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Date: Sun, 25 Mar 2007 13:09:05 -0400 (EDT)
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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Subject: Being Zapatistas Where We Live - Southern Routes
FROM: JOHN ROSS
206-419-7957
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Blindman's Buff #153
BEING ZAPATISTAS WHERE WE LIVE - SOUTHERN ROUTES BEAR A STRANGE FRUIT
I.
"Southern trees bear
A strange and bitter fruit -
Blood on the leaves
And blood at the root"
(March 1st-19th) - Cape Fear seemed an appropriate geopolitical point
from which to launch my odyssey through the nether portions of the North
American South. The terror alert was at Orange level as we waited for
the small ferry that would move us up the Carolina coast to Wilmington.
The bay is ringed with choice targets - a nuclear power plant, an Army
ammo dump, strategically significant port infrastructure through which a
lot of war machinery is shipped towards Iraq. Camp Lejeune and Fort
Bragg are a few degrees north and kids here wear camou and blacken their
eyes with battle paint when they go out to play.
Fort Bragg, home of the 82nd Airborne, the Green Berets, and the Center
for Special Forces trains the killers of Latin American babies. General
Mario Renon Castillo, a graduate in counter-insurgency warfare, plotted
the massacre of 49 Tzotzil Indian supporters of the Zapatista Army of
National Liberation at Acteal on the eve of Christmas 1997 - four babies,
nearly at full term, were ripped from the wombs of their dead mothers.
Mexican drug fighting troops are trained at Fort Bragg. One group of
trainees defected to the narco cartels, renamed themselves the Zetas, and
are deemed accountable for dozens of public beheadings in Acapulco and
other disputed turf.
While year after year, the nuns and the priests summon thousands of
activists to the School of America at Fort Benning, Georgia, Fort Bragg
continues to crank out its quotient of killers without much protest. It
has not always been that way.
Chuck Fager who runs Quaker House in Fayetteville showed us display
boards chronicling Bragg's bad old days. One of the first G.l.
coffeehouses was set up here as the bloodshed surged in 'Nam. Fonda and
Donald Southerland, Peter Boyle and Country Joe came to the Haymarket
which was heavily infiltrated by intelligence agencies. Drugs were
planted on anti-war activists and there were firebombings. Main Street
was honky tonk rowdy in those days and there was lots of heroin on the
scene.
All that changed with the volunteer army, Chuck observes. Now more often
than not, the soldier boys and girls are married, however
dysfunctionally. The 82nd Airborne is stretched to the max with its
three battalions always en route to Iraq with little breathing room
between tours. Hundreds have come home in body bags or too damaged to go
on living. Some arrive in the morning and murder their families by
afternoon. There are multiple suicides. The local press does its best
to muzzle the bad news. "Words conquer!" Fort Bragg Psy-Op officers
caution editors.
Human blood is not the only body fluid that fuels Fayetteville.
Smithfield Farms, owned by the Cargill conglomerate, kills a reported
30,000,000 hogs here each year at a high-walled penitentiary-like enclave
just down the road. Many undocumented workers are paid a pittance to do
the rendering. Mostly, they are kept out of sight, living in the
backwoods under trees and tents. You know they are here because of the
roadside crucifixes erected to mark the demise of a loved one killed in
an auto accident.
But according to "Que Pasa?" a combative North Carolina weekly that
zeroes in on the exponentially expanding Mexican community, many families
are in hiding.
ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) is cracking down everywhere in
the Carolinas, snatching people off their bikes as they pedal off to work
in the early morning dark, doing workplace raids and home invasions and
gratuitously terrorizing the indocumentados. A lot of families are so
fearful they won't even venture out to the nearest Piggly Wiggly. One
moment they be picking their way through the frozen food aisle and then
you can't find them anywhere anymore. People are disappearing.
I didn't see many Afro-Americans either as I shuffled through Raleigh
and Chapel Hill. It was a mystery to me until I shipped out of the
Winston-Salem Greyhound station and realized that was where they were
hanging.
Greyhound was the preferred travel mode for the Freedom Riders back in
the early '60s. The buses they rode got burnt up at southern route
depots and the riders set upon by Klan-led lynch mobs. Things are
quieter on the Big Dog runs these days but a whole lot more desperate.
Greyhound is the bottom-rung ride for those with no fixed destination and
hardly any money to get there. They climb aboard with all their worldly
possessions bunched up in a garbage bag. Some just got out of prison or
the local psycho lock-up and everyone is eager to get out of town.
Skinny crack head mothers hauling their screaming infants and battered
woman running scared from killer boyfriends, stagger on board. The lame,
the halt, and the mad scrunch down in the grungy seats and snore fitfully
under cheap towels. I watched a young Mexican worker who had been
hugging the back seat by the toilet since New York City descend from the
bus in Cleveland Tennessee with a puzzled look troubling his eye - maybe
he had meant Cleveland Ohio when he bought the ticket. Now all his
luggage was missing, had never been moved from one bus to the next. The
driver instructed him to ask up in the U-Haul that doubled as the
Greyhound depot but he didn't understand the language. He was still
standing there clutching what he had left, a greasy paper sack, when the
driver slammed the door shut and pulled out of the deserted mall.
This is what Amerikkka looks like from inside the belly of the big dog.
Amy Goodman, Noam Chomsky and all the others who interpret this oozing
wound that calls itself a country ought to be riding the bus to see
what's really coming down in the Land of the Tree and the Home of the
Grave these days.
II.
"They say in Harlan County
There are no neutrals there -
You either are a union man
Or a thug for J.H. Blair.
Which side are you on boys?
Which side are you on?"
Times have come full circle in the coal fields of West Virginia and
eastern Kentucky in the year of Our Lord 2007. Now coal is the
"patriotic" fuel because it keeps us from being dependent on raghead
terrorists and commie dictators like Hugo Chavez. You mess with the
rights of the coal companies to kill miners and murder the oldest
deciduous forests on the American continent, decimate the streams and the
songbirds, the fish and the deer and the soul of the hill people, and you
got Homeland Security knocking on your door, explained Terri Blanton, a
coalminer's daughter from Harlan County whose own brother got cut down
down in the mine "where its dark as a dungeon and damp as the dew (and
the sun never shines/and the pleasures are few.")
These days, Terri is organizing against what the coal barons
euphemistically label "mountaintop removal" where they just decapitate
the hills to get at coal seams they can strip quick and then shove the
debris into the hollow between here and the next hill over.
Although she probably never heard of the Zapatistas - I didn't get to ask
her that the night she spoke at a lonely Catholic church out by the
Interstate in Berea Kentucky - Terri is being a Zapatistas where she
lives anyway, speaking truth to power, ripping the mask off savage
capitalism, and serving her community.
In Atlanta, where King Coke and the Carter Center dictate the moral tone,
I spoke about being Zapatistas where we live and what that meant, to a
bunch of hungry minds at the MadRatz Infoshop under a highway overpass in
a dilapidated warehouse district - the MadRatz is, of course, Ignatz the
Rat who never tired of hurling bricks at Officer Pup in George Herriman's
loony, artful "Krazy Kat." There were real anarchists there - George
Sossenko, now 88, fought with the Durutti Column in the Spanish Civil
War. Together we sang the Internationale and cut a cake to mark my
seventh decade on this lonely planet. Dr. Mark Heffington who heals farm
laborers up in North Carolina drove three hours to learn about this being
a Zapatista where he lives idea - many of his patients are speaking
Tzotzil now, the language of the People of the Bat ("Tzotz"), the
Highland Maya who are so integral to the Zapatista rebellion.
Atlanta will play host to the U.S. Social Forum come June and there is a
lot of jostling afoot about who gets to set the agenda. From this bend
in the river, the affair looks suspiciously topdown with a national
directorship and leaders of Atlanta's social change movement (the
progressive, patriarchal Black Church will play a key role) at the
controls. The topdown model is how these conclaves have been conducted
ever since Lula and the PT ran them from Puerto Alegre with a velvet
glove and crowbars behind their backs (ask anarchist guru John Holloway
about the PT goons) - similarly, Comandante Hugo called the shots in
Caracas.
Making the U.S. Social Forum work from the bottom up without hierarchies
or patriarchies, fending off all the old -isms and the vanguard parties,
taking decisions collectively and uncompromisingly confronting savage
capitalism is going to be a hard climb in Atlanta. These spectacles are
so huge that it is hard to get a grip on where we fit in - how to see the
whole elephant and not just an abstract haunch concerns anarcho printer
Barry Weinstock. Nonetheless, we need to be there and mix it up with the
tired old North American Left sworn as it is by inertia to keep doing
business as usual. The U.S. Social Forum offers U.S. Zapatistas an
alluring opportunity to smash sectarianism, find commonalities, and form
coalition from the bottom up.
I hopped the New Orleans-bound Crescent through the piney woods and
murky, gator-laden swamps of Alabama and Mississippi. Emmit Till's body
was still on the bottom of the Tallahatchee river. Two black women who
had fled Katrina for Atlanta to find a comfortable niche in that black
bourgeoisified city and were returning for the weekend to visit family
members left behind, sat across the aisle from me the whole route,
telling each other the stories of their lives. They both had married
well to husbands with military careers and their children had followed
their fathers' footsteps. Some were in Iraq, which made the women fret.
"I know she will be alright" the retired nurse assured her companion who
ran an Atlanta dance studio, "I brought her up to take care of herself."
But she didna^t sound convinced.
They talked a lot about the dying city from which they had escaped 18
months ago. "Crime" was a frequent theme - what they meant was black on
black crime - and they dissed the underclass i.e. the "project niggers"
unstintingly for having driven them from New Orleans. "Project nigger",
I would soon learn, is the anthropological designation of those people of
color down at the bottom who were flattened by Katrina and have had the
audacity to fight back.
III.
"What has happened here
Is that the wind has changed,
Clouds roll in from the north
And it start to raina^|"
If New Orleans was a novel or a film, it would no doubt be entitled
"American Chaos." But New Orleans is not a work of fiction although the
corporate media tends to confuse it with one.
In Latin America, cataclysm has often gestated social cohesion and
fightback from the bottom. I lived through the aftermath of the 1985
Mexico City earthquake that took 30,000 lives and leveled my barrio and I
watched my neighbors organize themselves to take back their lives from a
government that ran away from the tragedy and pocketed the relief
donations. The damnificado movement signaled the rebirth of Mexican
civil society that continues to flourish today in Oaxaca and the jungles
of Chiapas and at the portals of power up in Mexico City. The thieving
Somoza dynasty's disregard for the Nicaraguan people following the 1975
earthquake in that threadbare banana republic fanned the flames of the
Sandanista revolution.
But across the Gulf in New Orleans, the process has been one of
disintegration. The racial divide, always the snake in the baby's crib
here, has festered way out of control. Fear and loathing permeates the
languid air.
The National Guard, decked out in Baghdad camou, still patrols the
streets in squat Humvees and the number of concealed weapon permits
issued last year broke an American record. Everyone has got themselves a
big bad dog. They lunge furiously at you on tight chains from behind
spiked gates when you walk the streets on the edge of the Quarter.
Terror stalks the merchant class - mug shots of accused black muggers are
taped to the windows of their establishments. Marsha, a crinkly-eyed
woman from Alabama, drove us around one night. She saw the dead
everywhere as if they were police outlines of the corpses of victims
drawn upon the sidewalks. We didn't slide through a corner where someone
hadna^t been shot or stabbed or bludgeoned. Nervous all night, she
freaked bad when she spotted a flattened black cat in the gutter by where
we were staying. "I'm getting out of here soon as I can" she mumbled and
sped off in her big rented car.
Visitors are warned to take precautions. The owner of our guest house,
an affable gay man who worried about his guests putting Tampax down the
toilet, urged us to take a cab to catch Ellis Marsalis a scant two blocks
away on Frenchman. He too could identify the bodies that turned up on
his doorstep out on Elysian Fields. He wasn't a prejudiced person, he
insisted, but these people who wanted the government to do everything for
them were just a drain on the property-owning class. He didn't actually
pronounce the project nigger epithet but that's whom he was talking
about.
Big Steve Jennings, a dangerously overweight 65 year-old Creole man who
calls himself white, didn't have any such compunction. We tooled through
the Lower 9th Ward where every home is gutted - those who have returned
are encamped in front of their damaged domiciles in FEMA trailers.
"That's where they got Fats Domino off the roof." Steve pointed a
sausage-sized finger at a modest frame house, now uninhabitable. I
marveled that so legendary a New Orleans luminary would be living down
here at the bottom. "Well, let's face it - the blacks and the whites
don't get along down here so I guess he wanted to stay with his own
people" Big Steve philosophized.
The driver didna^t want to waste much time on the Lower 9th where he
thought the people were all crack heads and prostitutes or else project
niggers - although the Lower 9th has the highest percentage of
Afro-American homeownership in the state of Louisiana. He couldn't figure
out why they were getting all this attention when white folks had been
screwed blue and tattooed a whole lot worse. Steve drove me over to his
home in Saint Bernard Parrish, just a foundation slab now like a big flat
tombstone. The tidal surge had wiped him out and the insurance company
wouldn't compensate him for wind damage although they kept dunning him to
pay off the premiums. "I just had it bulldozed - would have cost me more
to make it right again. But they still after me to pay up even though the
house isna^t even standing here anymore."
Steve drove me out to Lakeside and over to New Orleans East where half
million buck homes stood empty and unsteady and the upscale "chopping"
centers had all drowned in the flood, then out to the 17th Avenue levee
where Lake Pontchartrain, really an inland sea, had broken through the
flimsy sea wall and inundated the city. His mantra was incessant. White
folks had gotten fucked over and all you ever heard about is the project
niggers over there in the Superdome raping and eating on each other.
"We whites should be marching on Washington and not paying our taxes" he
grumbled, "but we aint." When the niggers put a boycott on a store no
one crossed the line, but white people, they went shopping all the time.
"I dona^t understand why we can't get together. It make me sick."
When I suggested that maybe that was because they would be behaving too
much like black people, Steve shrugged and looked about as sheepish as a
300-pound peckerwood can get. "Maybe you right."
This project nigger thing digs right into the nerve of all the race and
class umbrage that is seething in this doomed city. Poverty blacks have
been driven en masse from New Orleans - some call it the diaspora and
others a pogrom but what's happening is a species of genocide anyway you
look at it. The population is down to 200,000 and leaking from a half
million on the morning that Katrina struck and most of those who are
missing are darker than white. The city fathers and mothers, black and
white both, seem determined to keep it that way too. Closing down the
projects is a cornerstone of this strategy to get rid of the poor so
Donald Trump can build his tower and up the property values in what used
to be called the Big Easy and now aint nothing less than the Big Hurt.
It was Spring Break and March Madness when I got to New Orleans and tens
of thousands of nubile white university kids were piling into town. Some
had actually come to this blighted urb to do good, gut houses with ACORN
or Habitat or the dozens of church groups at work here. Others were
volunteering at Common Ground, which has a more combative line and
confronts power with truth in a city where the truth is a precious
commodity.
But bridging the race and class divide too often results in disconnect.
One Saturday, I went down with the Common Ground kids to a block party at
Survivor Village where former project residents are encamped and all the
white students clustered together on their side of the circle and watched
the black folks eat bar-b-cue. Some Revolutionary Communist Party hack
got into my ear about the projects and overthrowing the ruling class. It
didn't sound much like being a Zapatista where one lives.
I had what old James Joyce used to call an epiphany on our last day in
New Orleans. It was "Super Sunday" when the Wild Mardi Gras Indians
traditionally parade through the black neighborhoods in Uptown. But by
the time we finally made it down to LaSalle and Louisiana in Central
City, they had long ago passed through although hundreds of residents
were in the street anticipating their return. There were not a lot of
white faces in the crowd and we sat down on the steps of the boarded-up
Magnolia-C.W. Peete projects to watch kids race FEMA motorcycles (bought
with FEMA money) up and down the street. One large gentleman came over to
snap our picture - aging bohemians are a rare sight in Uptown these days.
Rosemary Johnson sidled over and announced that she was the "Chancellor"
of the Magnolia Projects. Illysa pulled out her camcorder and the
Chancellor slammed everyone from the housing authorities to George Bush
on camera. "This is where we live in America and honey, we going to
show them what America is" Rosemary snarled, looking like she was about
to bite the head off Illysia's mic.
Meanwhile, the afternoon was getting seriously stressed. No Indians were
on the darkening horizon and the crowd pushing in around the intersection
was bored and edgy. We called a cab to bail us out of the neighborhood
but, of course, no cab would venture into Central City. Dozens of patrol
cars were now cruising the streets, waiting for the first bottle to fly.
Tilda and I walked a few blocks west and called the cab company again.
The dispatcher assured us that one was on its way but it never came. We
stood on the street corner for an hour and finally put our thumbs out.
An older brother stopped and pulled us into his pick-up. Pierre had
stood in water up to his neck for three days after Katrina washed through
his home and it had wrecked his lungs. But God had come to him during
his ordeal and gifted him with the powers of discernment - that's the
word he used - and he had discerned that we were o.k.
Which is to say they have cruelly fucked over New Orleans, tried to drain
this city of color of color, and crush its spirit into the mud but they
cana^t quite extinguish the juju that has always powered this place.
If I were Donald Trump, I wouldn't build that tower anytime soon.
John Ross continues his sojourn through the United Snakes with his latest
opus "Zapatistas! Making Another World Possible - Chronicles of
Resistance 2000-2006" in the mid-west (Minneapolis, Madison, Cincinnati,
Chicago), thence onto the Right Coast (New York, Philadelphia, Hartford,
Boston, Burlington) - write him at [EMAIL PROTECTED] for precise
itineraries.
