Vidal and McVeigh; Hitchens Kisses Kerrey's Ass; Brook Trout and Ethnic Cleansing
One of the last sights afforded Tim McVeigh on this earth will be Gore Vidal. Worse things can befall a man. McVeigh has invited Vidal to be on his observer team at the upcoming execution in Terre Haute, scheduled for May 16, and Vidal has accepted. He told the Daily Oklahoman he began corresponding with McVeigh when McVeigh wrote him about Vidal's 1998 article in Vanity Fair on "the shredding'' of the Bill of Rights. "We've exchanged several letters," says Vidal. "He's very intelligent. He's not insane." Of the bombing he told the Oklahoman: "Do I approve of it? Of course I don't," adding that he and McVeigh have similar views about the erosion of constitutional rights and about the federal government's 1993 raid on the Branch Davidian compound near Waco that left 80 people dead.
I wrote a few weeks ago here about the unsatisfactory nature of the Oklahoma memorial and the manner in which the city has shirked the issues raised by McVeigh's attack. Oklahomans are selective in their grief after a mass killing. They took about 80 years even to make official acknowledgment of the scores of dead blacks slaughtered in the Tulsa race riots, while fiercely denying reparations.
Nor is the Oklahoma City site a simple memorial. Funded by us taxpayers, it offers an Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism. But if Oklahomans refuse to confront McVeigh's motives and rationale, what credentials can their Institute have for any preventive strategies? There's something ghoulish about the way Oklahomans are remembering their 168, from the repellent architecture and commemorative furniture of the site, to the icky blather about "survivors" and "closure," to the nature of this supposed "closure," focused on killing more people, whether those on death row (for whose denial of habeas corpus rights they fiercely lobbied in the passage of the Effective Death Penalty Act) or on McVeigh, whose jury they entertained as though it were a victorious football team, and whose execution they have been drawing lots to attend.
There are plenty of references in the Memorial literature to Oklahoma City as part of the American heartland. From that heartland have gone forth across the world Oklahoma lads who have, in government service, dropped bombs, gone on terror missions like Bob Kerrey's, participated in dreadful campaigns of extermination. Now, if they were to visit the Memorial, would not a survivor of one of those missions, a Vietnamese or a Salvadoran, say, perhaps feel that some expression of empathy with other acts of terror was in order? Face it, there are plenty of "survivors" around the world, bereft of their parents, brothers, sisters, kids, because some Oklahoman kitted out in one of the national uniforms pressed the button, pulled the trigger, lit the fuse.
But no, the Memorial specifically offers a definition derived from USC Title II, Section 265 F(A) of terrorism as "politically motivated violence perpetrated against non-combatant targets by subnational groups... Note definition excludes irrational acts, purely criminal or economic activities, or acts committed by nation states." McVeigh made some of these points, and to say that he has the better of the argument with the Oklahoma Memorial is not in the least to apologize for what I described as his evil act; it's to say that the Memorial offers kitsch rather than dignified and considered sorrow.
Good for Gore Vidal. One of Norman Mailer's best books, The Executioner's Song, came out of Gary Gilmore's execution. Capote saw Dick Hickock, one of the killers described in his In Cold Blood, drop through the hangman's trapdoor. He fled the scene in horror before Perry Smith was hanged. According to one memoir, Capote was in love with Smith, and bribed his way into the death cell for a sexual tryst with the doomed man. Hopefully Vidal will as memorably as Mailer do the honors for McVeigh. It's the perfect subject for him.
Kerrey, Scheer and Hitchens
By and large the liberals have massed to defend Bob Kerrey, usually by saying that he was just a grunt following orders. In the Los Angeles Times Bob Scheer announced that Kerrey is "a good man" and that the fellow who should be in the dock is Robert McNamara, who wasn't even secretary of defense when Kerrey lined up those women and babies in Thanh Phong and had his unit of SEALs machine-gun them at a range of 10 feet. (It's true that McNamara, secretary of defense under JFK and LBJ, signed off on the policy of civilian extermination practiced in South Vietnam in the middle and late 1960s, and therefore merits trial as a war criminal along with all the others.)
On Fox, Christopher Hitchens, implacable foe of the war criminal Kissinger, had similar kind words for Kerrey:
Why does Scheer say Kerrey is a "good" man and Hitchens confide to the Fox audience that "I like him very much"? There's far more evidence to say "Bob Kerrey is an evil man." His political career offers meager evidence to back any plea that Kerrey improved the human condition.
His associates in the Senate mostly thought Kerrey was an arrogant shit. A Republican staffer who dealt with him down the years described him to Jeffrey St. Clair, my CounterPunch co-editor, as "the Democrats' Alan Simpson. Smug, holier than thou and a vicious backstabber." That's exactly the impression I had of Kerrey when I saw him on the campaign trail in New Hampshire in 1992. A cold fish, and a nasty one.
Why does Hitchens have to insist he likes Kerrey "very much"? Well, Hitchens has a taste for creeps, but usually they're a little more offbeat than the president of the New School. Maybe Hitchens wants tenure at the New School. So instead of urging the New School students and faculty to demonstrate outside Kerrey's office and demand he be sent to the International Court at the Hague to stand trial, and his salary be sent to Thanh Phong as reparations, he's kissing Kerrey's ass. People will do anything for tenure.
Hitchens is certainly capable of hatred. Just because Bill Clinton put his hand up the skirt of some woman Hitchens cared for (to my knowledge, he's never disclosed who precisely the offended party was), he confused him with Pol Pot and lately has denounced his Nation colleagues, so I'm told by a fellow who e-mailed me in search of reaction, for being "lying servants of power," presumably (though I haven't see the text of his attack) because of their qualified support for the Clinton White House throughout the Lewinsky scandal. So why can't Hitchens hate Kerrey? Perhaps he can only get mad about one person at a time: Mother Teresa, Ronald Reagan, Paul Johnson, Bill Clinton, Kissinger.
I think it's a class thing. Scheer and Hitchens feel okay about giving Kerrey a pass because he's socially okay, not like that Southern cracker Thomas Blanton, who got put away for life on May 1 for bombing a church and killing four little girls in Alabama in 1963, which was six years before Kerrey shot other little girls and boys a few thousand miles farther east. No one is talking about the "ambiguities of that bitter and divided time," or the "fog" of the fight over segregation in the South. No one is saying that Blanton was just a compliant footsoldier in a struggle for which the commanding officers in Dixie?Strom Thurmond and the others?bear responsibility.
Just listen to Kerrey's session with Dan Rather on 60 Minutes II a week ago.
Rather: If in fact it did happen?that is, an old man, an old woman and three children being killed?was it or was it not within the rules of engagement for you and your men as you understood it, if necessary, to kill those people?
Kerrey: Yes, I mean, the Vietcong, in a guerrilla war, the people that get caught in the middle are the civilians. And the Vietcong were 1000 percent more ruthless than any standard operating procedure that any American GI or Navy SEAL had...
Here's Scheer's "good man" still saying that the babies he killed "were 1000 percent more ruthless" than any U.S. force or procedure.
Let Kofi Annan send a UN unit down 5th Ave. to the Village, to seize Kerrey. If Blanton can get put in the dock for what he did in the 60s, so can the former Senator now running the New School, where fugitive scholars like HannahArendt from Hitler's Germany were given shelter.
[Stop press. This column was on its way to the printers when I got a phone call from Hitchens (the first in a very long time) in which CH was eager to make it known to me that at the time he made those remarks on the Fox show, he was not fully up to speed on the circumstances of Kerrey's conduct. Hitchens' appearance on the Fox show, readers may note, was Monday, April 30, after the Kerrey story had been on the boil over the weekend. Hitchens' considered opinion is set forth in The Nation, in which, he tells me, he lambastes the New School for a repellent statement about responsibility for war crimes. He also says that he was tough on Kerrey, though he still insists that Kerrey's a likable guy. He agrees that people will do anything for tenure.]
Brook Trout And Ethnic Cleansing
I quoted last week Jean Giono's recipe for trout (basically a bouillabaisse) and elicited this fierce reaction from a friend raised in Colorado (I also like the vers libre effect):
"Nobody from Colo would be caught dead cooking a nice fat native brook trout that way. I disapprove. Recipe: Give big fish away, they are likely hatchery fish. Clean 7" or smaller fish right away, leaving hds on, and wash blood out of spine with cold water. Dry gently. Dip in flour, then in corn meal. Fry very quickly but gently in a hot cast iron pan, in either bacon grease or butter. Just until they curl. Serve with lemon, hot buttered toast and glass of white wine. Never put vinegar anywhere near such a nice fish. Why mess around?"
Well, Susan has a point, though I don't care for corn meal, which is gritty, and even small bird fanciers (like self, co-guardian of a clutch of Gloster Corona canaries) are being counseled against grit these days. Apparently it sticks in the bird's esophagus and can kill them. Cuttlebone is no substitute. Instead, add scrapings from a mineral block into a bit of apple, celery or cucumber.
Trouble is, as my friend was tartly informed by St. Clair, brookies aren't native to Colorado. They were introduced in 1872 and edged out the native rainbows and cutthroat, breeding faster and more frequently. First intended to help provision miners, they were encouraged later for fancy tourism. As the Navajo and Comanche were to the Hopi (who called them The People Who Came from the North and Crushed Our Skulls), so are the brookies to the native, peace-loving cutthroats of Colorado's Rio Grande and San Juan rivers.
"As the Chicanos say, 'How long do you have to hang around before you're a native,'" my Colorado friend riposted tartly. "Next you'll be casting aspersions on yellow toadflax and leafy spurge... The cutthroat are all now hatchery fish, as are the rainbows. At least in my area. Ironically the brook and brown are the best eating in my opinion, the others tasting like mush."
It is true, this business of eradicating "alien species" can go too far. Back in Nazi Germany the young Aryans used to hike about on weekends, exterminating alien plant species. A couple of years ago, on a pack trip in the Golden Trout Wilderness in the California Sierra, I moodily noted the lack of any trout in a stream of high repute and was told that biologists from the state's Fish and Game Department had decided the resident trout were alien and poisoned them. If they'd introduced trout with the correct birth certificates, they hadn't survived. Fishwise, the stream was dead.
This kind of exterminism is not unusual. Take Lake Davis in the Sierra. Fish and Game poisoned it with Rotenone in 1997 in a mad campaign of ethnic cleansing, to get rid of an invasive pike. They did it for the sports fishermen. Nothing thriving there as yet except the pike, and the townspeople, so the postmistress of the nearby town of Portola informs me, are still not hooked up to the lake water. It was a major California uproar.
Same thing is going on in Colorado. Listen to this calm account of state-sponsored brookiecide on the Rio Grande. It's from the Colorado Dept. of NaturalResources, which used to make money planting brookies and now makes money exterminating them and cutthroats:
"Colorado Division of Wildlife biologist John Alves and a crew of 18 captured an estimated 2300 brookies in the middle section of West Indian Creek on the Forbes Trincheria Ranch over a three-day period in early August. Last year's effort was successful at removing 3000 non-native trout species from the lower section of the river, said the Monte Vista-based biologist...
"In August three teams, led by Alves, Division employee Brent Husung and Assistant Ranch Manager Alfred Pacheco, waded up the willow-choked stream, electro-shocking the likely hiding places for fish. Two or three crew members followed with nets scooping up lightly stunned fish, quickly returning cutthroats to the water and placing the brookies in buckets. The brookies were then placed in oxygenated holding tanks and later transferred to a nearby lake.
"'It's too early to determine how successful the removal was,' Alves said. But a survey on the lower section, which was treated last year, indicates brook trout populations were significantly reduced there. So far, brook trout have been removed from 7.5 miles of the stream in the past two years."
Notice the decorous bureaucratese about it being "too early" to "determine" whether the brookiecide had been "successful." Fish and Game probably gave Alves the piscine equivalent of Kerrey's Medal of Honor. Same mindset.