The Field on the Narcosphere

By Al Giordano

This segment of a Bill Moyers interview with Howard Zinn came after the production of last month's History Channel special, The People Speak: Democracy Is Not a Spectator Sport, based on the works of Howard Zinn.

Almost everyone who lived and organized in New England during the past many decades found yourself on a picket line or in a rambunctious assembly hall with Howard, who passed away yesterday at the age of 87 after a long life that anyone should consider successful. A Boston University professor during much of that time, Howard practiced the art of looking at - and participating in - history from below.

Where other leftish icons across the Charles River have spent these decades gnashing their teeth, lecturing and bemoaning how awful everything that happens up above has been (as if most folks born down below didn't already know that by the time we were eight), Howard answered the call, again and again, to help us do something about it. He walked out to the picket lines every time he was called - by neighborhood organizers fighting against his university's real estate grabs, by striking workers that cleaned and fed the students and professors, by almost anyone who organized and fought that asked, and often before they asked, for his support.

To those of us who were part of the Clamshell Alliance and related anti-nuclear struggles of the seventies and early eighties in New England, Howard would drive out to the countryside, consult and call attention to our organizing campaigns and acts of civil disobedience whenever asked. He did this before his 1980 book, A People's History of the United States, published by Harper & Row, turned him into a national and international icon.

In 1986, when students at the University of Massachusetts occupied school offices to block CIA recruiting, joined by my pal Abbie Hoffman and presidential daughter Amy Carter, and went to trial (a case that I was involved in at least to the extent of getting my attorney Tom Lesser to represent Carter and advise Abbie and the others how to turn the tables and put the CIA on trial in what was meant to be a mere criminal trespass case), Howard came to Northampton, raised his right hand, and swore to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. His testimony - about the patriotic and fully American traditions that the occupiers had practiced - was key in convincing the jury to acquit the defendants.

In 1990, when Boston University president John Silber sought and won the Democratic Nomination for Governor of Massachusetts, Zinn drove out to Springfield regularly to co-captain my WSPR radio show and explain to the populace in the western part of the state the authoritarian nature of this bizarro-land political candidate whose autobiography, Howard quipped, should have been titled Mein Campus. Howard understood the inspiring power of humor, too.

Last night and today the Internets were ablaze with worthy praise for this great narrator of authentic history, the history from below. But I must say I am puzzled (although not surprised) by how many folks who don't practice what Zinn preached have joined in the hagiography-fest because they either really believe they are part of his tradition or merely to co-brand themselves with his now hallowed name.

Howard, at least in the decades I knew him (and I don't claim to have been any particularly close friend - just another among thousands of comrades who knew him from where the work was being done, inside the foxholes of community organizing) never once whined, never committed an act of poutrage, not feigned, not real. He didn't view the world and its discontents as too overwhelming to change and he understood the non-linear nature of change. He was pragmatic to the core, optimistic in word and deed, and as he says in this recent video interview with Moyers, the real struggles happen down below.

The 1920s and 30s labor strikes that led to the New Deal and the 1950s and 60s civil rights actions that ended legal segregation were not per se aimed at those up above; they were struggles by real people to change their daily lives on the most local of levels. That they led to big national legislation and change were incidental benefits for the many of what they had already won directly for themselves; a better wage at better conditions, the ability for they and their children to play, study and shop in the same places white folks did.

Watch the video and listen, really listen, to what Howard said during his last months on earth, the culmination of what he had been saying and learning throughout his wonderful life. He was no whiner nor Chicken Little. He had the same attitude about Obama (in '08 we published his qualified endorsement which, in sum, said that it made sense to elect someone under whom the space would expand for us to organize and win our own battles for ourselves) that he'd had about every leader during his lifetime: that we, down below, have more power than we know to change things and we ought to stop waiting for others up above to hand it down to us.

The doctrine of Authentic Journalism and its emphasis on turning the cameras and microphones and pointing them below - instead of obsessing upon how bad everything is up above - is Zinnism in praxis, beyond mere repetition of theory.

(And my pal from the old Bedford Park neighborhood in the Bronx, Eddie C, has posted the rest of these final Zinn interview videos over at DKos, check 'em out.)

Howard Zinn didn't want or need flowery eulogies. He wanted us to get out there and do the work he chronicled. In lieu of flowers, organize, document and tell the stories of that organizing so that others may, too, be inspired to do the same. That - and not a book on a coffee table - is the legacy of Howard Zinn. Like the song says, if you wanna go to heaven, you gotta raise a lotta hell.

By Al Giordano

Today we begin constructing the campuses for the 2010 Narco News School of Authentic Journalism, its 32 scholars and 40+ professors, on Mexico's Yucatán peninsula. The students and professors arrive by February 3 for ten days of intensive training in investigative reporting, online journalism, documentary filmmaking and viral video production.

The theme of this year's school is Journalism and Civil Resistance, to better train ourselves to report on social movements, civil resistances, community organizing and nonviolent campaigns, and to better understand the underlying strategic dynamics at play through the eyes of the strategists and organizers at the grassroots level.

You will be able to read a multitude of written reports by our students about the school's sessions, as well as see photographs and videos and daily updates - once the school begins - on the pages of Narco News. And for years to come you will be able to read, see and listen to the good works to come by the 70+ participants who will be giving each other an upgrade in these skills to be able to do this work of authentic journalism faster, better and more coherently.

Southeastern Mexico was one of five places on earth from where the phonetic written word was developed, replacing pictographs and bringing with it a great evolutionary leap forward for human society and our capacity to communicate with each other. We hope and plan that during these ten days we might take a small step ahead in the same direction to evolve this craft to the next level.

So if I'm a bit more quiet around here for the next couple of weeks, that's because we're off-screen, out there in the real world, laying the groundwork for even more reporting and information to come your way very, very soon.

Many of the Field Hands and readers here contributed to make the 2010 School of Authentic Journalism possible. Thank you again. Very shortly, you will begin to see a return on that investment in the works of a new generation of talents of conscience who do what we do here.

Do check in regularly for updates, and when I can send up a flare here on The Field, you know I will.

By Al Giordano

Somewhere in America – actually, on every street – there is an Independent voter, or a family of them.

Let's call them Mr. and Mrs. Independent. Contrary to the hype, they are less likely to be small-i independent in the sense of open-mindedness and careful vetting of issues and policy positions than they are prone to looking, election after election, for which bandwagon to jump onto.

And that explains how, on Tuesday, so many of the same Massachusetts Independent voters that cast ballots 14 months ago for Democrat Barack Obama went and did so for Republican Scott Brown.

The harsh reality is that so many of these “Independents” can more properly be called “Bandwagon Voters.”

Imagine Mr. and Mrs. Independent living on one of those streets. In the house to the right of them is one family, devout evangelical Christian, pro military interventions, and desiring of lower taxes.

Mr. and Mrs. Independent consider the family to the right a little bit scary and weird. In the privacy of their home they might even make fun of the family on the right, which reminds them of that of the cartoon Flanders family on The Simpsons TV show. And the Independents don’t generally agree with the Flanders' obsessions against abortion and gays. Still, they share some of the same fear of people of different races (most of the Independents are white), they also resent taxes, respect the military, and they also have to contend with the family in the house to the left.

In the house to the left is a more liberal family. Really, it more resembles the Simpsons themselves. Often, if given the choice between attending a party at either neighbor’s home, Mr. and Mrs. Independent will choose the party in house on the left, as they did in 2008. The Simpsons are generally more fun than the Flanders.

But if throughout 2009 the dysfunction inside the house on the left – the screaming matches, yelling, pouting, expressions of outrage and feigned outrage – spilled out onto the street, it is kind of understandable that this month they chose to accept the invitation of the Flanders instead of that of the Simpsons.

The house in the middle contains the Bandwagon Voters. They will reliably, year in, year out, follow the neighbor that seems like it is having more fun. They’re Good Time Charlies, essentially.

This dynamic – more than any public policy explanation – describes what happened in Massachusetts this week and why it happened.

And this is why we see so many preemptive screeds by the same “progressive” bloggers that have been doing the screaming out in the street all year long. They are now furiously typing to mock the idea that they have any responsibility for the Democrats’ defeat on Tuesday, pointing fingers at everyone else, because somewhere inside their little pea brains they understand perfectly well their role in the dysfunction that scared Mr. and Mr. Independent away this round, and they fear - as well they should - that Tuesday's defeat will fall harder upon them even if their behavior helped create it.

Worse, they’re using Tuesday’s results as permission to scream even louder, disturb the neighborhood even more, yell “I told you so” and make petulant demands that things must be done their way, or else.

And this only makes Mr. and Mrs. Independent more smugly satisfied that they attended the Flanders’ tea party this year instead.

And the continuing efforts at imposed buzzkill by The Poutrage Club of the house on the left only emboldens the Flanders, too. It gives them morale. It makes them more content, in turn, more confident, and therefore more attractive come November.

In that sense, they very much share in the blame that they so desperately attempt to assign to everybody else but them.

That's not "blaming the left." (I'm many paces to the left of most of those people, and many of you who share in this view are, too.)

It is, rather, identifying the dysfunction.

By Al Giordano and Joaquín Nezua Herrera

(Many thanks to 2010 School of Authentic Journalism scholar Joaquín Nezua Herrera, who put up the subtitles so that English speakers can get this unique ground level view of post-earthquake Port au Prince...)

Update: In contrast, CNN and the English language networks have largely been doing a dreadful job covering the crisis and recovery in Haiti. Ansel Herz offers an informed critique via his blog, Mediahacker: Tell CNN to Stop Hyping Fears of Violence in Haiti. Here's a screen shot of the kind of yellow journalism being practiced by CNN this week:

It occurred to me this morning that this is the first time since the dawn of cable news that during a big international story that I don't have CNN or the other TV news networks turned on as I go about my day. The shift has already happened in which the Internet reporting has surpassed what poses as journalism on the big networks, and any video clip they broadcast that does turn out to add to the story quickly gets posted to the Internet anyway. TV news - at least in English - is now officially dead. And unless it radically changes its way of doing things, it is only a matter of time before the public reaches the same conclusion. Rest in pixels.

Update II: Here is an audio-visual presentation by BrownManThinkingHard, courtesy of Baratunde Thurston:

It tells the back story of Haiti's history and its relationship with US history. Did you know, for example, that the Haitian revolution that won independence from France directly led to the Louisiana Purchase and expansion of US territory? That, and other important context to understand current events in Haiti can be seen and heard by clicking "play."

By Al Giordano

It has been many years since I so intensely reported politics in Massachusetts, and these recent weeks leading up to Tuesday’s special election on Senator Ted Kennedy’s replacement have reminded me of the following bad memories:

In 1978, a socially conservative pro-business challenger toppled Massachusetts Governor Mike Dukakis in the Democratic Primary. His name was Ed King and he became governor for four years, until Dukakis retook the corner office through a titanic rematch. Of course, King did a lot of damage during his four years as Governor.

In 1990, a whacked-out right-wing nutcase named John Silber – longtime president of Boston University, professor Howard Zinn said that his autobiography should have been titled Mein Campus – won a three-way Democratic primary for governor with his anti-abortion, anti-poor people, pro-business stances. Silber was defeated by descended-from-the-Mayflower millionaire Bill Weld, who ran as a pro-choice, pro-gay rights – but pro-business – Republican, who ushered in twelve years of Republican control – half by him and half by a Rogue’s Gallery in succession named Cellucci, Swift and then, brrrrrrrr, Romney.

These things happened in the supposedly “liberal” and “Democratic” state named Massachusetts.

Truth is, Massachusetts’ reputation as a progressive electoral bastion – dating back to 1972 when it was the only state to support Democrat George McGovern against President Richard Nixon (leading to a plethora of bumper-stickers that said, “Don’t Blame Me, I’m from Massachusetts”) – is undeserved. And that anomaly probably had to do more with McGovern’s choice of a Kennedy in-law named Sargent Shriver as his running mate than with McGovern’s heroic opposition to the Vietnam War. Massachusetts – so heavily Irish-Catholic - has always loved its Kennedys, but in spite of their liberal politics more than because of them.

Its capital city of Boston is the most segregated major city, racially speaking, perhaps in the United States. (And it was the Far North bastion of opposition to public school integration long after the Deep South had stepped into the future.)

Which is why Governor Deval Patrick’s 2006 gubernatorial triumph was a big step forward for the Bay State electorate.

But the Massachusetts Democratic primary electorate is one inordinately influenced by State House hacks in one corner and politically-correct practitioners of “identity politics” activism and such in the other, and regularly in the dysfunctional push-and-shove between the two, the Massachusetts Democratic Party falls so out of touch with the public that it takes a big electoral hit.

Here is the bad news (for progressive politics, for health care reform, and so much more): By all traditional political math, Democratic US Senate nominee Martha Coakley – currently attorney general of the state – will lose Tuesday’s special election for the seat that Ted Kennedy held until his passing last summer.

Coakley’s nomination is the result of a perfect storm (for Republicans): A Massachusetts Democratic primary electorate still a bit hungover that its own choice for president in 2008, now Secretary of State Clinton, lost in the rest of the country to Barack Obama, some still a bit bitter over that, and the general mediocrity of Coakley's primary opponents, too. (Say what you will about John Kerry, but each of them were mere political insects compared to him.)

Coakley - originally way ahead in the polls - took much of the month of December off from stumping the state and recently suggested that it would be a waste of her time to engage in retail campaigning by shaking hands outside of Fenway Park. She exudes, at times, that prissy elitism that turns Massachusetts voters away from Democrats so regularly.

Worse news is that her Republican opponent, Scott Brown, is a buffoon who voted 96 percent of the time in the Massachusetts State Senate with GOP dogma. If he arrives in the US Senate – as the traditional political math says he will – he will become the forty-first Senator vote to block so many progressive advances that would still be possible if he doesn’t succeed.

And yet, by traditional Massachusetts political math, I repeat: Brown will win Tuesday’s special election.

Now, here is the good news – if you are a pro-health care, pro-immigration reform, pro-people progressive – for Massachusetts, and for the United States.

There is still a cubic centimeter of chance that the script can be broken on Tuesday, and Massachusetts can be exorcized from its seasonal flirtations with the right-wing out of its frustrations with the hack-fest that is the Democratic party there: The Massachusetts special election has been nationalized.

As of the moment I type these words, volunteers for Organizing for America from the other 49 states have made more than 150,000 get-out-the-vote phone calls today alone toward saving Coakley’s rear (and that of the US Senate, and so many policies to come). Organizing for America has added a new ingredient to the stale old Massachusetts political recipe: that of, duh, organizing.

This afternoon, the US President himself ventured into Massachusetts to rally the cavalry that Coakley and the Massachusetts Democratic Party couldn't muster on their own.

Those phone calls have been made by lone citizens making calls from their homes, or via Skype or Vonage on the Internet, and in many cases from phone banks organized by many of the very same grassroots organizers who changed the US political game in 2008.

What they do is simple, and with easy step-by-step instructions available to anyone with a modem.

The small chance that Massachusetts – and so follows the nation – has this year to rip up the traditional Bay State script and short-circuit yet another right-wing rise to power from the faux-progressive state comes from the cavalry that Organizing for America has driven in to organize a better voter turnout from folks who don’t normally vote in off-year elections.

Given Massachusetts’ political history over recent decades, it is a bit of a long shot... But… So was 2008.

Should Coakley lose on Tuesday, well, that’s just business as usual in Massachusetts politics.

But should she emerge triumphant, that (now) come-from-behind victory will be because Organizing for America – at the moment when all seemed lost (and public opinion polls suggested so) - changed the game, and turned out the kind of folks that normally only vote in presidential elections, if at all.

The cavalry, in sum, is sitting in front of a computer, in your home or office, reading these words.

That latent cavalry will be in front of your mirror when you awaken on Monday.

Tuesday could signal that the cavalry is here to stay, to keep changing the game of corroded and corrupted politics with community organizing techniques.

But that will be decided on Monday, depending, one at a time, on whether the cavalry answers the game-changing call once again.

Are you part of that cavalry?

If so, use the comments section to tell us of your ride, and of what you saw or heard while galloping...

By Al Giordano

Journalist Ansel Herz writes on his blog, Mediahacker:

I really wish I could hav e edited and uploaded this footage sooner.  Here it is.  The scenes are graphic, shot as soon I left my house in Jacquet, in the 2-30 minutes after the tremors. Much more video to come.

Meanwhile, Jeremy Dupin is working with Reed Lindsay and the TeleSur crew, doing important reporting in Spanish. We're going to see if we can get some of that translated. Reed, who lived in and reported from Haiti for various years, and arrived this week with a film crew, writes, "Everyone I know is safe."

Update: And here is Part II of Ansel's series of video reports:

I don't know what I could add to that. The reports speak clearly and and coherently about the real situation on the ground.

Update II: See also:

"The International Community Must Let President Jean-Bertrand Aristide Return to Haiti": Voices from Puerto Principe, by Ansel Herz (Narco News, January 17, 2010).

And...

Getting Help to Haiti, by Charlie Hardy (Narco News, January 17, 2010).