The Assassination of a Poet 

Memories of Roque Dalton

by Nina Serrano

Counterpunch  

I first met Roque Dalton in Havana in July of 1968. He claimed he was a descendant of an outlaw, and he turned me into a writer and a poet.

I was in Havana working on a documentary film about Fidel with my then-husband, Saul Landau, and our two children, Greg, age 13 and Valerie, age 10. It was our second trip there as a family. I researched Cuban photo and film archives and filled in as the sound person. Making a film about Fidel involved a tremendous amount of waiting and therefore free time.

Living in a hotel with maid and laundry service, as well as restaurant meals, liberated my life from domestic duties. I met remarkable people including Estella Bravo who worked at Casa de Las Americas, the hub of Cuban and international leftist life with publications, exhibits, and conferences. Estella recruited me as a volunteer to help her catalogue American folk and protest music at “Casa.”

…

Excerpted from Homefront: Aaron Thompson worried about Gulf War Syndrome – which he had read up on a little after hearing a few soldiers talk about it in the States.

Supposedly thousands of veterans had died following the first Gulf War ten years ago, and tens or even hundreds of thousands had fallen ill. Many were permanently plagued or disabled, and who knew from what?

It seemed unclear, and there were charges against the military of cover-ups and withheld information, and now there were websites and organizations trying to figure out the problem and make it more well known.

What had caused all the postwar illnesses, for real? Military vaccinations had been blamed, along with low levels of toxic chemicals. But one of the most worrisome things to Aaron that a lot of the groups pointed to was the three hundred tons of depleted uranium that had been left in the region by the US. Aaron worried about all the rounds of DU ammunition that would be fired into buildings and tanks and scattered on the battlefield during the coming conflict.

The stuff was toxic, even radioactive, and Aaron resented the fact that he had hardly been given any warning about it by the Army.

Doing his own reading, Aaron found out that in 1996 the United Nations had classified DU ammunition as an illegal weapon of mass destruction, but the US continued to use it despite the UN resolution.

Aaron knew next to nothing about where it would most likely be used and found, or how to protect himself if he came across it or was forced to operate – let alone camp or patrol – in areas where it lay about, or was likely to have leached into the soil and water.

Back in the States, Aaron had read that after the first Gulf War – which included Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm – as of May 2002, the Veterans Administration reported that apart from the 760 casualties of those two operations, “an additional 8,306 soldiers had died and 159,705 were injured or ill as a result of service connected ‘exposures’ suffered during the war.”

And amazingly, “the VA revealed that 206,861 veterans, almost a third of General Norman Schwarzkopf’s entire army, had filed claims for medial care, compensation, and pension benefits based on injuries and illnesses caused by combat in 1991.” And then “after reviewing the cases, the agency classified 168,011 applicants as ‘disabled veterans’,” and stated that “in light of these deaths and disabilities, the casualty rate for the first Gulf War might actually be a staggering 29.3 percent.”

Aaron read about other studies that found the casualty rate to be even higher than this one, the government’s own study.

Plus, Aaron came across another article about Gulf War illness and depleted uranium that so stunned him he printed it off and sealed the pages in plastic and carried them with him wherever he went.

There never seemed to be a good time to talk about it, but he intended to hang onto the article and bring it into Iraq so that if he and his teammates ever encountered depleted uranium or if he felt they were in danger of it, he would have something to show them, to prod them to be careful.

They were all in this together. And unfortunately, it seemed that just being in the arena of operations put everyone at risk in a way that not too much could be done about.

Aaron felt that to be the damned thing of it all, and he began to worry more about what exactly he had gotten himself into.

In his tent one night in Kuwait, just before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, US soldier Aaron Thompson pulled out the photocopied papers and read them over again. One was an article based on the work of a British journalist, John Pilger, who had interviewed Dr. Al-Ali, a cancer specialist at a hospital in Basra, Iraq. Dr. Al-Ali was also a member of Britain’s Royal College of Physicians.

“Before the Gulf War,” the first Gulf War, the Iraqi doctor said, “we had only three or four deaths in a month from cancer. Now it’s 30 to 35 patients dying every month, and that’s just in my department. That is a 12-fold increase in cancer mortality. Our studies indicate that 40 to 48 per cent of the population in this area will get cancer – in five years’ time to begin with, then long afterwards. That’s almost half the population. Most of my own family now have cancer, and we have no history of the disease. We don’t know the precise source of the contamination, because we are not allowed to get the equipment to conduct a proper survey, or even test the excess level of radiation in our bodies. We strongly suspect depleted uranium, which was used by the Americans and British in the Gulf War right across the southern battlefields. Whatever the cause, it is like Chernobyl here; the genetic effects are new to us.”

When Dr. Al-Ali was asked what he says to people who deny the connection between depleted uranium and physical ailments, he answered, “How much proof do they want? There is every relation between congenital malformation and depleted uranium. Before 1991, we saw nothing like this at all. If there is no connection, why have these things not happened before? I have studied what happened in Hiroshima. It is almost exactly the same here; we have an increased percentage of congenital malformation, an increase of malignancy, leukemia, brain tumors – the same.”

One thing was for sure, Aaron Thompson did not want any of these diseases hitting him and his buddies, and what came next in the article was even more frightening.

A physicist from the US Army, Professor Doug Rokke told the reporter, “I am like many people in southern Iraq. I have 5,000 times the recommended level of radiation in my body. Most of my team are now dead.”

The article concluded that what happened in the Gulf was “a form of nuclear warfare,” and that the fourteen-year embargo against Iraq, sponsored by the United Nations Security Council and supported by the US for over a decade, did not allow into the country the equipment needed to decontaminate.

When Colonel Doug Rokke criticized NATO commanders for not doing enough to protect their troops from DU, he was basically fired by the Pentagon.

And now here were Aaron and his buddies getting ready to fight and live in the land of depleted uranium.

It reminded Aaron of Stephen King’s novel The Tommyknockers, in which the people living in Haven, Maine, find something from outer space buried in a backyard that gives the townspeople increased powers of mind and body – at first – until they start to experience the horrible side effects: frequent menstrual flows, loss of teeth and hair, the sallowing of skin – all symptoms of radiation poisoning.

The main character Jim Gardener comes to realize that this power that gives the people of Haven new abilities to act and create does not give them the ability to actually understand what all is going on.

They build and use incredible devices but they do not know exactly what they are doing and are unaware of many harmful side effects. And later, some of them do not necessarily want to know.

Could that be like the Army, Aaron worried, the Navy, the Air Force raining down depleted uranium on other countries but horribly poisoning and killing its own soldiers in the process, not to mention the people of the country under attack, for years to come?

Aaron understood that The Tommyknockers was supposed to be an allegory warning against the dangers of nuclear power – a seemingly inexhaustible and powerful energy source but with extremely dangerous side effects.

He understood that only too well.

Surely there were precautions being taken, Aaron hoped.

After all, the difference between Haven and the Army was that in Haven the people were not organized. They had few group responsibilities, and not a lot of working knowledge and coordination – in some ways like the American public at large.

Whereas in government, business, and the military, the number of standard operation procedures and the degree of organization and systematization were intense.

People were specifically trained and focused to solve problems, the major ones at least – so Aaron believed, and hoped, for his own sake and those of his buddies. And also for the people of Iraq – the people he and his buddies were supposed to liberate. 

But what did it say, really, for the quality of safety measures, if Aaron felt forced to carry around secretly in his flak jacket (tucked into one of the pouches where the SAPI plates were inserted) the crucial warnings about depleted uranium?

What did it imply about their degree of safety, that he did not feel free to much discuss these concerns even with his best friend Juan?

Maybe all the soldiers in the Army were somehow dangerously separated from each other, just like regular civilians.

And maybe the soldiers, like the protesters, would get more done for themselves if they had more soldier-to-soldier organization, both in the army, and independent of it too.

What would that be like? Did the soldiers need some kind of union? More say in what went on? Was that even thinkable?

Aaron felt danger everywhere.

He wondered what it would take for him to be able to talk seriously about some of his deepest concerns in the military simply with his best friend, let alone with anyone else in the squad.

How could he do it without being brushed off, laughed at, or scorned, or worse?

If it were true that soldiers could do nothing about such large concerns, was that in part because, immediately upon enlisting, they were trained, in an often unstated sort of way, to not talk and not think in any detail about what they knew and valued most but only to focus on what the Army brass valued most?

And what exactly did the Army brass value most when you got right down to it?

Aaron was under no illusions.

He tried not to be at least.

May we be forgiven – Aaron thought to himself on more than one occasion when he witnessed some brazen macho grandstanding, or some overt display of arrogance, or some subtle or blatant racism among the officers, his fellow soldiers or, worse, himself.

May we be forgiven, he thought, if we know not what we do.

——————————————-

 Excerpted from Homefront

God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut

   Ron Jacobs 

Two of the essential books on every literate, at least somewhat countercultural young person in the US’s list at the time were Slaughterhouse Five and Cat’s Cradle:. The former is an antiwar novel that needs to be dusted off and read anew by every US resident who gives a shit about the direction our country has been going since it was written. We are all Billy Pilgrim–the novel’s protagonist–and we can all decide to either make a difference or not. The second novel is an allegory about a lot of things. There’s a substance called Ice-Nine that cannot touch water without instantly freezing it. Not only does this substance freeze the water it first touches; it continues to freeze all the water that that water touched and so on, potentially freezing all the water in the world. In fact, that’s how the book ends. The rock band The Grateful Dead named their publishing company Ice Nine. Interestingly enough, the Grateful Dead also represented another concept presented by Vonnegut in Cat’s Cradle: the karass. Simply put, a karass is a group of people who, unbeknownst to them, are collectively doing God’s will in carrying out a specific, common, task. The idea became the model for more than one group of young folks trying to put together a collective living situation.

Although I re-read both of the above books every couple of years, the Vonnegut novel that I favor the most is God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. The story of Eliot Rosewater, a WW II veteran who is also the scion of a wealthy industrialist, this novel might be Vonnegut’s most pointed piece of social criticism. The protagonist follows the road expected of him after his military service–he finishes college, marries properly and joins the family business. Then he has an epiphany and decides to use his share of the family fortunes to help out the hopeless. He sets up a philanthropic office in a small town in Indiana and gives away money to anyone who asks for it. The Foundation’s slogan is “Don’t kill yourself, call the Rosewater Foundation.” A family lawyer wants to get Eliot declared insane in order to get the money in someone else’s hands. Yet that is a mere subplot. The real story is about human redemption and Eliot’s belief that almost everyone has some good in them. Interspersed throughout the book are incisive critiques of the history and nature of US capitalism. Yet, it is a very funny novel.

Kurt Vonnegut’s insights will be missed…

Why can’t Republicans write good novels?

   Rod Dreher

A liberal named Benjamin Nugent has written a pretty interesting piece wondering why Republicans don’t write good novels. Daniel Larison’s answer to the question is vastly more interesting than the Nugent piece itself. I exhort you to read his entire entry — Daniel ought to turn this into an essay, and The American Conservative,which is where the most surprising and unpredictable commentary on the Right is being published today, ought to make it a cover story. Anyway, Daniel says that the question isn’t why don’t Republicans write good novels, as ideologues aren’t ever going to produce good art. Rather:

The real question ought to be why conservatives generally don’t write fiction.

The answer is actually much more straightforward: the sorts of grand conservative thinkers who were scholars of literature (Weaver, Bradford) and writers of ghost stories (Kirk) are sadly no longer with us, they have not found worthy replacements and the importance of imagination is much, much less in the thinking of most self-styled conservatives than it was in theirs.

Part of the problem is indeed an excess of optimism, and optimism on the American right is one part Yankee, one part capitalist and one part Reagan. Whatever else you want to say about these three, they are not generally regarded as the fathers of great writing. Optimistic people typically are not the best artists, and I don’t just say this because I prefer the pessimists among us. Their frame of mind does not allow for real tragedy or real failure. For the optimist failure is not only unlikely, it does not ultimately, truly exist. The best days are always yet to come! But without a sense of nostalgia for a lost age or a lament for your people or even a full appreciation for the petty indignities of life combined with reverence for sacred mysteries (and sometimes, if a writer is really wise, he knows how to find the mystery in the petty indignity–see Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn), I think it is very difficult to write really captivating, good fiction.

This is right, it seems to me, and I really don’t have a lot to add to Daniel’s excellent observations. Larison’s post crystallized for me why I find myself so alienated from mainstream conservatism: it has no room for a tragic sense, and too often suffocates mystery and ambiguity in syrupy nationalistic uplift or platitudinous moralizing. Besides, I think most people on the right — shoot, most people, period — don’t trust art any more than they trust religion (real religion, the wild and terrifying stuff, I mean, not just bourgeois churchiness). The more intelligent people on the right understand that culture is more important than politics, but have no idea where to begin creating works of art that live and breathe.

Barbara Nicolosi of Act One, the program that trains Christians in screenwriting, lays into the faithful for their haughty ignorance and attitudinizing. Here’s a more polite version of the spiel I’ve been privileged to hear in person:

Flannery O’Connor, perhaps the greatest Catholic novelist of the past century, once noted, “Christian writers should be much less concerned with saving the world than with saving their work.” Many begin the Act One program with a slight cockiness that our seasoned faculty likes to call “the Messiah complex.” At some point in their lives, they swore off the cinema out of either fear or disdain, and they have come to Act One with the idea that they can save it from the outside. It takes several days of showing them some of the stunning and profound work being done in secular cinema before we can really begin to teach them.
[snip]
Ken Gire, an Act One alumnus, wrote in his book, Reflections on the Movies: Hearing God in the Unlikeliest Places (Chariot Victor, 2000), “I would rather be exposed to an a R-rated truth than a G-rated lie.” Having no conviction of hope, the entertainment industry tends to obsess over the only realities of which it is certain: confusion, darkness, isolation, fear, and depravity. Skewed as it is in its representation of what it means to be human, this kind of cinema can still hold profound truth for us about life without faith and, on another level, about using the screen art form in powerful ways.

Substitute “conservatives” for “Christians” and it still makes sense. Many conservatives, it seems to me, see art as an instrument for propagandizing for a particular worldview, as opposed to telling the truth, even telling hard truths (especially telling hard truths). The last great American novel I read was Marilynne Robinson’s “Gilead.” I don’t know whether Robinson is liberal or conservative, or whether her novel was either. But it was luminous, and it was true. That’s all that matters.

I wonder if there’s a connection between the fact that there are few conservatives among the ranks of novelists, and that there are few conservatives in US newsrooms. I remember when I was on my college paper’s staff, and was pretty liberal, campus conservatives bitched and moaned constantly about how biased we were. When I was in a position to invite them to contribute commentary to the paper, they weren’t faithful about meeting deadlines, and often never turned anything in at all. My guess is that conservatives love to complain about how biased the media are, and they’re more or less correct. But it’s rare to find conservatives who actually love journalism for itself, and what it can do. I’ve met young conservatives who aspire to be journalists, and they have the idea that they’re going to go into the business to tell stories “from the conservative point of view,” or somesuch thing. And I hope they fail. We don’t need to replace liberal bias with conservative bias. We need people to go into journalism because they want to tell the truth, and because they respect the art and craft of journalism. I don’t know why journalism as a profession appeals more to people who are pretty liberal politically. But it does. Perhaps the same is true with art — just as banking tends to attract conservatives.

But really, I’m the wrong person to pontificate on such matters, as I don’t read much fiction. I find contemporary fiction to be dull, as a general rule, and spend my time reading history and history-related books. That’s where life is, as far as I can tell. My wife is a conservative, and she reads almost nothing but fiction. But not much contemporary fiction. Do you who read a lot of fiction think that there’s much good fiction being written by anybody today? If so who, and why is it good? It’s the case, certainly, that the overwhelming number of novelists are liberals, but it seems to me that if they’re any good as a novelist, it’s not because they’re liberals, but because they understand something about human nature, and keep their art free from the proprieties of political correctness.

Larison is spot-on in his final observation, which is that the triumph of the therapeutic did away with a lot of suffering, but also seems to have erased the conditions that make for good art:

The therapeutic has driven out most of whatever remained of the tragic. The spirit of Atlee has spread like a poisonous cloud over the green fields of Logres, and the purpose-driven life has driven us into Babylon rather than leaving us to remember Jerusalem at the edge of her waters.

I’m sitting here tonight in a part of the country that is, I’m sorry to say, rapidly suburbanizing. For most of my adult life lived outside of the rural South, I’ve simply told stories about the kind of stuff I saw and heard growing up. And people think wow, what a good storyteller he is. But it’s not me: it’s the stories, and I’ve just reported what I’ve seen. That world, in all its crazy vitality, is going away. It just about kills me to think of what will pass away before I die. Sitting on the front porch with my dad today, we were talking about loss. He told me that he’s always had confidence that he could pull himself and us kids through any hardship, because growing up dirt-poor in the country during the Great Depression required him to learn how to do all kinds of things for himself. And I felt stupid and small just hearing that, thinking about how little of that I know. How little of that most people of my generation know. I wouldn’t trade the comfortable middle-class life I had growing up for the little cabin on a hill without running water than my dad had in the 1930s and 1940s. But it must be said that my generation is anesthetized by prosperity and the expectation of endless prosperity. There is plenty of suffering and tragedy in all this air-conditioned cheer, of course, but where are the conservatives who can see it and articulate it?