alias Bruce.

Racial torture, libraries, and poems.

This is National Poetry Month, a time when – like Black History Month and Earth Day – corporate culture blinks for a moment at realities it generally ignores. Still, a glimpse can reveal plenty. This month, in one of the main windows of the downtown public library in my town of Baltimore, the poem on display is "If Mamie Till Was the Mother of God" by Joseph Ross, which won the local Pratt Library system's 2012 poetry prize. The poem has to do with the 1955 torture and murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi for whistling at a white woman. If you're sketchy on the details, here is Ross's explanation of how Emmett's mother, Mamie, electrified the world by displaying her son in an open casket:

Mamie Till’s decision to bury her son in a casket with a glass top was a momentous one. In her words, she wanted the world “to see what they did to my boy.” In 1955, Mamie Till sent her son Emmett to live with relatives in Mississippi for the summer. One night, he was dragged from his uncle’s house, beaten to death and dumped in the Tallahatchie River, with a cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire. His body was found downriver some days later. The image of her son’s beaten and distorted body were broadcast around the world. In the view of some, this murder was seen as the beginning of the civil rights movement.

Emmett Till, as I've mentioned, was not only brutally beaten but tortured, including having one of his eyes gouged out. As it happens, a few years ago I met and interviewed Emmett Till's cousin, who was in the same bedroom with Till the night that white men burst into the house and took him away to murder him. I will never, ever forget it.

Here is a photo of how you'd see Joseph Ross's poem if you walked past the Baltimore downtown library this month:

Photo: Robert Waxman

At a time when today's American brown shirts want for government's sole job to be the killing of infidels and the punishing of scapegoats, it's good to see a public library acting like a public library. My thanks to my friend Rachel for pointing this out.

What happened on the first Columbus Day.

Most of us know that the Christopher Columbus for which the celebrations and holiday are named is nothing like the man who actually lived.

But do you know any of the actual details of what happened on Columbus's landing in the Bahamas on October 12, 1492 – and in the weeks, months, and years that immediately followed?

If you're prepared for this information, read the following excerpt from the late historian Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. A caveat: this excerpt covers just the beginning of what was done by Columbus's hand.

Chapter One

Columbus, the Indians, and Human Progress

Arawak men and women... emerged from their villages onto the island's beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts. He later wrote of this in his log:

"They . . . brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells, They willingly traded everything they owned . . . They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features . . . They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane . . . They would make fine servants . . . With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want."

These Arawaks of the Bahama Islands were much like Indians on the mainland, who were remarkable (European observers were to say again and again) for their hospitality, their belief in sharing. These traits did not stand out in the Europe of the Renaissance, dominated as it was by the religion of popes, the government of kings, the frenzy for money that marked Western civilization and its first messenger to the Americas, Christopher Columbus.

Columbus wrote: "As soon as I arrived in the Indies, on the first Island which I found, I took some of the natives by force in order that they might learn and might give me information of whatever there is in these parts."

The information that Columbus wanted most was: Where is the gold? He had persuaded the king and queen of Spain to finance an expedition to the lands, the wealth, he expected would be on the other side of the Atlantic--the Indies and Asia, gold and spices. For, like other informed people of his time, he knew the world was round and he could sail west in order to get to the Far East.

Spain was recently unified, one of the new modern nation-states, like France, England, and Portugal. Its population, mostly poor peasants, worked for the nobility, who were 2 percent of the population and owned 95 percent of the land. Spain had tied itself to the, Catholic Church, expelled all the Jews, driven out the Moors. Like other states of the modern world, Spain sought gold, which was becoming the new mark of wealth, more useful than land because it could buy anything.

There was gold in Asia, it was thought, and certainly silks and spices, for Marco Polo and others had brought back marvelous things from their overland expeditions centuries before. Now that the Turks had conquered Constantinople and the eastern Mediterranean, and controlled the land routes to Asia, a sea route was needed. Portuguese sailors were working their way around the southern tip of Africa. Spain decided to gamble on a long sail across an unknown ocean.
In return for bringing back gold and spices, they promised Columbus 10 percent of the profits, governorship over new-found lands, and the fame that would go with a new title: Admiral of the Ocean Sea. He was a merchant's clerk from the Italian city of Genoa, part-time weaver (the son of a skilled weaver), and expert sailor. He set out with three sailing ships, the largest of which was the Santa Maria, perhaps 100 feet long, and thirty-nine crew members.

Columbus would never have made it to Asia, which was thousands of miles farther away than he had calculated, imagining a smaller world. He would have been doomed by that great expanse of sea. But he was lucky. One-fourth of the way there he came upon an unknown, uncharted land that lay between Europe and Asia--the Americas. It was early October 1492, and thirty-three days since he and his crew had left the Canary Islands, off the Atlantic coast of Africa. Now they saw branches and sticks floating in the water. They saw flocks of birds. These were signs of land. Then, on October 12, a sailor called Rodrigo saw the early morning moon shining on white sands, and cried out. It was an island in the Bahamas, the Caribbean sea. The first man to sight land was supposed to get a yearly pension of 10,000 maravedis for life, but Rodrigo never got it. Columbus claimed he had seen a light the evening before. He got the reward.

So, approaching land, they were met by the Arawak Indians, who swam out to greet them. The Arawaks lived in village communes, had a developed agriculture of corn, yams, cassava. They could spin and weave, but they had no horses or work animals. They had no iron, but they wore tiny gold ornaments in their ears.

This was to have enormous consequences: it led Columbus to take some of them aboard ship as prisoners because he insisted that they guide him to the source of the gold. He then sailed to what is now Cuba, then to Hispaniola (the island which today consists of Haiti and the Dominican Republic). There, bits of visible gold in the rivers, and a gold mask presented to Columbus by a local Indian chief, led to wild visions of gold fields.

On Hispaniola, out of timbers from the Santa Maria, which had run aground, Columbus built a fort, the first European military base in the Western Hemisphere. He called it Navidad (Christmas) and left thirty-nine crewmembers there, with instructions to find and store the gold. He took more Indian prisoners and put them aboard his two remaining ships. At one part of the island he got into a fight with Indians who refused to trade as many bows and arrows as he and his men wanted. Two were run through with swords and bled to death. Then the Nina and the Pinta set sail for the Azores and Spain. When the weather turned cold, the Indian prisoners began to die...

– from A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present. Copyright © by Howard Zinn. Published by HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Two debt ceiling news flashes you may not have seen:

From satirist Andy Borowitz's The Borowitz Report:

Biden Compares Tea Party to Terrorists; Al-Qaeda Demands Apology
‘Bad for Our Brand,’ Madmen Claim

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) – Vice President Joe Biden ignited an international incident today when he called the Tea Party “terrorists,” causing the leader of al-Qaeda to demand an apology.

Just moments after Mr. Biden made his controversial remark, al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri appeared in a video to condemn the comment, which the terrorist called “hurtful.”

“I demand that the Vice President take back his offensive comment immediately,” Mr. al-Zawahiri said in the video, broadcast on Al-Jazeera.  “It has been very bad for our brand.”

Mr. Biden attempted to clarify his remark later in the day, telling reporters, “I in no way intended to insult the members of al-Qaeda.”

“Both al-Qaeda and the Tea Party tried to destroy the U.S. economy,” Mr. Biden elaborated.  “But in fairness to al-Qaeda, the Tea Party came a lot closer.”

Democrats Accept Major Cuts to Their Balls
Outcome Surprises No One

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) – After weeks of wrenching negotiations that went right up to the wire, Democrats in the House and Senate today accepted major cuts to their balls.

The cuts, which are expected to pass both houses of Congress on Tuesday, will give Republicans’ total custody of the Democrats’ cojones through the next election cycle.

The final hitch in the negotiations centered on how long the Republicans would keep the Democrats’ family jewels, with Democrats wanting them returned by 2012 and Republicans insisting on keeping them longer.

After much wrangling, a compromise was worked out in which the Republicans would keep the Democrats’ balls “indefinitely.”

After the deal was hammered out, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) was philosophical about an outcome that surprised no one.

“You win some and you lose some,” he told reporters.  “Except that, as Democrats, only the second part is true."

Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) said that the historic deal set the stage for more compromises between the two political parties: “Tomorrow we begin negotiating for their lunch money.”

Three weeks into a hunger strike at California prisons,

some inmates are showing signs of starvation, reports the Huffington Post.

If you have not yet heard about the widespread hunger strike, in which as many as 6,600 California inmates have participated, join the club. I had not heard of it, either, until a friend told me. It has been spottily covered by national media. Read this excerpt from a New York Times account of the confinement conditions inmates are protesting, and you will see why many Americans, including many journalists, would prefer that this story remain invisible behind concrete walls:

The protest was organized by inmates at Pelican Bay State Prison’s security housing unit, where prisoners are kept in isolation more than 22 hours a day. ...Most of the prisoners who remain on hunger strike are in security housing units like the one at Pelican Bay, where they are kept alone in windowless, soundproof concrete cells. ...The lack of human contact often leads to depression and bouts of rage, psychologists say.

Prisoners and activists say that such conditions are cruel and unusual punishment. Most inmates end up in these extreme isolation blocks because of ties to gang activities. To get back into the general prison population, activists say, they are pressured to divulge information about other gang members in prison, a process known as “debriefing,” which can jeopardize their safety.

“We do see this long isolation and debriefing process as torture,” said Carol Strickman, a staff lawyer with Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, an advocacy group in San Francisco. “These are inhumane conditions designed to extract information from someone.”

But a Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation spokeswoman, Terry Thornton, said that the restrictive conditions at Pelican Bay had been litigated numerous times.

Got that? Twenty-two hours a day in windowless, soundproofed concrete cells. All in an effort to force prisoners to rat out other prisoners' alleged gang connections. And to thereby endanger their own lives. (In the joint, there is no such thing as a witness protection program.) And the State of California's answer to this moral obscenity is, in effect, Well, nobody's told us to stop.

Notice, too, that California prison officials employ a sterile euphemism -- "debriefing" -- because they cannot bring themselves to call their actions what they are: torture.

Hmm. What was the euphemism at Guantanamo again? Oh, yeah: "Enhanced" or "harsh" interrogation techniques. AKA simulated drowning, extreme sleep deprivation, locking prisoners in agonizing positions for days, putting prisoners on leashes and making them perform like dogs, slamming them against walls, wrapping their heads in duct tape. Again, all done invisibly, concealed behind walls and the pretext of a no-holds-barred "war" against "enemy combatants." (St. Petersburg Times story detailing these Guantanamo practices here.)

So here we are again, folks. Just as we were asked to excuse these wicked acts at Guantanamo and at secret prisons abroad in the name of "national security," we are now being asked to look away when it comes to horrific treatment of prisoners right here on the mainland. You, as a voter, are being asked to not think about what is happening to "those people" (that is, chiefly nonviolent offenders convicted on drug charges) hidden behind the thick walls of the prisons in your own neck of the woods. You are being asked to drive past the prisons in your community, on your way to the park or the mall, and to not wonder what is being done in your name in these places. You are being asked to keep your eyes straight ahead and your ears and mouth shut when it comes to the increasingly for-profit human abuse industry that you subsidize with taxes taken out of your income.

Which means, if you are an obedient citizen, you won't read the details in the New York Times story about how prisoners in these California prisons are treated; and you won't read the Huffington Post story about the hunger strike involving inmates at one-third of California's prisons, some of whom are making good on their pledge to starve themselves to death; and you won't visit the blog created by prisoner advocates providing updates on attempts by the strikers and their supporters to gain political and public support for their demands for human rights in prisons.

Or will you?

Thanks to Linda.

Noam Chomsky on Osama Bin Laden's death.

My favorite nickname for Chomsky – from a 2003 New Yorker article – is "The Devil's Accountant." He dares to ruthlessly and dispassionately catalog the lies of accepted conventional knowledge. Read his May 6 accounting of the Bin Laden killing here.

We have taken out Osama Bin Laden. But hold

the champagne. This excerpt from a post by Actor212 (at Simply Left Behind and The Agonist) is worth some thought:

"Bin Laden dies knowing he accomplished what he set out to do: destroy America. For fifteen years, he carefully dissected the weaknesses of our "democracy" and our capitalist economy. He demonstrated the fear will trump (pun intended) principles every time. He managed to reveal that America can torture with the best of tyrannies, that America can oppress its people economically, that America can take a thriving economy and turn it into a bankruptcy, and that America will elect the weakest possible leaders if given half a chance and a [SIC] immoral faction whose lust for power overwhelms their patriotism. Allah could not have handed him a better adversary than George W. Bush, a man so morally corrupt and politically inept that he managed to take a moment that could have united the entire world, including the Arabic street, behind him and make that same world ridicule him and hate us."

Yes, we have killed Osama Bin Laden -- after 10 years during which Al Qaeda, led by a man in ill health, has disseminated the preeminent global model for decentralized terrorism. We have killed Osama Bin Laden, and crowds have gathered in New York and Washington, including officers with fists in the air, to chant with satisfaction at having answered murder with murder, at having had the latest heaping helping in a by-now-regular diet of fear and rage. Remember the weakened, angry Germany in the years prior to Hitler's rise? Take a close look. This is what a declining nation looks like.

If you believe that the upcoming congressional hearings on "the radicalization of American Muslims" are

about national security, then, for your sake, I hope you won't answer the phone when a scammer calls  and offers you sure-fire wealth in exchange for your credit card number.

The hearings are another installment of Fear Theater, this time brought to you by House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Peter King (R-NY). They will offer nothing that the nation needs for greater security – no innovations for improved international police work, no smartened relations with majority-Muslim nations and communities, no push for more competitive fairness in the international economy – but they will bring us wagonloads of politely coded alarm about the Turbaned Brown Menace and the need for those in "the Muslim community" to "do their part" in assisting anti-terrorist authorities. As if law-abiding Muslim citizens are not already doing their part by simply being law-abiding.

This photo-op congressional farce is as excruciatingly obvious as it is disgusting, which is why the hearings are being met with street protests even before they begin. In New York, protesters stood in the rain on Sunday and decried Rep. King's exercise in stereotype and blame by association.

King, for his part, offered a comically lame defense. According to CNN:

King defended the hearings on CNN's "State of the Union" program. "We're talking about al Qaeda," he said. "We're talking about the affiliates of al Qaeda, who have been radicalizing, and there's been self-radicalization going on within the Muslim community, within a very small minority, but it's there." King compared the goal of the hearings to investigating the Mafia within the Italian community or going after the Russian mob.

Right. Which is why I am utterly confident that Rep. King's Mafia hearings would be titled "The Radicalization of American Italians."

The name of the Muslim hearings, in fact, says everything. The title is a dead giveaway that the hearings serve only as another stunt to toss scraps of red-meat race-bait to scared, angry voters who, without such continual distractions, might start asking intelligent questions about the kinds of policies that would actually make us all safer. There is no widespread terrorist-friendly "radicalization" of Muslim Americans any more than there is a rampant mob-friendly radicalization of Italian-Americans. In fact, there is a better case for holding hearings on "the radicalization of malcontent American whites," e.g., the Tea Party (complete with publicly-wielded guns and violent anti-government dogma), than there is for an inquiry into American Muslims.

If King's hearings were serious, they would be titled "Combatting al Qaeda's influence in America." And they would, like any smart threat analysis, look at all potentially dangerous players, including the Jihad Janes and munitions sellers. But these Muslim hearings are about neither seriousness nor safety. They are about playing the simplistic fear card in yet another attempt to convince 300 million Americans that a smattering of presumed Muslim potential suicide bombers poses a greater threat to their health than, say, a broadly toxic food industry and a completely broken health care industry.

After all, why actually address the terrorism problem when you can instead scapegoat Muslims and leave things as they are?

Your nation at work:

The broad-daylight assassination of Salman Taseer, high-profile governor of Pakistan's Punjab Province, by one of his own bodyguards, apparently an Islamic militant, has blasted another bloody hole in the Obama Administration's fantasy that robot drones and widely-mistrusted American battalions have a prayer of altering the fundamental course of Pakistan and Afghanistan, two nations in which America refuses to confront the reasons for the public illegitimacy of the regimes it tries in vain to prop up.

Meanwhile, modern descendants of North America's most disastrous and violent tsunami of illegal immigrants -- centuries of invaders from Europe -- have grown ever more wickedly and delusionally selfish in their fervor to shut the gates behind themselves, most recently with a growing effort to deny citizenship to babies born in the United States whose parents came here illegally from the artificially-depressed and peril-wracked storehouse of desperately cheap labor to our south, otherwise known as Mexico.

At the White House, the Obama Administration has collapsed on the issue of Medicare coverage for end-of-life planning, doing a 180 to delete the provision, which had been hailed by doctors and hospice caregivers as a way of making end-of-life medical care both more humane and cost-effective. Any suggestions for names to be circulated for an alternative 2012 Democratic presidential nominee?

It's your country. Use it or lose it. And whatever you do, keep yourself grounded in things that are not subject to the decay and inevitable collapse of the unsustainable machinery that passes for current American normalcy.

The costs of torture,

which some news outlets (including NPR) still coyly call "harsh interrogation," continue to mount. The latest consequence is a judge's ruling that a key witness cannot testify in the trial of an accused terrorist bomber because the witness's name was obtained by torture (the judge didn't use the word but it's clear it's what he meant). The defendant, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, was held for years in a secret CIA prison overseas and at Guantanamo.

Thank God for what remains of an independent judiciary. Federal Judge Lewis Kaplan spoke for the missing conscience of national security when he declared in his ruling, "the Constitution is the rock upon which our nation rests. We must follow it not only when it is convenient, but when fear and danger beckon in a different direction. To do less would diminish us and undermine the foundation upon which we stand."

The torture issue is, of course, about far more than the vanity of our moral self-esteem. It is, first and foremost, about the fact that torture is wrong. Torture is wicked. Torture is evil.

The fact that we are even discussing these things -- waterboarding and other U.S. torture methods, secret U.S. prisons abroad -- pretty much screams an indictment of the contemporary United States of America.

72% of Americans don't think it's appropriate to build an Islamic Center and mosque

two blocks from Ground Zero, a CBS poll shows.

This is horrifying, and it naturally leads to such questions as, "Should Americans be allowed to reproduce without international supervision?" The stabbing of a Muslim cabbie, allegedly by a white man who asked the man's religion before attacking him, underlines the atrocity. And understand me: this is not just about addle-brained white Americans. As an African American, I have heard downright wicked remarks about Muslims out of the mouths of black people, including one of my own late relatives.

But an additional finding from the CBS poll, and from a Siena College poll of New Yorkers, puts a slight twist on this. In both polls, a majority of respondents did say they don't like putting a mosque in that location. But a majority -- 67% in the CBS poll and 63% in the Siena poll -- also said they believe the developers have the constitutional right to build the mosque there. So, beyond the screaming headlines, a truer interpretation of the polls is, "I don't like the mosque being there, but I think it has a right to be there under American law." This is still terrible, but not quite as terrible as voters fantasizing that the mosque and Center do not enjoy constitutional guarantees. So you could say that we have a nation of largely pragmatic racists.

Other twists: Ron Paul, staying true to Libertarian principle, has defended the Center and mosque and denounced the "demagogy" of those opposed to it. And Howard Dean, turning his back on progressive ideals, has condemned the project as "a real affront" to 9/11 victims.

Meanwhile, the project's developers say they're not budging. Hallelujah.