1. Meet you on the common, we used to say.
2. To know a place through your nose & the soles of your feet.
3. The country store in North Scituate village where I learned what money is, where we bought penny candy barefoot, past the porch bench marked Democrat Republican & Independent. The vividness of a nickel still, the ones with Jefferson's profile but especially the ones with an Indian man's profile on one side & a buffalo on the other.
4. 1965 Connecticut newspaper article, Buffalo Nickels Headed for Last Roundup.
5. Although we were taught that we lived not in the State but in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, how anomalously miraculous libraries seemed, because they trusted you & anyone could use them for free.
6. The shreds of an older order clinging to the inflections & gestures of townspeople describing other people who voted against school budgets at town meetings because they didn't have any kids.
7. How I took in the distorted stories about the first people who'd lived there like eating food that makes you sick but keeps you from dying. How I watched the muskrat tracks & listened to the brook & ripped off the orange surveyor's ribbons where I found them & broke their sticks & scattered the pieces & tried to walk in the woods like someone not white.
8. How the summer I first visited Paris I was shocked by the armored police carrying machine guns in the train stations & the fact that the grass was fenced in.
9. How young men of North African descent were rioting in the projects that summer, but I was 20 & still drinking & the few tools I had weren't sharp enough yet to figure out what was going on.
10. How my government was rioting in Vietnam from the day I was born until the year I started bleeding, at 14.
11. That dizziness lately that's familiar, of great violence & social custom coexisting.
12. Yesterday 14 years since George II started the 2003 bombing of Baghdad, 12 years after George I started the 1991 bombing of Baghdad, just as I turned 30 & my hair more white than red now, the photo yesterday of the 82nd Airborne participating in the rerubblification of Mosul, shall we call it the 26-Year War.
13. Stars & Stripes reporter in Mosul: "What we end up talking about is how these soldiers have been limning Mosul for two months."
13a. limn. v. 1. to depict or describe in painting or in words. 2. to suffuse or highlight something with a bright color or light.
Mosul. AP photo for The Japan Times.
14. Elaine Scarry's enduring mystery, how the road of injury claims to lead to the town of freedom.
15. Like the enduring mystery of Adam Smith's invisible hand. Whose.
16. The red patch on a smiling white woman soldier's arm, a medic: Make Mosul Great Again.
17. Henry Rousso, French Holocaust historian, born in Egypt, detained traveling from Paris to Houston at the end of February, re what happens after he explains his invitation to Texas A & M & his visa status, to no avail: "We then fall into another dimension."
17a. "On bascule alors dans une autre dimension," there's that verb again, see Mala #5 Fascisms, "to fall."
18. The fascist candidate for president of France who, when young black Frenchmen were in the streets again last month because the police raped one of them with a baton, called them scum & urged support for the police, speaking at Oxford in 2015: "It was vital to name the evil & the danger."
Marine Le Pen at Oxford, September 24, 2015
19. "They approach the man seated in front of me, maybe a Mexican, personable. They show him a plane ticket & tell him they're going to escort him. Asked to stand up, he's then handcuffed, chained at the waist, & shackled at the ankles. I can't believe my eyes. Images of slavery cross my mind: the policewoman who puts the irons on his ankles is African-American, vaguely embarrassed. I ask myself if this is what's waiting for all of us. I prefer to believe he's committed a serious offense."
20. The questions asked of Susan Abulhawa at the Allenby Bridge crossing into Palestine, over the course of 6 different interrogations over 7 hours last December, before she was barred from entering the country where she was born, for "non-cooperation": Why are you here. Where is your family. What is the relation. Where are you staying. What's his name.
21. "Me: My cousin Adel, whose name & number I just gave you, along with every other officer who asked.
Her: (now very angry) I am asking the questions.
Me: I'm answering all your questions.
Her: You are not answering how I like.
Me: I can't read your mind & I don't care what you like. I'm answering your questions.
Her: You don't care? Ok. Get out. I will show you."
22. General Wesley Clark in 2007 on a meeting with another general in October 2001: "He reached over on his desk & he picked up a piece of paper & he said 'I just got this down from upstairs,' meaning the Secretary of Defense's office, 'today. This is a memo that describes how we're going to take out seven countries in five years.'"
22a. George Bush I, NBC Nightly News, February 1991, 4 million lives & liberties ago: "The US has a new credibility. What we say goes."
22b. George Packer, 2003: "Liberalism needs to assert anew that American power can be employed to good ends and indeed that American power must be used wherever needed around the globe to support the principles to which liberalism is dedicated." The Fight Is For Democracy
22c. Thomas Friedman, 2003: “This is the most radical-liberal revolutionary war the US has ever launched--a war of choice to install some democracy in the heart of the Arab- Muslim world.”
22d. Álvaro Bardón, one of Milton Friedman's Chilean Chicago Boys, 2008: "So, under what economic, social, & political form of organization have the people succeeded in increasing their income & quality of life indefinitely, &, as a result, increasing the quality of the environment? Obviously, with liberal capitalism, open & competitive, based in respect for personal rights, starting with the right to property."
22e. Young queer man with glasses at Nancy Pelosi's town meeting: "A Harvard University poll last May showed that 51 per cent of people between 18 & 29 no longer support the system of capitalism. The younger generation is moving left on economic issues. I wonder if there's anywhere you feel that the Democrats could move farther left toward a more populist message the way the alt-right has sort of captured this populist strain on the right wing. If you think we could make a more stark contrast to right-wing economics."
22f. Steve Bannon: "We are strong capitalists. And we believe in the benefits of capitalism. And particularly the harder-nosed the capitalism the better."
22g. NP: "Well I thank you for your question, but I have to say, We're capitalist [nervous laughter], that's just the way it is.
"However, we do think that capitalism is not necessarily meeting the needs with the income inequality that we have in our country. And let me just tell you this. About 40 years ago, no less a person in terms of capitalism than the chairman of Standard Oil of New Jersey talked about 'stakeholder capitalism': capitalism that says that as managers & CEOS we take into consideration our shareholders, our management, our workers, our customers, & the community at large. At that time, the disparity between the CEO & the worker was about 40 times more for the CEO than for the worker. As productivity rose, the pay of the worker rose, & the pay of the CEO rose. Everything rose together.
"Around 20 years ago it started to turn into 'shareholder capitalism.' We're strictly talking about the quarterly report. So a CEO would make much more money by keeping pay low, even though productivity is rising, the worker's not getting any more pay, & the CEO's getting a big pay because he's kept costs low by depriving workers of their share of the productivity. That they created. The disparity between the CEO & the worker, under the shareholder capitalism, is more like 350 to 400 to 1.
"That income inequality is an immorality. And it's not even smart from an economic standpoint, because it doesn't grow the economy.
"So we have to change the thinking of people. I don't think we have to change from capitalism, we're a capitalist system, the free market is a, a place that can do good things. Actually Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, the invisible hand, he was more compassionate. He wrote two books, his other book was about our responsibilities to each other. I wish he had written one book, where he incorporated all of it together."
February 1, 2017
22h. Financial Times obituary of Augusto Pinochet: "On the one hand he presided over what was undoubtedly a murderous regime; on the other he was the man who paved the way for Chile’s economic prosperity."
22i. Milton Friedman: "It was the first case in which you had a movement toward communism which was replaced by a movement toward free markets."
"The real miracle is not that those economic arrangements worked so well, because that's what Adam Smith said. The real miracle is that a military junta was willing to let 'em do it."
22j. Memo from CIA Deputy Director of Plans Thomas Karamessines, the month after Allende's election in 1970: IT IS IMPERATIVE THAT THESE ACTIONS BE IMPLEMENTED CLANDESTINELY AND SECURELY SO THAT THE USG AND AMERICAN HAND BE WELL HIDDEN. (Note that even 47 years ago, "USG" & "AMERICAN HAND" are two different things.)
22k. Daniele Ganser, NATO's Secret Armies: Operation Gladio & Terrorism in Western Europe: "The Greek-American CIA officer who played a central role in setting up and running the secret Greek army mentioned by Agee was Thomas Karamessines...Due to his strong anti-Communist convictions and Greek roots he was transferred to the US embassy in Greece in January 1946 under the cover of military attaché...After the CIA was created in 1947 to replace the OSS, Karamessines set up the CIA headquarters in Greece located in Athens on the fifth floor of the pale monolith Tamion Building just off Syntagma Square. Within a few years the CIA station numbered more than 100 full-time agents, most of whom were Greek-Americans as Karamessines himself. And Athens became the hub of all CIA activity in the Balkans and the Middle East, as far as Iran.
"Directly involved with secret warfare and the anti-Communist CIA armies, Karamessines in 1958 was transferred to Rome where as CIA chief of station he controlled the Italian Gladio and the battle against the Italian Communists. In 1962 Karamessines was forced to leave Rome amidst rumours that he had been involved in the non-clarified death of Italian industrialist and ENI boss Enrico Mattei. Back in the United States, secret warrior Karamessines became chief of CIA global covert actions when he was promoted to Deputy Director of Plans. Allegedly secret warrior Karamessines had carried the battle also to the United States, and after the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963 was accused to have covered up traces and destroyed sensitive documents."
22l. Daniel Yergin, The Prize: "Mattei himself became a popular hero, the most visible man in the country. He embodied great visions for postwar Italy: antifascism, the resurrection and rebuilding of the nation, and the emergence of the 'new man' who had made it himself, without the old boy network. He also promised Italians their own secure supply of oil."
22m. NYT December 1977: "The Rome Daily American, which the CIA partly owned from 1956 to 1964, when it was purchased by Samuel W Meek, a J Walter Thompson executive, was only one of the agency's 'proprietary' newspapers. There were, it was said, such 'proprietaries' in other capitals, including Athens and Rangoon. They usually served a dual role--providing cover for intelligence operatives and at the same time publishing agency propaganda...'We "had" at least one newspaper in every foreign capital at any given time,' one CIA man said, and those that the agency did not own outright or subsidize heavily it infiltrated with paid agents or staff officers who could have stories printed that were useful to the agency and not print those it found detrimental."
22n. Headline of NYT story co-written by Judith Miller, September 8, 2002: US SAYS HUSSEIN INTENSIFIES QUEST FOR A-BOMB PARTS
22o. NYT story November 1985 on Brussels attacks, BELGIUM IS SHAKEN BY BOMBS AND 'CRAZY KILLERS,' by Judith Miller. "In the last 13 months the Fighting Communist Cells has taken responsibility for at least 24 bombings of banks, commercial offices and North Atlantic Treaty Organization centers."
22p. Daniele Ganser: "The Belgian Communists, as in Italy, were discredited by these false flag operations carried out by US Special Forces together with the Belgian stay-behind. This thesis was supported when it was revealed that the alleged Communist terror group CCC in reality had been set up by the extreme right. Between October 1984 and fall 1985 the CCC was responsible for 27 attacks. CCC was led by Pierre Carette and targeted, with well-planned explosions, classical capitalist symbols including American installations linked to NATO, banks and military installations."
22q. J Patrice McSherry: "Later, investigators linked Gladio with terrorist attacks officially attributed to left-wing guerillas, such as the Red Brigades' 1978 assassination of Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro, who was moving to include the Communist Party in a coalition government."
"In short, evidence suggests that key individuals formed part of a global anticommunist network that involved P-2, Condor, Gladio, the CIA, and defense and intelligence personnel in Western countries."
22r. Guardian, September 10, 2003: "Probably no figure more personalised the cruelty of the Pinochet regime than the head of its secret DINA police force, Manuel Contreras.
"Previously classified documents now confirm that, not only was Contreras on the CIA payroll, but that when he came to Washington during the height of human rights abuses, the US state department had specific tasks for him.
'Contreras was also asked to check in with Anaconda [Copper] and General Motors to encourage them to resume operations in Chile.'"
22s. Daniele Ganser: "Keramessines saw to it that the CIA not only financed but also controlled the Greek military secret service KYP, despite the fact that the latter repeatedly engaged in torture."
22t. Tweet as I write this, from John Schindler @20committee who used to work for the Navy & the NSA :
"The last Kremlin-connected president elected with secret KGB assistance was named Allende.
Somebody should tell Trump how that saga ended."
22u. The leaflet appearing on college campuses & on Klansman David Duke's website, Anti-Communist Action, with an image of a helicopter & someone falling.
22v. Brecht's "Writing the Truth: Five Difficulties": "We must say that torture is used in order to preserve property relations. To be sure, when we say this we lose a great many friends who are against torture only because they think property relations can be upheld without torture, which is untrue."
22w. Carol Rosenberg, Miami Herald last October: 'Sodomized' Guantánamo Captive To Undergo Rectal Surgery
Note: page 100 of 499.
22x. David Nevin, defense attorney for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, via Carol Rosenberg yesterday reporting from the 'war court' in Guantánamo, discussing how the makers of "Zero Dark Thirty" talked to the CIA agents who tortured his client, while shooting a Chanel commercial in Tahiti, over tequila at Citronelle in DC, meeting with them a total of 23 times: "The government, by collaborating with filmmakers, has gotten the opportunity to tell its version of what happened to these men."
22y. My grandmother's beloved Catholic cousin who knew Kwame Nkrumah & cheered at Sékou Touré's inauguration, who worked in Dar es Salaam for the African-American Institute, later found to be funded by the CIA--
& the woman I played rugby with in college whose phone was always busy because she was helping invent the internet, who I just saw spent sabbatical time at the Atlas Institute in Boulder, whose Phase 1 was African Training for Leadership & Advanced Skills ATLAS, emphasizing Participation of Women & Historically Black Colleges & Universities, sponsored by the African-American Institute, Bureau for Africa, USAID--
& my beloved ex's beloved sister who worked on nitrogen fixation in legumes, then worked for seed-patenting Agent Orange manufacturer Monsanto, whose father was a helicopter pilot in Vietnam, whose father was a World War 2 Major General, whose father was a Brigadier General who fought to take Spain from Cuba at the mouth of a river in Pinar del Río named for the wild peanut plant, the Río Maní-Maní, whose father was a Confederate Colonel from the county in Mississippi where James Meredith was shot as he tried to walk against fear from Memphis to Jackson in 1966--
& my beloved friend whose beloved uncle made Vietnam & Panama & Iraq burn--
& my beloved college French teacher whose beloved Greek mother died in her arms after being shot by a sniper in 1946 through the window of their apartment off Syntagma Square.
What a fractal web we weave.
22z. The photo of someone in a CIA basement beside shelves of filed copies of the Cuban newspaper Juventud Rebelde. How I remember sitting near the Plaza Vieja in Havana last spring reading it, re the mysterious origins of Greek fascism: "Mud comes from rain."
23. Susan Abulhawa: "They brought out three soldiers who just stood & stared at me. I kept yelling. I told them they're the ones who should go back. I said it was bad enough we have to enter like tourists & endure their endless humiliations & power plays...Thieves, occupiers, I called them. You wish you had the same roots as I do, I screamed. You should be the one to leave, not me. I'm a daughter of this land. Then they took me to my luggage & sent me in the bus. I regret walking & not making them carry me."
24. Hassan Aden, former police chief of Greenville, NC, detained at Kennedy a few days ago, "after spending a lovely weekend in Paris celebrating my mom's 80th birthday": "I was taken to a back office which looked to be a re-purposed storage facility with three desks & signs stating 'Remain seated at all times' & 'Use of telephones strictly prohibited'--my first sign that this was not a voluntary situation and, in fact, a detention."
25. "The second CBP officer was indeed kind and appreciated the fact that I was a career police officer and tried to be helpful. He explained that my name was used as an alias by someone on some watch list. He stated that he sent my information to another agency to de-conflict and clear me, so that I could gain passage into the United States...my own country!!!"
26. Henry Rousso: "That's the situation today. On the other side of the Atlantic it's now necessary to deal with the utmost arbitrariness and incompetence. I don't know which is worse. I do know, having loved this country forever, that this United States is not quite the United States anymore."
27. Hassan Aden: "This experience has left me feeling vulnerable and unsure of the future of a country that was once great and that I proudly called my own...This country now feels cold, unwelcoming, and in the beginning stages of a country that is isolating itself from the rest of the world--and its own people--in an unprecedented fashion. High levels of hate and injustice have been felt in vulnerable communities for decades--it is now hitting the rest of of America."
28. The former prime minister of Norway detained at Dulles Airport, apparently because he visited Iran in 2014.
29. The Dulles airport confrontations the night the ban was first announced, after the first judicial order granting a stay, with attorneys & Congressmen presenting court orders entitling them to see detainees, to CBP who said, "It's not going to happen." The family of 3 in handcuffs sent back to Syria, photographed through glass, the child about 3 maybe.
30. Dakota/Lakota Ruth Hopkins in Birdland as they started to shut the Standing Rock camp down: "Grandmother arrested. Please don't strip her & number her & put her in a dog kennel like you did the rest #NoDAPL"
31. On Washington's birthday I watched the livestream from Standing Rock, with 6,000 other people, as the armored police & the protectors stood in lines across from each other on the muddy treaty-protected road & @ericpoemz said to the one Native policeman, "Why don't you be honorable & set down your badge right now," just before they charged & you could hear @ericpoemz screaming.
32. EP: I can't get up.
P: How many times do we have to tell you. This game is over. This is the governor's deadline & you violated it.
EP: I think you broke my hip though.
32a. P: Quit playing games. Cut your stupid shit. You've been disrespecting this whole area, you've been disrespecting our state & us for six months. Knock it off.
32b. It turned out later it was his pelvis they'd broken.
Police chasing livestreamer Eric Poemz, Standing Rock, February 24, 2017. Photo by Rob Wilson.
33. Bystander to wounded John Brown lying on the floor of his cell: Robber!
JB: You are the robbers.
34. The people in the livestream comments section calling the journalists & the water protectors communists.
35. "Common property and civilization cannot coexist." T Hartley Crawford, US Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1839, in a letter to the Secretary of War.
35a. Territorial Governor Alexander Ramsey, 1851: "We regard the Community System among the Dakotas as one of the most serious obstacles in the way of this civilization."
35b. John Patrick Montaño: "It was in this context that the need to replace one culture with another, one type of untamed landscape with a civilized, rational one, provided a focus, a battleground, even a language for the conflict associated with the strategies for civilizing or establishing plantations in Ireland. The winner is easily recognizable: by the Restoration, the openness of the 16th-century Irish landscape had disappeared, and in its place appeared the regimented, ordered, cultivated, and urbanized landscape so valued by the English." The Roots of English Colonialism in Ireland
35c. Report from the Office of Indian Affairs, US Department of War, 1832: "The unrestrained authority of their Chiefs, & the irresponsible exercise of power, are of the simplest elements of despotic rule; while the absence of the meum & tuum in the general community of possessions, which is the grand conservative principle of the social state, is a perpetual operating cause of the vis inertiae of savage life."
35d. Gerald of Wales, delivering a 3-part lecture at Oxford in 1188 on "The History & Topography of Ireland": "a wild & inhospitable people. They live on beasts only, and live like beasts. They have not progressed at all from the primitive habits of pastoral living."
36. Fearlatha O'Gnive, bard of the O'Neills of Clandeboy: "They have wounded the earth, and they have disfigured, with towers and ramparts,/Those fair fields, which Nature bestowed for the support of God's animal creation."
37. The gull that died in the back yard in Scituate with the plastic that held six-packs together around its beak like a bit. The Guardian story last week that half the wild animals over the past 40 years have gone. How I'd try to imagine the lost bobcats & wolves to try to learn how to run.
38. North American Review, 1838: "They must either conform to the institutions of the Europeans or disappear from the face of the earth."
39. Ho Chi Minh: “It was patriotism, not communism, that inspired me.”
39a. How in the song You're A Grand Old Flag I always thought it was, You're the engine of. The land I love.
40. The David Duke tweet with a soulful painting of the last Tsar standing beside his wife & children: Love Tradition, Hate Bolshevism, Smash Cultural Marxism.
41. What exactly is communism anyway. Does it have other names.
42. The wind blowing the Washington sleet the day of the Standing Rock march & the joy-beyond-comfort, what's the word for that, when from 2 blocks away you could hear Lakota ringing along the marble corridors, drums & thousands of voices, Mni Wiconi, Water is life.
Washington DC, March 10, 2017
43. The grassy Washington Monument hill, where I crawled around in the dark with my first girlfriend, looking for the keys I lost doing cartwheels when I first visited at 17. Where I stood to watch Barack Obama be inaugurated. Where I stood that Saturday after the Standing Rock march, Day 50 of let's call it the bardo, between death & rebirth, sequence TBA, watching the sweep from the Blacksonian whose architect was born in Dar es Salaam, the 3-tiered Yoruba crown in dialogue with the ironwork of slaves, to the Monument like a white sword, to the tall white Lakota tipis, the smell of sage smoke & the sound of drums.
44. The Buddhist drummers marching in saffron with the Lakota. Tibetan Buddhist custom when someone has died: 108 lamps, sometimes made of dough, burning butter as fuel.
45. Dinner around the corner at Oscar's, 3 men with Native faces, speaking Spanish, one cooking, one washing up, one lighting the candles in red glasses & placing them on the checked blue plastic tablecloths with anchors in every other square, & in a row along the window, edged with piles of snow
46. --along Hudson Street, where last month the NYPD Disorder Control Unit DCU or was it the Strategic Response Group SRG, I didn't see the Technical Assistance Response Unit TARU that day, walked in the street with the LRAD strapped on like an accordion ("LRAD Corporation, The Global Leader in Long-Range Acoustic Hailing Devices"), beside the anti-deportation demonstrators on the sidewalk, & arrested people face-down in the snow.
47. The LRAD repeating in that robot voice, You Are Ordered To Disperse Now To Permit The Safe Flow Of Pedestrian Traffic. If You Refuse To Disperse, You Will Be Placed Under Arrest & Charged With Disorderly Conduct, & the people yelling We. Are. Pedestrians.
48. The NYPD baton across my shoulder blades to shove me, the night of the Occupy eviction, when I stepped with one foot from the sidewalk to the street, whose street was it.
49. The line of police that night protecting the nearby land my ancestor occupied? appropriated? took? stole? owned? almost 400 years ago, at the corner of Wall & Pearl: Jacob Gardinier, carpenter, from Old Amsterdam to New, indentured to Kiliaen van Renssalaer, a Dutch pearl merchant who apportioned Lenape land without ever setting foot on it.
50. The young policeman pinning the little crowd of us on the corner between metal barricades in Times Square as George II's Iraq War started, who said, You should've stayed home, & I said, I am home, I live here.
51. At Oscar's the many skillets hanging over the stove & the evergreen beauty of men not dominating or destroying anything, feeding people.
52. Pericles Korovessis, yogi tortured by the Greek junta Gladiators, in The Method: A Personal Account of the Tortures in Greece, translated from French in 1970: "In order to confront Fascism, the innate tendency of monopoly Capital, eat your food--that's all you can do."
53. How Ho Chi Minh worked as a cook's assistant on a ship & came to New York in 1912, & worked as a baker at the Parker House in Boston, the Omni Parker House now.
54. How when I was 10 Corita Kent painted rainbow swaths on the Dorchester gas tanks with Ho's delicate profile in the blue swath, secretly, from the rush-hour expressway you had to look hard to see it. How I'd always look first for his eyelashes.
55. How it was Ruth who fled the Nazis from Vienna in 1938 at 14, Harvard's first tenured woman Biology professor, who told me napalm was invented at Harvard
56. & how I remembered that photograph of the naked bombed Vietnamese girl, burning & running, because she was about my age
57. & in 1973 when I was 12 & OPEC cut off the oil & there were long lines at the gas stations, I remembered her & thought there might be benefits, since napalm was jellied gasoline.
58. Stars & Stripes report on My Lai, 39 years ago last week: "US infantrymen have killed 128 Communists in a bloody day-long battle."
59. The night last week ICE called cities with immigrants "a target-rich environment."
60. Can you be a witness, a yoga teacher wanted to know, as I tried to breathe & wipe the sweat from my eyes.
61. Adrienne's poem, "From An Old House in America," where a man asks Will you punish me for history, & a woman asks back What will you undertake.
62. Bystander on Hudson with parcels, when the LRAD passed: "Yeah like God forbid our shopping should be interrupted."
63. The cold wind at dusk outside 201 Varick last week when they took someone named Ramesh, like standing outside the downtown Federal buildings for the Special Registrations in 2002 but there were more of us this time.
64. The fear in the faces of the Latina women under the scaffolding, the grief in the detained man's wife's face, the love in the face of the Latino man who had us all walk two circles around the building & put our hands on the bricks--An exorcism, maybe, he smiled--who introduced the minister who was going to meet with the governor the next day to try to get a pardon for Ramesh. Dear Lord, We are your Pilgrim children, said the tall white man in a collar, Immigrants all.
65. How the buds in the park were beginning to open on one of those broken warm days & I could feel them opening my tight throat & chest, & looked over my shoulder to make a turn on the bicycle & flinched when I saw the Pilgrim statue.
66. First typed 'the Pilgrim state.' (Missing: u.)
67. "The Central Park Pilgrim is one of the most-loved statues in the Park. Since 1885, he's watched over picnics, proposals, and sled races from his perch amid the cherry trees on top of Pilgrim Hill. On the occasion of the New England Society's 75th year, the association commissioned the statue to honor the early colonists. The pilgrim grasps the muzzle of a flintlock musket in his right hand. The pedestal comprises four bas-reliefs depicting Crossbow and Arrows, the ship Mayflower, Commerce, and Bible and Sword."
68. Víctor Dreke who fought with Che, on the crack of colonialism when he was little, before the Revolution: "I only knew those stories, of the Indians killing the poor white people, cutting off their heads."
69. @apihtawikosisan in Birdland: "I think the single biggest obstacle to real change is an inability to even imagine life beyond the colonially violent present."
69a. Ruth the biologist on her awakening, rereading The Origin of Species with a woman's eyes:
"So it's the animal kingdom. How come a kingdom? And it's operating in a world of scarce resources, so that all the organisms in there, in any one species & between species, are in competition with each other. Where does that come from? Is that obvious? Is that the only thing you can see when you look at the world of nature?
"And then you find that there is a Russian prince, whatever his name is, Kropotkin, who tells the story just the opposite way. Isn't that interesting?"
69b. "So we've got this Brit sitting in England & he lives in a world of scarce resources, where there is competition of all against all, and then you've got this Russian anarchist prince, where you're working and living in a world of cooperation and that's what makes things work. And so on.
"Well, you know, that sort of changed things for me."
70. Last spring in Havana watching the tv images of Obama smiling & waving over the zipper with the news of the assassination of someone I'd never heard of, Berta Cáceres in Honduras.
70a. Her good face a year gone now, smiling on a giant puppet at the Standing Rock march, covered with plastic against the sleet.
70b. Joy Harjo: "I heard they started drilling today / Water is Life / I heard the sound of bit hit bone"
70c. Berta Cáceres: "Our bodies are our territory."
71. Visiting Cuban friend standing under the oil portraits of the founders of the college where I teach: Are they the owners?
72. & when I smiled & said No, not exactly, her next question: So who are the owners?
73. The common in Scituate: a little green, with statues of a Civil War soldier & of 3 elephants from Thailand back to back in the basin of a fountain I remember as always dry. Someone told me there's a Vietnam War memorial there now.
74. Technically it was Lawson Common, although no one called it that, after Thomas Lawson the stock speculator, who teamed up with Standard Oil to create Amalgamated Copper, who brought the elephants from Thailand, who paid the railroad not to pick anyone up between Scituate & Boston when he was riding, so he could get to his office on State Street in 37 minutes.
75. Raymond Williams on what a common used to be, before the English enclosures, via Thomas Bewick in the 1820s, remembering a Northumberland common of the 1780s: "On this common--the poor man's heritage for ages past, where he kept a few sheep, or a Kyloe cow, perhaps a flock of geese, and mostly a stock of bee-hives--it was with infinite pleasure that I long beheld the beautiful wild scenery that was there exhibited, and it is with the opposite feeling that I now find all swept away."
76. How in French 'enclosure' is 'enclosure,' & in Spanish 'privatización.'
77. The newspaper from 100 Februarys ago now that published Zapata's Constitution after the Mexican Revolution: Article 1 that said 'todo individuo gozará que otorga esta Constitución,' all beings without exception shall enjoy what this Constitution grants, Article 2 that prohibited slavery, Article 3 that made education secular & free, & Article 27 that granted a fixed amount of land to anyone who asked for it, provided it be made productive; that said foreigners, religious institutions, & commercial stock companies couldn't own property; & that established the ejidos, small pieces of communal land to grow food on, "to impose on private property such limitations as the public interest may demand," "to ensure a more equitable distribution of public wealth."
78. "A Northumberland common" in Spanish: "un ejido común de Northumberland."
79. Orwell in 1944, "On the Origins of Property in Land": "Stop to consider how the so-called owners of the land got hold of it. They simply seized it by force, afterwards hiring lawyers to provide them with title-deeds. In the case of the enclosure of the common lands, which was going on from about 1600 to 1850, the land-grabbers did not even have the excuse of being foreign conquerors; they were quite frankly taking the heritage of their own countrymen, upon no sort of pretext except that they had the power to do so."
80. How Bush & Clinton & Salinas teamed up for the birth of the New World Order in 1992 to enclose Article 27 in Mexico. Salinas: "In the past, land distribution was a path of justice; today it is unproductive and impoverishing."
80a. On abolishing the clause prohibiting foreign ownership, as reported by the Heritage Foundation: "This is especially important for the growth of agribusiness."
81. George Orwell who gave lists of reds to the British Foreign Office, the Occupy organizer whose father-in-law was ambassador to Egypt & to Turkey & sells Boutique Activist Consultancy campaigns, & the Jacob Riis Houses Anonymous hacker boy who collected hackers & activists for the FBI.
81a. His tweet the first day of Occupy: @YourAnonNews Mark my words, we're taking over the world.
82. Principle #1 of the Standard Oil code, via Thomas Lawson, in his book Frenzied Finance, 1906: "Keep your mouth closed, as silence is gold, and gold is what we exist for."
83. Motto of Allen Dulles's Gladiators (gladio=short Roman sword): "Silendo Libertatem Servo," With my Silence I protect Liberty.
84. 7-term Iowa Republican Congressman & Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee Chuck Grassley, to the Des Moines Register last Wednesday: "If you want some history from an 83-year-old person, I can tell you I remember reading about our own CIA trying to influence the Italian voters not to go communist. We very much backed the Christian Democratic Party while the Russian communist party under Stalin was backing the communist party of Italy."
84a. "Russian involvement in our elections ought to be very seriously considered, just like the French politicians are very nervous about the Russian involvement in their election. But we don't come to this table hands free. I told you about the 1948 CIA involvement in the Italian elections where the communists were trying to take over the country and Russia was behind that and our CIA got involved. None of this stuff should be going on."
85. Lawson: "In the big room on the fifteenth floor at 26 Broadway, there gather each day, between the hour of eleven and twelve o'clock, all the active men whose efforts make 'Standard Oil' what 'Standard Oil' is...Around a large table they sit. Reports are presented, views exchanged, policies talked over, republics and empires made and unmade."
86. How he received a set of glasses from the last Tsar, through a visiting ambassador.
87. Pinochet to US Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs William D Rogers, June 1976, when Operation Condor was new: "It is a long-term struggle we are part of. It is a further stage of the same conflict which erupted into the Spanish Civil War. And we note the fact that though the Spaniards tried to stop Communism 40 years ago, it is springing up again in Spain."
Rogers: "We had the Spanish King recently, & I discussed that very issue with him."
88. Pinochet later: "El Marxismo es como un fantasma. Cuesta mucho tomarlo. Mejor dicho: No se puede tomarlo." "Marxism is like a ghost. It's costly to defeat it. More precisely: You cannot defeat it."
88a. tomar v. to take (power). Los soldados tomaron la ciudad. The soldiers took the city.
89. That feeling in the DC streets with so many Native people like sitting by the bed of Ruth the Vienna refugee the last six days of her life, ha ha génocidaire motherfuckers, it didn't work, they lived.
90. That same feeling when I visited Shatila in 2002, the institutional rooms & damp cinderblock smell, chipped tables & plastic chairs like the ones on the Hopi reservation, the dispossessed people who hadn't given up or forgotten or disappeared. The woman whose parents had fled Akka as children in 1948 & her daughter I sang with, songs of our countries, who pinned a flag to my shirt.
91. How I can read enough Arabic now to have caught my breath at one Arabic word when the Israelis killed a young man with glasses last week who fought the enclosure of his village near Bethlehem called al Walaja, a tweet that just said, Basel!
92. Basel al-Araj who was a nonviolent activist until he wasn't, who died like Fred Hampton did, in a house in al Bireh not far from where I had dinner at the home of Islah Jad & Saleh Abdel-Jawad, where when the lights went briefly out Islah said, "I hope they are not going to assassinate anyone."
93. Basel's death in his bed in the dark as passed on to the world by the video from one of the scopes in the masks covering his murderers' faces. His body dragged out by the feet & kept from his family for 12 days. How he'd been imprisoned with 5 friends last April & tortured in a Palestinian Authority prison. The women in the funeral procession singing Once the Authority, once the Army, Why Why Why.
Basel al Araj on a settlers' bus. Photo via Electronic Intifada.
94. Berta Cáceres who died like Fred Hampton in Honduras for trying to protect a river, after a coup in 2009.
94a. In Buenos Aires November 2014: "We're trying to keep from being pulled under by a coup we can't put behind us."
"A coup here in the territories to decapitate the social movements against capitalism."
"It was very dangerous & gave an opening to barbarism, not only here in Honduras but in the whole continent. We were witnesses to this."
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: You ended up negotiating with Óscar Arias a deal for new elections.
HILLARY CLINTON: Mm-hmm, right.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But the situation in Honduras has continued to deteriorate.
HILLARY CLINTON: Right.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: There’s been a few hundred people killed by government forces. There’s been all these children fleeing, and mothers, from Honduras over the border into the United States. And just a few weeks ago, one of the leading environmental activists, Berta Cáceres, was assassinated in her home.
HILLARY CLINTON: Right, right.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Do you have any concerns about the role that you played in that particular situation, not necessarily being in agreement with your top aides in the State Department?
HILLARY CLINTON: Well, let me again try to put this in context.
94b. James Angleton memo, March 1973, Joint CIA/USAID Terrorist (Technical) Investigations Course #7: "This effort is a joint CIA/USAID training program for foreign police/security personnel. The initial phase of training will be conducted at the International Police Academy (IPA), Washington, DC, during hte period 2-27 April 1973. The following subject matter is covered in this phase of the training: investigative techniques, collection and preservation of evidence, records, files, and reporting, gathering of information on terrorist groups and their activities, a student seminar devoted to discussions on terrorist and other hostile activities currently existing in their respective countries etc. This phase of the training is concluded by a two day orientation by the Bomb Squad of the Dade County Police Department in Florida."
94c. Popular Mechanics Special Issue, The Protectors, with a picture of an armored policeman with a machine gun. On the Job With the NYPD's Massive Counterterrorism Force. Meet the People Who Keep America Safe In The Age of the Mass Gathering.
95. The man who owns Whole Foods who helps out with the model cities in Honduras where you can make your own laws & hire your own police, or as the groovy USAID websites with the word 'stakeholder' in them put it: Conscious Capitalism. Radical Social Entrepreneurs. Peace Through Commerce. Freedom Lights Our World (FLOW).
Q: If your company has to decide between doing what's right & making a profit, which should it be?
A: Both.
Would you like to join us in liberating the entrepreneurial spirit for good™?
Entrepreneurs are taking over downtown Santiago. Want to join them?
95a. The sign in the Miami Whole Foods that said Conscious Capitalism, & the one over the Honduran coffee that said Coffee For You, Water For All, & the piece of wood to separate your groceries from your neighbor's that said Mine Mine Mine.
95b. Adam Smith's invisible hand & the white print the Salvadoran death squads used to leave.
95c. From Faulkner's The Unvanquished: "Naw, suh," he said. "This War aint over. Hit just started good."
96. Dreamed Anne & Currie & I were traveling to Cambridge on a toboggan, like Huck Finn's raft but on snow, with casings from spent uranium weapons on the path, & Anne was going to give 3 lectures saying that the Enlightenment is over, reason won't save us now.
97. Hobsbawm on the Enlightenment: "a narrow, lucid, & sharp-edged philosophy."
98. Aimé Césaire of Martinique, from "Notebook of a Return To My Native Land": "Praise to those who have never invented anything."
& "Raison, je te sacre vent du soir." "Reason, I crown you night wind."
99. Whose names we learned as children & whose we didn't, & whose we learned without knowing whose they were, or what had happened to them, at whose hands. How we played hockey on Musquashicut Pond when it froze & borrowed dinghys at dawn to fish in Cohasset & learned to spell 'Scituate' & 'Massachusetts' as if they were English words.
100. The night wind along the strip of north beach where it became true that the taste of salt water on granite will mix with every other taste I know for the rest of my life. If reason won't save us, is it grateful love for life that might. That inlet of Massachusetts Bay with snow at its edges, with the moon rising over it, with peace to teach in times of torment & with house timbers in its teeth in storms. The night wind along the river now, by whose side I smelled the smoke from the attack they use as pretext for their murders, the emblem of. The land I love.
101. How I was taught to be a person by the smell of pine, of low tide, of brook, of rotting wild apples, of burning leaves, of saltspray rose thickets in summer sun, of lichens on rocks arranged by people who were gone but present, of salt rain, of snow.
102. What if communism is another word for the lifeways of every unconquered people that's ever existed.
103. What if communism's relation to the commons so far has been like the relation of cafeteria squares of frozen fish to the living trembling at the end of a line.
104. What if the invisible hand is una mano Caceriana, trying to make Cain's crime right.
105. Valarie Kaur in Washington Square Park on Valentine's Night: "What if this darkness is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb?"
106. Faiz Ahmed Faiz: "Spring comes, ready with all the old accounts reopened."
107. Jean Valentine's "In Prison": "you / who the earth was for."
108. What if secretly there's enough for everybody.
Berta Cáceres
Hillary Clinton
