Amy’s Show: The Silenced Majority
An SRO crowd of 300, mas o menos, attended the Amy Goodman benefit for Cultural Energy’s community radio station, FM KCEI, at La Martina’s (Old Martinez Hall) in Ranchos de Taos on Tuesday night. Some members of the mostly gray-headed audience hadn’t been in the hall since the boogie days of the seventies. Martina, the Teutonic toughie, has overcome a stubborn county commission in her efforts to restore and re-open the century-old dance hall and restaurant. She has transformed a disintegrating edifice into an architectural marvel (though she needs a curator for the art). The good vibes of the hall will make La Martina’s the people’s choice for community events.
And Amy was terrific. The Democracy Now show, which began in 1996, broadcasts on over 1000 stations, including TV, radio, Internet, Podcasting, etc. She spoke for an hour and a half, mentioning a litany of local, national, and worldwide stories in what amounted to a brief filed in support of the First Amendment and community–even as civil and human rights are under attack at home and abroad by proto corporate fascists.
Amy calls her show “the war and peace report.” She’s journalist-in- chief when it comes to courage and stories of both justice and injustice from Tahir Square to Madison, Wisconsin, to Zucotti Park and the Occupy movement.
Many of us bought her book, The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance, and Hope, co-written with Dennis Moynihan (available at Moby Dickens). Hope appeals to the angels in our nature in opposition to the corporate bestiality that stalks the land. Those of us who needed a boost got it last night. She works tirelessly to get the word out—to stop the murder of innocents by drone or the torture of alleged terrorists and American whistle-blowers: see Bradley Manning—and she advocates for hundreds of the deprived on death row in America’s prisons.
(By the way, Dear Reader, one of Robin Collier’s supporters from the Las Vegas Peace and Justice Center, Pat Leahan, told the audience of seeing American Drones spying and training in the Mora-San Miguel area: truth is stranger than yesterday’s satire!)
Amy mentioned how the current wars of American imperialism are mutilating a generation of men and women in the military both physically and mentally. She talked about Jim Brady, the Brady bill gun control advocate and former Ronald Reagan press officer, who couldn’t get PBS’s Jim Lehrer to ask Romney and Obama about the random gun violence in America.
(Romney wants to fire Big Bird but I hope he fires Jim Lehrer first at PBS.)
Amy’s friend Michael Moore has often said the American people are decent and compassionate and basically liberal but corporate America and the U.S. Congress have quashed dissent, exported jobs, cut taxes, and promoted schisms among the classes and races in order to maintain power. Financiers like Mitt Romney believe in globalism, which is anti-sustainability: closing plants and exporting jobs—the community be damned. Today’s elite have reversed the age-old Robin Hood principle by stealing from the working classes and the poor while keeping their ill-gotten profits in offshore accounts.
Still, the 99% are learning how to shame their corporate masters and their progeny. Read this week’s New Yorker: never has a class of billionaires been so desperate to elect one of their own in order to assure them of future profits. And they want a place in heaven.
After the last presidential debate, many of us felt let down by Obama’s weak response to the self-righteous Romney. Romney has since risen in the polls. The right wing swing toward proto-fascism began with Reagan and was reinforced by George Bush, and now we have the coup de grace in the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizen United decision.
Apparently, Chief Justice John Roberts, a Catholic, sees himself as Pope and decided to imitate the belief in transubstantiation per the Holy Eucharist. He waved his censer and transformed a profane corporation into a sacred human being–contrary to Christian dogma. We call that “hypocritical hubris”–if not outright heresy!
As Amy spoke, in addition to thinking about Joan of Arc, I was thinking about the Palestinians and their counterparts, the Native Americans. Trapped in ghettos or on the REZ—due to an accident of birth—the torture and deprivation of natives by colonists is a common crime against humanity. Now we kill Afghanis and Pakistani innocents by drone—similar to the way Colonel John Chivington led the Colorado volunteers against Native Americans in the Sand Creek Massacre during the 19th Century.
In his fine book, Hold Everything Dear, poet, critic, novelist John Berger, writes about the quality and response of Palestinians, a quality he refers to as “undefeated despair.” As Berger says, “One was born into life to share the time that repeatedly exists between moments: the time of Becoming, before Being risks to confront one yet again with undefeated despair.”
Embracing the notion of “undefeated despair” is an act of existential humanism. We shall die but we shall laugh together all the way to the grave. It will take years to reverse the loss of civil and economic rights, in America, whether due to false prophets from the world of financiers or their servants in the courts.
Between the disasters, for instance, while I was listening to Amy last night, both the San Francisco Giants and Oakland As won baseball playoff games . The As have the lowest payroll in Major League Baseball and beat for one night the high flying Tigers from Detroit–a city representing an industry bailed out of disaster by Obama. Similarly, the Giants in 2010 won the world series with a ragtag team.
At least we weren’t silent in Taos last night. Si si puede.