The Mouse that Squeaked

Suddenly the gorilla in the greenhouse shrivels to mouse dimensions. Listen to King Kong's mighty war cry, thundering across the jungle: "The United States and our allies call on North Korea to comply with its commitments under the nonproliferation treaty and to eliminate its nuclear weapons program in a verifiable manner."

Gee, that'll scare the bejeezus out of the NorthKoreans. And that came right after George Bush was thumping his chest at Saddam Hussein. Of course there are differences. Sharon isn't on the phone every day, ordering Bush to please hurry up and raze Pyongyang. The Japanese don't want North Korean rockets falling on Tokyo. There's China nearby, and the last time we went to war on the Korean peninsula it was a messy business.

See what happens when you fall in love with a phrase? A mature president, scanning the first drafts of his State of the Union address, would have relished that smoldering jingle, "axis of evil," then hauled out the red pencil and struck it, on the grounds that it was not only silly, but would be liable to cause no end of trouble. But Bush isn't mature, and has only the verbal arsenal of a caption writer for silent westerns with which to handle world affairs, as in, "Mr. President, why do you want to bomb Baghdad?" "He tried to kill my dad."

So he kept "axis of evil" in the speech, and the person who took it seriously was the North Korean leader, who'd already listened, in March of last year, to George Bush humiliate his secretary of state, Colin Powell, by brusquely reversing the latter's endorsement of reconciliation talks between North and South Korea. As soon as they read the text of the axis-of-evil speech the North Koreans bunkered down for invasion. Maybe they really did accelerate their efforts to make a nuclear weapon. Or maybe, when U.S. envoy John Kelly accused them recently of breaching all past pledges to not try to build nuclear weapons, they said to themselves, "Screw it, let's make 'em jump. Let's call their bluff." They told Kelly they were working hard for to join the nuke club. Fine by me. My line has always been every nation should have at least one. I do believe in the nuclear deterrent.

So now what's Bush going to do? Restart the Korean war, after he's done with refighting the one against Iraq? Who's next? Axis of Evil, Part One: Germany, Italy and Japan?

Saddam's Amnesty

Maybe Saddam didn't care for the way the North Koreans pulled the spotlight off Bagh- dad. So he struck back by declaring amnesty for not only political prisoners but also criminals. Murderers, both convicted and accused, have to get an okay from the mother of the victim, and debtors a green light from their creditors. This was either the act of a desperate man or from a dictator so sure of his grip that he felt he could afford to void the prisons without worrying about any public commotion.

Clearly the Iraqi Corrections Officers' Union hasn't much clout in Baghdad. Nor has the prison construction industry. Imagine what would happen in this country if word leaked out that the President was thinking of amnestying any violent criminal, let alone almost all of the inmates of the federal gulag. A blanket amnesty for all nonviolent drug offenders? Within 24 hours the prison industry, the prison guards' unions and law enforcement lobbying groups would swamp Congress with e-mails and personal delegations.

The cops and the guards exercise pretty much total veto power here in California. In late August of this year the California legislature passed a bill put up by state Senate Majority leader Richard Polanco intended to encourage peaceful protest and civil disobedience by clarifying and codifying limits of prosecution, given the fact that much so-called "crime reform" has clearly been deliberately designed to limit peaceful protest. Peacefully demonstrate and you risk big trouble. Here are some examples, as offered on justdissent.org, a site that lobbied for Polanco's bill.

Excessive fines...Exorbitant bails?some as high as $1 million?keeping peaceful protesters in prison. Felony charges used to threaten or punish protesters with loss of voting rights and jobs. Federal RICO and domestic terrorist legislation employed to stigmatize peaceful protesters. Permits to protest denied for legitimate protests... Trespass and other false charges fabricated by police. Charges of "Interfering with a religion" used to prosecute protesters.

Police granted immunity from lawsuits, leaving them free to abuse protesters' rights. Adults prosecuted for bringing minor children to protests. "Zero tolerance" rules which expel students who participate in nonviolent protests. Use of court orders to stifle future legitimate and nonviolent protests. Long sentences in overcrowded and inhuman conditions meted out to protesters. Seizure of organizations' bank accounts so that members who protest can be fined.

Protesters arrested and held without charge, preventing them from further protest. Use of racial and other biases in the arrest and prosecution of protesters. Unjustified force (tear gas, pepper spray, bean bags) is used against peaceful protesters. Legal distinctions blurred between violent and nonviolent protest, so that all protesters are demonized as "anarchists," "hoodlums" and "domestic terrorists."

Pre-protest surveillance, infiltration and investigations to identify, arrest and detain nonviolent protesters prior to protest. Police entrapment used to fabricate grounds for arrest and charges.

To try to redress the balance, Polanco introduced SB 1796 in Sacramento last February, designed to roll back all these dire inhibitions against peaceful, nonviolent protest. Essentially, it provided that the punishment for the commission of, or for a conspiracy to commit, certain misdemeanor offenses (ones that didn't cause physical harm to people or property) would be a fine not larger than $100, imprisonment in a county jail for a period not to exceed two days, or both that fine and imprisonment, if the motive for the violation is found to be political expression.

Polanco's bill cleared the legislature near the end of August and went to Gov. Gray Davis for signature. Davis, prime whore for the enforcement and corrections officers' lobbies, vetoed it a month later.

Gays Join Ashcroft

Mind you, when it comes to restrictions on free speech and ventilation of political opinion, the liberals are up there with John Ashcroft. Consider the uproar raised by gay groups against Dr. Laura, and more recently against the drag performer Charles Knipp, who does a blackface skit featuring Shirley Q. Liquor, a black woman on welfare with 19 children.

Last month Knipp took his act to the View, the Manhattan gay bar. An offended member of the audience recruited protesters for the second night, including Sue Hyde of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and performer/activist Imani Henry. When around 50 demonstrators mustered, the cops broke up the protests and issued two summonses to the View for failing to control a crowd and creating disorder in a licensed establishment, which had the effect of shutting down the club temporarily. A big victory for freedom of expression, for which Hyde and the others felt proud enough to carry their campaign against Knipp to Boston, where he was scheduled to bring Ms. Liquor to a gay club called Machine.

In the Boston Phoenix Michael Bronski had a good story reporting what happened next. Machine canceled the show after the club's management got a call from Mayor Tom Menino's liaison to the gay community, Jerome Smith. Smith told the Phoenix that the Mayor "didn't want to see the show happen" and that Smith was to "see if there was a way to talk to the club's management" to make sure the show was canceled. According to Bronski, "One phone call from Smith, who had worked in the Mayor's office of neighborhood services for just a month, was all it took to get the show canned." The Phoenix also ran a strong editorial whacking the gay groups and allied censors for their disgusting assault on free expression.

As Bill Dobbs of QueerWatch remarks, this "is the all-too-common gay response to anything offensive these days?shut it down! No need to confront disagreeable ideas, just shut up the source. The campaign against Shirley Q. Liquor builds on the work by John Aravosis (stopdrlaura.com), Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), Human Rights Campaign and others to shut down Dr. Laura's TV show. Such cavalier attitudes about free expression ignore the historical and contemporary suppression of queer culture. Just in the last several weeks, Cherry, a lesbian erotic novel by Charlotte Cooper, has been seized by Canadian Customs; the shipment of books was headed for a small gay bookstore in Victoria, British Columbia."

Imani Henry is scheduled to perform at NGLTF's Creating Change Conference next month. What does NGLTF have to say about free expression?

Corporate Crooks

F ortune magazine reports that officers and directors of the 1035 companies that have fallen the most from their recent bull-market peaks cashed in $66 billion worth of stock before the crash. Meanwhile those companies' non-insider employees were watching as their children's college funds and their retirement incomes were in free-fall. Before the crash executives from AOL Time Warner cashed in $1.79 billion. Enron executives hauled off $994 million. Global Crossing's commissars netted $951 million.

It's clear that America's corporate executives are, as a class, crooks. The percentage of "bad apples" runs at about 95 percent per barrel, honed to immoral conduct in costly business schools, forging grounds for a career in crime, the same way prisons are for the humbler classes.

Here's a writer I don't often quote with approval: "?a great disaster has occurred. It is the establishment during the last decade or so of the MBA as the moral equivalent of the MD or the law degree, meaning a way of insuring a lucrative living by the mere fact of a diploma that is not the mark of scholarly achievement?the prebusiness economics major, who not only does not take an interest in sociology, anthropology or political science but is also persuaded that what he is learning can handle all that belongs to those studies. Moreover, he is not motivated by the love of the science of economics but by love of what it is concerned with?money."

This is from Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, which shot up the bestseller list in the 1980s. Bloom goes on to say that prospective MBA students have "blinders" put on them. Now, why is it that all of Bloom's paranoid passages about the effects of 60s radicals and shallow multiculturalism on the university are quoted by William Bennett yet not the passage above?

Bloom was right about the MBA student. Anyone who attended an American university in the 80s or 90s can remember those smug fellows who dreamed of the riches derived from a Wharton or Harvard MBA. (The role model was Donald Trump with his degree from the Wharton School of Finance.) Who can forget their superior attitude toward their fellow students who were wasting their time in the humanities department?

By the way, George W. Bush is the first president with an MBA.