Conservative vs. Progressive: One finds the Unemployed Offensive; the other Shows Empathy.

American liberals care about others, even total strangers. Conservatives care about themselves, their kin, their cronies -- and power.  Liberals – Democrats! - gave Americans Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, Family Leave, Medicare and Medicaid. And always against the resistance of conservatives – Republicans! - who also resisted the GI Bill, the civil rights act, and the New Deal.

Knowing history, then, we are not surprised when a conservative politician, Jim Bunning of Kentucky, exploited Senate rules recently to block a one-month extension of unemployment benefits. In the end, he relented, but by then payments to around 100,000 workers were interrupted. And now he’s a hero among his callous kind.

Jon Kyl of Arizona, the second-ranking Republican in the Senate, defended Sen. Bunning’s positions by declaring on TV that unemployment relief “doesn’t create new jobs. In fact, if anything, continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work.”  Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and flank after flank of GOP media megaphones push that same old conservative line. For Paul Krugman, the Nobel economist , it just isn’t true.

“That’s a bizarre point of view — but then, I don’t live in Mr. Kyl’s universe.” writes Krugman in The New York Times. For him, the universe of the Bennings, the Kyls, the Limbaughs and Hannitys, is immoral.

Kyl warned that Republicans are still fighting for repeal of the “death tax.” Yet the House has already passed a bill to exempt 99.75 per cent of estates from being taxed. Not enough for Kyl as long as that 0,25 per cent have to part with some of their fabulous wealth. ”One party feels for the unemployed, while the other weeps over the mega-rich few,” notes Krugman. (Notice that conservatives always call this the death tax so that even those who don’t pay it will find it repelling.)

That reminds me of George Bush flying over Katrina-devasted New Orleans – slow to react - and commenting that the disaster showed the need to lower taxes. We know what he meant: the taxes on his rich pals, not those poor bastards waiting desperately for help on the ground. 

More proof: Yesterday former Republican Speaker of the House Tom DeLay told CNN that people are unemployed "because they want to be."


“Someday, somehow," said Krugman, "we as a nation will once again find ourselves living on the same planet. But for now, we aren’t. And that’s just the way it is."

Howard Zinn, Voice of the People

The United States has lost a great man with the death on January 27, 2010, at 87, of author, teacher and political activist Howard Zinn. He is remembered most of all for his book “People’s History of the United States”, which  truly lives up to its name by reshuffling the standard roles of heroes and villains.

He certainly opened my eyes. I bought the first edition when it appeared in 1980 and learned of dramatic events ignored in standard history books. Instead of military heroes I found people who protest against war. Helen Keller, for example: a renowned American writer and lecturer who was blind and deaf. But to preserve her as a role model, historians before Zinn skipped over the fact that she was also a firebrand socialist who marched and campaigned against World War I. Why was that side of her kept from us? 

As another example, Christopher Columbus becomes more villain than hero in Zinn’s writing when we read what Caribbean Indians thought of his massacres and enslavements. And President Andrew Jackson, enshrined in our history for forging modern American democracy, also resorted to genocide by sending the  army to drive Indians in the southwest U.S. out of their homes.

Reactionaries charged Prof. Zinn with undermining feelings of patriotism by being too negative, even though they could never fault his research. “Dissent,” he countered “is the highest form of patriotism.” I share that feeling strongly. Only by facing up to the darkest moments in history can a nation understand itself and strive to be just and moral.

Zinn never tried to write a linear historical record of his country, only to publish what he felt was being censored. "It's not an unbiased account; so what?,” he told one interviewer. “If you look at history from the perspective of the slaughtered and mutilated, it's a different story."

Zinn's close friend, the linguist and foreign policy expert Noam Chomsky, said it well: "I can't think of anyone who had such a powerful and benign influence. His historical work changed the way millions of people saw the past."

“A People’s History of the United States” was published with little promotion and a humble first printing of 5,000. It became a bestseller and has been made into a documentary and divided into a series of teaching courses. Although he was rarely invited to speak on mainstream television or radio, or to express his views in  the big  publications, there is an interview with him on the  independent TV network C-Span whose transcript you can read here  

and with luck might be able view here.

Howard Zinn was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1922, to Jewish immigrants. His father was a waiter. After high school, he worked three years in the local shipyard, then, eager to help wipe out the Nazis, volunteered for the Army Air Corps in 1943. Until the end of the war he was a bombardier in B-17s over much of Europe. Near the end, the bombs contained a new deadly fire called napalm, which years later would be used on North Vietnam.

“You'd bomb from 30,000 feet,” he recalled in the C-Span interview. “You don't see what's happening down there. You don't see people suffering. You don't see people burning. You don't see limbs falling. You--you just see little flashes in the dark. ...”

“Later--only later did I begin to think about it, and I was horrified by what I had done, and I'm still horrified by what I did. But I think that had an effect on my thinking about war, because here I was in the best of wars. And I believed it was the best of wars because I volunteered for it. A war against fascism? I mean, how could you find a more bestial enemy? And yet it's a--it complicated the war for

me. It complicated the morality of the war, and it made me begin to think that war itself is evil. Even when it starts with good cause, even when the enemy is horrible, that there's something about war, especially in our time when war inevitably involves indiscriminate killing--and I came to the conclusion that war simply cannot be accepted morally as a solution for whatever problems are in the world.”

After the war, he stuffed his medals into an envelope and wrote on it, “Never again!”

(See him on this U-Tube video declare that despite what so many sociologists say, war is not part of human nature   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFGCLu3YWwE&feature=related

As a professor, first at Spelman, an all-black university in Mississippi, and later at Boston University, he encouraged his students to stand up to abusive authority, which often meant the White House and Pentagon. “Protest beyond the law,” he declared, “is not a departure from democracy; it is absolutely essential to it.”

“Men who have no respect for human life or for freedom or justice have taken over this beautiful country of ours. It will be up to the American people to take it back.”

Back in 2003 when George W. Bush was gunning for Saddam Hussein, Zinn wrote a cover story for The Progressive called “A Chorus Against War.” This is how it ends:

“If Bush starts a war, he will be responsible for the lives lost, the children crippled, the terrorizing of millions of ordinary people, the American GIs not returning to their families.”

As always it was those ordinary people who were the most important to Howard Zinn.

My First Thanksgiving in 49 Years

After our parents broke up a half-century ago, I didn’t see much of my sister Eli, the other sibling. I settled in Spain and she in Florida, So it was a pleasant surprise when she sent us an email invitation a few months ago to visit her in Sarasota. It had been six years since we last met, at our mother’s funeral in Maine.

With Ma’s death, family contacts were reduced to occasional email messages across 5,000 miles of Atlantic Ocean to Eli and some of her offspring in New England and Florida. America too seemed more and more remote; I’d come to feel that I’d never return again.

A bit more background about that loss:

During the last two decades of Ma’s life, we visited her in the little northeast seacoast town Kittery, Maine, for a month every summer, bringing along our children in diminishing numbers. “Grammy” was a cheerful, warm and generous host. Her  cozy house, on a quiet country road where deer abounded, was like our second home. We grew close to her neighbors and friends and even registered the kids and I in the Town Hall as voters for U.S. presidential elections.

The last years were quite different as Ma’s health and mind declined. She was often hospitalized for falls, but recovered quickly, and stubbornly returned to her beloved cottage rather than enter a nursing home. Then came the fall of no return that had me flying over on the next plane. At York Hospital she didn’t recognize me, or even know where she was. I quickly sold her house and set up a trust fund with the proceeds to pay for care in nursing homes. She died, age 94, in one of them at North Hampton, New Hampshire, only a few miles from her granddaughter Pat.

Now, Eli’s invitation stirred and loosened my sense of detachment. Rosina and I accepted, and decided to go for the week of Thanksgiving, the November holiday that is the essential moment for family reunions.

After a lifetime of hard struggle, Eli lives in a very nice, three-bedroom house, surrounded by large trees and gardens in a quiet residential area of Sarasota, an hour’s drive south from Tampa on the Gulf Coast. “This is like Grammy’s,” Rosina said as soon as we looked around and saw some of Ma’s furniture and captured a general atmosphere of comfort and informality that made us feel again right at home.

Eli's house with Rosina in the foreground

Always On the Wrong Side

Family and friends on this side of the Atlantic are puzzled by America's hysterical health-care debate. They see TV images of angry protestors who don't want Washington to change a system that, from this persepctive, is grossly unfair. They ask me to explain.

Well, I tell them, it's really an old story. We all know that conservatives (like the protestors, their cable-TV cheerleaders and most all GOP politicans) are resistant to change. Conservatives were against emancipation, women getting the vote, the GI Bill, the Civil Rights Act. And much more, as Nicholas Kristof of the NY Times explains:

"Critics storm that health care reform is 'a cruel hoax and a delusion.' Ads in 100 newspapers thunder that reform would mean 'the beginning of socialized medicine.'

"The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page predicts that the legislation will lead to 'deteriorating service.' Business groups warn that Washington bureaucrats will invade 'the privacy of the examination room,' that we are on the road to rationed care and that patients will lose the 'freedom to choose their own doctor.'

"All dire — but also wrong. Those forecasts date not from this year, but from the battle over Medicare in the early 1960s. I pulled them from newspaper archives and other accounts."

Similar arguments were used in 1935 by conservatives to fight against Social Security, and in 1965 against Medicare. Ronald Reagan warned, "If you don't stop Medicare, one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free."

Kristof continues: "These days, the critics of Medicare have come around because it manifestly works. Life expectancy for people who have reached the age of 65 has risen significantly. ...

"Yet although America’s elderly are now cared for, our children are not. A Johns Hopkins study found that hospitalized children who are uninsured are 60 percent more likely to die than those with insurance, presumably because they are less likely to get preventive care and to be taken to the doctor when sick. ..."

Horrors of Civil War Emerge from Spanish Soil

Emilio Silva, a Madrid journalist, knew that his grandfather had been murdered in his country town at the outbreak of the 1936-39 Spanish civil war. But he had never heard anyone in his family mention where the grave might be. The subject was taboo.

Thirteen other villagers had also been executed by the same fascist  thugs on the side of the so-called nationalist forces which had risen up against the democratic government of the Second Republic. No one in town had talked about their missing bodies either. 

It was a silence of fear: the killers and their families lived on as respected citizens in the town, Priaranza del Bierzo in the northwest province of León, throughout the 40-year dictatorship of the victorious nationalist leader, Gen. Francisco Franco, who died in 1975. At last, in October, 2,000, dirty secrets began to surface when a backhoe on road construction uncovered bones believed to be of some of the victims. Emilio set out for Priaranza to learn about the fate of his grandfather.

He discovered that some oldtimers in Priaranza had lost their fears and were ready to talk. Their stories were terrifying. Emilio’s own father, who had been ten at the time, had never been told what happened to grandfather, but practically everyone else in the town had known of those murders on October 16, 1936. Some children had been witnesses, and one intended victim – the 14^th , who had escaped his captors –  managed to tell several people what had happened before he was hunted down elsewhere and killed .

Grandfather, also named Emilio, was a 44-year-old grocery supplier and the father of six children. He had been member of a moderate leftwing party that had opened the first secular school in the town and supported the elected government. He and the other 13 were forced into a van by fascist gunmen, assassinated and, with the exception of the one who fled, dumped into a communal grave 30 kilometers from town. Emilio even located one of the the men who’d been hired to bury them.

Sixty-five years later, in 2001, Emilio and a team of volunteers excavated the remaining bones and identified all of them, including Emilio senior. Grandfather could at last receive a decent burial with headstone.

First bones uncovered by

backhoe in Priorenza del Bierzo

Emilio’s story of the discoveries brought him in contact with other members of a young generation of Spaniards asking about relatives missing during the war years. To help them locate and identify hidden graves, he co-founded The Association for the Recuperation of Historical Memory (ARMH in Spanish), which includes archeologists and forensic experts fo locate and identify remains, and collects oral and written testimonies from surviving witnesses. Thus far, ARMH has conducted 40 excavations and found 520 skeletons. It has also published a book of its discoveries.

In this decade, more exhumations have been carried out by other organized searchers. They range from individual graves to mass burials as in Malaga, where roughly 4,000 bodies are thought to have been dumped in the San Rafael cemetery in 1937. In the past two years some 2,300 of them have already been recovered.

During the three-year war, both sides committed atrocities. Recent town-by-town studies conclude that 90,000 people were assassinated by nationalists  and 55,000 by radical Republicans. The Franco regime exhumed remains of only its own supporters; they were all given proper funerals and burials, and Spain was decorated with plaques, street names and monuments that glorified them. A spot in Paracuellos, outside Madrid, where 2, 500 nationalist supporters were assassinated is practically a shrine where people still lay flowers on marked graves.


Emilio Sylva has declared that 98 per cent of the bodies exhumed by his association were victims of the  fascist party Falange Española, which had its own militia at the service of the Franco rebels. 

Why so little interest in “the other” victims until now? Blame a pact of silence made by the architects of post-Franco Spain. To gain cooperation from the old guard still holding power, democratic forces agreed to ignore rather than investigate abuses of the Franco regime. No one wanted to recreate the deadly divisions that had led to civil war in 1936. The new, free Spain was founded with all eyes looking only forward.

Today, most of the principle figures of the old regime are dead and beyond reprisals.  Nevertheless, Spanish conservatives are bristling over the Socialist government’s Historical Memory Law of 2006, inspired by the appearance of so many mass graves.  “What need is there to open old wounds that had already been healed?” asked Mariano Rajoy, leader of the the major opposition party, the PP, which was founded by Francoists. Rajoy, as well as Spanish Catholic bishops, have vigorously opposed the timid law, which does little more than provide moral support for the new generation of grave hunters.

Just ten days ago some town officials  of the PP stayed away from a ceremony in Calatayud, Aragon, honoring  a councilman assassinated in 1936 for being a socialist, and whose remains were discovered by UNRH. At the ceremony, UMRH’s vice president Santiago Macías lamented the fact that “those who consider themselves ‘democrats` are incapable of recognizing the merits of those other democrats that preceded them and who were killed for being  so.”

Map of secret graves discovered across Spain

Our weekly renewal

Saturday morning and time to flee the city. Madrid is a modern metropolis of some four million people so its noise and pollution can wear you down. You have to get out into the Guadarrama Mountains to breathe real fresh air and hear birds sing.

Not many major cities of the world have a great mountain range so close. From our neighborhood in an eastern district we see the Guadarramas spread across the northern skyline. It takes just 40 minutes in our little Renault Clio to reach the nearest foothills.

            For more than three decades these Saturday excusions have been a vital part of our lives, a renewal of mind and spirit. What began as exercise for our three youngest kids evolved into six-to-seven-hour hikes for a family that kept growing. We strived to reach summits - the highest, Peñalara, is 2,429 meters (7,965 ft.) above sea level - and explore new trails among the hundreds that criss-cross the 80-km. (64 miles)-long range and even extend as far as Portugal and France. 

Now it’s only Rosina and me, and we’re just as happy in our senior years with three-hour strolls over grasslands and along river banks. On this day, we’ve brought a half-dozen preserve jars for refills at a local honey farm: today’s specials are multi-flor (mixed flowers), bosque (forest) and azahar (orange blossom). There’s always good conversation with the fiftyish farmer, Pablo, as honey is oozed out of his shiny metal tanks into our jars, because he is a naturalist, an expert archer and a teacher of Oriental meditation.

Beekeeper Pablo de la Quintana

The bee farm is at the edge of our final hiking destination, the Upper Manzanares River Basin Regional Park, designated by the UNESCO as a biosphere reserve.  More than 5,000 people are allowed to live here, many of them cattle owners who have settled amid year-round grazing spaces. Wildlife is everywhere, although mainly hidden during the day when humans are around. In 35 years of climbing we’ve only seen a few of the hundreds of deer that roam the range, caught one quick glance of a darting fox, and never saw more of the wild boar than their scat. Boar sightings especially are not missed: above a bar in the neighboring town Manzanares El Real there is a masive mounted head of a long-toothed boar hunted down in the area, and it gives one the shivers. Good thing they’re shy.

Glacial  lake near Peñalara Peak

Once we did have a scare, but not from boars. We were turning a bend on a path that encircled the Fuenfría Valley, not far from remains of a Roman road that used to join Madrid and Segovia provinces across the Guadarramas. Suddenly we were face to face with a half-ton of Iberian fighting bull, an all-black beast with the meanest eyes I've ever seen. Somehow he’d been able to wander away from one of those ranches that post warning signs, “Toros bravos  – no trespassing!”.

Bulls in the wild, they say, do not necessarily attack people, but they are unpredictable. In a flash we  plunged into a cover of tall, thorny bushes that instantly shredded our arms. As he came after us, we kept flaying along, hoping he'd find this place too nasty even for his own tough hide. And so he did. He stopped, snorted at the edge of the brambles and ambled away down the mountainside. Right then our cover of thorns came to an end in a broad clearing. 

When we related our harrowing adventure to a veteran hiker, he was unimpressed. “The bull probably wanted salt and thought you were bringing it to him, like his masters do.”  It turns out that cattle can’t lick enough salt out of the rocks in that area, and need a steady supply. OK, but I’ll stick to our scarier, more interesting version.

Although summer has just ended it’s hot. We find a spot under a tree inside the park and unwrap egg-salad sandwiches and fruit. Then it’s time for a nap in in the shade of an evergreen. Another great day in the Guadarramas. And we can be home for tea.

The Maturing of My America.

Racism was an ugly fact of life in the America of my early days, but I didn’t give it much thought. In our all-white town, Wilmington Massachusetts, miles from Boston’s black ghettos and farther still from the absolute segregation of the southern states, racism was not a subject for discussion; neither at home nor in our schools or our churches.

All my baseball heroes were white because there were no black players in the Major Leagues until 1947, when the color bar was lifted so that Jackie Robinson could join the Brooklyn Dodgers. It took another three years for pro basketball to admit a black player, Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton, who had to clown with the Harlem Globetrotters until the New York Knicks let him in their locker room. We didn’t hear of black war heroes because military units were segregated by race, and the bravery of their soldiers was given no publicity.

Although slavery had been abolished in America’s south at the end of the civil war, blacks there still faced discrimination in every aspect of their lives: kept from voting by rigged registration rules; banned from the best schools and even cafés; forced to ride in the rear of buses. It is fair to say that the USA did not become a truly democratic nation until July 2, 1964 (five days short of my 30th birthday), when President Lyndon Johnson signed the civil rights bill banning discrimination in voting, jobs, education and public services. Another milestone, of course, was the election of a multi-racial president, Barrack Obama, in 2008.

Read more.