You Better Hail the Chief

Bush faced around a thousand protesters in Portland, OR, when he arrived to make a speech on behalf of the timber industry. The riot police came and the demonstrators were sprayed and shot with rubber bullets. These days any criticism of the Commander-in-Chief is not taken lightly. Look at those kids in Ohio a couple of months ago when Bush came to speak at a commencment.

They were told that if they shouted anything obstreperous or otherwise displayed themselves in a critical posture, they would not be allowed to graduate. Not long before W appeared Bruce Springsteen came to Portland on his tour. The word was that the Boss would denounce Ashcroft, maybe even W too, for trashing the Constitution. In the event Springsteen named no names and merely confided to the crowd, in the memory of one present, "We've got to be very vigilant about civil liberties because that's what it means to be Born in the USA." Then the song followed.

Rather more boisterous is Merle Haggard, according to Cheryl Burns who reports thus from Kansas City: "I saw Merle Haggard tonight in KC?great show. He said something about 'so now we're in another war?' and went on to say he was still proud to be an American and all that, so I was wondering just where he was headed. But then he said there was nothing good about any war except the soldiers, sailors, etc.

"Then he says, 'I think we should give John Ashcroft a big hand...(pause)...right in the mouth!' Went on to say, 'The way things are going I'll probably be thrown in jail tomorrow for saying that, so I hope y'all will bail me out.'"

Cheryl concludes, "Proud to be an Okie from...um...Oklahoma City."

Right on, Merle. At another concert, June a year ago, he was quoted by John Derbyshire in National Review Online as saying, "Look at the past 25 years?we went downhill, and if people don't realize it, they don't have their [expletive] eyes on... In 1960, when I came out of prison as an ex-convict, I had more freedom under parolee supervision than there's available to an average citizen in America right now... God almighty, what have we done to each other?"

Was Presley A Racist? On the occasion of the recent 25th anniversary of Elvis Presley's death I read a truly stupid piece in the London Guardian, "He Wasn't My King" by Helen Kolawole, to the effect that Elvis stole songs like "Hound Dog" from black folks, that Willie Mae (Big Mama) Thornton wrote "Hound Dog" and sang it better and that anyway Elvis was a racist, noted for having said, "The only thing black people can do for me is shine my shoes and buy my music."

Wrong on every count. Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, white men, wrote "Hound Dog" and Big Mama Thornton's version is markedly inferior to Presley's. Peter Guralnick, in his Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley (1994), cites a good story by Louie Robinson that appeared in Jet magazine on Aug. 1, 1957.

"Tracing that rumored racial slur to its source was like running a gopher to earth," Jet wrote. "Some said Presley had said it in Boston, which Elvis had never visited. Some said it was on Edward Murrow's show, where Elvis had never appeared. Jet sent Louie Robinson to the set of Jailhouse Rock. 'When asked if he ever made the remark, Mississippi-born Elvis declared: "I never said anything like that, and people who know me know I wouldn't have said it."'"

Robinson then spoke to people "who were in a position to know" and heard from "a Negro physician in Tupelo [Dr. W.A. Zuber] that Elvis Presley used to 'go round to Negro sanctified meetings'; from pianist Dudley Brooks that he 'faces everybody as a man' and from Presley himself that he had gone to colored churches as a kid, like Reverend Brewster's and that 'he could honestly never hope to equal the musical achievements of Fats Domino or the Inkspots' Bill Kenny.'" "To Elvis," Jet concluded in its Aug. 1, 1957, issue, "people are people regardless of race, color or creed."

Ivory Joe Hunter visited Presley in Graceland, worried about the stories of prejudice that had been circulating through the spring of '57. Presley sang his composition "I Almost Lost My Mind" with him, and they hung out for the day singing. Hunter said later, "He showed me every courtesy and I think he's one of the greatest." If you want to look at some great photographs of Elvis in black locales and with black musicians in Memphis in the 1950s, get Daniel Wolff's wonderful edition of Ernest Withers' photos, The Memphis Blues Again. You can find it on the CounterPunch website, counterpunch.com.

When my daughter was around 12 I got Lieber to play her "Hound Dog" and Yip Harburg to sing her "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," all in one summer.

Cut Before It Burns In Portland Bush set forth the argument that the best way to protect our forests from fire is to cut them down. Bush wants to okay the timber industry to log off more than 2.5 million acres of federal forest over the next 10 years.

No one likes fire, that's for sure. Here in Petrolia, Northern California, the valley has been filled for the past three weeks with smoke drifting down from the big Oregon fires that blanket the southern part of the state. Indeed, a lot of the fires in the West this summer were man-made.

The big blazes in Arizona and Colorado were set by Forest Service employees and seasonal firefighters; another big fire in California was started by a marijuana suppression operation. Fires in Oregon, Washington and Montana have been started by people. As my CounterPunch co-editor Jeffrey St. Clair recently wrote, "In Oregon more than 45,000 acres of ancient forest in the Siskiyou Mountains were torched by the Forest Service's firefighting crews to start a backfire in order to "save" a town that wasn't threatened to begin with. The fires were ignited by shooting pingpong balls filled with napalm into the forest of giant Douglas firs. By one estimate, more than a third of the acres burned this summer were ignited by the Forest Service as backfires. That's good news for the timber industry since they get to log nearly all those acres for next to nothing."

The problem is the Forest Service's policy since the 1920s of trying to suppress all fires. This zero-tolerance posture has allowed a huge buildup of fuel load, so when lightning strikes or a campfire gets out of control you get an unmanageable inferno that overwhelms everything in its path.

Even so, the solution to the fuel problem is burning, not logging. St. Clair noted, "The last thing a burned over forest needs is an assault by chainsaws, logging roads and skid trails, to haul out the only living trees in a scorched landscape. The evidence has been in for decades. The proof can be found at Mt. St. Helens and Yellowstone Park: Unlogged burned forests recover quickly, feeding off the nutrients left behind from dead trees and shrubs. On the other hand, logged-over burned forests rarely recover, but persist as biological deserts, prone to mudslides, difficult to revegetate and abandoned by salmon and deep forest birds, such as the spotted owl, goshawk and marbled murrelet. They exist as desolate islands inside the greater ecosystem."

Hitchens and Kissinger: As One on War

Clearly irked by the thought that he and Henry Kissinger might be on the same wavelength when it comes to attacking Saddam Hussein, Christopher Hitchens is now declaring in the London Observer that H.K. is against war: "A week or so ago I wondered when he was going to pronounce on the impending confrontation with Iraq. And I bet right. He is against it."

Oh no he's not. As a Kissinger-hater Hitchens isn't doing his homework. The veteran war criminal set forth his views on war against Iraq in the Chicago Tribune on Aug. 11. The entire purpose of the piece is to offer appropriate justification for attacking Iraq and?this is the only bit Hitchens bothered to read?he starts by saying that Bush's simple declaration that a "regime-change" in Iraq is desirable won't do as the pretext for a U.S. attack.

"Regime change as a goal for military intervention challenges the international system established by the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, which, after the carnage of the religious wars, established the principle of non-intervention in the domestic affairs of other states. And the notion of justified pre-emption runs counter to international law, which sanctions the use of force in self-defense only against actual, not potential, threats."

Kissinger then makes the case for an attack, based on the rationale that Saddam possesses and intends to use weapons of mass destruction:

"?[T]he objective of regime change should be subordinated in American declaratory policy to the need to eliminate weapons of mass destruction from Iraq as required by the UN resolutions. The restoration of the inspection system existing before its expulsion by Saddam is clearly inadequate. It is necessary to propose a stringent inspection system that achieves substantial transparency of Iraqi institutions. Since the consequences of simply letting the diplomacy run into the ground are so serious, a time limit should be set. The case for military intervention will then have been made in the context of seeking a common approach."

It's clear that Kissinger has no problem with the argument that, if we are to believe former weapons inspector Scott Ritter, all weapons of mass destruction in Iraq have been destroyed. He knows well enough that all it would take is for the CIA suddenly to "discover" a new launch pad on its satellite photos, and the pretext would be there.