By James Moore

“We need the tonic of wildness. At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and un-explorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, un-surveyed and unfathomed by us because it is unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.” – Thoreau

I once rode up to the headwaters of two rivers in one day. Motorcycles can simplify such accomplishments. The Guadalupe I knew well and had traveled much of its length in a canoe and raft, and I had seen it in a fierce flood that had taken innocent lives. Upstream where the river moves placidly over shining limestone beds it is not easy to imagine murderous rushes of water leaving float piles of debris a hundred feet up in the branches of an ancient cypress, but it is not uncommon.

Riding over the low water crossings of the river on my way west I was still unable to imagine such flooding. The Guadalupe is a languorous, spring-fed flow that offers mostly shallow pools and views to clear, stony bottoms. The crystalline reflection of a spring sun was almost blinding but offered no evidence nature might wrest such a tragedy from such an idyllic setting.

The big BMW motorbike was nearly as silent as a trickling river and took me up a slow rise to a box canyon that had long ago birthed another river. A visitor follows the water back up to a limestone cliff where hundreds of springs leak from the rock and gather into a flow that becomes the Frio River. Once known to beer marketers as the “Land of 1100 Springs,” a 10,000-acre ranch was worked along these headwaters by descendants of Stephen F. Austin’s sister.

The Frio River

Oma Bell Perry, who had never married, and her sister, deeded the land over to Gary Priour, the poet-philanthropist who has devoted his adult life to raising children broken by unfair circumstances of their birth. Invisible hands, Priour has always claimed, guide his work, and when visitors see children playing in the water beneath the Texas sun, they understand why the ranch’s location is now referred to as “The Canyon of Angels.”

The highway through Frio Canyon unspools from the hill country twists to an easy run toward Uvalde. The hills are almost Irish green and treed with live oak and cottonwood and the tall cypress that always find the water. I slow the bike and stop for pictures without thinking I might be keeping a friend waiting down on Highway 90. Leakey and Utopia, dreamy little country towns, demand lingering but I pass through as quickly as though I were watching a movie and roll the throttle up.

Jake and I connect and move in the direction of the sun, riding parallel to the Rio Grande. His bike shines and rumbles in the southwestern glare as we get west of Del Rio. The sky must be as clear and blue as the day the world began to spin. Bluebonnets and paint brush spread out over the rocky hills and color the desert. Water from Lake Amistad is backed up into what ought to be dusty arroyos that have been transformed into canals and waterways that are settings for large vacation homes owned by wealthy Mexicans. The vistas are improbable after the urban franchise sprawl of Del Rio, an unusual border town that is surrendering to American homogenization.

Highway 505, South Toward Mexico

Jake is an excitable boy in his 70s and cannot wait for the Davis Mountains to rise in front of us. He has spoken vaguely about cross country motorcycle rides but I am not certain he has experience with longer trips. His enthusiasm suggests this is certainly the first time he has gotten on two wheels for a run to the Texas Trans Pecos. Always energized by this ride, I am, nonetheless, affected by Jake’s garrulousness on our stops and become enamored anew with familiar sights. Being a lobbyist in the state capitol and living in the tropical Rio Grande Valley has kept him from such scenery most of his life.

The sky gets bigger and consumes the countryside. We catch glimpses of Lake Amistad between the low mesas until U.S. 90 points down toward a river bridge. The Pecos, rarely much wider than a city sidewalk, has cut a deep canyon on approach to the lake. Water appears to be hardly moving but from above it is clear and shimmering in the breeze. The watercourse of the Pecos, which is mostly through the arid ranch country along the eastern perimeter of the Chihuahua Desert, has made it one of the most disputed water sources in the civilized world. Thousands of years before we motored across the river, indigenous peoples lived in the canyon below, possibly some of the first in North America, and they have left stone paintings and petroglyphs on the walls of caves and rock overhangs down where the Pecos meets the dammed up Rio Grande.

Pecos River Canyon

There are still lawsuits over the diversion and consumption of the Pecos and when you stand on its bank and taste the sweetness of the water in 100-degree heat, surrounded by rock, sand, and cactus, you understand why it has been treated as sacred by every human who has lived within its watershed. Encircled by ocotillo and pinon and cholla in the rising spring heat and staring down at the Pecos from the bridge, I end up thinking about the delta down on the Gulf Coast where the Old and the Lost River sweeps to the sea. Those two waterways always have looked to me as though they have the capacity to slake the thirst of all eight billion souls on board our little ship even as we shoot at each other across a stream like the Pecos.

The world continues to confound me.

When the road levels out farther west, we see the green and white Border Patrol vehicles dragging tires behind them on a long rope. A dirt track has been bladed beside the highway beyond the bar ditch and up next to the fence line. The dusty line runs west to Sanderson and then beyond toward Marathon and Van Horn and there are several of the government SUVs pulling tires and covering their tracks.

Unless you know the border, there is no context for such an absurd endeavor. River crossers with the right gear and water and food often come to these remote spots to enter the U.S. They are sometimes carrying backpacks with marijuana or other “contradbando,” but mostly they are just determined spirits that believe they can survive anything if they just get to America. The soil itself holds a magic for them. They are often wrong, though. The Border Patrol drags the dirt to make footprints visible and to know where to go to capture the transgressor.

“Seems to me we ought to want those guys here,” I heard an acquaintance say over breakfast in Marathon. “Anybody gets that far; they are pretty damned determined and might be useful in a country like ours.”

There were just Jake and I at a nearby table, each with a full head of hair, and not a single strand showed any color. We only looked like we might have a touch of wisdom. Such a judgment was only marginally accurate.

“Just seems to me like an insane waste of money,” I said, aware that we had both overheard the nearby conversation. “Doesn’t appear to offer much of a return on investment by catching a few pounds of marijuana or the lone border runner.”

“Well, Jimmy, we don’t have much say about it either way,” Jake said. “It’s just the way it is along that river.”

“They’ve been doing that drag and detect foolishness since I was a kid,” the man at the other table said, having picked up our exchange. “No way of knowing if it’s effective.”

“It’s effective at spending government tax money and keeping people employed,” I told him. “And I suspect that’s what matters more than few pounds of pot being confiscated. Makes politicians feel better, too. Secure the border!!”

Jake and I sped south toward the national park after breakfast and watched the clouds shred themselves on the Glass Mountains. The sky above was clear and blue but the pretty people on the motel TV had said rain was likely before sundown. I was skeptical as we began the sharp climb up to the Chisos Basin a few hours later because we stopped and looked behind us to the north and the air was pure enough to almost make visible McDonald Observatory about 150 miles distant.

The park road curled so sharply it almost felt as if it were twisting back onto itself and we slowly rose to altitude past the signs warning about bears and panthers. The ancient world was visible from up there and looking through “The Window” that opened up between two mountains at the desert floor, I had no trouble imagining great prehistoric species stalking the far plains along the shores of ancient, inland seas.

The Window, Chisos Basin, Big Bend National Park

We ended up on the porch of the general store in Terlingua, a ghost town that thrived briefly during a global demand for mercury. There is now the little store and the Starlight Restaurant and rustic adobes turned into pricey bed and breakfast establishments. A few cantinas and burger joints are along the bumpy road up the hill. The predominant feature, though, is the graveyard with Spanish surnames cut crudely into stone or desiccated wood crosses, many of them tilted by weather and time.

I went to the icebox in the general store and got two Tecates and came back out to sit on the bench that spans the front of the building and looks out over the long slope back to the river. The Chisos cut a ragged line across the horizon as we looked eastward toward the park and leaned against the wall to talk with the assembled strangers.

“Where’d you two ride from?”

The question was from a young man in a dirty baseball cap, jeans, and work boots. His dark tee shirt was sweated through and dirty but it was not torn.

“Different places. Austin and the Rio Grande Valley,” I said.

“I need to get to Austin some day,” he said. “But it’s just another big, corporate city now, I suppose.”

“There’s more than just a touch of that, for sure,” I said. “Whatever we used to like about it thirty years ago is slipping away. Where are you from?”

“Oh, Connecticut.”

“Really? What in the hell got you out here?”

“I just wanted to get as far away from corporate bullshit as I could and this looked like the best spot on the map.”

“You don’t look old enough to be fed up with climbing the corporate ladder.”

He cut his eyes at me but then smiled. “Well, I am. I hated it. I had a good job. But it was all politics and caring about shit that seemed pretty stupid to me. Out here, I work when I want, do what I want, and nobody cares what I think or do.”

“I guess that’s worth more than a corporate salary.”

“It is,” he said, and then pointed to the Chisos. “The light at the end of the day on those ranges never gets old to me. Ain’t it funny? This is probably the only place in America where people come to sit and see the sunset by looking east at those mountains.”

The people who live in the desert around the ghost town all have a story about wanting to be away from the world. They move up into the remote stretches and build adobes and survive off the grid but never have to impress another human or answer any questions. I have met government agents and truck drivers and drug runners sitting the sun on that general store porch and they all view privacy as Terlingua’s most precious commodity.

We got back on the bikes and went north toward Alpine. Crossing deserts on a motorcycle always leaves me with a sense that even the most mundane human act takes on epic proportions. Closing a door or simply walking across a street feels like it has a connectedness to some grander endeavor, which cannot immediately be known. This is mostly delusional, I suppose, but no one ever seems to simply watch the rain as it falls after a storm arrives in a desert; they appear to be battling the elements before an incomprehensible backdrop. I have ridden across the Mojave, Sonoran, and Chihuahua deserts many times and up and down the Great Basin and have always expected the universe to reveal secrets as the road endlessly extends.

More than an hour out of Alpine we had ridden under a black sky and left the sun shining behind us on the canyons of the Rio Grande. Lightning shot across our view in sharp-edged bolts and the thunderclaps were disturbing even above the wind and engine noise. When we rode into the rain, we were drenched in minutes, and as we came over each rise I looked to the north for a break in the sky and a furtive hope our destination might yet be dry.

Curtains of rain hung over the high mesas to our east and the inky black in some parts of the cloud cover faded to gray. Rain sways as belts in the far wind. Immediately, small breaks appeared in the storm and the sun found a few white basalt hills and dried out ranges and illuminated them in the afternoon darkness. A spotlight was cast across our front and onto a scene as old and eroded as it can be made by time and the elements. The show was almost more than could be imagined because the light and the dark and the rain and the desert offered such contrasts in microcosm.

“I prayed all the way through that storm, Jimmy,” Jake said later. “I got us some good mojo.”

We are eating thick steaks at the Reata and trying to dry out over dinner. Friday night was working hard to be exciting outside in Alpine.

“I guess you got us some magic then, Jake. Here we are. Wet but alive. And you’ll remember that stretch of Texas highway, I bet.”

“Yeah, but let’s not do that again real soon, pardner.”

“Let’s see what the ride looks like back to Marathon.”

The storm was rolling east as we ate, and we lingered to give it time enough to pass but as we went back down U.S. 90 the lightning lit our way. We did not hear thunder, but the cell was curling back on its own cloud tops and peeling away toward Del Rio, leaving great flashes of light across the night as it receded. We slowed enough to let the weather guide us down the road, but we were still surrounded by momentary brightness and daggers of light that seemed like cannon shot and were frequent enough that they might eventually find their targets.

We had dined also the day previous in Marfa at the old Paisano Hotel, and I was confident the ghosts of Liz Taylor, Rock Hudson, James Dean, and Dennis Hopper were shuffling the halls looking for their rooms and wondering what had happened to the desert ranch town they had left behind after filming Edna Ferber’s “Giant.” I worried greatly about the monsoon and lightning also turning us into something incorporeal.

Almost biblical rain had fallen in Marathon by the time we parked our bikes. Six to eight inches running across the rock and finding the dry arroyos, eventually reaching the Rio Grande.

Jake took off his helmet and smiled in the dim light from the cabins. “Got ya more mojo there, too, brother. Kept ya safe all the way in.”

“Yep, you are, from here on, Lightnin’ Jake.”

The magical desert sky and the western landscapes had fooled me yet again. And made me believe we were immortal.

Jacob Fuller, Dec. 1940 – Mar. 2024 RIP

This article was originally published on Texas to the world.

By James Moore  

“Mr. Speaker, our Nation depends on immigrants’ labor, and I hope we can create an immigration system as dependable as they are.” – U.S. Cong. Luis Gutiérrez.

Politics needs enemies to move constituencies. Fear doesn’t just sell, it motivates, and divides. The strategy for succeeding in American electoral politics has been, for several decades, to scare voters and convince them the opposition is about to unleash great danger upon the masses.

The tactic was artfully practiced with vigor by Republican consultant Lee Atwater, who used a Black convicted killer, released on a weekend furlough by the governor of Massachusetts, and who had become recalcitrant and committed rape, assault, and armed robbery while outside his prison walls.

Although the program helped to rehabilitate criminals in the state, Governor Michael Dukakis suffered political blame for the crimes of Willie Horton. Horton had always been referred to as William prior to his infamy, but Atwater applied a diminutive to make him less formal, and told his colleagues that he’d use the criminal to “strip the bark off the little bastard” (Dukakis) and make the public “think Horton is his running mate.”

The case became a centerpiece of the 1988 presidential campaign. GOP support groups put a mug shot of Horton into campaign ads for their candidate, George H.W. Bush, and the fear mongering began to move the political needle. Racism was barely sub-textual and the goal was to convince white, middle class voters that if the liberal Democrat were elected that scary black killers would be released into the streets of America, and it worked. Bush the elder became president and Atwater was lionized as a political genius, though, on his death bed, dying of a brain tumor while just 50 years of age, he apologized to Dukakis and the other people victimized by his radical campaign tactics.

Apologies from political operatives often lack sincerity even as they are facing mortality. Atwater claimed in the last days of his life that he had found faith and comfort in a living Bible he had been reading. Ed Rollins, Reagan’s campaign manager, took solace in Atwater’s story about the Bible and told colleague Mary Matalin that he hoped the craven consultant had finally found some peace. In a documentary, Matalin relieved Rollins of that final delusion about Atwater by saying, “Ed, when we were cleaning up his things afterwards, the Bible was still wrapped in the cellophane and had never been taken out of the package, which just told you everything there was. He was spinning right to the end.”

Lying might be a more accurate term than spinning. Atwater’s political descendent and confederate, unsurprisingly, was Karl Rove, who refined the ideas the two had developed while traveling the country and organizing college Republicans. When Rove later promoted the idea of wedge issues to separate out voters, what he was really doing was creating more boogiemen to frighten people. In Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign, Rove pushed an anti-gay marriage constitutional amendment for state ballots, which he knew would motivate Christian evangelicals to vote for Bush in bigger numbers. The rhetoric stirring up the issue informed the public that the idea of homosexual marriage was a threat to the very way of life in America because it undermined the traditional concept of family. Even black voters got the message. The Sunday before Election Day in 2004, I was in an African American church in Columbus, Ohio and was stunned when the pastor concluded his sermon with a political admonishment to his rather large congregation.

“When you go to the polls this coming Tuesday,” he said. “I have this message for you to take into the booth with you. Don’t you dare vote against God. Now let us pray.”

Bush, whose flaws as a leader were many and manifest, did not have a homophobic cell in his body, but he carried Ohio by turning LGBTQ voters into a danger to the republic, and even traditionally liberal and Christian African Americans got a bit of a fright. The victory was also made possible by hiding a significant sexual orientation secret of a top GOP operative. The head of the Republican National Committee, Ken Mehlman, who was put in charge of running the anti-gay marriage amendment campaign in various states, was a closeted gay man. When asked about his personal life by a reporter at an Ohio rally, Mehlman, who did not come out until after his political career, said only, “You have asked a question no one should have to answer,” and he spun and his heels and left. After Mehlman came out in 2010, he became an advocate for gay marriage. I brought the contradictions up with Bush during an off camera interview in 2004 and asked him how he could reconcile the inherent meanness of the strategy with who he was as a person, and all he said was, “It’s just politics, Jimmy.”

Rove was hiding a stark hypocrisy in his family, too. On the eve of Karl’s eighteenth birthday, his father, Lou Rove, home for Christmas, announced he was leaving and would seek a divorce. Lou was actually Karl’s stepfather but had raised him from an early age, and he had no relationship with his biological dad. Lou, an oil company geologist, had decided he had reached the point where he wanted to live openly as a gay man. Karl’s mother, eventually, committed suicide, though he never acknowledged any linkage to that act and the trauma of the failed marriage and Lou’s shocking announcement regarding his true sexual orientation. Estranged from Lou, Karl eventually reconciled with the man who had raised him and made annual visits with his dad in Palm Springs, California, often taking road trips together to Santa Fe. The politics Karl was pursuing regarding gay marriage that fall with the Bush campaign had the potential to complicate Lou Rove’s life, or any partner of his. But, hey, “It’s just politics, Jimmy.” The contradiction probably did not ever register with Karl’s diminutive conscience.

The radical right, empowered by Trump, continues attempts to marginalize Blacks and LGBTQ persons but the new scary icons are brown-skinned people from south of the border. Cultural and political battle lines are stretched along the Mexican frontier but the issue of immigration is informing almost every voter in 2024. In Texas, the legislature passed a law that empowers local law enforcement to arrest undocumented immigrants, and, in some cases, even take them back to ports of entry for deportation. Unfortunately, for Texas Trumpers like the perpetually angry governor, immigration, customs, and border protection are powers bestowed upon the federal government by the Constitution. Even the conservative appeals courts have, thus far, stopped enforcement of the law pending a hearing on its constitutional viability.

Because “they are not sending their best people,” Texas has erected a Berlin Wall on the border to keep the hungry, homeless, and financially desperate from entering a state in dire need of workers. We are very capably managing to both despise and rely on undocumented immigrants in Texas. They are essential to almost every economic endeavor in the state. The housing boom has been utterly reliant on cheap labor from Mexico, the overwhelming majority of which is here without legal papers. They are, nonetheless, skilled trades people who frame homes, put in electrical wiring, do brick and mortar work, roofing, paving, and any type of skill required to finish a home. Mexican laborers are reliable, work hard, and earn less, much to the delight of the big businesses that take advantage of their desperation for employment. Companies are also able to avoid paying for benefits like health care or unemployment, which adds to their profit margins.

Texas, expressing excessive anger about undocumented immigration, is the state most heavily dependent upon their employment. Harvesting the cantaloupes in the Pecos River Valley or wheat in the South Plains or Ruby Red grapefruit in the Rio Grande Valley or working the legendary ranches or cooking at your favorite restaurant or welding I-beams on high rises or hanging sheet rock in new suburban homes, Mexicans and immigrants from Central and South America have made significant contributions to the economic prosperity of Texas. In fact, they have always participated, and they always will be an important part of the state’s capitalistic enterprises. These inescapable facts also consistently make for strange accommodations.

When Rick Perry was governor of Texas, one of his biggest donors was a major statewide homebuilder, who relied heavily upon illegal immigrants to build his neighborhoods. Perry reached a gentleman’s agreement with the construction magnate that allowed the governor to complain publicly and campaign on illegal immigration as long as he didn’t pass any legislation that might reduce the homebuilder’s cheap labor pool. They both kept up their ends of the bargain, too. The less-than-finesse approach for Trumpublicans is also to vilify immigrants while continuing to provide them employment and hold down labor costs. They keep the rooms clean at Mar a Lardo and the orangeatan’s golf course carefully groomed, too, in a manner that any putt Trump makes will curl toward the hole.

Illegal immigration can be brought to a halt, however, without the expense of building a wall, which will never work. Congress needs to pass a simple law making it a felony with a minimum of five years in prison if an employer knowingly hires an undocumented worker. No early release. Never happen, of course, because the great driving wheel of the American economy relies on immigrants to keep it turning, regardless of whether they have papers. Washington has implemented an e-verify program but uncountable businesses say it is costly and burdensome to implement and use effectively. The digital identification system of legal immigrant workers has had an impact on unlawful employment, but enforcement has been lax and difficult. Were the system properly working, those would likely not have been immigrants who died in the Baltimore Harbor bridge disaster. They would have been American citizens.

America’s problems with immigration and narcotics are consequences of our own behavior. Violent cartels would not be flourishing in Mexico if there were not huge demand north of the Rio Grande. Consumption of contrabando never goes down, and supply lines are always open, regardless of the risk. Immigration, too, would not be at crisis levels were it not for our adventurism in Central America, tossing over governments and propping up strongmen who gave succor to our corporate imperialism. We turned several countries into peasant fruit plantations, and when narcotrafficantes came along, an abundant and disenchanted labor supply was at the ready. The attendant violence, though, and social breakdown has sent them north by the hundreds of thousands, and they will keep coming because they have heard us tell the world we are the land of opportunity.

Which we are. Until a bridge falls down. And we get a peek under the covers at the naked truth.

This article was originally published on Texas to the world.

By James Moore  

Moses was mad.

Our bus was rolling to a pancake breakfast being held to support the 1996 presidential campaign of Phil Gramm. The Republican Senator from Texas was energized by his delusion that America wanted a corporate tax cutter with a drawl and tortured 19th century metaphors about who “pulls the wagon” for the nation. On this cold and snowy morning, Charlton Heston, the actor, had for reasons known only to himself, had agreed to speak at the dawn meal to fire up support for Gramm.

I do not remember what Heston told the surprisingly large crowd in the Boone, Iowa community center that morning but I assume his baritone was as persuasive as when he was reading the Ten Commandments on film. His celebrity was probably all that mattered to the audience, that and the pancakes, of course. I did notice that Mose’s toupee was tilted slightly to the side throughout his speech and seemed a touch more off center as he signed autographs. Heston apparently did not notice his aesthetic comportment was slightly askew until he visited a restroom and when he came out an unmistakable scowl added dark definition to his already serious countenance.

Back outside in the snow after some satisfying bacon and flapjacks, I saw Heston towering over a diminutive campaign assistant, emphatically communicating her shortcomings, most likely for not taking him aside and delicately explaining his rug was tilted and people were not hearing a word he said because of the lack of hirsute symmetry. Maybe that’s why Sen. Gramm finished fifth in Iowa that year with a little over 9,000 votes. I do not know, but I am confident that we did not see Moses again that day and he was supposed to be present and sonorous at every event.

Every bit of every Iowa caucus is as much absurdist folly as that event with Charlton Heston. Why does a state with a tiny percentage of the nation’s population at 3,200,000 people, 90 percent of whom are white, get outsized influence on a critical national decision? I am sure everyone knows the story about the unknown governor from Georgia who decided to go to Iowa and jump start his campaign prior to New Hampshire’s primary. Jimmy Carter ran around the state in rental cars and probably shook 3 million hands, and won, which set him on a course to the White House. But that was 1976 and voters across the country knew far less about Iowa than they do in 2024, and it is a state that is not representative of the larger country’s diversity. What the overwhelmingly conservative Whites of Iowa desire can hardly be considered reflective of the national preference.

The cause of this silliness is the media. Yeah, I’m a long-time ex-TV news guy and I’m blaming the media. Trump’s victory in this week’s caucuses is being treated like an inaugural parade and a coronation all rolled into one big hype show. But what did he win? Iowa has about 752,000 registered Republicans and only 15 percent of them went to a caucus and voted, which is approximately half of normal turnout. Trump got a whopping 55,000 of their votes. Mr. Excitement, even exercising the Adderral advantage, could not get them out of their houses to play voter in the cold. Only 110,000 turned up their fur collars and bent into the wind to serve their future dictator, but now the narrative is Trump has taken the first step in his restoration to president.

Like piss he has. Iowa means almost nothing, and certainly has less influence every four years. Just ask President Ted Cruz, who won there in 2016 and defeated the man from Mar a Lardo. President Rick Santorum can also tell you about how his 2012 win in Iowa got him into the White House just like it helped President Mike Huckabee realize his cornpone dreams of putting his hand on the Bible for the inaugural. Remember President Bob Dole? No? Nobody does, but he won the caucus in the land between two rivers and learned campaign tactics from President Phil Gramm. Iowa is a predictor of nothing in the national political process and needs to permanently return to being a state that grows corn and stops trying to grow presidents. Hell, according to the Des Moines Register, 25 percent of the Iowa’s caucus goers said they will not vote for Trump in the general election, eight percent would seek a third-party candidate, and six percent preferred to support Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Lop those percentages off Trumpie’s 55,000 total and he’s down to just over 30,000. Not exactly a bigly win.

Watching reporters, inexplicably, standing in the cold and explaining the dangers of Iowa’s wind chills, prompted me to recall a story I reported during the 1988 New Hampshire primary. Democrat Dick Gephardt from Missouri was trying hard to win and was getting to every event and function on the party’s agenda. My crew and I happened to get caught out in a New England blizzard and discovered Gephardt was nearby shaking hands in the driving snow during a day of dog sled racing. The visuals were too tempting to sit in the rental car with our fingers curled around the heater vents. Barking dogs and blinding snow and sleds leaving tracks that were quickly covered by new snow as we taped the race provided great b-roll so I interviewed a man who would be president while snowflakes accumulated on his bushy eyebrows, and he kept brushing them off.

Gephardt, who had a commendable legislative record of meaningful policy, possessed a pleasing voice and the look but he could not win over New Hampshire voters. Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis defeated the Missouri congressman by an almost 2-1 margin before driving his campaign off the cliff in a tank. But why do the political parties give New Hampshire importance in the primary campaign for president? The state presently has about a million registered voters, divided almost equally between the GOP and Dems while 40 percent claim to be independent. Even back then, though, standing in snow almost to my knees, I was confounded by the silliness of my interview about politics and policy in a blizzard with a sled race and yapping dogs in the background to see if a stranger from Missouri could win over White folks in a state full of ‘em. A colleague on the press bus had come to refer to New Hampshire as the “NASCAR state of the North,” which might have spoken to its politics but not its diversity. Southern states have demonstrably larger populations of persons of color.

New Hampshire’s 1.4 million residents are whiter than Iowa, and I am not talking about the snow. Figures from the Census Bureau indicate 92.6 percent are White, 2 percent are Black, and 4.6 percent Hispanic or Latino. Again, not exactly a diverse population for determining the nation’s leadership, and in many ways, the fates of the wider world since American escapades tend to impact global economies and politics. When New Hampshire and Iowa are finished putting their imprimatur on the presidential nominating races, there is often a fatalist sense of inevitability regarding outcomes in the subsequent states, and we end up with Presidents who ought to be greeters at Walmart instead of sitting at the Resolute Desk.

We need to stop the madness and find a new methodology for picking presidential nominees. Maybe the best approach is to select 25 states with diverse populations and have two or three Super Tuesdays. It would give candidates time to raise money and then campaign and deliver a real reading of what American voters want because the demographic includes people other than Whites acting cranky in the snow or at home. By holding caucuses and a primary in two small states on the front end of the process, we also give underfunded candidates a chance to make an impact. That’s probably a good thing, but they are achieving among an almost homogenous population cohort. Let’s move on, or maybe we won’t have to worry about elections in 2028.

Cuz God gave us a dictator.

This article was originally published in Texas to the World.

By James Moore  

“In youth we learn; in age we understand.” – Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

Nothing mattered to Stanley McMullen more than his dogs. When he came home from work on the Fisher Body assembly line, the first thing he did after stepping out of his faded brown station wagon, was walk to the dog pens on the back of his property. People thought he owned that car to make room for his six children, but there were steel cages in back to haul his dogs on hunting trips. There was never room in the vehicle for Stanley’s entire family, which was not a cause for concern to him since he never saw a reason for group travel. The dogs, though, had to go hunting every Saturday night in the north woods of Michigan.

The two oldest sons, Sonny and Georgie, were my friends, and I was often in their backyard playing baseball when their father game home from the factory. We always stopped throwing the ball or fielding grounders as their dad walked silently from the car to check on his dogs. The boys never even said hello to him because they knew his mood was going to be a consequence of what he saw in the dog pens. They had been given the responsibility of the twice daily feeding and watering, adding fresh hay to the crude wooden houses, and raking poop into a corner to be collected later in the week and spread across the family garden. If inspection resulted in Stanley’s dissatisfaction, the boys were often slapped around or subjected to a swinging razor strop as punishment for mistreatment of the animals.

When the gate was closed and their father began his slow shuffle up the hill to the house, his sons tried to read his face because he rarely spoke. I remember a day, though, when Sonny, momentarily unafraid, asked favor in return.

“Everything okay, Daddy?” he asked.

“Yeh.” Stanley’s answer was more grunt than word, and he did not look at his eldest son.

“Does it mean we can have popcorn tonight, Daddy? Please?”

“We’ll see.”

“Can Jimmy spend the night, too, and eat with us?”

Stanley stopped and looked in my direction. I never wanted any attention from Mr. McMullen because I was certain my presence displeased him for reasons unknown, and I was confident he would knock me on the head with his fist just as readily as he did his four sons. I was equally certain he would just explain it to my father by telling him I deserved whatever he might have done to me, and no real questions would be asked.

“We’ll see,’“ Stanley said, and opened the screen door to the kitchen.

Typical Home of the Dixie Diaspora

Sinewy and ectomorphic, every part of Stanley appeared lined by blood veins standing out against his skin. He ate prodigiously, but had no trace of even a middle-aged spread above his waistline. His default personality was to be grim and discontent and always on the edge of either a vocal or physical outburst. The McMullen children made it their practice to engage their father only as necessary because they feared any request might be met with a whirling hand or a threat. Their mother, Madelyn, comported herself with the same trepidation regarding her husband.

“I don’t think I can spend the night,” I told Sonny. “My mom won’t want me to because she’s working late tonight at the restaurant.”

“Your mom doesn’t like us, does she?” Georgie asked.

“How am I supposed to know? I guess she thinks your dad is too much like mine and she worries about me getting hurt sometime when I’m over here.”

Georgie shrugged but Sonny laughed. He was thirteen that summer, older than me by two years, and already growing cynical toward people and circumstances. In school, he was in frequent fights because they were the singular tactic he knew that settled arguments, generally in his favor, and gave him social stature, a lesson he had taken from his frequently violent father. Also, getting expelled did not bother him. Little was more enjoyable to Sonny than being home from school while his parents were at work and he could do what he wanted, which likely would have led to punishment if he were to be found out.

“If you don’t stay the night,” Sonny asked, “You wanna go coon huntin’ with us Saturday and do the campout?”

“Yeah, I guess so, if my dad is going.”

“My dad said he is.”

“Okay.”

Coon hunting was a form of recreation and income for families in our neighborhood. We were all part of the Dixie Diaspora, up from the South to make dependable incomes in the car and steel factories instead of swinging hoes in the cotton fields of the Mississippi River bottomlands. Much of the culture from south of the Mason-Dixon Line had come with us in our rattly old cars and cardboard boxes of modest belongings, which meant racism traveled as well as coon hunting. Although most of the families in our little settlement, north of Detroit and near Flint, were low income even by the standards of the 50s and 60s, they were also all white. Our parents, taking on mortgage payments, and a developer, had managed to convince VA lenders to redline the location and keep out black homebuyers, and the discrimination was not easily ended. In 1969, when I graduated from a very large high school with several hundred in each class, there was not a single black student enrolled.

The McMullens were from outside of Philadelphia, Mississippi, which became the site of some of the most notorious racist acts of violence during the protest era of Civil Rights. My father, too, had spent much of his youth nearby on the Choctaw Indian Reservation near Noxapader, where my grandfather taught school and received a house and land for farming along with his modest salary. My grandparents were raising corn and cotton and nine children. Racism and hunting were breathed into a white child’s being in every image and action they observed in their surroundings. These habits and personal traits were not to be abandoned when families left sharecropping and farming to seek employment on assembly lines and in the foundries of the Midwest.

The hunting, and even fishing, remained essential to survival for families with too many bills and not enough income, and that was the overwhelming majority of us before unions began negotiating better wages and benefits. My father, who had shot humans in World War II, was likely a proficient soldier because of hunting skills he had learned and polished while growing up in the South. When money became scarce, food did, too, and the Southern men living around us were not averse to walking to the edge of the development to hunt squirrel and rabbit. A quarter mile down the narrow road from our house, a stand of great oaks and white pines rose next to a rolling pasture with a gravel pit full of water. Nobody knew who owned the land but it served as a place to harvest small game and the echoes of gunfire rattled windows on the homes where families were slowly adjusting to urbanization.

Daddy’s brothers said he was so good with a .22 caliber rifle that he could shoot a squirrel out of the air as it jumped between limbs of a tree, and even as he stood a few hundred feet distant. Squirrel and rabbit were infrequent items on our diet, though, because our mother worked as a waitress and often brought home unserved food that had spent the evening setting under a heat lamp. My mouth still waters when a see a white, cardboard To-Go box with grease smears on its sides. The McMullen kids, meanwhile, had acquired such a distaste for the wildlife that Sonny told me he often chose to not eat dinner when it was served, and slipped his cuts of meat between his legs while his dad was not looking. I thought maybe that was why he looked like Stanley’s wizened, teenaged doppelganger. There was in him, though, a broken piece of a boy that was going to make him grow crooked as a man, and I am confident it was his father who had done that damage.

My first dinner at the McMullen’s table remains one of the oddest sights ever to hit my retinas. Sonny had been told they were having the rare treat of pork chops and that if he wanted to share his with me, I could stay and eat, and spend the night, assuming I called my mother at the restaurant. Everyone, including Madelyn, who had just finished frying the chops, had to be seated before Stanley came to the table to serve. He was shirtless for dinner, and when he pulled out a chair I saw a few of his fat veins throbbing between his neck and caved chest. His gray eyes, set beneath a nearly Cro-Magnon brow, were dull and beady as he looked at his gathered family. I had never been this close to Stanley and the proximity did nothing to ease my childhood discomfort.

Pulling out his brown metal folding chair from the sagging wooden table, he stepped up onto the seat and stood erect before squatting on his haunches while he balanced a tray of pork chops his wife had provided. Stanley wore only loose, gray cotton sweatpants, cinched at his waist by what I thought were shoelaces strung together, as he placed the platter of food on the table. His knees were bent high enough to almost frame his face after he had squatted, and he balanced on the folding chair with a confidence that would have made an outsider think he was a forest creature come indoors for the first time.

“Who goes first today, Daddy?” Georgie was hungry and anxious to be served.

“I reckon it’ll be Sonny,” Stanley said. “Since he’s got company and gonna share. That right Sonny?”

“Yes, sir.”

Sonny raised his plate next to me, I thought to hand to his father, but instead tilted it at an angle and faced its surface toward Stanley, who promptly grabbed a pork chop with his fingers and spun it in the air across the table like he was dealing a face card in a game of poker. Sonny only had to move his plate slightly for the chop to land perfectly, and he lowered it to begin cutting off my share. The two little girls at the end of the table giggled and their father turned momentarily in their direction and they fell immediately silent. The other boys raised their plates and caught their flying chops as Stanley dealt them out to all his family with the exception of the two girls under age six. I ate my carved-off section of a chop and began trying to figure out an excuse for leaving and not sleeping over. I came up with nothing.

The McMullen’s house was the exact same size and floor plan as the one my parents had purchased with three bedrooms, one bath, a kitchen and a living room in just over 800 square feet. The four boys slept on two sets of bunks in one room, which I had not ever seen until that night. Every piece of clothing they owned was on the floor or a bed. The closets were doorless and empty, except for unmatched shoes and dirty underwear on the floors. Not an inch of the rooms floor was visible beneath the scattered clothing. I really wanted to go home to the comfort of my mother’s meticulous cleanliness but it was dark and I doubted Stanley would let me leave unless I managed to vomit on his sons’ clothes, which felt like an increasing possibility.

“Y’all can come out now.”

Stanley was calling to the four boys and me, who had been told to go spend time in the bedroom. I did not know what we were supposed to do because there were no books or magazines or a TV and it felt like we had been sequestered in that tiny space for days, though it turned out to be just over two hours. Sonny was first out the door and went straight to his dad.

“Can we make popcorn now, Daddy?” he asked.

“I reckon.” Stanley did not turn away from the TV set across the room.

“How many ‘poppers’ can we make, Daddy? Can we make two?”

“That’ll probably be enough.”

Sonny went to the kitchen alone and grabbed a plastic container of grease and lard his mother kept in the refrigerator. Two large scoops were dropped into a deep, cast iron pot and he took handfuls of seed from a can and spread them atop the fat, and put on a top. I saw him staring at the cookware, waiting for it to sizzle and start popping, and I felt sad because I thought, even then, I might be seeing the greatest happiness he ever experienced with his family. I had never recalled ever seeing Sonny smile until the moment he walked into the living room with two oversized plastic mixing bowls piled high with popcorn. He presented one to his dad and the seven of us kids gathered around the second helping, which he had gently sat on the floor across from the television.

The children consumed our popcorn rather quickly, grabbing frantically for more than our hands could hold, and when Sonny looked at the half eaten bowl on his father’s lap, he was still craving the treat.

“Can I make another popper, Daddy? We had to share too much.”

“Y’all just have what’s left of mine.”

“But it’s not very much for seven kids, Daddy. Can I just…….”

“I don’t want to hear anything more.”

Sonny fell silent, as did the rest of us, and he reached for his father’s bowl, which was gone after our grappling fingers spilled kernels across the floor. Madelyn had never said a word throughout our snacking and crunching and she stared at the rerun of “Gunsmoke,” flickering across the black and white screen, a Western that fascinated Stanley as much as my father. I recognized Madelyn’s expression years later when I came of age and assumed she was taking a few moments to ask herself how she had ended up in that cluttered and messy room with six children and a crude country boy who cared more about his coon dogs than his family’s life.

Stanley’s dogs were blue tick hounds. He said no dog was better at treeing a coon than a blue tick. You can’t teach any hound to do what they do, he liked to explain, it’s just in their blood. All six of them were howling in their cages in the back of his station wagon the next Saturday as several families set up camp on the Shiawassee River, dark, slow-moving water course that slipped across lower Michigan. The dogs must have smelled coons in the tangy autumn air because the animals of other hunters were barking with a kind of cacophonous wail between the trees and across the river while other hunters arrived in their pickups and camper trailers. By dark, a big bonfire flew at the night, adults were drinking from bottles in brown bags, and children were scrambling along the edge of the firelight, running toward the perimeter of night, eager for the hunt.

The Blue Tick Hound, Nature’s Finest “Gun Dog.”

We had no idea what was coming. Sonny and Georgie and I went to the station wagon and helped Stanley leash his dogs. He said he was using a shot gun instead of rifle because even with strong flashlights a direct hit was going to be too difficult. The dogs pulled at their restraints, which Stanley had fastened in loops around his belt. With his 12 gauge on his shoulder, the anxious, barking dogs pulled him into the black woods, and we followed. My father paid us no attention and had focused on Stanley and his blue ticks. When the animals, who were, oddly, without names, smelled a coon, they were crazed, and their leashes unclipped. They ran ahead of the waving flashlights, found their prey, and chased it up a tree.

“They got us three up there, James,” Stanley said to my father. “You see ‘em?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“Ain’t that somethin? Tell ya what, you take that one over yonder, if you can see to shoot him with your rifle. Sonny point the light at that one on the right.”

“I got him,” Daddy said, and fired. The animal fell with a thump into the long grass beneath the trees, and the dogs had to be called off before they ripped apart the fur.

“See if I can get me two at once,” Stanley said before he pulled the trigger on his shotgun. One animal fell, and the other, wounded, still clung to the limb with its claws, which set the dogs to making a discordant noise that only barely resembled a bark. I thought they sounded like they were being tortured, but when the coon finally fell bloody from the high limb, Stanley let the dogs tear at it with their teeth until their snouts were covered in blood and there was not much left that resembled a formerly living mammal.

Stanley and my father killed more than two dozen raccoons that night. I went back, instead, toward the fire, yellow and faltering through the trees, and wrapped myself in Army surplus blankets, listening as the sound of the marauding dogs grew more distant, and I fell off to sleep. In the morning, I saw Stanley, as energetic as he had appeared when the hunt began, loading the raccoon carcasses into his neighbor’s truck bed to be delivered to his house. I assumed they were intended to be used as dog food. I was wrong. That evening, when my father and I went to look at the bounty, more than twenty coonskin furs, tails still attached and bouncing in the wind, were hanging from a nylon rope clothesline in the McMullen’s back yard.

“Why’s Mr. McMullen got the furs hanging out on the line, Daddy?” I was profoundly baffled, more than normal.

“Gotta get ‘em ready to sell, dry ‘em out, cut off leftover bloody flesh.”

“People buy coon furs? What for?”

“You seen them TV shows, buddy boy, with Davey Crockett wearin’ a coonskin hat, ain’t ya? That made ‘em popular with a lotta kids. That’s why people buy the furs. The higher ups, too, that got money, they make fancy coats out of coonskins. Even over in Europe is what I hear.”

“Do rich people pay a lot of money for coonskins, Daddy?”

“I don’t know. But whatever they pay, I’m gettin’ half of it.”

Daddy went into the McMullen’s house and I stayed outside looking for Sonny and Georgie. My father got into a loud argument with Stanley and I took off down the street, breaking into a run. I always ran to make my anxiousness fade and clear my head, trying to understand our little world. We had electricity and running water and an oil heater in the middle of our house to keep us warm in the winter and some people in our neighborhood even had new cars, which seemed impossible to me. The country boy hunters from the woods of Mississippi still seemed to be having trouble adjusting to urban living. The market for coonskins probably was not going to be very reliable, but they could still see an animal in a dark woods better than they could the future.

I understood nothing in those days, and mostly still do not.

This article was originally published in Texas to the World.

By James Moore

During the Reagan era of the 1980s, America and the Republican Party were still selling the idea that the U.S. was exposed to the dangers of Communism. The president was very effective at spreading the fear across the land, and his acolytes even used the premise to support their election campaigns. Republican Texas Congressman Jim Collins ran TV commercials warning his constituents in Dallas that Nicaragua was just a two-day drive from Texas. Even back then, though, gas prices made it unlikely a Central American country could afford to even reach the Rio Grande.

Americans are reliably uninformed about the world outside their borders. The Internet has transformed our ability to get information, but it has also enabled the access to falsehoods that can seem even more viable than the facts. With the Internet, LBJ might have had less trouble spreading his nonsense of the “Domino Theory,” the fear that if Vietnam became Communist the hordes of Southeast Asia would soon be at our doorstep. His task was made much easier, however, by simply manufacturing the false flag event of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, which he used to launch a failed and purposeless war that cost more than 58,000 lives of U.S. service members. The fake attack was fed to TV networks and newspaper correspondents, and a war ensued. Vietnam, in 1995, provided a formal estimate that more than 2,000,000 civilians were killed and 1,100,000 fighters.

History’s oldest lesson is that the occupied always outlast the occupiers, which is why much of American imperialism since World War II has involved CIA facilitated coups. When the democratically elected leader of a country defies our paradigm for democracy and challenges policies beneficial to American corporations and military power, our government finds clandestine measures to overthrow the non-compliant politicians and defy the will of their people. Inevitably, complications arise from our meddling, and history’s course is altered, generally not for the good. The most glaring example of the past 75 years happened in Iran, and we are still dealing with the geo-political ramifications.

In 1953, the grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt, Kermit Roosevelt, was a leader in the orchestration of deposing Mohammad Mosaddegh, who had been elected Prime Minister of Iran. Roosevelt was a CIA operative who organized and paid politicians to fight against the democratic government while also busing in violent non-state actors to brutalize supporters of Mosaddegh. Ultimately, U.S. taxpayers funded the violent overthrow of a democracy. The sole reason for the intervention was because the U.S. and the U.K. were resisting an audit of their oil companies to make certain they were paying fees owed for extraction rights. The CIA installed Shah Reza Pahlevi, who was, quite literally, a puppet of the West. Pahlevi tortured and killed political opponents using his secret police, SAVAK, which was fine with American and British powers as long as he left alone their oil companies and spent Iranian wealth buying armaments from multi-national defense contractors in the U.S.

The outcome of such oppression tends to be predictable. Only sixteen years transpired before the Islamic Revolution, which resulted in 52 Americans taken hostage at the U.S. embassy in Teheran. Iran’s internal turmoil was never truly grasped by the U.S. population and its fixation was on the hostage crisis, a standoff that was a principle cause of President Jimmy Carter’s political demise. A rescue attempt he ordered failed after a helicopter crash in the Iranian desert, and covert back channel messages to Iran’s new leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini, led to the revolutionaries holding the hostages until after Ronald Reagan was elected to benefit his political power and stature. While a subsequent U.S. president vilified Iran’s religious government as part of the “Axis of Evil,” American citizens remained largely oblivious to the geo-political crimes committed in their name before Iran became an Islamic Republic. U.S. policy with Iran and in the wider Mideast still suffers from its earlier sins.

A year after the American coup in Iran, the emboldened CIA used its blueprint in the Western Hemisphere to toss out Guatemala’s president, Jacobo Árbenz, who had been elected by his fellow citizens. Árbenz had committed the un-American sin of seeking land reforms that upset U.S. corporations along with his push for modest wage increases for peasants working for United Fruit Company. The coup had been authorized by President Eisenhower, whose key staffers Allen and John Foster Dulles, were busily trying to shape the Post War world to fit their vision of American global hegemony, and they were empowered by developing the CIA. Both men had ties to United Fruit and when Árbenz had been toppled they convinced U.S. leadership to facilitate Guatemalan military regimes with funds, training, and equipment to set up decades of oppressive rulers acting at the behest of American interests.

Eventually, social movements arose in Guatemala but those military units moved through indigenous communities, mostly Mayan, and committed 600 massacres between 1981 and 1983. Reagan, still pushing a communism phobia, asked congress for more money to support the dictatorial regimes running Guatemala even as the genocide of Mayans was unfolding. His advisors comforted military killers of the peasants with the message that, “Mr. Reagan recognizes that a good deal of dirty work has to be done.” The American president publicly complained that his hand-picked dictator of Guatemala, Efraín Ríos Montt, was getting a “bum rap” and was “totally dedicated to democracy.” Montt’s commitment to democracy apparently prompted him to kill 75,000 indigenous people, an attempted genocide. Reagan’s dedication to his friend, though, was unwavering and he referred to Montt in public statements as “a man of great personal integrity and commitment.”

Less than a day after the American president’s initial praise, Montt’s troops killed 160 people in the Dos Erres village, a number than included 65 children. Witnesses claimed the children’s heads had been smashed on rocks. This must have been the “dirty work” Reagan was mentioning. Ultimately, the U.N. reported that between 1960 and 1996, 200,000 people had died, 50,000 had been disappeared, and 93 percent of human rights violations were committed by paramilitary and state forces, funded and backed by American taxpayers and their presidents. The CIA, trying to justify its geo-political histrionics, conducted an operation called PBHistory to search for evidence of Soviet influence in the country, and found nothing.

Reagan was merely continuing a policy the CIA had implemented after its successful coup in Iran. The Soviet Union was our “throw-down” boogie man and political leaders in the U.S. spent much of their time in office convincing constituents commies were around every corner. In his book, Open Veins of Latin America, Eduardo Galeano described the horrors perpetrated by strong men dictators living off American support in Guatemala.

“In 1967, all the men of the village of Cajón del Rio were exterminated; those of Tituque had their intestines gouged out with knives; in Piedra Parada they were flayed alive; in Agua Blanca de Ipala they were burned alive after being shot in the legs. A rebellious peasant’s head was stuck on a pole in the center of San Jorge’s plaza. In Cerro Gordo the eyes of Jaime Velázquez were filled with pins. In the cities, the doors of the doomed were marked with black crosses. Occupants were machine gunned as they emerged, their bodies thrown into ravines.”

My first trip to Central America in the 1980s was to report on a U.S. military exercise of massive proportions, designed, obviously, to deter Soviet interest in the region and let Communists know that interference was our job, not theirs. I was stunned by the poverty in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and nearly emotionally exhausted every morning when I walked out of my hotel to be surrounded by a dozen naked children, homeless and begging for food. A few hundred miles distant, on the Nicaraguan border, the Contras were growing fat on steaks and lobster, champagne and beer, provided by illegal funding from the U.S. government. Honduras was being used as a military staging area to destroy revolutionary movements in Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador. U.S. mining and banana companies had gained control of the country by backing authoritarian leaders willing to work for American corporate interests and plunder.

Honduran Immigrants Bound for the U.S. Border

The Contras, little more than motorcycle thugs and drug traffickers, were described by Reagan as, “the moral equivalent of America’s founding fathers.” In fact, they were servants of the American obsession to stop social movements in Central America, which threatened U.S. economics and control of the region’s natural resources. The Contras were trying to stop the Sandinistas’ ascension to power after their overthrow of Anastasio Somoza, another tin pot dynastic dictator whose family had used the country to enrich themselves while oppressing workers and political opposition. Reagan operatives, using the CIA, established arms sales to Iran, a sworn enemy of the U.S., as a method to support the Contras. Money from the sale of weapons to Iran would go to the Contras to circumvent congressional opposition to their funding, a tactic that led to an investigation and one of Reagan’s many controversies, which became known as Iran-Contra.

There is neither time nor space here to relate all the American transgressions in Central America, and the ruination they have brought to the lives and environment of indigenous peoples and the general populations of Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala. Our government enabled death squads, assassinations, torture, mutilations, and disappearances in the name of keeping our authoritarian flunkies in power. Social and revolutionary movements within those countries, born of resistance to historic inequities, were brutally crushed and their leaders eliminated. There were even credible reports that the CIA was involved in helping the Contras traffic cocaine to the U.S., which may have launched the cartels and drug economies of those countries.

The chaos and harm caused by the U.S. has hardly abated and is as contemporary as the struggles of the immigrants coming to our border. As late as 2009, the Obama administration gave into pressures from American economic interests in Honduras after they became concerned about attempts to raise the minimum wage and increase community involvement on corporate projects. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton led U.S. involvement in a coup that deposed democratically-elected Manuel Zelaya. She told the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa to “engage elements of the Honduran Armed Forces and de facto regime,” which led brutal austerity measures for citizens and caused activists to be murdered. The leaders of military governments in Honduras, since the U.S. okayed the 2009 coup, have presided over what has been described as a “nightmarish cycle of violence” directed at human rights activists, peasants, indigenous leaders, journalists, LGBTQ people, and anyone who dared confront what was wanted by the authoritarian strongmen and their American masters.

Among the most prominent victims was Berta Isabel Cáceres Flores, a defender of the rights of the Lenca people and the Gualcarque River, considered sacred by indigenous peoples. Caceres organized against the construction of the Agua Zarca Dam because it threatened livelihoods and ecosystems. Her work connected the rights of indiginous peoples to resist capitalism and imperialism. She had also very publicly denounced the 2009 coup, and called out Clinton’s role, which led to assassins shooting Caceres on March 2, 2016. A court ruled that Agua Zerca Dam executives ordered her murder.

He has survived death threats and attempts on his life since February 1989. But Salman Rushdie’s luck just about ran out at the Chautauqua Institution, southwest of Buffalo in New York State. On August 12, at a venue historically celebrated for bringing education to all, the writer was stabbed incessantly by a fanatic who felt little sense of guilt or remorse. Hadi Matar only had eyes for Rushdie’s neck and abdomen. As a result of the attack, the author is likely to lose sight of one eye and possibly the use of an arm.

It was a chilling reminder that the fatwa condemning him to death never risked going stale, even if it might have been put into a form of archived cold storage. Declared by the Iran’s sickly spiritual ruler, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Rushdie’s remarkable crime was to have blasphemed against the Prophet Muhammad in the novel The Satanic Verses. The supreme leader, having hardly distinguished himself in a bloody war against Iraq, needed a supreme distraction.

The entire exercise was an example of how irony and humour have no place for dour, dogmatic priestliness. How dare an author, in a work of fiction, playfully and plausibly claim that the Prophet was not the sole editor of the message to Angel Gibreel (Gabriel), and that Satan had cheekily inserted his role into it? And that this was done using the medium of Gibreel Farishta’s hallucinations?

Dare Rushdie did, and this exhortation to state-sanctioned killing of an author and all those associated with translating and disseminating the book exposed the underbelly of cowardice that often accompanies attempts to defend literary freedoms. Rushdie’s translator Hitoshi Igarashi was, in fact, murdered, while his Norwegian publisher, William Nygaard, was gravely wounded. The Turkish translator, Aziz Nesin, escaped a mob assault that led to 37 deaths in Silvas, Turkey.

It was one thing to find fanatics who had never read the book and wished to do away with the author in a fit of state subsidised zealotry. But then there was that camp: those who, in principle, opposed the fatwa but still wished to attack Rushdie as an act of cultural understanding and solidarity with his enemies. (Grahame Wood of The Atlantic calls them the “Team To Be Sure”, who rubbished the West’s free speech defence of Rushdie, claiming that mischief might have been averted if only he hadn’t been so inclined to offend.)

The events of 1989 cast a long shadow. There were those in holy orders, who thought that the Ayatollah had a point. There was Dr. Robert Runcie, Archbishop of Canterbury, who called for a strengthening of blasphemy laws to cover religions other than Christianity, though he was also careful to “condemn incitement to murder or any other violence from any source whatever.” Very Church of England.

And there was former US President Jimmy Carter, who seemed to take issue that an author’s rights were considered fundamental even in the face of insulting religions. What, came the insinuation, about the insulted?  Where would their anger go? Rushdie’s First Amendment freedoms might be “important”, but there had been “little acknowledgment that this is a direct insult to those millions of Moslems whose sacred beliefs have been violated and are suffering in restrained silence.” Contemplated homicide against an author, in other words, was being excused, even if the “death sentence” was an “abhorrent response.”

It was even more galling to see fellow novelists mauling the underdog, showing how solidarity among scribes is rarer than you think. The Marxist author John Berger did not think much of Rushdie’s case, hiding behind a sham argument that producing threatening literature might well endanger “the lives of those who are innocent of either writing or reading the book.” Berger’s ingratiating note was an attempt to convince other Islamic leaders and statesmen to avoid “a unique 20^th-century holy war, with its terrifying righteousness on both sides.”

Roald Dahl, man of dysfunctional virtue and author of disturbed children’s tales, decided in a letter to The Times that Rushdie was a “dangerous opportunist,” as if engaging in irony in such matters is to be avoided.  He had to have been “aware of the deep and violent feelings his book would stir up among devout Muslims.” His suggestion: a modest dose of self-censorship. “In a civilized world we have a moral obligation to apply a modicum of censorship to our own work to reinforce this principle of free speech.” Censors from Moscow to Tehran would have approved.

Nor did John le Carré, consummate writer of espionage novels, disagree. “I don’t think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity,” he told The New York Times in May 1989.

In November 1997, with le Carré complaining of being unfairly branded an anti-Semite, Rushdie wrote a pointed reminder it would have been easier “to sympathize with him had he not been so ready to join in an earlier campaign of vilification against a fellow writer.” It would have been gracious were “he to admit that he understands the nature of the Thought Police a little better now that, at last in his own opinion, he’s the one in the line of fire.”

Le Carré sniped back accordingly, taking the position he claimed to have had in 1989: “that there is no law in life or nature that says great religions may be insulted with impunity.” Little time was spent then, and now, on the malicious, sinister nature of religious totalitarianism that has been a monstrous burden on expression, critique and sober thought.  Instead, the creator of Smiley and the Circus wished to strike a “less arrogant, less colonialist, and less self-righteous note than we were hearing from the safety of his admirers’ camp.”

As Wood writes, the honourable response to the attack on Rushdie would have been to admit a failure to protect a brave author and declare “that we are all Rushdie now.” Read his work; throw his name in the faces of the regime’s apologists and their homicidal dolts. After all, while the Republic of Iran has claimed to have lost active interest in killing the author, it will not object to an independent enthusiast doing the same. The decision encouraging Rushdie’s murder, stated Khomeini’s successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, “is a bullet for which there is a target. It has been shot. It will one day sooner or later hit the target.”

This crippling germ of authorial assassination is incarnated in more current forms, without the lethal element: cancel culture, the desire to actively enact one’s offended disposition to liquidate, banish and extirpate the views of your opponent. They offend you because you, somehow, have answers beyond question. Assassination is simply one of the most extreme forms of censorship, an attempt to silence and kill off the vibrant chatter that makes an intellectual world live. Sadly, as Rushdie recovers, the maybe mob and their complicity should be noted, their names marked on walls high. The inner censoring assassin is everywhere.

Making moral statements in the blood and gristle of international relations can often come across as feeble. In doing so, the maker serves the worst of all worlds: to reveal a false sense of assurance that something was done while serving no actual purpose other than to provoke. Anger, and impotence, follow.

The Biden administration is proving to be particularly good on that score. Since taking office US President Joe Biden has nipped at the heels of China’s Xi Jinping with moral urgency. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan has lectured Beijing on human rights abuses with mistaken clarity. The Pentagon has been firming up plans for militarising the Indo-Pacific and expanding its military footprint, notably in Australia.

Now comes a sporting boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics. On December 6, the White announced that US officials would not be attending the games. In the words of White House press secretary Jen Psaki, the administration would “not send any diplomatic or official representation to the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics and Paralympic Games given the PRC’s ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang and other human rights abuses.”

During the briefing, Psaki told the press about Biden’s remarks to President Xi: that “standing up for human rights is in the DNA of Americans.” Sporting personnel, however, would still be competing, suggesting that the spirals of such DNA might be wonky.

Washington’s additional aircraft carriers – the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada – proved to be three appendages in chiming imitation. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, while stating to MPs that he did not generally support such measures, thought this exceptional. “I do not think that sporting boycotts are sensible and that remains the policy of the government.”

Canada’s Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, claimed that Beijing could hardly be surprised by his country’s stance. “We have been very clear over the past many years of our deep concerns around human rights violations.” Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, in justifying not sending diplomats and politicians, suggested that it was “in Australia’s national interest” and “the right thing to do.”

Such moves strike a farcical note. For one, boycotts of the Olympics in the name of human rights abuses have generally been ineffectual. The International Olympic Committee has been a consistent and firm opponent of the formula, insisting that sporting endeavours are politically neutral matters. They have been aided by the fact that such boycotts are rarely uniform or evenly applied.

In 1956, Spain and Switzerland refused to send contingents to the Olympic Summer Games in Melbourne in protest against the Soviet invasion of Hungary. (Neither country could hardly claim to have squeaky clean human rights records, least of all Spain’s bloodstained fascist General Francisco Franco.) The Netherlands recalled their sporting team after they arrived in Melbourne for the same reason, though Egypt, Iraq and Lebanon did so for a rather different grievance: the Suez Crisis. “The little-noted absence of these athletes from competition,” writes Heather Dichter, “had no effect on global politics.”

The hollowness of these recent gestures against China is also evident by the fact that the ones who matter at such fixtures – the athletes – will be free to participate. Superficially, they have been treated as politically childish, even insentient. The competing athlete should have little time to ruminate over the plight of oppressed minorities or the conduct of a brutal regime.

This is the attractive, if fashionable nonsense of the IOC and, it should be said, many sporting bodies. It denies the reality that athletes are very much walking and participating statements of their country, whatever their personal beliefs. They often receive State funding and are implicated in their programs. Along with participation comes patriotism.

Sporting contingents have also expressed frustration at being used as examples of political furniture. The effects of US President Jimmy Carter’s decision to boycott the 22^nd Olympiad in Moscow in protest against the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union did not go down well on the performers’ circuit. Swimmer Brian Goodell, who won the 400m and 1500m freestyle events in world-record time as a stripling of 17 at the Montreal Olympics, was crushed by Carter’s decision. “In Moscow, I would have been 21 and in the prime of my career. And zippo. (Carter) screwed with everybody’s lives. I could have made some pretty good coin.” Hardly an enlightened view, but then again, athletes are rarely selected for their capacious intellects and firm moral compasses.

When whole blocs of states have pursued sporting boycotts, some measure of difference has been achieved. The New Zealand Rugby tour of apartheid South Africa in 1976 saw a number of African states demand that the IOC expel New Zealand. Officials were cool to the suggestion, arguing that rugby had last featured as an Olympic game in 1924.

The ensuing boycott by some 20 African and Arab states of the Montreal games, which also featured the withdrawal of athletes, caused quite a stir. It troubled the UN Secretary General at the time, Kurt Waldheim, who wished “to point out that the Olympic Games have become an occasion of special significance in mankind’s search for brotherhood and understanding.”

Fancifully, the Commonwealth Secretary General Shridath Ramphal went so far as to argue that participating in the games, not withdrawing from them, would aid the “propitious resolution of wider questions.”

By not participating, the countries in question helped spur one particularly propitious resolution: the signing of the 1977 Gleneagles Agreement between Commonwealth States. In reaching the agreement, the signatory members agreed to “combat the evil of apartheid by withholding any form of support for, and by taking every practical step to discourage contact or competition by their nationals with sporting organisations, teams or sportsmen from South Africa or any other country where sports are organised on the basis of race, colour or ethnic origin.” Isolated, apartheid South Africa began facing searching domestic questions about the future of that political system.

An event free of wine guzzling and canapé gobbling dignitaries is something to cheer but leaving the sporting figures out of a “sporting boycott” is a proposition that remains pointless and absurd. The point was not missed by the authoritarian IOC president Thomas Bach. “The presence of government officials is a political decision for each government so the principle of IOC neutrality applies.”

At Beijing, sporting participants will be able to avoid the Carter experiment of 1980 and the babble about human rights and the liberty of the subject. Expect a few, however, to take the knee, though not for the Uighurs. In the meantime, the policies of the PRC will remain unchanged.