigative reports on the combat teams’ activities during the months leading up to September 11 make it clear that the members were not fundamentalist Muslims. Rather, it’s pretty obvious at this point that they were secular activists—soldiers, really—who, while undoubtedly enjoying cordial relations with the clerics of their countries, were motivated far more by the grisly realities of the U.S. war against them than by a set of religious beliefs.

And still less were they/their acts “insane.”

Insanity is a condition readily associable with the very American idea that one—or one’s country—holds what amounts to a “divine right” to commit genocide, and thus to forever do so with impunity. The term might also be reasonably applied to anyone suffering genocide without attempting in some material way to bring the process to a halt. Sanity itself, in this frame of reference, might be defined by a willingness to try and destroy the perpetrators and/or the sources of their ability to commit their crimes. (Shall we now discuss the US “strategic bombing campaign” against Germany during World War II, and the mental health of those involved in it?)

Which takes us to official characterizations of the combat teams as an embodiment of “evil.”

Evil—for those inclined to embrace the banality of such a concept—was perfectly incarnated in that malignant toad known as Madeline Albright, squatting in her studio chair like Jaba the Hutt, blandly spewing the news that she’d imposed a collective death sentence upon the unoffending youth of Iraq. Evil was to be heard in that great American hero “Stormin’ Norman” Schwartzkopf’s utterly dehumanizing dismissal of their systematic torture and annihilation as mere “collateral damage.” Evil, moreover, is a term appropriate to describing the mentality of a public that finds such perspectives and the policies attending them acceptable, or even momentarily tolerable.

Had it not been for these evils, the counterattacks of September 11 would never have occurred. And unless “the world is rid of such evil,” to lift a line from George Junior, September 11 may well end up looking like a lark.

There is no reason, after all, to believe that the teams deployed in the assaults on the WTC and the Pentagon were the only such, that the others are composed of “Arabic-looking individuals”—America’s indiscriminately lethal arrogance and psychotic sense of self-entitlement have long since given the great majority of the world’s peoples ample cause to be at war with it—or that they are in any way dependent upon the seizure of civilian airliners to complete their missions.

To the contrary, there is every reason to expect that there are many other teams in place, tasked to employ altogether different tactics in executing operational plans at least as well-crafted as those evident on September 11, and very well equipped for their jobs. This is to say that, since the assaults on the WTC and Pentagon were act of war—not “terrorist incidents”—they must be understood as components in a much broader strategy designed to achieve specific results. From this, it can only be adduced that there are plenty of other components ready to go, and that they will be used, should this become necessary in the eyes of the strategists. It also seems a safe bet that each component is calibrated to inflict damage at a level incrementally higher than the one before (during the 1960s, the Johnson administration employed a similar policy against Vietnam, referred to as “escalation”).

Since implementation of the overall plan began with the WTC/Pentagon assaults, it takes no rocket scientist to decipher what is likely to happen next, should the U.S. attempt a response of the inexcusable variety to which it has long entitled itself.

About Those Boys (and Girls) in the Bureau There’s another matter begging for comment at this point. The idea that the FBI’s “counterterrorism task forces” can do a thing to prevent what will happen is yet another dimension of America’s delusional pathology.. The fact is that, for all its publicly-financed “image-building” exercises, the Bureau has never shown the least aptitude for anything of the sort.

Oh, yeah, FBI counterintelligence personnel have proven quite adept at framing anarchists, communists and Black Panthers, sometimes murdering them in their beds or the electric chair. The Bureau’s SWAT units have displayed their ability to combat child abuse in Waco by burning babies alive, and its vaunted Crime Lab has been shown to pad its “crime-fighting’ statistics by fabricating evidence against many an alleged car thief. But actual “heavy-duty bad guys” of the sort at issue now? This isn’t a Bruce Willis/Chuck Norris/Sly Stallone movie, after all.. And J. Edgar Hoover doesn’t get to approve either the script or the casting.

The number of spies, saboteurs and bona fide terrorists apprehended, or even detected by the FBI in the course of its long and slimy history could be counted on one’s fingers and toes. On occasion, its agents have even turned out to be the spies, and, in many instances, the terrorists as well.

To be fair once again, if the Bureau functions as at best a carnival of clowns where its “domestic security responsibilities” are concerned, this is because—regardless of official hype—it has none. It is now, as it’s always been, the national political police force, and instrument created and perfected to ensure that all Americans, not just the consenting mass, are “free” to do exactly as they’re told.

The FBI and “cooperating agencies” can be thus relied upon to set about “protecting freedom” by destroying whatever rights and liberties were left to U.S. citizens before September 11 (in fact, they’ve already received authorization to begin). Sheeplike, the great majority of Americans can also be counted upon to bleat their approval, at least in the short run, believing as they always do that the nasty implications of what they’re doing will pertain only to others.

Oh Yeah, and “The Company,” Too

A possibly even sicker joke is the notion, suddenly in vogue, that the CIA will be able to pinpoint “terrorist threats,” “rooting out their infrastructure” where it exists and/or “terminating” it before it can materialize, if only it’s allowed to beef up its “human intelligence gathering capacity” in an unrestrained manner (including full-bore operations inside the US, of course).

Yeah. Right.

Since America has a collective attention-span of about 15 minutes, a little refresher seems in order: “The Company” had something like a quarter-million people serving as “intelligence assets” by feeding it information in Vietnam in 1968, and it couldn’t even predict the Tet Offensive. God knows how many spies it was fielding against the USSR at the height of Ronald Reagan’s version of the Cold War, and it was still caught flatfooted by the collapse of the Soviet Union. As to destroying “terrorist infrastructures,” one would do well to remember Operation Phoenix, another product of its open season in Vietnam. In that one, the CIA enlisted elite US units like the Navy Seals and Army Special Forces, as well as those of friendly countries—the south Vietnamese Rangers, for example, and Australian SAS—to run around “neutralizing” folks targeted by The Company’s legion of snitches as “guerrillas” (as those now known as “terrorists” were then called).

Sound familiar?

Upwards of 40,000 people—mostly bystanders, as it turns out—were murdered by Phoenix hit teams before the guerrillas, stronger than ever, ran the US and its collaborators out of their country altogether. And these are the guys who are gonna save the day, if unleashed to do their thing in North America?

The net impact of all this “counterterrorism” activity upon the combat teams’ ability to do what they came to do, of course, will be nil.

Instead, it’s likely to make it easier for them to operate (it’s worked that way in places like Northern Ireland). And, since denying Americans the luxury of reaping the benefits of genocide in comfort was self-evidently a key objective of the WTC/Pentagon assaults, it can be stated unequivocally that a more overt display of the police state mentality already pervading this country simply confirms the magnitude of their victory.

On Matters of Proportion and Intent As things stand, including the 1993 detonation at the WTC, “Arab terrorists” have responded to the massive and sustained American terror bombing of Iraq with a total of four assaults by explosives inside the US. That’s about 1% of the 50,000 bombs the Pentagon announced were rained on Baghdad alone during the Gulf War (add in Oklahoma City and you’ll get something nearer an actual 1%).

They’ve managed in the process to kill about 5,000 Americans, or roughly 1% of the dead Iraqi children (the percentage is far smaller if you factor in the killing of adult Iraqi civilians, not to mention troops butchered as/after they’d surrendered and/or after the “war-ending” ceasefire had been announced).

In terms undoubtedly more meaningful to the property/profit-minded American mainstream, they’ve knocked down a half-dozen buildings—albeit some very well-chosen ones—as opposed to the “strategic devastation” visited upon the whole of Iraq, and punched a $100 billion hole in the earnings outlook of major corporate shareholders, as opposed to the U.S. obliteration of Iraq’s entire economy.

With that, they’ve given Americans a tiny dose of their own medicine.. This might be seen as merely a matter of “vengeance” or “retribution,” and, unquestionably, America has earned it, even if it were to add up only to something so ultimately petty.

The problem is that vengeance is usually framed in terms of “getting even,” a concept which is plainly inapplicable in this instance. As the above data indicate, it would require another 49,996 detonations killing 495,000 more Americans, for the “terrorists” to “break even” for the bombing of Baghdad/extermination of Iraqi children alone. And that’s to achieve “real number” parity. To attain an actual proportional parity of damage—the US is about 15 times as large as Iraq in terms of population, even more in terms of territory—they would, at a minimum, have to blow up about 300,000 more buildings and kill something on the order of 7.5 million people.

Were this the intent of those who’ve entered the US to wage war against it, it would remain no less true that America and Americans were only receiving the bill for what they’d already done. Payback, as they say, can be a real motherfucker (ask the Germans). There is, however, no reason to believe that retributive parity is necessarily an item on the agenda of those who planned the WTC/Pentagon operation. If it were, given the virtual certainty that they possessed the capacity to have inflicted far more damage than they did, there would be a lot more American bodies lying about right now.

Hence, it can be concluded that ravings carried by the “news” media since September 11 have contained at least one grain of truth: The peoples of the Mideast “aren’t like” Americans, not least because they don’t “value life’ in the same way. By this, it should be understood that Middle-Easterners, unlike Americans, have no history of exterminating others purely for profit, or on the basis of racial animus. Thus, we can appreciate the fact that they value life—all lives, not just their own—far more highly than do their U.S. counterparts.

The Makings of a Humanitarian Strategy In sum one can discern a certain optimism—it might even be call humanitarianism—imbedded in the thinking of those who presided over the very limited actions conducted on September 11.

Their logic seems to have devolved upon the notion that the American people have condoned what has been/is being done in their name—indeed, are to a significant extent actively complicit in it—mainly because they have no idea what it feels like to be on the receiving end.

Now they do.

That was the “medicinal” aspect of the attacks.

To all appearances, the idea is now to give the tonic a little time to take effect, jolting Americans into the realization that the sort of pain they’re now experiencing first-hand is no different from—or the least bit more excruciating than—that which they’ve been so cavalier in causing others, and thus to respond appropriately.

More bluntly, the hope was—and maybe still is—that Americans, stripped of their presumed immunity from incurring any real consequences for their behavior, would comprehend and act upon a formulation as uncomplicated as “stop killing our kids, if you want your own to be safe.”

Either way, it’s a kind of “reality therapy” approach, designed to afford the American people a chance to finally “do the right thing” on their own, without further coaxing.

Were the opportunity acted upon in some reasonably good faith fashion—a sufficiently large number of Americans rising up and doing whatever is necessary to force an immediate lifting of the sanctions on Iraq, for instance, or maybe hanging a few of America’s abundant supply of major war criminals (Henry Kissinger comes quickly to mind, as do Madeline Albright, Colin Powell, Bill Clinton and George the Elder)—there is every reason to expect that military operations against the US on its domestic front would be immediately suspended.

Whether they would remain so would of course be contingent upon follow-up. By that, it may be assumed that American acceptance of onsite inspections by international observers to verify destruction of its weapons of mass destruction (as well as dismantlement of all facilities in which more might be manufactured), Nuremberg-style trials in which a few thousand US military/corporate personnel could be properly adjudicated and punished for their Crimes Against humanity, and payment of reparations to the array of nations/peoples whose assets the US has plundered over the years, would suffice.

Since they’ve shown no sign of being unreasonable or vindictive, it may even be anticipated that, after a suitable period of adjustment and reeducation (mainly to allow them to acquire the skills necessary to living within their means), those restored to control over their own destinies by the gallant sacrifices of the combat teams the WTC and Pentagon will eventually (re)admit Americans to the global circle of civilized societies. Stranger things have happened.

In the Alternative Unfortunately, noble as they may have been, such humanitarian aspirations were always doomed to remain unfulfilled. For it to have been otherwise, a far higher quality of character and intellect would have to prevail among average Americans than is actually the case. Perhaps the strategists underestimated the impact a couple of generations-worth of media indoctrination can produce in terms of demolishing the capacity of human beings to form coherent thoughts. Maybe they forgot to factor in the mind-numbing effects of the indoctrination passed off as education in the US. Then, again, it’s entirely possible they were aware that a decisive majority of American adults have been reduced by this point to a level much closer to the kind of immediate self-gratification entailed in Pavlovian stimulus/response patterns than anything accessible by appeals to higher logic, and still felt morally obliged to offer the dolts an option to quit while they were ahead.

What the hell? It was worth a try.

But it’s becoming increasingly apparent that the dosage of medicine administered was entirely insufficient to accomplish its purpose.

Although there are undoubtedly exceptions, Americans for the most part still don’t get it.

Already, they’ve desecrated the temporary tomb of those killed in the WTC, staging a veritable pep rally atop the mangled remains of those they profess to honor, treating the whole affair as if it were some bizarre breed of contact sport. And, of course, there are the inevitable pom-poms shaped like American flags, the school colors worn as little red-white-and-blue ribbons affixed to labels, sportscasters in the form of “counterterrorism experts” drooling mindless color commentary during the pregame warm-up.

Refusing the realization that the world has suddenly shifted its axis, and that they are therefore no longer “in charge,” they have by-and-large reverted instantly to type, working themselves into their usual bloodlust on the now obsolete premise that the bloodletting will “naturally” occur elsewhere and to someone else.

”Patriotism,” a wise man once observed, “is the last refuge of scoundrels.”

And the braided, he might of added.

Braided Scoundrel-in-Chief, George Junior, lacking even the sense to be careful what he wished for, has teamed up with a gaggle of fundamentalist Christian clerics like Billy Graham to proclaim a “New Crusade” called “Infinite Justice” aimed at “ridding the world of evil.”

One could easily make light of such rhetoric, remarking upon how unseemly it is for a son to threaten his father in such fashion—or a president to so publicly contemplate the murder/suicide of himself and his cabinet—but the matter is deadly serious.

They are preparing once again to sally forth for the purpose of roasting brown-skinned children by the scores of thousands. Already, the B-1 bombers and the aircraft carriers and the missile frigates are en route, the airborne divisions are gearing up to go.

To where? Afghanistan?

The Sudan?

Iraq, again (or still)?

How about Grenada (that was fun)?

Any of them or all. It doesn’t matter.

The desire to pummel the helpless runs rabid as ever.

Only, this time it’s different.

The time the helpless aren’t, or at least are not so helpless as they were.

This time, somewhere, perhaps in an Afghani mountain cave, possibly in a Brooklyn basement, maybe another local altogether—but somewhere, all the same—there’s a grim-visaged (wo)man wearing a Clint Eastwood smile.

”Go ahead, punks,” s/he’s saying, “Make my day.”

And when they do, when they launch these airstrikes abroad—or may a little later; it will be at a time conforming to the “terrorists”‘ own schedule, and at a place of their choosing—the next more intensive dose of medicine administered here “at home.”

Of what will it consist this time? Anthrax? Mustard gas? Sarin? A tactical nuclear device?

That, too, is their choice to make.

Looking back, it will seem to future generations inexplicable why Americans were unable on their own, and in time to save themselves, to accept a rule of nature so basic that it could be mouthed by an actor, Lawrence Fishburn, in a movie, The Cotton Club.

”You’ve got to learn, “ the line went, “that when you push people around, some people push back.”

As they should.

As they must.

And as they undoubtedly will.

There is justice in such symmetry.

ADDENDUM

The preceding was a “first take” reading, more a stream-of-consciousness interpretive reaction to the September 11 counterattack than a finished piece on the topic. Hence, I’ll readily admit that I’ve been far less than thorough, and quite likely wrong about a number of things.

For instance, it may not have been (only) the ghosts of Iraqi children who made their appearance that day. It could as easily have been some or all of their butchered Palestinian cousins.

Or maybe it was some or all of the at least 3.2 million Indochinese who perished as a result of America’s sustained and genocidal assault on Southeast Asia (1959-1975), not to mention the millions more who’ve died because of the sanctions imposed thereafter.

Perhaps there were a few of the Korean civilians massacred by US troops at places like No Gun Ri during the early ‘50s, or the hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians ruthlessly incinerated in the ghastly fire raids of World War II (only at Dresden did America bomb Germany in a similar manner).

And, of course, it could have been those vaporized in the militarily pointless nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

There are others, as well, a vast and silent queue of faceless victims, stretching from the million-odd Filipinos slaughtered during America’s “Indian War” in their islands at the beginning of the twentieth century, through the real Indians, America’s own, massacred wholesale at places like Horseshoe Bend and the Bad Axe, Sand Creek and Wounded Knee, the Washita, Bear River, and the Marias.

Was it those who expired along the Cherokee Trial of Tears of the Long Walk of the Navajo?

Those murdered by smallpox at Fort Clark in 1836?

Starved to death in the concentration camp at Bosque Redondo during the 1860s?

Maybe those native people claimed for scalp bounty in all 48 of the continental US states? Or the Raritans whose severed heads were kicked for sport along the streets of what was then called New Amsterdam, at the very site where the WTC once stood?

One hears, too, the whispers of those lost on the Middle Passage, and of those whose very flesh was sold in the slave market outside the human kennel from whence Wall Street takes its name. And of coolie laborers, imported by the gross-dozen to lay the tracks of empire across scorching desert sands, none of them allotted “a Chinaman’s chance” of surviving.

The list is too long, too awful to go on.

No matter what its eventual fate, America will have gotten off very, very cheap.

The full measure of its guilt can never be fully balanced or atoned for.

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Ward Churchill (Keetoowah Band Cherokee) is one of the most outspoken of Native American activists. In his lectures and numerous published works, he explores the themes of genocide in the Americas, historical and legal (re)interpretation of conquest and colonization, literary and cinematic criticism, and indigenist alternatives to the status quo. Churchill is a Professor of Ethnic Studies and Coordinator of American Indian Studies. He is also a past national spokesperson for the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee. His books include Agents of Repression, Fantasies of the Master Race, From a Native Son and A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas.

**********************

Ward Churchill Responds to Criticism of“Some People Push Back”

In the last few days there has been widespread and grossly inaccurate media coverage concerning my analysis of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, coverage that has resulted in defamation of my character and threats against my life. What I actually said has been lost, indeed turned into the opposite of itself, and I hope the following facts will be reported at least to the same extent that the fabrications have been.

* The piece circulating on the internet was developed into a book, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens. Most of the book is a detailed chronology of U.S. military interventions since 1776 and U.S. violations of international law since World War II. My point is that we cannot allow the U.S. government, acting in our name, to engage in massive violations of international law and fundamental human rights and not expect to reap the consequences.

* I am not a “defender”of the September 11 attacks, but simply pointing out that if U.S. foreign policy results in massive death and destruction abroad, we cannot feign innocence when some of that destruction is returned. I have never said that people “should” engage in armed attacks on the United States, but that such attacks are a natural and unavoidable consequence of unlawful U.S. policy. As Martin Luther King, quoting Robert F. Kennedy, said, “Those who make peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable.”

* This is not to say that I advocate violence; as a U.S. soldier in Vietnam I witnessed and participated in more violence than I ever wish to see. What I am saying is that if we want an end to violence, especially that perpetrated against civilians, we must take the responsibility for halting the slaughter perpetrated by the United States around the world. My feelings are reflected in Dr. King’s April 1967 Riverside speech, where, when asked about the wave of urban rebellions in U.S. cities, he said, “I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed . . . without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government.”

* In 1996 Madeleine Albright, then Ambassador to the UN and soon to be U.S. Secretary of State, did not dispute that 500,000 Iraqi children had died as a result of economic sanctions, but stated on national television that “we” had decided it was “worth the cost.” I mourn the victims of the September 11 attacks, just as I mourn the deaths of those Iraqi children, the more than 3 million people killed in the war in Indochina, those who died in the U.S. invasions of Grenada, Panama and elsewhere in Central America, the victims of the transatlantic slave trade, and the indigenous peoples still subjected to genocidal policies. If we respond with callous disregard to the deaths of others, we can only expect equal callousness to American deaths.

* Finally, I have never characterized all the September 11 victims as “Nazis.” What I said was that the “technocrats of empire” working in the World Trade Center were the equivalent of “little Eichmanns.” Adolf Eichmann was not charged with direct killing but with ensuring the smooth running of the infrastructure that enabled the Nazi genocide. Similarly, German industrialists were legitimately targeted by the Allies.

* It is not disputed that the Pentagon was a military target, or that a CIA office was situated in the World Trade Center. Following the logic by which U.S. Defense Department spokespersons have consistently sought to justify target selection in places like Baghdad, this placement of an element of the American “command and control infrastructure” in an ostensibly civilian facility converted the Trade Center itself into a “legitimate” target. Again following U.S. military doctrine, as announced in briefing after briefing, those who did not work for the CIA but were nonetheless killed in the attack amounted to no more than “collateral damage.” If the U.S. public is prepared to accept these “standards” when the are routinely applied to other people, they should be not be surprised when the same standards are applied to them.

* It should be emphasized that I applied the “little Eichmanns” characterization only to those described as “technicians.” Thus, it was obviously not directed to the children, janitors, food service workers, firemen and random passers-by killed in the 9-1-1 attack. According to Pentagon logic, were simply part of the collateral damage. Ugly? Yes. Hurtful? Yes. And that’s my point. It’s no less ugly, painful or dehumanizing a description when applied to Iraqis, Palestinians, or anyone else. If we ourselves do not want to be treated in this fashion, we must refuse to allow others to be similarly devalued and dehumanized in our name.

* The bottom line of my argument is that the best and perhaps only way to prevent 9-1-1-style attacks on the U.S. is for American citizens to compel their government to comply with the rule of law. The lesson of Nuremberg is that this is not only our right, but our obligation. To the extent we shirk this responsibility, we, like the “Good Germans” of the 1930s and ‘40s, are complicit in its actions and have no legitimate basis for complaint when we suffer the consequences. This, of course, includes me, personally, as well as my family, no less than anyone else.

* These points are clearly stated and documented in my book, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens, which recently won Honorary Mention for the Gustavus Myer Human Rights Award. for best writing on human rights. Some people will, of course, disagree with my analysis, but it presents questions that must be addressed in academic and public debate if we are to find a real solution to the violence that pervades today’s world. The gross distortions of what I actually said can only be viewed as an attempt to distract the public from the real issues at hand and to further stifle freedom of speech and academic debate in this country.

Ward Churchill Boulder, Colorado January 31, 2005

Tim's Last Kill - Janet Burroway

As a child Tim Eysselinck was obsessed with toy soldiers, John Wayne and guns. As an adult he became a soldier, a keen hunter and toured the world clearing mines. Then he shot himself dead after returning from Iraq. His mother Janet Burroway reflects on the life of “a fiercely honourable boy.”

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I have today cancelled the subscription of my son Timothy Alan Eysselinck to American Rifleman, and removed his name from the National Rifle Association mailing lists, lobbying efforts, fund solicitations, and so forth. Tim has been a lifetime member of the NRA, a registered Republican, an avid hunter of both small and big game, a ranger and a captain in the army, and a civilian contractor for humanitarian de-mining. Because he was deployed or employed all over the world, his NRA mail still comes to the house in Tallahassee where he spent part of his childhood and his adolescence, but as he shot and killed himself on April 23, the messages are no longer received.

I have been looking over the most recent issue of Rifleman, trying to grasp why a fiercely honourable boy fell in love with objects manufactured to destroy, and why such boys continue to believe that such objects foster integrity and peace. But my mind is not adequate to the task, and the magazine is not intended to explain to the unconverted.

We came to England when Tim was 15 months old, I to teach at the University of Sussex and his father to direct the Gardner Centre for the Arts in Brighton.

I have a black-and-white snapshot of Tim and his little brother Alex, both of them fair-haired and long-lashed, squatting in an orchard full of daffodils in the Sussex countryside where we lived until Tim was eight. I also own a colour photograph taken in the African savanna of Tim, now grown, kneeling over the carcass of a kudu, surrounded by his wiry Cameroonian guides. Now, looking at the toddler in the daffodils, I can see the clear lineaments of the hunter’s face. But squatting beside him I had no premonition of which planes, tilts, colours of that cherub head would survive.

Tim was a loving and obedient child, fascinated none the less with all things military, tactical, strategic, ballistic. He could spend hours repositioning the limbs of a plastic soldier or reproducing the patina of wear on a toy ammo belt. As a teenager he sought discipline and rigour, to the wonder of my friends.

He lit with enthusiasm for his most demanding teachers, praising their strictness. He was modest, intense, and had few but deep friendships. He was, like his brother, proud of his Scottish heritage and the grandmother who was “pure-bred McKenzie”, but of the two McKenzie mottos it was clear that Tim espoused the Celtic that translates, “All for the king,” whereas Alex and I wore the Latin badge “Luceo non uro”, meaning “light not heat”, or, “I shine not burn”.

Tim, who described himself as a fiscal conservative and social liberal, held tolerant attitudes with regard to sex, race and religion. His politics, however, emanated from a spirit of gravity rather than irony. In puberty he developed no interest in sports but read voraciously, mostly adventure novels, admired John Wayne’s acting and his politics, and more than once to my despair quoted, “My country right or wrong.”

For a period he enjoyed goading my Democrat and Labour friends with army swagger. At 18 he came home at three one morning, in tears because he could not go to defend England’s honour in the Falklands. I had to be aware of my own contradictions in his presence: a feminist charmed by his machismo, a pacifist with a temper.

We came to acknowledge that, mother and child, we could not only not share, but could not respect each other’s world views. Our task was to love each other in the absence of that respect. It was a tall order. We agreed that we did pretty well at it. And Tim was broad-minded enough to observe once, “It’s a good thing it’s you who’s the liberal, mom. If I was the parent, I wouldn’t want to let you be you the way you’ve let me be me.”

Tim took a degree in history at the University of Florida, where he was a member of the Reserve Officer Training Corps, then spent four years stationed with the army in Hawaii, where he described himself as a “warrior without a war”.

He left to work for a security corporation guarding the embassies and multinationals in Cameroon, and, as a US army reserve officer in Stuttgart, was sent to Bosnia, the Republic of Congo, and then to Namibia, where he learned the skill of de-mining. In Windhoek, the Namibian capital, he married on the eve of the millennium, became a stepfather and later a father to a daughter, who is now three and a half.

In August last year, having completed a two-year humanitarian de-mining project on the Ethiopian-Eritrean border (his family spent that time in Addis Ababa), Tim was offered his choice of a desk job in Washington or a mine-clearing contract in Iraq. His wife agreed to return to Windhoek and honour his desire for a limited tour at the front.

In Baghdad, Tim headed a $7m project with eight civilian colleagues, a sniffer dog team and a crew of 90 Iraqis who, he said, were the best he had ever worked with - the most dedicated, the most disciplined. They gave him hope for the governmental handover because, Sunni, Shia and Kurd, they worked side by side in mortal danger with mutual trust.

In the “green zone” where coalition officials live and work in Baghdad, and in the field, Tim carried two pistols and a machine gun; I paid no attention to what kind or calibre. He spent his days blowing things up - some mines, but more often unexploded ordnance from US cluster bombs - to clear building sites for housing and schools and, in one instance, a soccer field.

In January my son came to Tallahassee for a day, en route from Namibia back to Baghdad by way of a de-mining conference in Tampa. He was gorgeous in Iraqi guise - tanned, bearded, and with a full head of hair in place of his usual crewcut; my husband Peter said that I fell in love with him all over again. The three of us shared the irony that Tim’s brother Alex - that erstwhile punk and eternal pacifist - was now on the front line as supervisor of the Piccadilly Circus station of the London Underground, not only chasing buskers from the tunnels where he used to busk, but uniformed, drilling his crew in emergency evacuation.

Tim was missing his family in Namibia and thought his Iraqi team was on the verge of self-sufficiency. But he also worried that they would become targets of the insurgents in Iraq, and he was both despondent and enraged by the Bush administration and its regime (then under Paul Bremer) in Baghdad: “The corruption, the incompetence, the greed, the lies, the brute stupidity.”

I confess I was elated to hear this. I did not then know that one of his men had lost a leg in a de-mining accident, nor that their compound was fired on daily, nor that he had been treated for depression in Ethiopia the year before. Nor did I suspect that his plane, while taking off from Baghdad, had had to weave to dodge a missile.

I had, like a good liberal mom, let him choose his views and his life, and now first-hand experience was bringing him round to mine. With better hindsight, my brother pointed out, “Tim was someone who thought that with ideals and a gun you could fix things.” He had put his life at the service of a government that stood on just such a belief, and his disillusionment cut deep.

Back in Iraq, a note in his appointment calendar for January 10 reads: “All mistakes anyway everything crazy now I hope I can make it home safe.” In late February, Tim completed his tour and rejoined his family in Windhoek, and he spent a couple of weeks in the jubilation of freedom.

But his re-entry to the low-level chaos of family life was hard. He was obsessively irritable in small ways. He became a news junkie. Madrid was attacked, the Spanish pulled out of Iraq, Falluja fell apart, hostages were taken. If all the contractors left, how could there be reconstruction? Tim’s work would have come to nothing but danger for the troops who trusted him. He obsessively emailed his men, but they were busy staying alive and answered at a lag if at all. He consoled himself with hunting on a gamefarm in Namibia, sending proud pictures of himself with a downed warthog, a springbok, a magnificent kudu.

Then, on Thursday April 22, hunting with an unfamiliar rifle in the wrong light, he wounded a gemsbok that he could not track. On his return, inconsolable, he told his stepson that he had found a tooth, which meant that he had hit the animal in the face. He had had to leave it, like his men in Iraq, to its fate.

Tim shot himself on the Friday evening in the dining room of his house in the Windhoek hills called Eros. It was a clean kill. The trajectory took the bullet through Tim’s cranium, a black and beige Herrera-patterned curtain, and out through a rectangular window pane, so that the best friend of his widow was able to pick up the pieces of his brain and her sister to mop the blood from the carpet.

A week later Alex would stand in front of that window in full McKenzie kilt regalia, on his way to his brother’s funeral - bringing together Tim’s Scottish heritage and his choice of Africa as homeland.

No one will ever know what exploded in Tim’s mind. And no one will know how many children for decades to come in Namibia, Angola, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Iraq will retain all four limbs because my kid, who loved weapons, accidentally stumbled into the profession of getting rid of them.

We do know, however, from the Namibian police, that the last gun he held was a 45-calibre Norinco model 1911 (nicknamed “Government”), serial number 901233.

They prised it from his cold, dead hand.

Friday July 2, 2004
The Guardian
© Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2004

Instant-Mix Imperial Democracy (Buy One, Get One Free) - Arundhati Roy

In these times, when we have to race to keep abreast of the speed at which our freedoms are being snatched from us, and when few can afford the luxury of retreating from the streets for a while in order to return with an exquisite, fully formed political thesis replete with footnotes and references, what profound gift can I offer you tonight?

As we lurch from crisis to crisis, beamed directly into our brains by satellite TV, we have to think on our feet. On the move. We enter histories through the rubble of war. Ruined cities, parched fields, shrinking forests, and dying rivers are our archives. Craters left by daisy cutters, our libraries.

So what can I offer you tonight? Some uncomfortable thoughts about money, war, empire, racism, and democracy. Some worries that flit around my brain like a family of persistent moths that keep me awake at night.

Some of you will think it bad manners for a person like me, officially entered in the Big Book of Modern Nations as an "Indian citizen," to come here and criticize the U.S. government. Speaking for myself, I'm no flag-waver, no patriot, and am fully aware that venality, brutality, and hypocrisy are imprinted on the leaden soul of every state. But when a country ceases to be merely a country and becomes an empire, then the scale of operations changes dramatically. So may I clarify that tonight I speak as a subject of the American Empire? I speak as a slave who presumes to criticize her king.

Since lectures must be called something, mine tonight is called: Instant-Mix Imperial Democracy (Buy One, Get One Free).

Way back in 1988, on the 3rd of July, the U.S.S. Vincennes, a missile cruiser stationed in the Persian Gulf, accidentally shot down an Iranian airliner and killed 290 civilian passengers. George Bush the First, who was at the time on his presidential campaign, was asked to comment on the incident. He said quite subtly, "I will never apologize for the United States. I don't care what the facts are."

I don't care what the facts are. What a perfect maxim for the New American Empire. Perhaps a slight variation on the theme would be more apposite: The facts can be whatever we want them to be.

When the United States invaded Iraq, a New York Times/CBS News survey estimated that 42 percent of the American public believed that Saddam Hussein was directly responsible for the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. And an ABC News poll said that 55 percent of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein directly supported Al Qaida. None of this opinion is based on evidence (because there isn't any). All of it is based on insinuation, auto-suggestion, and outright lies circulated by the U.S. corporate media, otherwise known as the "Free Press," that hollow pillar on which contemporary American democracy rests.

Public support in the U.S. for the war against Iraq was founded on a multi-tiered edifice of falsehood and deceit, coordinated by the U.S. government and faithfully amplified by the corporate media.

Apart from the invented links between Iraq and Al Qaida, we had the manufactured frenzy about Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction. George Bush the Lesser went to the extent of saying it would be "suicidal" for the U.S. not to attack Iraq. We once again witnessed the paranoia that a starved, bombed, besieged country was about to annihilate almighty America. (Iraq was only the latest in a succession of countries - earlier there was Cuba, Nicaragua, Libya, Grenada, and Panama.) But this time it wasn't just your ordinary brand of friendly neighborhood frenzy. It was Frenzy with a Purpose. It ushered in an old doctrine in a new bottle: the Doctrine of Pre-emptive Strike, a.k.a. The United States Can Do Whatever The Hell It Wants, And That's Official.

The war against Iraq has been fought and won and no Weapons of Mass Destruction have been found. Not even a little one. Perhaps they'll have to be planted before they're discovered. And then, the more troublesome amongst us will need an explanation for why Saddam Hussein didn't use them when his country was being invaded.

Of course, there'll be no answers. True Believers will make do with those fuzzy TV reports about the discovery of a few barrels of banned chemicals in an old shed. There seems to be no consensus yet about whether they're really chemicals, whether they're actually banned and whether the vessels they're contained in can technically be called barrels. (There were unconfirmed rumours that a teaspoonful of potassium permanganate and an old harmonica were found there too.)

Meanwhile, in passing, an ancient civilization has been casually decimated by a very recent, casually brutal nation.

Then there are those who say, so what if Iraq had no chemical and nuclear weapons? So what if there is no Al Qaida connection? So what if Osama bin Laden hates Saddam Hussein as much as he hates the United States? Bush the Lesser has said Saddam Hussein was a "Homicidal Dictator." And so, the reasoning goes, Iraq needed a "regime change."

Never mind that forty years ago, the CIA, under President John F. Kennedy, orchestrated a regime change in Baghdad. In 1963, after a successful coup, the Ba'ath party came to power in Iraq. Using lists provided by the CIA, the new Ba'ath regime systematically eliminated hundreds of doctors, teachers, lawyers, and political figures known to be leftists. An entire intellectual community was slaughtered. (The same technique was used to massacre hundreds of thousands of people in Indonesia and East Timor.) The young Saddam Hussein was said to have had a hand in supervising the bloodbath. In 1979, after factional infighting within the Ba'ath Party, Saddam Hussein became the President of Iraq. In April 1980, while he was massacring Shias, the U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinksi declared, "We see no fundamental incompatibility of interests between the United States and Iraq." Washington and London overtly and covertly supported Saddam Hussein. They financed him, equipped him, armed him, and provided him with dual-use materials to manufacture weapons of mass destruction. They supported his worst excesses financially, materially, and morally. They supported the eight-year war against Iran and the 1988 gassing of Kurdish people in Halabja, crimes which 14 years later were re-heated and served up as reasons to justify invading Iraq. After the first Gulf War, the "Allies" fomented an uprising of Shias in Basra and then looked away while Saddam Hussein crushed the revolt and slaughtered thousands in an act of vengeful reprisal.

The point is, if Saddam Hussein was evil enough to merit the most elaborate, openly declared assassination attempt in history (the opening move of Operation Shock and Awe), then surely those who supported him ought at least to be tried for war crimes? Why aren't the faces of U.S. and U.K. government officials on the infamous pack of cards of wanted men and women?

Because when it comes to Empire, facts don't matter.

Yes, but all that's in the past we're told. Saddam Hussein is a monster who must be stopped now. And only the U.S. can stop him. It's an effective technique, this use of the urgent morality of the present to obscure the diabolical sins of the past and the malevolent plans for the future. Indonesia, Panama, Nicaragua, Iraq, Afghanistan - the list goes on and on. Right now there are brutal regimes being groomed for the future - Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Pakistan, the Central Asian Republics.

U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft recently declared that U.S. freedoms are "not the grant of any government or document, but….our endowment from God." (Why bother with the United Nations when God himself is on hand?)

So here we are, the people of the world, confronted with an Empire armed with a mandate from heaven (and, as added insurance, the most formidable arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in history). Here we are, confronted with an Empire that has conferred upon itself the right to go to war at will, and the right to deliver people from corrupting ideologies, from religious fundamentalists, dictators, sexism, and poverty by the age-old, tried-and-tested practice of extermination. Empire is on the move, and Democracy is its sly new war cry. Democracy, home-delivered to your doorstep by daisy cutters. Death is a small price for people to pay for the privilege of sampling this new product: Instant-Mix Imperial Democracy (bring to a boil, add oil, then bomb).

But then perhaps chinks, negroes, dinks, gooks, and wogs don't really qualify as real people. Perhaps our deaths don't qualify as real deaths. Our histories don't qualify as history. They never have.

Speaking of history, in these past months, while the world watched, the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq was broadcast on live TV. Like Osama bin Laden and the Taliban in Afghanistan, the regime of Saddam Hussein simply disappeared. This was followed by what analysts called a "power vacuum." Cities that had been under siege, without food, water, and electricity for days, cities that had been bombed relentlessly, people who had been starved and systematically impoverished by the UN sanctions regime for more than a decade, were suddenly left with no semblance of urban administration. A seven-thousand-year-old civilization slid into anarchy. On live TV.

Vandals plundered shops, offices, hotels, and hospitals. American and British soldiers stood by and watched. They said they had no orders to act. In effect, they had orders to kill people, but not to protect them. Their priorities were clear. The safety and security of Iraqi people was not their business. The security of whatever little remained of Iraq's infrastructure was not their business. But the security and safety of Iraq's oil fields were. Of course they were. The oil fields were "secured" almost before the invasion began.

On CNN and BBC the scenes of the rampage were played and replayed. TV commentators, army and government spokespersons portrayed it as a "liberated people" venting their rage at a despotic regime. U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said: "It's untidy. Freedom's untidy and free people are free to commit crimes and make mistakes and do bad things." Did anybody know that Donald Rumsfeld was an anarchist? I wonder - did he hold the same view during the riots in Los Angeles following the beating of Rodney King? Would he care to share his thesis about the Untidiness of Freedom with the two million people being held in U.S. prisons right now? (The world's "freest" country has the highest number of prisoners in the world.) Would he discuss its merits with young African American men, 28 percent of whom will spend some part of their adult lives in jail? Could he explain why he serves under a president who oversaw 152 executions when he was governor of Texas?

Before the war on Iraq began, the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) sent the Pentagon a list of 16 crucial sites to protect. The National Museum was second on that list. Yet the Museum was not just looted, it was desecrated. It was a repository of an ancient cultural heritage. Iraq as we know it today was part of the river valley of Mesopotamia. The civilization that grew along the banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates produced the world's first writing, first calendar, first library, first city, and, yes, the world's first democracy. King Hammurabi of Babylon was the first to codify laws governing the social life of citizens. It was a code in which abandoned women, prostitutes, slaves, and even animals had rights. The Hammurabi code is acknowledged not just as the birth of legality, but the beginning of an understanding of the concept of social justice. The U.S. government could not have chosen a more inappropriate land in which to stage its illegal war and display its grotesque disregard for justice.

At a Pentagon briefing during the days of looting, Secretary Rumsfeld, Prince of Darkness, turned on his media cohorts who had served him so loyally through the war. "The images you are seeing on television, you are seeing over and over and over, and it's the same picture, of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it twenty times and you say, 'My god, were there that many vases? Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?'"

Laughter rippled through the press room. Would it be alright for the poor of Harlem to loot the Metropolitan Museum? Would it be greeted with similar mirth?

The last building on the ORHA list of 16 sites to be protected was the Ministry of Oil. It was the only one that was given protection. Perhaps the occupying army thought that in Muslim countries lists are read upside down?

Television tells us that Iraq has been "liberated" and that Afghanistan is well on its way to becoming a paradise for women-thanks to Bush and Blair, the 21st century's leading feminists. In reality, Iraq's infrastructure has been destroyed. Its people brought to the brink of starvation. Its food stocks depleted. And its cities devastated by a complete administrative breakdown. Iraq is being ushered in the direction of a civil war between Shias and Sunnis. Meanwhile, Afghanistan has lapsed back into the pre-Taliban era of anarchy, and its territory has been carved up into fiefdoms by hostile warlords.

Undaunted by all this, on the 2nd of May Bush the Lesser launched his 2004 campaign hoping to be finally elected U.S. President. In what probably constitutes the shortest flight in history, a military jet landed on an aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, which was so close to shore that, according to the Associated Press, administration officials acknowledged "positioning the massive ship to provide the best TV angle for Bush's speech, with the sea as his background instead of the San Diego coastline." President Bush, who never served his term in the military, emerged from the cockpit in fancy dress - a U.S. military bomber jacket, combat boots, flying goggles, helmet. Waving to his cheering troops, he officially proclaimed victory over Iraq. He was careful to say that it was "just one victory in a war on terror … [which] still goes on."

It was important to avoid making a straightforward victory announcement, because under the Geneva Convention a victorious army is bound by the legal obligations of an occupying force, a responsibility that the Bush administration does not want to burden itself with. Also, closer to the 2004 elections, in order to woo wavering voters, another victory in the "War on Terror" might become necessary. Syria is being fattened for the kill.

It was Herman Goering, that old Nazi, who said, "People can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders.… All you have to do is tell them they're being attacked and denounce the pacifists for a lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."

He's right. It's dead easy. That's what the Bush regime banks on. The distinction between election campaigns and war, between democracy and oligarchy, seems to be closing fast.

The only caveat in these campaign wars is that U.S. lives must not be lost. It shakes voter confidence. But the problem of U.S. soldiers being killed in combat has been licked. More or less.

At a media briefing before Operation Shock and Awe was unleashed, General Tommy Franks announced, "This campaign will be like no other in history." Maybe he's right.

I'm no military historian, but when was the last time a war was fought like this?

After using the "good offices" of UN diplomacy (economic sanctions and weapons inspections) to ensure that Iraq was brought to its knees, its people starved, half a million children dead, its infrastructure severely damaged, after making sure that most of its weapons had been destroyed, in an act of cowardice that must surely be unrivalled in history, the "Coalition of the Willing" (better known as the Coalition of the Bullied and Bought) - sent in an invading army!

Operation Iraqi Freedom? I don't think so. It was more like Operation Let's Run a Race, but First Let Me Break Your Knees.

As soon as the war began, the governments of France, Germany, and Russia, which refused to allow a final resolution legitimizing the war to be passed in the UN Security Council, fell over each other to say how much they wanted the United States to win. President Jacques Chirac offered French airspace to the Anglo-American air force. U.S. military bases in Germany were open for business. German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer publicly hoped for the "rapid collapse" of the Saddam Hussein regime. Vladimir Putin publicly hoped for the same. These are governments that colluded in the enforced disarming of Iraq before their dastardly rush to take the side of those who attacked it. Apart from hoping to share the spoils, they hoped Empire would honor their pre-war oil contracts with Iraq. Only the very naïve could expect old Imperialists to behave otherwise.

Leaving aside the cheap thrills and the lofty moral speeches made in the UN during the run up to the war, eventually, at the moment of crisis, the unity of Western governments - despite the opposition from the majority of their people - was overwhelming.

When the Turkish government temporarily bowed to the views of 90 percent of its population, and turned down the U.S. government's offer of billions of dollars of blood money for the use of Turkish soil, it was accused of lacking "democratic principles." According to a Gallup International poll, in no European country was support for a war carried out "unilaterally by America and its allies" higher than 11 percent. But the governments of England, Italy, Spain, Hungary, and other countries of Eastern Europe were praised for disregarding the views of the majority of their people and supporting the illegal invasion. That, presumably, was fully in keeping with democratic principles. What's it called? New Democracy? (Like Britain's New Labour?)

In stark contrast to the venality displayed by their governments, on the 15th of February, weeks before the invasion, in the most spectacular display of public morality the world has ever seen, more than 10 million people marched against the war on 5 continents. Many of you, I'm sure, were among them. They - we - were disregarded with utter disdain. When asked to react to the anti-war demonstrations, President Bush said, "It's like deciding, well, I'm going to decide policy based upon a focus group. The role of a leader is to decide policy based upon the security, in this case the security of the people."

Democracy, the modern world's holy cow, is in crisis. And the crisis is a profound one. Every kind of outrage is being committed in the name of democracy. It has become little more than a hollow word, a pretty shell, emptied of all content or meaning. It can be whatever you want it to be. Democracy is the Free World's whore, willing to dress up, dress down, willing to satisfy a whole range of taste, available to be used and abused at will.

Until quite recently, right up to the 1980's, democracy did seem as though it might actually succeed in delivering a degree of real social justice.

But modern democracies have been around for long enough for neo-liberal capitalists to learn how to subvert them. They have mastered the technique of infiltrating the instruments of democracy - the "independent" judiciary, the "free" press, the parliament - and molding them to their purpose. The project of corporate globalization has cracked the code. Free elections, a free press, and an independent judiciary mean little when the free market has reduced them to commodities on sale to the highest bidder.

To fully comprehend the extent to which Democracy is under siege, it might be an idea to look at what goes on in some of our contemporary democracies. The World's Largest: India, (which I have written about at some length and therefore will not speak about tonight). The World's Most Interesting: South Africa. The world's most powerful: the U.S.A. And, most instructive of all, the plans that are being made to usher in the world's newest: Iraq.

In South Africa, after 300 years of brutal domination of the black majority by a white minority through colonialism and apartheid, a non-racial, multi-party democracy came to power in 1994. It was a phenomenal achievement. Within two years of coming to power, the African National Congress had genuflected with no caveats to the Market God. Its massive program of structural adjustment, privatization, and liberalization has only increased the hideous disparities between the rich and the poor. More than a million people have lost their jobs. The corporatization of basic services - electricity, water, and housing-has meant that 10 million South Africans, almost a quarter of the population, have been disconnected from water and electricity. 2 million have been evicted from their homes.

Meanwhile, a small white minority that has been historically privileged by centuries of brutal exploitation is more secure than ever before. They continue to control the land, the farms, the factories, and the abundant natural resources of that country. For them the transition from apartheid to neo-liberalism barely disturbed the grass. It's apartheid with a clean conscience. And it goes by the name of Democracy.

Democracy has become Empire's euphemism for neo-liberal capitalism.

In countries of the first world, too, the machinery of democracy has been effectively subverted. Politicians, media barons, judges, powerful corporate lobbies, and government officials are imbricated in an elaborate underhand configuration that completely undermines the lateral arrangement of checks and balances between the constitution, courts of law, parliament, the administration and, perhaps most important of all, the independent media that form the structural basis of a parliamentary democracy. Increasingly, the imbrication is neither subtle nor elaborate.

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, for instance, has a controlling interest in major Italian newspapers, magazines, television channels, and publishing houses. The Financial Times reported that he controls about 90 percent of Italy's TV viewership. Recently, during a trial on bribery charges, while insisting he was the only person who could save Italy from the left, he said, "How much longer do I have to keep living this life of sacrifices?" That bodes ill for the remaining 10 percent of Italy's TV viewership. What price Free Speech? Free Speech for whom?

In the United States, the arrangement is more complex. Clear Channel Worldwide Incorporated is the largest radio station owner in the country. It runs more than 1,200 channels, which together account for 9 percent of the market. Its CEO contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to Bush's election campaign. When hundreds of thousands of American citizens took to the streets to protest against the war on Iraq, Clear Channel organized pro-war patriotic "Rallies for America" across the country. It used its radio stations to advertise the events and then sent correspondents to cover them as though they were breaking news. The era of manufacturing consent has given way to the era of manufacturing news. Soon media newsrooms will drop the pretense, and start hiring theatre directors instead of journalists.

As America's show business gets more and more violent and war-like, and America's wars get more and more like show business, some interesting cross-overs are taking place. The designer who built the 250,000 dollar set in Qatar from which General Tommy Franks stage-managed news coverage of Operation Shock and Awe also built sets for Disney, MGM, and "Good Morning America."

It is a cruel irony that the U.S., which has the most ardent, vociferous defenders of the idea of Free Speech, and (until recently) the most elaborate legislation to protect it, has so circumscribed the space in which that freedom can be expressed. In a strange, convoluted way, the sound and fury that accompanies the legal and conceptual defense of Free Speech in America serves to mask the process of the rapid erosion of the possibilities of actually exercising that freedom.

The news and entertainment industry in the U.S. is for the most part controlled by a few major corporations - AOL-Time Warner, Disney, Viacom, News Corporation. Each of these corporations owns and controls TV stations, film studios, record companies, and publishing ventures. Effectively, the exits are sealed.

America's media empire is controlled by a tiny coterie of people. Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission Michael Powell, the son of Secretary of State Colin Powell, has proposed even further deregulation of the communication industry, which will lead to even greater consolidation.

So here it is - the World's Greatest Democracy, led by a man who was not legally elected. America's Supreme Court gifted him his job. What price have American people paid for this spurious presidency?

In the three years of George Bush the Lesser's term, the American economy has lost more than two million jobs. Outlandish military expenses, corporate welfare, and tax giveaways to the rich have created a financial crisis for the U.S. educational system. According to a survey by the National Council of State Legislatures, U.S. states cut 49 billion dollars in public services, health, welfare benefits, and education in 2002. They plan to cut another 25.7 billion dollars this year. That makes a total of 75 billion dollars. Bush's initial budget request to Congress to finance the war in Iraq was 80 billion dollars.

So who's paying for the war? America's poor. Its students, its unemployed, its single mothers, its hospital and home-care patients, its teachers, and health workers.

And who's actually fighting the war?

Once again, America's poor. The soldiers who are baking in Iraq's desert sun are not the children of the rich. Only one of all the representatives in the House of Representatives and the Senate has a child fighting in Iraq. America's "volunteer" army in fact depends on a poverty draft of poor whites, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians looking for a way to earn a living and get an education. Federal statistics show that African Americans make up 21 percent of the total armed forces and 29 percent of the U.S. army. They count for only 12 percent of the general population. It's ironic, isn't it - the disproportionately high representation of African Americans in the army and prison? Perhaps we should take a positive view, and look at this as affirmative action at its most effective. Nearly 4 million Americans (2 percent of the population) have lost the right to vote because of felony convictions. Of that number, 1.4 million are African Americans, which means that 13 percent of all voting-age Black people have been disenfranchised.

For African Americans there's also affirmative action in death. A study by the economist Amartya Sen shows that African Americans as a group have a lower life expectancy than people born in China, in the Indian State of Kerala (where I come from), Sri Lanka, or Costa Rica. Bangladeshi men have a better chance of making it to the age of forty than African American men from here in Harlem.

This year, on what would have been Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s 74th birthday, President Bush denounced the University of Michigan's affirmative action program favouring Blacks and Latinos. He called it "divisive," "unfair," and "unconstitutional." The successful effort to keep Blacks off the voting rolls in the State of Florida in order that George Bush be elected was of course neither unfair nor unconstitutional. I don't suppose affirmative action for White Boys From Yale ever is.

So we know who's paying for the war. We know who's fighting it. But who will benefit from it? Who is homing in on the reconstruction contracts estimated to be worth up to one hundred billon dollars? Could it be America's poor and unemployed and sick? Could it be America's single mothers? Or America's Black and Latino minorities?

Operation Iraqi Freedom, George Bush assures us, is about returning Iraqi oil to the Iraqi people. That is, returning Iraqi oil to the Iraqi people via Corporate Multinationals. Like Bechtel, like Chevron, like Halliburton.

Once again, it is a small, tight circle that connects corporate, military, and government leadership to one another. The promiscuousness, the cross-pollination is outrageous.

Consider this: the Defense Policy Board is a government-appointed group that advises the Pentagon. Its members are appointed by the under secretary of defense and approved by Donald Rumsfeld. Its meetings are classified. No information is available for public scrutiny.

The Washington-based Center for Public Integrity found that 9 out of the 30 members of the Defense Policy Board are connected to companies that were awarded defense contracts worth 76 billion dollars between the years 2001 and 2002. One of them, Jack Sheehan, a retired Marine Corps general, is a senior vice president at Bechtel, the giant international engineering outfit. Riley Bechtel, the company chairman, is on the President's Export Council. Former Secretary of State George Shultz, who is also on the Board of Directors of the Bechtel Group, is the chairman of the advisory board of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. When asked by the New York Times whether he was concerned about the appearance of a conflict of interest, he said, "I don't know that Bechtel would particularly benefit from it. But if there's work to be done, Bechtel is the type of company that could do it."

Bechtel has been awarded a 680 million dollar reconstruction contract in Iraq. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Bechtel contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republican campaign efforts.
Arcing across this subterfuge, dwarfing it by the sheer magnitude of its malevolence, is America's anti-terrorism legislation. The U.S.A. Patriot Act, passed in October 2001, has become the blueprint for similar anti-terrorism bills in countries across the world. It was passed in the House of Representatives by a majority vote of 337 to 79. According to the New York Times, "Many lawmakers said it had been impossible to truly debate or even read the legislation."

The Patriot Act ushers in an era of systemic automated surveillance. It gives the government the authority to monitor phones and computers and spy on people in ways that would have seemed completely unacceptable a few years ago. It gives the FBI the power to seize all of the circulation, purchasing, and other records of library users and bookstore customers on the suspicion that they are part of a terrorist network. It blurs the boundaries between speech and criminal activity creating the space to construe acts of civil disobedience as violating the law.

Already hundreds of people are being held indefinitely as "unlawful combatants." (In India, the number is in the thousands. In Israel, 5,000 Palestinians are now being detained.) Non-citizens, of course, have no rights at all. They can simply be "disappeared" like the people of Chile under Washington's old ally, General Pinochet. More than 1,000 people, many of them Muslim or of Middle Eastern origin, have been detained, some without access to legal representatives.

Apart from paying the actual economic costs of war, American people are paying for these wars of "liberation" with their own freedoms. For the ordinary American, the price of "New Democracy" in other countries is the death of real democracy at home.

Meanwhile, Iraq is being groomed for "liberation." (Or did they mean "liberalization" all along?) The Wall Street Journal reports that "the Bush administration has drafted sweeping plans to remake Iraq's economy in the U.S. image."

Iraq's constitution is being redrafted. Its trade laws, tax laws, and intellectual property laws rewritten in order to turn it into an American-style capitalist economy.

The United States Agency for International Development has invited U.S. companies to bid for contracts that range between road building, water systems, text book distribution, and cell phone networks.

Soon after Bush the Second announced that he wanted American farmers to feed the world, Dan Amstutz, a former senior executive of Cargill, the biggest grain exporter in the world, was put in charge of agricultural reconstruction in Iraq. Kevin Watkins, Oxfam's policy director, said, "Putting Dan Amstutz in charge of agricultural reconstruction in Iraq is like putting Saddam Hussein in the chair of a human rights commission."

The two men who have been short-listed to run operations for managing Iraqi oil have worked with Shell, BP, and Fluor. Fluor is embroiled in a lawsuit by black South African workers who have accused the company of exploiting and brutalizing them during the apartheid era. Shell, of course, is well known for its devastation of the Ogoni tribal lands in Nigeria.

Tom Brokaw (one of America's best-known TV anchors) was inadvertently succinct about the process. "One of the things we don't want to do," he said, "is to destroy the infrastructure of Iraq because in a few days we're going to own that country."

Now that the ownership deeds are being settled, Iraq is ready for New Democracy.
So, as Lenin used to ask: What Is To Be Done?

Well…

We might as well accept the fact that there is no conventional military force that can successfully challenge the American war machine. Terrorist strikes only give the U.S. Government an opportunity that it is eagerly awaiting to further tighten its stranglehold. Within days of an attack you can bet that Patriot II would be passed. To argue against U.S. military aggression by saying that it will increase the possibilities of terrorist strikes is futile. It's like threatening Brer Rabbit that you'll throw him into the bramble bush. Any one who has read the documents written by The Project for the New American Century can attest to that. The government's suppression of the Congressional committee report on September 11th, which found that there was intelligence warning of the strikes that was ignored, also attests to the fact that, for all their posturing, the terrorists and the Bush regime might as well be working as a team. They both hold people responsible for the actions of their governments. They both believe in the doctrine of collective guilt and collective punishment. Their actions benefit each other greatly.

The U.S. government has already displayed in no uncertain terms the range and extent of its capability for paranoid aggression. In human psychology, paranoid aggression is usually an indicator of nervous insecurity. It could be argued that it's no different in the case of the psychology of nations. Empire is paranoid because it has a soft underbelly.

Its "homeland" may be defended by border patrols and nuclear weapons, but its economy is strung out across the globe. Its economic outposts are exposed and vulnerable. Already the Internet is buzzing with elaborate lists of American and British government products and companies that should be boycotted. Apart from the usual targets - Coke, Pepsi, McDonalds - government agencies like USAID, the British DFID, British and American banks, Arthur Andersen, Merrill Lynch, and American Express could find themselves under siege. These lists are being honed and refined by activists across the world. They could become a practical guide that directs the amorphous but growing fury in the world. Suddenly, the "inevitability" of the project of Corporate Globalization is beginning to seem more than a little evitable.

It would be naïve to imagine that we can directly confront Empire. Our strategy must be to isolate Empire's working parts and disable them one by one. No target is too small. No victory too insignificant. We could reverse the idea of the economic sanctions imposed on poor countries by Empire and its Allies. We could impose a regime of Peoples' Sanctions on every corporate house that has been awarded with a contract in postwar Iraq, just as activists in this country and around the world targeted institutions of apartheid. Each one of them should be named, exposed, and boycotted. Forced out of business. That could be our response to the Shock and Awe campaign. It would be a great beginning.

Another urgent challenge is to expose the corporate media for the boardroom bulletin that it really is. We need to create a universe of alternative information. We need to support independent media like Democracy Now!, Alternative Radio, and South End Press.

The battle to reclaim democracy is going to be a difficult one. Our freedoms were not granted to us by any governments. They were wrested from them by us. And once we surrender them, the battle to retrieve them is called a revolution. It is a battle that must range across continents and countries. It must not acknowledge national boundaries but, if it is to succeed, it has to begin here. In America. The only institution more powerful than the U.S. government is American civil society. The rest of us are subjects of slave nations. We are by no means powerless, but you have the power of proximity. You have access to the Imperial Palace and the Emperor's chambers. Empire's conquests are being carried out in your name, and you have the right to refuse. You could refuse to fight. Refuse to move those missiles from the warehouse to the dock. Refuse to wave that flag. Refuse the victory parade.

You have a rich tradition of resistance. You need only read Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States to remind yourself of this.

Hundreds of thousands of you have survived the relentless propaganda you have been subjected to, and are actively fighting your own government. In the ultra-patriotic climate that prevails in the United States, that's as brave as any Iraqi or Afghan or Palestinian fighting for his or her homeland.

If you join the battle, not in your hundreds of thousands, but in your millions, you will be greeted joyously by the rest of the world. And you will see how beautiful it is to be gentle instead of brutal, safe instead of scared. Befriended instead of isolated. Loved instead of hated.

I hate to disagree with your president. Yours is by no means a great nation. But you could be a great people.

History is giving you the chance.

Seize the time.


_____________________________________________

Presented in New York City at The Riverside Church
May 13, 2003
Sponsored by the Center for Economic and Social Rights
Copyright 2003 by Arundhati RoySponsored by the Center for Economic and Social Rights http://www.cesr.org/
For permission to use or reprint, contact: arnove@igc.org.

Sex with the Imperfect Stranger - Patrick Califia

"Why should a transsexual be a menace to you?"
-- Riki Wilchins, founder of the direct action group Transexual Menace


November 20, 2002, is a day of remembrance for the transgendered community to honor our beloved dead. This custom, begun three years ago by Gwendolyn Ann Smith, has grown until this year it includes events in 35 cities in the U.S. and abroad. In 2001, transactivists often said that one person was reported killed every month because of prejudice against transgendered people. This phraseology is used because not all of the victims of prejudice against transgenderism are themselves cross-dressers or transsexual. They include, for example, people like Calpernia Addams' boyfriend, Barry Winchell. He was a soldier who was killed by two other men in his unit who were incensed that his lover was a transgendered woman.1 Two dozen such deaths have been reported this year.2 One of these killings took place on October 3, the body discovered about two weeks later. The recent death of Gwen Araujo (born Eddie) makes this an especially somber day.

As I write this I am looking at an undated photograph of Gwen (who sometimes called herself Lida). She is wearing a hooded sweatshirt, holding a baby and smiling, looking like any high school girl baby-sitting for one of her mother's friends.3 It is painful and disturbing to imagine her dead body, wrapped in a blanket, buried in a shallow grave in a remote campground.4 When one of the people who had witnessed her murder led police to that hiding place, she still had a rope wrapped around her neck. She had been stabbed several times and beaten. When I read the account of her injuries, I feel as if I too am a witness of the fury and, yes, terror that reportedly drove a group of young men to murder her. It is as if she has to be killed over and over again. This is a common (if such savagery can be described by such a banal word) characteristic of the murders of transgendered women. It is clear that the perpetrators of these vicious crimes are trying to obliterate something else, something beyond her -- something, I believe, that they hate and fear within themselves.

Michael Magidson, 27; Jason Nabors, 19; Paul Merel Jr., 25; and his brother, Jose Merel, 24, were arrested on suspicion of homicide. Magidson, Nabors and Jose Merel were charged with murder and the commission of a hate crime.5 (California is one of only five states that include gender identity in their hate crime laws.) A fourth suspect, Jason Cazares, 22, was recently charged solely with murder.6

On October 3, the day that she died, Gwen was 17 years old. According to news accounts, she went to a party that was fated to turn ugly. Although Gwen had worn women's clothes for several years, she had never worn a skirt in public before.7 She was apparently nervous about this, because she took a pair of pants with her to change into if the more feminine outfit became uncomfortable or dangerous. At the party, she reportedly had a few beers and had anal sex with Jose Merel, a boy she had a crush on, and perhaps with a friend of his, Michael Magidson. Things started to go wrong when Nicole Brown, the girlfriend of Jose's brother, followed Gwen into the bathroom (or, by some accounts, took her in there) and discovered that she wasn't a biological female. "It's a man, let's go," she called out, and the attack began.

This makes it sound like the people at the party had no idea that Gwen Araujo was not born male. But according to one of Araujo's friends, Stephanie Baumann, she didn't pass. "I don't understand how those men could say they had no idea he was a guy. If you just saw him, you'd know," she told reporters from the San Jose Mercury News.8 Several other details reported in this case do not ring true. It is reported that Araujo had an altercation with the suspects about a week before the party. (She had also been found unconscious in front of a church near her home a few weeks before the murder. Her mother said she had been beaten.)9

This was someone who had been insisting on wearing makeup, women's clothing and using a female name since she was 14. She had frequently been taunted and threatened. She'd been unable to find a job locally because of her gender expression. Why would she willingly attend a social event with people who hated her -- unless she was lured to that party? Or, as one source suggests, she was dating one of the men who are now charged with killing her.10 The "gender check" apparently performed by one of the arrested men's girlfriend is also suspicious. The whole thing sounds like a setup. It is quite reasonable to ask if the sex that reportedly took place was consensual. Paul Merel says his girlfriend woke him up and made him leave the party with her when the attack began, but he also says he saw Araujo on the floor with her skirt pulled up. That sort of exposure smacks of sexual humiliation if not outright rape.11 It's also possible that if one of the men present was her boyfriend, he was utterly and completely humiliated when Gwen's biological sex was publicly exposed, and was so afraid for his own reputation that he became enraged and violent. A more accurate account of what happened probably will not emerge until the trial.

In a small town like Newark, California, it is doubtful that everyone at the party was completely ignorant of Gwen's gender status. Gossip like that travels far and fast. And the defendants were well-enough known to her for their names to appear in a Harry Potter address book that police found in her belongings.12 Did an entire group of people conspire to expose and punish someone who had been getting on their nerves for years? Did the fact that they had gotten away with assaulting her a week earlier encourage them to escalate the violence? "We're dealing with a number of people [at the party] who could have helped, stepped in, prevented or reported this," says Newark Police Lt. Lance Morrison. "None of them did."13

Gwen's mother reported her missing when she did not come home from the party. Scary rumors about her fate circulated for two weeks until one of the party-goers cracked. Jaron Nabors contacted the police and took them to where Gwen's body was buried, 150 miles into the Sierra Nevada foothills. The location was so remote that it could only be reached by a four-wheel-drive vehicle. Morrison described the crime scene as "haunting and gruesome."14

I'm not sure why this murder of a transgendered person has gotten so much more attention in the press than previous cases like the June 2001 murder of two-spirited Fredericka Martinez, a 16-year-old Navajo from Cortez, Colorado.15 Bay Area cultural critic David Steinberg speculates it's because the death took place in Newark, California, near the "proudly open-minded,

relatively diversity-accepting San Francisco Bay Area," and because she had strong support and acceptance from her family.16 Her youth and beauty make her a sympathetic figure. She had been driven out of public school by her bigoted peers, she had problems with drugs and alcohol. Maybe the poignant deaths of Brandon Teena and Matthew Shepherd have tenderized the conscience of the mass media. The high school that could not tolerate Araujo's attendance was, ironically enough, producing The Laramie Project, a play about the Wyoming murder of Shepherd, a gay man who was pistol whipped, tied to a fence and left to freeze to death by two men who later claimed he had propositioned them.17

Araujo's case has generated so much indignation that some gay activists have expressed concern about the defendants being treated fairly, and attempted to remind antiviolence advocates of the flaws in our criminal justice system. Bill Dobbs is a gay civil libertarian and a member of Queer Watch, a gay justice group that has lobbied GLBT organizations to take a position against the death penalty. Dobbs questions the addition of hate crimes charges and indeed questions the entire concept of hate crimes enhancement. "Hate crime?" he says. "This is a horrible killing, and murder charges have been brought. Murder is a million-dollar word. Prosecuting this as a hate crime undercuts the horror of intentional killing. The push for hate crimes laws comes from a mistaken belief that we can stamp out ugly deeds with longer prison sentences. More 'law and order' will not solve the social problem here, hatred towards GLBT people. Gwen Araujo's death raises many issues, including how often transgender persons are attacked. Those issues deserve our attention; at the same time, we must consider carefully what we demand of the criminal justice system. It is worrisome when a group like the National Transgender Advocacy Coalition calls for maximum punishment long before any trial has begun. Those charged in connection with Gwen Araujo's death deserve fair legal treatment. We must not lose sight of justice."18

Stories about Gwen's death appeared on CNN, in USA Today and in the New York Times. Although generally sympathetic in tone, articles about the case often referred to Araujo as a cross-dresser and used male pronouns. (Araujo's mother suffered from the same problem, referring to her transgendered child as "he" even while revealing her plans to bury Gwen in female clothing and put the name Gwen on her headstone.) But a spate of letters from readers who felt this was an insult to the dead girl moved the San Francisco Chronicle to editorialize about the "pronoun problem," and an article they ran about Jack Thompson, a female-to-male teenager, was carefully edited to refer to him as such.19 Reporter Kelly St. John insisted upon this usage, and the newspaper is considering the updated Associated Press style which calls for use of the pronoun consistent with the way a transgendered individual lives publicly. (Old guidelines had insisted on using the birth name and sex assigned at birth until after sex-change surgery.)

Other signs of positive social change have been noted. The spokeswoman for San Francisco's Community United Against Violence, Tina D'Elia, praised the Newark Police Department officer who handled Araujo's case for his unique sensitivity. It would have been nice if Newark city leaders had publicly expressed their indignation about the crime or attended Araujo's funeral, but at least they drew hostile fire in the local press for keeping their heads down.20 "Kids are dying out there because they don't meet narrow gender norms," said Riki Wilchins, executive director of the Washington, DC-based Gender Public Advocacy Coalition. "I'm confident change is coming as crimes like these raise people's awareness. Unfortunately, it's not happening quick enough."21

Sadly, the killing of Araujo did not end her persecution. She was buried on October 25 in a casket adorned with butterflies. Her mother had dressed her in a lace blouse and had her fingernails done in rainbow glitter. Rev. Jeff Finley eulogized Gwen, saying, "I wonder how many times Eddie cried in secret, wondering, where do I fit in? Maybe we were not there enough for you, because we did not understand."22 But Araujo's family was probably remembering the night before, when the notorious publicity hound and homo-hate-monger Fred Phelps dared to show up with a band of 23 of his crazed followers and picket her mother's house, bearing signs that said, "Eddie's in hell."23

Araujo's case has been prominently featured on Phelps' Website, www.godhatesfags.com, as well as the Website of the Army of God and other right-wing Christian organizations. Right-wingers were also quick to take umbrage at the compassionate and respectful tone taken by more liberal newspapers. One critic ridiculed "the liberal Hate Crimes crowd" and "the ridiculous whining that began right after Araujo's death, about the media not using the 'correct' pronouns or names in their coverage of the story... Never mind that journalists are required to report the facts of a given news story... such points as a subject's gender and legal name."24 I've yet to see an article about the case that did not include Araujo's birth name and the sex she was assigned at birth. But even such a trifling matter as including the name that she preferred to be called is seen by conservatives as a very big step down the slippery slope toward (gasp) social acceptance of transgendered people. "[P]art of the campaign to further 'understanding of transgender issues' is to indoctrinate, or to use a more politically correct term, to educate children on such subjects in school," sniped the right-wing Chron Watch Website. The person responsible for this editorial seems oblivious to the fact that Gwen Araujo was a child who went to school, a school where she found no safety. And school systems that keep silent about homosexuality and transgenderism teach queer bashers -- taught the murderers of Gwen Araujo -- that it was socially acceptable to target butch girls and femme boys.

The most twisted response to this 5'6", slightly built teenager's death has to be an article by Zach Calef which appeared in the Iowa State Daily. Let's not forget that Araujo not only suffered blunt force trauma to the head, she was also tied up, stabbed in the face and body, and dragged into the garage where a rope was tied around her neck by a crowd of assailants, who strangled her. But Calef terms this violence as "simply a reaction to a form of rape." Throughout this screed, Calef refers to Araujo as "he" and says, "He tricked them into having sex with him, but if they would have known his sex, they wouldn't have been interested. That is just as bad as rape." He concedes, "Given the circumstances, murder is a bit much," but suggests Magidson, et al. were "not in a normal mind set when they acted ... probably 'temporarily insane'" and so should be "charged with manslaughter or something along those lines." Calef even has the gall to argue that the murder is not a hate crime, because according to him, that would mean "the underlying reason for the beating was Araujo's sexual orientation. And that is not the case. The men did what they did because Araujo violated them. He used lies and deception to trick them into having sex. He was not honest with them and had he been, none of this would have happened. A hate crime should not even be considered. No one killed him because he was a cross-dresser. These men were truly violated. They were raped."25

It's fascinating that Calef assumes that he knows so much about what happened between this transgendered teenager and the men who reportedly fucked and then murdered her. His scenario is based on a dreary stereotype that is horribly familiar to anyone who has followed legal cases in which ostensibly straight men are charged with assaulting or killing gay men or transgendered people. These defendants always argue that it was the queer who came on to them, who used deceit or force in an attempt to wring some sexual gratification out of them. Defense attorneys try (with a depressing amount of success) to get judges and juries to see their clients' violent behavior much as Calef does -- as a perfectly understandable state of rage that springs from a feeling of having been violated. This strategy relies on widespread social acceptance of the belief that this is what straight men are supposed to do when their heterosexual identities are threatened. They are supposed to murder in defense of their masculinity. Because if one of them doesn't do this, if he does not violently repudiate the possibility that he found it pleasurable to have sexual contact with someone who was not born female, then he must be queer himself. (What often goes unstated is the corollary that this would then make him liable to stigma and assault.)

Sex with a new person is always a risk, whether you're on a blind date or hiring a sex worker. You are always going to come out of such an encounter with information about the other person that you didn't have before. (And they are going to carry away some secrets about you, as well.) I am always skeptical about the claims made by johns who say they had no idea the gorgeous girl they screwed was "really a guy" [sic]. But even if his astonishment is real, what is the appropriate response? If I find out that somebody I had sex with is really married, and this is a huge disappointment to me, or morally offensive, does that justify killing them? Of course not. Suppose I've tried something new, something I never thought I would like, and after the pleasure is over, I feel upset about what I've done. Remorse is often the precursor to self¬knowledge. So I have a lot to think about. I may decide I never want to do that again, and I may work through my shame or anxiety and integrate this new pleasure into my repertoire. What I absolutely ought not to do is attempt to obliterate the person who set this uncomfortable but pretty common process in motion. If you don't get what you want out of a sexual encounter, you may have very powerful feelings about it, but the thing to do is put your pants or panties back on, and take your feelings with you when you leave.

The number of gay men or transgendered people who feel powerful enough to try to pressure a straight guy into having sex with them -- let alone actually rape him -- is miniscule. The victim in such cases is usually deliberately sought out by the attackers, hunted down and intimidated, battered or slaughtered. Violence against sexual minority people is a sport. And the number of straight men who occasionally or habitually have sex with other men or with male-to-female transgendered people is so high that the word "heterosexual" ought to always have quotes around it. Given the fact that the men accused of killing Araujo are known to have harassed her before they took her life, it seems highly unlikely that they were shocked by her genitalia. Perhaps what really happened is that they were caught enjoying sex with someone who was not a socially sanctioned object of desire. They were, it's reasonable to suspect, quite happy to make use of her body as long as that activity wasn't a matter of public knowledge. This would make them hypocrites, not rape victims.

The creepy illogic that informs Calef's infamous article is so pervasive that the right wing is using the defamatory stereotype of transgendered people as sexual predators to attack civil rights legislation. The National Transgender Advocacy Coalition (NTAC) has protested attack ads circulated shortly before voters were asked to retain or repeal an equal rights ordinance in Ypsilanti, Michigan. This bedroom community of less than 23,000 people has been under a relentless right-wing siege to overturn its civil rights ordinance ever since it was passed in 1997. All previous attempts have failed. Tom Monaghan, an anti-abortion activist and wealthy ex-CEO of Domino's Pizza, former Green Bay Packer Reggie White, a religious soul group called the Winans Sisters and Ypsilanti Citizens Voting Yes for Equal Rights not Special Rights are among the opposition. Ypsilanti Campaign for Equality, which does not have the big budget of the forces for repeal, has gone door-to-door to counter ads that feature a picture of a preoperative transsexual with the caption, "Will you vote YES to protect your daughter... your granddaughter... from being forced to use the girl's bathroom with men like this?"26

NTAC chair Vanessa Edwards Foster responds, "It's misleading, and very provocative. They implant the message of 'protect your daughters' with the false image that male-to-female transgenders all somehow rape or molest. It's only a step away from the Klan movie Birth ofa Nation inferring a need to protect your daughters by saying that all black men wanted to rape white women. These broad generalizations are not only inaccurate, they're defamatory and damaging to an entire class of people."27

Speaking as a preoperative transgendered person who is sometimes forced to use public restrooms, I want to point out that we are the people who are especially at risk there. Even when I go into a stall and lock the door, I am always afraid to take my pants down while other men make use of nearby urinals and stalls. It has been more than a year since anybody challenged my gender identity in public. But if the difference between my face and my genitals is ever going to become an explosive issue, it is there, and I hate it. Gwen Araujo was someone's daughter. She was someone's granddaughter. And her biological sex was exposed in a place that was supposed to be private, by an intrusive straight woman, who may have then incited the men at the party to kill her. Non-transgendered people don't need protection from us in public bathrooms or elsewhere. We need protection from them.

Among the people that Araujo needed protection from was her own therapist. Between the ages of 14 and 16, she is reported to have worked with Linda Skerbec. Skerbec is associated with the Focus on the Family ministry, that bizarre organization in Colorado that sponsors "National Coming Out of Homosexuality Day." Focus on the Family endorses so-called "reparative therapy" to change gay people into heterosexuals, a dubious and ineffective practice that has been condemned by the American Psychological Association. After Araujo's death, Skerbec told one reporter that she was about to persuade her client to "move beyond the label" of transgender and "claim the sexual identity that matched his anatomy. To me, Eddie was very much a male, a creative, sensitive male. But I worried some. I knew that kids like Eddie could be hurt."28 Why, yes -- by mental health professionals who are unethical, poorly trained and blinded by hateful religious ideology. With "support" like this, no wonder Araujo had problems with drugs and alcohol, couldn't pursue her education and engaged in other self-destructive behavior.

This is the kind of violence that legal reform cannot address. Transsexuals are hated because our existence breaks up the hegemony of "normal" social sex-roles and compulsory heterosexuality. In this era, the existence of "opposite sexes," male and female, is thought to be dictated by biology. This view of nature ignores a plethora of gender-fucking and same-sex activity among mammals, birds, fishes, reptiles and insects.29 Gwen Araujo had to teach herself how to put on makeup. When she put on a skirt, she was perceived as pretending to be a woman, being a cross-dresser, going in drag. But her sisters and her mother had also been taught how to "put on" the clothing and mannerisms of women. If being a human female was a simple matter of obeying the dictates of biology, how much of this conditioning would be necessary? Why would it be necessary for our society to enforce such horrendous penalties upon people who violate these norms? Of course our physicality, our genetic inheritance, plays a huge role in our personalities and the presentation of self. But transsexuals are as much a part of nature as female babies born with vulvas and wombs who grow up to be feminine straight women. We belong here, too.

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1. Thomas Hackett, "The Execution of Private Barry Winchell," Rolling Stone, March 2, 2000. Posted on-line at www.davidclemens.com/gaymilitary/rolstobarry.htm.
2. Information supplied by the National Transgender Advocacy Coalition website, www. ntac. org.
3. The Free Radical, "A Real Horror Story: The Murder of Eddie Araujo," http:/1.editthispage.com/2002/11/01.
4. Niesha Gates, "Body Found in El Dorado County Identified," The Sacramento Bee, October 18, 2002. www.sacbee.com/content/news/story/4842263p-5855552c. html.
5. "Anti-transgender Violence is Common," Associated Press, October 20, 2002, posted on www. geocities. com/dan a_rivers_2000/featurednews.html.
6. "Fourth Suspect Charged in Transgender Death," In Brief/Fremont, Los Angeles Times, November 20, 2000, www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-sbriefs20.3nov20.story?null.
7. Karen de Sá, "Teen's Sad Tale," San Jose, California, The Mercury News, October 26, 2002. Posted on-line at www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/news/local/4374271./htm.
8. Jessie Seyfer and Lisa Fernandez, "Parents of Arrested Man Say He Did Not Kill Cross-Dressing Teen," San Jose Mercury News, October 21, 2002. Posted on-line at www. geocities. com/dan a_rivers_2000/featurednews.html.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Associated Press, "Three Charged with Hate Crime-Murder of Cross-Dressing Teen,"October 19, 2002, posted on-line at www.cnn.com/2002/LAW/10/19/teen.killed.ap/
12. Karen de Sá, op. cit.
13. "Three Men Arraigned in Death of Transgendered Teen," National Transgender Advocacy Coalition press release, October 19, 2002. Posted on-line at www.ntac.org/pr/release.asp?did=50.
14. Ibid.
15. David Steinberg, "Comes Naturally: RIP, Gwen Araujo: Uncommon Response to an All Too-Common Crime," The Spectator, Issue 1255, October 31, 2002. Posted on-line at www. spectator. net/ 1255/pages/1255_steinberg.html.
16. Steinberg, et al.
17. Michelle Locke, "Life Imitated Life as Show Goes On," Associated Press, November 9, 2002. Posted on-line at www.cjonline.com/stories/111002/art_laramie.shtml.
18. Bill Dobbs, e-mail interview by Patrick Califia, November 22, 2002.
19. Christopher Heredia, "Transgender Teen's Slaying Shakes Nation," San Francisco Chronicle, October 23, 2002. Posted on-line at www.glsen.org/templates/news/ record.html?section=12&record=1422. Also see Annie Nakao, "What's In A Pronoun? We're all Figuring It Out," San Francisco Chronicle, November 7, 2002. Posted on-line at www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cig?file=/chronicle/archive/2002/11/07/DD116742.DTL.
20. Rob Kuznia, "City's Response to Slaying Under Fire," The Argus, October 31, 2002. Posted on-line at www.theargusonline.com/Stories/ 0,1413,83%257E1968%257E960612,00.html.
21. Heredia, op. cit.
22. Karen de Sá, op. cit.
23. "We stand in Solidarity with Gwen's Family," www.roanoke7.com.
24. Cinnamon Stillwell, "The Chron Teaches Transgender 101," Chron Watch: Striving for Balance in the News, November 11, 2002, www.chronwatch.com/editorial/ contentDisplay.asp?aid=802.
25. Zach Calef, "Double Standard in Reactions to Rape," Iowa State Daily, October 24, 2002. Posted on-line at www.iowastatedaily.com/vnews/display.v/ ART/2002/10/24/3db7765f45381.
26. "NTAC Decries Cheap Shot Tactics in Ypsilanti Campaign," National Transgender Advocacy Coalition press release, November 3, 2002. Posted on-line at www.chicagogender.com/news_items/htm.
27. Ibid.
28. Karen de Sá, op. cit.
29. Bruce Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity, New York City: St. Martin's Press/Stonewall Inn Editions, 1999. On page 1, Bagemihl says, "Any book on homosexuality and transgender in animals is necessarily unfinished, a work in progress. The subject is so vast, the types of behaviors so varied, and the number of species involved so large, as to defy any attempt at comprehensiveness."

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Patrick Califia is the author and editor of several fiction and nonfiction books which investigate various aspects of sexual politics. These include Public Sex, a collection of essays; Melting Point and Macho Sluts, short-story collections; and Sensuous Magic, a guide for adventurous couples. Patrick's newest books are Sex Changes, an examination of the politics of transsexuality; Diesel Fuel, a volume of passionate lesbian poetry; and No Mercy, another collection of stories. You can visit Patrick's web site at http://www.patcalifia.com.