fired by a rodent? - The Texas Observer

CAN BILL
WHITE SAVE
THE DEMS?
Page 3
A JOURNAL OF FREE VOICES
NOVEMBER 10, 19 95 • $175
FIRED BY A RODENT?
Jim Hightower on Life After Mickey Mouse
AND
Larry King in LBJ Country
LBJ in Ho Chi Minh Country
J. Evetts Haley in a Country of His Own
DIALOGUE
Note: The following Dialogue was received in response to "A Professor's Resignation," in the Observer for September
29, 1995.
A Visit to West Papua
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2 • NOVEMBER 10, 1995
(The following is excerpted from a letter,
dated September 27, by Professor Steven
Feld to William H. Cunningham, Chancellor of the University of Texas System.)
Dear Dr. Cunningham,
Your letter [T.O., September 29] attributes
the source of our disagreement on
Freeport's environmental and human
rights record to the fact that you have visited the mine site and I have not.... [This
response] indicates little understanding of
the political situation in Irian Jaya.
I have not undertaken research in Irian
Jaya because the Indonesian government
does not grant research visas to anthropologists for work there. This has been the
dominant situation for twenty-five years. It
is well-known that the Indonesian state
finds anthropologists to be potential
threats to its efforts to dominate indigenous West Papuans. This pattern applies to
both foreign and local anthropologists;
witness the 1984 Indonesian police murder
of Irian Jaya anthropologist Arnold Ap. Indonesia has been repeatedly cited for such
repressive and brutal retaliation against researchers and journalists. As I write, over
fifty political prisoners are in Indonesian
jails merely for advocating independence
for the indigenous people of Irian Jaya.
Documentation of these matters can be
found in Amnesty International's 1995
Annual Report and 1994 Indonesia handbook, Power and Impunity: Human Rights
under the New Order; more local details
can be found in Carmel Budiardjo and
Liem Soei Liong's book West Papua: The
Obliteration of a People, published in
1988 by TAPOL, the Indonesia Human
Rights Campaign.
You might object that even if I cannot
do official research in Irian Jaya, I could at
least visit as a tourist. But in fact travel to
Irian Jaya on a tourist visa is also quite re-
strictive in terms of where one is allowed
to go and who one is allowed to meet. Indeed, there are serious risks to visitors
who ask questions of indigenous Melanesians, as well as retaliations against locals
who speak to them....
But this does not mean that there is no
reliable information about indigenous responses to Indonesian colonialism and its
transnational component. Some ten thousand indigenous West Papuans who are
refugees from Indonesian political oppression in Irian Jaya currently live over the
border in Papua New Guinea.... [R]efugee
accounts, as well as those from other West
Papuan refugees living in Australia and
The Netherlands, have been in circulation
for years. There are also eyewitness and
first-person accounts of experiences
around the mine, like the ones in the
ACFOA and Catholic Church reports, and
ones provided by Indonesian and foreign
NGO's as well as former Freeport staff.
...Whatever your experience at
Freeport's mine...the volume and variety
of information I and others have researched is serious and must be addressed;
it cannot simply be dismissed by claiming
that I have not been to the site.
I am, nonetheless, grateful for your
offer to facilitate a visit to the mine, now
that you have gone on record stating how
strongly you feel that such an experience
would significantly alter my views. I
would very much like to take such a trip in
the near future (at my own expense of
course). Please inform me how I might initiate the process of visiting the mine site
and witnessing Freeport's operation in the
way you have.
[...]
Finally, I am astonished by your transparent acceptance of The Jakarta Post
headline proclaiming "Freeport Not Involved in Timika Case." Neither the
ACFOA report nor the Catholic Church
report I sent claims that the murders, detentions, tortures, and harassments cited
Continued on P. 10.
Editor's Note
Since September of 1989, Observer Copy Editor Roxanne Bogucka has held the line
against typos, misspellings, lapses in style and taste, and the editor's inclination to occasionally split infinitives. Except for those occasions when we managed to circumvent
her desk, the quality of our copy has been far better because of her attention. Roxanne
left the Observer to pursue an advanced degree in library science—an academic discipline new to her, and probably a mother's attempt to provide chronic bibliophiles
Woodrow and Harriet with a steady supply of reading material. She is replaced by Mimi
Bardagjy, who happily returns to Austin after ten years AWOL in Houston.
server
T ilt TEXAS
EDITORIAL
NOVEMBER 10, 1995
VOLUME 87, No. 22
A Man, a Plan
Can Houston Lawyer Bill White Save
the Texas Democratic Party?
EN SHERMAN LAWYER Bob Slagle got the "come to Jesus" call
from Lieutenant Governor Bob Bullock last
month, he probably knew it was time to say.
goodnight. So he negotiated the terms of
his departure, and after fifteen years as
chairman of the Texas Democratic Party,
Slagle moves on in December. The organization he will leave is not exactly vigorous.
The Texas Democratic Party has been
cited by The New York Times and other
national media for its record number of defections to the Republican Party; a huge
note has come due on a piece of real estate
the party had used as a cash cow in the
mid-eighties; Democratic margins in the
state House and Senate are narrower than
they have been any time in this century;
Ann Richards is no longer governor; and in
the last election campaign the Texas Republican Party identified and registered
new suburban voters before they had even
removed their California license plates.
Democrats, it seemed, never saw them
coming.
One wonders why Slagle had to be compelled to resign, never mind that someone
else would want the job. But three candidates are out talking to editorial boards
and regional party leaders. Carroll Robinson, a lawyer and professor at Thurgood
Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern
University in Houston, entered the race
back when some thought Slagle still had a
pulse. He was followed by Houston lawyer
Bill White, who has raised money for the
party and recently left a position with the
Clinton Administration to come home and
run for the state chair. Hector Uribe, a former state senator now practicing law in
Brownsville, is also a candidate. (The position is voluntary and there is no salary.)
White, who has been endorsed by all five
of the Democratic Party's statewide
elected officials, is the heir apparent. In
Austin on the last Saturday of September,
in a soft-spoken deliberate monologue,
White discussed his plans for the Democratic Party in Texas. He stressed the economic issues common to progressives and
moderates; providing candidates with
tools, like party data bases, that will allow
them to compete without hiring expensive
consultants; and fundraising. The party,
White said, does not have to run against its
W
traditional core constituency—labor, minorities, progressives—as Democratic
Leadership Council co-founder Al From
suggested in a recent article in The New
Democrat. What follows are edited excerpts of White's comments:
"I think the state party should do four
things:
• Stress the important differences between
the Democratic Party and the Republican
Party on, mainstream issues such as public
education, clean air and clean water, and
equal opportunity.
• Provide first-class service to candidates,
particularly those that can't afford highpaid consultants. And we should have a
bias for those services which could lower
the costs of campaigning, like data bases
that are complete and 'accurate so that if
somebody is willing to put in the door-todoor grassroots effort, they will have the
tools to do it. That would provide candidates an alternative to expensive TV campaigns.
• The third thing the party ought to do is
shine the spotlight of truth on the very radical right-wing element of the Republican
Party. Radicals have taken over their party
organization and they have a lot of candidates or potential candidates from that
wing of the party who are not ready for
prime time. And they ought to be exposed....There are several mainstream issues where people trust our party a lot more
than they trust Republicans. And for good
reason. Public education, equal opportunity, and clean air and clean water. All
those issues have something in common,
which is that they are biased toward the future. And they are biased either toward
what we leave another generation or how
we go about effectively competing against
the Germans and Japanese and Koreans in
a world in which that's going to become
more and more of a factor every year.
• The fourth is to serve as a focal point for
running a cost-effective coordinated campaign in '96 and '98. We don't have the
governor's staff or office. We don't have
either of the senators. In '92 we used Ann's
organization, in '82 we used Bentsen's.
Well, we don't have that now. A lot of people can waste a lot of money unless some-
FEATURES
Hightower After Mickey Mouse
By Michael King
Texas Prison Cells for Rent
5
9
By Robert Bryce
DEPARTMENTS
Dialogue
2,10-11
Editorial
Bill White's Plan for Texas Dems
3
Molly Ivins
One More Hog Report 12
Jim Hightower
12
Belling the Cow & Quayling
Survival in a Chemical World
Sick Plane Syndrome 13
For the Record
14
President Clinton at UT-Austin
BOOKS AND THE
CULTURE
"Houseboat"
Poetry by Andrea Carlisle
15
King on Nixon Agonistes Play review by Don Graham
From Texas to Vietnam
Book review by Eyal Press
Luddites Then and Now
Book review by Ray Reece
Chronicle of a Death Foretold
Film review by Louis Dubose
16
18
20
22
AFTERWORD
J. Evetts Haley Looked at LBJ
By Bill Adler 23
Political Intelligence 24
Cover photo of Jim Hightower by Alan
Pogue
body is there making coordinated decisions. The top priorities in that coordinating campaign, by my way of thinking,
should be to keep the State Senate and
State House, and to try to pick up at least
one congressional seat. That means a heavy
focus in East Texas, because that's going to
be a battle ground. And it can also be a firewall, if we're able to hold those two seats
THE TEXAS OBSERVER • 3
in Congress [House seats vacated by Jim
Chapman and Charlie Wilson] and pick up
[Beaumont freshman Congressman Steve]
Stockman's seat.
We can't ignore the fact that Republicans have had a strategy, since 1968, of trying to assimilate the so-called George Wallace voters into the Republican Party. And,
I don't think the Democrats have done as
good a job as we can do, incorporating and
enlisting people in electoral activity on behalf of progressive candidates and causes
and Democratic candidates and causes. So
the Republicans have kept their old coalition, which was an expression of the economic status quo, and grafted on another
group of people who have in many cases a
far different agenda.
If the Democratic Party were to respond
strategically to that, we would have been
emphasizing the issues that we have in
common—not with people who want the
economic status quo, but with people who
want more economic opportunity and
growth. I'm convinced that it's more plausible to Americans that government can
have an impact on the economy than it is
that government can be the source of all
personal morality. So we need to move into
to that economic arena effectively. Now to
my way of thinking, that does not mean
that the Democratic Party should focus on
some issues that some folks may call "class,
warfare." I think there is a whole big range
of issues under the heading of competing
effectively in a global economy, where all
Americans or a vast majority of them are in
the same boat in the long run, in needing an
educated workforce, and companies that
have a stake in their workers over a longer
period of time than just on piecework contract basis, and in not allowing the natural
world in which we live to be destroyed or
wasted...just so we can compete with
Korea or Nigeria."
T
HE DEMOCRATS HAVE probably
not made the progress they need in articulating this world of Post Cold War economic competition. I think it is quite possible to view what some people call free
trade as inevitable, while at the same time
saying that we shouldn't let all of our jobs
go to countries that won't let our goods
across their borders.
And, more significantly, much more significantly, we can't tolerate a society that is
classed along the lines of knowledge and
still retain the unique things about America. My father grew up on a farm without
electricity, and everybody has stories like
that. The vast majority of Americans have
had people walk across a river or come
over on a boat...That idea of upward mobility is one of the many contributions of
America. And in a global economy, there
can be big wins and big losses, just de4 • NOVEMBER 10, 1995
pending on how prepared you are. That's a
natural Democratic issue. We haven't used
it enough.
I've watched Colin Powell a few times
on TV and read some excerpts of his book.
He ought to be in the Democratic Party.
Career military, the Republicans gave him
those promotions, and he has said that one
reason he's not a Democrat is that he'd
have a hard time taking on a sitting president. But people like him, people who
don't think it's tolerable to have an underclass, and don't believe that we should be
doing a lot worse than Germany and Japan
in teaching our kids, they ought to be
Democrats."
Asked about the Republican Party's ability
to identify new voters, incorporate them
into a database, and fill their mailboxes
with campaign material—while the
Democrats lagged behind, White responded:
"I think that we ought to be able to mount a
coordinated campaign of the size that we
did in '92. But, whether we should match
the Republicans dollar for dollar this year,
I think that some of the things that are good
for the party and frankly good government
and for either party, are to rely on a broader
smaller-donor base, rather than having
fewer, bigger donors. That takes a while to
develop. I would say, as a three-year objective, we should have a reliable small-donor
base."
Asked about decline in fundraiser interest
and whether important Democrat Party
funders have left the party, White said:
"I was pretty successful fundraising back
in '92 and I never raised money from
PACs. It was all people of good will. Now,
many of those [larger donors]...will want to
know that the money is well spent. Ann
Richards raised a lot of money. My sense is
that people of good will, with sufficient resources, will participate. But they don't
want money to go down some rathole
where they never see any tangible results or
it's all spent on negative campaigning. Or
it all goes to hiring a huge staff.
I will be honest, the Republicans did
peel off people who shared a lot of the
basic Democratic values—by an aggressive use of this so-called tort reform issue.
I'm being real candid. I believe in a right to
a jury trial and I myself have tried lawsuits,
many lawsuits, for consumers. ...So I'm not
anti-lawyer. But I will say, as a factual matter that there has been some erosion of support among small business—because of the
Republican's very calculated use of this
tort reform issue. I don't think people see
their insurance rates lower, but there's a lot
of demagoguery. But I believe that small
businesses ought to be more aligned with
the Democratic Party than they are today.
And this is not something we are going to
reverse in a year but over a period of several years."
Asked about the difficulty of appealing to
suburban voters outside the urban loops,
while holding on to the traditional Democratic constituency of labor and minorities,
White responded:
"I don't for the life of me understand why
there should be a difference between labor,
minorities and any other so called constituencies. Al From is a friend of mine and
he had written a piece in The New Democrat about three months ago...His theory is
that the Democratic Party ought to take on
[run against] its traditional base. And he
cited as an example, FDR. He said FDR appealed to the broad things like economic
growth and internationalism. Well, to my
recollection, FDR did not "take on" the
base of the Democratic Party. Now, FDR
rose to power by the unfortunate circumstance that something called the Depression forced most of the American republic
into a underclass. But the New Deal coalition persisted because he emphasized the
things that we had in common...
I'm not one of those people who thinks
that everybody should be on board with the
all the issues. I think that the big divide,
though, ought to be that the progressive
party is the party that thinks about the future and where we want to be in five years.
And the reactionary party is the party of
nostalgia. And I think to some considerable
extent, a Dole candidacy, certainly a
Gramm candidacy, will be a candidacy of
nostalgia. It will be in the world of momma
and World War II. We can see how they
would build a Dole-Powell campaign or a
Gramm-Powell campaign..telling voters to
remember when the world was capitalist
versus communist, democrat versus totalitarian... That is the big cleavage I see in
American politics. That is the cleavage I
see organizing about. Remind people about
the mainstream issues' where the
Democrats and democratic values appeal to
eighty percent of the people, even to many
Republicans...and to the business community, which also has a great stake in the
quality of life in this state, particularly in
education."
All three candidates were scheduled to
make their pitches to the State Democratic
Executive Committee in Austin on November 4, and on December 9 the committee
will select a chair to serve until the state
convention in June.
—L.D.
\ Editor's Note:
The item "Women in Court," which appeared in Political Intelligence of the October 27 issue of the Observer, was written
by Mary O'Grady.
Fired By a Rodent?
Was Tim Hightower Exterminated by Mickey Mouse or Just Big Money?
BY MICHAEL KING
Raphael counters that he took personal
IM HIGHTOWER WILL NOT be
charge
of station acquisition, and "it besilenced.
came unpleasantly evident to me that the fuThat's where we should begin, alture for this show was quite limited."
though, as most Observer readers know by
But at first, the only one talking was
now, Hightower's nationally syndicated,
Hightower. A committed critic of global
weekly talk show was canceled in midSeptember by the ABC Radio
network. As ABC tells it, only
insufficient ratings were behind
the decision to cancel the show,
which was broadcast on some
one hundred and fifty stations
nationwide, to an audience of
approximately two million listeners. Frank Raphael, ABC's
vice president for programming,
told the Observer, "I terminated
this show for lack of audience."
Hightower responded that his
audience and station-count, accumulated in about a year and a
half, was by the network's own
admission already larger than either Rush Limbaugh or Gordon
Liddy had acquired for their
shows in a similar period. More
to the immediate point, Hightower reports that ABC management, and particularly Raphael,
had been completely supportive
of the show until August 1,
1995—the day that Capital
Cities/ABC and The Walt Disney Company announced that
Disney would be purchasing
Capital Cities/ABC and merging
the two corporations. Raphael
says that Hightower is entitled to Jim Hightower
his "mistaken perception," but
corporate power, Hightower had already
that it's simply not true.
taken shots at both Disney and his ABC
The merger did provide a handy phrase
bosses in the past. (See "Hightower Speaks
to describe the way ABC handled the subOut!," page 7.) On August 5, he devoted
sequent Hightower dismissal: it was
much of the talk to cracks about Disney ("I
mickey-mouse.
work for a rodent") and more serious disFollowing the merger announcement,
cussions of the inevitable effects of the
Hightower says, there was no communicamerger ("It's going to be Top-40 radio
tion from his bosses that the show might be
news as brought to you by Disney"). He
in trouble. But the ABC staff assigned to
also opposed the corporation-friendly
work with the show in effect "physically
withdrew" from the program. The network telecommunications legislation then under
consideration in Congress (strongly supimmediately stopped doing its job—atported by both ABC and Disney). For
tempting to recruit new stations for the proHightower, the merger and the new laws
gram—and when ABC's staffer in charge
were the direct result of the increasing conof that task departed, ABC made no attempt
centration of corporate wealth and power,
to replace her. So when ABC now says that
particularly as it affects the lifeblood of
the show was not acquiring stations, it's
democracy: the free-flow of information.
hard to take the complaint seriously.
J
In an extended interview with the Observer last month, Hightower summarized
the current media situation: "Now these
conglomerates, who have no allegiances,
no understanding of journalism, and no
imagination of their democratic responsibilities to provide a diversity of
viewpoints, [and who don't acknowledge] that citizens need
to find out what's going on in
their own country—will decide the news, will decide the
information and the viewpoint
that gets across. I'm willing to
say it's not even malicious; it's
the 'all the news that fits' syndrome...' why this just doesn't
fit' ...' nobody cares about
this'... who would want to hear
about this?'—because they
don't care about it, and they
don't want to hear about it."
Hightower soon had his suspicions confirmed: Hightower
Radio "just didn't fit" into the
future of Disney/ABC. Although Hightower remains
quick to praise Raphael and his
earlier support—"he was committed to the message I was
putting out, and committed to
the long-term growth of the
show"—a few weeks after the
merger, he says Raphael had
become the "hit man" for Disney. At first there were rumors
and hints. Hightower, who had
ALAN POGUE
been ABC's featured favorite
at the 1994 convention of The
National Association of Broadcasters,
mysteriously was not even invited to the
1995 convention. Then, on September 12,
five weeks after his anti-merger show,
Hightower was "offed"—told that the
show would be canceled as of November 5.
At that point, ABC's behavior descended
from mickey-mouse to, as Hightower puts
it, "chickenshit." The staff had been told that
the cancellation would not be announced
until November, but negative stories immediately began appearing in the national
press. During the following show (September 17), callers reported hearing from their
local stations that this was in fact the last
week for the show. The immediate cancellation was confirmed by ABC later that week.
"I was not even allowed to go on the air to
THE TEXAS OBSERVER •
5
"It was not to send a message to [Disney/ABC], but to send a message
to my listeners. I had a responsibility, as one who attacked these kind of
power grabs, not to back away from one that would affect me, or could
affect me. I had a responsibility to my listeners."
explain to listeners what had happened, to
say goodbye, to thank them—even the
niceties that one would like to have had."
Hightower believes Raphael was straight
with him "insofar as he knew," but he believes the pending merger was the show's
death sentence. Raphael returns Hightower's compliments, but insists that the decision was based solely on lack of "market
penetration"—particularly the defection of
major city stations—and was his decision
alone. Raphael emphasized that, since the
merger was not concluded, it would have
been illegal for Disney even to contact ABC
concerning the program, and he reiterated:
"The decision was made, by me, exclusively
for the reasons I have maintained from the
get-go. Anybody who says otherwise is just
wrong." He added that when Hightower insisted on publicly blaming Disney for the
termination, he had no choice but to take
him off the air immediately.
H
IGHTOWER SAYS he has no regrets, either about the overall approach and quality of his show or
about his frank willingness to directly criticize Disney and ABC. He describes the
program as "a good show, a fun, lively, and
hard-hitting show, which is everything that
talk radio is supposed to be," crediting not
just the show's format but its consistently
progressive, populist politics. He says the
network would have been happier and he
might have even survived the merger if he
had abandoned his anti-corporate stance
and become just another "Washingtonbasher." But he and his staff had long ago
decided that if they were going to do the
show at all, they were going to give it their
best shot. They believe they did themselves
proud: "It was the most hard-hitting message on the air-waves in my lifetime." As
for his refusal, immediately following the
merger, to temper his criticisms of the deal
at least until he knew how he stood with his
new bosses, he believes he really had no
other choice: "It was not to send a message
to [Disney/ABC], but to send a message to
my listeners. I had a responsibility, as one
who attacked these kind of power grabs,
not to back away from one that would affect me, or could affect me. I had a responsibility to my listeners."
Even among large corporations, the Disney company has earned a reputation for an
extremely conservative corporate climate,
dating back to Walt Disney himself—whom
Hightower had earlier criticized, on the air,
6 • NOVEMBER 10, 1995
ALAN POGUE
as being both a union-buster and a confirmed informant for the FBI in its notorious
investigations of "communists" in the entertainment industry. It was not likely that
Walt's successor, Michael Eisner—also
bashed repeatedly by Hightower—would
look kindly on the most forthrightly progressive voice emanating from his newest
acquisition, whatever the show's ratings.
Skeptics have suggested that if Hightower's numbers were as good as he says
they were—if he were making money for
the corporation—they wouldn't have cared
if he had accused Mickey and Minnie of living in sin. Hightower counters that even before the merger, the network had turned
down advertising (recruited by Hightower's
staff) from the A.F.L.-C.I.O. as well as
Mother Jones magazine, calling it "advocacy" instead of "product" advertising—this
in an industry which wallows in the dollars
derived from "image" advertising of corporations. If they had accepted union advertising, says Hightower, "I could have brought
them a good quarter of a million dollars a
year" just from unions. Raphael defended
the network policy, saying that if they accepted "political agenda" ads from unions,
they would have to do the same "from the
NRA or the American Nazi Party....I don't
think [Jim] would have liked that."
Hightower also says his core audience had
thus far been borrowed or stolen from the socalled "conservative" audience of right-wing
talk shows like Limbaugh or their local imitators. He was pleased with those results—it
confirmed his belief in the essential "pop-
ulism" of most ordinary Americans, who do
not subscribe to the orthodox Republican
agenda—but when his staff suggested an advertising campaign to broaden the audience
by reaching out to progressive, alternative
stations and other media, ABC had no interest. "They put ads in the broadcasters' magazines, but otherwise they didn't have a clue
how to find [a progressive] audience. This
from people who supposedly make their living at this stuff."
In short, Hightower remains convinced
that it was not his numbers, but his message, that dismayed his corporate bosses.
They approve of Washington-bashing,
from the right or the left, he believes, because "these corporate powers want everybody to think that Washington is the
enemy, because government is the only entity in the country that gives us the collective power to battle with these global
monoliths. So they want us to think that our
enemy is us."
Hightower's message was unique on the
talk-show circuit, he points out, because
rather than, like conservatives and liberals
alike, just slamming Congress or dishing
on the hot-button social issues—welfare,
immigration, abortion, O.J.—he reiterated
his progressive populist message "the real
political spectrum in this country is not
left-to-right,' it's 'top-to-bottom.'" A persistent Hightower slogan, borrowed from
an Austin bumpersticker, was "Question
Authority." When callers would blame the
country's problems on welfare cheats or
immigrants he would listen politely and
then respond, "'They're getting you to look
down the economic ladder, or looking sideto-side at each other, instead of looking up
at them, the real power. And as for the people in Washington, they're only the puppets of the power.' A constant theme in our
show is 'follow the money.' If you want to
know what's going on in any issue in
Washington, follow the money."
Hightower never tires of insisting that
"the real challenge to our political and economic democracy is in the great concentrations of economic power at the top," and he
promotes his own brand of "populism" as
the antidote. For Hightower, populism is
"fundamentally a belief in ordinary people,
and in as much decentralization of economic and political power as we can sensibly achieve." He considers himself to be
carrying on the populist tradition of the
nineteenth century, and looks to his predecessors also to provide an example of how
to deal with corporate media. "I have been
preaching for years that progressives have
got to grab every media outlet that we can
possibly get our hands on, and then invent
new ones. This is nothing new; the old time
populists in the 1880s got shut out by the
ranking media of their time, the newspapers, so they created their own papers, their
own national magazine, their own speakers' bureau, and other methods to reach
people. We've got to do the same thing
today: use cable television, radio, newsletters, the interne, and other outlets that I'm
not smart enough to think of, or that
haven't been invented yet. We must seize
every opportunity that comes along, like
ABC offered to me, even if it means you're
not going to be on that long."
Asked about immediate plans, Hightower laughed. "I've spent a lifetime running my mouth, and never having to have
an actual job. So I definitely intend to continue that line of thought and activity. I will
continue speaking out against,te,powersthat-be, who are running roughshod over
the powers-that-ought-to-be in this country, using whatever microphones I can get
ahold of. I continue to do my daily commentary, in radio broadcasts which are on
seventy-eight stations across the country
and are doing very well. I've had a book
contract for a couple of years that's long
overdue, that I'll now strive to fulfill. In
fact, 'The Liberal Media' is one of my
chapter headings. The working title is
`There's Nothing in the Middle of the Road
But Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos.'
It's what they call an 'anecdotal opinion
book' —my perceptive B.S. on whatever
turns me on or turns me off." He is also
launching a political newsletter ("The
Hightower Lowdown") next year, and continues to talk with both radio and television
producers about future broadcast work.
Hightower is guardedly optimistic about
the current prospects for progressives
across the country. He pointed to the various efforts to establish independent parties
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what does it mean to the journalism at
stem ABC?" And ABC's head honcho--my pets too....
bos—didt.t't miss a beat. He turned to THE TEXAS OBSERVER • 7
or grass-roots organizations (the Greens,
the New Party, the Citizens Alliance), and
the election of an insurgent slate in the
A.F.L.-C.I.O. "It's a historic moment, and
the public is waiting and wanting and wondering why [change] is not coming. But
we've had a failure of leadership on the
left. Maybe we are inadequate leaders,
counting myself; but I think progressive
leadership has been too Washingtonbound, too wrapped-up in presidential politics.... You only get power from grassroots building, and you only get grass-roots
building by being at the grass roots, building. We keep wanting to do it by whizbang presidential campaigns."
Hightower, of course, has a long record as
a Democratic party activist, but the party
leadership's listless accommodation to the
Republican takeover of Congress has finally
convinced him that real progressive change
will not come through the Democrats. Citing Bill Clinton's surrender to Newt Gingrich's corporate agenda, and the congressional Democrats' "game-playing" to
undermine substantive campaign finance reform, he said, "I've only come to that final
conclusion slowly...in the last few months.
Some progressive effort from the outside=
whether that's an effort targeted to the
Democratic Party, or some independent
group as a third party—has got to be
made....Democrats as well as Republicans
are hopelessly beholden to money politics,
and cannot fix it themselves. Just as the pop-
ulists of a hundred years ago had to come
from the outside, I think we have to do that
again. I would like to see that result in a
change in the Democratic party—for it to be
taken over and get back to its roots—but I
can't predict that will happen. So therefore
it's important to make the fight on the merits, and then worry about the form later on."
Hightower noted the handful of progressive exceptions in an otherwise moribund Congress ("the good people, the
David Boniors, the Marcy Kapturs"), and
acknowledged that "the Democratic Party
has a structure and a history that you don't
give up easily—but it has essentially given
up on us." He added that among the national progressive activists he works with,
there has been "a final dawning...that the
Clinton Administration is dead—whether
literally or spiritually doesn't matter—and
is not an agent for progressive change, and
neither is the Congress. So the change has
got to come from outside Washington."
Turning his attention to Texas, Hightower said "the same thing has to happen in
Texas that has to happen everywhere: a recommitment of resources to the gruntwork
of political party-building, centered on
democratic principles, and based upon oldfashioned grass-roots organizing. We don't
have that in Texas, and we don't have that
in the country...." Democrats pinned their
hopes on Ann Richards just as they had on
Bill Clinton, "and now it's four years later
and we're four years further behind."
is
8 • NOVEMBER 10, 1995
Hightower sees his radio work as an attempt to "blaze a trail" for progressive activism—or "agitatin,'" as he calls it—and
says that his message hit home with working-class listeners "across the so-called political spectrum" because it was a call they
already believe in: to defend themselves
against political and economic attacks by
the wealthy and powerful. "The consistent
theme we ended up unabashedly proclaiming, on a regular basis, was class warfare.
That the global corporations and their
wealthiest beneficiaries, for more than
twenty years now, had been waging class
warfare against working folks and the poor.
And isn't it time we began to fight back?"
So, it seems only fair to put Michael
"Mouse" Eisner on notice. He has definitely
not heard the last of Jim Hightower.
❑
If Build It,TheyWill Come
The Latest in "Free" Enterprise: Texas Prison Cells for Rent
BY ROBERT BRYCE
T
EXAS SPENDS MILLIONS of dollars every year to attract visitors from
other states. The state's tourism business is thriving, and Texas has also begun
attracting lots of visitors whose attire doesn't include Bermuda shorts. Instead, they
are sporting handcuffs and leg irons.
Prisons are Texas' newest growth industry. The state incarcerates more of its citizens than any other state—six hundred and
thirty-six prisoners per one hundred thousand Texans—and has an incarceration rate
that is eight times higher than many European countries. Even at that staggering
rate, our prison industry is expanding so
rapidly that it can't satisfy demand with
homegrown customers. So the state has
begun importing inmates.
That's right. Last year, Texas had so few
beds it was housing inmates in tents. But
now, after years of overcrowding followed
by an explosion in prison construction,
dozens of Texas counties have jails full of
beds and no inmates to sleep in them. Thus,
county sheriffs have begun competing with
Wackenhut, Corrections Corporation of
American and other private prison companies for a slice of the multi-billion-dollar
incarceration pie.
Six Texas counties are now housing
more than one thousand, seven hundred
out-of-state inmates, and thousands more
are on the way. Inmates from Utah, Missouri, Colorado, Virginia, North Carolina
and Oregon—with no space available in
their home states—have been shipped to
Texas county jails.
The surfeit of beds is due to an unprecedented prison-building binge. Texas has
built more prisons faster than any other
state (or country) in history. Since 1985,
the number of prison beds in Texas has
nearly quadrupled, and the number of
county jail beds has tripled. Over the past
two years, Texas has spent 1.5 billion dollars on new prisons. By next January, the
state will have one hundred and forty-five
thousand beds behind bars, with another
sixty-three thousand in county jails. This
year, Texas taxpayers will spend some 3.5
billion dollars just operating state and local
prisons.
Robert Bryce is a contributing editor of the
Austin Chronicle.
Sheriff Walker
ROBERT BRYCE
Want comparisons? Dell Computer,
Austin's fast-growing computer company,
had revenues of 3.4 billion dollars last
year. Southwest Airlines took in a paltry
2.5 billion dollars.
u
ntil recently, Texas' county sheriffs
have relied on the state to keep their
jails full. While the state was expanding the prison system, tens of thousands of inmates were being housed in
county jails, and TDCJ was paying the
counties thirty-five dollars and twenty-five
cents, per inmate per day.
Last spring, the state was paying Limestone County more than five hundred thousand dollars per month to house six hundred
of its inmates. But in mid-July, the state removed them all. Faced with the prospect of
laying off one hundred and fifty prison employees and having the county's almost
new 15.3-million-dollar, eight-hundredand-thirty-six-bed minimum security
prison sitting empty, Sheriff Dennis Walker
began looking for new tenants.
On September 8, Walker and other
county officials signed a one-year contract
with the North Carolina Division of Prisons. The contract calls for the county to
hold four hundred and eighty inmates, in
return for twenty-one thousand, five hundred and fifty-two dollars per day. The new
contract will allow the county to continue
paying the debt service on the jail and keep
local residents employed. "This is one of
the biggest employers in the county," says
Walker, and adds that the county is also
talking with the Department of Justice's
Bureau of Prisons. He expects to begin receiving federal prisoners soon.
In Bastrop County, Sheriff Fred Hoskins
began working the phones in mid-summer,
looking for itinerant inmates. Democrat
Hoskins talks like a Republican who wants
to make "government run like a business."
So, the first thing Hoskins did was to solicit
business from the government. And he got
it. At present, Hoskins has eighty-one federal inmates in the one-hundred-eightyfour-bed Bastrop County jail, with room
for thirty to forty more.
Dallas County may soon have the
biggest jail leasing program in the country.
Jim Ewell, a spokesman for the Dallas
County Sheriff's Department, said the
county is talking with prison officials from
Massachusetts, Tennessee and Washington, DC. He expects the county to sign a
contract within the next few weeks that
will bring two thousand, eight hundred inmates to Dallas. A few miles west, Chief
Savala Swanson of the Tarrant County
Sheriff's Department, says the county has
one thousand beds it wants to lease.
Ewell says the county needs to lease the
space. Two years ago, Dallas County completed an eighty-million-dollar, three-thousand, three-hundred-bed facility near
downtown Dallas. The county recently garnered a contract with the U.S. Immigration
and Naturalization Service to house up to
four hundred inmates. If it can fill the remaining empty beds, Ewell said, "our staff
is projecting that we would make a profit."
He predicts gross revenues "could be in excess of fifteen million dollars a year, and
I've heard as high as thirty million."
About two dozen states, the District of
Columbia, and the U.S. Department of Justice have an immediate need for additional
prison beds. Most of them are looking at
Texas. Newton County, which already has
six hundred and twenty inmates from Virginia, may soon be getting an additional
three hundred inmates all the way from
Hawaii.
Much of the Texas' new prison business
THE TEXAS OBSERVER • 9
is handled by "bed brokers" like Bobby
Ross, a private prison contractor, who has
fielded calls from ten states interested in
sending inmates to Texas. Ross estimates
that Texas jails may have eight thousand
jail beds available for lease, and he believes all of them can be used.
Ross, a former Navarro County sheriff,
helped broker the deal that brought Virginia inmates to Newton County. And
Ross' company, Austin-based BRG Inc.,
has a multi-million-dollar bet riding on the
prison business. BRG is building a fivehundred-bed prison in Karnes County,
which will be completed on January 13th.
Right now, Ross doesn't have any inmates
to sleep in those beds. But he's not worried.
"It's not exactly a 'field-of-dreams' jail,"
Ross said. "It was a jail planned on existing
needs."
The numbers support Ross' contention.
In 1982, one out of fifty-eight adults in
Texas was on probation, parole, or in jail.
By the year 2000, one of every twenty-one
adult Texans will be in that situation.
Thus, the current jail bed surplus won't
last long. In a report released in September,
the Texas Criminal Justice Policy Council
estimated that by August of 1997, the state
will need an additional twelve thousand,
nine hundred prison beds.
Until then, private prison operators like
Ross and county sheriffs like Walker and
Hoskins are stepping forward to take advantage of the national incarceration
frenzy. The sheriffs, no longer dependent
on state or local jurisdictions, are finding
that their jail beds are a commodity that can
be sold on the open market to the highest
bidder. They have become virtually indistinguishable from privately-operated prisons, which are growing at an astounding
thirty-five percent per year. With that kind
of explosive growth, how long will it be
before prison beds—or prisoners themselves—are traded on the futures market,
just like pork bellies and sorghum?
Hoskins and Walker have no doubts that
they can keep their jails filled, and both
have found that running their jails as forprofit ventures makes sense politically and
economically. Hoskins is particularly
bullish on his new business. "I don't think
the number of inmates is going to dwindle," he said.
He's probably right.
But there is something lamentable about
Texas' new status as the incarcerator of
choice for states around the country. Certainly the "prison business" is creating jobs
and bringing revenue to counties all over
the state. But Texas' two hundred thousand
prison beds are also emblematic—symbols
of a culture that has fundamentally failed.
And all those prison beds are now a destination point not only for homegrown Texas
failures—but for the entire country's.
❑
10 • NOVEMBER
10, 1995
"Dialogue," cont'd from p.2.
were perpetrated by Freeport security personnel. They indicate clearly that these
were acts carried out by Indonesian military police. But this hardly means that
Freeport was "not involved." If any of
• these violent abuses of human rights took
place, as reported, on Freeport vehicles, in
Freeport containers, at Freeport workshops, at Freeport security stations, in the
presence of Freeport personnel, then
Freeport surely was involved. For this the
company must accept its measure of responsibility rather than hide behind a distorted headline in the state-controlled
press.
Steven Feld
Santa Fe, New Mexico
Hearts of Darkness
You challenge "members of the university
community" to respond to the Feld-Cunningham correspondence. You state that
silence is acquiescence to the savagery
Feld describes. Yet is anyone really surprised that university officials might be involved in this kind of activity? Has everyone forgotten even Viet Nam and the '60s?
You challenge as if acquiescence is not the
well-established response of the university
"community" to just about everything, no
matter how bestial.
But I think we know that it is. When
considering the great problems of the day,
how many reporters contact the managers
of universities with the expectation of
clear, forceful, unequivocal opinions? Do
we really expect managers to lead (or better, "manage") their institutions into any
confrontation with politico-economic
elites? The longish tenure of most managers suggests that service to elites and
their predatory acts, not confrontation, is
the norm.
We are talking about managers here.
Why would anyone think those who manage universities would have any more "social conscience" (your term) than the management of tobacco or arms export
companies? They exist to manage their institutions in accordance with the dictates
of those who gave them their jobs, no matter how predatory they may be. Most of
them do so eagerly. They exist to protect
their six-figure (or nearly so) incomes and
enhance them whenever possible. After
all, they are managers and thus their "bottom line is not ethics but business..."
(Feld). Why would anyone expect university (corporate) managers to be more willing to sacrifice privilege than any other
manager? In short, as with their interchangeable kin in other corporations, they
serve politico-economic elites and, therefore, themselves, protect and enhance their
own incomes and "manage" those who
have no need to be managed. It is hardly
surprising that they have no appetite for
confronting serious social problems seriously. Neither is it surprising that they
and/or their institutions will make a profit
from these problems, if possible.
None of this means that managers cannot be good, caring, even charming persons at the individual level. Even the coal
operators of old were probably generous
on occasion. Neither is it to say that none
escape the manager-for-profit mentality.
Decades ago, a few did fight Joe McCarthy and his minions. It does mean that
your construct, "Social Conscience vs.
Corporate Predation" is no more relevant
for university managers than it is for those
of any other corporate entity.
None of this is intended to suggest that
faculty members are much, if any, better;
indeed they are not. Most are proudly neutral in the struggles of justice vs. injustice.
Of those who do indicate some commitment, most claim to be working "behind
the scenes." I would like a nickel for every
one of them who claims to be working
there, for wherever it is, it must be mighty
crowded.
If Feld is right, it is hardly surprising
that Cunningham does what he does and
justifies it. What is surprising is what Feld
has done. Indeed, it is so surprising that it
made your journal.
You ask what we should do about "the
continuing involvement of the University
in crimes against humanity and nature."
Since such involvement mirrors that of
both the U.S. Government and our
transnational corporations, both rhetoric
and reason would say, "Shut them down;
shut them all down." This is not likely to
happen, of course. On the lowest level, it
would be nice to know how all managers
of state universities are "supplementing"
their state pay. We might ask that the
sources of that income be made public.
One problem here is that state legislators
would have to so order, but then we might
demand to know who owns them. (We
might also move to restrict their total incomes to something like forty thousand
dollars or less, certainly enough to live on.
At least then we would know that they are
probably in it for something more than the
money. Since it would cost them less to resign "on principle" and return to the faculty, they might be more willing to do so.)
The problem we face is far more difficult than Feld vs. Cunningham. Late in
life, Ghandi was asked what made him
most sad and he answered that it was the
hardness of the hearts of the well-educated. Kozol notes that while academics
may appear different from the brutal and
the "ice-cold" (i.e., corporate leaders),
they are in "faithful service to the same
unjust social order." We may be disturbed
by this but the one thing we are forbidden
is to be surprised that it is so.
Harold A. Nelson
University of Texas-Pan American
.
No Argument
Not too surprisingly, I was fascinated by
your editorial, "A Professor's Resignation" (September 29). I also have been a
professor at the University of Texas and
also no longer find it a morally-acceptable
place of employment. One difference between Professor Feld and myself is that he
resigned because of his moral repugnance;
I was terminated.
However, I was fired for a similar reason, arguing with the system. The university should be a place for argument, for
mulling over, massaging ideas. We should
debate every day there is anything worth
talking about, and I feel my writing here .
to the Observer and Steven Feld writing
his editorial are a fundamental sign of the
failure of our Texas so-called higher education. The system is not working. When
our Chancellor William H. Cunningham
can reply.to Dr. Feld without really facing
up to most of Dr. Feld's criticisms, plus
feel a need to write a demeaning wisecrack about how Dr. Feld had not actually
been in the McMoRan mine site in Indonesia, implies the Chancellor thinks
learning requires being there. It's as if he
requires children to put their hands in the
fire so they can understand that fire is hot.
At UT, the faculty is not supposed to
argue these things.
Dr. Feld argued with the system and
lost....
I admire Professor Feld for his courage
in challenging Chancellor Cunningham. I
hope many faculty on the Austin campus
shared his arguments, as I hope some of
our faculty and students have shared in the
discussions which I have instigated at UT
Southwestern Medical School in Dallas.
Thank you for publishing material like
this. Thanks for setting up the potential for
continuing the debate about the openness
and democratic ideals of the university,
not just our University of Texas, but universities everywhere.
Peace!
Larry Egbert, MD, MPH
formerly Professor of
Anesthesiology & Pain Management
UT Southwestern Medical
Center, Dallas
Look at the Evidence
On a daily basis, I document human rights
violations all over the globe, perpetrated
by governments and nongovernmental actors with impunity. So it was with some
sadness that I read "Cunningham Replies"
(September 29). William Cunningham's
response to Steven Feld's letter of resignation was tiringly reminiscent of so many
responses to the "alleged" abuses of
human rights.
Grappling with the possibility that one's
colleagues, business associates, or one's
government may be complicit in human
rights violations is difficult. One's first instinct is denial. But is it conceivable that
human rights abuses perpetrated by the Indonesian government could occur on
Freeport property under the noses of
Freeport Indonesia officials without their
knowledge? Corporations doing business
internationally depend on host governments for their continued profit. Individuals out of perceived "necessity" disconnect from troubling suspicions that
business collaborators (in this case a government/military establishment) may be
torturing and killing their citizens, or that
they themselves could be drawn in, either
passively or actively, to participate in violations of human rights.
Cunningham notes correctly that
"human rights" concerns are...subject to
distortion and highly charged rhetoric."
However, in the case of Indonesia, the distortion and rhetoric have been largely generated by the government itself. Over the
past five years, the human rights abuses
committed by the Indonesian military
have been continually denounced by foreign governments and international bodies. It was not distortion or rhetoric to
which the international community was
responding when, as noted by Human
Rights Watch/Asia in its September 1994
report, The Limits Of Openness: Human
Rights In Indonesia And East Timor,
• after the November 1991 massacre in
Dili, East Timor, both Canada and the
Netherlands temporarily suspended new
foreign aid allocations;
• in October 1992 the US Congress cut
off IMET (International Military Education and Training) funds to Indonesia;
• in 1992 and in 1993, the UN Secretary
General sent a personal envoy to inquire
into human rights abuses in East Timor;
‘'r
• in March 1993, the UN Commission
on Human Rights passed a resolution
condemning human rights abuses by the
Indonesian military in East Timor.
Two recent reports by reputable and
credible sources have linked Freeport Indonesia directly with human rights violations committed by the Indonesian government in Irian Jaya. In rebuttal, Mr.
Cunningham quotes an official from the
Indonesian National Commission'On
Human Rights in absolving Freeport Indonesia from any involvement in human
rights abuses. Should he be so trusting?
The US Dept. of State's Country Reports
On Human Rights Practices For 1994
notes "continuing skepticism about the
Commission's independence, in part because its members are appointed by the
President." It goes on to say that "commission members actively looked into many
of the numerous complaints...and in some
cases showed themselves willing to question government actions." Human Rights
Watch/Asia, in its above-quoted report, titles a chapter: "The Indonesian Human
Rights Commission: Weak But Better
Than Expected." These are hardly rousing
endorsements. Freedom House, in its
1994-95 annual report on human rights,
Freedom in the World, condemns the lack
of many freedoms, including freedom of
the press, freedom of speech, and freedom
of association. It mentions Freeport by
name in noting areas where the government has withdrawn services in some Irian
Jayan villages in Freeport's mineral exploration zone, in order to encourage people
to relocate in Irian Jaya.
Is Mr. Cunningham surprised that no witnesses corroborated Freeport's involvement
in the government's torture and murder
when they were interviewed by a government commission on human rights? What
protections would witnesses have against
retaliation by the government? Its past torture of those who oppose it are well documented. These realities compel an individual in the position of authority and
significant responsibility of William Cunningham to examine the evidence of human
rights violations more closely before accepting the assurances of company officials
that Freeport is blameless. How many
ounces of gold is a human life worth?
Charlotte McCann
Refugee Legal Support
Service Coordinator
Human Rights Documentation
Exchange, Austin
.
WE PRINT
YOUR MAIL
Write Dialogue
307 West 7th Street
Austin, Tx 78701
THE TEXAS OBSERVER • 11
MOLLY IVINS
ONE MORE HOG REPORT
One of my problems with Big Bidness is
that those folks don't have the sense God
gave gravel. What a bunch of cashews.
Here we are, going through this massive,
enormous, Gingrich-powered transfer of
wealth from the Have-Nots to the Haves,
and what does the latest mega-merger
media conglomerate do? Fire Jim Hightower, the only guy on talk radio with the
brains to understand what's happening, the
grit to speak out about it, and the wit to
make us laugh through our pain over it.
Wait'll the Republicans get through with
us; people in this country are going to be so
mad, they'll be chewing wallpaper. We've
been a little distracted by O.J. Simpson and
other cataclysmic events, but the truth is
that Republicans have been ramming this
stuff through so fast no one (except maybe
Hightower) has fully grasped the implications of it all. When we see how all this
shakes out, a voice like Hightower's is
going to be the hottest property in America.
And these fools fired him (same fools who
own the newspaper I work for—hi, suits).
Hightower had a unique concept: investigative talk radio. Instead of just cussing
the bad guys, he told us what they were up
to every week. His "Hog Report," attractively introduced with much squealing and
slurping, gave us the skinny on campaign
contributions by corporations and the
sweetheart legislation and tax giveaways
for those same corporations. Hightower
had two million listeners on one hundred
and fifty stations and a growing audience,
but the ABC Radio network quit promoting
his program the minute that Capital
Cities/ABC got engaged to the Disney
Company. His contract ran into November,
but they canned him on September 22—
told him the show wasn't bringing in
enough advertiser dollars.
Sheesh, no wonder. ABC chased off advertisers like Mother Jones magazine (as
though The American Spectator never
sponsored Rush Limbaugh) and refused to
let unions buy ads on the show. ABC
turned away two hundred fifty thousand
dollars' worth of union advertising on the
grounds that unions are "advocacy"
groups. Great Caesar's ghost, who did they
think would sponsor Hightower? General
Electric? Archer-Daniels-Midland? Some
non-advocacy outfit like that?
Hightower, our former agriculture commissioner, is the finest Texas populist of
Molly Ivins is a former Observer editor
and a columnist for the Fort Worth StarTelegram.
12 • NOVEMBER 10, 1995
Hightower has always
looked at politics not
as a spectrum that runs
from right to left but as
a scale that runs from
top to bottom.
his generation. Fellow Texans will recall
that he was rated the most popular politician in Texas just three months before he
lost his 1992 election. He lost after the Republicans, determined to knock him off before he got into higher office, hit him with
a television blitz about all these supposed
improprieties in his office, which of course
came to nothing.
Hightower has always looked at politics
not as a spectrum that runs from right to left
but as a scale that runs from top to bottom.
"And the vast majority of the people aren't
even in shouting distance of the economic
and political powers at the top."
One of his ideas for the 1996 presidential
campaign is that we should make politicians
"like NASCAR race drivers or PGA golfers.
Why not require candidates to cover their
clothing, briefcases and staff with the logo
patches of their corporate sponsors?"
Because Hightower is so funny (when he
heard Governor Bill Clements was taking
Spanish a few years back, Hightower said:
"Oh, good. Now he'll be bi-ignorant"),
some people don't realize how serious his
stuff is. They like to hear him go after the
Black Hats (he once called Senator Orrin
Hatch "a low-life...industry hack" and described Governor Pete Wilson of California as "George Wallace in a Brooks Brothers suit"), but his program was packed with
solid information. He talks in a soft Texas
twang, was never rude to his callers and
never used his wit to hurt people who are in
pain. Unlike Limbaugh, Hightower knows
that pointing out that the emperor wears no
clothes is funny, but pointing out that the
beggar wears no clothes is not.
Like Michael Moore's marvelous television program "TV Nation," Hightower's
show is unlike anything else on the air.
Moore, the populist journalist who did the
film Roger and Me, was put on the Fox network as a summer replacement at the everinviting 7 p.m. Friday time slot. Moore's
antic show developed a cult following, but
wasn't seen by enough people for Fox to
renew it.
Hightower says, "The basic thing at
issue here is that Big Money is now in a position to decide what gets talked about on
talk radio, and the one thing they don't
want talked about is Big Money. And I
found on my show that's just what people
are dying to talk about."
Hundreds of politicians are running
around this country and talking about street
crime, which costs this country 19.2 billion
dollars a year. White-collar crime costs us
between 175 billion dollars and 230 billion
dollars a year, according to the National
Council on Crime and Delinquency, and
Jim Hightower is one of the few people
around well-prepared to talk about that. ❑
JIM HIGHTOWER
BELLING THE COW
Have you seen those great ads being run by
the milk industry—the ones featuring Joan
Rivers, Gabriella Sabatini, Christie Brinkley and other celebrities, each one posing
with a milk mustache on their face?
It's a clever way to remind us grown-ups
of the childhood joy of having a big, cold
glass of wholesome milk.
Jim Hightower is a former Observer editor
and Texas Agricultural Commissioner. His
daily radio commentaries are broadcast
nationwide, as he continues to preach the
populist gospel.
But Holy Cow, look out! What the big
milk processors don't advertise is that your
milk mustache might contain more than
you bargained for. It's estimated that about
a third of America's dairy herds now are
treated with recombinant bovine growth
hormone—or BGH—a synthetic chemical
manufactured by Monsanto to force cows
to squeeze out more milk.
Since most of us don't want our children
getting a daily dose of artificial hormones,
those clever milk marketers are trying to tiptoe past our concerns buy simply not telling
us which carton is nature's own milk—and
which one is Monsanto's surprise!
But lo and behold, it's the purveyors of
this doped-up milk who've gotten the sur-
prise. The little state of Vermont had passed
a law requiring them to label any BGH milk
sold there, giving Vermont consumers the
power to decide for themselves if they want
the additive.
In a flash, six national diary-trade groups
stampeded into federal court, with a whole
herd of lawyers to stop the state from implementing this law. But to their "udder" shock,
the judge ruled for the people! The industry
immediately appealed, but the appeals court,
too, has now okayed the new law, and such
giants as Kraft and Land O'Lakes are labeling their BGH products in Vermont.
This David and Goliath battle is long from
over, but the good folks in Vermont are
showing all of us that we don't have to go
along like a bunch of docile cows with every
bad idea big industry tries to force-feed us.
HYPOCRITE HOOSIER
Just when you think hypocrisy cannot possibly stoop any lower, along comes DQ.
No, not Dairy Queen, though he is a bit of a
dip: I'm talking about Dan Quayle—the
very politico who's made his career by denouncing "Big Government Spending" and
calling for privatizing every government
function there is—except draft deferments,
of course.
So guess who has just received two of
those nasty Big Government grants from
Washington? Danbo! Or, more specifically,
"The Dan Quayle Center and Museum" in
Huntington, Indiana, featuring such educational exhibits as Dan's high school
sweater. It has just been announced that this
Shrine to Quaylism is the recipient of a little dollop of your and my tax dollars, courtesy of a federal agency called the Institute
of Museum Services.
Never mind that, as Vice President, the
Quaylester wailed loud and long against the
evils of Washington subsidizing such cultural institutions, claiming it subverts local
initiative and control. Why, he even penned
a newspaper column this very year demanding the privatization of the National
Endowment for the Arts.
So what does Dan now say about his museum so cravenly seeking and accepting
such funding form the feds? Nothing. He's
refusing to talk to the press. But his
spokesman has tried desperately to draw a
long, squiggly line between what Dan
says...and what he does: Weeelllll, you see,
this isn't NEA funding, which Mr. Quayle
definitely opposes and would never apply
for, this is federal museum funding, don't
you see, which is not part of the NEA, so
therefore yadda, yadda, yadda...
Instead of cashing that check they took
from us taxpayers, wouldn't it be more appropriate for the Quayle Museum to frame
it, along with a copy of Danbo's newspaper
column, and exhibit it as a tribute to his
rank hypocrisy? Now I'd pay to see that! E]
A CHEMICAL WORLD
SICK PLANE SYNDROME
percent of cabin air is now being recycled
in order to burn less fuel and therefore save
money.
By now most of us have heard of "Sick
This is taking the popular phrase, "ReBuilding Syndrome," whereby persons reduce, Reuse and Recycle" a step too far.
siding or working in a newly-built or reThe Association of Flight Attendants
cently remodeled building report a variety
claims its members are suffering from an
of adverse health effects. We are now beincrease in often chronic air-quality-related
coming more aware of a similar problem
maladies, including headaches, dizziness,
which closely resembles "Sick Building
and nausea (unrelated to in-flight starvaSyndrome" and could be called "Sick Plane
tion). Flight attendants and many frequent
Syndrome," in that many of the health eftravelers complain that they often catch sefects—headaches, nausea, and related
vere colds after long flights. Poor air quality
symptoms—are similar. The fact that these
can also aggravate
problems are experipassengers' bronchitis,
enced after short-haul
asthma, emphysema
(presumably domesCurrent FAA
and allergies. The low
tic) flights within the
United States would requirements permit humidity in planes further aggravates these
rule out these probair in cabins with
problems
by drying
lems being smoke-renearly one hundred out mucous memlated, as smoking is
branes, lowering denot permitted on these
times the level of
fenses against infecflights. The cause
carbon dioxide in
tion. Poor ventilation
could be the actual air
and tightly-packed
in the aircraft cabin.
outdoor air.
seating may also lead
CurrentFederal
to the airborne transAviationAuthority
mission of serious communicable disease,
(FAA) requirements permit air in cabins
such as tuberculosis.
with nearly one hundred times the level of
You can take a couple of simple selfcarbon dioxide in outdoor air, and thirty
help measures to avoid or at least minimize
times the recommended standard for carbon
the adverse effects of poor air quality:
dioxide concentration in buildings set by
the American Society for Heating, Refriger■ Avoid Boeing 757s. The recycled air
ation and Air-Conditioning Engineers. A
quickly becomes stale on narrow-body
recent Consumer Reports study tested air planes such as the 757 and 737, because
quality in one hundred and fifty-eight
there is so little space per passenger. Older,
flights and found that cabin air in one in
wide-body DC-10s, L-1011 s, 747-100s and
four of those flights fails the industry guide747-200s have more room for air circulaline for freshness.
tion, and ventilation systems on planes deCost-cutting in the airline industry is taksigned prior to the early 'eighties (such as
ing a nasty turn. While most of us can tolDC-9s or 727s) circulate one hundred pererate a bag of peanuts if it's going to give
cent fresh air throughout the cabin.
us a cheaper flight, it is unlikely that the
■ Let the airlines know that you are congeneral public will tolerate a compromise
cerned about this issue. They listened when
in its health status to save a few bucks. In
we complained about the smoking issue.
fact, the money saved on the cheap flights
is actually false economy, as on your way
■ If the air begins to feel stuffy during the
flight, let the attendant know; the pilot may
to the baggage hall you might have to stop
at the gift shop to buy yourself headache be able to increase ventilation.
relief. In the airline industry's never-end■ Write to the Aviation Consumer Action
ing search for ways to pinch pennies, fifty
Project, Box 19029, Washington, DC
20036. This non-profit consumer group is
trying to improve air travel safety in genMarvin S. Legator is a professor and direceral, and will submit the public's letters to
tor of the Division of Environmental Toxithe FAA. The FAA continues to insist that
cology at the University of Texas Medical there is no problem with in-flight air qualBranch at Galveston. Amanda M. Howells- ity. Potential lawsuits may assist in changDaniel is with the Toxics Assistance Pro- ing their opinion.
gram at the University of Texas Medical
Branch. The views expressed in this column
—Marvin S. Legator and
do not necessarily reflect those of UTMB
Amanda M. Howells-Daniel
Galveston.
THE TEXAS OBSERVER
• 13
FOR THE RECORD
Facing History With
Courage
(Introductory remarks by Bernard
Rapoport, Chairman of the Board of Regents of the University of Texas at Austin,
on the Occasion of President Clinton's
Speech at the University, October 16, 1995)
A
S A LONG-TIME FRIEND of Bill
Clinton, and a long-time friend of this
University, I am honored by the opportunity to bring us together. Texas has always
been a place marked by the courage of its
people. In the early days, Texas was a hard
place to make a good life. Today, it's a
good place even in hard times. The courage
of our state's leaders, from Sam Houston to
Sam Rayburn to Lyndon Johnson to Barbara Jordan and others, stands out in the
struggle to build a society that is good for
all its people.
Courage gave Heman Sweatt strength to
stand up for civil rights at The University
of Texas years ago., and it gave University
leaders strength to defend affirmative action here in the past year. It takes courage
to say the right thing and do the right thing.
That's why Bill Clinton is president of the
United States today.
Just a few years ago, on a morning like
this, a morning that was filled with high
spirits and hope, we transcended all troubles for one moment, on the pulse of that
morning, when the poet Maya Angelou
read aloud in tribute to the inauguration of
our president. And she said:
History, despite its wrenching pain,
cannot be unlived, but if faced
with courage, need not be lived again.
We live in times that demand equally
large measures of intellect and courage to
lead this nation. We are fortunate to have a
president whose head and heart are strong
enough to pull this country together now.
Albert Camus once said, "Poverty is a
prison without a draw-bridge." Indeed, divisions of wealth, race, class, literacy and
more divide us, and will imprison all of us,
if we let them. From one Texan to all of
you, my fellow Texans, let me urge you not
to let them. I urge you to listen to the leader
who is courageous enough to speak on the
tough issues, who challenges America to
heal her differences. Listen to the leader
who knows in his heart and soul that a good
education is a draw-bridge, that health care
is a draw-bridge. Those are strong bridges
that free us from the grim work of building
prisons, and free us to think about building
castles of hope again.
We thank you, Mr. President, for your
14 • NOVEMBER 10, 1995
commitment to education as the top priority for young Americans. We thank you,
personally, Mr. President, for coming here
today to speak about an issue that others
are too afraid to mention in their speeches
about the future of the country. I believe
that unless we talk about race in America
we will have no future as a country.
Finally, we thank you for seeking a politics
of unity, hope and healing to overcome the
politics of fear, cynicism and division.
Your presence makes me optimistic we can
restore public service as a noble calling.
The following are excerpts from President
Clinton's speech:
White America must understand and acknowledge the roots of black pain. It began
with unequal treatment, first in law and later
in fact. African-Americans indeed have
lived too long with a justice system that in
too many cases has been and continues to be
less than just. The record of abuses extends
from lynchings and trumped-up charges to
false arrests and police brutality. The
tragedies of Emmet Till and Rodney King
are bloody markers on the very same road.
Still today too many of our police officers play by the rules of the bad old days. It
is beyond wrong when law-abiding black
parents have to tell their law-abiding children to fear the police whose salaries are
paid by their own taxes.
And blacks are right to think something is
terribly wrong when African-American men
are many times more likely to be victims of
homicide than any other group in this country; when there are more African-American
men in our corrections system than in our
colleges; when almost one in three AfricanAmerican men in their twenties are either in
jail, on parole, or otherwise under the supervision of the criminal justice system—
nearly one in three. And it is a disproportionate percentage in comparison to the
percentage of blacks who use drugs in our
society. I would like every white person
here in America to take a moment to think
how he or she would feel if one in three
white men were in similar circumstances.
And there is still unacceptable economic
disparity between blacks and whites. It is
so fashionable to talk today about African
Americans as if they have been some sort
of protected class. Many whites think
blacks are getting more than their fair share
in terms of jobs and promotions. That is not
true. That is not true.
The truth is that African Americans still
make on average about 60 percent of what
white people do; that more than half of
African-American children live in poverty.
And at the very time our young Americans
need access to college more than ever before, black college enrollment is dropping
in America.
[...]
On the other hand, blacks must understand and acknowledge the roots of white
fear in America. There is a legitimate fear
of the violence that is too prevalent in our
urban areas; and often by experience or at
least what people see on the news at night,
violence for those white people too often
has a black face.
It isn't racist for a parent to pull his or
her child close when walking through a
high-crime neighborhood, or to wish to
stay away from neighborhoods where innocent children can be shot in school or
standing at bus stops by thugs driving by
with assault weapons or toting handguns
like old west desperados.
It isn't racist for parents to recoil in disgust when they read about a national survey
of gang members saying that two-thirds of
them feel justified in shooting someone
simply for showing them disrespect. It isn't
racist for whites to say they don't understand why people put up with gangs on the
corner or in the projects, or with drugs
being sold in the schools or in the open. It's
not racist for whites to assert that the culture
of welfare dependency, out-of-wedlock
pregnancy, and absent fatherhood cannot be
broken by social problems unless there is
first more personal responsibility.
The great potential for this march today,
beyond the black community, is that whites
will come to see a larger truth—that blacks
share their fears and embrace their convictions; openly assert that without changes in
the black community and within individuals,
real change for our society will not come.
This march could remind white people
that most black people share their old-fashioned American values—for most black
Americans still do work hard, care for their
families, pay their taxes, and obey they
law, often under circumstances which are
far more difficult than their white counterparts face....
Finally, both sides seem to fear deep
down inside that they'll never quite be able
to see each other as more than enemy faces,
all of whom carry at least a sliver of bigotry
in their hearts. Differences of Opinion
rooted in different experiences are healthy,
indeed essential, for democracies. But differences so great and so rooted in race
threaten to divide the house Mr. Lincoln
gave his life to save. As Dr. King said, "We
must learn to live together as brothers, or
we will perish as fools."
,
❑
BOOKS & THE CULTURE
Houseboat
After all these years of living on it
I am becoming the river
My mind moves more and more like water
turned blue and green and silver by reflection
Water moving, moving all the time
Moving even as I sleep
Sometimes in the company of others
I can't understand their words
Their words float over me like bird calls
I am ripples, light and shadow
Trees fall across my face
Late nights lying alone I wonder
To what ocean are my thoughts returning
even now?
In the cool foggy morning I wonder
To what ocean will my thoughts return
When I am gone?
"The cat needs her breakfast?'
"Where did I put the keys?"
"I've been sitting here—staring—a long time, I suppose?'
Outside, six plump geese guard nests
When they see me at the window they cry out
Six rusty gates opening at once
If I watch them long enough
If I am still enough, plump enough
They take me in
The scolding stops
Quiet seeps through windows, floorboards
the soles of my feet
And rises, rises
Filling my legs and pelvis
Filling belly, heart, lungs
Filling my wings, my goosey throat, my feathers, my feathertips
Quiet dissolves me
Liquid, I fill the silent house
—Andrea Carlisle
A
NDREA CARLISLE HAS PUBLISHED a book of fiction,
The Riverhouse Stories, now a classic in feminist circles, as
well as many stories and articles in various journals, including
Calyx, Northwest Review, Writer's Digest, and Willow Springs.
She teaches each summer at Flight of the Mind, a writing conference for women in the wilderness, in Oregon. (For next year's
brochure, to be mailed this winter, write: 622 SE 29th Ave., Portland, OR 97214.)
Carlisle has worked as a counselor for adolescents, a writing instructor, a writer for various government agencies and for companies in the United States, Canada, and England. She co-authored
and co-directed an award-winning video program on disability
called "Looking Up." She currently teaches fiction at the Oregon
Writers' Workshop and is working on another collection of stories
and a novel.
—Naomi Shihab Nye
THE TEXAS OBSERVER •
15
Nixon
In Larry King's
BY DON GRAHAM&
ed to Shakespeare and Samtt
other parts of these Etats Unis,
t bet the farm on local laughJones, a dead playwright,
,, .8 played in New York back
ody down here was saying
was the greatest thing
'tioning.
new play is about
, the
THE DEAD PRE By Larry L. Kin - Staged Reading
G.W. Bailey.
October 14, U . ,eat*
Southwest Tex*.
(In conjuncti
;:
Larry L. Kim
letters,
western Wii Library, th ug
house.;.
by his4
he has been --$141,4744no..
doubt, for 4i:oilier: tranced by the
pretty much
that had mad
essay, where t
and what
e purpose of a
is to register lesi
ternal applause me
, is intended to be a
yoke a lot of laughup mostly of SWT
be entertained, and
But this is still the
where Greater Tuna
ame reverence an
rank Dobie Regents
d English Litera1 Texas at Austin.
16 • NOVEMBER 10, 1995
he
sio
tub
s. of everyt
Ine:ere is some dis
opping of the A-bomb:
ver gets beyond he
ybody who has Xr
'y over the Smit
As played b
edits include
s Truman dogg
sts upon his rectitu
g.fellow dead president,
this Truman isn't funny—although he thinks he is—and I was waiting
for someone to knock the stuffing out of
him, but it never happens. He blusters on
to the end.
13J, A LEGENDARY teller of jokes,
bawdy stories, and tall tales, would
seem to offer vast comic potential,
and King has written beautifully of LBJ in
His essay "My Hero LBJ" fairly
with Johnsonian energy and volons of profanity in the name of
nsonian) self-interest.
. ds its way into this
-,.,...0*, Ll3J country, and
C:::::1:::' inded like of Lyn-.
o ' 'w guffaws here at his
am
native Texan wellT arry
in TV's "Northern Exown fo
played the stereotypical
osure:'
an in anus er of films, would seem to
evitable choice to play Johnson.
as accent as broad as the LBJ
ooks right at home in a Weste suit, and he wears boots the
son wears gloves: poured
ybe the part was just too
have to work to play
14111E411'h Corbin's LBJ caught
10hiliierisms well and many of
s drew gales of laughter, in
arry Corbin playing Barry
airness, this was a reading
d, done almost literally on
everal of the actors, including
flown in from L.A. that day.
case G. W. Bailey's Nixon is eas
best of the dead presidents. Curactor-in-residence at SWT, Bailey
excellent comic credentials, having
played in "M.A.S.H." and several of the
Police Academy films.
It's intriguing to see how Nixon comes
out the most lifelike and vital character in
production. A traditional New Deal
iocrat and therefore life-long Nixon
has had to do the artist's job: he
t a Nixon. In the process
n took over King's
t, Because King
o some
Wm.
Richards. Look in the mirror and imagine
yourself Governor: Wouldn't I make a
great Governor? (Of course, Billy Lee
Brammer, who was very close to Johnson,
managed to concoct a highly credible and
very funny LBJ in his famous portrait of
Arthur "Goddam" Fenstemaker in The Gay
Place. So go figure.)
All I know is what I saw that night, and
what I saw was G. W. Bailey's Nixon walk
off with the play. Dick Nixon was the only
one to have the guts to tell God that God
was giving him the shaft. The historical
Nixon was always afraid somebody was
going to shaft him. And he was right:
Democrats spent their lives waiting to shaft
him, and they did. Oh, they'll say he
shafted himself, but they had a hand in it,
too. You think Nixon was the only one who
ever said dirty words in the White House?
The play has some funny remarks by LBJ,
saying what he'd have done with those
tapes: he'd have burned them. King's
Nixon is a human character. He wants to
curry God's favor; he wants to figure out a
winning strategy; he wants to suck up, but
he wants to suck up memorably. He's the
hardest-working suck-up in this play. He
is, finally, a convincing portrait of what he
was, and what Coolidge and LBJ and Tru-
man all were—politicians. But Nixon,
paradoxically, is the only one who is really
honest about it. And he has reasons: he's
the perennial outsider, the man loved by no
one, from his days at Duke to his days in
the White House. Now this famously solitary man's facing Judgment Day along
with three other stiffs—and he still fears
he's going to get the shaft.
Because this is the 'nineties, God, of
course, is an African-American woman.
Loretta Devine, known for the TV series
"Picket Fences" and soon to appear in
Waiting To Exhale, plays it light, like it is
written. Her God is genial, fair-minded,
feminist, and funny.
Endings to plays must be hard to write.
The kind of ending I like the best is the
way Hamlet ends, where all the principals
are slaughtered on stage; but in this play
all the principals are already dead when
the play opens. In any case, King's solution left me longing for something weightier. God doesn't send the Presidents to
Hell, but rather, New Age-wise, sends
them back to earth, with Coolidge as a butterfly (I can't remember why), Truman as
a pit bull (too obvious), Johnson as a steer
(wherein King, never one to pussyfoot
around feminist sensibilities before, has
LBJ put out to pasture among cute cows as
penance for his excessive devotion to masculinity), and Nixon as a scarab beetle, a
roller of dung. Here, I think, King's politics show through. Poor, paranoid, distrustful, shaft-ridden Dick Nixon, simply
for the sheer exuberance his character
brings to this play, deserves a better fate.
Why not make him a butterfly and LBJ a
dung-bailer? After all, they both knew the
loamy depths of political fertilizer, the
maggoty middens of desire and ambition.
Was one purer than the other? Not if you
leave out the politics.
❑
ANDERSON & COMPANY
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THE TEXAS OBSERVER • 17
FronfkxasT)Vietnam
Imposed His Bloody, Grand Illusion on a Nation
LBJ
That Had No Use for It
BY EYAL PRESS
PAY ANY PRICE
Lyndon Johnson
and the Wars for Vietnam.
By Lloyd C. Gardner.
Ivan R. Dee, 1995.
610 pages. $35.00.
good TVA philosophy." That "philosophy"
was packaged as a global strategy by
British economist Barbara Ward in The
Rich Nations and the Poor Nations, a book
that prescribed using welfare capitalism in
the third world to convert "restive proletarians into fine upstanding consumers," and
which Johnson admitted to reading "like
N CONRAD'S Heart of Darkness, the
the Bible." He drew nourishment, as well,
narrator Marlow observes of the Eurofrom the story of the frontier composed by
pean adventure in Africa: "What rehitorian Walter Prescott Webb, in which it
deems it is the idea at the back of it: not a
was shown that "courage" belonged to
sentimental pretense but an idea; and an
those who stayed the course regardless of
unselfish belief in the idea—something
the odds. Vietnam, then, was not about viyou can set up, and bow down before, and
olence and terror. It was about
offer a sacrifice to." There was,
welfare and opportunity, acRutgers University professor of
complished the American way.
history Lloyd Gardner observes
There were moments when the
As Johnson would say in 1965:
in his excellent new book, Pay
The guns and bombs, the rockAny Price: Lyndon Johnson and
illusion faded and the glass in the
ets and warships, are all symthe Wars for Vietnam, somemirror cleared. One stunning note, bols of human failure. They are
thing Lyndon Johnson needed
to believe in and sacrifice to in
scrawled during a meeting with his witness to human folly. A dam
built across a great river is imorder to commit himself to the
war in Vietnam. Cynical and advisers, read: "Murderer—Hitler," pressive...electrification of the
countryside is impressive...a
conniving though he was, JohnStop the War."
rich harvest in a hungry land is
son fancied himself a disciple
impressive.... These... are the
of Franklin Roosevelt—not
achievements which the American naveiled plans for a project to finance a series
Metternich—and therefore felt the need to
tion believes to be impressive. And if we
of dams along the Mekong River. Johnson
justify Vietnam as an exercise in "good
are steadfast, the time may come when
was impressed. Had not rural electrificagovernment" and benevolence—not power
all other nations will also find it so.
tion and dams lifted the once-impoverished
politics. "At the crucial moment of deciThere were, of course, certain snags in
South to economic parity with the North?
sion in Southeast Asia," says Gardner,
the vision. America's only political allies
Had not Johnson personally "brought the
Johnson
in Vietnam, for one, were not New Deal
lights" to the two hundred thousand ranchrecalled his beginnings in the Deprestechnocrats bristling with optimism and eners and farmers of the Texas Hill Country?
sion and the glory days of the New Deal,
ergy, but the most befouled of henchmen,
Vietnam deserved nothing less. "It's a
when for the first time the South and
whose idea of "good government" was to
great thing," he told Goldschmidt, "when
West were offered a roughly equal role
jail and murder the opposition. What Ho
in the nation's economic development. If people of such different cultures can get toChi Minh was trying to accomplish, moregether on power." Delivering a speech at
the North Vietnamese ceased their agover—to integrate North and South into a
Howard University shortly after his visit,
gression, Johnson promised... they
functional, prosperous unit—was precisely
Johnson expounded the faith: "Either the
would find the United States eager to
what Johnson was so proud of having
groups who live in misery and degradation
help them overcome 'the bondage of maachieved in America, yet exactly what U.S.
pull down their fellow men to their level; or
terial misery.'
policy strictly forbade. Finally, there was
the more fortunate nations extend the helpThe "idea," in other words, was to defeat
the fact that American bombers were obliting hand of friendly cooperation that raises
communism by making Vietnam prosper
erating, not developing, the countryside.
the standards of those in a lowly status."
through the methods that had helped lift the
By 1964, as the crucial decisions about
American South. Forget that Vietnam was
ARDNER ILLUMINATES these
bombings and troop deployments were
seething with revolutionary anti-colonialist
contradictions with great care. He
being deliberated, Johnson was calling
ferment, and wanted nothing more than to
also shows that Johnson clung to
upon former Tennessee Valley Authority
be left alone. By fashioning Vietnam as
the "idea" not because he was ignorant of
director David Lilienthal to take charge of
"the Texas of yesterday"—a neglected, unthese problems but because he knew. Even
a project whose goal was to bring rural
as he sat by the map and personally seelectrification to the areas adjoining the
lected the bombing targets, he would rail at
Eyal Press is a freelance writer based in Mekong River. "Dave," he whispered,
his advisers for their "bomb, bomb, bomb"
"give them some of that philosophy, that
New York.
I
derdeveloped agrarian region fit not for
revolution but for New Deal-style programs such as dams, rural electrification,
schools, health and welfare programs—
Johnson could convince himself that the
war was not only endurable, but necessary
and just.
The origins of this grand illusion trace
back to 1961. Embarking on his first trip to
the country as an emissary of John F.
Kennedy, Johnson met with his old friend
from the New Deal days, Arthur Goldschmidt, then an economic specialist at the
United Nations. Goldschmidt promptly un-
"—
G
18 • NOVEMBER 10, 1995
"Chronicle," Continued from
page 22.
LBJ at tea with Vietnamese Prime Minister Ky
mentality—"That's all you know." Winning "hearts and minds," the military men
did not realize, required that attention be
paid to the "other war"—for economic development, which helped Johnson believe
he was not a killer fighting a mad and criin
inal war, but a do-gooder bringing the Vietnamese progress. There were, of course,
moments when the illusion faded and the
glass in the mirror cleared. One stunning
note, scrawled during a meeting with his
advisers, read: "Murderer—Hitler," "Stop the War."
He never did, instead constructing a
soothing, utterly inverted analogy between
Vietnam and his Great Society. Why were
American boys fighting and dying in Vietnam, he was asked in September, 1965 by a
grieving mother who had just lost her son.
"We must," he assured her (and himself),
"maintain the commitment.... For if we do
not we shall have little chance to devote
ourselves to the nourishment of freedom in
America." Again and again, Johnson
would tell the people that the wars for prosperity at home and abroad were inextricably connected. Both struggles had to be
tackled by America's finest experts and
footsoldiers. If good men refused to roll up
their sleeves and get the job done in either
setting, it would mark a victory for "the
politics of principle"—i.e., radicalism—
which "brings out the masses in irrational
fights for unlimited goals." "Then," he explained, "the whole thing begins to explode."
Instead, the whole thing began to unravel. Two months after his letter to the
grieving mother, when Office of Economic
Opportunity director Sargent Shriver
YOICHI OKAMOTO
pleaded for higher funding for the War on
Poverty, Johnson said, "Well, Sarge, we
can't spend that kind of money....Congressional elections are coming up. After that
we'll be out of this Vietnam thing, and I'll
give you the money." The money never
came. The billions poured into the war,
Martin Luther King understood by 1967,
meant that "America would never invest
the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor." By that time, the only
similarities between America's urban
slums and Vietnam's jungles were that
both were burning and both were surrounded by armed U.S. squadrons.
Like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, Johnson's fantasy of benevolence ended not in
triumph or glory but in blood and anguish.
Gardner is able to convey the content of
this fantasy without for a moment positing
this as a case of good intentions gone awry.
Johnson's war, he shows, flowed from the
false faith and arrogance that so often characterizes imperialism, accented by his personal experience as a Congressman from
the South. Child of the New Deal, he imagined ways of exporting it to Vietnam. Imbued with the crusading spirit of liberalism
at its high tide, he believed that America
had a right—indeed a duty—to define the
path of progress for others. Defeating communism in Third World countries, he believed, would prove his and his country's
good intentions, its generosity. "How is it
with our general," Gardner quotes from
Coriolanus,
Even so, as with a man by his own
aims empoison'd
And with his charity slain.
Latin America. The Indian nanny who cares
for Neto is a contradictory character, who
along with the family she serves finds herself
looking at her own people, as they stand,
backlit and framed in a doorway while stealing a glimpse at an elaborate birthday celebration. The Yanqui-go-Jom leftist who frequents the Yepes household is not so
preoccupied with ideology that he cannot
provide the boy and his friends with bourgeois magazines filled with pictures of nude
women—and charge them for the discreet
service he provides. And there are no generales , no troops, no airplanes, just one family huddled around a radio—and outside the
gunfire and bombing that has become background noise in Guatemala.
Filmed on location in Guatemala, with a
Guatemalan cast, for five hundred thousand
dollars, the film is also visually understated, not nearly as lush (or flush) as its recent Mexican antecedent, Alfonso Arau's
Como Agua Para Chocolate. At times, it
even has the look of an early Technicolor
feature, although the video knock-off provided for the press viewing subdued some
of the film's visual quality. And though it
has taken film festival prizes at Biarritz
(France); Huelva (Spain), and in Puerto
Rico, El Silencio de Neto still lacks a distributor.
We will be remembered as the first Latin
American country "to have said 'No' to the
gringos," Eduardo says, in a moment of resignation. And they were. Unfortunately, it
has been the CIA and almost every U.S.
President since 1954 who has remembered
best.
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THE TEXAS OBSERVER •
19
Luddites Then and Now
A Foreboding History of the War Against Technology
BY RAY REECE
REBELS AGAINST THE FUTURE
The Luddites and
Their War on the Industrial Revolution
By Kirkpatrick Sale
Addison-Wesley, 1995. 320 pages,
$24.00.
and cotton trades that accounted for the
bulk of England's lucrative export market.
This was "cottage industry" in the purest
sense. "Work usually involved some bodily skill," writes Sale—like combing, spinning and weaving wool—"and some mental agility, often a craft in which a person
would take some pride, usually with the
ME MAGAZINE recently called it
family pitching in and with occasions for
"The Twentieth Century Blues." Casongs and stories and gossip the while, and
nadian philosopher George Grant
when times were good it was possible to
has written of the "darkness which enlay by a shilling or two and when work was
velops the Western world." Betty Friedan,
slack there was always a garden and a few
in The Feminine Mystique in 1963, referred
animals to fall back on."
to a "quiet desperation" among suburban
Not that life in these cottage communiAmerican housewives—"the problem with
ties was wholly idyllic, without travail and
no name." Most Americans since then, and
discord, even before "the • problem"
certainly most Earthlings, have experiemerged. Sale notes that the "cottage
enced "the problem" in their own lives. It is
weaver" often toiled in "damp and
the grist of daily journalism: runaway murcrowded quarters," was generally beholden
der and suicide rates, brutal mass layoffs of
to merchant suppliers and buyers of his
formerly secure employees, rising poverty
"finished goods," and so was "part of an
and family violence, unceasing civil wars,
`outworker proletariat' long before the
poisoned air and water and soil, pandemic
power loom was perfected." Sale notes furextinctions of plant and animal species,
ther that patriarchy "was the norm in the
glaciers melting and food crops failing as
countryside villages"—though women
the climate heats up in a thickening cloud
could "earn an equal social status" with
of carbon gases around the world.
men—that children entered the work force
Social historian Kirkpatrick Sale, in his
at an early age, and that "life was usually as
eighth luminous book in three decades, has
bare and simple and functional as the furnigiven a name to "the problem with no
ture in the parlor."
name." He calls it "technology," "innovaNonetheless, Sale contends, "it had its
tion," "machinery"—machinery in the servirtues," not only in terms of family cohevice of industrialism, and therefore "hurtsion and self-reliance but also and perhaps
ful," he writes, to human "commonality"
especially in terms of municipal fraternity
and global well-being.
and collective well-being. The "close-knit
Rebels Against the Future is part social
villages" of Nottinghamshire, Lancashire
history and scholarship, part novel in the
and Yorkshire, where these tens of thouspirit of Zola, and part advocacy on behalf
sands of families lived, "functioned as true
of planet Earth—"the only living planet in
communities," writes Sale, with a "comthe universe"—which he stubbornly calls
mon culture" and "traditional relationships
the "biosphere." Sale declafFs in his openamong masters and journeymen, workers
ing sentence that he shares in "affinity for
and merchants, cottagers and squires,
the ideas and passions that motivated the
parishioners and parsons. And central to it
subjects of this book, particularly their
all [emphasis added] was a moral custom
abiding sense that a world dominated by
that was the framework upon which all sothe technologies of industrial society is
cial and economic relations hung, in large
fundamentally more detrimental than benemeasure based on mutual aid and reciprocficial to human happiness and survival."
ity over the back fence...and on honesty
Sale argues that "human happiness" in
and fairness in the workplace and marcentral England, prior to the Luddite rebelket...and on an abomination of anything
lion there in 1811 and 1812, was rooted
that would upset or alter that custom, inlike an oak, in three and four centuries of
stable family and community life. Most of cluding innovations and technologies imposed from without."
the families worked together in the wool
Starting roughly in 1785, which marked
Ray Reece is an activist and writer in Fort the introduction of the "steam-powered
factory" in England, the traditional cotWorth and Austin.
20 • NOVEMBER 10, 1995
tagers of the textile districts were increasingly threatened and set upon by "innovations and technologies imposed from without." The principal source of this
imposition was a new breed of capitalist
evolving in England under the banner of
Adam Smith—an ambitious coterie of inventors, manufacturers and marketeers
who were quickly able to enlist the apparatus of the British state on behalf of their
lunge for wealth and power.. By 1800,
writes Sale, "some 2,191 steam engines
were thought to be at work in Britain—
those `Stygian forges with their fire-throats
and never-resting sledge-hammers' that
Carlyle wrote of." By 1813, "there were an
estimated 2,400 textile looms operating by
steam, but that burgeoned to 14,150 by
1820 and exploded to more than 100,000
just a decade later." At which point, writes
Sale, "according to a contemporary expert,
one man could do the work that two or
three hundred men had done at the start of
the Industrial Revolution, 'the most striking example of the dominion of human science over the powers of nature of which
modern times can boast."'
Hence, in cruelly short order, the artisans and their families in the textile districts were absorbing the brunt of what Sale
calls the "First Industrial Revolution." (He
argues that a "Second Industrial Revolution" was triggered in 1971, with the "master technology" of the digital computer.)
Many of the artisans lost their jobs in the
industrial onslaught, and those who found
work at "Stygian forges" found themselves
essentially enslaved. "While the engine
works," wrote a doctor of the period,
quoted by Sale, 'people must work. Men,
women, and children are thus yoke-fellows
with iron and steam: the animal machine—
fragile at best, subject to a thousand
sources of suffering, and doomed, by nature in its best state, to a short-lived existence, changing every moment, and hastening to decay—is matched with an iron
machine insensible to suffering and fatigue.'"
And yet, writes Sale, "at bottom the
workers' grievance was not just about the
machinery—it never was just the machinery throughout all these years—but what
the machinery stood for: the palpable, daily
evidence of their having to succumb to
forces beyond their control... that were taking away their livelihoods and transform-
ing their lives." The diabolical "logic of the
machine" quickly infected whole communities, driving a wedge of profit-hunger between traditional artisans and local owners
of the new technology. "This was the
morality of industrial capital, and it apparently had no place in it for the morality of a
society where the well-being of the workers and their work, the salubrity of family
and community, mattered most"
In any case—the preliminary tactic of petitions and letters and pleas to capitalists
and government officials having failed—a
small band of textile workers in Nottinghamshire decisively launched the Luddite
rebellion on November 4, 1811. Their target
wasn't a steam-powered textile mill, though
not a few of them hulked in the region, but
rather the house of a "master weaver"
named Hollingsworth who had recently installed some "hated machines" of the jobkilling kind. In the darkness, writes Sale,
the raiders "blackened their faces or pulled
up scarves, hoisted their various weapons—
hammers, axes, pistols, 'swords, firelocks,
and other offensive weapons' (as one report
had it)—and marched in more or less soldierly fashion to their destination." They
broke into the house and smashed a halfdozen of Hollingsworth's "frames," or "cutup" machines, and then disbanded—only to
return some six nights later to finish the job.
This time, however, they were met by gunfire. One of the raiders, a weaver named
John Westley, was mortally wounded.
"Proceed, my brave fellows," he reportedly
exclaimed, "I die with a willing heart." His
comrades, writes Sale, "bore the body to the
edge of a nearby woods and then returned
`with a fury irresistible by the force opposed
to them' and broke down the door while the
family and the guards escaped by the back
door. They then smashed the frames and apparently some of the furniture, and set fire
to the house, which was gutted within an
hour; the men dispersed into the night,
never identified, never caught."
Thus erupts the boisterous tragedy of
Luddism, a brief but seminal and instructive episode in the annals of Western industrialism, which Sale narrates with the flair
of a novelist. (He notes, by the way, that the
famous namesake of the Luddite rebellion—often referred to by the rebels themselves in public declarations as "Captain"
or "General Edward Ludd"—didn't exist at
the time of the revolt and may never have
existed, save perhaps in the person of a boy
in Leicester some twenty years before who
may have smashed a knitting machine.) It
is a story, writes Sale, of "pseudonymous
letters, night-time raids, quasi-military operations, secrecy and solidarity, and a campaign to instigate fear, or alarm, or dread in
the hearts of those at whom it is aimed." It
is also a story of ruthless suppression by a
British state whose armed dragoons and
magistrates—mistaking a leaderless, inchoate uprising for a disciplined revolution—would stop at nothing to protect the
interests of England's new industrial elite.
I
N ITS LATER MONTHS, when the rebellion has spread from Nottinghamshire to Lancashire and Yorkshire,
"it adds on public demonstrations, attacks
on factories (including one which claims
the lives of ten Luddites), arson and burglary as its character hardens , and the raids
become more frequent, sometimes frenzied, even in the face of growing numbers
of troops." Particularly in Yorkshire, Sale
observes, "Luddism rises to its most imposing form, rooted as it is in communities
with long heritages and strong allegiances,
and here there are clearer signs of an authentic insurrection—arms raids and the
hoarding of weapons, the voice of a true
rebel raised now and again, and eventually
even assassination—and here the wave
crashes against unyielding breaker rocks
and is largely spent, only little more than a
year after it begins."
By January 1813 at the latest, when fourteen rebels are strung from the gallows on a
single day, the Luddites have lost, "their
howl drowned out by the deafening noise
of the factory engine." But Sale hasn't finished by a long shot. He marches on for
seventy-five pages, mainly skewering and
demythologizing the "post-industrial"
computer age, which Sale insists is not remotely post-industrial. He argues that the
modern computer and attendant technologies now in the hands of the international
corporate state are the driving force of the
"Second Industrial Revolution"—with
grave implications for human "commonality" and global well-being.
Sale is aware that the "computer age"
has far more champions and defenders at
this point than it has detractors. He acknowledges, too, that some industrial processes have been cleaned up and made
more efficient by the application of computer-based technologies, and that a certain
small quantum of the world's population
has benefitted more than it has been damaged by those technologies—at least so far.
But in sum, he concludes, the basic and ultimately corrosive currents of the First Industrial Revolution are fully present and
working their evil in the Second. He lists
those "currents" as the following: (1) "The
Imposition of Technology," (2) "The Destruction of the Past," (3) "The Manufacture of Needs," (4) "The Service of the
State," (5) "The Ordeal of Labor," (6) "The
Destruction of Nature."
Sale is persuasive in his treatment of
these "currents," showing how each interacts with the others to produce "the prob-
lem" afflicting the denizens of the late
twentieth century. He is especially compelling in his treatment of number six: "The
Destruction of Nature." It is "characteristic
of industrialism," he writes,
to make swift and thorough use of nature's stored-up treasures and living organisms, called 'resources,' without regard to the stability or sustainability of
the world that provides them—a process
ratified by such industrial ideologies as
humanism, which gives us the right, materialism, which gives us the reason, and
rationalism, which gives us the method.
But it was not until industrialism grew
into its high-tech phase, with the immense
power-multiplier of the computer; that
this exploitation of resources escalated
onto a new plane different not only in degree, with exhaustion, extermination, despoliation, and pollution at unprecedented and accelerating rates, but in
kind, creating that technosphere so immanent in our lives, artificial, powerful,
and global, and fundamentally at odds
with the biosphere. What Carlyle saw as
the economy's 'war with Nature' in the
19th century has, like all warfare, become
a vastly more thorough force in the 20th.
Not surprisingly, Sale makes clear that he
is sympathetic to the efforts of activists in
America and abroad to conceive and execute a "Neo-Luddite" revolt against modern
technology run amok, citing the provisions
of a "Neo-Luddite Manifesto" by Chellis
Glendinning. But Sale is too watchful and
intellectually honest to be optimistic in the
near term. Despite his references to hopeful
signs of effective opposition to industrialism—among them such thinkers as Wendell Berry and Jeremy Rifkin and such organizations as Greenpeace—he seems to be
convinced that "the problem" he has named
will not be contained in time for salvation.
Indeed, he expects that the Second Industrial Revolution—a global Frankenstein
ravaging the planet in quest of more profit
for its corporate masters, reducing all life to
market commodities—will continue laying
waste to the biosphere until "civilization"
simply collapses, in one or another variant
of apocalypse.
Assuming there are survivors, he writes,
it will be necessary for those "survivors to
have some body of lore, and some vision of
human regeneration, that instructs them in
how thereafter to live in harmony with nature and how and why to fashion their technologies with the restraints and obligations
of nature intertwined, seeking not to conquer and dominate and control the species
and systems of the natural world—for the
failure of industrialism will have taught the
folly of that—but rather to understand and
obey and love and incorporate nature into
their souls as well as their tools."
❑
THE TEXAS OBSERVER • 21
Chronicle of a Death Foretold
New Film Provides an Elegy for Lost Guatemala
BY LOUIS DUBOSE
THE SILENCE OF NETO
Directed by Luis Argueta
Spanish with English subtitles
Opens November 10 at the Dobie
Theater in Austin
(The first Dobie screening, followed by a
reception with Luis Argueta, will be a
fundraiser for the Guatemalan Support
Network's Austin Chapter. Tickets are $10
in advance, $12 at the door. For advance
tickets, call (512) 453-0089 or 304-1355.)
play, finds Neto (an abbreviation of
Ernesto) at that particular moment when a
boy is bidding a reluctant farewell to childhood. Almengor, who tells much of the
story through the nuances of a wonderfully
expressive face, portrays a reticent and observant pre-adolescent, at times still loyal
to the radio adventure trio, "Los Tres Villalobos," at times an overeager consumer
of the mens' magazines that passed for
photoerotica in the fifties, and at times pursuing his classmate Ani (Ingrid Hernan-
N 1954, GUATEMALA was
governed by democratically
elected President Jacobo Arbenz, idle arable land was being
expropriated at its declared taxable value and redistributed to
landless peasants, and the country
was at peace. In Washington,
Henry Cabot Lodge, the Dulles
brothers, and Dwight Eisenhower
were ordering the CIA to destroy
one of two democracies in Central
America. And in Rome, Pius XII
presided over a church whose
hegemony and pre-Vatican II orthodoxy was yet to be challenged
in Latin America.
Yet despite its historical context,
The Silence of Neto (I would have
preferred Neto's Silence to the title
transliterated from El Silencio de
Neto) is not a polemical response
to United Fruit's foreign policy. In
taking a historical moment and infusing it with nostalgia, Guatemalan filmmaker Luis Argueta- Oscar Almengor and Eva Tamargo Lemus
an exile who produced and
dez), who "disappears" with her upperdirected the film—has created a story that is
middle-class family shortly after President
incapable of bitterness or rancor.
Arbenz runs out of options and capitulates
Argueta observes the death of
to Eisenhower, Dulles & Lodge.
Guatemalan democracy from the home of
In a story that is almost soap-operatic in
an upper-middle-class civil servant emits setting, the domestic details—cooking,
ployed by the Arbenz ministry of justice.
ironing, and card playing—provide an
The Silence of Neto is the story of innoelaborate scrim that separates Neto from
cence lost, but by 1954 Eduardo Yepes, the
the larger reality of Guatemala's encounter
emotionally austere civil servant portrayed
with North American political reality.
by Guatemalan actor Julio Diaz, had long
From his bedroom, Neto plots a secret assince lost his innocence. Perhaps it was lost
sault on one of his country's highest volwhen he came to terms with his wife's earcanos, a rite of passage he will share with
lier interest in his brother, Ernesto (Herbert
two classmates who, like him, are more inMeneses). The story clearly belongs to its
terested in radio adventure serials than the
eponymous protagonist, Eduardo's elevenfalse news bulletins broadcast by the CIAyear-old son Neto (Oscar Javier Almengor).
operated radio station, or the news of a
Argueta, who along with Guatemalan
coup, and Arbenz' resignation, which also
screenwriter Justo Chang wrote the screen22 • NOVEMBER 10, 1995
plays out on the radio.
Backpacks on their shoulders and
singing the theme from "Los Tres Villalobos," the three boys make it to the top of
the mountain. But the grainy footage of
their climb through lush jungle portends a
descent into four decades of civil war and
genocide, and larger rites of passage that
three innocents savoring a day of truancy
cannot understand. Neto returns to an
angry father so preoccupied with the collapse of the Arbenz presidency and the impending death of his brother,
Ernesto, that he has no time to
scold the boy.
L
IKE THE BEST of Modern
Latin Lit, which began with
Quixote, The Silence of Neto
is a story of the struggle between
prudence and passion. Neto's
mother (Eva Tamargo Lemus)
had made her choice years earlier,
when she settled for the the safer
of the two brothers interested in
her. Ernesto, who has come home
to die but claims he is in
Guatemala because "Morocco
was too hot, I thought I'd come
back to cool off in the Cold War,"
is the personification of every
passion his sedate brother Eduardo has denied. And like all
prodigal sons, he is more beloved
than the brother who remained
home and fattened the calf. But
although Ernesto fails in a discreet lifelong courtship of Neto's
mother, in the end he prevails in
his struggle for the heart of his namesake,
as Neto bolts from Ernesto's funeral to
launch a small Chinese hot air balloon his
uncle taught him to construct and fly.
The Silence of Neto is the work of writers
who understand the importance of type and
the weakness of stereotype. Augueta uses a
ladino family— a class that had completely
adopted European culture—as a window
into Guatemalan society in the 1950s. So the
viewer sees Guatemala from the perspective
of an urbane family that accepts Arbenz'
agrarian reform, seems to avoid ideology,
and continues the intimate relationship with
the Roman Catholic Church that was characteristic of people of privilege in all of
.
Continued on p. 19
AFTERWORD
Artxan Looked at Lyndon
The Late and Unrepentant Nemesis of LBJ
BY BILL ADLER
T
HIS STRANGER IN THE CROWD
called me a paid propagandist of the
Republicans, and I called him a Goddamned liar." The speaker was ultraconservative J. Evetts Haley, who nearly came to
blows with a liberal disputant on the courthouse lawn in Amarillo in 1946. For Haley,
who died in Midland on October 9th at the
age of ninety-four, the pugnacious moment
foreshadowed the rancher-historian's most
notorious battle.
That occurred almost two decades later,
with the publication of his book A Texan
Looks at Lyndon, the most controversial
book ever written about a Texan. Before it
fell into obscurity, it became a cause
celebre of the 1964 presidential election.
Subtitled "A Study in Illegitimate Power,"
the two hundred and fifty-four page selfpublished paperback—Haley said no publishing house would touch it—portrayed
Lyndon B. Johnson as a vain and vicious
man whose ascent to the presidency was
wrought with malevolence on every rung
of the ladder. In bellicose terms, Haley described the National Youth Administration,
of which Johnson had been state director,
as' "a disloyal, subversive organization,
under the domination of Russia"; he
claimed Johnson was a congressman who
supported farm programs "conceived by
the communist cell in agriculture"; a senator,. who stole an election, Haley alleged;
and a vice president who "accepted second
place for money."
The problem was that Haley's polemic
maintained only intermittent touch with reality. While he made some good points
about Johnson's shadowy dealings—such
as the peculiarity of two hundred and two
of his South Texas supporters voting in alphabetical order in the 1948 Senate race—
they were buried waist deep in rumor-mongering and mad-dog ruminations.
Controversy swirled around the book
even before the first copies rolled off the
press. A typesetter at the Dallas print shop
,
Bill Adler, in true freelance fashion, dusted
off a similar version of this article that first
appeared in the September 1987 Texas
Monthly.
J. Evens Haley
NITA STEWART HALEY
MEMORIAL LIBRARY
to which Haley took the manuscript apparently refused to continue when she reached
the author's insinuations that Johnson was
involved in the Kennedy assassination.
Company officials declined to finish the
job, so Haley demanded they melt the type
and hired an Ohio firm to print the book.
The initial press run of a hundred thousand copies caused little hubbub. But as the
presidential campaign heated up during the
summer, sales skyrocketed. By the time of
the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City in late August, sales averaged
fifty thousand copies a day, mostly in bulk
orders of one hundred to ten thousand
copies from the John Birch Society and
Goldwater for President clubs, which
hoped the book would swing close states to
Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, Johnson's Republican opponent. At almost
seven and a half million copies, A Texan
Looks at Lyndon had become the best-selling book of any kind in the country, and the
most successful political book of all time.
In the campaign's final weeks, counterattacks on Haley and his book began in
earnest, many of them penned by Johnson's supporters, such as special assistant
Bill Moyers and nationally syndicated
columnist Drew Pearson. Some of these
adversaries offered choice diagnoses of the
author's problem. "A case of unhospitalized paranoia," declared A.C. Greene in the
Dallas Times Herald. Jim Mathis, a volunteer for the Democratic National Committee, wrote a widely reprinted article that
spoke of "the festering climax of Haley's
fantasies." (Mathis, incidentally, was the
son-in-law of George Brown, a co-founder
of the giant construction company Brown
and Root. The firm's unwholesome financial relationship with Johnson had been
chronicled by Haley in some detail.)
As the backlash peaked, newsstands
around the country refused to carry the
book, airport authorities ordered it removed from terminals, and even the Republican National Committee publicly rebuked it. In the end, the tract caused
Johnson little political damage; his election
captured what was at the time the greatest
popular majority in history.
Historians today dismiss the polemic as
a venomous propaganda piece, an eruption
of the old renegade streak in Haley's nature that got him leveraged off the University of Texas faculty in 1936 for being, in
essence, too outspoken and too right-Twing.
The book tarnished his well-regard41 reputation as the author of many frontier histories and biographies, including the classic Charles Goodnight: Cowman and
Plainsman.
Haley divided his time between ranching
and writing. He worked cattle on horseback
well into his eighties, and wrote from his
office in a fourteen-thousand-volume library of Texana he established in Midland
in 1976. He was unrepentant until the end.
In a conversation not long ago, he maintained that his book's allegations must
have been true or he would have been sued
for libel. And he resented that he was seldom cited in the dozens of Johnson biographies that have appeared since 1964.
"'Course," he told me with a sharp-edged
cackle, "everybody wants to write about
the sonofabitch now that he's dead." ❑
THE TEXAS OBSERVER
• 23
Postmaster: If undeliverable, send Form 3579 to The Texas Observer, 307 W. 7th St., Austin, Texas 78701
POLITICAL INTELLIGENCE
✓ WAGING THE MINIMUM. Corporate profits are up. Stock prices are up.
Productivity is up. So Ore11 Fitzsimmons
thinks it's about time the minimum wage
went up as well.
Fitzsimmons, state director of the Service Employees International Union
(SEIU), has launched a Houston initiative
drive to raise the local minimum wage
from four dollars and twenty-five cents to
six dollars and fifty cents an hour. To put
the issue on the ballot, he estimates that
thirty-two thousand registered voters will
have to sign petitions, and the drive to collect those signatures has already begun.
Relying on volunteers supplied by the
SEIU, the Harris County AFL-CIO Council, local Catholic churches, and community organizations such as ACORN,
Fitzsimmons planned to have petitioners
stationed at many inner-city polling places
for the November 7 election. "This issue is
about the people who live inside the [610]
Loop and make the minimum wage,"
Fitzsimmons told a local reporter. "They
are the ones who will decide this."
To help publicize the campaign, the
union is focusing on the Jack-in-the-Box
restaurant chain, which is enjoying record
profits produced by its minimum-wage
workforce. 'Jack's Back," reads a union
flyer distributed at local fast food outlets,
"but how can he afford to spend millions of
dollars on TV ads while paying five-year
employees four dollars and forty cents an
hour?" According to the union, a higher
minimum wage would actually increase
Jack-in-the-Box sales, since fast-food
workers could now begin to afford a little
more upscale dining experience for themselves and their families. "Now they'll be
able to buy an apple pie to go along with
that cheeseburger!" notes the leaflet.
The plutocracy is not amused. A recent
editorial in the Houston Chronicle referred
to plans for a higher minimum wage as
"economic suicide." Paying a living wage
to hamburger flippers, the editorial writers
24 • NOVEMBER 10, 1995
solemnly intoned, "would be a guaranteed
recipe for disaster for our city." According
to the editorial, the chief victims of a higher
minimum wage would be unskilled
women, minorities, and teenagers, who in
the Chronicle's view seem to be thriving
on incomes below the current poverty line.
Undeterred by the Chronicle's magnanimity, Fitzsimmons continues to take the
campaign to local Jack-in-the-Box restaurants, where he and other union members
pass out petitions and sign up unregistered
voters. For more information about the petition drive, contact the Campaign for a
Living Wage at 1-800-322-SEIU.
,
✓ WHAT COLOR IS YOUR AIR?
The Austin media have been attentively
following various environmental controversies, most of them the involving potential pollution of the Edwards Aquifer and
Barton Springs, or suburban battles over
encroaching urbanization, diminishing
water supplies, or burdensome traffic.
Meanwhile, heavy industry continues to
expand in largely minority East Austin,
generally with the encouragement of city
government—but with little input from or
consultation with ordinary East Austinites.
In response to the latest encroachment—
plans to develop a plant site for Tokyo
Electron America Inc. in the Montopolis
neighborhood—two neighborhood organizations, People Organized in Defense of
Earth and Her Resources (PODER) and
Montopolis Area Neighborhood Improvement Council (MANIC), have filed a Title
VI Administrative Complaint, with the Office of Civil Rights of the Environmental
Protection Agency, against the City of
Austin and the Texas Natural Resource
Conservation Commission.
In a statement released October 12 ("Dia
de la Raza"), PODER and MANIC charged
the city with promoting development by allowing polluting industries to locate in East
Austin, without encouraging simultaneous
sustainable development or providing
buffer zones for adjacent neighborhoods.
They also accused the TNRCC of withholding pertinent technical information concerning Tokyo Electron and its potential environmental impact on the community.
Overall, the two organizations describe
disproportionate industrial development
and pollution in the largely minority neighborhoods of East Austin as evidence of
"environmental racism" which, they
charge, violates Title VI of the Civil Rights
Act of 1964.
✓ WHAT ABOUT FAY WRAY?
Don't look now, but Ann Richards is tied
with Phil Gramm in the race for Texas Senator. Luckily for Phil, Ann isn't running—
but according to the Austin AmericanStatesman (October 29) the Texas Poll
(Office of Survey Research, University of
Texas) for October 12-23 reported that if
she were, Texans would divide equally between Gramm and Richards (forty-five to
forty-four percent, a statistical tie). Gramm
was quick to attach his unique rhetorical
spin to these results, as his spokesman
Larry Neal called the poll a "hypothetical
King Kong vs. Godzilla kind of question."
Neal did not clarify which role his candidate was auditioning for, or who Gramm
would choose to play Tokyo.
Perhaps more sobering for Gramm-san
is that his more high-profile, presidential
candidacy also remains strictly second-feature stuff, even in his home state. Gramm
remains tied with Bob Dole among Texas
Republican voters, at thirty-two percent
each, with the remainder currently opting
for Pat Buchanan (five percent), Steve
Forbes (four percent), or "others or no answer" (at twenty-seven percent, a statistical
tie with the front runners). Whatever else
the poll reveals, it suggests that neither
Gramm nor Dole exactly has a vise grip on
the hearts of Texas Republicans.
A final note: fifty percent of likely Texas
voters said they would consider voting for a
third-party candidate for president.