A Colossal Wreck (66 page)

It’s certain that the legal team mustered to defend KSM and the other four will be reviewing mountains of documents amassed by the prosecution, setting forth the evidentiary chain that led to the indictments of the Ground Zero Five. Of course, most of these will no doubt be classified top secret, to be reviewed by defense lawyers only under conditions of stringent security; but it’s a safe bet that enough will be leaked to portray the Bush administration and Republicans in general in a harshly unflattering light, with Bush and Cheney ignoring profuse indications of the unfolding conspiracy.

There are those who gravely lament the impending spectacle, ranging from pinkos raising wussy concerns about secret witnesses and confessions extorted under torture, to the right blaring that KSM and the others will defile the Foley courtroom with their filthy Muslim diatribes. Bring them on, say I. The show trial is as American as cherry pie, as the former Black Panther H. Rap Brown—currently
serving life without the possibility of parole in the supermax in Florence, Colorado—famously said about violence.

American political life is at its most vivid amid show trials. Their glare discloses the larger political system in all its pretensions. At the very least we need the drama to help us get through what is looking more and more like the bland, respectable corporate rule of the Eisenhower years.

2010

January 8

Connoisseurs of the ritual known as “accepting full responsibility” will surely grade Obama a mere B for his performance Thursday at his White House press conference. “Ultimately, the buck stops with me,” Obama said, apropos Terror’s near Christmas Day miss on Northwest Flight 253. “As President, I have a solemn responsibility to protect our nation and our people, and when the system fails, it is my responsibility.”

First strike against Obama’s speech writer is the weasel-use of “ultimately,” not to mention the mawkish use of “solemn.” Second strike is his habitual dive into “systemic failure,” as he termed it earlier in the week. Everyone knows that systemic failure spells out as “No one is to blame. This is bigger than all of us.” That’s the phrase’s singular beauty.

I give John Brennan low marks too. “I told the President today I let him down,” said Obama’s top counterterrorism aide, who followed his boss at the press briefing. Okay so far. Exciting, even. In medieval Japan he would have stuck a sword in his stomach at this point. Not Brennan. “I am the President’s assistant for homeland security and counterterrorism and I told him I will do better and we will do better as a team.”

February 5

If you want to draw a line to indicate when history took a great leap forward, it could be February 1, 1960, when four black students from the Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina sat down at a segregated lunch counter in Woolworth’s department store in Greensboro, North Carolina. Three months later, the city of Raleigh, NC, eighty miles east of Greensboro, saw the founding of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), seeking to widen the lunch-counter demonstrations into a broad, militant movement. SNCC’s first field director was Bob Moses, who said that he was drawn by the “sullen, angry and determined look” of the protesters, qualitatively different from the “defensive, cringing” expression common to most photos of protesters in the South.

In contrast to that time, here are two important reminders about political phenomena peculiar to America today, which help explain the decline of the left: the first is the financial clout of the “nonprofit” foundations, tax-exempt bodies formed by rich people to dispense their wealth according to political taste. Much of the “progressive sector” in America now owes its financial survival—salaries, office accommodation, etc.—to the annual disbursements of these foundations which cease abruptly at the first manifestation of radical heterodoxy. In other words, most of the progressive sector is an extrusion of the dominant corporate world, just as are the academies, similarly dependent on corporate endowments.

A second important reminder concerns the steady collapse of the organized Leninist or Trotskyite left which used to provide a training ground for young people who could learn the rudiments of political economy and organizational discipline, find suitable mates, and play their role in reproducing the left, red diaper upon red diaper, tomorrow’s radicals, nourished on the Marxist classics. Somewhere in the late 1980s and early ’90s, coinciding with collapses further East, this genetic strain shriveled into insignificance.

An adolescent soul not inoculated by sectarian debate, not enriched by the
Eighteenth Brumaire
and study groups of
Capital
, is open to any infection, such as 9/11 conspiracism and junk-science climate
catastrophism substituting for analysis of political economy at the national or global level.

February 10

There used to be a time when the CIA would go berserk at the merest suggestion that its executive actions included torture and assassination. This modesty has long gone but even so, it was astonishing to hear the Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, blithely tell a Senate committee this week that “Being a US citizen will not spare an American from getting assassinated by military or intelligence operatives overseas if the individual is working with terrorists and planning to attack fellow Americans.” Blair added helpfully that “If we think direct action will involve killing an American, we get specific permission to do that.”

Does that mean the President or one of his cabinet members issued an okay for the FBI to riddle Detroit Imam Luqman Ameen Abdullah on October 28, 2009, with twenty-one bullets, some of them aimed at his testicles and at least one in his back? They say the Imam was handcuffed after this lethal fusillade.

February 22

Thirty years ago, driving across the hill country in the South, every fifty miles I’d pick up a new Pentecostal radio station with the preacher screaming in tongues in a torrent of ecstatic drivel—“Miki taki meka keena ko-o-ola ka”—the harsh consonants rattling the speakers on my Newport station wagon. I had a friend, a “shouter,” whose trailer featured by way of cultural uplift only the Bible and a big TV set tuned to the Christian Broadcasting Network, on which Pat Robertson used to denounce New Age paganism on an hourly basis.

Last time I visited, a few months ago, my friend’s nice home still featured the Bible. Next to it was a thick manual of astrological guidance—could Geminis pair up with Scorpios with any hope of success, and kindred counsel—and he and his wife surfed through a
big menu of channels. Out on the highway my radio picked up Glenn Beck spouting drivel, but the old Pentecostalists had vanished from the dial. These days, my friend told me, he and his wife didn’t tithe to any particular church and pastor. “All crooks,” he said dryly. They stay home and hold their own Sunday service there.

James Cameron gives us
Avatar
and the planet Pandora, which is Gaia brought to life in the most savage denunciation of imperial exploitation, explicitly American, ever brought to screen. Now a huge hit,
Avatar
is the most expensive anti-war film ever made (at $200 million, about half the cost of a single F-22). “It is nature which today no longer exists anywhere,” a peppery German called Marx wrote in 1845. But Rousseau is having his revenge on Karl.

The night I went to
Avatar
the audience cheered when Pandora, as a single Gaian organism, puts Earth’s predatory onslaught to flight and man’s war machines are crushed by natural forces. Against Genesis and the Judeo-Christian tradition, pagan mysticism is carrying the day, at the level of fantasy, as it is in those astrological manuals down in the Bible belt.

March 4

Joe Stack wrote: “I saw it written once that the definition of insanity is repeating the same process over and over and expecting the outcome to suddenly be different. I am finally ready to stop this insanity. Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let’s try something different; take my pound of flesh and sleep well.”

Stack was now thirty words from the end of his life. He continued: “The communist creed: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. The capitalist creed: From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed. Joe Stack (1956–2010).”

Then, on February 18 this year, the computer software engineer climbed into a Piper Cherokee plane and flew it into the IRS building in Austin, Texas. When the smoke cleared and the fires had been put out, the IRS counted many injured and one dead, Vernon Hunter, a sixty-eight-year-old Vietnam veteran on the edge of retirement.

Later that day, Stack’s thirty-six-paragraph suicide note surfaced on the internet. Though opaque in its recitation of his precise personal grudges with the tax man, as a farewell blast at the system it was eloquent on the essentials of the American Way: “When the wealthy fuck up, the poor get to die for the mistakes.”

Such a system, Stack correctly emphasized, is predicated on “two interpretations for every law; one for the very rich, and one for the rest of us …” What to do? “Violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer.” From several Republican politicians, hoping to harness the huge head of political steam building up in a society facing mass unemployment for years to come, Stack’s last flight got astonishing respect. “It’s sad the incident in Texas happened,” said Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa, “but by the same token, it’s an agency that is unnecessary. And when the day comes when that is over and we abolish the IRS, it’s going to be a happy day for America.”

March 31

Marijuana was by no means the first boom crop to delight my home county of Humboldt, here in Northern California, five hours’ drive from San Francisco up Route 101. Leaving aside the boom of appropriating land from the Indians, there was the timber boom, which crested in the 1950s when Douglas fir in the Mattole Valley went south to frame the housing tracts of Los Angeles.

In the early 1970s new settlers—fugitives from the ’60s and city life—would tell visiting friends, “Bring marijuana,” and then disconsolately try to get high from the male leaves. Growers here would spend nine months coaxing their plants, only to watch, amid the mists and rains of fall, hated mold destroy the flowers.

By the end of the decade the cultivators were learning how to grow. There was an enormous variety of seeds—Afghan, Thai, Burmese. The price crept up to $400 a pound, and the grateful settlers, mostly dirt poor, rushed out to buy a washing machine, a propane fridge, a used VW, a solar panel, a 12-volt battery. Even a three-pound sale was a relatively big deal.

The 1980s brought further advances in productivity through the
old Hispanic/Mexican technique of ensuring that female buds are not pollinated, hence the name
sin semilla
—without seeds. By 1981 the price for the grower was up around $1,600 a pound. The $100 bill was becoming a familiar local unit of cash transactions. In 1982 a celebrated grow in the Mattole Valley yielded its organizer, an Ivy League grad, a harvest of a thousand pounds of processed marijuana, an amazing logistical triumph. Fifteen miles up the valley from where I write, tiny Honeydew became fabled as the marijuana capital of California, if not America.

That same year, the “war on drugs” rolled into action, executed in Humboldt County by platoons of sheriff’s deputies, DEA agents, roadblocks by the California Highway Patrol. The National Guard combed the King Range. Schoolchildren gazed up at helicopters hovering over the valley scanning for gardens. War in this case brought relatively few casualties and many beneficiaries into the local economy: federal and state assistance for local law enforcement; more prosecutors in the DA’s office; a commensurately expanding phalanx of defense lawyers; a buoyant housing market for growers washing their money into legality; $200 a day and more for women trimming the dried plants. A bust meant at least a year of angst for the defendant and at least $25,000 in legal fees, though rarely any significant jail time. It did produce a felony conviction, several years of probation and all the restrictions of being an ex-felon. There are thirty-two people serving life sentences in California on a third-strike marijuana conviction. In 2008, 1,499 were in prison on marijuana convictions; in 2007, 4,925 in county jails.

By now the cattle ranchers were growing too. Where once you’d see a battered old pickup, now late-model stretch-cab Fords, Chevys, and Dodges would thunder by. Ranch yards sported new dump trucks and backhoes. Dealerships were selling big trucks and Toyota 4Runners, purchased with cash. By the mid-’90s the price of bud was up around $2,400 a pound.

Best of all, the war was a sturdy price support in our thinly populated, remote Emerald Triangle of Humboldt, Mendocino, and Trinity counties. Marijuana remained an outlaw crop. Then in 1996 came California’s Compassionate Use Act, the brainchild of Dennis Peron,
who returned from Vietnam in 1969 with two pounds of marijuana in his duffel bag and became a dealer in San Francisco. In 1990, when his companion was dying of AIDS, Peron began his drive for the legal medical use of marijuana.

It was the launch point for greenhouses big enough to spot on Google Earth, plus diesel generators in the hills cycling 24/7 and lists of customers in the clubs down south. By 2005, with increasingly skilled production, the price was cresting between $2,500 and even $3,000 a pound for the grower. These days, in San Francisco and LA (the latter still fractious legal terrain), perfectly grown and nicely packaged indoor pot—four grams for $60, i.e., $6,700 a pound—can be inspected with magnifying glasses in tastefully appointed salesrooms.

The age of Obama saw Attorney General Eric Holder tell the DEA to give low priority to harassment of valid medical marijuana clubs in states—fourteen so far, plus Washington, DC—that give marijuana some form of legality. On March 25, California officials announced that 523,531 signatures—almost 100,000 more than required—had been validated in support of an initiative to legalize marijuana and allow it to be sold and taxed, no small fiscal allurement in this budget-stricken state. The initiative will be on the November ballot. Various polls last year indicated such a measure enjoyed a 55 percent approval rating.